A hedge fund says the queues piling up on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video and Apple TV look like the subprime of attention.
A bear fund says American streaming queues on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video and Apple TV now hold twenty-six months of unwatched shows per household. It calls the pile-up a duration mismatch and compares it to 2007. The streamers say later is a very large market.
The list went up before breakfast on Saturday, as it does every week. Forbes counted the new shows and films landing on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video and Apple TV, and a nation added them to the queue without watching a single one.
Then Grimwald Capital, a bear fund with a taste for the funereal, released its first Weekend Watchlist Report. The average American household, it says, now carries twenty-six months of unwatched television. Nobody has the weekends to service it.
Grimwald calls this a duration mismatch, which is fund-speak for borrowing short and lending long. Viewers promise themselves one Saturday night. The services hand them a decade of prestige drama with a cliffhanger every forty minutes (the cliffhanger being, in effect, a balloon payment).
"We have seen this shape before," said Halvard Penn, the fund's chief strategist, from a conference room lit only by a paused title screen. "In 2007 it was mortgages nobody could pay. Today it is a documentary about a chess prodigy that nobody will ever start. The maths is identical, only sadder."
The trouble deepens on the other side of the balance sheet. The New York Times published its own roll-call of titles leaving Netflix in October. Grimwald reads those as maturities. Shows are coming due faster than anyone can watch them, and the collateral simply disappears at midnight.
"A viewer who queued twenty-six films in 2021 is now technically underwater. The films are gone. The guilt remains. That is a bad loan."
The fund has started shorting the weekend itself. It could not find a way to do this and has instead sold its own sofa.
The streamers respond
The services pushed back, though gently, in the manner of people who suspect the bear may have a point. "Our members enjoy the freedom to save titles for later," said Priya Ostrander, a spokesperson for one of the platforms, declining to say which. "Later is a very large market. We have not seen it end."
Grimwald disagrees. Its report tracks a metric it calls the Autoplay Velocity Ratio, the speed at which a household lets the next episode start rather than making a decision. The ratio, it says, has gone parabolic. Parabolic things, Penn notes, tend to come back down through the roof they went up through.
Analysts at rival funds were unimpressed until they checked their own queues. One found a Norwegian crime series he had added in 2019 and could not name a single character. He has since moved to cash.
By Sunday the first symptoms had spread. Households reported opening an app, scrolling for twenty-six minutes, and going to bed having watched the trailer for a show they had already queued. Grimwald logged each instance as a technical default.
The next weekend list is due on Saturday. It will be longer. They always are.
