Consumption levels of streaming video entertainment have boomed amid the pandemic, while production studios have been slowed—and for a time, halted altogether. Pearl-clutching began almost a year ago suggesting that the major streaming services would run dry on new shows. 

Based on a fair amount of anecdotal evidence, we might have arrived at that point. 

According to Kasey Moore, founder and editor of the online guide What’s on Netflix, the number of original series episodes and movies debuting on Netflix this year through April 1 is down 12%, from 180 in 2020 to just 159 in 2021. New programming additions of all kinds for April on Netflix are down by more than half, from 83 in April of last year to only 40 for this month. 

“It’s fair to say the content drought is here,” Moore tweeted. 

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw suggests plenty of other data points indicating slowdowns on other services. 

Also read: Here are the Spring 2021 TV Premieres, March to June 

HBO Max, for example, released the original series Generation in March. But its other new March releases consisted of a recut (Zack Snyder’s Justice League), two documentaries (Allen v. Farrow and Tina) and a theatrical title that was finished before the pandemic started, Godzilla vs. Kong.

By this time last year, Shaw noted, HBO had released new miniseries The New Pope and The Plot Against America, a new series, The Outsider, and new seasons of original shows Westworld and My Brilliant Friend. HBO does have new drama series Mare of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet, coming up on April 18.

Amazon Prime Video’s biggest March release was a title that Paramount unloaded amid theater closures, Coming 2 America. 

And Hulu didn’t have any originals for March. Its biggest titles for the month were FX series Mayans M.C. and Fox-produced Aretha Franklin biopic Genius.

Looking around further, Peacock is debuting the original Ed Helms comedy Rutherford Falls in April. But otherwise, its big programming events seem to be WWE wrestling matches. 

Disney Plus is launching David E. Kelley original series Big Shot on April 16. But otherwise, it has a National Geographic documentary on whales and some older movie titles (Night at the Museum, anyone?) lined up.

As Bloomberg noted, the pipeline for documentaries and animated shows seems to be robust. But English-language live-action titles are running predictably low. Streaming services continue to turn to foreign pipelines to find shows their audiences maybe haven't yet seen. 

The No. 1 title on Netflix on Tuesday, for example is a 2020 English-language German sci-fi movie, What Lies Below.

The evidence of this predictable programming shortage isn’t all anecdotal. FX noted in late January that the number of original shows on broadcast, basic cable, premium cable and streaming dipped 7% in 2020 to 493 from their peak of 532 in 2019.

Facebook is pivoting strategy for its Facebook Watch video platform, cutting back on scripted original shows, while focusing more on talk shows and licensed clips from TV networks and sports leagues, subscription news site The Information reports.

Watch will also reportedly pull back from licensing live sports event broadcast rights.

Notably, Facebook recently cancelled two of its most high-profile original shows, drama Sorry for Your Loss starring Elizabeth Olson, and Limetown with Jessica Biel.

For more stories like this, visit our sister publication Next TV.

The site reported that Facebook will invest $1.4 billion in Watch in 2020, up from its initial investment of $1 billion in 2017.

Speaking to Next TV sister publication Multichannel News in October 2018, Matthew Henick, head of content strategy & planning for Facebook, said, “Unscripted content definitely works well on the platform, but we are seeing really strong signals with viewers connecting with each other around scripted content, whether it’s a drama like Sorry For Your Loss or stand up comedy clips from Dry Bar Comedy.”

Last summer, Facebook reported that it has 720 million monthly viewers for Watch, but it already had started to cut back on the number of Major League Baseball games it was licensing, as well as the amount of news programming it produced. 

Making a move that is rare among AVOD platforms, Amazon announced the first original series for its recently launched free-to-consumer service, IMDb TV.

Short-forum animated series You’re Not a Monster will voice star Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet as Max, a psychotherapist to anxious iterations of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Medusa and other frightening folks. Kelsey Grammer will play Max’s great, great grandfather and mentor, a veteran shrink himself who also happens to be a vampire.

The formidable supporting voice cast includes Ellie Kemper, Patton Oswalt and Amy Sedaris. Creator Frank Lesser (The Colbert Report) will serve as animation director.

Notably, the production credits include Grammer’s Grammnet Productions, as well as “IMDB Originals.”

Attendees of Comic-Con in San Diego will get a first peak at the first season of 10 four-to-five-minute episodes later this month.

The launch of an original show by an AVOD platform is notable. Subscription services, of course, have used the original series model to grow their subscriber ranks. But the price tag of producing originals is typically "way beyond what anyone in the AVOD ecosystem could spend," noted Farhad Massoudi, the CEO of Tubi, discussing the AVOD business model with MCN in April. 

Of course, IMDB isn't just owned by anyone--we're talking about Amazon, here.

