When covering the streaming industry, there’s rarely a dull day. And 2022 was, like the past several years, full of momentous, meaningful, and sometimes even jaw-dropping industry developments.
We thought back on the last 12 months and brought together six of the biggest streaming developments of the year.
ViacomCBS’s big rebrand
What’s in a name? In the case of ViacomCBS, lingering evidence of a prior megamerger. The company scrapped it in February and rebranded itself as Paramount Global.
Choosing Paramount as the company name was a signal to investors that its priority is streaming entertainment, anchored by Paramount+, which last reported 46 million global subscribers.
CNN+’s failure to launch
Well, that was quick.
There was a lot of hype around CNN+, a subscription streaming service for the news-watching set, an attempt to show that cable news could adapt in the streaming world. But it hardly had a chance: The service, which debuted at the end of March, shut down after five weeks, giving us Quibi flashbacks.
WarnerMedia-Discovery merger closes
WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc. officially completed their megamerger in April, bringing entertainment assets from Succession to Say Yes to the Dress under one corporate roof. Like many media moves of the past several years, the deal was designed to give the new company, in this case Warner Bros. Discovery (or WBD), more scale and resources to hopefully better compete in the streaming wars. Even so, it has come with layoffs and cost-cutting measures.
Coming up next for the company: A combined streaming service slated to debut in 2023 that will move content from platforms like HBO Max and Discovery+ into the same service. Fingers crossed they don’t actually name it “Max.”
Prime Video in the end zone
Amazon’s billion-dollar bet on the future of sports viewing kicked off this August with the debut of Thursday Night Football on Prime Video. The deal has brought fewer viewers for TNF compared to when it aired on broadcast TV, but it nonetheless marked a turning point for the future of sports viewing in the US.
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“Amazon is somewhat of a test dummy for the NFL,” one media buyer told us earlier this year.
Netflix adds ads
The small earthquake you experienced in April might have been advertisers jumping for joy after Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings announced that the company was finally planning an ad-supported tier. Less than seven months later, Netflix Basic with Ads was up and running in November, with hundreds of advertisers, including Louis Vuitton, Subway, and Duracell, all signed on.
The new tier opened up a new avenue for advertisers eager to reach younger, more connected viewers, although it still remains to be seen how many of Netflix subscribers are willing to watch Netflix with about five minutes of ads per hour.
Disney’s Bob swap
It’s rare to see the Uno reverse card played in real life, but Disney’s board of directors did basically that in late November. Now-former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, who took the reins of the company mere weeks before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, was dramatically ousted and replaced by then-former Disney CEO Bob Iger after a challenging year for the entertainment giant.
Chapek’s ouster came after a challenging quarter for Disney. Iger, the driving force behind the early plans for Disney+, was back in the drivers’ seat just as Disney+ introduced its own ad-supported tier.