HBO Shows on Netflix. Xbox Games on PlayStation. Is Exclusivity Over?

When Sex and the City arrived on Netflix this week, critics couldn’t help but wonder: What does this mean for Gen Z?

If the various backlashes to Sex and the City sequel series And Just Like That … are any indication, we can’t discount the risk of a culture clash between today’s sensibilities and the iconic quartet (now trimmed to a trio) that propelled the franchise to fame. But I’m less concerned with whether Carrie and Co. could get canceled a quarter century on than I am with a different question: What does this mean for TV?

For those old enough to remember Sex and the City’s triumphant run on HBO in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it’s somewhat surreal to see the sitcom vault into the Netflix Top 10. Until last year, The New York Times noted, HBO “had a longstanding policy of not licensing its shows to Netflix.” That changed last July, when the streamers struck a deal to add several HBO originals—including Six Feet Under, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Insecure, and Ballers—to Netflix’s library, even as the two rivals vied for Emmy honors. It took a separate, subsequent transaction for Netflix to land Sex and the City, which the Times called “one of the most illustrious titles in HBO’s library.” The six-season, 94-episode series, which debuted seven months before The Sopranos, helped establish HBO’s brand and spawned an ongoing revival of Max. Yet now it’s also in Netflix’s corner:

Netflix

Sex and the City’s new, nonexclusive home says something about the specific streamers involved, given Netflix’s lead in the Streaming Wars and Warner Bros. Discovery’s belt-tightening under president and CEO David Zaslav. But the story of Sex and the City on Netflix goes beyond a single series or particular corporate powerhouse. It’s emblematic of a recent sea change. Media exclusivity is going out of style—not just with TV, but also with movies, video games, and even podcasts. All over entertainment, boundaries between subscription services are breaking down, and content that was once jealously guarded is being made more widely available. This isn’t the end of exclusivity: There will always be an appetite for possessing appealing IP that can’t be consumed anywhere else. Increasingly, though, the emphasis is on reaching the most eyes and ears possible by putting properties on multiple platforms, rather than cloistering them on a single platform in the hope of luring subscribers.

As with Carrie Bradshaw’s return to Paris’s Pont des Arts bridge, the licensing of Sex and the City is a case of history repeating itself. In 1998, the year Sex and the City debuted, HBO promos sometimes bragged about where the network’s content could be found: “Only here. Only HBO.” When the new, risqué sitcom premiered that June, much of the media coverage struck the same tone. “A pay-cable network like HBO is the only place the show could have worked,” wrote Keith Marder of the Los Angeles Daily News. “Had its content been sanitized to the point it would have passed through network television’s standards and practices, Sex and the City would have been a doomed project.” Series creator Darren Star seconded the sentiment. “I’m not knocking network television,” he told Marder. “But for this particular show, HBO was the right place.”

Elsewhere in the article, Star and, um, star Sarah Jessica Parker sang the praises of the series’ singular home and parroted HBO’s “It’s not TV” tagline. Marder noted, “Unlike the broadcast networks, HBO can afford to nurture material. Its economics are based on the fact that quality will entice subscribers, who in turn pay the bills.” In other words, HBO’s business was based on exclusives: Subscribers would pay for access to series they couldn’t see—because they couldn’t exist!—anywhere else. The resulting revenue stream would in turn fund the making of more exclusives, in a virtuous circle of prestige not-TV.

That model worked well: By early 2002, HBO boasted Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Oz, with The Wire on the way. The AP reported that this classic lineup was “driving a surge in growth for the network” but warned that HBO’s success would be tested by a plan to “increase its number of series by 50 percent.”

Less than two years later, as Sex and the City was nearing the end of its run, The Wall Street Journal warned that HBO’s boom time was over: The network’s subscriber count had plateaued. HBO, the Journal noted, knew that “new subscribers alone aren’t enough to maintain its torrid growth.” And so, said then-chairman Chris Albrecht, “In order to sustain the double-digit growth, we need to have the HBO brand extend into as many areas as possible.” The network’s new areas included international markets, theatrical releases, DVD sales, and … yes, syndication.

