Media Industries 8.

1 (2021)

Beyond Streaming Wars:

Rethinking Competition in Video Services1
Ramon Lobato2
RMIT UNIVERSITY
Ramon.lobato [AT] rmit.edu.au

Amanda D. Lotz3
QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
Amanda.lotz [AT] qut.edu.au

Abstract
Internet-distributed video services have attracted exceptional attention in
recent years for their novelty and growth. Business and trade discussions
frequently excerpt internet-distributed video services from the broader field of
video and narrowly construct their relationship as one of direct competition
(e.g., streaming wars). However, there are several distinguishing characteristics
of these services that make their relationship more complex. This article explores
the multifaceted distinctions and markets within internet-distributed video,
including differences in programming, geography, audience, business model,
and market position. We also consider what is at stake in different imaginings of
video markets for media industry scholarship and policy.

Keywords: Streaming Wars, Competition, Subscription Video-on-Demand,

Market Boundaries, Netflix, Amazon

Since the early 2000s, the emergence of diverse internet-distributed video services—from
global players such as Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and Apple, to an extensive multiplicity of
national and regional services including BBC iPlayer (UK), Stan (Australia), Blim (Mexico), and
countless others—has transformed the entertainment landscape. In this volatile environ-
ment, it is often difficult to sort out who is competing with whom and where the boundaries
of different markets lie. Categories such as television, film, home video, and pay TV have
become porous as established industrial norms both shift and grow pluriform. Amid this
complexity, the dynamics of competition are often misunderstood.
This misunderstanding is evident in recent business and trade press discussion of “streaming
wars,” a term which entered the lexicon in late 2018 and which has since become a journalistic
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meme widespread in news coverage of video product launches, stock price fluctuations, and
subscriber counts, especially in the United States. Indicative headlines such as “The Great
Race to Rule Streaming TV”4 and “Disney, Netflix, Amazon: The Battle for Streaming Survival”5
give a sense of the winner-takes-all narrative that emerges from such coverage.
This streaming wars discourse has several characteristics. It reduces multidimensional com-
petitive dynamics to a race between a handful of media and technology giants, or presents a
battle between new and old media when considerable complementarity exists among the
growing array of services. It imagines competition in terms of conflict, victory, and defeat.
(Which company will “win” the streaming wars? Will Disney kill Netflix? How many services
can survive?) It also divorces internet-distributed services from their wider industrial con-
text. In effect, distribution technology becomes the market boundary, with the consequence
that all streaming services are seen to be directly competing with one another. (Curiously,
this frame has been pervasive in analysis of video services but is less commonly used in dis-
cussing streaming audio services that do compete more directly with nearly identical music
libraries and similar functionality.)
Clearly, the streaming wars frame—an artifact of trade commentary and industry hype—does
not do justice to the complexity of actually existing video markets. The sudden popularity of
this concept does, however, provide a useful opportunity for scholars to critically reexamine
the competition dynamics of video services and to ask meaningful questions about the cur-
rent service ecosystem. In recent work, television industry scholars including Catherine
Johnson, Tom Evens, and Karen Donders have begun this important work by reconceptual-
izing the institutional landscapes of television and video in a manner appropriate to their
changing technological contexts.6 Working in this tradition, our article asks a further series of
questions about competition. To what extent are advertising video-on-demand (AVOD), sub-
scription video-on-demand (SVOD), transactional video-on-demand (TVOD), and legacy pay-
TV services directly competing? What is at stake in claims of a streaming war? And how can
we speak about competition among video services in nuanced ways?
To answer these questions, our analysis identifies specific vectors of competition and non-
competition among video services.7 We show that rather than creating a zero-sum space of
direct competition, internet distribution has in fact introduced further complexity to a video
marketplace that was already diverse in distribution technologies, business models, and
types of video content—a marketplace also integrated within a larger sphere of leisure indus-
tries that seeks consumers’ attention, money, data, or all of the above. These points are illus-
trated through an analysis of current video services in a single territory: Australia. We also
consider some policy implications of judging certain services, and their parent companies, as
being in the same or in different markets.

Market Boundaries
A first step in understanding competition in any given media market is to define market
boundaries. However, defining a market is no easy matter. Indeed, questions of market defi-
nition are among the most complex and materially consequential issues in media law, policy,
and regulation. In fields such as antitrust and competition law, setting the boundaries of a

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market to include or exclude certain actors may, as Brett Christophers observes, “generate
very different assessments of competition issues, and thus very different forms, vectors and
intensities of market intervention and reconfiguration.”8

It is instructive to consider the language used by major media companies to describe the
markets in which their video services compete and how such descriptions are often cali-
brated to serve the strategic purposes of each company. Media mogul Barry Diller once
described video streaming as “a giant arms race”9—evoking the familiar streaming wars dis-
course of direct competition between services. The CEO of NBCUniversal, Steve Burke, has
stated that “Everybody is going to compete with everybody.”10 BBC Director-General Tony
Hall, reflecting on the status of the BBC’s on-demand service iPlayer, described the BBC’s
competitive position as “a medium-sized planet compared to the huge gas giants of the US—
the Netflixes, Apples, and Amazons,” in a claim that connects companies in multiple indus-
tries, with multiple revenue models, and both public-service and commercial measures of
success.11 In contrast, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings expanded the market boundary further yet
in rejecting the idea that Netflix’s primary competitors are video services; instead, he identi-
fies the videogame Fortnite, and even sleep, as the company’s main competition.12 Given this
discursive slipperiness, where market boundaries seem to expand or contract depending on
who is speaking, the problem of market definition becomes highly significant.

