Who Won (and Lost) the Year in Streaming?

This episode of The Town is brought to you by Netflix, presenting Train Dreams, nominated for four film independent spirit awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, Clint Bentley. The playlist laws it as a career best performance from nominee Joel Edgerton.

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This new Wonder Man has some serious surprises in store. It's about Von Kovac, an award-winning director coming out of retirement promising to redefine the genre, while Simon Williams, an aspiring actor with secret superpowers, goes after his dream role as Wonder Man with the help of his mentor, Trevor Slatter. Starring Emmy winner Yahya Abdul Mateen the second and Oscar winner Ben Kingston.

Don't miss Marvel Television's Wonderman, streaming Tuesday, only on Disney Plus. It is Wednesday, December 31st. It's our last show of 2025. Happy New Year. It's been a kind of weird year in the streaming business.

YouTube has been the dominant story, of course. It really solidified its lead over subscription services and the time spent metric on TVs. Made some big inroads on traditional content. An exclusive NFL game and a deal to broadcast the Oscars. The Oscars on YouTube. Starting in twenty twenty nine. Netflix, the biggest paid streamer at more than three hundred million subscribers, it's certainly mindful of YouTube. Netflix started going after podcasts, including some from The Ringer.

Netflix still accounts for the majority of the hit shows across streaming. About sixty six percent of the original programs in Nielsen's top ten lists are from Netflix, according to Bloomberg. Still, Netflix no longer accounts for all of the hits, of course. In fact, the biggest show of the year in the US is on Disney Plus. The second biggest is on Hulu.

Every major streaming service can brag about some show in the top ten. Although there were no new shows among the Nielsen top ten streaming originals for the year. The first time that's ever happened Netflix's overall share of streaming viewership has dipped below twenty percent, Q its planned acquisition of HBO Max. And that's a sign of the times. There really is competition out there.

This time of year, there's a million stats flying around, a lot of it weaponized to try to spin a narrative. So today we've got Julia Alexander back with us to parse it all. She's my colleague at Puck and a full-time streaming video analyst. She's gonna take us through the year in streaming the biggest hits. Does heated rivalry qualify? We'll discuss that.

Plus the struggling platforms and the biggest surprises and takeaways from the year in streaming. From the Ringer Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is the town.

Okay, we are here with Julia Alexander, media correspondent at Puck, where I work, data analyst, extraordinaire. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, Matt. How are you? Good. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Were you able to relax? Did you unwind a little bit? No. But I'm not working very much. I don't really unwind. I know. It's kind of sad. Uh but I stayed in town. in LA. So it's nice. I'm enjoying the lack of crowds at the restaurants.

No traffic. LA during the holidays. It's great. Love it. All right. So I want to get into the year in streaming, but I want to do some like big picture kind of view from 35,000 feet above this because I feel like it's been kind of a relatively quiet year in streaming. These services are just kind of chugging along and keeping my you know, separating out the fact that like

HBO Max is probably gonna merge with one of them, whether it's Netflix or Paramount Plus. Take that out. Let's just talk about where we are in the subscriber world. Netflix is at 305 worldwide, 305 million, 308 million? Or or do we not know because they're not telling us anymore? They even told us it's 300 million subscribers globally, 190 million on the ad tier, right? They adjusted their ad numbers. Now they've got way more monthly viewers.

on that ad tier. But they are still sitting at the kind of the top. If we just level set across the board, we have prime video somewhere in there, right? Yeah. Mystery number of people will actually watch. They don't tell us. It's kind of all a mush mess. Yeah, the last public number they gave on the subscriber number was Andy Jassy, CEO in two thousand twenty four, saying like two hundred million monthly active, which is still not a subscriber number.

Uh but then if we've got Disney plus at 131.6 million. This was surprising to me when I was doing the numbers, Matt. HBO Max at 128 million subscribers, they saw the highest number of gained subscribers this year as well, like just in the span of one year.

That's because they're opening in various territories. I mean, we've known this. They're expanding across the world and they are converting their output deals where they would sell their shows to other services in all these territories into HBO Max. Territories. And that's how they are growing, correct? It's not like all of a sudden they're having huge HBO subgrowth in the US or anything.

