Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal revealed a bidding war to be currently underway for the exclusive streaming rights of Seinfeld among SVOD giants Amazon, Hulu and
Yahoo
. According to the report, the current bidding is putting a price on the series north of $500k per episode, or $90 million for the entire deal. But, if this is indeed the case, then whoever ends up with the streaming rights will have overpaid for the exclusive rights to a series that’s anything but a rare commodity in the modern era.
Seinfeld is a legendary show that makes
Sony
money hand over fist year after year because of continually renewing syndication deals with cable providers and local affiliates across the country. Because of this, the series is pretty much available on a daily basis to anyone looking to seek it out. Of course, there are certain episodes that have fallen out of syndication because they aren’t as popular with mainstream audiences as others, but the point stands that Seinfeld is readily accessible to just about everyone. This fact is why a $500k per episode price tag for streaming rights seems high.
Recently, Hulu paid a reported $120 million for all 300+ episodes of CSI: from
CBS
, or roughly $400k an episode. So, when CSI: plays in syndication almost as much as Seinfeld, if not more, why is it valued at nearly $100k less? Is it really all about the “prestige” of the show’s name? Is the brand of Seinfeld still worth that much money nearly 26 years after the debut of its pilot episode? This isn’t like Lost or 24, which are shows that found their value through their binge friendly serialized formats. Seinfeld is an episodic, multi-cam sitcom. It’s fun, but hardly seems like a show that will pay off for anyone in the long-term.
Is anyone going to sign up for an SVOD service they don’t already have for the sake of watching episodes of Seinfeld? There’s a reason
Netflix
passed on the rights last year, as per The Wall Street Journal’s report. They passed because there’s no real value to owning Seinfeld in the realm of SVOD. This is why The Simpsons rights were so much more valuable to the traditionally built FXX. By being the exclusive television home of an episodic show like the hit Fox series, you can run marathons, themed events and a host of other promotional tie-ins that give people a reason to tune in. A traditional network could do something like an EVERY. SEINFELD. EVER. marathon and have it succeed in ways the SVOD rights simply wouldn’t.
Of course many would then ask why Netflix was willing to shell out the cash for the exclusive rights to Friends for nearly the same price of what Seinfeld is currently going for. Friends speaks to a more SVOD friendly audience. Friends was a series that found itself amidst the digital age when it ended, and thus it attracted a tech savvy, internet based crowd just as it was entering a state of consumer classification – a crowd that will buy a Netflix subscription without question or, more than likely, already own one. When Seinfeld concluded in 1998, it did so with the last throes of a generation still running on an older model built on re-runs and syndication. Seinfeld belongs in classification with the likes of M*A*S*H, All in the Family and Family Matters, not Friends and CSI.
Seinfeld is worth a fair chunk of change, perhaps somewhere around $300k-$350k an episode, but $500k an episode just seems ridiculous for a series that airs daily on TBS in multiple blocks at a time. What’s the real exclusivity here? Exclusivity of the right to be the one online outlet that controls Seinfeld? Sure, it may land you some street-cred, but it’s hardly going to pay off from a revenue perspective for anyone who lands the rights.
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