Netflix is in discussions to bring competing streaming services—including Peacock and Fox One—inside its own app as subscription add-ons, according to people familiar with the talks. The services would appear as tiles on the Netflix homepage, letting subscribers buy and watch competing platforms without leaving the Netflix interface.
The model Netflix is studying already exists at Amazon and Apple. Prime Video sells access to Paramount+, Starz, MGM+ and dozens of other services directly inside its app, collecting a distribution cut on every subscription. Apple TV does the same through its Channels product. Netflix has resisted this approach for years, preferring to own and control everything a subscriber watches. That position is now under review.
Engagement is the pressure point. Netflix executives have discussed a pattern of viewership decay across follow-up seasons of popular original shows. One Piece dropped 30 percent of its audience between season one and season two. Beef lost more than 70 percent. Subscribers who finish a show and find nothing new to watch are the churn risk—and adding third-party content is one way to fill that gap without the cost of producing original programming.
A separate idea under discussion inside Netflix is a set of live television channels that would run continuously—streaming films, shows or programming sorted by genre without any viewer input required. The channels would function like traditional cable: turn it on, something is always playing. Netflix views this as a response to Tubi and the Roku Channel, both of which offer free, ad-supported streaming with always-on linear programming and have posted rapid audience growth. Netflix, which already runs an ad-supported tier launched in 2022, sees linear channels as an extension of that same inventory.
Neither the live channels nor the third-party bundle is a confirmed product. Both are internal discussions. What is confirmed is that Netflix has already started expanding outside its original content-only posture. The company added video podcasts to its platform last year. It carried a Formula 1 race live this year. Starting Aug. 3, it is adding programming from Architectural Digest, BuzzFeed, People and Condé Nast under their digital brand identities.
The competitive landscape around Netflix has shifted faster than the company's product has. The Paramount-Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closed this year, combining two of the largest content libraries in the United States under one balance sheet. Fox announced its Roku acquisition last month. Consolidation at that scale forces every remaining standalone streamer to answer the same question: do you try to own the consumer relationship end-to-end, or do you become a platform that aggregates everyone else?
Netflix's subscriber base and brand recognition give it enough leverage to take the aggregator route without it looking like surrender. Amazon built Prime Video's add-on channel business into a meaningful revenue line—it collects a percentage of every subscription sold through its marketplace, layering distribution revenue on top of its own content spend. Netflix, with roughly 300 million paid accounts globally as of its most recent earnings, would enter that business with a larger starting audience than Amazon had when it launched Channels.
The weekly release debate is also part of the engagement conversation. Some subscribers and show creators have pushed Netflix to move away from full-season drops and toward a weekly episode schedule—the model HBO and Hulu use to sustain audience attention over months rather than a single weekend. Netflix has experimented with hybrid releases on a few titles but has not shifted its core strategy. If viewership for second and third seasons continues to fall at the rates seen with One Piece and Beef, that pressure to change the release model grows.
The bundle and live-channel discussions amount to Netflix reconsidering the product decisions that defined it for a decade—no ads, no live TV, no outside services, content released all at once. Each of those positions has already been reversed or is now under review. The ad tier launched in 2022. Live sports and events arrived this year. Third-party bundles appear next in line.
