I wasn’t trying to imply that nothing has changed. But I was being intentional in saying that things haven’t “shifted” away from streaming content (the context of the original question) or personal media. If you have fewer people, then you broadly have two choices: do less, or do it more slowly. (You could argue those are the same things framed differently, but I think the framing is important.) So the question felt like: with fewer people, are priorities shifting away from X? From personal media, from ad-supported content, from discover? And the answer is no. There are plenty of things that will progress more slowly, or that can’t happen simultaneously. To give a simple (if vague) example, within that Discover umbrella, there were two teams that consolidated into a single team. They haven’t necessarily changed their ambition, but now they have to decide what order to tackle things that they might have had the capacity to do simultaneously before.
A lot of this is predicated on the idea that ad-supported streaming has been a failure. I’m not going to do a deep dissection of company financials here, but it’s important to realize that that’s not true. We bring in more revenue from ad-supported content than we do from Plex Pass subscriptions. Both are important to us.
So, if ad-supported streaming isn’t failing to bring in money, what happened? Well, like I said, I’m not going to do more than scratch the surface on financials. But generally speaking, when investment markets feel like everything is awesome, investors tend to look to invest larger amounts of money and value growth above all else. When investment markets are tighter, investors tend to look to invest smaller amounts of money and value profitability. A few years ago, we took a large investment and made a big bet on growth. It hasn’t been a failure, but it hadn’t grown to the point of sustainability yet. So we made the tough changes that we made and now we’re back to being on a path to profitability. And that path includes personal media, ad-supported content, and discover features.
