Welcome back to What I’m Hearing+, coming to you from Toronto, where I’m seeing family and meeting with industry people in Canada’s entertainment capital.

This week, news and notes focused on a couple of important Netflix stories and statistics, HBO and Nielsen, and two of the biggest questions haunting the streaming industry. But first…

• Can TCM Be Saved?: We’d all like to think that great content will get discovered no matter how it’s distributed. But Dancing with the Stars was a hit on linear TV… and when it moved to Disney+, the audience didn’t follow. The reverse is true as well: Extraction 2 debuted with some 43 million “views” on Netflix but wouldn’t necessarily succeed as a theatrical bet, or even on Max.

  So it’s easy to blame Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav for the brutal and very public cuts to Turner Classic Movies, a brand that A-listers adore. He’s decimating the unit to service a $45 billion debt load. (As my partner Bill Cohan has noted, WBD is really a leveraged buyout.) But the truth is that TCM’s value proposition on linear has not transferred to streaming, where it is a buried shingle on Max. Its epic curation of old movies and lean-back ethos means less in an environment rich with subscription offerings (Criterion, Mubi) and free services (Tubi, YouTube).

  Of course, TCM is a brand that still means something, especially to people over 45, a demo that is less likely to cut the cord. But everything that TCM does well—the outros after films, the outstanding curation—is appealing to an evaporating audience. TCM lost nearly 8 percent of its Pay TV viewer base between 2019 and 2020, and saw a nearly 9 percent decrease in revenue the same year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Meanwhile, cable penetration in the U.S. has decreased by more than 50 percent over the last decade-plus, and is estimated to drop below 40 percent in the next few years.

  So how do you salvage TCM? Remember, Zaz manages some of the culture’s most pristine brands yet he effectively works for his creditors right now. How do you bring down costs and support the legacy brands? There is no perfect answer.

  Compared to the rest of WBD, TCM isn’t that expensive from a content perspective. The harder costs to justify are operating expenses (employees, fungible budgets, non-fixed costs), which is why we’re seeing so many executive pink slips. One might interpret these maneuvers as Zaz’s attempt to keep the lights on, but those execs have made TCM what it is, and their absence might hasten its eventual demise. Hollywood is a people business, but in today’s cold, McKinseyfied calculus, they may appear to Zaz and his rapacious C.F.O. Gunnar Wiedenfels like yet another burden on the parentco P&L—an easier asset to eliminate than the films themselves.

No, this metric doesn’t account for how many people rewatched a series, or how many gave up halfway through. But in fairness to Netflix, Nielsen isn’t much better at gauging this information. (In fact, few measurement companies are better.) And give credit where it is due: Netflix may have a reputation for opacity, but it is one of the only companies providing any transparency, probably because its volume makes it look good. Netflix’s Top 10 ratings have helped analysts and fans learn more about viewing patterns over the last two years, and this update to the formula will theoretically make our jobs easier.

Another hidden factor is an elongated window. Titles are now judged on their performance during the first 91 days (13 weeks), not 28 days (four weeks), which is intended to better represent the longevity of interest in a series or film. That’s an improvement on its own terms, but it will also help Netflix deflect criticism that its top shows are only popular for a minute before tapering off. Interestingly, under the new protocol, a hit series like Wednesday actually appears to be more popular than the blockbuster Stranger Things franchise because it received more views over a longer period of time. We can therefore argue that Wednesday had a longer viewership tail.

Netflix’s Top 10 lists do provide valuable insights, but they’re also smart P.R. After all, Netflix was the only company that could show its numbers because it was the only streaming company that had those kinds of numbers. Sure, every streaming company has viewership figures but only Netflix has the advantage of hundreds of millions of hours viewed across multiple titles; releasing its Top 10 every week is a reminder of its unique scale, both in the U.S. and globally. But we still don’t know how those titles helped with actual streaming economics like customer acquisition, churn prevention, and a title’s referral value (i.e., the ability to connect viewers between titles). The Top 10s track the overall viewership for top titles, but they still exist to make Netflix—and Netflix originals—look good. Nothing more, nothing less.

