Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Hulu push 'streaming war' with $445bn on video content in four years

Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Hulu push ‘streaming war’ with $445bn on video content in four years

By Luther Animashaun

The media industry has recorded historically high spendings in the past four years, with Netflix, Apple, Amazon and Hulu, the world’s leading media giants, spending not less than $445 billion, in what has been termed a “streaming war” to attract internet users all over the world and gather the largest streaming numbers in the lucrative digital video content market.

This is contained in a recent report by OnlyAccounts, which found that media companies have spent surprising figures creating video content as the industry demands new and entertaining content to keep users from not losing interest.

The report showed that, Since 2019, media Industry’s content spending has moved up to 40 percent betwen 2019 and 2023.

Further breakdown of expenditures by the top media companies by Statista and MoffettNathanson, revealed that in 2019, media companies spent a total of $96.8 billion on video content. However, the figure dropped by two percent in 2020 at $95.1 billion. There was a surge in spendings in 2021 as media companies spent more than 25 percent over the previous year with $118.4 billion on video content while the figure moved up by 14 percent in 2022 at $134.6 billion worldwide. This, according to OnlyAccounts, sums up to the media giants spending $444.9 billion on video content between 2019 and 2022.

Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Hulu push 'streaming war' with $445bn on video content in four years

According to Statista and MoffettNathanson data, total video content spending is to grow by just one percent in 2023 as spending figure is expected to hit $136.4 billion, slightly above last year’s expenditure of $134.6 billion. They explained that the slow increase is as a result of media companies moving their focus away from subscriber growth, rationalising their business strategies and also cutting down spendings on new video contents.

So far in 2023, statistics have shown that Amazon, Fox Corporation, and Apple are the only three companies among the media giants that have increased their content spending. This is as Fox Corporation increased its spending 22 percent year-over-year to $3.8 billion in 2023. In a similar move, Amazon and Apple raised their expenditure by 17.8 percent and 13.5 percent annual spending increase, respectively.