No, heated rivalry is not driving eighteen million subscribers. As a Canadian, I'm sure you're very pro heated rivalry. Yeah, pro hockey in general. But I think if you look at HBO Max, similar to Disney Plus, these are also two streaming services that aggressively pursue kind of these linear bundles.

So we look at Disney Plus with charter, we look at what HBO Max does in international territories. So it's your point. They're expanding and they're also kind of licensing a lot of what they do, making these these deals. Then you've got Paramount Plus at about eighty million, seventy nine point one million to be specific. Hulu at sixty million. So total Disney is up around two hundred.

Yeah, yeah, it's up around 200. I've got Peacock at 41 million and then Apple TV plus. I've got three big question marks. 'Cause we've never actually gotten a number from Eddie Q. Eddie Q on this very show said that they are well above forty-five million subs. What do you interpret or what do the the outside services interpret that as meaning?

I think we've seen at anywhere between thirty and forty is the number that I see a lot. Well wait a second. He said he said well above forty five. I've seen numbers from outside that say thirty five thirty to forty. So I don't know what he's saying versus what numbers are. Oh, so Eddie is lying? No, I don't think Eddie's lying. I think that it's such a convoluted task.

to figure out an estimated number of subscribers for a service like Apple TV Plus that people are still just estimating to the best of their ability and we don't have any actual numbers. Why is it convoluted? You either are or you aren't. I'm just saying on the numbers that I've seen, we haven't seen significant growth over the last year or two for Apple T V plus in terms of just pure numbers, domestically and internationally.

Hm. So the gorge, not bringing him in. The gorge. Yeah. By the way, Craig is correcting me. He said significantly more than forty or forty five. So maybe he was hedging a little Maybe. The only number one I use, it's not a subscriber number, but I think it's important, is the YouTube monthly active users, because it's you cannot talk about streaming in twenty twenty five without YouTube. And that's anywhere between two and two point five billion MAUs globally.

Two and two point five billion. What is the Netflix monthly active user number? They said a hundred and ninety million. Okay. So this would be about ten times. the Netflix monthly active user. Removing the fact that there's no paywall. So yes, I was just gonna say, but yes, it is free. Netflix is not free. But when you talk about the streaming wars, and I'm sure this will come up in the antitrust evaluation of the Netflix Warner's deal.

YouTube still dwarfs Netflix. Yeah. A hundred percent. So let's get into some of the big shows of the

Give me the top ten from your perspective, because there's a lot of these services. There's the Nielsen top ten, which I like their numbers, but I, you know, acknowledge, they acknowledge it's only US, it's only on connected TVs. So there are limitations there. You go to Netflix and they're like, oh, those are not real and Apple is like, well, we're we're huge globally. It's like, okay, well show us the numbers. No, we're not gonna show you the numbers.

I think if you looked at the biggest shows of the year that spoke to where these individual streamers are in streaming, I think there's five or six titles you can talk about on the TV. All right, let's talk about the the shows of the year. So I think for Disney Plus, you look at Bluey. Bluey is the number one show of the year. Number one show of the year. They license that title. It's exclusive to Disney Plus in the United States. The fact that they can find this.

kind of cultural zeitgeisty, sticky content for kids in an era of YouTube, in an era when kids are watching a lot of stuff on YouTube, like Coco Melon, like Miss Rachel, which of course are now on Netflix as well, I think speaks to where Disney's

Strength has always lied with kids and will continue to. Because I think if you look at Disney Plus outside of it, other than Andor, which landed in the Olsen's top ten, it kind of landed at number one back during the finale, it did almost a billion minutes. Other than Andor, Disney Plus has not had a great year. Viewership has stagnated.

Subscribe subscriber growth in the United States has stagnated, but Bluey is kind of this touchstone of, oh, this is what Disney could do really well, which is leaning into a market that Netflix is coming for, that YouTube dominates, but that parents still really like. Well and it's the brand. The brand is Disney for families and they have this show. It's gotta drive them nuts that they don't own it. I mean, countdown to when the Brinks truck backs up to that guy in Australia's house.