Launched in January under the name Freedive, Amazon recently changed the name of tits ad-supported streaming service to IMDB TV. The service, which claims to run half the number of ads than found on a typical linear network, is available with the Amazon Fire TV ecosystem of devices, on iOS and Android mobile devices, and the open internet via IMDB.com.

In addition to the name change and its first original show, IMDB TV also announced the ongoing addition of “thousands” of new movie titles which it said would triple the platform’s library.

The first wave of new titles hit the service on July 1. Here is the list of movies:

n alphabetical order):

A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988)

A KNIGHT'S TALE (2001)

AGE OF INNOCENCE, THE (1993)

BEAUTIFUL CREATURES (2013)

BEFORE WE GO (2014)

BEN-HUR (2016)

CABLE GUY, THE (1996)

CADILLAC RECORDS (2008)

CHARLIE'S ANGELS (1976-1981)

CLIFFHANGER (1993)

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)

DESPERADO (1995)

DOMINION (2014-2015)

EASY RIDER (1969)

FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN (2001)

FINDING FORRESTER (2000)

FLATLINERS (1990)

FUNNY GIRL (1968)

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (1997)

LA LA LAND (2016)

LEGEND OF ZORRO, THE (2005)

LEVERAGE (2008-2012)

LOVE & MERCY (2014)

MADE OF HONOR (2008)

MALLRATS (1995)

MASK OF ZORRO, THE (1998)

MAX (2015)

MI-5: THE GREATER GOOD (2015)

MONSTER CALLS, A (2016)

MOON (2009)

MY GIRL (1991)

MY GIRL 2 (1994)

NET, THE (1995)

NIGHT GALLERY (1970-1973)

NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE (2001)

RATCHET & CLANK (2016)

REMAINS OF THE DAY, THE (1993)

REVOLUTION (2012-2014)

RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, A (1992)

ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

SAVING SILVERMAN (2001)

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1995)

SHAUN THE SHEEP (2015)

SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (1992)

SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER (1993)

STUART LITTLE 2 (2002)

THE FOLLOWING (2013-2015)

THE INCREDIBLE HULK (1978-1982)

THE LAST WITCH HUNTER (2015)

THE PROFESSIONAL (1994)

VERTICAL LIMIT (2000)

WILD CARD (2015)

WILD THINGS (19

Starz has promoted Marta Fernandez to executive vice president of originals programming, the network said Monday.

Fernandez, formerly senior vice president of originals programming, will expand her role within the original team while continuing to spearhead the network’s inclusion initiatives across the network’s slate of shows.

Fernandez has been a long-time, key contributor to the success of Starz Originals, beginning with the Spartacus franchise and including the critically acclaimed series Boss as well as Flesh and Bone, Ash vs Evil Dead, Da Vinci’s Demons and Black Sails.

“Marta has done an excellent job of developing premium content and diverse talent and has been a great representative for Starz in our goal of serving underserved audiences,” said Carmi Zlotnik, president of programming for Starz, in a statement.

Netflix is slowly easing back on its reliance on licensed movies and TV shows, and it will generate half of its audience with its own originals by October 2019.

That’s the conclusion of a new report just jointly published by research companies Parrot Analytics and Kagan.

According to the research companies, Netflix originals’ share of total audience increased an average of 1% each month from June 2017 to July 2018. Reliance on licensed content dropped 10.9% over that span.

Based on this data, Parrot and Kagan forecast parity between originals and licensed content late next year.

Earlier this month, WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey delivered a shot across the ol’ bow, telling investors that Netflix and other top subscription streaming platforms can expect a “thinning” of their libraries when WarnerMedia launches its own direct-to-consumer platform in late 2019.

In April, research firm 7Park Data released a report suggesting that Netflix was getting 80% of its viewing from licensed shows at the time.

Although it is well known to be spending top dollar on leading creative talent, Netflix has been criticized by analyst for not effectively promoting its shows.

“Netflix has been great at developing a lot of content, but what it hasn’t been great at is the traditional, Hollywood style of marketing and creating enough buzz around shows,” explains Omar Akhtar, an analyst for the San Francisco-based Altimeter Group, told Yahoo Finance earlier this year. “That’s not where their budgets lie. They’d rather spend on great content.”

Netflix is amping up its originals slate, putting 85% of all new spending toward content production, chief content officer Ted Sarandos said.

Speaking at MoffettNathanson’s Media & Communications Summit Monday (May 14), Sarandos said the SVOD service expects to have nearly 1,000 originals by the end of the year, about half of which have not yet premiered.

The OTT juggernaut added 7.41 million streaming subscribers worldwide in the first quarter, bringing its global customer base to about 125 million, and it leads the pack in a category forecast to continue booming. Following a gain of 41% in 2017, U.S. OTT revenue is expected to grow another 40% this year, reaching $16.6 billion, according to Convergence Research Group's study The Battle for the American Couch Potato: OTT, TV, Online.