That June, six years after the series premiere and a few months after the series finale, a shortened, bowdlerized version of Sex and the City made its cable debut on a sister channel, the Time Warner–owned TBS. For $450,000 per episode (plus another six-figure payout from ads), TBS had purchased complete exclusivity for Sex and the City for the summer of 2004. That fall, HBO would regain the right to play its own show (along with TBS), and the following fall, Sex and the City would also start airing on Tribune Co.’s 26 stations. Syndication deals with E! and Prime Video would come later.

Thus, over the lifespan of Sex and the City, HBO evolved from a network of “only HBO” exclusives that derived nearly all of its revenue from subscriptions to one that liberally licensed its shows. To maintain rapid growth and robust profits, the company had to cultivate that extra income stream because its newbie subscriber gains had leveled off, and its expenses had swollen as its production portfolio expanded.

That sounds a lot like what’s happening now. When the Streaming Wars really ramped up around 2019, companies reclaimed the IP they’d previously licensed to the trailblazing streaming services. As the Times wrote in January, “About five years ago, media companies like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery pulled many popular TV shows and movies, like Friends, The Office, and Moana, from Netflix. The companies wanted to use popular series to induce people to subscribe to their new streaming services, like Disney+ (which debuted in 2019) and Max (2020).” Lately, though, subscriber growth has slowed. (One might say that Max has maxed out.) In addition, piracy has increased, possibly because of the profusion of streaming services and subscription fees. And so, the Times continued, “Several of those companies, still trying to make meaningful profits in streaming and struggling with nose-diving cable revenues, have reversed course.”

That reversal stems from a similar flip-flop on Wall Street, which went from rewarding subscriber growth above all to prioritizing profitability. In response to investors’ evolving priorities, streamers have moved to cut costs, raise prices, and introduce ad-supported tiers—and they’ve also relaxed their resistance to sharing. “Overall, we’re seeing a decline in exclusivity mainly as a function of the shifting from a growth-in-streaming mindset to one of a focus on profitability,” says the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming exec who now analyzes the landscape of TV and film. “In that way, this is a rational [change] of some money-losing endeavors to ones that generate more cash flows.”

The chart below, provided by the ESG, shows the most popular preexisting TV series Netflix acquired last year from the likes of Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, and Paramount Global, and others in terms of total hours streamed since October. Two second-run sensations, Young Sheldon and Suits, stand out.

In early March, the ESG wrote, “We’re seeing more and more shows on the acquired charts showing up on multiple streamers.” The following week, he noted, “TV series are switching streamers constantly nowadays.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, total time spent watching streaming services was up 21 percent last year compared to 2022, while time spent watching the top 10 licensed or acquired shows increased 41 percent.

Handing hits to Netflix only makes the market leader stronger. However, feeding the beast can still benefit smaller streamers. Many Netflix subscribers, the ESG says, are Netflix-only users or Netflix-favoring cord-cutters. Young Sheldon and Suits weren’t new—Suits had been on Peacock for years before its breakout—but they were new to those Netflix folks. Thus, porting those titles opened up a new audience without cannibalizing an old one. Exclusivity “only works if something is valuable,” the ESG says. “If a show or film gets to the point where no one is watching it, then it doesn’t matter that it is ‘exclusive,’ because, again, there is very little demand for it.” Most stuff in streaming libraries is hardly watched at all. But there may be demand for some movies or shows on another network or service.

As the ESG points out, streaming exclusivity is different from exclusivity in the age of only linear, traditional TV, when broadcast networks reached every TV-having household. “Back then, shows were ‘temporally exclusive,’ since if you missed it, you missed it,” he says. “Then syndication acted as a second, nonexclusive window. Nowadays, few streamers have that same level of reach. … So if something isn’t being watched, when it switches streamers, it can find a new audience. Now, the added benefit is that the streamers can collect a second or third or fourth paycheck to let it stream elsewhere. This won’t ever be as valuable as syndication of yore, but it’s something.”