These CEO statements have a performative dimension in that they seek to shape as well as
describe a competitive field. Napoli and Caplan refer to this as the “disconnect between how
these companies have perceived themselves—and want to be perceived by others—and how
they actually function in the contemporary [media] ecosystem.”13 In his analysis of Netflix’s
investor relations, Colin Crawford, building on the work of Timothy Havens, describes the
“investor lore”—“narratives and discourses of value which organize, justify and govern [ . . .]
new industrial practices”—that constructs public understanding of video and entertainment
markets.14 News, business, and trade press coverage—itself an end-product of the markets it
purports to describe—also plays a part in this process, presenting varied and sometimes
conflicting visions of markets and their boundaries.15
This discursive aspect of competition has been famously analyzed by Michel Callon in The
Laws of the Markets. For Callon, any understanding of competition depends on how a market
is framed:

Competition, whether perfect or imperfect, is not a starting point but a finishing point. It can exist
and really does exist—and that is what makes it so valuable. However, it occurs only when the
boundaries, the technical options, have been selected and stabilized, i.e., in a world that is already
highly structured and shaped.16

As Callon observes, markets have both institutional and discursive dimensions, and a feed-
back loop exists between the two. For media industry studies—as a field concerned with
both institutions and discourse—there are several considerations here. On the one hand,
there is the need to understand how specific markets have been institutionally defined and
what this means for questions of market power, efficiency, conduct, gatekeeping, and other
relevant issues. A second task is to explore how particular market boundaries have come to
be made thinkable, common-sensical, legible, and acceptable (their discursive dimension).

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Here, it is helpful to consider the work of Callon, Christophers, and other key thinkers in the
critical social science of markets, as well as media scholars such as Patrick Vonderau, whose
essays on digital video markets have emphasized the need for “an analysis of the very
practices through which markets are constantly made and remade.”17
How can these perspectives enrich understanding of video? We suggest that a textured
account of audiovisual competition needs to do two things: first, to move beyond mono-
dimensional accounts of competition by paying closer attention to the differences among
services, their business models, geographies, catalogs, and operations; and second, to explore
how market boundaries are drawn and how such boundaries make markets seem variously
larger or smaller, more or less competitive, more or less crowded, depending on who is
speaking. Hence, the streaming wars case provides an opportunity to reflect, once more, on
the complexity and nuance of video markets and their relation to broader entertainment and
leisure markets.

Framing Competition:
Video Services in Australia
For illustrative purposes, let us now consider a specific national market and its mix of video
services. Figure 1 presents the twelve most popular internet-distributed video services
available in Australia in December 2019.18 Australia has been chosen as the site of our analysis
for practical reasons, but we expect that some principles of our analysis will be transferrable,
and that readers will be able to extend the analysis to include the firms and service catego-
ries most relevant to their own national context.
When grouped together as internet-distributed video services, the leading players in the
Australian market appear thus.

Figure 1. Leading internet-distributed video services in Australia.

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From this perspective (i.e., when the market is defined by distribution technology alone), all
the major services for streaming video in Australia appear to be in the same competitive
field. Yet a closer look reveals a more complex picture of different service types and catego-
ries, including the following:

•• Multi-territory, US-based SVODs—Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.
•• YouTube, the world’s largest AVOD platform.
•• Stan, a national SVOD owned by an Australian media corporation, Nine Entertainment.
•• Foxtel Now, the national multichannel operator’s over-the-top (OTT) service.19
•• The advertiser-supported services of three national commercial networks (NineNow,
TenPlay, SevenPlus) that mostly allow “catch-up” availability of linear programming
and also increasingly feature separately licensed programming.
•• The on-demand services of the two public-service broadcasters, ABC iView (govern-
ment funded) and SBS On Demand (ad-supported).20

As this breakdown suggests, the category of streaming video is in fact a place-holder for a
multiplicity of different services with distinct histories, libraries, and content strategies.
How can we understand the interactions between these services? Are they all in direct com-
petition? Research from other national contexts suggests a need for caution here, as services
are often competing for quite different things, and many are complementary rather than
directly competitive. Ampere Analysis observes that “the interaction between SVoD and pay
TV service uptake is complex and varies significantly by market,” with territories including
the United Kingdom exhibiting a high degree of complementarity among services, while
other territories (notably the United States) exhibit some evidence of substitution (cable-
cutting).21 This makes sense given the varied range of services in the market before SVOD in
different countries and their creation of different value propositions and satisfaction levels.
In the United States, the substitution occurs between cable/satellite and virtual multichannel
video programming distributors (vMVPDs), which offer fundamentally the same product dis-
tributed using a different technology. The answer to the question “who is competing with
whom?” also depends on what specific metric is under consideration (viewing time, sub-
scriber numbers, revenues, and so on) and whether services are also competing for inputs
such as production resources, talent, and scripts.22
Let us now consider in more detail some vectors of differentiation that organize the field.
Here, three considerations are especially important: (1) content characteristics; (2) revenue
source, business model, and value to the firm; and (3) geographic scale.23

Content Characteristics

The first key distinction among these video services is the variation in content they offer,
including their specialty genres, original productions, and the depth and breadth of their
catalogs. The extent of variation is such that most of the above services are not readily sub-
stitutable: each offers exclusive content and a particular mix of genres and program types.
At a general level, clear content differences can be identified in the size and variety of the
libraries of content these services offer, as Figure 2 shows.

