No, netflix did. Let’s not be silly. Cable succeeded by itself for decades then netflix came along and said have everything for ten bucks a month. Everyone switched. Cable started its death ride its been on since.
But netflix could only offer everything for ten bucks a month because Cable customers were the ones paying for that content to be made.
Netflix offered an alternative, but people left cable because cable was crap. If cable was good, people wouldn’t have left.
Netflix could still offer things for $10 a month, but they don’t want to, because now they’re crap, too. They’re not crap because cable isn’t producing any more shows, though - the old shows are still just as strong of a draw as they always have been. However it doesn’t help that these old shows have exclusive deals where they all end up on different platforms.
The main reason we don’t have good new shows anymore is the strikes. Covid a little bit, too, but in general the writers and actors just haven’t been working so much.
This isn’t about cable, they’re sinking themselves by burying their head in the sand and pretending like streaming isn’t a threat - all while bleeding subscribers.
As for Netflix, you’ve got your take backwards. Netflix was licensing all of the content and paying the content owners fees. NBC, CBS, Paramount, HBO (now Max), AMC, Disney… they all got greedy. They saw the money Netflix was making, and they thought they could make more by keeping the content, creating their own services, and raking in the cash. Unfortunately that created a glut of new problems. Some of these providers don’t have enough content to justify their price to consumers. Consumers struggle to find shows they want to watch now because content is spread so thin, so they give up. Most importantly, consumers feel nickeled & dimed. They don’t want to pay for numerous services, so it becomes a game of “which one(s) am I going to subscribe to, and which am I going to ignore?”. Many of these services have struggled and lost money, so they’ve decided that it’s easier to license the content back to Netflix, let Netflix handle pricing, infrastructure, subscriber retention, etc., and they can cash the licensing checks.
Their take on Netflix isn’t backwards. Netflix was able to get all of those shows initially because the streaming licenses were really cheap, cause they were making enough money through cable subscriptions. Once streaming caught on though the companies started raising the prices and/or withholding content because the cable money stopped flowing. Remember Friends cost Netflix $100 million and over $500 million for Seinfeld.
You could be right, but my understanding was that content owners pulled content from Netflix because they thought they could make more money setting up their own streaming services. Most are at worst losing money, and at best not bringing in projected profits, so they’re moving content back to Netflix and taking the licensing money.