Against that backdrop, Netflix apparently believes Peak TV's apex is still to come.

But while Sarandos evangelized Netflix's content vision, he dampened speculation that Netflix has aspirations in sports and news, saying the company has no plans at this time to pursue either.

More from the MoffettNathanson Summit | via CNBC: How Netflix Budgets New Shows

New Production Deals

Among the most high-profile of Netflix's programming investments is an exclusive production deal with writer/producer/director Ryan Murphy that kicks in July 1. Two new Murphy-produced original series are already lined up, Ratched and The Politician. 

Before luring Murphy away from his FX deal earlier this year, Netflix last summer signed prolific series creator Shonda Rhimes, long attached to ABC, to a multi-year production deal.

Recent new series orders include sci-fi drama Another Life, starring Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica), and multi-camera comedy series Mr. Iglesias, starring Gabriel "Fluffy" Iglesias, whose deal includes two stand-up specials as well.

Upcoming Returns

Netflix on Wednesday (May 16) released its first look at season four of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which returns this month. The season will play out in two halves, with six episodes launching May 30.

Other upcoming returns include Arrested Development (May 29) and GLOW (June 29).

Bookmark This:MCN's Complete Coverage of Netflix

Over-the-top subscription video-on-demand services are a black box in the sense that they don’t release viewership metrics, but new proprietary data analysis from Parrot Analytics attempts to penetrate the sector and peer at what lurks inside.

What Parrot found in the first quarter of 2017 is that, for the first time, a non-Netflix show was the most popular digital original series around the globe, as Amazon Video’s The Grand Tour — featuring the former BBC Top Gear trio of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May — took the top spot in five out of 10 markets, including the United Kingdom.

Netflix’s Stranger Things was the top digital original in the U.S. in that period, but the surprise was that the announcement of the series’ season two release date, set for October 31, caused an average spike in demand of 262% in all ten global markets covered, Parrot Analytics found in latest quarterly Global Demand Report.

In the U.S., other events caused spikes in popularity in certain shows. Amazon’s Goliath, for example, got a lift in January when it won a Golden Globe, and Netflix’s Grace and Frankie ticked up when season three was released on March 24.

Season two of Hulu’s The Path premiered on Jan. 25, with episodes doled out weekly until April 12. Though that strategy didn’t follow digital’s typical binge-viewing model, The Path still saw demand rise under this more linear TV-like release schedule, the research firm said.

Among other regional examples, The Grand Tour, Stranger Things and Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle were the top digital original series during Q1 in the U.K. In France, three Netflix titles — Orange Is the New Black, Black Mirror and Stranger Things — led the way, while The Grand Tour, Stranger Things and Marvel’s Luke Cage were the top trio in Japan.

To determine that popularity, in the absence of hard usage data from each OTT service, Parrot Analytics bases its findings on what it calls Average Demand Expressions, relying on a platform that collects consumer demand data from several sources, including video streaming-media and social-media platforms, photo-sharing platforms, fan and critics’ ratings systems, as well as file-sharing platforms. Once that data is captured, Parrot Analytics combines it using an artificial intelligence system that pumps out a single measure of demand.

Though original titles from Netflix, Amazon Video and Hulu tend to rise to the top of the demand heap, Parrot Analytics also monitors demand for content from other sources, including YouTube Red (YouTube’s SVOD service), Crackle (Sony’s ad-based VOD service), and Seeso (NBCU’s comedy-focused SVOD).

Oxygen Media will develop five new projects targeted to its core female millennial viewers, the network announced Wednesday.

The new series include Dead Clean, chronicling an all-women clean-up crew; House of Black Diamond, which follows the lives of six members of a California drill team; and Start Me Up, a competition series focusing on raising money through online crowdfunding. Also on the docket are Swipe For Love, in which singles are matched up via social media in front of a studio audience, and competition series The Ultimate Relationship Test, in which couples wager money on each other abilities to win a variety of challenges.

“Inspired by millenials who express themselves and their ideas in innovative and diverse ways, these five new projects reflect Oxygen Media’s commitment to sharing fun and meaningful stories that resonate with our audience,” Cori Abraham, senior VP of development & international for Oxygen Media, said in a statement.

With fewer original shows airing during the third quarter, AMC Networks reported a drop in earnings that was slightly smaller than expected.

Citing an increasingly digital world, the company also said it is reducing staff and eliminating positions. By tightening its belt, AMC joins Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting, HBO and Warner Brothers, as well as Scripps Networks in cutting payroll costs in order to invest in  contest creation while maintaining profit growth.