The more complicated question is how having HBO series on Netflix may potentially hinder Max beyond having shows available on both platforms. Individual shows perform differently depending on what service they’re available on. On HBO Max, Succession drives as many subscribers as it does to retain them, according to data from research firm Parrot Analytics, where I work as director of strategy. Meanwhile, a Netflix original, like Control Z, has stronger acquisition power than retention on Netflix, while a film like Air, which debuted in theaters before heading to Prime Video would also perform as a stronger acquisition title than retention on Netflix. Air, however, would theoretically perform much, much stronger as a retention title for Apple TV+ than it would in acquiring customers. Each title theoretically performs differently on each platform because of the differences in consumer bases it’s reaching.

Interestingly, the data suggests that Succession would actually fare more than 20 percent better on retention versus acquisition, were it to be made available on Netflix. In other words, non-subscribers wouldn’t be as likely to sign up for Netflix to watch Succession so much as existing subscribers would increase their engagement and stay subscribed. Series like Insecure, Six Feet Under, and Ballers aren’t exactly new, buzzy fare like Succession, but it’s not hard to imagine the data patterns would be much different.

And yet that’s just what Netflix needs these days, given the growing competition and increased churn in the U.S. market. So while HBO content might not help Netflix to bring in new customers, it will help with the mission-critical task of keeping customers there longer. And while this may impact engagement on HBO, especially if the average Netflix consumer is happy to have most of what they want in one place, it’s nothing that Zaz & Co. will lose sleep over. After all, there’s a reason that high-end retailers only give certain products to wholesalers like Bloomingdale’s. The goal is to expand the brand’s overall market by choosing specific low-risk and low-cost items to have in places like Walmart, while encouraging customers who want their high-end fare to seek out their clothes at dedicated storefronts. Insecure isn’t Succession, but it’s also not How to Make It in America or Luck.

The bigger, more complicated problem for HBO is how licensing impacts audience expectations. Training viewers to expect films on streaming after 45 days has clearly hurt Disney at the box office, for example. Likewise, training an audience to find HBO series on Netflix plausibly hurts HBO in the long run, too. Licensing HBO series isn’t new—the company struck a strong deal with Amazon years ago—but that was before streaming was the dominant form of viewing. That’s the Catch-22 of streaming: the only way to continue building is by using whatever tools and strategies are available, even if that means taking some hits. The long-term effect of having HBO content dispersed to so many services, and training audiences to find that content anywhere and everywhere, is less certain. Alas, Zaz does not have time on his side. He’ll take the debt-servicing revenue stat.

The question on everyone’s mind is what makes Tubi so popular with consumers, and what makes it more in-demand than other FAST platforms, like The Roku Channel and Pluto TV, both of which appeared on Nielsen’s May Gauge, but below Tubi. The answer is multifaceted. It’s a combination of better U.I., distribution availability, and content, of course, but the simpler explanation is that Tubi actually fulfills the original promise of streaming: it’s cheap, it has just enough of what people are looking for, it’s curated, and it’s easy to just hit play.

Streaming, after all, has become complicated, leaving audiences to sort through the messiness of what television and entertainment at large has become. It’s not just about why people choose to watch a streaming service, or how they do it, but where all those signals point to. Tubi has A-list movies, A-list shows, curated channels for every age, race, gender, and interest—and everything is split into channels like typical Pay TV. There’s enough comfort television (classic reruns), unscripted fare, and films for audiences to feel satisfied at zero dollars per month. And companies like Tubi will continue to benefit as the big content suppliers increasingly search for ways to offload or syndicate their content.

The larger macro question is whether FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) is a bubble. It’s easy to look at these ratings numbers, and the free model, and recall a time when Vice, Vox, and Buzzfeed were the envy of the media world. What’s increasingly apparent, however, is that co-exclusive licensing is back for all general streamers, and the leading FAST platforms are more than happy to take what they can get. As prices for core SVODs rise, and the number of platforms that audiences have at home falls, it may not be a mixture of Netflix, Max, and Disney+ that comprise the typical household bundle, but Netflix, Max, and Tubi.