And Disney just buys the entire thing. I know it's complicated. I know the BBC is involved. Like there's a lot of things that go into Bluey, but They gotta just buy it. I mean, it's so dominant. Thirty nine point three billion minutes as of November ninth, according to Nielsen. By far the biggest show of the year of shows that are in the weekly top ten. Um, Gray's Anatomy.

is number two, which is not Disney Plus, but is a Hulu show. I think they licensed some it some seasons elsewhere as well. Squid Game, number three, K-pop demon hunters, a movie, made it to number four for the year. NCIS, gotta put NCIS in there. When the apocalypse comes, there will be cockroaches and NCIS left over. Then Wednesday, SpongeBob SquarePants, yay, Paramount Plus, Bob's Burgers, yay, Hulu, Animal Kingdom, that is hilarious because it's an old TNT show that was on Netflix this year.

And then Blind Spot, which is an old NBC show that was on Netflix this year. Those are the top ten for most watched in twenty twenty five as of November nine. Well and not on that list, but I think is also important from the streaming of twenty twenty five story is Love Island. If we look at streaming services that have really struggled, I think we can all agree Peacock is probably top of that. Yeah, you didn't even mention Peacock in your initial your your group.

It's you know, it's sitting there at forty one million subscribers. It is stagnated there for the last two or three quarters. Domestic only. Domestic only. We've seen a bump of about three million subscribers over the last year. But Love Island. Broke out. It was a multi-day per week show. So people were tuning in. Yeah, Craig's watching. Craig watches like marathons.

That's incorrect. That's that's a lie, but okay. That's not a lie. You told me that you watch Love Island and you watch it pretty religiously. You are just blatantly lying, but that's all right We're gonna litigate this elsewhere, but you I'm gonna go to the table. I'm gonna go to the t my wife watches all the time and it is on when I'm in the apartment, but that's bad. Uh okay. Couldn't name a character.

I don't think the characters are what people are watching it for. But what's it? Let's keep go. Here's what I like about Love Island. If you look at why Peacock is struggling. I think it's a really interesting streamer in that so much of what is available on Peacock that people want, they can get through a VM V PD. They can get through like a YouTube TV. If the vast majority of it is broadcast television. some kind of financial news like C N B C or whatever it is and then sports.

If you have YouTube TV, you don't have to pay for peacock. So in a moment when everyone is saying, okay, I'm trying to figure out how to balance all these different streaming services, there is this moment of consolidation happening around the virtual cable system where people are saying, I'll have YouTube TV. You know, it's sitting at about ten million subscribers. It's growing. It's the fourth largest cable uh company in the United States now.

And then they're saying, okay, and what do I not get through there? I do not get Netflix, right? I do not get prime video stuff. Like I cannot get this here. So I think if you look at Love Island, which is this exclusive show to Peacock, it broke out, people are watching it. I think that goes to show that there is this interest in general.

Entertainment, reality programming that NBC Universal has always done well. But so much of that content, because it's available elsewhere, is really hard to convince people to sign up for. And Love Island did that. What about uh the the Sarah Snooks show, all her fault? Was that a big hit this year? It was not a big hit this year. No, but it did break out. It didn't make the Nielsen chart, which is rare for a peacock.

This is actually it's funny, like you and I were were talking about this in regards to Marty Supreme. And I think the question is like, well, what is a general hit versus well, what is a hit for a service? With very few number of subscribers that no one's really watching. So in that regard, is it a hit? Yes. Is it a regard is it a hit compared to even a severance? No.

Yeah. Well it's funny, it's happening right now with Heated Rivalry, this uh gay hockey player show on HBO where if that is your algorithm, it is being served to you over and over and you think it's a huge hit. But Let's see when the Nielsen numbers come out, whether heated rivalry has broken through to the general culture. And I am betting that it has not. Yes, and and on the heated rivalry front, uh, we have a few datic dots. Oh, please share.

We do not have actual viewership number, but uh according to uh variety had a cover story and they said they got this. It is the most watched original series ever on Bell Media's Crave, which matters to no one but Canadian listeners. All right. That is like a girlfriend in the Niagara Falls area. That does not mean anything. Like what what does that mean? Sounds like a Hulu press release. Hulu's the worst at this. Where it's like the most watched original on Thursday nights in the fall.

Well that so and in the US and I'm quoting here, quote, it's now the top rated non-animated acquired series on HBO Max since twenty twenty, and it is among the top five all scripted debuts on HBO Max this year.

