The Year in Strategery

Happy seventh night of Hanukkah, and welcome back to the final edition of Buffering for 2023. It’s been another intense year of covering the roller coaster ride that the streaming business has become. We kicked off with a long conversation with TV icon John Landgraf, whose slightly premature but still prescient 2015 prediction that we were getting close to Peak TV finally came true this year. We were almost certainly due for a slowdown anyway, but then the nearly six-month production showdown that resulted from the major studios working out a timely labor deal with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA pretty much sealed the deal. Elsewhere this year, Buffering took a look at the exec behind Paramount Global’s Yellowstone empire; dove into Tubi’s pop culture moment; went deep into Netflix’s Korean content machine; explored streaming’s big problem creating catalog shows; reported on the rise of new streaming bundles; and, just last week, talked to Netflix’s guru of unscripted TV. It’s been a busy twelve months, but also never dull.

This week, we’re wrapping up with a somewhat unconventional year in review. Rather than singling out one specific winner or broader trends, our focus is on strategy— the key moves the big streamers made that helped shape 2023. We’ve also got some thoughts on Netflix’s end-of-year data surprise. Here’s hoping the rest of your holidays are filled with joy and that 2024 brings health, happiness and peace. Thank you for reading. —Joe Adalian

Reach Joe on Twitter @tvmojoe or email [email protected].


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There’s no doubt which streamer owned the year: After spending 2022 in corporate hell, and while its rivals suffered through endless rounds of cutbacks and cancellations, Netflix finally steadied itself, reaffirming its status as the industry’s clear-cut global leader. But while it deserves kudos for its accomplishment, at this point in the streaming wars — if it’s even fair to still call it a “war” — assessing the state of the industry through an up/down narrative feels a little stale. Who’s winning or losing is obviously still important, but what’s even more interesting is how various platforms played the game. And that’s where strategy comes in.

While great programing and an effective user interface and algorithm are the most fundamental factors in any streamer’s performance, crafting and executing smaller, more focused gameplans matters a lot as well. Hulu’s decision years ago to offer live TV packages, for instance, allowed it to stand out from its rivals and created an excellent weapon against churn. Paramount+ was also smart to partner with Walmart, a deal which has delivered millions of eyeballs to its ad-supported tier. So rather than offering up yet another horse race analysis, I decided to review the year in streaming by identifying some of the smartest strategic moves we saw play out over the last twelve months. The most interesting came not in the subscription space, but the ever-expanding world of FAST— free, ad-supported TV. It was in this corner of the streaming universe that Amazon-owned Freevee showed itself to be a strategic powerhouse.

While Freevee isn’t the only free streaming service spending money on original content, the Amazon-owned FAST platform has arguably been the most aggressive and ambitious with its efforts. Taking full advantage of its parent company’s deep pockets, Freevee has launched multiple first-run dramas based on existing IP (Bosch: Legacy, Leverage: Redemption, Alex Rider), all of which have the sort of premium feel you’d expect from bigger streamers or cable networks. It has also partnered with producers like Mike Schur and Greg Garcia on comedy projects, and spent big on unscripted, moving Judy Judy icon Judy Sheindlin from syndication to streaming (and then letting her produce a quasi-spinoff series, Tribunal Justice).

But Freevee’s biggest breakthrough moment came this year with Jury Duty, the scripted mockumentary series which put a non-actor at its center. Almost out of nowhere, it became a viral hit, giving the platform months of social media buzz and critical praise, as well as lots of awards season love, including multiple Emmy nominations in major categories. Not surprisingly, Freevee says Jury Duty also now stands as its most-watched series to date, though it hasn’t quantified exactly what that means. But the show’s TikTok domination last spring, and its continued strong kudos game this fall and winter — it was nominated for a Golden Globe Award this week — hint that the numbers probably were substantial.

Whatever the actual audience for Jury Duty, its success breaking through the cultural noise serves as validation of Amazon’s decision to invest so heavily in its free platform. The dominant philosophy in streaming the past decade has been that quality original content is for subscription services, with FAST the place for library titles, i.e., the leftovers. Make no mistake: Freevee is still 90% powered by reruns, and acquisitions are key to its business model. But much the way basic cable started adding more and more original shows to its portfolio in the late 1990s and early aughts, Freevee execs realized that the right kinds of originals can help it stand out and attract specific kinds of viewers.

