What the Media Industry Forgets About Its Own Business

What does it mean to be a business?

The most immediate answer is that a business exists to make money. But this isn’t quite true. The same way an individual can’t simply sit down and make money, nor can a large corporation. A business makes money by pursuing another goal, solving a problem or offering a product, for which customers are willing to pay them.

The media industry seems to have lost sight of this fact, especially with their streaming media endeavors. They’re so focused on the abstract purpose of reaping theoretical revenues that they’re failing the more basic and necessary business requirement of providing a product that consumers want to pay for.

An Industry in the Wrong Direction

The proliferation of streaming services has produced a marketplace that is more hostile to consumers than the one of just a few years ago. The big media networks saw that they’d created a monster in Netflix, which grew rapidly and got millions of consumers to pay up for a monthly subscription. So when dozens of new streaming services arrived on the scene, their goal wasn’t to make consumers’ lives easier, it was simply to grab that $9.99 a month they had watched Netflix rake in for so long.

Indeed, the strategy they employed often served quite the opposite purpose, making consumers lives more difficult and more expensive. Pulling shows and movies from the incumbent third-party SVOD players (Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime) and putting them on first-party streaming apps was supposed to lure consumers into their arms. But so far, that hasn’t happened, and it’s not hard to see why.

Look at the media industry from the consumer’s perspective. Imagine a hypothetical set of shows and movies that a consumer might enjoy. Now compare accessing those shows five or six years ago to doing so in the present. No matter who you are or what your interests are, getting access to what you want to watch now surely requires subscribing to more services, and paying a lot more per month to do so. The consumer experience has been degraded in any way, and the content providers seem to, collectively, expect more money from consumers despite being measurably worse at solving the underlying consumer problem.

Any businessman knows what’s wrong here. If there’s a product on the market, and you replace it with a lower quality one at a higher cost, on paper it might sound like the seller makes more money per unit sold. But the reality is that it quickly drives consumers to seek out alternatives.

Solving the Consumers’ Problem

FreeCast has always taken a different approach: building a business with the aim of solving these problems as they emerge.

We’ve known all along that content would move from cable and satellite to internet distribution, and that we didn’t need to build those systems. What we’ve always looked at is the consumer experience. What will the challenges be for the average Joe television-watcher during this technology transition? That’s been our question.

The problem we identified way back in the early 2010s has not only remained, but gotten exponentially worse. Namely: shows and movies are spread across too many different apps, sites, and services, making them a pain to find and requiring too many accounts and subscriptions.

Our offering to consumers has never been online video itself, but rather, the solution to that problem: one service that simplifies all the others.

The real challenge for FreeCast now is getting the big networks and studios, who have already made investments totaling billions of dollars, to embrace the consumer-first mindset with us. We’ve built systems that are designed for content providers and programmers to easily plug into and utilize to distribute their own content, reaping all the benefits of our problem-solving approach.

But these companies continue to see pro-consumer moves as at-odds with their monetize-first strategy. In response, I would merely ask: how’s that working so far?

The Power of the Right Approach

FreeCast is one of the only players in this space that is actively trying to make the streaming experience better, and not merely “win” some hypothetical streaming war.

If streaming providers are at war, what does victory look like? Creating a streaming service so compelling that consumers forget all about Netflix and flock to its competitor instead? For Disney, NBC Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount (formerly Viacom), Amazon, Apple, and others, this represents an impossible goal. Consumers will always want content from across these different providers.

But FreeCast, with its unique approach, is actually a company capable of meeting that victory condition. If a consumer can get Game of Thrones, their favorite Disney movies, classic sitcoms like Seinfeld or The Office, the latest James Bond film, and more, all from a single app or website, they would gladly do so. And they would gladly pay fair prices for all of this content from those media companies, so long as it’s not half a dozen different $10.99 per month subscriptions.

That platform that FreeCast wants to build represents a win for everybody. Consumers get a streaming experience that eliminates so many of the pointless frustrations of the current system where every network maintains its own streaming service. Those more-engaged and less-fatigued consumers could then be more effectively monetized, with FreeCast sending the bulk of revenues right back to the content providers, at minimal cost to them. This is in stark contrast to the current environment, where each network incurs the cost of building and operating a streaming service, only to then be faced with high customer acquisition costs and rapid churn.

Make no mistake, FreeCast is a work in progress. We believe we can build a better streaming world, but we can’t build it alone; we need those major networks and content providers on board with us. That will be the difference maker. But as we continue to work to make that happen, consumers recognize that we’re building a solution for them, and not merely inventing new ways to divert their money to our own products.