Many of the top shows and movies on Netflix, produced by upcoming streaming competitors like AT&T and Disney, have licensing rights locked in for years to come
Streaming service has many programs locked up for years to come — Hollywood studios say they're breaking up with Netflix.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 report lands mid-arc in the streaming land-grab: by late 2018, more than half of the top 50 shows on Netflix were still owned by others — Disney, NBCU, WarnerMedia — all of them then planning rival services. The lock-in periods Bloomberg describes are the last stretch of that dependency, and they explain why Netflix had already started serving as its own studio back in 2015 to control distribution rights.
What makes the piece worth revisiting is how the cycle resolved: after years of pulling marquee titles back for their own platforms, Disney, WBD, and other studios were licensing content to Netflix again by late 2023 — holding back only their most popular franchises — because they needed the cash.
First-order effects
- Disney and AT&T can launch their rival streaming services, but their biggest audience draws stay on Netflix until the existing licenses expire, muting each launch's differentiated catalog at day one.
- Netflix gets a multi-year grace period: its top-50 lineup remains stocked with rival-owned hits even as the owners become direct competitors.
Second-order effects
- As locks expire, Disney and AT&T face a pricing dilemma — reclaiming exclusivity shrinks their own subscriber value proposition unless their platforms can replace the Netflix reach those titles provided.
- The expirations force Netflix to accelerate originals spending, since its library advantage is contractually scheduled to shrink rather than renew on favorable terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Hollywood splits into walled-garden platforms competing on owned franchises — but the 2023 reversal suggests the end state is cyclical rather than permanent: studios retreat to exclusivity when confident, then re-license when their balance sheets demand it.
- Rights ownership, not distribution scale, becomes the structural fault line of streaming — which is why Netflix's later pursuit of Warner Bros.' library and theatrical commitments reads as the logical endpoint of this 2019 dependency.
The trend: Streaming rights are moving through a full cycle — from shared licensing, to exclusivity wars, back to cash-driven licensing — with ownership of franchises deciding who holds leverage at each turn.