It’s not alone in understanding this: Tubi has been very smart about greenlighting low-budget original movies (scripted and documentaries) and working both with independent creators and production studios owned by its parent company, Fox. And Roku Channel saw the value in originals long ago with its purchase of the Quibi library and investments in movies like last year’s Emmy-nominated Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

Freevee, however, seems light years ahead of its FAST rivals in developing originals in all kinds of genres and spending serious money to make them attractive to broad audiences vs. smaller niches. It’s also led the way in experimenting with different release patterns for FAST. Judy Justice and Tribunal Justice, for instance, drop new episodes daily, giving audiences a reason to regularly open the Freevee app (half the battle for smaller players). Along the same lines, it’s also invested in resurrecting a very popular daily soap opera from Australia, Neighbours, something which feels like a test to see if something similar might work with a U.S. soap format.

And Freevee has also exploited its synergy with big brother Prime Video to maximum effect: Not only is its content integrated into the Prime Video app — making sure people who come for The Boys can quickly segue over to Jury Duty — but earlier this fall, the company said it would shift Freevee’s Leverage: Redemption over to Prime Video in season three. Audiences which got hooked on the first two seasons for free will now have to pay for Prime to get a third season. Some consumers obviously won’t be thrilled, but it’s an undeniably savvy way of using FAST as a sales tool to generate sign-ups for an SVOD model. Bottom line: Freevee’s willingness to invest and experiment is paying real dividends for Amazon and revealing a lot about what the future of free (or even lower-cost) ad-supported streaming might look like. It’s hardly the only successful FAST player out there — the whole space continued to explode in 2023 — but it’s arguably done the most to raise the bar for what free streaming can accomplish.

While Freevee executed the most interesting strategy this year, it was hardly alone in making winning moves. Here are four other gameplans that caught my eye:

Disney turned its war with Charter into a win-win for cable and streaming. When ABC, ESPN, and other Disney-owned properties went dark in millions of Charter homes last summer, it looked like yet another of the frequent spats over money between a big cable provider and an entertainment conglomerate. But this time, the stand-off revolved around Charter being upset that Disney — like much of the industry — had moved most of its best programming over to its streaming services. It told Disney that if it was going to keep selling cable packages with increasingly less sexy channel offerings, it needed to be able to give its customers access to apps like Disney+ and Hulu as part of their monthly fee. Charter obviously deserves credit for taking a stand here, and it certainly had some leverage over Disney. But Disney also played a super smart hand throughout the negotiations, using its Hulu with Live TV service as leverage to get Charter to agree to a compromise that resulted in more money flowing to Disney and a bigger available audience of Disney+ and Hulu viewers. Plus, it offered a template for how cable providers can become sales tools for streamers, in the process slowing cord-cutting down just enough to keep that sweet cable bundle cash flowing for a few more years.

Netflix got transparent. After years of being the poster child for hiding how many people are watching its shows and movies, the streaming superpower just decided to post viewing data for virtually all of its programming on a random Tuesday in December. Even though Netflix has been moving toward more transparency in recent years, it was still a total shock and immediately had people in the industry asking why it decided to reverse course and why it did so now (more on that later on in the newsletter). While it’s too soon for sure to say whether it will end up being a smart strategy, it definitely ranks as one of the year’s boldest moves.

Hulu transformed the streaming debut of Moonlighting (and some other shows) into an event. Too often, streamers treat library acquisitions of classic TV shows as an afterthought, with some older shows popping up on digital platforms without so much as a line in a “What’s New This Month” press release. But in the last few months, Hulu has given some new additions to its streaming catalog the red carpet treatment, starting with the October arrival of Moonlighting. The streamer announced in September that it had spent the money to digitally restore the show to look better than it did in the 1980s, giving news outlets and social media weeks to build up excitement over the fact that a series long missing from streaming would finally have a home. The result was a ton of interest in the show and lots of goodwill from subscribers. Hulu gave L.A. Law and Who’s the Boss similar treatment later in the year.

