Happy Halloween. I'm dressed as a streaming service that's about to introduce ads, which is to say I'm dressed as all of them.
Netflix launched its ad tier this month. Disney+ launches theirs next month. HBO Max is restructuring into whatever Warner Bros. Discovery decides it should be this week. And consumers are sitting at home with six subscriptions they can't remember the passwords to, wondering why they're paying more than cable cost.
When Glossier built a $1.2 billion valuation primarily through Instagram, they proved that a feed could be a storefront, a community, and a brand manifesto simultaneously. Their comments section did more brand-building than most companies' entire marketing budgets.
The streaming wars didn't end with a winner. They ended with everyone losing. Including us.
From a brand strategy lens, here's what happened: every streaming service tried to be everything to everyone. They chased total addressable market instead of owning a specific position. And now they've all landed in the same undifferentiated middle, competing on the same axis (volume of content), with the same business model (subscription + ads), and the same basic user experience.
From a brand strategy lens, here's what happened: every streaming service tried to be everything to everyone.
Think about it. Can you articulate what makes HBO Max different from Paramount+ different from Peacock in one sentence? Without referencing specific shows? I've been a strategist for over a decade, and I struggle. The brands have become interchangeable containers for content.
This is what happens when an entire category optimizes for the same metric. Everyone chased subscriber growth. To get subscriber growth, everyone needed more content. To fund more content, everyone needed more subscribers. It's a flywheel that only works until the market saturates. We're saturated.
The strategic parallels to other categories are striking. It's the same pattern as the direct-to-consumer boom. Everyone launched with the same playbook: sleek branding, Instagram ads, free shipping, easy returns. And now most of those brands are either dead or desperately trying to differentiate themselves after years of sameness.
What would I do if I were advising a streaming brand right now? The counterintuitive move: get smaller. Own a specific audience obsessively rather than trying to serve everyone. Shudder does this for horror. Criterion does this for film. Crunchyroll does this for anime. These services have loyal, engaged users who would riot if they disappeared. Can Netflix say the same?
The ad tier introduction is particularly telling from a brand perspective. Netflix spent years positioning itself as the premium, ad-free experience. That was their differentiation. Now they're just another ad-supported platform, and the price premium has to be justified by something else. What is that something else? I genuinely don't know, and I suspect they don't either.
Consumers are going to do what consumers always do when a category becomes undifferentiated: they'll choose on price and cancel freely. The result is the "streaming rotation" behavior we're already seeing, where people subscribe for one show, binge it, cancel, and move to the next service. That's not loyalty. That's transactional entertainment.
The streaming wars taught us something brand strategists already knew: when everyone chases the same thing, nobody wins. The exit strategy is differentiation, not more volume. But I doubt anyone in those boardrooms wants to hear that right now.