Remember when every media company was going to be Netflix? Remember the breathless coverage of "the streaming wars" like it was some grand strategic chess match? I'm calling it: the war is over. It ended not with a bang but with a bundle.
Disney and Warner Bros. bundled their services. Peacock and Paramount explored merging. Every streamer added ads. Every streamer raised prices. And consumers, exhausted by subscription fatigue, quietly went back to pirating content or just... watching whatever was already on. We re-created cable television but with worse interfaces and more passwords.
Netflix spent $17 billion on content in 2020 alone. That's not a content budget. That's a moat-building exercise disguised as entertainment. The library IS the brand.
As a brand strategist, what interests me isn't the media business story. It's the pattern. Because the streaming wars are a perfect case study in what happens when an entire industry mistakes disruption for strategy.
Netflix disrupted cable with a genuine insight: people want to watch what they want, when they want, without ads. That was a real value proposition. Every subsequent streamer that launched was not disrupting anything. They were just following. And following without differentiation is not a strategy. It's just competition.
Every subsequent streamer that launched was not disrupting anything.
The result was predictable. Too many undifferentiated options chasing the same consumer dollar. No one with enough content to stand alone. Margins destroyed by content spending wars. And eventually, consolidation back toward something that looks remarkably like the thing they disrupted.
I see this exact pattern playing out right now in AI. Dozens of companies launching nearly identical products, competing primarily on benchmarks that consumers don't understand, burning billions in a race that will inevitably end in consolidation. The winners will be the ones who find genuine differentiation, not just marginal performance improvements.
The lesson for any brand, in any category: if your competitive strategy is "do what the market leader does, but also us," you're setting yourself up for a long, expensive journey back to where you started. Disruption only works when you're offering something genuinely different. Everything else is just expensive following.
I have eleven streaming subscriptions right now. I watch three of them regularly. The other eight are the exact equivalent of those gym memberships I keep meaning to cancel. That's not a streaming war. That's just friction masquerading as loyalty.