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Figure 2. Internet-distributed video services in Australia organized by content characteristics: genre breadth
and catalog depth.

Figure 2 charts the differences among the libraries. The SVODs (Prime Video, Netflix, Stan,
Foxtel Now) typically have catalogs in the low thousands of titles: Stan offers half of the
roughly five thousand titles offered by Netflix Australia, which is about a third of what Prime
Video offers.24 The services maintain these titles for a duration measured in years. The
broadcasters’ services, in contrast, typically have a smaller catalog (typically in hundreds of
titles) consisting of original network productions that are available for weeks or months
rather than years and a smattering of back-catalog titles (mostly from the United States).
These services rarely have full series available. The broadcaster services remain primarily
“catch-up” services that maintain residual norms of the ephemerality of “television” sched-
uling, while SVOD services are more characteristic of a precursor such as video rental. Apple
here assumes an outlier position: the Apple TV+ library consists of a small number of pre-
mium exclusive shows initially released on a weekly basis. The library differences indicated
by the cluster evident in Figure 2 suggest subsets of services that may “compete”—at least on
the basis of offering similar content scale and viewing experience—while the relationship
between the subsets is more complementary.
The services are also distinguished in terms of the variety of content offered in their libraries.
A distinction in strategy occurs between those that offer several types of programming but
less depth in any one (generalist) and those that offer lesser range in types of programming but
more depth (specialist). The SVODs tend to offer a deep but restricted mix of genres, com-
pared to the much broader but shallower offering of the broadcasters’ services (which cover
the full spectrum of news, sports, light entertainment, and local content provided by broad-
casters). Consequently, viewers seeking local news cannot easily switch from a broadcast

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service to an SVOD in a manner that makes them interchangeable. As an analogy, like internet-
distributed video, “store” is a general category of a place that consumers buy goods; however,
all stores do not directly compete. An office goods store competes as meaningfully with a teen
fashion store as a film service competes with the one offering sports. Just as broadcast and
multichannel television has simultaneously offered news, sport, fiction, game shows, and films
in different dayparts or channels, internet-distributed video content likewise reproduces this
range of desired content across the diverse marketplace of services.
Our point here is a basic but important one: all video is not interchangeable, and conse-
quently, these various services do not compete directly in the manner suggested by the
blunt criterion of distribution technology (i.e., they all offer internet-distributed video).25 As
Kevin Sanson and Gregory Steirer have argued, the industrial logics of streaming video are
not uniform.26 Furthermore, viewers’ regard of these different services derives from more
than content characteristics. That content is part of an overall value proposition that includes
type of content, depth of content, user experience (ability to find desired content, ease of
use, interface), and whether viewers pay through a fee or the tedium of commercials.
Internet-distributed video services are highly differentiated by these measures.

Revenue Source, Business Model, and Value to the Firm

A second distinguishing characteristic of video services includes the intertwined consider-

ations of revenue source, business model, and value to the firm. Revenue source is often
glossed over, or erroneously conflated, in industry commentary about video services. Despite
their considerable differences in content and geographic scale, multi-territory SVODs
(Netflix), national SVODs (Stan), and internet-distributed services from pay-TV providers
(Foxtel Now) are all funded directly by subscriber payment. YouTube, in contrast, is funded
through advertising and cross-subsidized by its corporate parent, Google, although it also
offers an ad-free subscription product in YouTube Premium. Public-service media stream-
ing services (ABC iView and SBS) receive public funding, although the latter also relies on
advertiser funding.
Such differences in what is traded—subscriber fees, attention, and public funds—lead the
broad field of internet-distributed video to fail what Aspers has described as a fundamental
definition of a market—that it is about trade of a common thing.27 Following Aspers, separate
markets exist among those services that compete for subscriber fees and those that com-
pete for advertiser dollars. By shifting the lens in this way, we see how SVODs compete with
other leisure services such as gaming and how AVODs compete with ad-funded linear ser-
vices, other ad-supported media, and growing forms of ad-spending such as search and
social media—in an effort to convince advertisers that they offer optimal audiences and tools
for addressing them.
What are the competitive relations between and within each of these revenue categories?
Advertiser-funded services do not compete with subscription services for revenues because
the former are free to the viewer and the latter require payment. In other words, their busi-
ness models can be understood as complementary in the same way that broadcast television
and video-store rentals in a bygone era were complementary from the point of view of rev-
enue source. Viewers, at least those with an internet connection and sufficient awareness of

