Perhaps the best part of analyzing (and consulting on) Hollywood’s decade-plus transition to streaming is that few people really know how it’s going to play out, or which business model will prove to be the right one in the end. Netflix, the original pure-play streamer, has jumped into advertising and live TV. Warner Bros. pivoted from debuting movies in theaters to dumping them onto streaming and back again. Disney, which has an option to buy out Hulu from Comcast, can’t seem to decide whether to keep it or sell. Studio veterans have adapted the industry jargon of “LTV” and “churn” while ex-tech executives have enrolled in a crash course on the high-touch art of talent management. 

Among the most prophetic analysts of this new regime is Matthew Ball, an investor, former head of strategy for Amazon Studios, metaverse guru to executives around the world, and a renowned essayist and futurist. Ball recently published a mini-book detailing the three eras of streaming: the early adaptation era, in which Netflix and Hulu were first-movers, focused on educating consumers and stealing market share from cable; the present content era, in which film and TV costs have spiked as streamers compete for subscribers; and the dawning platform era, in which the market becomes oversaturated and companies focus on new formats, such as gaming or merchandising.