Entertainment

For streaming, much like every other distribution, rights aren't free. I don't know the exact details, but I suppose (and if I'm wrong, please correct me) companies have to pay a percentage of their income, or fixed price, every month, to keep the show on their catalogue.

There is also the idea shows with low viewership are "costly" because you're hosting something that isn't being used often. Storage isn't free, neither is serving bandwidth, especially for 1080p and greater qualities. If only 5 of 100 customers watch a certain show, it means that the show only "brought in" 5% of the revenue. It doesn't matter that this math "is wrong" or "doesn't make sense", that's the simplified version of corporate thought: if the cost is greater than the profit, ditch it.

Many companies have to pay a publisher rights for their show, which may or may not go onto paying other actors and companies and other stuff. This is much lower if you own the show. Hence why Netflix will have their own shows that don't disappear. Or Disney plus will keep Disney owned shows.

But some examples are:

• you are an avid watcher, you've seen these shows, so to retain you, companies will cycle out long standing shows for others (use the money for new stuff)
• Company is paying a lot for 1 show when they could diverse (or the other way) to get a more popular show to drive in traffic or cheaper shows that drive more traffic.
• company would rather drop the money going to the publisher and spend it for their own new show that they pay less ongoing cost for
• if a company has a hard year, they may just not pay publishers for as many shows so their books look better and they make some money to invest in innovation/shows
• some CEO's look at companies differently. They join a company, they cut costs saving 10mil by not paying publishers. They then pocket 5mil as a ceo saying they saved so much money. Then they move onto their next company. And the company pays for the show to come back again.

IP is a clusterfuck of rights and licenses. The owners have generally made sure to wring the last cent out of this stuff, making it fairly complicated. So things can randomly end up removed from re-releases or over the air, due to time-limited licenses. E.g. Scrubs had a huge part of its iconic soundtrack nuked from streaming versions.

I’m not in that industry, but I am in tech, so this is mostly conjecture based on other, somewhat similar, experience.

My guess is it comes down to storage space, bandwidth costs, and licensing fees. Probably the latter more than anything.

When they own the IP, they probably don’t have much in licensing but there’s probably all sorts of agreements with other studios, royalties to consider, etc… not carrying these shows could free that up.

Bandwidth can be expensive. I’d imagine that Disney is hosting this on their own hardware to help mitigate costs, but having seen some AWS bills in the past for a moderately trafficked SaaS platform, it adds up. Extrapolate that to millions of users.

Storage, likewise, can also be expensive. Especially as the quality of these shows and movies increases. A 1 hour, 4k video can be multiple GB of storage so having whole seasons of shows can add up.

Then of course there’s the marketing side of this. I can imagine they have several, if not teams of several, data analysts who are able to pinpoint how much money a show/movie is bringing in. Then it’s purely a cost comparison. If it’s costing more than what they are bringing in, it’s a no brainer. If it’s similar or less, then there could be even further factors I’ve not considered.

Anyway, that’s my thoughts. It would be cool to know more from an industry perspective, but that’s an industry I likely won’t ever join.

I am no expert, I only heard a podcast on the subject, but this is my understanding of it: People subscribe for new shows, and old shows are less profitable for the companies. Old shows require them to pay residual fees to the actors and creators involved, so a show that's been out for a while has a fixed cost associated with keeping it on the platform, but a vague, less easily measured 'profitability' based on how many subscribers stay on the platform because of it's large back library. So, by cutting a few of the shows that less people are viewing, they save the fixed costs, and only lose out on the handful of customers who might quit because of an old, beloved show. It's stupid, because it's short sighted. They get a small reduction in overhead costs at the expense of the overall value of the product, and they irritate their customer base.

I wish I remember which podcast it was, they explained it so much better. I think it was a Planet Money, maybe?

It's the same way there's new customer promos for cell phones and such. You're effectively punishing loyal customers, but you need to drive growth quarter over quarter. The money you save by screwing over existing customers can be spent on a flashy new show that might bring in new subscribers in the short term.

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