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Netflix Should’ve Seen This Coming — The First Casualty of the Streaming Wars
Netflix’s first subscriber decline in a decade sent shockwaves through the marketplace, but how did no one see this coming?
Just a few months ago, Netflix quietly celebrated the 10th anniversary of its first original streaming series. Starring The Sopranos alum and E Street Band legend Stevie Van Zandt as a kind of carbon copy of his Silvio Dante character, Lillyhammer was a show made for Norwegian television that Netflix co-funded in order to bring it to the rest of the world. In the years that followed the DVD-by-mail turned streaming service debuted a number of hits that captured the zeitgeist. House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and the failed Marco Polo were all signs that the era of Prestige TV was about to be led by streaming services. Yet, with the recent announcement that the service lost subscribers for the first time in a decade, investors and (likely) executives in the company are panicked about its future. Yet, since the “Streaming Wars” became a thing, this was always the inevitable result for Netflix. Which begs the question: how were they not prepared for every studio starting its own “Netflix?”
While it feels like a relatively new phenomenon, we’re actually celebrating the 15th anniversary of streaming this year. In 2007, both Netflix and Hulu launched their…
