---
type: claim
domain: entertainment
description: "Pay-TV bundling cross-subsidized across networks and time hiding the true customer acquisition cost that unbundling now reveals as up to half of streaming ARPU goes to re-acquiring churned subscribers"
confidence: likely
source: "Doug Shapiro, 'To Everything, Churn, Churn, Churn', The Mediator (Substack)"
created: 2026-03-01
---

# streaming churn may be permanently uneconomic because maintenance marketing consumes up to half of average revenue per user

Shapiro's churn analysis reveals a structural problem that may make streaming permanently unprofitable for non-Netflix services. Using Antenna data, he shows that 40% or more of Netflix's gross subscriber additions are actually resubscribers -- people who previously cancelled and came back. This reveals that churn is circular, not linear. Subscribers cycle in and out, and the cost of re-acquiring them (maintenance marketing) can consume up to half of ARPU. For services with lower brand strength than Netflix, the economics are even worse.

The deeper insight is that pay-TV bundling masked this problem by cross-subsidizing across two dimensions simultaneously: across networks (hits on one channel funded programming on others) and across time (subscribers who would have churned after their favorite show ended stayed because something else was on). The bundle created positive inertia -- not through lock-in but through continuous value delivery. Unbundling destroyed both cross-subsidies at once, revealing the true cost of maintaining a subscriber relationship that had been hidden for decades.

Shapiro distinguishes between positive switching costs (I stay because the product is consistently valuable) and negative switching costs (I stay because leaving is painful -- contracts, data migration, learning curves). Good bundles create positive switching costs by ensuring there is always something worth watching. Bad bundles create negative switching costs through contracts and hassle. Streaming services attempted to recreate the bundle (Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+, Warner Bros. Discovery's Max) but without the key ingredient: subscribers cannot be forced to stay, so the cross-subsidy across time collapses.

This connects to the broader disruption thesis because since [[media disruption follows two sequential phases as distribution moats fall first and creation moats fall second]], the churn economics are a consequence of the first phase. Streaming destroyed the pay-TV bundle, which destroyed the cross-subsidy mechanism, which made content economics worse for everyone. This is why since [[value flows to whichever resources are scarce and disruption shifts which resources are scarce making resource-scarcity analysis the core strategic framework]], subscriber loyalty has become the scarce resource -- and the entities best positioned to capture it are not streaming services but community-owned platforms and creators with direct fan relationships.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[media disruption follows two sequential phases as distribution moats fall first and creation moats fall second]] -- streaming churn economics are a direct consequence of the first-phase distribution disruption
- [[value flows to whichever resources are scarce and disruption shifts which resources are scarce making resource-scarcity analysis the core strategic framework]] -- subscriber loyalty becomes the scarce resource that streaming economics cannot capture
- [[when profits disappear at one layer of a value chain they emerge at an adjacent layer through the conservation of attractive profits]] -- unbundling destroyed the cross-subsidy mechanism that generated profits at the distribution layer
- [[good management causes disruption because rational resource allocation systematically favors sustaining innovation over disruptive opportunities]] -- streaming overshoots on volume while undershooting on curation, creating the churn cycle
- [[information cascades create power law distributions in culture because consumers use popularity as a quality signal when choice is overwhelming]] -- power law dynamics mean only a few titles drive subscriptions, making the gap between content cost and hit probability lethal

Topics:
- [[competitive advantage and moats]]
- [[web3 entertainment and creator economy]]
