Netflix faces losing licensed hit shows to streaming rivals

theguardian.com:

Netflix faces the threat of an exodus of a number of hit shows as it battles to reignite subscriber growth, with almost a third of its most popular content with British viewers – from Friends and Pretty Little Liars to Paw Patrol – licensed from rivals building their own streaming services.

Earlier this month, Netflix’s market value was slashed by almost $60bn as investors panicked that the decade-long streaming boom has come to an end, after the company forecast it would lose millions of subscribers in the first half of this year.

Netflix invests billions of dollars annually in original content – starting with House of Cards in 2013 and extending to recent hits such as Squid Game, Ozark and Bridgerton – in a long-term strategy designed to insulate its business from the impact of Hollywood rivals pulling content they license for their own rival services.

However, research shows that Netflix continues to have a significant dependency on licensed content, with major titles potentially moving off the service when contracts come up for renewal in the next few years.

In the first two months of this year, 31% of the 150 most-viewed shows and films by British users belonged to Netflix’s competition, and a quarter of all viewing was to content owned by rivals with streaming services of their own, according to the research firm Digital i.

“There is certainly risk for Netflix,” says Richard Broughton, an analyst at Ampere. “A significant number of its highest-performance titles are licensed from studios with in-house streaming ambitions of their own.”

Friends, the most popular show among British viewers and Netflix’s biggest hit globally, has already been removed by Warner Bros Discovery in the US along with other hits such as The Big