For Netflix, I think the expectation used to be that they would establish themselves as a long-lasting company that would generate $20bn in profit per year. It's now looking dubious that they will exist in a meaningful way in a decade--that their value is now to milk the subscribers they have for all they're worth until they have no more.
Of the big tech companies, Netflix has the smallest most.
Google has search.
Apple has the iPhone.
Microsoft has Windows and Office.
Amazon has AWS and logistics.
All of these are huge competitive moats.
However, unlike when Netflix first started, the moat for streaming is not the tech it is the content. As such, Disney, Universal, etc which have decades worth of movies/shows have a huge advantage in this new reality where streaming can be implemented relatively easily.
Netflix's moat is the marginal unit economics of media. At present, they have twice the number of subscribers of the nearest competitor(Disney), and that ratio is probably far higher in non-US markets. They can outbid everyone for content and still deliver a service at a lower COGS than anyone else in the market. They still have to produce a high volume of good content, but it allows them far more mistakes in doing so. It also allows them to make content tailored to niches which aren't economic for others.
> they have twice the number of subscribers of the nearest competitor(Disney)
And Disney had 60% subscriber growth in the past year (74M Q4 2020, 118M Q4 2021), while Netflix had 9% growth in the past year (203M Q4 2020, 222M Q4 2021), meaning the distance is shrinking as we speak. Disney sits on a massive portfolio of content, especially compared to Netflix. They are the bigger company, and have infrastructure to sell the content they own via multiple ways instead of just streaming.
Upvoted your comment for a solid counter argument. Disney's growth is decelerating as well. If you measure from Q1 2021 to Q1 2022, growth was down to 37%. I do think they're a very viable competitor, but I don't think the two businesses are mutually exclusive at current ARPU.
The reliance on theatrical releases is a bit of a mixed bag. It is another mechanism for content generation that can add to their library, but it also comes at a loss of some value to users of Disney+ if they care about seeing stuff on release. Additionally, it's dependent on a distribution channel(cinemas) that is currently hemorrhaging money. If moviegoing doesn't recover to pre-pandemic levels before the apes' money runs out, it might prove to be a vulnerability.
the problem netflix faces is that more and more content won't be offered to netflix at any price since it'll be produced explicitly for other streaming services. If everyone has their own streaming services competing with netflix then eventually netflix is left with almost nothing but the content netflix itself produces.
Looking at the current market capitalization of both companies, Netflix is at 84.57 billion and Disney at 203.Billion.
The difference, however, is Netflix could hone squarely in content if it needed to, and can benefit from having a single focus of mind. Disney's resources are allocated into 5 primary verticals, and 2 subsidiaries, with multiple competing budgets, priorities, resource allocations, and most debilitating at a company their size, internal politics.
That being said, Disney already funds so much of their own content generation, so the question isn't can Disney match a bid by Netflix (that's already a losing question for Disney), but can Disney create competing content that is more compelling.
