By the time the final episode of The Office aired on May 16, 2013, the NBC sitcom already had inked lucrative TV syndication deals. And its parent company, NBCUniversal, had decided to sell the streaming rights, too, to Netflix. Over the next few years, Netflix’s subscriber base discovered the show, ultimately forcing NBCU to buy back the rights for $500 million and make it a centerpiece of its new streaming service Peacock.
Since 2013, there has been a whole lot of change in the streaming space. But you might not know it if you look at the streaming ratings charts. Once again, Suits, an NBCUniversal show, is finding new life on Netflix, as the service reestablishes itself as the place to find TV shows and movies from every company.
But it’s not just Suits: Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings regularly feature shows that are available on multiple platforms. The CBS procedurals NCIS (Netflix and Paramount+) and S.W.A.T. (Hulu, Netflix and Paramount+) and the Canadian drama Heartland (Hulu, Netflix and Peacock) are all among the top 20 streaming series of 2023. Nielsen doesn’t break down its streaming figures by platform, but it’s not a reach to assume that Netflix, whose 77 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada tower over the numbers for other streamers, powers most of the viewing time for those multiple-streamer shows. (If absence is any kind of proof, The Office hasn’t cracked a top 10 list since it became exclusive to Peacock in 2021.)
“I think Suits is a great example of the impact of the Netflix effect,” co-CEO Ted Sarandos told analysts Oct. 18. “Because of our distribution footprint and our recommendation system, we were able to take Suits, which had played on cable and had played out in other streaming services and pop it right into the center of the culture in a huge way, not just in the U.S. but all over the world.”
Netflix’s pitch of the service as a force multiplier for other studios’ programming has at least one data point in its favor: After the runaway viewing numbers for Suits over the summer, series creator Aaron Korsh has begun developing a companion series for NBCUniversal. It won’t, however, have its first run on Netflix; NBCU is looking to keep Korsh’s new project in-house.
It wasn’t that long ago that every entertainment company with a streaming service decided to hoard their content. NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount all followed Disney in pulling most or all of their content from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, seeking to bolster their own offerings.
Disney mogul Bob Iger, in a January 2022 interview (before he came back as CEO) likened the practice of licensing the studio’s content to Netflix to “selling nuclear weapons technology to a Third World country, and now they’re using it against us,” he told The New York Times. Well, the entertainment nuclear arms trade is back in business, it seems. Yes, even with Disney. At the company’s annual shareholder meeting April 3, Iger told attendees, “We’re not looking to license our core Marvel, Disney, Pixar or Star Wars product to third parties,” but added that “we will consider on occasion licensing other product to third parties.”
It’s a strategy that’s suddenly in vogue, with Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and Paramount Global all taking a similar approach, trying to keep core franchises exclusive to their streamers wherever possible, while taking more flexibility with older product, or for IP that isn’t as valuable.
Warner Bros. Discovery arguably has been the most aggressive licensor of its programming in the past year as it seeks to claw its way out of merger-fueled debt, sending Westworld and The Nevers to AVOD (ad-supported streaming) services Tubi and Roku and some of its formerly off-limits HBO titles to Netflix. Three of the latter — the Dwayne Johnson comedy Ballers and the World War II miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific — also jumped onto the Nielsen rankings since debuting on Netflix in late summer; none of the three had done so while streaming only on Max.
“The fact is licensing some library content to other SVOD platforms, like Netflix or Amazon, as part of a co-exclusive agreement is just smart business,” WBD CEO David Zaslav told analysts Aug. 3. “We’re expanding our audience while maximizing the value of the asset and providing more revenue streams. And that is our job, to optimize the windowing to get the best possible return on investment.”
Paramount agreed to license its animated series Star Trek: Prodigy to Netflix after canceling it at Paramount+, and WBD quietly licensed the movie Dune to Netflix, taking an active major movie franchise and sharing it with the streaming giant.
And Netflix, which has proved time and again that it can take older shows or ones that couldn’t find an audience elsewhere and make them into global hits, is once again set to benefit from the fire sale.
A high-level source at a company with its own streaming service that also licenses its content elsewhere tells The Hollywood Reporter that its in-house data team “religiously” reviews every morsel of data available for its licensed programming to try to figure out how many people are watching a particular show or movie on- or off-platform, and whether having something on Netflix drives meaningful viewers to the same show or similar shows on their owned platform. The walled gardens may be locked up, but this source says that there are ways to peek inside, and it informs whether they continue collecting cash in licensing fees, or whether they should consider making it exclusive as an enticement, as with the Suits spinoff.
Zaslav has frequently touted his company’s enormous film and TV library, and on the last earnings call said that extended strikes could mean “more demand” for his company’s library content. And while Iger has been insistent that Disney’s core franchises would stay exclusive to Disney+, some Wall Street observers think that the need to make streaming profitable will cause cracks in that foundation.
Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall says that the stunning success of Suits on Netflix marks “a paradigm shift that reinforces how much more valuable library can be on the leading platform.” As a result, he writes in an Oct. 12 research note, “we think Friends, HBO library titles and even Disney content could come to market.”
And there’s only one buyer that’s proven that it can take an older show and turn it into a bona fide smash. Netflix “is proving out that streaming – at least for the scaled, industry leader – can be a very good business,” says Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney in an Oct. 19 note.
“We can’t make everything, but we can help you find just about anything,” Sarandos said on the last earnings call. “In one way or another, we’re in business with nearly every supplier, including our direct competitors. And I think that we bring a ton of value to them.”
It’s a position that could bring the industry back to 2013, with Netflix riding a rocket and everyone else selling them the fuel while building their own scale models.
Rick Porter contributed to this report.
This story first appeared in the Oct. 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.