"We are very mindful of expenses and are continually focused on refining our organization and the way we do business in order to operate as efficiently as possible," CEO Josh Sapan said on the company's earning call with analysts. "As part of this ongoing effort, we have taken steps in recent month to reorient and reorganize our staffing. This is an area we continue to examine carefully and constantly calibrate."

AMC has been ramping up original programming, causing worries on Wall Street about rising costs.

The company declined to say how many positions have been eliminated, but on the call, CFO Sean Sullivan said that third-quarter earnings included $6 million in restricting charges related to the elimination of certain positions across the company."

He added that there would be further charges in the fourth quarter and possible more beyond that.

In the third quarter, AMC Networks' net income dipped to $54 million, or 74 cents per share, from $58 million, or 80 cents a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 31.4% to $520 million because of the acquisition of Cellomedia, now called AMC Networks International. Revenue at AMC's national networks was up 4.3%.

Both figures exceeded analyst expectations of 73 cents a share in earnings and revenue of $511 million.

Distribution revenue was up 10.5% to $259 million.

Domestic advertising revenues dropped 5.8% to $138 million because AMC's cable networks aired fewer original programs during the quarter. Last year, the high-rated final episodes of Breaking Bad aired and those attracted premium prices from advertisers. The company said that while ad revenue was down at AMC, it was up at its other, smaller networks.

Sullivan said that the company expected results to improve and that the fourth quarter would be the strongest quarter of the year. "Advertising continues to be a growth driver for the company and will benefit from the return of The Walking Dead, is forecast to grow double digits at our national networks."

"AMC Networks continued its strong financial and operating performance in the third quarter with a double digit increase in revenue and growth in AOCF," Sapan said. "We are particularly pleased that for the broadcast season, which ended in the third quarter, AMC Networks in aggregate was the only cable media group to have experienced double-digit growth in viewership among key demos adults 18-49 and adults 25-54. Our year over year growth is significant and speaks to the success of our core content investment strategy."

Sapan added that AMC's recently announced BBC America partnership "meets many of our core strategic objectives for our business and provides a platform for long-term growth and success."

W

TruTV this week embarks on a new approach that it hopes will make viewers see it as a fun destination, rather than a place where conflict and drama reign.

Sporting a new logo and tagline — “way more fun” — the network is launching 11 new shows over the next two quarters.

Series such as Hair Jacked, in which hair salon customers are lured into a comedic trivia contest, and Fake Off, in which teams compete in the performance-art genre known as “faking,” launch this week, with the aim of drawing new and younger viewers, truTV president and head of programming Chris Linn said.

“We are truly flipping the switch and becoming an all-new channel, and we’re moving toward a much more diverse slate with content that has a more comedic tone,” Linn said.

Since converting from Court TV six years ago, truTV has offered a range of dramatic, investigative and lifestyle-reality fare in primetime. Series developed over that span have included Hard Core Pawn, Storage Hunters, Inside American Jail, Black Gold and Swamp Hunters, along with prank show Impractical Jokers. Some of those have done well, Linn said, but not well enough to establish an identity for the network.

“While truTV has enjoyed significant ratings success with individual shows in the past, it’s never really broken out as a brand,” Linn, who replaced Marc Juris as the network’s chief in May, said. “It has very low awareness compared to the ratings success we’ve had, and part of that is the programming has never really differentiated itself from what others are doing.”

TruTV has also been slumping in the ratings. Its average primetime audience (581,000 viewers) was down 36% in the third quarter, compared with 941,000 viewers during third-quarter 2013. The decline was 34% among adults 18- 49 and women 25-54 compared to the year-ago period, according to Nielsen.

Linn said his hope is that unscripted, “fun” shows will fill a void in the cable-network universe as it exists today.

“So much of what is in the landscape now is heavy drama, and in the unscripted space not much new has happened in the last few years,” he said. “We looked and we saw there was a lot of space where most reality shows are and where Comedy Central is for broadly appealing, comedic innovative programming. We’re trying to be a refreshing oasis in a conflict-driven recycled TV environment.”

Starting today (Oct. 27), the network will launch 11 new series over the next six months, with five to six new show launches per quarter.

Of those shows on truTV’s lineup last year, only two — Impractical Jokers (very much in line with the new “fun” emphasis) and Hardcore Pawn — will return with new episodes.

Along with Hair Jacked and Fake Off, shows debuting this week include How to Be a Grown Up, which provides funny takes on advice shows; Friends of the People, a sketch-comedy series; and The Carbonaro Effect, starring comedian and magician Michael Carbonaro.

Linn also said two scripted comedy series are in the planning stages.

“Scripted is something we want to be very thoughtful about,” he said. “People are quick to jump on the scripted bandwagon, and it’s clear nothing elevates the perception of a network like a successful scripted series, so we’re cognizant of that.”