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the various services on offer, consequently all have access to a wide variety of monetarily
free, advertiser-funded services, but will likely limit their purchase of subscription services
based on their disposable income, the content differentiation noted above, and the value
proposition offered. There is a monetary budget constraint among the subscription services,
but a “time/attention constraint” in advertiser-funded services. These differences are cru-
cial to distinguishing content strategy and how services seek to attract viewers.
As a result of these varying revenue sources, different internet-distributed video services
have different criteria for success. While all compete for viewer attention, the metrics that
really matter, and how and why they matter, are distinct to each revenue source. For
advertiser-funded services, the most important metric is the revenue generated from
advertisements—which is closely linked to overall viewing hours. The broadcasters, the
broadcasters’ AVOD services sell attention in a manner similar to their linear broadcasts.
In contrast to the case of ad-funded services, the baseline metric for success of SVODs
including Stan, Netflix, and Disney+ is their number of subscribers. Netflix is unusual among
these services in being the only pure SVOD service that is overwhelmingly reliant on sub-
scriber payments and unable to cross-subsidize and integrate its video service with other
lines of business. For Netflix, metrics such as time spent on the service are likely useful as
predictors of satisfaction with the service necessary for continued subscription (heavy usage
might generally predict less likelihood of a user canceling their subscription). However,
increasing viewing hours is not Netflix’s primary aim. Viewing hours and behavior (e.g.,
binge-like viewing) are proxies to Netflix for the metric that really matters to the company
and its shareholders—subscriber numbers. Purely publicly funded internet-distributed video
services (ABC iView) and hybrid public-funded/ad-funded services (SBS On Demand) have
yet other criteria for success. While these services are keenly aware of their digital viewing/
engagement metrics, their public-service mission means that they see these metrics through
the prism of considerations such as public impact, public value, and Charter fulfillment.28
Overlooking the differences among what these video services trade video for leads to mis-
understanding competitive dynamics. One common misunderstanding focuses on the belief
that there is a common market for attention. This idea holds that attention to SVODs is “lost”
by linear services in a manner that diminishes advertising revenue. The actual impact likely
appears paradoxical though completely in line with classic economic theory. Although linear
viewing of broadcasters declined markedly in the United States with mainstreaming of cable
service, such that their share of viewers declined from 90 to 64 percent during the 1980s,
and then to 46 percent by 2005, advertisers’ spending on them did not decline.29 The gross
rating points (number of ad exposures to viewers) available declined, but that decreased
supply, matched with constant demand, led the price of reaching those viewers to increase
so that television ad spending, on the whole, has remained remarkably constant despite
diminishing audience size (advertisers pay the same amount to channels, but pay more per
exposure). In the last decade, advertisers have moved some spending from television
(decreasing demand), but that results from the existence of other advertising tools such as
search and social media that offer advertisers a better—or different—value proposition,
rather than a function of attention gathered by SVODs.
Business model ties revenue source and content strategy. Because these services trade video
for different things—payment, attention—they build business models and content strategies

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that vary accordingly. An AVOD service derives value from mass viewing, either from having
mass popularity or a mass of videos all gathering attention (YouTube), or from attracting the
kinds of viewers that attract premium advertising rates. In contrast, SVODs must offer con-
tent viewers are willing to pay for. As we explore next, many services are not focused cen-
trally on that payment (Apple, Amazon) or might be using the SVOD as a way to more directly
monetize libraries of intellectual property created for other licensors (Disney+), while others
yet are built around providing a video service distinctive and valuable enough to warrant
payment (Stan, Netflix).

As these examples suggest, there is great variation among the revenue sources and thus pri-
mary metrics of success among internet-distributed video services. This variation compli-
cates any attempt to place these services into a singular competitive field. Public service,
ad-supported, and subscriber-supported services trade video content for different things,
and they judge their success accordingly. Caricatures of competition—for example, narra-
tives of Netflix “displacing” the BBC, or a battle royale between American tech giants such as
Amazon, Netflix and Apple—are misleading. While services ultimately vie for the time atten-
tion, and sometimes payment of viewers in their target markets, the metrics that really count
to each category of funding are distinct, and not a zero-sum dynamic.

A further defining characteristic is the relative importance of video services to the overall
strategy and revenue of the owning firm. For the leading US technology firms offering inter-
net-distributed video services—Amazon, Google, Apple—these video services provide bene-
fits for other business objectives, such as collecting data or expanding e-commerce or
hardware sales. We can therefore draw a further distinction between at least three catego-
ries of video service: those where video is the primary or only activity (Netflix), those where
video forms part of a wider set of media activities (including Disney+, Stan, and the commer-
cial TV and public-service operators offering online catch-up services), and those where
video activities are secondary to the larger business objectives of the parent company (Apple,
Amazon, and Google/Alphabet).30

Value to the firm provides the final component of this cluster of distinguishing characteris-
tics. The revenue derived from video service is the whole of some businesses and quite mar-
ginal to others, leading it to have different importance within different firms. This also has
implications for how we understand dynamics between firms. Seeing Australian video ser-
vices from this perspective allows us to draw finer distinctions between what could other-
wise be glossed as “Big Tech” companies, which have been conflated in acronyms such as
FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google), GAFA (the same minus Netflix), and
poorly differentiated anxiety about “tech” and “platform” companies. The value of Apple TV+
and Prime Video to their parent companies (Apple and Amazon) is largely indirect and of
lesser overall significance to the revenue base than for “pure” video services like Netflix or
those integrated in media conglomerates. For example, Netflix’s revenues in 2019 were
approximately US$20 billion, the vast majority of which derived from user subscriptions. In
contrast, Amazon Inc.’s overall revenues for the same period were US$280 billion, with Prime
Video essentially adding value to Amazon Prime memberships and thus enticing consumers
to increase their retail spend with Amazon.31 Netflix is fundamentally different from these
other companies because of its exclusive reliance on video. Unlike Amazon, Google, and

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Apple, Netflix does not have the luxury of cross-subsidizing its video operation with other
sectors. Its continued commercial viability relies on its ability to attract subscribers.

