crowded.

It is a giant arms race.

The streaming landscape has been getting more

competitive.

Linear TV, no offense to what we're doing right

here, is in trouble.

Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and others are

about to come head to head with the likes of

Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, HBO Max and CNBC's

parent company Comcast NBCUniversal.

It's been dubbed the streaming wars.

A lot of people are figuring out where they want

to position themselves for the future of TV.

In 2017, 61 percent of adults 18 to 29 year olds

said they primarily watched TV through a

streaming service, compared to just 31 percent

who watched cable.

There's gonna have to be winners and losers here.

So who's going to win, what's going to happen to

cable, and what will happen when customers have

to pay just as much, if not more, for all their

streaming services as they would have for cable?

Are we headed toward a future where an aggregator

will simply bundled together popular streaming

services, and will the cost of that be close to

the cost that people pay for cable?

And the answer to that may very well be yes.

Let's start with who's doing what.

Disney announced the details of its Disney Plus

platform in April of 2019, touting all of its

franchises and acquisitions like Marvel, Star

Wars, Pixar, National Geographic and 20th Century

Fox.

Disney has the best chance just because of its

very, very popular content and the money and

distribution and the Disney name it's put it

behind.

That's going to cost customers $6.99

a month or $69.99

a year.

Most recently, Disney announced it will also be

offering a bundle, including Disney Plus, ESPN

Plus, an ad-supported Hulu.

Disney Plus and the bundle will be launching on

November 12th, 2019.

We've partnered with the most thoughtful,

accomplished, and award winning group of creative

visionaries who have ever come together in one

place.

Apple announced Apple TV Plus at a keynote in

March of 2019, which will feature original

content from some of the most prominent producers

and actors like Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg,

Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.

Apple TV Plus is set to launch in the Fall of

2019, but the price has not been announced.

HBO Max is slated to launch its beta in late 2019

and will feature content from a variety of assets

owned by its parent company, AT&T and Warner

Media. Warner Media hasn't released the pricing

for HBO Max, though it's expected to be somewhere

around $15 to $18 a month.

It will offer all of the programming you already

get on HBO, which is probably the most

competitive product in terms of quality, plus

it's going to offer you all of the programming

that lives in the Warner Brothers universe,

whether it's Friends or DC Comics, and then you

throw in original programming on top of that.

Viacom and CBS have held extensive merger talks

which would put them in good standing for a

streaming service.

This service could include the Star Trek movies,

programming from Comedy Central and shows that

currently stream on CBS All Access, CBS' current

streaming service that already boasts 8 million

subscribers. CNBC's parent company, NBCUniversal,

is taking a more cable-focused approach, which

makes sense as NBC is owned by cable provider

Comcast. NBCUniversal announced the service would

be free to cable customers, and while it hasn't

announced a cost for cord cutters, sources say it

will probably be $10 or less per month for

customers without cable subscriptions.

NBCUniversal's product will be ad-supported.

So whether you are a cable subscriber and you get

the product for free or you are a cord cutter

paying $10 a month, that product will have

advertisements in it.

All of these streaming services have created

multiple bidding wars from networks to buy back

their content from Netflix.

Warner Media will spend $85 million a year for

the next five years to stream its popular sitcom

Friends. NBCUniversal will shell out $100 million

a year for the next five years to take back the

rights to stream its own show, The Office. And

Disney will be pulling all of its movies from

Netflix in 2019 as it rolls out Disney Plus.

These companies will also be creating content

specifically for their streaming services.

Netflix alone spent $12 billion on original

programming in 2018 and is expected to spend even

more in 2019.

Very, very few companies can match that.

OK, Apple could.

You know much HBO was spending on content?

It's about $4 billion a year, like, Netflix is

actually dramatically outspending them.

Hulu and Amazon invest large sums of money in

original programming, too, and CBS has exclusive

content for its All Access streaming service

that's not available on CBS' TV station, like

Star Trek Discovery.

You absolutely need to have your own original or

at least exclusive content.

That's how are you going to drive people to a

director consumer product when you offer

something that you can't get elsewhere.

Netflix has gone from largely reselling other

people's content to really heavily investing

billions of dollars in original content that

can't be taken away from them.

So why now?

Netflix has been serving streaming content since

2007 and introduced its first original show,

House of Cards, in 2013.

It was clearly on to something, but most content

creators wanted to see if the trend stuck around.

The more successful we were at building an

on-demand subscriber base with content, the more

likely they were gonna be to stop licensing to

us, right?

It's actually one of the reasons why we started

original content in the first place, because we

believed this shift would all happen.

It's just taken many years longer than

we thought.

For several years, while Netflix gained in

valuation, the party line among traditional media

executives was, 'this is a flash in the pan.

What we want to do is protect the cable bundle.

We don't want to self-imposed the destruction of

this. It's our golden goose.'

What has happened in the past couple years is an

evolution of thinking that the bubble in Netflix

is not actually going to burst.

In fact, Netflix stock rose over 2000 percent from

the beginning of 2013 to early August 2019.

Now, with streaming content solidified in the

consumer market, content creators and media

outlets all want a piece of the pie.

The more choice they get, the less they need the

traditional cable bundle.

And so what we should see is more and more people

cutting the cord or cutting traditional cable.

Cord cutting, the process of ditching cable has

been on the rise.

The five biggest cable companies collectively

lost 3.2

million pay TV customers in 2018, and the high

volume of streaming services could push that

number even higher.

All of broadcasting is in danger.

The only people who are willing to watch

commercials are people who can't afford to buy

the goods that are being sold.

That's an existential, long-term issue.

But it's not lights out for cable just yet.

There are things that cable offers that streaming

services don't.

The live news, the live sports, that's not yet

included in these streaming services and it has

kept the traditional cable bundle alive.

It's a jolting experience to have to navigate

multiple apps on a TV, and so high level speaking

cable is a great value proposition from a product

standpoint, bringing it all together.

And because the cable providers are also providing

the internet access to make the streaming

possible, they are at an advantage.

So everyone's talk about cord cutting, cord

shifting, cable companies, their businesses are

just going to cord shift onto a new medium that's

that's Internet based.

'So even if we lose you and we only sell you

broadband internet, we don't care because we're

only breaking even.'

Goldman Sachs calls this the point of

indifference.

Analysts are also speculating how this will affect

big players like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.

No one's going to compete with Netflix and grow

subscribers. I believe they have won the game.

And I think that there's nothing that I can see

that's going to dislodge them.

There's gonna be a tremendous amount of

competition coming in over the next two to three

years. I wouldn't want to be in a position of

competing against Amazon, Apple, Disney, Comcast,

AT&T.

Not only could streaming cost as much as cable,

but users would also have to navigate a

complicated and segmented landscape of products

to get to the content that they want.

Do people want to sign up for six different

streaming services.

Everything is going to be behind its own silos.

It's just creating a fragmented media world.

There might even be the potential of a company to

bundle all of these products together under one

umbrella product.

Everyone's talking about Apple TV Plus. Where

I put Apple into this fight is there Apple TV

app. Everything can be watched and aggregated

through the TV app.

So what are the benefits?

Well, customers will get to pick and choose what

services they want to spend their money on.

Don't care about Disney movies?

Don't get it service.

It's that simple.

Consumers will have more and more choice on what

they choose to buy.

And maybe they buy three streaming services.

Maybe they buy five.

Maybe they buy one.

We'll have to wait and see how this all shakes

out. But some casualties will be expected.

There are simply too many streaming products that

the entire ecosystem won't work with all of them.

I think some will see return and some will realize

we just put a lot of money into something maybe

we shouldn't have.