Look, classic TV shows are never going to be the thing that gets most people to sign up or keep a streaming subscription. But as evidenced by the slew of older shows in Netflix and Nielsen data, audiences crave familiar favorites. Hulu also purged a number of classics from its roster this year (I still can’t believe they parted ways with The Bob Newhart Show), but it reinvested some of the money it saved by doing so in bringing “new” classic titles to the service. That, along with working to make sure audiences knew these older shows could now be found on Hulu, helped the streamer maximize the value of its retro offering.

For years, reporters and talent agents and labor guilds have been prodding and pushing Netflix to be more open about who’s watching what on the platform— and then on Tuesday, Netflix just tweeted it out. And by “it,” I mean the streamer revealed audience consumption numbers for nearly every TV show and movie in its library during the first half of this year— from The Night Agent (812 million hours) to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (100,000 hours). While not comparable to the data Nielsen publishes for linear broadcasts — the metric Netflix used is millions of hours watched, as opposed to Nielsen’s average audience number, among many differences — it’s the first time the streamer has offered such an expansive peek at consumption habits on its global platform. “This is the data we use to run the business,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told reporters during a brief telephone press conference.

Dubbed the “Netflix Engagement Report,” the streamer’s new ratings tool — which will be updated twice a year — is a massive list of more than 18,000 movies and shows, covering 99 percent of titles on the service, which were on the streamer between January 1 and June 30 of 2023. Netflix rounds up viewing hours to the nearest 100,000th viewer, and series are broken down by season. But unlike the top 10 lists Netflix posts weekly, these numbers shouldn’t be confused with either viewers or even “views.” For one thing, the data isn’t adjusted to reflect run times: An hour-long drama such as NCIS gets reported the same way as season three of I Think You Should Leave, which is made up of six episodes with a combined length of 95 minutes.

What’s more, while most Netflix originals are available to every Netflix home, many library shows and movies are only streamable in certain regions and thus don’t have the same global reach. And finally, because the report covers a full six months of viewing, it captures titles that have been on the service for years (and thus every day of the six-month reporting frame) while others were only out a month or a day before the June 30 cut-off point.

Because of all this, as Netflix correctly cautioned in a blog post announcing its new tool, the rankings in the engagement report really are not an ideal way to compare different titles to each other. Case in point: In the example cited at the start of this story, season one of The Night Agent was only widely available for about three of the six months the report covers and was available to every Netflix customer, while Ferris Bueller has been on Netflix (and TV and streaming) forever but is not available in many Netflix countries. The former also has a running time of about nine hours, while the latter clocks in a hair more than 90 minutes. In other words, extreme caution should be used when comparing shows and movies on this list.

Still, while the Netflix Engagement Report isn’t analogous to Nielsen’s list of the top 100 shows of 2023, it is still a giant leap along what Sarandos described to reporters as a “continuum of transparency” — and much more data than any other streamer has offered up before. In explaining why Netflix had resisted opening up its books for so long, Sarandos was refreshingly candid. Earlier during the streamer’s existence, “It wasn’t really in our interest to be that transparent because we were building a new business,” he said. “We needed room to learn, and we also didn’t want to provide roadmaps to future competitors. And by not doing public data, there was something the creators liked a lot about it too, which is it took a lot of pressure off of the overnight ratings model or the weekend box office model and gave people room to create — [and] not focus so much on the numbers.” Plus, when Netflix was the only real streamer in the game, comparisons didn’t make sense, Sarandos argued: There were no streamers near its size to measure against, and linear networks use a very different model of consumption (scheduled vs. on-demand).

While this summer’s WGA and SAG strikes resulted in streamers agreeing to share their data with the guilds in order to establish new residual formulas, Sarandos insisted Netflix was already on a path toward sharing more data before the labor action. That said, he admitted that by keeping so much data hidden for so long, what began as a plus for some creators — less pressure to perform — ended up becoming a negative. “The unintended consequence of not having more transparent data about our engagement was it created an atmosphere of mistrust over time with producers and creators and the press about what was happening on Netflix,” Sarandos said during his press conference. He was even more blunt during an appearance on Matt Belloni’s podcast The Town, saying having creators who thought Netflix was trying to pull a fast one with its data became “a lousy way to start a creative relationship. It was starting to feel like grounds for mistrust. So I said, “You want the data, here’s the data.”

