Content owners are breaking herd immunity

It is all the rage for fashionable content owners to set up their own streaming services. First came CBS AllAccess with original programming premiered only on it, then Disney announced Disney+ (entertainment focused on children) and a separate service for ESPN, both of which would offer exclusively programming that would be withdrawn from Netflix and other third-party distributors, in January Comcast/NBCUniversal has announced a service with exclusivity on some programming, and now AT&T has announced that Warner Studios series such as Friends, The Office (US version) and ER will be pulled from third parties and offered exclusively on its new three-tiered streaming service, to be launched next year (it already operates three, which will be subjected to some rationalization). Original programming of company’s HBO unit has always been exclusive to its own streaming services. When the same week as AT&T’s announcement, its Warner Bros. movies were downgraded from 4k to regular HD on iTunes, some thought this was a quiet and immediate imposition of a milder version of exclusivity: one could still use the content but not as well. As the MacRumours story suggests at the end, this seems not to have been intentional. Especially as it affected the entire Harry Potter series of feature films, which does not make sense as an exclusive on an AT&T streaming service because its audience is very far from overlapping. But the withdrawal of so many big turtles into their shells does feed the assumption that the downgrade was intentional. Exclusivity doesn’t make sense if you can monetize the demand for your content more fully by permitting its distribution by others. Disney can go it alone, at least in the US, because it can be reasonably sure that most customers will follow it to its new platform, for both its sui generis entertainment programming and for ESPN with its exclusive sports rights. Few others can assume they can leverage such loyalty. But brinkmanship in negotiations over money will only increase in the near future, and when talks break down a downgrade might seem temporarily (while regular HD is not seen as tantamount to no service) attractive alternative to a complete outage of that content on the distributor’s platform. It might not suffice, though (the lower resolution might not be enough of an impediment to use, neutralizing the content owner’s main weapon). I rather expect that AT&T is fooling itself when it assumes its high-profile ex-NBC series give it the market power on which Disney is relying. The proliferation of content-owner streaming services with exclusivity on the owned content—disaggregation—raises the cost and complexity beyond the tolerance of most viewers, and something will give. The lesser content will fail first but almost every player will be hurt. As the antivaccination movement shows, a few ill-advised decisions can spoil it for everyone.