THB #294: Years End 4... What I Think I Know

I am a smart guy.

But it didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out a lot of the hard realities of what a Streaming future might look like, as I have been writing for years.

1. No one else can do Streaming like Netflix did streaming. Wall St. won’t let them. Ever.

2. International means more than domestic in streaming moving forward, even though domestic is a more mature, has higher ARPU, and is a market that will have actual brand competition that means something soon.

There is a little growth in the U.S. that’s still possible… but the real growth will be international. If companies with big streamer aspirations are regressing to a primary focus on US/Can, they have made a terrible mistake by tearing up the previous domestic working system. They will lose money if they are domestic alone.

International households paying over $3 a month have stalled out at around 120 million. 300 million paying households may not be a fantasy. But without China changing their stance, 500 million seems se…