Competitors
•Hulu: 7.99$ per month (Hulu),
–In 2007, NBC and Fox—joined, two years later, by ABC—created Hulu, a Web site that lets viewers watch current and many past television shows but is subsidized by the same complement of commercials seen on broadcasters’ Web sites.
–Five million viewers subscribe to Hulu Plus, which, for eight dollars per month, offers more current content and past shows, on multiple devices and with fewer commercials.
•Amazon Prime: costs $79 a year or $6.60 per month)
–The advent of the Internet and streaming video brought new competitors. In 2011, Amazon made its streaming-video service, Instant Video, available free to every customer who signs up for its Amazon Prime program, which, for seventy-nine dollars a year, also provides free two-day shipping.
–The arrangement inverts the traditional advertising model: instead of forcing you to view commercials, video is the gift you get for shopping.
–Amazon Prime subscribers number about twenty million, although the number of those who are Instant Video viewers is certainly smaller.
–Last fall, Amazon released its first original series, “Alpha House,” created by Garry Trudeau.
•YouTube -owned by Google:
–A billion unique visitors watching six billion hours of video every month. Ynon Kreiz, the executive chairman of Maker Studios, the world’s largest provider of online content, noted that its series “Epic Rap Battles of History,” broadcast on YouTube, and which offers comical face-offs between, say, a faux Miley Cyrus and Joan of Arc, attracts on average forty million viewers—almost four times the viewership of the finale of AMC’s “Breaking Bad.”
•Netflix competes both on its brand and on the fact that it has an extensive content library.
•Netflix now offers in-house produced content such as “House of Cards.