Another structuring difference among the corporations offering internet-distributed video

services is the ownership of large libraries of intellectual property, production facilities, and
established content brands that enable vertical integration of video production and circula-
tion. The historical dominance of the United States in creating this intellectual property has
advantaged US media conglomerates that are building internet-distributed services to lever-
age their libraries of content. Services such as Hulu, CBS All Access, and, to some degree,
HBO have offered internet-distributed video built on this logic for some time, and these
services provide the basis for more recent launches of Disney+, Paramount+, and HBO Max
that are larger and more strategic efforts to collapse layers of circulation and more directly
connect companies that produce video with consumers’ dollars. Importantly, these services
based on deep catalogs of preexisting intellectual property should be conceptually distin-
guished from the services offered by Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, not because they are not
“tech” companies, but because of the underlying economics of their businesses that derive
from owning libraries of video offerings.

Firms that primarily derive revenue from distribution infrastructure and internet service
providers (ISPs) can also use free or discounted access to proprietary internet-distributed
video services as a tool to drive take-up of internet plans (HBO Max, Peacock in the United
States). Such cases can be identified around the globe. The advantage of this vertical integra-
tion could be particularly acute in the United States, where the elimination of net neutrality
provisions enables conglomerates that provide internet service to throttle or seek rents
from services competing with those they own.
A further consideration is how ISPs might use video services as loss leaders—in a way
comparable to, but still distinct from, companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Google—to
offer video services that seem to compete, but have quite different strategic purposes for
their companies. These companies offer video for varied reasons, and those reasons lead
to different priorities in spending and willingness—and ability—to accept financial losses.
Seeing internet-distributed video as a single competitive field therefore fails to account
for the significantly different measures of success that govern the operation of different
services.

Geographic Scale

Geographic scale is an important consideration for any analysis of media competition

because a common feature of media industries—especially internet-distributed video—is
very low marginal costs, which incentivizes firms to seek economies of scale. In other words,
most costs are bound up in the making of the good—a television show or film—while sharing
the show with additional viewers attracts little or no further cost. Thus, the industry is incen-
tivized to distribute a title across the widest possible audience most efficiently to recoup the
content investment—whether paid in attention or time. The distribution architecture of the
internet has allowed companies seeking to provide multi-territory distribution with more
direct ways of reaching multi-territory audiences than the norms afforded by broadcast and

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multichannel distribution—although it is important to acknowledge that moving-image dis-

tribution has been multi-territory for most of its history.32 Commercial success for internet-
distributed video services does not require global or multi-territory scale; however, available
scale does significantly affect the content and strategy of the service.
Rearranging our video services according to geography produces yet another organization
of the competitive field. A key distinction emerges between multi-territory services (YouTube,
Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+) that operate across a large number of countries and national
services that do not benefit from global economies of scale and are available only in one
country (Stan, ABC iView, SevenPlus, TenPlay, NineNow, and SBS On Demand).
There is a profound difference between the cost structures of multi-territory and national
SVOD services. The scale of Netflix’s original production budget—US$15 billion in 2019—is
often cited as an indication of its outsized power,33 but Netflix is servicing 148.8 million sub-
scriber accounts with that budget. Per subscriber account, that spend is US$100.80.34 To
draw valid comparisons, we must consider budgets in relation to subscriber levels, although
there are competitive advantages in scale. Available scale also enables different content
strategies. A multi-territory service with an extensive subscriber base such as Netflix can
target program tastes and sensibilities that might not be significant at a national level but
become significant with multi-territory aggregation.35
Netflix is able to spend far more on programming overall, but that programming is also
designed to service viewers in various languages and a wide array of taste cultures. Netflix
cannot offer the depth of local content associated with national services—certainly not in
each of the markets it serves—which again points to a degree of complementarity between
Netflix and national services.36 Indeed, national video services are likely to offer very differ-
ent content than those with multi-territory aims and are also likely to have far fewer dollars
to spend. Recent analysis by Variety and Ampere Analysis note the high amount of local con-
tent that many dominant national services carry. For example, Germany’s Joyn offered
66 percent German titles (Netflix 4 percent), United Kingdom’s ITV Plus 65 percent
(Netflix 7 percent), and India’s ALTBalaji 76 percent (Netflix 8 percent).37 In the European
context, research by the European Audiovisual Observatory has also established that domes-
tic video services are more likely to feature higher levels of local content.38 Different viewers
prioritize domestic and US content differently; hence, services that seek to offer domestic
versus foreign content are somewhat more complementary than competitive with those
offering mostly US titles. In the global market, US services compete more directly with each
other because all rely heavily on US-produced content.
Another point of differentiation within the major multi-territory SVOD services (Disney+,
Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV+) is the extent to which they engage multi-territory
production—a distinction that blends content and geography. Netflix has progressively
expanded its original production worldwide, shooting original series and movies in more than
thirty countries. Although the “streaming wars” narrative has most frequently given top bill-
ing to the battle between Netflix and Disney+, to date, Disney’s investment in original inter-
national production remains minimal compared to Netflix. In other words, there is a notable
difference in operational dynamics between national services and multi-territory services
and, furthermore, between the multi-territory services committed to significant international

