Juline Garnier 13:40 pm, March 29, 2023

While the French streaming platform Salto officially stopped working on Monday, the good health of other video-on-demand services raises questions. Are the increase in prices, the multiplication of offers, the quality of programs ultimately brakes for users, pushing back web giants? Elements of response.

DECRYPTION

The new web giants already in turmoil? Stars of a renewal of the consumption of films and series, streaming platforms seem to be going through a first crisis in their young history. Launched at the end of 2019 on the American continent, Disney + for example lost for the first time 2.4 million subscribers during the last three months of 2022, causing the upcoming elimination of about 7,000 jobs within the entertainment giant.

At home, the Salto platform, which was to position itself as the "French Netflix" and was the pride of the country's main audiovisual groups, announced its closure. The service officially ended on Monday, March 27, 2023, due to a lack of sufficient profitability for its shareholders. And the number one Netflix, to limit the breakage, has announced for its part to hunt the sharing of accounts between users.

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Expensive competition

What can we conclude from these various strategic reversals? First, the multiplication of different platforms forces most users to favor certain offers, which creates bitter competition between services and a race for exclusivity.

Disney + bets everything on a catalog based on its licenses such as Pixar, Star Wars or Marvel. Netflix is betting on creations highlighting global stars: recently with Tim Burton at the helm of the series Wednesday, but also Daniel Craig on the poster of Glass Onion, the blockbuster proposed in December 2022.

The same goes for Prime, Amazon's video platform, which recently launched its serial adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Last of Us licenses, recording two global hits. But this mad dash comes at a price.

In detail, if Netflix boasts of good economic health in recent months, the veteran platform has seen its annual net profit fall by 12%, to 4.5 billion at the end of 2022. And since its launch, the service has accumulated more than $14 billion in debt, including to finance its original productions.

The inevitable increase in the price of subscriptions

To compensate for losses and remain attractive, all platforms have come to the same conclusion: they need to increase the price of subscriptions. This is how the "standard" subscription offered by Netflix went from 7.99 to 13.49 euros per month. Disney + and Amazon Prime have increased their price by nearly 40%.

And in order not to scare away some users, but also to attract others, Netflix has paved the way for a method that for the moment was prohibited: the advertising page before and during programs. Since the beginning of the year, the platform has been offering an "essential" formula at almost six euros per month, including advertising.

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Canal + plays the smartest. Taking advantage of the confusion around the number of platforms, the audiovisual group launched at the beginning of March an offer ironically called "Rat +" and intended for at least 26 years old. It offers a grouping of subscriptions to different platforms for less than twenty euros per month, a good compromise that avoids users to choose a single platform.

If the sector has shown these first feverishness, it is still far from disappearing. As a reminder in 2022, Netflix alone accounted for nearly 15% of global internet traffic, trailing YouTube and Tik Tok.