Welcome back to What I’m Hearing+, coming to you again from Brooklyn after weeks of traveling. It was wonderful meeting so many WIH+ readers from around the world—thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to talk to me about the industry we all love.

This week, a look at whether Amazon Prime Video’s outsized spending on shows like Citadel and Rings of Power is really the smartest plan for one of the world’s biggest streamers.

Of course, it’s unfair to compare Prime Video to the other big streamers. It’s not a new service from a legacy media company, like Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, or Max. Nor is it a standalone pure play platform like Netflix or Hulu. On the contrary, Prime Video, like Apple TV+, is a shingle atop a multi-trillion-dollar technology company, designed to increase overall value. Sure, all these companies hope that streaming pixie dust will filter down to sister business units, like theme parks or merchandise. But Amazon is unique in looking at the number of Prime customers who sign up through Prime Video, or who use Prime Video and then shop on its e-commerce site, as a key performance indicator.

As the high-priced content scaled, many of these shows became commoditized. Secret Invasion, which like other Marvel Disney+ series reportedly cost an arm and a leg to make, is performing well compared to other Marvel shows when looking at premiere demand, but that isn’t going to make much of a dent in Disney+ subscribers. It’s catering to an audience that already exists. Silo, Apple TV+’s critically acclaimed sci-fi series, may have been renewed for a second season but is it moving the needle on subscriber acquisition or churn at the rate needed to justify its cost, or is it another expensive sci-fi series on a streaming platform that doesn’t necessarily need another expensive sci-fi series?

Then there’s Citadel. The show is performing well in India, according to third party research data, including from Parrot Analytics, where I work as director of strategy. In India, Citadel has 115 percent higher demand than the rest of the world, and is currently ranked as the 26th most in-demand series in the country. It also skews heavily male (just under 60 percent) and heavily millennial (just under 40 percent). Concerningly, however, Google Trends related searches for Citadel are all for BitTorrent and other piracy sites. People in India are interested in Citadel, but they might not be interested in Prime Video.

That doesn’t mean Salke doesn’t need to take huge swings like Citadel or Rings of Power, but it does mean that she doesn’t need so many of them—and, crucially, she needs to deploy those capital-intensive projects wisely. Without syndication as another revenue producing tool, creating a well-balanced slate, efficiently, and built with longevity in mind, is paramount. In streaming, tentpoles are customer acquisition tools, and they should be focused on separate audience clusters as the platforms unearth adjacent cluster content to keep those customers retained.

Last week, some of the most consumed series for audiences watching Citadel included less expensive, licensed shows like The Blacklist, The Equalizer, and CW’s The Flash, plus Yellowjackets and Queen Charlotte. Not everything needs to cost $100 million; nor should it. And strategically clustering less expensive archival content in support of tentpoles could really synergize Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM.

Netflix hasn’t pivoted away from prestige TV, of course, but unlimited content spending isn’t a viable long term business plan either, and the effort to be more cost efficient means leaning into what works. When we talk about Prime Video’s issues, we tend to focus on a couple of expensive shows and say, “Is this really worth it?” We talk less about what Prime Video is, and even less about what Prime Video should be. The platform has a number of strong shows, like The Boys, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Jack Ryan, and Reacher. The issue isn’t that Amazon can’t make great TV, it’s that it is seemingly finding it difficult to do efficiently.

And in 2023, when most outlets are trying to be HBO, the smarter move may be to pivot and lean into becoming something more like CBS—a network that still produces some of the most watched shows on television (that also have a long shelf life on streaming platforms) and is home to a medley of sports, including Sunday football. It sounds exactly like what Prime Video wants to be.

One way forward for Amazon involves borrowing some thinking from Moneyball. To wit: The streamer needs to focus less on trying to hit home run after home run. There are only so many players with consistent power, and they cost a premium. Instead, Amazon should find a larger group of less-valued but consistent players who actually get on base and provide run support. Audiences love home runs, but they also want to support a team who puts on an exciting game of baseball more often than not—and that’s a game of efficiency. Perhaps that’s not as sexy, but it’s where streaming is headed.