The relentless pace of new series premiering in recent years has been a boon for consumers. The challenge audiences face in the peak-streaming era is sorting through the mountain of available content, rather than not having enough options to choose from. However, this state of affairs hasn’t been such a positive for the platforms. The massive spike in the number of recent series available on streamers has not led to an equal rise in demand for these shows. In fact, older shows tend to overperform relative to the share of platforms’ catalogs they make up.
Across major U.S. Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) providers, 52% of shows premiered in 2019 or later. However, while more than half the titles on SVODs have been released since 2019, the newest shows account for only 33% of demand for all shows available on these platforms.
It is not surprising that 2019 is something of an inflection point. It was a watershed year in the streaming wars that saw the competition for subscribers heat up. Notably, both Apple TV+ and Disney+ launched that year, so all the shows those platforms have released since their launch helped to balloon the number of series post-2019.
One factor likely driving the over performance of older content is 20/20 hindsight. Having seen which older shows audiences want to watch helps streamers separate the wheat from the chaff and pick winning shows that will keep audiences engaged on their platform. New content by its very nature is untested.
This is good news for legacy entertainment companies, which continue to cash in on their deep catalogs of content by licensing their shows to streaming platforms. It is impossible to quickly replicate the time-tested appeal of long-running shows, so these content arms dealers should be able to extract a premium price for licensing the rights to this content.
From a business perspective, this data validates some of the less consumer-friendly moves we have seen from streamers this year, including canceling series or removing them from streaming entirely and an overall slowdown in the pace of output of new streaming originals.
The path to streaming profitability will likely mean less content, but the silver lining is that there already are more new shows than audiences can keep up with.
Christofer Hamilton is a senior insights analyst at Parrot Analytics, a WrapPRO partner. For more from Parrot Analytics, visit the Data and Analysis Hub.