There’s no doubt which streamer owned the year: After spending 2022 in corporate hell, and while its rivals suffered through endless rounds of cutbacks and cancellations, Netflix finally steadied itself, reaffirming its status as the industry’s clear-cut global leader. But while it deserves kudos for its accomplishment, at this point in the streaming wars — if it’s even fair to still call it a “war†— assessing the state of the industry through an up/down narrative feels a little stale. Who’s winning or losing is obviously still important, but what’s even more interesting is how various platforms played the game. And that’s where strategy comes in.
While great programming and an effective user interface and algorithm are the most fundamental factors in any streamer’s performance, crafting and executing smaller, more focused game plans matters a lot as well. Hulu’s decision years ago to offer live-TV packages, for instance, allowed it to stand out from its rivals and created an excellent weapon against churn. Paramount+ was also smart to partner with Walmart, a deal that has delivered millions of eyeballs to its ad-supported tier. So rather than offering up yet another horse-race analysis, I decided to review the year in streaming by identifying some of the smartest strategic moves we saw play out over the last 12 months. The most interesting came not in the subscription space, but the ever-expanding world of FAST — free, ad-supported TV. It was in this corner of the streaming universe that Amazon-owned Freevee showed itself to be a strategic powerhouse.
While Freevee isn’t the only free streaming service spending money on original content, the Amazon-owned FAST platform has arguably been the most aggressive and ambitious with its efforts. Taking full advantage of its parent company’s deep pockets, Freevee has launched multiple first-run dramas based on existing IP (Bosch: Legacy, Leverage: Redemption, Alex Rider), all of which have the sort of premium feel you’d expect from bigger streamers or cable networks. It has also partnered with producers like Mike Schur and Greg Garcia on comedy projects, and spent big on unscripted, moving Judge Judy icon Judy Sheindlin from syndication to streaming (and then letting her produce a quasi-spinoff series, Tribunal Justice).
But Freevee’s biggest breakthrough moment came this year with Jury Duty, the scripted mockumentary series that put a nonactor at its center. Almost out of nowhere, it became a viral hit, giving the platform months of social-media buzz and critical praise, as well as lots of awards-season love, including multiple Emmy nominations in major categories. Not surprisingly, Freevee says Jury Duty also now stands as its most-watched series to date, though it hasn’t quantified exactly what that means. But the show’s TikTok domination last spring, and its continued strong kudos game this fall and winter — it was nominated for a Golden Globe Award this week — hint that the numbers probably were substantial.
Whatever the actual audience for Jury Duty, its success breaking through the cultural noise serves as validation of Amazon’s decision to invest so heavily in its free platform. The dominant philosophy in streaming the past decade has been that quality original content is for subscription services, with FAST the place for library titles, i.e., the leftovers. Make no mistake: Freevee is still 90 percent powered by reruns, and acquisitions are key to its business model. But much the way basic cable started adding more and more original shows to its portfolio in the late 1990s and early aughts, Freevee execs realized that the right kinds of originals can help it stand out and attract specific kinds of viewers.
It’s not alone in understanding this: Tubi has been very smart about green-lighting low-budget original movies (scripted and documentaries) and working both with independent creators and production studios owned by its parent company, Fox. And Roku Channel saw the value in originals long ago with its purchase of the Quibi library and investments in movies like last year’s Emmy-nominated Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
Freevee, however, seems light-years ahead of its FAST rivals in developing originals in all kinds of genres and spending serious money to make them attractive to broad audiences vs. smaller niches. It’s also led the way in experimenting with different release patterns for FAST. Judy Justice and Tribunal Justice, for instance, drop new episodes daily, giving audiences a reason to regularly open the Freevee app (half the battle for smaller players). Along the same lines, it’s also invested in resurrecting a very popular daily soap opera from Australia, Neighbours, something that feels like a test to see if something similar might work with a U.S. soap format.
And Freevee has also exploited its synergy with big brother Prime Video to maximum effect: Not only is its content integrated into the Prime Video app — making sure people who come for The Boys can quickly segue over to Jury Duty — but earlier this fall, the company said it would shift Freevee’s Leverage: Redemption over to Prime Video in season three. Audiences that got hooked on the first two seasons for free will now have to pay for Prime to get a third season. Some consumers obviously won’t be thrilled, but it’s an undeniably savvy way of using FAST as a sales tool to generate sign-ups for an SVOD model. Bottom line: Freevee’s willingness to invest and experiment is paying real dividends for Amazon and revealing a lot about what the future of free (or even lower-cost) ad-supported streaming might look like. It’s hardly the only successful FAST player out there — the whole space continued to explode in 2023 — but it’s arguably done the most to raise the bar for what free streaming can accomplish.
