The cooler months bring many of us a welcome reprieve from busy summer schedules.
Plus, plenty of people are finally back home after a calendar filled with holidays, trips and social gatherings. And with the holidays firmly behind us, we’re looking around for things to do, preferably not far from the couch.
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The winter typically finds many of us with some more free time, which is why some streaming services choose to withhold some of their best and most anticipated content for the fall and winter. And if it seems like you have to wait a little too long until your next binge-worthy drama returns, that’s probably because you do.
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The 2023 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike dragged on for far longer than expected. The dispute between writers and studios about labor and the rise of artificial intelligence in entertainment led to a broad shutdown for months, delaying the release of many hotly anticipated shows on streaming and cable.
But now that the strike is firmly behind us, many streaming services are working around the clock to release long-awaited content.
A woman watching Netflix on TV.
Netflix tries to push ahead
Even though the strike may be over, streaming services all feel the pinch to push out new content and outpace each other.
The second season of “Squid Game,” Netflix’s South Korean game/drama show achieved 126 million views in less than two weeks’ time, setting a record for Netflix and for streaming as a whole.
The first season of the show achieved 265 million views and became the number-one show in 94 countries. It received 14 Emmy Award nominations and won six.
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Netflix has bet big on other shows and entertainment media, hosting its first NFL games on Christmas Day in late 2024. The games, which saw the Baltimore Ravens play the Houston Texans and the Kansas City Chiefs versus the Pittsburgh Steelers, also featured a halftime performance by Beyonce and featured nearly all the fanfare that a Super Bowl might.
Respectively, the two games “claimed the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on the English TV list with 14.4 and 14.3 million views, respectively. The NFL Christmas games are the two most-streamed NFL match-ups in US history,” Netflix said.
Netflix bets big on a new trend
But in order to stay competitive, Netflix needs to stay ahead of trends rather than just resting on its laurels. It knows that dramas and sports tend to outperform other genres, but many other streaming services offer plenty of drama, and Amazon AMZN has a firm foothold in the NFL already with its $1 billion per year Thursday Night Football deal.
So Netflix is looking to another “platform” that already has a cult following: books.
The wildly popular world of BookTok, which is where fans of books — especially fantasy devotees — discuss their favorite reads on TikTok, offers what could be a potential gold mine.
The hashtag #BookTok has approximately 44 million posts on the popular social media platform. It has helped everyone from New York Times bestsellers to independent authors create more excitement around their new releases.
And Netflix is making a bet that BookTok could lead the way to its next sensation. In December, it announced it would ink a seven-figure deal with independent author Callie Hart, whose breakout romantic fantasy novel “Quicksilver,” became an instant hit on the platform. Details surrounding the deal are still relatively mum, but we know Elizabeth Cantillon will produce the film, and Hart will serve as executive director. Netflix won the rights to all three books, two of which aren’t out yet.
Just weeks later, Netflix announced it had won yet another seven-figure deal to produce Ana Huang’s viral “Twisted Love” book series. The series has billions of views on TikTok. It has sold over 12 million copies and sat on the New York Times bestseller list for 60 weeks.
Neither “Quicksilver” nor “Twisted Love” has a release date yet.
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