The near-simultaneous releases will make for an epic ratings battle. But they are also part of a longer-running war that pits old Hollywood studios against new streaming upstarts
dollars’ worth of swordplay, sorcery and sex is on its way to a small screen near you. On August 21st Warner Bros Discovery will launch “”, a spin-off of its racy smash-hit, “Game of Thrones”, made at a reported cost of over $150m. Hot on its heels, on September 1st Amazon Prime Video will release “The Rings of Power”, a more chaste but even pricier drama based on the “Lord of the Rings” books.
Hollywood’s old hands are also refocusing on the business of making money, after two expensive years of chasing subscribers. Disney says its main streaming service, Disney+, will see its losses peak this year before turning a profit in 2024. A steep price rise, beginning in December, will help. On a recent earnings call David Zaslav, Warner’s new boss, bluntly criticised the old approach of “spend, spend, spend and then charge very little”.
Theme parks are full again, too, with Disney’s American ones generating record revenues and margins. Even broadcast and cable, long in decline, look like relative safe havens as the streaming business gets tougher. “We effectively have four, five or six cash registers,” Mr Zaslav told investors. “And in a world where things are changing, and there’s a lot of uncertainty and there’s a lot of disruption, that’s a lot more stable and a lot better than having one cash register.
Unlike the old Hollywood dragons, some new streamers don’t even need to make sure they get paid, in Mr Zaslav’s words. Amazon Prime Video exists to keep people signed up to Prime, whose main benefit is free delivery of Amazon purchases. Apple’s steadily expanding+ service is geared towards keeping customers in Apple’s ecosystem of phones and computers, where the company makes its real money.
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