So it's up there with like the pit, I guess. in terms of a debut on the series. Okay. Well the pit would be I mean the pit's a genuine hit at this point, but let's see. Let's see when the Nielsen numbers come out. Um by the end of the year, is Stranger Things going to be the biggest show of the year? It's a question of time. Right. So the debut of the newest season had about eight billion minutes, according to Nielsen. It's the largest debut on Nielsen of all time. It's clearly a big show.

Does the fracturing of it hurt the PR potential for Netflix where they can say it's the biggest show of the year? Maybe. You mean it just the calendar year is gonna end before the finale is really fully penetrated. Yeah, I think ultimately it's gonna be top five for sure, maybe top three. I don't know if it's going to be number one if it keeps going the way it's going, right? I'm looking at like K-pop demon hunters. I'm looking at what that did, 33, 34 billion, you know, eight billion for this.

I think it could do it, but I I I don't know if there's just enough time in the calendar year for that to get across. It'll definitely be the biggest show for Netflix. Like it will just will be. Uh but it's gonna happen this year. Yes. Okay. Yeah.

All right, so you have YouTube as the streamer of the year. Not a surprise there. You have Peacock and maybe Disney Plus as the loser of the year. I've got Disney Plus as the most disappointing streamer and I've got Peacock as the worst performer. Okay. And show of the year is Bluey. What is the biggest surprise hit of 2025? Well, I had it as he did rivalry. Oh, you're gonna call it a hit. You are. Yeah. I'm gonna call it a hit because I think it has

Now, to your point, I think this is very important to talk about in general with entertainment and streaming. As we kind of drift into these hyper niches. And then as those hyper niches are then supported uh and extended via Instagram reels, via TikTok, via YouTube Shorts, it does make it seem like this is suddenly the only thing everyone's talking about when really it's It's very something small that

some people are talking about, but you are getting inundated with it. Do I think heated rivalry is going to be as big as a Squid Game or Stranger Things? Absolutely not. Do I think that for a show made in like 30 days that debuted on this Canadian streamer that was a last minute acquisition that kind of broke through in a way that no one was expecting? I do. And here's why I think the s the if it's a if it's a surprise hit, here's why I think it matters.

That show should have existed on Amazon Prime Video. And here's why. Amazon Prime Video has access to a collection of very, very good data as of 2025. Because of the way that Amazon works, they have access to Prime Video, they have access to Amazon Prime as a retailer, and they have access to Goodreads.

They have a lot of access to what people are reading, to what is trending and therefore what might be something that is is worth acquiring. And so if you look at the interviews about heated rivalry, you've got the creator saying I kind of saw that this was blowing up and I thought romanticy is this big deal. So these are books. These were very popular books that this author turned into the TV show and you're saying it should have gone to Amazon.

Just look at the trend across the board. If you look at Spotify Rap, the top ten audiobooks on Spotify Rap are all these like Smuddy, romanticy type books. It is a trend that people are spending more time with, they're spending more money on, and they're willing to watch if it's good.

Amazon, which had I think the seventh highest watch show of the year with the summer I turned pretty, has access to all this data, has the audience, is trying to figure out that young female audience who's tuning into these types of shows.

and didn't do anything with it. But I think if this show, heated rivalry, really becomes a surprise hit, you will see a streamer like Amazon, like Netflix, start to look far more heavily into these kind of romanticy type books that are dominating audiences and especially young women and middle aged women who are not well served compared to you look at Paramount Plus and kind of the Taylor Sheridan universe, what's happening there.

Yeah, I mean, there may be a content issue. It's pretty hardcore gay sex. Maybe Amazon was not into that. Maybe they have other stuff. You never know. But Summary Turn Pretty, genuine hit on Amazon Prime Video, correct? HUGE HAT Is that the show of the year for them?

The show of the year for Amazon and I know this is gonna feel like a cop out and you're gonna go, Oh come on. Thursday night from Thursday night football. Yeah. It is, but it is it's a few years. They lucked out. They got some really good games this year. Yeah. They had that Rams game that was like l you know last second win and they had some other.

But even in general, you know, I think if you look at kind of as we take in all this data from twenty twenty five and where streaming stands, if we look at kind of what the main three storylines have been, which I think is the rise of free. So I think actually my streamer of the year is not YouTube, it's Tobi. Oh it is. Oh friend of the town, Anjali Seoud. So why is Tubi the streamer of the year?