Audience siloing also explained a large part of the appeal of syndicating Sex and the City decades ago. Back in 2003, when TBS licensed the series, HBO had fewer than 30 million subscribers. TBS reached 88 million households, only a few million of which had access to HBO. “Everybody’s heard about the show, but not that many people have seen it,” said TBS executive Steve Koonin, who forecast an “enormous, untapped audience.”

Last month, Judd Apatow called HBO’s spot in bed with Netflix “a scary thing as a creator of television,” because it might mean less appetite for new shows. That may be true relative to the very recent past, but the very recent past was pretty anomalous. Historically speaking, syndicating successful series and enabling them to reach a larger audience was standard. Airing 600 original scripted series a year was not the norm. And for many viewers, that was simply too much TV. As HBO chairman Casey Bloys said last November, “I’ve worked in television long enough that syndication used to be the pot of gold. That was the brass ring that meant that your show was going to go on and have a life after its initial run.” As often seems to happen, technological disruption has given way to a reinvention of the wheel.

Of course, maintaining some desirable exclusives is a must; live sports, for instance, are a streaming battleground because their exclusivity draws subscribers. (Though even in the sports realm, ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. are creating a new streaming service to pool their rights and resources.) In 2004, the Journal wrote, “Even with all these ancillary sources of revenue, HBO must tend to its first priority: holding on to its existing subscribers and preventing what is known as ‘churn.’” That’s just as true, if not more so, 20 years later: In February, streaming measurement firm Antenna reported (via Axios) that “subscriber churn, which includes cancellations and lapsed subscriptions, has nearly tripled in the U.S. in the past four years.” Netflix has proved uniquely resistant to churn, but every streamer has to have hits to retain and attract subscribers.

For the most part, those needle movers are new shows, such as The Last of Us and House of the Dragon. As Bloys said last November, “We have to be protective of the shows that we have that are successful. … I don’t think you’re going to see more recent shows anywhere else until years later, which is the syndication model.” People may decide whether to subscribe (or cancel their sub) based on buzzy blockbusters. They probably won’t withhold their money because a 20-year-old show was added to a second streaming service. And when you’re tens of billions of dollars in debt and only tenuously profitable, you take extra revenue wherever you can find it. Better for Zaslav to refill the corporate coffers by making media easier to see than by making it impossible to see.

One buzzy blockbuster that has been a bit of a streaming-service hot potato—albeit still sometime after its release—is Dune: Part One, which was distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures and premiered on Max on October 22, 2021, the same day it hit theaters in the U.S. Two years later, in October 2023, it became available on Netflix, where it remained until the day before the theatrical debut of Dune: Part Two—at which point Part One went to Hulu. (Peacock and Netflix have shared custody of The Super Mario Bros. Movie in much the same way.)

It’s hard to say how much the millions of viewing hours the movie accrued on Netflix contributed to the hype that helped Part Two blow by Part One’s box office performance, but they can’t have hurt. Short-term revenue gain isn’t the only possible perk of putting something on another service: The publicity can increase viewership on the original service, increase interest in a sequel, or even lead to a spinoff (such as Suits: L.A.). Martial arts crime drama Warrior was canceled in December after failing to break through on Max; months later, the Netflix bump boosted it up the Nielsen charts, renewing hopes of a fourth season. On Netflix, it’s identified as a “Max Original.”

Netflix

Even Netflix farms out content at times. In advance of this year’s Academy Awards, the streaming behemoth put the Oscar-nominated animated movie Nimona on YouTube for free, for extra exposure. Even for the heaviest hitter, there are always extra eyeballs to reach.

The fact that no network reaches everyone has led to two other developments in anti-exclusivity. The first is what the ESG has dubbed the “dual-cast model,” in which conglomerates that operate streaming services and linear channels—such as Paramount, Disney, and NBCUniversal— release shows on streaming and broadcast or cable simultaneously. “This is a genuine change from past TV windows, when the flow of TV shows only went one way,” the ESG wrote last October. “At the start of the 2010s, broadcast and cable shows went to a streamer (mainly Hulu) day-after-air. In contrast, when Netflix and Prime Video started streaming originals, very few, if any, streaming shows ever made it to a linear channel. But this is starting to change.”

