Services spent years pulling their programmes back from competitors, and are now selling them out again. The reversal follows a change in what these businesses are being measured on.
Exclusivity was a growth-phase strategy
While the priority was subscriber numbers, a unique library was the strongest argument for signing up. Anything available elsewhere weakened that argument.
Services therefore withdrew titles from rivals and absorbed the lost licence income as a cost of building an audience. Some paid substantial sums to buy back rights they had themselves sold a few years earlier.
That trade only works while investors are rewarding growth. It stops working the moment they start asking about profit.
Licence income arrives immediately and cleanly
A licensing deal produces a known sum on known dates, against a programme that has already been paid for.
Nothing further needs to be produced and no additional risk is taken. It is close to pure margin against a finished asset.
For a business under pressure to show earnings, that reliability is worth more than the strategic advantage exclusivity was providing.
Exclusivity turned out to defend less than expected
The assumption was that a viewer would keep a subscription to retain access to a specific show. In practice most viewers subscribe for a period, watch, and leave.
Against that behaviour, holding a show back prevents relatively little cancellation while forgoing real income.
Once services could measure this properly, the case for withholding weakened considerably. Exclusivity was defending against a behaviour that the audience had already largely abandoned in favour of rotating between services.
Licensed titles perform well on the buyer's side too
Acquired shows arrive with an existing audience and no production risk, which makes them efficient library filler compared with commissioning.
A series that has already run elsewhere is also cheaper than a new one, and its performance is knowable in advance.
Both sides of the transaction therefore have a reason to do it, which is why the market reopened quickly once one service moved.
What this means for where things live
The tidy arrangement where each show belonged to one service has broken down. Titles now appear in several places, sometimes with different seasons in different homes.
That is confusing for viewers and largely irrelevant to the businesses, which are optimising revenue rather than clarity.
The stable state is closer to the old television model, where rights were traded continuously and nobody expected a programme to stay anywhere permanently. The exclusive walled library now looks like a phase rather than a destination.