As Netflix asserts itself, studios and cable channels fret that the streaming company is headed for a near-monopoly in entertainment
The streaming service is spending $6 billion a year on content, choking basic cable and brusquely rattling the relationship business of the town as fears … Tweets: @janicemin , @drgmlatulippe , @johngary , @tvgrimreaper , @mccarthyryanj , @stevesi and @ktmckenna . See also Mediagazer Tweets: Janice Min / @janicemin : This chart explains Hollywood's growing fear of a Netflix monopoly http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ... http://twitter.com/... Geoff LaTulippe / @drgmlatulippe : Then Hollywood might start thinking about treating its writers like equal partners in the creative process. http://twitter.com/... John Gary / @johngary : When she says “Hollywood,” she means buyers. Creators aren't afraid - they're ecstatic. http://twitter.com/... TV Grim Reaper / @tvgrimreaper : Bizarrely, the “fear” is of a “monopoly” of production spending, not a monopoly of revenue/sales. http://twitter.com/... Ryan McCarthy / @mccarthyryanj : Bidding up prices for content is an entirely different thing than a “content monopoly” http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ... Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : // Good grief! More content and distribution now than ever. In 1999 there were 26 prime time shows. Now over 500! http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ... Katie McKenna / @ktmckenna : The strategy behind Netflix's 3000% increase in content production in 4 years: become the Google of entertainment: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
In September 2016, Hollywood Reporter captured the town at peak anxiety: Netflix was spending $6 billion a year on content and growing production roughly 3000% over four years, choking basic cable while disrupting the relationship-driven dealmaking Hollywood runs on. Studios and cable channels openly worried the streamer was headed for a near-monopoly.
The subsequent coverage reads as the answer to that fear. Rivals circled as Netflix stumbled — a disastrous Q2 in 2019 exposed US market weakness and the pain of losing licensed shows, and by late 2019 Netflix looked like the entertainment giants it disrupted. The studios' counter-move was structural: 2020's wave of streaming exclusivity plays pulled marquee titles off Netflix and onto four or five competing services. By 2023, Nielsen measured Netflix at just 7–8% of US TV viewing — dominant in engagement, nowhere near the monopoly of 2016's nightmares.
First-order effects
- Studios and cable channels stop selling top-tier licensed content to Netflix and redirect it to their own platforms, directly attacking the $6 billion content machine's supply line.
- Netflix is forced to replace licensed hits with originals at accelerating cost, straining the very spending power that made rivals afraid.
Second-order effects
- Consumers absorb the fallout as fragmentation: paying for four or five subscriptions instead of one becomes the norm once every major studio prioritizes its own service.
- Basic cable's erosion accelerates on both fronts — squeezed by Netflix's originals on one side and by studio-owned streamers pulling their own libraries off cable reruns on the other.
Third-order effects
- The feared near-monopoly inverts into the opposite structure: no single streamer wins outright, and the industry converges toward hybrid models — Reed Hastings' pivot toward cheaper ad-supported plans concedes that pure subscription growth had limits.
- Scale stops being a moat: Nielsen's finding that Netflix still captures 70–80% of the weekly top 10 shows that audience attention concentrates even when spending power doesn't — setting up a market where distribution scale and content ownership stay permanently contested.
The trend: Streaming is cycling from feared consolidation through forced fragmentation back toward re-aggregation via advertising tiers, with no platform able to hold monopoly economics.