But despite all the talk about a “continuum” of transparency, Sarandos also seems to be suggesting that this new era of data Glasnost may have reached its limit for a while, and that the streamer isn’t anxious about getting more specific about how its titles perform at a micro-level. For instance, Tuesday’s data dump includes viewing around the world and mixes titles which can be seen globally vs. others which are only in certain markets, both big or small. A more useful tool for creators (and journalists) trying to understand how shows do in their home country, or how NCIS plays in the United States vs., say, Spain, would break out how shows perform by territory or country. But when asked if that sort of data would eventually be shared with the public by Netflix — now that it’s gone well beyond its top 10 lists — the CEO suggested it would not. “We don’t plan on doing it at the country level,” he said. “That’s an enormous amount of competitive intelligence that we’d be putting out there.”

And while U.S. reporters, for example, might want to let readers know which shows are popular just in America, Netflix views things differently. “We run the business as a global company and we have a consolidated global content investment,” Sarandos explained. “So global engagement is really what matters.” He added that this report, as imprecise as it might be, “is a great gauge” of how Netflix titles are resonating (or not) in the broader culture. “Hardly anybody turns off things that they love and hardly anyone watches things that they hate when it’s so easy to switch to something else,” he said. “We think this is the most accurate reflection of that.”

So why do all this now? I think Sarandos is being honest about wanting to reset Netflix’s relationship with its creative partners. The WGA and SAG strikes did major damage to the public perception of the entertainment conglomerates, including Netflix, and while the richest, most successful showrunners and directors have likely already moved on, the much bigger Hollywood middle class might have a longer memory. This data play doesn’t erase those hard feelings, but I saw a lot of creative folks celebrating on social media Tuesday about the release of these numbers.

But there could be some other motives. For one thing, this list — flawed as it is — also shows that not every big Netflix original has a long tail on the platform. Orange Is The New Black and House of Cards both came out in 2013 and have similar lengths, but the first season of Orange generated nearly 50 million hours of viewing in the first half of 2023, while Cards got around 20 million (though, let’s face it, a lot of that might have to do with its star being Kevin Spacey). Establishing clear winners and losers will help Netflix negotiate future talent deals and adjust expectations about what it will and won’t pay for projects. Plus, it could come in handy when trying to explain why shows people loved got the ax after a season or two.

There’s also another possible explanation: Netflix likes to lead. “First is always a huge advantage for them so they [can] set the terms,” one industry vet tells me. “If someone else came along and included completion metrics for example, it would force their hand.” Indeed, Netflix’s decision to integrate top 10 lists into its user interface is something most other streamers soon emulated, just as it set the standard for releasing shows in the middle of the night (vs. a set timeslot) and established binge releases as a viable (though not universal) distribution approach. It’s also worth noting that the European Union recently enacted new data transparency rules for companies like Amazon, TikTok and Google. While its Digital Services Act did not apply to Netflix, that could change at some point. “They may be getting in front of government regulations in specific countries,” the insider says. “Better to get the jump.”

The other big question in the wake of Netflix’s pivot on transparency is whether its rivals will follow, particularly once the first mandatory data reports to the WGA and SAG get shared with labor officials. Those documents won’t be public but I wouldn’t bet against selective leaks. I don’t think smaller players like Peacock or Paramount+ will do anything close to what Netflix did this week, but it wouldn’t totally shock me if a Disney or Prime Video did, given their sizable global footprints. What really needs to happen, however, is for Nielsen or others to step up and release more detailed third-party reports based on scientific sampling. Nielsen’s top 10 lists are incredibly limited and don’t even begin to touch on the much more detailed data the company compiles for its clients. Understandably it’s not going to release everything it has for free, but now that Netflix has gone beyond the top 10, Nielsen ought to rethink its public release strategy, too. Netflix and other streamers shouldn’t get to fully control what we know about What We Watched.

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