Streaming’s New Sharing Economy

Streaming’s biggest players spent the past few weeks merging their apps and sharing their shows. Skydance closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery with plans to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single service. The combined company has more than 200 million subscribers and a projected 21% of U.S. TV ad share, ahead of Disney and Comcast. However, that scale may not translate directly into new reach for advertisers. EMARKETER expects audience overlap to limit the gains, with Paramount+ at 94.4 million U.S. viewers and HBO Max at just over 100 million.

Disney, meanwhile, has been lending some of its own content to a rival’s library. The company’s expanded licensing deal with Netflix brings the first two seasons of ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ to the platform ahead of season 3’s premiere on Disney+, using their rival’s audience as a discovery engine for their own franchise. How streamers roll out new shows matters as well. Other than Netflix, most major streamers release new episodes weekly. One study found that viewers watching shows on a weekly release schedule were 48% more likely to keep using the platform than those who got a full season at once.

Our Take
A show’s biggest audience may no longer arrive on premiere night, or even on the platform that made it. Disney is betting that viewers who find “Percy Jackson” in a rival’s library will follow it home for season 3, and viewer habits suggest it could pay off. As we’ve previously covered, 60% of viewers say their newest favorite show is actually an older series, and that share climbs to 65% among viewers ages 16 to 34. That stretches a title’s shelf life well past launch week. For advertisers, the moments worth planning around now start in the catch-up window before a new season and last through the final episode of a weekly release.

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