For instance, the most recent season of Dancing With the Stars was simulcast on ABC and Disney+ instead of airing on only the latter. Disney aired all of Ms. Marvel and the first two episodes of Andor on ABC. Paramount aired the first two episodes of the Frasier reboot on CBS in addition to Paramount+, and the premiere of another Paramount+ show, Special Ops: Lioness, also aired on the Paramount Channel. Other Taylor Sheridan shows pulled double duty: 1883 (originally on Paramount+) ran as reruns on the Paramount Channel, and Yellowstone (originally on the Paramount Channel) reappeared on CBS. Although cord-cutting continues, there’s currently close to a 50/50 split between streaming and non-streaming viewership across all of TV, so anything that isn’t available on both inevitably bypasses a wide swath of the audience. Dual-casting is the “Why not both?” model of distribution; we’ll likely see major awards shows pursue this strategy to bolster flagging ratings.

Similarly, while one might think that releasing a movie in theaters in advance of its streaming debut would sap interest in at-home viewing, the opposite seems to be the case. “The streamers have always argued that ‘exclusivity’ was valuable,” the ESG wrote last year. “Presumably that meant more people were watching on streaming because they hadn’t gone to theaters to see the movies. Or that subscribers were more likely to stay subscribed to a streamer based on the exclusivity of films that went straight to a streamer.”

However, in a multipart deep dive published last year, the ESG concluded that this isn’t the case. “By almost every metric, theatrical releases outperform streaming releases, plus they have all that box office [revenue] and more interest when a film comes to a streamer,” the ESG wrote. “If there is some intrinsic value to exclusive, straight-to-streaming releases, we don’t see that in ANY of the publicly available data.” Releasing a movie in theaters unlocks a second revenue stream and increases interest, awareness, and word of mouth. Perhaps this helps explain why Amazon and Apple have invested billions into theatrical releases: The better a film performs in theaters, the better it tends to do on streaming, even after accounting for potential confounding factors.

If anything, this growing open-mindedness about exclusivity has been even more evident in the video game industry, where growth has slowed and layoffs have accelerated. In gaming, multi-platform titles have always been common, but gamers’ spending on expensive hardware has created the conditions for console wars that are sometimes decided by which system has superior exclusives. In general, games published by the three major console manufacturers of the past two decades—Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo—haven’t appeared on any other systems, let alone each other’s systems. Lately, that’s started to change.

Over the past few years, Sony has dabbled in porting major PlayStation Studios exclusives to PC, generally at least a year after their initial releases. In February, Sony president and PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki said Sony plans to ramp up that program and treat first-party games not just as console sellers, but as opportunities to move as much software as possible. “Strong titles that achieve growth on PS5, PCs, and other platforms will widen our margins,” he explained. “We believe that we have opportunities for margin improvement and intend to pursue them aggressively.” Helldivers 2, a huge hit published by Sony, came out in February for both PS5 and PC. Sony has also teased some form of PC support for its struggling PSVR2 headset.

Microsoft, meanwhile, made major headlines when it announced in February that four Xbox games made by Microsoft-owned studios—Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded—would be coming to PlayStation and/or Nintendo Switch this spring. To some Xbox partisans, this decision seemed equivalent to sleeping with the enemy. But Microsoft has been signaling its platform promiscuity for some time. Last November, Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart said, “Our mission is to bring our first-party experiences [and] our subscription services to every screen that can play games. That means smart TVs, that means mobile devices, that means what we would have thought of as competitors in the past like PlayStation and Nintendo.”