That platform compar or service compared to all these other services that we're talking about costs very little to run. It is not a very expensive service. They're doing some original programming. They've got a lot of licensed content and what they proved is that people are willing to sit through an insane amount of ads in order to just watch free content. And they'll watch old stuff. They'll watch stuff that was not popular before.

And we've seen the share of Tubi pick up on the Nielsen Gauge of the last year. In fact, if you look at all the increases in shares, so just the overall time spent, if you combine Tubi and the Roku channel, both of which have seen pretty good growth, about one point two percent share and one percent share combined. It's on par with YouTube, sitting at that kind of 2% growth overall. Everyone else, the next closest is Netflix with half a percentage growth.

if the combination across the board bringing this into Amazon is people want to watch free content and people wanna watch sports, which is why I think that Amazon will bid on a very big exclusive package.

come the next NFL rights on top of Thursday night football. It's why they did the big deal with the NBA. It's why they're looking at more soccer deals. The NBA Cup actually did rate three million viewers for the NBA Cup final on Amazon, which was up. Pretty impressive given it's the first year on the platform. So what's the other one? The the the rise of free is what are the other two trends?

This one we didn't spend enough time talking about this year and I think it's so important, which is the rise specifically of social video on TV sets. Oh, like reels coming to TV. And the reason why this is a big deal is it's to your point, yes, Anne Mosari, CEO of Instagram says we think TVs are are a big potential opportunity for us, which is funny.

Right? Yes, but they also see the potential ad opportunity. Right? C T V connected TV ad spending is going to be one of the biggest growth ad areas in twenty twenty six. And if your Instagram, if you are a company that sees$50 billion a year in annual run rate revenue from reels alone. And you're seeing that people are spending more time watching this uh type of content on their T V sets?

twenty percent of social video time was spent with T V sets this year, you're gonna say, Of course we're gonna lean into it. We're gonna open our doors to a completely new area of advertising that we are currently not touching, that YouTube is gonna get all of this growth from.

So I do think if you are a streaming service You're not worried that all of a sudden your 30-second Toyota ads are gonna go away, but they are gonna start chipping into overall CTV ad spend like TikTok will when it relaunches its app, like YouTube currently is, even on the short side. And I think that is going to become a larger conversation as it all moves to the TV set. And that's going to ultimately be bad for the linear TV people, right?

Yes. That is my assumption. My big my big prediction is that this will be very, very bad for a lot of building your companies. And because, you know, you used to be able as a salesperson for traditional broadcasters to Poo-poo the digital stuff. Well, why would you want to be adjacent to that sewer of user-generated content? But now the sewer is on the TV.

And it's just another channel you flip to. And if you're competing directly and generating bigger numbers with the sewer, then maybe you hold the nose and jump into the sewer.

Something you said at the top of the episode, which I think is very important. I think it's extremely accurate, is that this year in streaming kind of felt Not boring, not not not not even slow. It just started to feel like a regular business. It started to feel like, oh, cool. Like it's now we're just managing a business.

Well, look what Netflix is doing. They're trying to buy their way to growth with HBO and Warner Brothers. That's what regular old media companies do. That's not what tech unicorns do. Precisely. And so I think if you look at the change in psychology over the last five years, where streaming was this.

hope that it was going to change consumer behavior. It was going to lower barrier to entry because people weren't doing cable. So they would get more subscribers. It would change the type of things people watched. It would change all of this. That hope has I think diminished.

I think there is an idea of like this is a business and we need to run it like a business and we need to figure out what that looks like. And at the same time that that's happening, as the legacy companies are trying to figure out how to make that transition from linear to streaming, you've got three of the largest companies in the world.

coming in and saying, oh, we want to be on TVs. Actually we think that's a really good area for this. And people are spending more time on their phone with us anyways. The conversation around YouTube, you know, I've covered YouTube for close to 10 years. In twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen, you remember this, the conversation around YouTube was like terrorist content. It was like anti Semitic content. It was bad Hitler stuff. It's like bad it was Hitler stuff.

