The major streamers have answered Wall Street loud and clear this earnings season: Look at us! We’re reining in unnecessary spending! We’re restructuring our businesses! We’re licensing out content!
That’s all in response to investors’ new focus on profitability over raw customer numbers, a trend that’s brought the go-go growth of the peak streaming era to an end, with far more scrutiny over metrics like average revenue per user, marketing spend efficiency and the productivity of sprawling content libraries.
Even as the primary metric of streaming success has shifted away from subscriber growth, each of the major streamers reported a quarterly increase, with the exception of Disney+.