A few factors have caused this dam to break (outside of Nintendo, which is still stubbornly plugging the leak and making games for its systems exclusively). “Exclusives matter most when trying to encourage consumers to purchase your video game console over the other company’s console,” says Mat Piscatella, executive director and video game industry analyst at market research company Circana. “This was far more important when consoles were the primary way people engaged with video games.” Now, committed console gamers are aging, and younger generations aren’t enthused about buying expensive hardware when they have computers, phones, and tablets. “It’s the wider adoption of mobile/tablet/PC, and maybe eventually cloud, that is lessening the importance of exclusive games,” Piscatella continues. “Consumer tastes and expectations have evolved, and convenience to content has become more important than loyalty to a console.”

People are playing on more platforms; therefore, publishers want to get their games on more platforms. Makes sense! Another factor: Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but subscription–service growth has stalled for both Microsoft’s Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. Even in 2022, Xbox boss Phil Spencer was saying, “We’re seeing incredible growth on PC. … On console, I’ve seen growth slow down, mainly because at some point you’ve reached everybody on console that wants to subscribe.” Spencer recently told Polygon that “the game experience is hindered when it matters what consoles we play on or what shops sell us our games.” Not for the first time, prominent members of the industry are cautioning that the console era could be coming to an end. “Consoles aren’t dying or anything,” Piscatella says. “The market has been remarkably stable. But that itself is a bit of a challenge when the goal is always growth, growth, growth.” (Insert obligatory “late capitalism” lament here.)

Microsoft, which has absorbed both Roblox and the Call of Duty franchise in major acquisitions—and which loses money on Xbox console sales—has seen the sales power of multi-platform juggernauts firsthand. No wonder it wants more. One of the sticking points in Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision last year was whether Microsoft would guarantee to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. Microsoft insisted it wouldn’t make sense for the company not to keep jumping in piles of cash from PlayStation owners after its purchase was completed—and behind the scenes, Sony agreed, as revealed in an unsealed email in which PlayStation chief Jim Ryan confided, “It is not an exclusivity play at all.” No one would make one of those these days.

Ryan’s predecessor as the head of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios, Shawn Layden, gave an interview last month in which he explained that the skyrocketing costs of triple-A game development—like the skyrocketing costs of TV production—make reaching larger audiences imperative. “When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel,” he said. “It reduces your addressable market. … Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in.” In a world of live-service games and free-to-play games where the vast majority of players won’t spend a cent, Layden added, “The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds.”

If you squint, you start to see subscription fatigue and the decline of exclusivity everywhere. (Including paywalls for news companies.) Spotify, which owns The Ringer, recently pivoted from seeking exclusivity with its top podcasters to distributing podcasts on all platforms. “Given our position as the leading global podcast platform, we are expanding our windowing strategies to increase the audiences and ad sales potential of our shows,” a Spotify spokesperson told The Verge last year. Or, as The Verge described the strategy this year: “be in as many places as possible and get as much ad money as possible.” Podcasts, for the most part, haven’t been driven by exclusivity, and it seems that they’re likely to stay that way. As Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in February, “While some of these exclusivity deals worked, generally it wasn’t aligned with what the creator wanted. The creator wants to have a broader audience.”

These days, who doesn’t? Subscription services will always be walled gardens, but the walls are getting lower, and the gates are getting wider. “So far, it seems to be working,” Bloys said late last year of HBO’s decision to cozy up to Netflix like a remora attached to a shark. (Remoras get a free ride, but they also eat shit.) But, he acknowledged, “Everybody’s just experimenting at this point, trying to figure out how much is too much.” For a while, there was too much TV and too much exclusivity. Now, maybe we’re moving toward too much intermingling. Nobody knows anything.

“True, we had never discussed exclusivity,” Carrie Bradshaw muses in Season 1 of Sex and the City (now on Netflix!), when she finds out Mr. Big hasn’t sworn off other women. “But while for me the idea of seeing another man would be trying to fit another outfit into an already overstuffed suitcase, Big was happily dating another woman like it was the most natural thing in the world. Is it that men have an innate aversion to monogamy, or is it more than that? I wondered. In a city like New York, with its infinite possibilities, has monogamy become too much to expect?”

Monogamy in New York is beyond the scope of this piece. Exclusivity in TV, movies, and video games, though? That is unrealistic.