3 ms·
I think the key point is that streaming companies don't think of it as "our customers are paying us a subscription fee and then our catalog is free to them", bu
by mewse 5y ago
I think the key point is that streaming companies don't think of it as "our customers are paying us a subscription fee and then our catalog is free to them", but rather as "our customers are paying us a percentage of their subscription fee for each thing they watch".
In terms of figuring out their own cash flow, most of these sorts of subscription services divvy up the subscription fee from each customer between everything that customer consumed from the service during the month. So if you've paid a $10 monthly fee and then only watch one movie, the company interprets that as you paying $10 to watch that movie. If you watch two movies, then you've paid $5 to watch each movie. (maybe with a skew favouring the longer movie or the newer release, depending on their own business logic)
That approach would make it pretty easy for them to figure out a reasonable internal estimate of how much money a particular movie has earned the company via their subscription service. Although that's all fungible internal money and who knows how they'd want to report it, if at all.
- manquer 5y agoIt doesn't matter how they gauge the success internally. They never share viewership numbers to the producers, and they don't pay by the actual viewership , they buy the property and do internal P&L on success of the buy as you say. From the producers perspective it only matters how much Netflix paid for a movie.
- mewse 5y agoHi. I think you may have got the wrong end of the stick, here. This conversation is about a company that's released their movie to theatres and is simultaneously streaming it via their own subscription streaming service, and trying to figure out how to account for money earned by the movie when some of that money may or may not be coming in via subscription fees on the streaming service. In that specific case (the one being discussed in this thread), the 'internal' numbers should be fine to use since they're all happening inside a single company -- both the royalties on theatrical ticket sales and the streaming subscription fees. There's no "sharing viewership numbers" with external parties implied in my comment above, and Netflix is not involved in this situation in any way.
- manquer 5y agoNetflix was an example of streaming , i didn't mean to say Netflix specifically, my arguments before were for an example of external streaming ( I assumed that even if owned by the same parent they don't share numbers between studio and platform , which may not be true.) Even if the numbers are available, This way of accounting is too simple to apportion revenue and is flawed. The power of platforms (or studios / back catalogues) is that sum of the whole is greater than individual property. That is why consolidation happens all time in the industry. Most people are not paying for a subscription because they watch specific content[1]. For example If I watch only one movie this month and 10 next month , isn't it more accurate to split my 2 month fees by 11 rather than giving all my first month fees to first movie ?. Me not watching anything else should not increase the value of the content I did watch based on an arbitrary time period (billing cycle of a month) [1] ignoring the cases additional cost for a new movie that is direct revenue.