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production investment (especially Netflix) and those using a “US export” model (Apple and
Disney, at this stage). Although Netflix also started as a US-only service, proper conceptual-
ization of the relationship among these services requires addressing these distinctions.
Suggesting a slightly different dynamic, Amazon has commissioned content outside the
United States, but far fewer titles, and mostly only in countries that are retail priorities such
as India, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Amazon’s video strategy is intricately connected
to the geography of its retail business. It uses the video service to drive Prime memberships
that encourage more retail shopping in countries where it has an expansive retail offering.
Its original video production strategy likewise preferences those countries that Amazon has
targeted for retail development, as evidenced by expensive Amazon originals such as Inside
Edge (an Indian cricket drama) and Beat (a German thriller). In other countries, the video
service may simply be a strategy of preparing the market for eventual retail service.
As this section illustrates, multiple attributes transect the internet-distributed video services
in meaningful yet inconsistent ways. The competitive field looks very different depending on
whether services are sorted by their content and value proposition, their revenue source and
business model, or geographic reach. This analysis has only considered these characteristics
among internet-distributed video services, but expanding that field to include video distrib-
uted using other technologies such as DVDs, cable and satellite TV, and linear broadcast tele-
vision adds yet further complexity. Viewers choose among video distributed by many services,
including broadcast and multichannel (cable and satellite) services, that coexist with internet-
distributed video. Defining a market according to distribution technology alone may be the
least helpful distinction in developing sophisticated analyses of the extent of the competition,
complementarity, and substitutability in domestic video markets.

Competition, Market Power and Policy

In this article, we have argued for a nuanced view of competition in internet-distributed
video as a means to move beyond the reductive frame of streaming wars. We have shown
that there are multiple vectors that structure and define markets discrepantly. Content
characteristics, business model/revenue source, and geography, among other factors, sub-
divide these services to create more complementarity than commonly recognized.

Why does this matter? Beyond the obvious need for analytical precision, there are several
reasons why a multifaceted conceptualization of competition among video services is impor-
tant. Competition matters to the extent that it shapes people’s access to content, the price
they pay, the diversity of content available, and the ability to switch between providers.
There is a clear public interest in clarifying understanding of who is competing with whom
in video services and on what basis: this is essential for the purposes of effective media regu-
lation as well as for meaningful analysis, critique, and scholarly investigation. Defining mar-
kets by distribution technology alone is insufficient for conceptualizing the multiple
competitive relations among streaming video services, and—just as importantly—between
those services and legacy linear services. However, other implications need to be considered
as well.

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For example, changing understandings of competition require that we also reconsider our
assumptions of market power—including the market power of key players like Netflix, Google,
Apple, and Amazon—precisely because the market shares of relevant firms expand or con-
tract when we move the market boundary. In its investor-targeted long-term view, Netflix
strategically identifies its competitors as including “linear networks, pay-per-view content,
DVD watching, other Internet networks, video gaming, web browsing, magazine reading,
video piracy, and much more.”39 Hence, Netflix argues for the largest market possible and
makes its own position in that market appear modest. Apple and Amazon have similarly
sought to present themselves as competing within very large and multidimensional markets,
such as entertainment and retail, rather than achieving positions of dominance in smaller
markets, such as online grocery goods or smartphone hardware. The argument that ad-
supported YouTube meaningfully keeps subscriber-funded Netflix “in check” through ideal-
ized competitive forces within a single market is therefore questionable. Rather, these two
internet-distributed video services have outsized influence within distinct markets, and
competition policy needs to be alert to the implications of that scale.

As we have shown, changing our view of a video market can dramatically shrink or expand
the boundaries of competition, and thus alter a company’s perceived position of market
dominance or vulnerability. Is Netflix competing with every leisure activity, including sleep,
or is it dominating a small market of multinational SVOD services? Does its giant status pre-
vent others from entering the market, or does it offer a particular value proposition of on-
demand US content that leaves ample room for other services with a more local focus? The
answers depend very much on looking past the common feature of using the internet to
distribute video, to factors such as what content do services offer, what revenue model and
business strategy do they use, in support of what corporate aim, and how do factors of
multi-territory or single territory scale circumscribe the competitive field.

As policy-makers grapple with the challenge of addressing regulatory imbalances between

different forms of video—and as some countries consider a shift toward a “harmonized”
regulatory environment where media services would have the same obligations regard-
less of their mode of distribution40—the stakes of these questions increase, along with the
risks of unintended consequences. For example, should domestically owned services face
different policy than those based outside the country? Should annual revenues govern
policy application? Should services with different value propositions be regulated the
same way?

Without doubt, the advent of internet-distributed video services has complicated regulatory
regimes that were already overburdened by the need to sort policy for discrepant distribu-
tion technology with discrepant funding structures that increasingly made once-national
television ecosystems increasingly multi-territorial in terms of the ownership of services,
channels, and producers. There is no single policy approach revealed by the analysis here;
rather, the complexity of the ecosystem points to the need to go back to first principles and
the aims behind policy.
In many countries, the ecosystem of video services is profoundly and irreversibly
changed. Policies made in eras of scarcity rarely remain fit for purpose, and supports
introduced to ensure domestic content within markets constrained to domestic

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services grow ineffective as viewers respond to expanded choice among video services
and among forms of leisure more broadly, some of which offer superior tools to adver-
tisers. Decades of unrestrained commercial television growth has halted as viewers take
their attention away from services with unfavorable programming or a suboptimal expe-
rience. As a result, the video marketplace grows more bifurcated between live program-
ming attractive to mass audiences (and thus valuable to ad-supported services) and
scripted content targeted to increasingly specific tastes and sensibilities (well suited to
viewer payment). The business, technology, and content are disaggregating from old
norms and reconfiguring with regard to new capabilities. The optimal policy response
builds from these new dynamics and reassesses previous goals of what is possible and
necessary in accordance with this reality.