And l a decade later, less than a decade later, the conversation on YouTube is that it is the future of TV. It's where Roger Goodell wants to put an NFL game. The Oscars. The Oscars, you're gonna have the most glamorous people in the world parading on the red carpet on YouTube. And I think that speed, alongside all these other bets that stringy executives thought they had to make, the big expensive

Stranger Things, the big expensive Marvel shows. At the same time that Tubi and the Roku channel are like, great, we'll take whatever NCIS spin-off you don't want. It is a recalculation about the type of formats, the type of content. that people want and what they don't necessarily need. And I think that we're starting to see that play out now where Netflix is saying

Stranger Things is ending. We need big franchises. It's really expensive to build and and it doesn't always work out. So we'd rather have Harry Potter. We'd rather have Game of Thrones. And I think at the same time, you're gonna see the Bob Iger or maybe Dana Walden or whoever it ends up being, and you're gonna see the um David Ellison types, all these new k people coming in saying, We need to re-examine what streaming should be.

from twenty twenty five to twenty thirty as opposed to using the same playbook from twenty twenty to twenty twenty five. What is your third trend?

Sport. There's no way around it. It's a boring trend, but you're going to see far more companies bid on these expensive sports packages. Amazon, Netflix, Google coming in means that the cost of specific sports rights is going to continue to escalate.

which means that all these other legacy companies are gonna have to spend less on original content. That's already happening. I mean, I know there's like a turf war going on at at NBC Universal because they're spending all their money on NBA and NFL.

And yet you've got the content people saying, Well, if you wanna grow peep cock, you gotta have some original shows and we gotta be able to compete and they're like, Okay, yeah, you can go after Taylor Sheridan, but the majority of the spend is gonna go to sports.

It becomes a really interesting question for audiences about how that looks. So like if you play it out, right? Let's use the NFL. It's the biggest thing in the United States according to Nielsen's big data. Right? It's the biggest thing in the United States, record breaking.

If right now you are a big NFL fan, you have Sunday Ticket, you get the vast majority of games. If Amazon and Netflix start to get more packages, then even something like Sunday Ticket or whatever that looks like starts to become less. valuable to consumers because they're going, well, how much am I missing out on? And this is a question I know like the NBA thought about when they were going through their rights deal.

If you're a league, how do you balance ensuring that you're not fragmenting it too much, even though audiences will go places, we know they will, but that you're not fragmenting it too much in the same air era where younger people are watching highlights on their phones and they're not watching full games. And how do you ensure that you're still getting the amount of money that you're getting? Most important question is anybody gonna watch Craig's fantasy football show on Netflix?

Craig, I will. This is very Julia. This is really big. All right. This is huge. The ringer shows, the Barstool shows, a bunch of other podcasts are now coming to Netflix. Is anybody gonna watch? Craig, I did uh an annual prediction of the I feel like a punt. A punt is coming.

No, this is Team Craig. I speak for every town listener. I'm Team Craig. I predict that Netflix will invest even more into sports podcasts. I think people will watch them and I think they'll pull back on their sports documentary. Yeah, that's much more urgent. Also the sports doc landscape has gotten so saturated and the and like the the air of exclusivity or access that these things provide is completely gone now. It's all too curative.

Yeah, it sucks. They all know it's a cash grab. The only thing I'll say about the podcast on Netflix is I'm curious how they will approach. The UIUX component, the the kind of how you view and interact with podcast component. You know, this idea of like, can people leave comments?

do they create a little community in there? I assume they don't for many reasons, but like I don't think Netflix has the capacity or the capability currently to do the kind of SEO mini channels targeting specific audiences when you break up podcasts into specific sections that YouTube does exceptionally well.

When YouTubers started doing podcasts on YouTube, people forget they did separate channels. They would have the main channel for the three hour video and then they'd have a separate channel with 10 minute clips that would target different audiences to build that audience.

Netflix can't do that. I think there's a lot of very smart people who operate on YouTube, knowing that the YouTube ecosystem for creators might get a little bit weird over the next two years as more generative AI content is brought in and they want some more secure money up front from someone like Netflix. Absolutely. So I think people will watch.

I don't think they'll be as successful as they would be on YouTube, but I think the people making these deals on the podcasting side are aware that YouTube might get a little hairy in a second and are just saying, let's try it here. And if it doesn't work, then we'll go back to YouTube.

