In order to answer this, one needs to first understand the history and landscape of digital media streaming/content delivery services.
For a content provider to succeed, it must first procure content. Ideally it should be content that people want, but when you are just starting out, anything is better than nothing.
As you gain viewership, so do you gain power. With that power comes the ability to gain exclusive content by licensing it from the content producers (or producing it yourself) – and once you have this exclusive content, you can start to draw significant viewership away from any competition.
This is where you start to surface a few issues:
- There’s a lot of new content being produced
- There’s a lot of content already produced
- Every viewer has different preferences
- Content licensing is expensive
- Content production is expensive
If there were one company with enough money to purchase the licensing rights for every amount of content every produced, and take over production for upcoming content, then there would be no room for any competition.
As I don’t see that as a possibility, I can see a place for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, and other services like Spotify to come in and cater to different viewership needs for years to come.
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-a-threat-could-Spotify-be-to-Netflix
Originally Posted On: 2016-02-07