Alongside concerns about competitive markets and their microeconomic dynamics, we note
that policy debates about video regulation—especially in smaller nations—are often less con-
cerned with the nuances of a multidimensional competitive space than with more immediate
questions of national competitiveness. Imperatives such as supporting national champions
(domestic media and technology firms), extracting tax revenue from multinational compa-
nies, and sustaining an appropriate mix of local and imported content have already surfaced
as major concerns for national regulators charged with navigating the rapidly changing video
landscape. Hence, the geopolitical question of competition between nations—as well as
within national markets—also comes to the fore.

As this discussion suggests, there is much at stake in how the competitive field is defined.
Each of the frames through which audiovisual competition can be imagined—whether
between specific services, service types, firms, sectors, or even nations—tells a different
story about who has power and influence in a given market. Advocating for a particular
frame is not the purpose of this article, but we would suggest in closing that both academic
scholarship and the public interest are best served by analyses that are transparent and
reflexive about their market definition process—and these decisions should not be on the
basis of distribution technology, nor the function of distributing video, alone.

1
The authors acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council
Discovery scheme (project DP190100978) and the expert research assistance of
Alexa Scarlata.
2
Ramon Lobato is Associate Professor (Australian Research Council Future Fellow) in
the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne.
3
Amanda D. Lotz is Professor and leader of the Transforming Media Industries
research program in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University
of Technology.
4
Jonah Weiner, “The Great Race to Rule Streaming TV,” New York Times, July 10,
2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/magazine/streaming-race-netflix-
hbo-hulu-amazon.html (accessed September 23, 2019).
5
Christian Hewgill, “Disney, Netflix, Amazon: The Battle for Streaming Survival,” BBC
News, April 12, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47692925 (accessed
September 23, 2019).

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6
Catherine Johnson, Online TV (London: Routledge, 2019); Tom Evens and Karen
Donders, Platform Power and Policy in Transforming Television Markets (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
7
This aspect of the argument has been briefly explored in an earlier article—see
Amanda Lotz, Ramon Lobato, and Julian Thomas, “Internet-Distributed Television
Research: A Provocation,” Media Industries 5 (2, 2018): 35–47.
8
Brett Christophers, “The Law’s Markets,” Journal of Cultural Economy 8 (2, 2015):
125–43.
9
Alex Sherman and Dain Evans, “How Streaming Wars between Disney, Netflix
and Others Will Change TV,” CNBC, August 10, 2019, https://www.cnbc.
com/2019/08/10/how-streaming-wars-between-disney-netflix-others-will-
change-tv.html (accessed September 23, 2019).
10
Natalie Jarvey, “NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke Explains How New Streaming
Service Will Take Shape,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 14, 2019, https://www.
hollywoodreporter.com/news/nbcu-ceo-steve-burke-talks-forthcoming-stream
ing-service-future-hulu-impact-nbc-news-1176015 (accessed October 17, 2019).
11
Tony Hall, “Roscoe Lecture,” Liverpool John Moores University, November 2, 2017,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2017/tony-hall-roscoe (accessed
September 17, 2019).
12
Rina Raphael, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: Sleep Is Our Competition,” Fast Company,
November 6, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/40491939/netflix-ceo-reed-
hastings-sleep-is-our-competition (accessed October 17, 2019).
13
Philip M. Napoli and Robyn Caplan, “Why Media Companies Insist They’re Not
Media Companies, Why They’re Wrong, and Why It Matters,” First Monday 22 (5,
2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i15.7051.
14
Colin Crawford, “Fictitious Capital: Netflix and the New Narratives of Media Value
in Platform Capitalism,” proceedings of Intersections, Cross-Sections conference
(Toronto: Ryerson University and York University, 2019), 18; and Colin Crawford,
Netflix’s Speculative Fictions: Financializing Platform Television (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).
15
The analyst Matthew Ball—a former Amazon Prime Video executive—has repeatedly
questioned the dominant narrative of streaming wars, offering instead a nuanced
account of the political economy of streaming services and their parent companies.
Ball’s various essays are available at https://www.matthewball.vc/all.
16
Michel Callon, The Laws of the Markets (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 44–45.
17
Patrick Vonderau, “Beyond Piracy: Understanding Digital Markets,” in Connected
Viewing: Selling, Streaming and Sharing Media in the Digital Age (London:
Routledge, 2013), 99–123; see also Patrick Vonderau, “The Video Bubble:
Multichannel Networks and the Transformation of YouTube,” Convergence 22
(4, 2016): 361–75.
18
To determine this initial sample, we consulted two resources: the Nielsen Streaming
Report Australia (https://digitallandscape.nielsendashboards.com.au/streaming-
report) and the Australian Communications and Media Authority Communications
report 2018–2019 (https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2020-02/report/com
munications-report-2018-19), which uses data from the Roy Morgan market research