It's the money too. They're paying. Exactly. So. All right, Julia. Thanks very much. Appreciate the time. Happy New Year. We are back with the call sheet. Craig, will you be in line for the final episode of Stranger Things in your local multiplex theater? I will not. That doesn't mean I won't watch the finale. I have yet to start season five. I've watched all the seasons prior. I I need to do it. I haven't found the time. They're long episodes. Oh, the finale is two hours and eight minutes.

It's not an episode of TV, it's basically a movie. So this is coming out in theaters december thirty first and the first only, just those two days. Yeah, okay, so here's what they're doing. Netflix agreed to let the theater chains play the finale for free. You do not have to buy a ticket for this.

But the chains are requiring you to have a food and beverage minimum. So for instance, at AMC, our good friend Adam Aaron, they are requiring a$20 voucher for food and beverage. Some of the other chains are lower than the The other reason it's free is because of residuals for the talent involved. If they are distributing it for money in theaters, they would have to pay residuals. Netflix didn't want to do that, so it's free.

By the way, I don't want to toot our own horn here, but Ted Serranos at Netflix and Adam Aaron at AMC, they came together because Ted listened to Adam on the Town. And started talking and all of a sudden they've got this great deal now where Netflix is giving them this finale essentially as a marketing stunt, but AMC is gonna make some serious money on this, and so are the other chains.

Because Netflix is not making any money on this. So if the tickets are free for customers, the food and beverage minimum of whatever it is, twenty bucks, that just goes all to AMC, correct? It is a pure profit thing. And Netflix is getting value out of it. They're creating hoopla. This is a marketing stunt for them and they're it's fan engagement for them and they're getting people to go to the theaters to see a TV show and good for them.

It's day and date, correct? Isn't it like the second this hits theaters is the second it hits? Yeah, you you can watch it on Netflix where the vast majority of people uh will watch it. But if you are a super fan and you wanna go out with your buds on New Year's Eve and dress up as eleven and Watch Stranger Things, you can do it. The Duffers put out some numbers saying that they had sold one point one million tickets so far. Not sold, but that one point one million tickets had been acquired.

And I am told that that is that about six hundred thousand of those are at AMC and the rest are at the other chains. The screen count on this one is interesting because it's at about 650 theaters, which if you add in all the screens, it could get up to like 2,000 screens. If you start to do the math, it's looking like they will end up at about 1.2 to 1.4 million tickets, quote unquote, sold for this.

And if you let's say the twenty bucks food and beverage at AMC, let's say, you know, the others are less around twelve, thirteen dollars. Let's put the average at about fifteen. That's more than$20 million in revenue for these theater chains. I'm gonna say that these theaters are gonna make more than 20 million on the Stranger Things stunt in theater.

Do you think this is gonna start happening more that s you know season finales on streamers will start to put uh their finales in theaters as marketing stunts? The theaters would love that. They want additional content wherever they can find it. They want sports. stunts from big shows. They want anything they can do. They want documentaries from Taylor Swift. Whatever they can do to make up for the lack of blockbuster movies.

in theaters. The question is whether Netflix wants to do this in the future. And listen, if you can get 1.3, 1.4 million people to go watch your TV show in a theater and dress up and yeah, that's pretty good marketing stunt. There'll be videos, there'll be social activity, all the things you want to eventuze your content. I mean also it just sets up for in the future, you know, wh whatever happens with Warner Brothers Netflix, but like

you might be able to go and see the release of Dune four and you can sign up for Netflix inside the theater and then you can watch the movie for half off. Well the end game here might be Netflix subscribers. get to see Warner Brothers movies in theaters early access. For free or for some kind Yeah, some kind of a discount and Netflix will subsidize that.

in order to increase the box office. Something like that, where there's a benefit to being a Netflix subscriber. So you get people to subscribe who may not. around the world and you get to see the Batman the night before or you get to see, you know, a movie for a discount. Something like that. I mean the theaters would have to be involved in that.

But uh I think this is a win. Congrats to the theaters for getting twenty million dollars. We may never know the number. I don't know if we're gonna ever be but I I could probably report it. Uh twenty million bucks is not nothing in this economy. So good. Alright, that's the show for today. I wanna thank my guest Julia Alexander, producer Craig Horlbeck, artist Jesse Lopez, and I wanna thank you. We'll see you in