Chris Pizzello/AP
Netflix has won the paid streaming wars — and its rivals are feeding its dominance.
Traditional Hollywood giants give Netflix some of their best shows, and they perform well. Five studios account for 22% of Netflix’s library — and 32% of its viewing hours, a new report from research firm Owl & Co. shows. The report is based on Netflix’s engagement reports and data from Ampere Analysis.
The top supplier is Comcast’s NBCUniversal. It provides 3.7% of Netflix’s content hours and 8.4% of its viewing hours, helped by popular series like “Suits” and “House.”
Disney has been less open to licensing — it also comes closest to competing directly with Netflix — but has given Netflix some of its hits, like “Prison Break,” contributing to a spike in Disney’s viewing hours for Netflix in the second half of last year.
With the exception of Sony, all five of the top five suppliers operate their own streamers, which compete with Netflix for subscriber revenue and ad dollars.
When Netflix first launched its streaming service, few anticipated it would become a global juggernaut, and studios were happy to license their content to the upstart. That practice dried up as studios began hoarding their shows and movies to build their own streaming services, and Netflix started commissioning its own originals, like “House of Cards.” A few years later, Hollywood hit the panic button about streaming’s business prospects and began to be more open to licensing to Netflix again.
In the current market, licensing to Netflix represents a complicated tradeoff for Hollywood giants. They lose the upside for their own streamers but get consistent cash from Netflix. And lending their shows to Netflix could give them broad exposure they might not get on their own — smaller — services, said Hernan Lopez, founder of Owl & Co. That’s known colloquially as “the Netflix effect.”
For Netflix, these shows can serve as a way to engage customers on a daily basis. This, in turn, helps prevent them from canceling, something the company is prioritizing now that it’s running out of potential new subscribers.
And for all of Netflix’s streaming success and big content budget — it expected to spend around $18 billion in 2025 — licensing known, popular comedies and dramas like “Grey’s Anatomy” from the studios is still often cheaper and easier than coming up with its own original hits, according to research from Parrot Analytics.
“The fact they are showing up on this chart is reflective of how much of that they still own,” Lopez said of the studio’s long-running hits. For now, Netflix will keep benefiting from them.
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