Future of TV Briefing: How TV and streaming businesses fared in the fourth quarter of 2022

By Tim Peterson

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at the latest round of quarterly earnings reports from companies including Disney, Netflix, Roku and Warner Bros. Discovery to sift through what they signal about the state of the business.

Earnings season recap
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Earnings recap

The TV and streaming industry seemed to have settled into its corrective period during the fourth quarter of 2022, based on TV and streaming companies’ latest quarterly earnings reports.

The ebb and flow of streaming subscription growth over the past few years settled into a semblance of normalcy. Meanwhile, the ad market continued its downturn but did not nosedive into the ground to the extent some companies had feared. Nonetheless, the TV and streaming economy — as with the global economy — remained in a precarious position with companies pressed to cut costs and prove profitability, especially on the streaming side.

Here is a rundown of the top takeaways for the TV and streaming industry from the most recent earnings season.

Streaming subscriptions

For a sign of normalcy in the subscription-based streaming market, look no further than Netflix solidifying its position at the top. The company added 7.7 million subscribers in Q4 to surpass analysts’ estimates. No, Netflix didn’t break out how many of those subscribers signed up for its new ad-supported streaming tier.

“We’re seeing take rate and growth on that ads plan is solid” was about as much as Greg Peters, who is replacing Reed Hastings as Netflix’s co-CEO, was willing to say during the company’s earnings call on Jan. 19.

Surprising as the strength of Netflix’s subscriber growth in the period was, similarly stunning was Disney reporting a 1% quarter-over-quarter subscriber downtick for Disney+. Disney attributed the subscriber shedding to its Disney+ Hotstar service losing 3.8 million subscribers in India and Southeast Asia after ceding Indian Premier League rights. By contrast, Disney+ added 200,000 subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, though that was only a quarter of the subscribers gained by sibling streamer Hulu in the period.

Streaming subscriber growth was a bit of a mixed bag across the rest of the major services in Q4. Paramount’s Paramount+ attracted 9.9 million new subscribers, but Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO Max only added 1.1 million. And NBCUniversal’s Peacock split the difference with a 5.5 million subscriber increase in the quarter.

At the close of 2022, here were the subscriber standings among the major streaming services:

Netflix: 230.1 million
Disney+: 161.8 million
HBO Max and Discovery+ (combined): 96.1 million
Paramount+: 55.9 million
Hulu: 48.0 million
Peacock: 20 million

Advertising downturn

The TV and streaming ad market “bottomed out” in the fourth quarter of 2022, NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell said during the company’s earnings call on Jan. 26. Of course, NBCUniversal was in a somewhat enviable position as the owner of Telemundo, which broadcast the World Cup and was cited a primary contributor to the Comcast-owned company’s 4% year-over-year increase in advertising revenue.

But Roku’s Q4 earnings report appears to provide further evidence of the advertising downturn, if …read more

Source:: Digiday