The fight for the home screen
Owning content is only half the business; getting an app in front of a viewer at the moment they turn on a television is the other half, and that moment is controlled by hardware the platforms mostly don't make themselves. Smart TV manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and Sony pre-install a set of apps and decide their prominence on the home screen, while standalone streaming boxes and sticks from Roku, Amazon's Fire TV line and Google TV act as an alternative gateway for viewers whose television doesn't do it well enough on its own. Being buried three menus deep on an unfamiliar TV interface costs a platform real viewership regardless of how good its content slate is.
Vertical integration versus open licensing
Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal each own the studios that supply a large share of their platforms' content, which gives them exclusivity without having to negotiate for it and lets them route their most valuable titles straight to their own service rather than licensing them elsewhere. Netflix, Apple and Amazon take a more open approach, commissioning through and partnering with a wide range of independent studios and production companies rather than owning a legacy studio outright. Vertical integration guarantees a pipeline of exclusive content but ties a platform's fortunes to that one studio's output; an open model can license from anywhere but has to keep winning each deal on its own terms rather than by default.
The technology layer nobody sees
Behind the interface, most platforms rely on cloud infrastructure and content delivery networks they don't own, and the arrangement gets stranger the closer you look: Amazon Web Services provides the underlying infrastructure for a significant share of the streaming industry, including services that compete directly with Amazon Prime Video for the same subscribers. This kind of dependency is normal in technology generally, but it means a platform's actual competitors sometimes double as its landlord, a fact none of them tend to put in the marketing.
Telecoms as an access channel
Mobile and broadband providers function as another kind of partner rather than a pure distribution channel, bundling platform access into contracts as a way of reducing customer churn on their own core product. For the platform, this trades some revenue per subscriber for access to a telecom's existing customer base without having to run a marketing campaign to reach them. It is the same logic as pricing bundles, just entered through the hardware and access side of the business rather than the pricing sheet.
Joint ventures where all three lines meet
TNT Sports is a useful example of studio, telecom and technology interests converging in one place: a joint venture between BT, a telecom, and Warner Bros. Discovery, a studio and platform operator, combining BT's existing broadband and mobile customer relationships with Warner Bros. Discovery's sports rights and production capability. Arrangements like this are becoming more common precisely because no single company comfortably covers content, distribution and infrastructure on its own anymore, if it ever fully did.
What to weigh
- Whether a platform's flagship content depends on one owned studio, which affects how much its future slate depends on that studio's output alone.
- How prominently an app appears on the television or device you actually use, which is a real factor even though it has nothing to do with content quality.
- Whether a bundled telecom deal changes anything about the platform itself, or is purely a billing convenience.
- Whether reliability issues during major releases or live events point to infrastructure strain rather than the content itself.