The Year Behind: How Our 2023 Fearless Predictions Panned Out

It’s always good to do a bit of self-reflection before the new year, so here’s a look at how our 2023 Fearless Predictions panned out. 

We’re keeping the rating system simple here: Green means nailed it, yellow means kinda-sorta, red means great big whiff. 

Here goes.

1. The Industry’s Two Biggest Problems Remain Unresolved. 🟩  The inability to make up for lost carriage and retrans fees and the inability to create a workable search engine are still major unresolved issues for the industry with no solution in sight.

2. Churn Leads To All Sorts Of Bundling 🟨 Maybe not “all sorts” but we’ve definitely seen some bundling moves from Disney, from Verizon (ad-supported Netflix + ad-supported Max). I’ve even seen mainstream pubs make reference to “The Great Rebundling”  So this one is still happening.

3. Cable TV Still Won’t Fucking Die 🟩 Yeah, it took some slightly bigger hits than usual this year for sure. But over 60% of US households still have a pay TV subscription, and vMVPDs like YouTubeTV and Hulu Live TV (which is still “cable TV” even if they are delivered over broadband) are growing pretty rapidly. 

4. RIP, Password Sharing 🟥 Netflix made some noise about it, but no one else seems to have followed suit and there have yet to be reports of cases of Netflix busting massive swaths of customers for letting College Student Chris and Grandma Gertie log onto their accounts.

5. Streaming Measurement Gets A Little Easier 🟩  GIving this a green square because of the qualifier “a little” and this sentence: “This is not to say that 2023 will be the year that streaming’s data and measurement issues go the way of the dodo bird.” Because there was some traction last year, with various networks adopting companies like iSpot, Videoamp and Comscore as currency on certain deals. Which is definitely making things a little easier. 

6. Ad Avoiders Get Seen 🟨  The point was that all those upscale, educated viewers who only subscribe to ad-free apps and have ad blockers on their browsers would finally get noticed and the difficulty of advertisers reaching them would become a thing. That did not happen, at least not to a large degree. There was, however, this article from The Economist, which used the EU rollout of ad-free subscription Facebook as its starting point. Small victories. 

7. Sports Go Streaming 🟩  Amazon’s Thursday Night Football. F1 on Netflix, MLB on Apple, RSNs to streaming. The shift is on.

8. Program Quality Replaces Program Quantity 🟨 This is happening on the FASTs, where content teams are definitely pushing back and where Warner is shopping HBO shows. It’s not really happening on streaming, where mass market shows like Ginny and Georgia rather than critical darlings like Succession seem to be ruling the roost. 

9.  Linear Channels Will Become A Thing On SVOD  🟥  Still not happening outside of Peacock and Paramount+. Really should be happening on the ad-supported tiers.

10. The Operating System Wars Heat Up 🟩 Hisense launched Vidaa. VIZIO announced it was going to license its OS. That second ring of media, the people who sit in between the mainstream media and the trade press have started to take notice too. And TVREV is releasing a report on the topic next year. Making it officially a thing. 

So how’d we do? 5 greens, 3 yellows and 2 reds. That’s a respectable outcome and we’re pretty happy with it.

Stay tuned for our 2024 Fearless Predictions. Coming next week.