While Freevee executed the most interesting strategy this year, it was hardly alone in making winning moves. Here are four other game plans that caught my eye:
➽ Disney turned its war with Charter into a win-win for cable and streaming. When ABC, ESPN, and other Disney-owned properties went dark in millions of Charter homes last summer, it looked like yet another of the frequent spats over money between a big cable provider and an entertainment conglomerate. But this time, the standoff revolved around Charter being upset that Disney — like much of the industry — had moved most of its best programming over to its streaming services. It told Disney that if it was going to keep selling cable packages with increasingly less sexy channel offerings, it needed to be able to give its customers access to apps like Disney+ and Hulu as part of its monthly fee. Charter obviously deserves credit for taking a stand here, and it certainly had some leverage over Disney. But Disney also played a super smart hand throughout the negotiations, using its Hulu with Live TV service as leverage to get Charter to agree to a compromise that resulted in more money flowing to Disney and a bigger available audience of Disney+ and Hulu viewers. Plus, it offered a template for how cable providers can become sales tools for streamers, in the process slowing cord-cutting down just enough to keep that sweet cable-bundle cash flowing for a few more years.
➽ AMC+ used Max as a marketing machine for its originals. For two months in September and October, some of the most popular programming on Max came from a much smaller streamer — AMC+. That’s because AMC Networks execs struck a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery to give Max free access to newer shows like Interview With the Vampire and Dark Winds, as well as more valuable library titles such as Fear the Walking Dead. While some thought it weird that AMC would give a rival so much content for nada, the fact is that Max has five times the number of subscribers, and the power of AMC’s linear cable networks isn’t what it was five years ago. What AMC got was two months of marketing from a much bigger streamer, exposing an audience of millions to its newest shows. If even a fraction of those Max viewers end up watching on AMC or signing up for AMC+, it will be a big win for the smaller streamer.
➽ Netflix got transparent. After years of being the poster child for hiding how many people are watching its shows and movies, the streaming superpower just decided to post viewing data for virtually all of its programming on a random Tuesday in December. Even though Netflix has been moving toward more transparency in recent years, it was still a total shock and immediately had people in the industry asking why it decided to reverse-course and why it did so now. Perhaps it was Netflix feeling the pressure from labor (SAG and WGA made transparency a big part of their negotiations with the AMPTP); maybe it thinks there’s an advantage in letting folks know what isn’t being watched, just in case it decides to start pulling a Zaslav and purging older originals from the platform. It could also be that, having pioneered subscription streaming, it once again wants to get that first-mover advantage and help set the terms of how streaming ratings get reported. While it’s too soon for sure to say whether it will end up being a smart strategy, it definitely ranks as one of the year’s boldest moves.
➽ Hulu transformed the streaming debut of Moonlighting (and some other shows) into an event. Too often, streamers treat library acquisitions of classic TV shows as an afterthought, with some older shows popping up on digital platforms without so much as a line in a “What’s New This Month†press release. But in the last few months, Hulu has given some new additions to its streaming catalogue the red-carpet treatment, starting with the October arrival of Moonlighting. The streamer announced in September that it had spent the money to digitally restore the show to look better than it did in the 1980s, giving news outlets and social media weeks to build up excitement over the fact that a series long missing from streaming would finally have a home. The result was a ton of interest in the show and lots of goodwill from subscribers. Hulu gave L.A. Law and Who’s the Boss similar treatment later in the year.
Look, classic TV shows are never going to be the thing that gets most people to sign up or keep a streaming subscription. But as evidenced by the slew of older shows in Netflix and Nielsen data, audiences crave familiar favorites. Hulu also purged a number of classics from its roster this year (I still can’t believe it parted ways with The Bob Newhart Show), but it reinvested some of the money it saved by doing so in bringing “new†classic titles to the service. That, along with working to make sure audiences knew these older shows could now be found on Hulu, helped the streamer maximize the value of its retro offering.