Is there life outside Netflix?

For a number of years, Netflix has been the flagstaff name in streaming. Beginning as a company roughly fifteen years ago, it has proven an adaptive force in its ability to harness shifting viewer preferences and rapidly advancing mobile technologies. It consistently pushes quality content, enabling it to wield a wider audience and increased subscriptions.

Dumping the traditional one-week-one-episode standard, Netflix almost mostly provides all episodes of a season in bulk, giving viewers full and immediate access upon release. This model has created an upswing in viewership resulting in the recently coined term binge-watching, which marks viewership surpassing two back-to-back episodes. Recent figures estimate that 61% of users engage in binge-watching with the average Netflix user watching 93 minutes of content per day.

Growing engagement is recognized not only in consumer data, but also in voiced praise. Priding itself on its original series, it has been nominated for Emmys, Academy Awards and Golden Globe titles, securing a number of wins over the years. Its quality content has a budget to match, allowing production costs for two seasons of the critically acclaimed House of Cards to climb up to USD 100 million. Its content library contains over a petabyte of content, is available in 50 countries, and reaped a revenue of USD 1.4 billion in the first quarter of this year alone.

Yet, even with all its achievements in tow it faces increased competition. Netflix holds a steady third of all downstream traffic online and roughly 50% of the streaming market, but with new competitors and new original series bubbling to the market surface; these numbers could begin to fall. Between an increasingly crowded market, contentoriented competitors and new ways to watch, the industry giant is beginning to feel the heat.

In 2007, Hulu, one of Netflix’s largest current competitors, entered the market. Since then, the SVOD service has risen to claim the second largest market share after Netflix with roughly 9 million subscribers. It has been highly flexible and adaptive. It has experimented with its method of distribution, releasing some series in full season (binge model), and others in the traditional one-episode-one-week standard, staying true to its belief in ’water-cooler’ TV. It has moved into completely new streaming terrain, accessible to desktops, smartphones, smart TVs and tablets.

In addition to its accessibility, Hulu has also sought to mirror and emulate its competitor in the field of content. Beginning as a distribution forum for licensed content, it has started producing its own originals, churning out a number of series since the beginning of 2011. Amidst continuous deals with content providers to acquire the shows audiences want to watch in bulk (such as the recent addition of all nine seasons of Seinfeld), the SVOD service has launched a number of noteworthy originals including The Awesomes, Deadbeat and newly acquired from FOX, The Mindy Project.

The full report is available at NATPE Miami 2016 edition. Download the full version here