While the French streaming platform Salto officially stopped working on Monday, the good health of other video-on-demand services raises questions. Are the increase in prices, the proliferation of offers, the quality of programs ultimately obstacles for users, pushing back web giants? Response elements.
Are the new web giants already in turmoil? Stars of a renewal of the consumption of films and series, streaming platforms seem to be going through a first crisis in their young history. Launched at the end of 2019 on the American continent, Disney + for example lost 2.4 million subscribers for the first time during the last three months of 2022, causing the imminent loss of around 7,000 jobs within the giant of the entertainment.
With us, the Salto platform, which was to position itself as the “French Netflix” and was the pride of the main audiovisual groups in the country, has announced its closure. The service officially ended on Monday March 27, 2023, due to a lack of sufficient profitability for its shareholders. And the number one Netflix, to limit the breakage, has for its part announced to hunt for the sharing of accounts between users.
Expensive competition
What can we conclude from these different strategic reversals? First, the proliferation of different platforms forces most users to favor certain offers, which creates fierce competition between services and a race for exclusivity.
Disney + is betting everything on a catalog based on its licenses such as Pixar, Star Wars or Marvel. Netflix is betting on creations featuring planetary stars: recently with Tim Burton at the helm of the series Wednesdaybut also Daniel Craig starring in Glass Onionthe blockbuster proposed in December 2022.
The same goes for Prime, Amazon’s video platform, which recently launched its serial adaptations of the licenses The Lord of the Rings And The Last of Us, registering two world successes. But this mad rush has a price.
In detail, if Netflix boasts of good economic health in recent months, the platform veteran has seen its annual net profit drop by 12%, to 4.5 billion at the end of 2022. And since its launch, the service has accumulated more than 14 billion dollars in debt, in particular to finance its original productions.
The inevitable increase in the price of subscriptions
To compensate for losses and remain attractive, all platforms have come to the same conclusion: they need to increase the price of subscriptions. This is how the “standard” subscription offered by Netflix went from 7.99 to 13.49 euros per month. Disney+ and Amazon Prime have increased their prices by almost 40%.
And in order not to scare away some users, but also to attract others, Netflix has opened the way to a method which for the moment was prohibited: the advertising page upstream and during the programs. Since the beginning of the year, the platform has thus offered an “essential” formula at almost six euros per month, including advertising.
Canal + plays smarter. Taking advantage of the confusion around the number of platforms, the audiovisual group launched at the beginning of March an offer ironically called “Rat +” and intended for people under 26. This offers a grouping of subscriptions to different platforms for less than twenty euros per month, a good compromise that avoids users having to choose a single platform.
If the sector has shown these first feverishness, it is still far from disappearing. As a reminder, in 2022, Netflix alone accounted for nearly 15% of global internet traffic, trailing YouTube and Tik Tok.
Source: Europe1
I am a journalist who writes about economics and business. I have worked in the news industry for over 5 years, most recently as an author at Global Happenings. My work has focused on covering the economy news, and I have written extensively on topics such as unemployment rates, housing prices, and the financial crisis. I am also an avid reader and have been known to write about books that interest me.