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agency. We then identified the top services in each report to establish a sample of
the major streaming services in Australia (i.e., those listed in both indexes). To this
list of services, we have added Apple TV+ and Disney+, which were not available
in the Australian market at the time of these studies. We acknowledge the par-
tial nature of these underlying metrics and the difficulties inherent in measuring
streaming audiences. The purpose of our analysis is not measurement but rather to
explore the consequences of classifying and comparing video services into differ-
ent competitive fields.
19
The Australian pay-TV provider Foxtel has subsequently launched a standalone
subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service, Binge, which is presently offered
alongside Foxtel Now.
20
There is no equivalent of the catch-up services in the US market, likely because of
the limited use of free-to-air broadcast reception. The high rate of multichannel
subscription has led US multichannel services such as Comcast to facilitate on-
demand access to current season programming in a manner similar to these catch-
up services. Hulu also serves this function for subscribers without multichannel
services, though it is not a precise parallel to Australian broadcasters’ internet-
distributed services.
21
Ampere Analysis, The UK VoD Market: Current Status and Future Developments
(London: Ofcom/Ampere Analysis), 5. For a sophisticated analysis of comple-
mentarity and substitution in internet-distributed video, see Evens and Donders,
Platform Power and Policy, 47–85.
22
Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel, “Netflix: Global Hegemon or Facilitator of Frictionless
Digital Trade?,” Journal of Cultural Economics 42 (2018): 443–44.
23
We note the hybridization of these categories in services such as YouTube, which
has both advertising video-on-demand (AVOD) and SVOD tiers, and in certain
catch-up services (TenPlay) that have a premium ad-free tier (TenAllAccess), blur-
ring the boundaries between AVOD and SVOD.
24
The Prime Video catalog has a high proportion of older and non-premium content.
Ramon Lobato and Alexa Scarlata, Australian Content in SVOD Catalogs: Availability
and Discoverability, Report (Melbourne: RMIT University, 2019), 12–13.
25
It is fair to ask whether any video is interchangeable, arguably a key aspect of cre-
ative goods is that they are not. However, we can imagine some titles do provide
some degree of substitutability.
26
Kevin Sanson and Gregory Steirer, “Hulu, Streaming, and the Contemporary
Television Ecosystem,” Media, Culture & Society 41 (2019): 1210–27.
27
Patrik Aspers, Markets (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
28
Gregory Ferrell Lowe, Hilde Van den Bulck, and Karen Donders, Public Service
Media in the Networked Society (Göteburg: Nordicom, 2018).
29
Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, 2nd rev. ed. (NY: New York
University Press, 2014).
30
The case of Foxtel Now is complex. Strategically, this is an effort by a multichannel
cable provider to expand its user base to those not subscribing to the multichannel
service. Foxtel Now is owned by large media conglomerates (News Corp Australia

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and Telstra) but is not being used in a loss leader capacity to drive business to other
businesses of those companies.
31
The figures referred to here are as per the 2018–2019 annual reports of Amazon,
Inc. and Netflix, Inc. The proportion of revenues derived from Prime Video is not
easily calculable due to the complex bundling of Prime Video with Prime member-
ship. However, it is clear that the value of Prime Video to Amazon, Inc. is indirect:
Prime Video makes up a very small part of a much larger corporate enterprise with
multiple strategic objectives, rather than being the exclusive revenue source as for
Netflix.
32
Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market,
1907–1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1985).
33
Karlene Lukovitz, “Netflix Toughening Criteria for Original Content Spend,” Media
Post, July 8, 2019, https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/337869/
netflix-toughening-criteria-for-original-content-s.html (accessed September 26,
2019).
34
Notably, multiple viewers commonly access a single subscription. Although as
industry analyst Matthew Ball notes, Netflix pays for content over time in a way that
makes this a more conceptual exercise than a precise cost accounting: Matthew Ball,
“How the Paradox of the Term ‘Original Series’ Explains the Video Industry,” Redef,
August 27, 2018, https://redef.com/original/how-the-paradox-of-the-phrase-
original-series-explains-the-video-industry-netflix-misunderstandings-pt-4
(accessed September 24, 2019).
35
Amanda D. Lotz, “In between the Global and the Local: Mapping the Geographies
of Netflix as a Multinational Service,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 24
(2020): 195–215.
36
For comparison, local (Australian) content comprises 11 percent of the Stan catalog,
compared to 1 percent of the Netflix catalog. See Lobato and Scarlata, Australian
Content in SVOD Catalogs.
37
The Ampere/Variety data analyses can be found at Mandori Ravindran, “Brave New
World: Meet the International Streamers Battling Netflix With Local Originals,”
Variety, July 30, 2019, https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/international-stream
ers-originals-netflix-amazon-1234720139 and linked articles from that page.
38
European Audiovisual Observatory, Film and TV Content in VOD (Strasbourg:
Council of Europe, 2019), 25.
39
Netflix, “Netflix’s View: streaming entertainment is replacing linear TV,” January 21,
2021, https://ir.netflix.net/ir-overview/long-term-view/default.aspx.
40
This approach was advocated in the Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission’s recent Digital Platforms Inquiry: ACCC, Digital Platforms Inquiry—
Final Report, July 26, 2019, https://www.accc.gov.au/publications/digital-plat
forms-inquiry-final-report (accessed June 18, 2020).

105
Media Industries 8.1 (2021)

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