Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon- can Netflix really compete?

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The streaming wars took a savage turn this past week. Netflix’s earnings report disappointed investors. CNN+ dropped out of the game entirely, just a month after launching. The result has been a wave of brutal selloffs, making Netflix the worst-performing member of the S&P 500 this year to date.

Here’s the data point that likely wiped out billions of dollars of value: A decade of seemingly perpetual growth came to a halt with the loss of some 200,000 subscribers. You might need to grab a magnifying glass to see them, though, because ultimately that’s just a 0.09% decline.

Had it been an increase, rather than a decrease, the move would far more likely have been reported as “static,” rather than a devastating plunge. So why has the market freaked out so much over a rounding error? John Authers explains that it’s likely a combination of the human aversion to loss of any kind and low confidence in valuations. With the perception that Netflix offered never-ending growth erased, so too has its valuation premium.

It may partly be a product problem. “Netflix has stopped meaningfully differentiating itself from its competitors over the last two years,” former Hulu executive Alex Kruglov told Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, in a recent Twitter Spaces. “Great competitors like Disney+, HBO Max, Apple and Amazon are putting out phenomenally good shows, so having a distinct place that has truly great shows is no longer a Netflix differentiator. Having a lot of stuff is no longer a differentiator — Amazon has that, too. And when it comes to user experience, everyone essentially looks exactly the same.”

Just before the Netflix news broke, market research firm Kantar found that, in the U.K., more than 1.5 million people cancelled