Yahoo Autos From Netflix to Disney: How Much the Top 7 Streamers Will Spend on Content in 2023
Welcome to what Moffett Nathanson research analyst Robert Fishman calls the “post-streaming wars.” In 2022, streamers couldn’t wait to tell you how much they spend on content. A year later, the same platforms don’t want to open their wallets, let alone discuss it.
“Fueled by cheap money and unbridled/naive optimism from the Street, management teams were willing to spend whatever it took to establish their new streaming services,” he wrote in his very long March 21 note to clients of the Silicon Valley Bank-owned (yes, that one) firm. “To that point, if the launch of Amazon’s $1 billion ‘Lord of the Rings’ series sounded like the peak of the bubble, that’s because it likely was.”
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Even at the time, that figure sounded insane. Today, as interest rates continue to rise and most services struggle toward profitability in the face of a looming recession, it’s certifiable. As Fishman wrote, “As we now painfully know, money is no longer cheap.”
He noted that Wall Street has decided that subscriber growth is exciting only if it has revenue to show for it… and on that note, is streaming even a good business? If so, the balance sheets need to start proving it.
Fishman and his team (there are four names on the 26-page note, including senior partner Michael Nathanson) see total media-industry content cash spend (not just streamers) growing to $136.4 billion in 2023. That sounds huge, until you see that it represents an increase of just 1 percent from 2022. That’s what financial analysts like to call “flat,” especially compared to the 14 percent increase in 2022 or the 25 percent jump a year prior.
Below, IndieWire analyzed 2023 content spends at the biggest streamers. When we couldn’t break out streaming-specific totals, we noted that the numbers include theatrical films and linear TV. Sources include our own reporting, company SEC filings, earnings reports, public statements by executives, and that Moffett Nathanson note.
Courtesy of Disney
Disney: $30 billion estimated (theatrical, TV, and streaming)
Let’s start with the biggest of the big spenders. Even after cutting $1 billion in content spend from its own initial 2022 estimate, Walt Disney Co. still set out to spend $32 billion on movies and series last year.
Disney CFO Christine McCarthy said during the company’s fiscal first-quarter earnings call in February that she “expect(s) cash content-spend company-wide to remain in the low $30 billion range for fiscal 2023.” Last November, equity analysts at Wells Fargo predicted that Disney will spend $31.75 billion on content in 2023; Moffett Nathanson sees the cash spend coming in at $30.4 billion.
Disney’s streaming ecosystem includes Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. Check back with us on that whole Hulu thing in a few months — and maybe even on that whole ESPN thing.
Jennifer Rose Clasen/HBO Max
Warner Bros. Discovery: $20 billion estimated (theatrical, TV, and streaming)
For Warner Bros. Discovery, we’re going with another ballpark figure based on recent history and professed consistency. For Warner Bros. Discovery, this is particularly tough since its 2022 track record is comprised of eight months and change.
Prior to the merger, WarnerMedia under AT&T was poised to spend “over $18 billion” in 2022. In February 2022, Discovery, Inc. CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said his own company, the one soon to acquire WarnerMedia, spent “more than $4 billion for content” in 2021. He added that both sides of the then-pending combination would be “increasing the spend.”
Those building blocks would suggest the 2022 content spend for what we now know as WBD totaled $22 billion or so. Wiedenfels’ initial optimism hit cold water when the combined company was immediately be tasked with carving out billions to serve its mountain of debt.
However, as the WBD CFO, Wiedenfels said at this month’s Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, it’s not really taking a chunk out of the content budget with the company’s cost-savings initiatives — at least, they’re not touching the good content.
“I view this as having shaved off that excess,” he said. “We didn’t abandon anything that would have made any sense strategically or financially.” We’ll assume he was at least half talking about “Batgirl” there.
An individual with knowledge of WBD’s linear, theatrical, and streaming (HBO Max and Discovery+, soon to be combined) 2023 content spend told IndieWire the figure remains in the same $22 billion-$23 billion range. That feels a bit high to us; we’re more in alignment with Moffett Nathanson’s $20.2 billion forecast.
Courtesy of Netflix
Netflix: $17 billion estimated
Netflix has been nothing if not consistent. The streaming king invested about $17 billion — give or take — into streaming shows in movies in 2020, 2021, 2022, and now, 2023. That spend must feed the world, with an eye toward creating hits across the globe — and in rare cases, global hits.
Ted Sarandos, co-CEO (now with Greg Peters, not company founder Reed Hastings) and chief content officer put it into perspective during Netflix’s fourth-quarter earnings interview in January. “Watching where viewing is growing and where it’s suffering and where we are under-programming and over-programming around the world is a big task of the job,” he said. “There aren’t that many global hits, [where] everyone in the world watches the same thing. ‘Squid Game’ was very rare in that way. And ‘Wednesday’ looks like one of those too, very rare in that way.”
