Target Discontinuing Digital Streaming Service in March
Travis Reilly / The Wrap :
Context & Ripple Effects
Target's March exit is an early entry in the shutdown wave this archive keeps documenting: months later Samsung shuttered its Milk Video service, then came Fullscreen's SVOD closure, with roughly 25 employees laid off, and eventually AT&T pulling the plug on WarnerMedia's two-year-old FilmStruck.
What these closures share is the difficulty of sustaining a small, standalone subscription video operation against scaled incumbents — a squeeze the Washington Post's later reporting frames as an industry-wide existential crisis driven by user cancellations and disappearing libraries.
First-order effects
- Target's subscribers lose the service in March and must relocate their viewing to remaining platforms.
- Target stops carrying the content-licensing and operating costs of a subscription video business competing against far larger rivals like Netflix.
Second-order effects
- Departing subscribers become acquisition targets for scaled incumbents — though Netflix itself tightened the funnel by ending its 30-day free trial across all markets.
- Studios and licensors lose another mid-sized distribution buyer, compounding the demand attrition visible in each successive shutdown from Fullscreen to FilmStruck.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, retailer-backed and niche services consolidate into a handful of scaled platforms, leaving consumers fewer but larger places to subscribe — the structure behind the industry's self-described existential crisis.
- Every closure raises the unresolved digital-library question: whether titles consumers bought through a shuttering storefront survive the platform's exit at all.
The trend: Subscription video is consolidating around a few scaled services as retailer-backed and niche platforms exit one by one.