 Blair Brown as Judy King and Michael Harney as Sam Healy in Season 4 of Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black.” (JoJo Whilden/Netflix) I read a lot of entertainment industry business news, because though Hollywood isn’t a wholly rational business, the bottom line does have a considerable impact on what television shows and movies get made. So I was interested to see Variety report that the share of broadband use in American households during primetime television viewing hours dedicated to Netflix is down 2 percent. That’s not entirely because people are watching other streaming services; Sandivine, the company that crunched the broadband numbers, said some of the fall is due to the fact that Netflix got better at streaming your favorite television shows and movies more efficiently. Reporter Todd Spangler noted, “But part of Netflix's decline in share of bandwidth consumption may be because of a big jump in usage attributed to Amazon: This spring, Amazon Video accounted for 4.3% of peak downstream traffic, a significant gain from 2% on Sandvine's report a year ago. Like Netflix, Amazon made optimizations to its video compression in early 2016.” (A disclaimer I have to give you so often it’s boring: Amazon’s chief executive and founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) Whatever the figures mean for the relative positions of these companies, the statistics got me thinking. A lot of the talk about unbundling cable seems to work from the assumption that people who decide to lose their cable subscriptions, or who never intend to get them in the first place — cord-cutters and cord-nevers in industry parlance — will instead subscribe to a package of streaming services. But what this data suggests is that Netflix is really functioning as the new cable bundle: a much more limited, and much less-expensive bundle, but a bundle none the less. Anecdotally, at least, it seems that Netflix has a huge advantage in that people go there first, and are aware of what’s streaming there, particularly for its original content, including shows such as “House of Cards” and “Orange Is The New Black.” I know plenty of people who assumed that “The Americans,” for example, simply wasn’t streaming because it wasn’t on Netflix. Because I’m a critic, I subscribe to a ton of different services, but I suspect that I’m unusual in this regard. So I’d be curious to know, and perhaps we can discuss this in the chat on Monday, what streaming services you subscribe to, which you actually use, and how you choose what to subscribe to. I promise we’ll make time amidst the inevitable “Game of Thrones” aftermath. |
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