I mean, if they're really losing half of a billion dollars per quarter, they'd need to do something like doubling their subscriber count to even approach breaking even. Is that really the case?
It looks like maybe WB is doing OK: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/war...
But in general, Netflix was in a broad Silicon Valley sense profitable at the time (in that I don't recall and I'm not going to dig it out, but if they weren't profitable, they were in a growth mode and definitely pulling in revenue and choosing debt-for-growth, which isn't really the exact same thing as straight-up losing money), and the competition is losing billions at a time. That's not a "larger slice of the pie".
Maybe they'll make up for it later, but at the moment I wouldn't bet on all of them managing it. I actually think the recent Hollywood strikes were darkly funny; the writers were striking because they want a bigger slice of what they perceive to be that sweet, sweet streaming money, whereas almost all of the news about the actual streaming services is them losing billions. When the real numbers come out we'll probably hear accusations of more Hollywood accounting, and while there will be some truth to that (inevitably), Hollywood is already reporting huge streaming losses when it is actually against their interests to do so.
> Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million.
It seems unlikely they were losing money on the Netflix licensing deals.