Binge Times

Hayes and Chmielewski, both entertainment industry journalists, wrote about the competition among media companies to build streaming services, covering roughly 2017 to 2022.

The reporting covers each company's approach. Disney's launch of Disney Plus, built on its owned intellectual property and on the Fox acquisition that gave it full control of Hulu, and the decision to withdraw content from Netflix. WarnerMedia under AT&T's ownership, the HBO Max launch, the internal conflict between HBO's curated approach and the volume the platform required, and the decision to release the 2021 film slate simultaneously in cinemas and on the service. NBCUniversal's Peacock and its advertising-supported model. Apple and Amazon entering from outside the industry with different economics, since neither needed the service to be profitable on its own. Quibi, which raised nearly two billion dollars and failed within six months.

The analytical content concerns the economics. The authors document the enormous content spending, the subscriber acquisition costs, the effect on the companies' reported results, and the tension between the licensing revenue the studios had earned from Netflix and the strategic need to withdraw content to build their own services. They also cover the effect on cinema exhibition and on the theatrical release window.

The book is journalism and captures the period in which the industry assumed subscriber growth justified any level of spending. That assumption ended in 2022 when investors repriced the sector. The account is therefore a record of the period's reasoning rather than an assessment of it, and the consolidation and cost reduction that followed are outside it.