Second-Window Licensing Matters as Much as Originals in 2026

Streaming spent nearly a decade running on one assumption: that new content mattered most, so a title that was brand new and exclusive earned the biggest price tag and was much harder to license, while older films and shows were treated as filler, just there to round out the lineup.

New data from the Global Film Licensing Index (GFLI) shows that assumption no longer holds, and a string of major deals in 2025 and 2026 backs it up. Second-window licensing now generates real value in its own right, stretching across years of reruns after a title's first release, and the data increasingly puts it on par with what platforms spend chasing new originals. At allrites, this is exactly the world we work in, so we looked at the numbers, the deals, and what people in the industry are saying to understand what it means for anyone who owns or sells content today.

Acquiring Newly Produced Content Has a Price Cap Now

Production budgets used to set the price, with streamers paying more the more a show or movie cost to make, but that link has broken. According to the latest GFLI numbers, U.S. prices for big new titles have stopped climbing. Even expensive titles are landing in a similar price range, regardless of how much they cost to produce, and streamers have put a ceiling on what they'll pay just because something is new.

Streamers still want plenty of content; what has changed is how carefully buyers spend, partly because there are simply fewer big platforms left to bid against each other. Getting a new hit show used to mean winning a bidding war, and now it's one line item in a bigger, tighter budget.

Second-Window Licensing No Longer Trails Behind First Release

Prices for shows and movies that have already had their first run are moving in the opposite direction, even as first-run prices flatten, climbing steadily in a way that makes sense. A title that already aired comes with proof it worked, and buyers know how audiences reacted to it. That makes it a safer purchase than something brand new and untested, and it's cheaper to use for filling out a schedule or keeping people from cancelling.

A rerun used to just be a rerun. Now it's something platforms plan for and pay real money for, based on how well it's already performed.

Library tiers in the U.S. and Europe are holding steady or slowly climbing rather than losing value over time, giving a platform a steady, reliable base of things to watch without spending huge amounts of money every year.

Real deals back this up, with Disney licensing 14 of its shows to Netflix, including Grey's Anatomy, even though Disney spent years building its own streaming service around keeping shows exclusive. Sony skipped its own big streaming app entirely and licenses its whole movie catalogue, brands like Columbia and TriStar, to Netflix in the U.S., while handling the rest of the world separately.

Studios that built their own exclusive platforms still turn to second-window licensing once that exclusivity period ends. 3Vision's Movie Tracker data shows that NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. each resell more than a third of their Pay-One titles in the US and Canada once their platform-exclusive window closes. Disney is more selective, moving only 27% of its titles into a second window in North America. Paramount goes furthest of all, licensing 38% of its titles into second windows domestically and 52% internationally in Latin America, the only studio running meaningful second-window sales across every region it operates in. The buyer patterns are consistent too: Warner titles that premiere on Max typically move to Netflix, Disney titles move to Amazon Prime in the US and Crave in Canada, and NBCUniversal's titles go to Amazon, except for animation, which tends to land on Netflix instead.

This pattern says something important about vertical integration. Studios with the strongest reason to keep everything exclusive, because they own the platform it premieres on, still choose to sell a meaningful share of their catalog into the open market once the exclusive window closes, and vertical integration has made them more selective about which titles go into that window and when, rather than closing the window off entirely.

Why Netflix Was Ready to Pay $72 Billion Just for a Library

The fight over Warner Bros. Discovery is the best proof of how valuable old content has become. Netflix agreed in December 2025 to buy WBD's entire studio and streaming business for about $72 billion, a deal that would have handed Netflix decades of famous shows and movies, including Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and The Sopranos. Investors were unimpressed, and Netflix's stock dropped about 15% after the announcement.

Paramount Skydance came back with a bigger offer soon after, agreeing to pay $110.9 billion in cash for WBD instead. U.S. regulators approved that deal on June 12, 2026, making it the largest all-cash company purchase in history, ahead of Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard. Netflix walked away with a $2.8 billion fee, and according to CNBC, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the experience gave the company a clearer sense of its own appetite for large-scale acquisitions going forward.

Two of the biggest media companies in the world spent months fighting over an old TV and film library rather than a list of new shows still being written, and that alone shows how much old content is now worth.

Originals Bring Subscribers, Older Content Retains Them, Isn't It?

Conventional wisdom holds that new, original shows pull subscribers in, while a rich library keeps them from cancelling, but licensed, older content can apparently do that first job too. According to Parrot Analytics, licensed shows have made up more than half of everyone who signed up for Netflix because of a specific show, every quarter since early 2025, and by early 2026, that number passed 53%. What makes this surprising is that licensed shows are only about 40% of everything on Netflix, so title for title, they're pulling in new subscribers at a higher rate than the average show on the platform.

Netflix's own spending backs this up too: in 2025, the company spent about $18 billion on content, more than 53% of it on licensed shows rather than its own originals. For a company that spent a decade telling everyone "Netflix Originals" were the whole point, that's a big change.

Europe shows the same pattern, handled differently. In the UK, France, and German-speaking countries, deals for reruns and older content increasingly come with guaranteed minimum payments tied to how well a title did in theatres. American buyers are largely getting to the same place deal by deal, while European buyers are building that protection directly into contracts from the start, and either way, value has spread across a title's whole run, well beyond its opening months.

What Viewers Are Actually Watching

Subscriber-acquisition data is one lens on this, but raw viewing time is another, and it tells an even more lopsided story. According to Luminate's Streaming Viewership data, U.S. audiences streamed more than 25 billion hours of library film and TV in the first quarter of 2026, compared with 7.3 billion hours for originals, a gap of well over three to one. Part of that is simply a supply effect, since library titles outnumber originals by roughly two to one on major U.S. services, so there's more of it available to watch. The gap in viewing time is wider than the gap in supply, though, which suggests something beyond volume is driving it.

Viewers seem to confirm that directly: in a Luminate survey of 1,300 U.S. TV viewers, people said they spend close to 60% of their TV time on content that is at least a year old, split fairly evenly between rewatching familiar favourites and discovering older titles for the first time, with only 43% of viewing time going to something watched shortly after release.

One of the more telling examples of this involves shows that have effectively left home. The most-streamed Hulu original of 2026 so far is, technically, a decade-old limited series called 11.22.63, and Hulu no longer even carries it. Its 4.8 billion minutes of viewing this year have come almost entirely on Netflix, where Disney licensed it, and HBO Max originals The Staircase and Love & Death tell a similar story, still drawing millions of views apiece after being licensed to a direct competitor. Legacy streamers are, in effect, choosing to monetise their own old hits on a rival's platform rather than let them sit quietly in a catalogue nobody browses.

People inside the industry read that decision differently. Some see a sensible use of a sunk asset, arguing a dormant title earns more once, on Netflix, than it would sitting unwatched at home. Others see something closer to an admission that these platforms can't compete with Netflix's reach for their own older titles, trading away future engagement on their own service for near-term licensing revenue.

There's a less comfortable number sitting underneath all of this too: Luminate's data also shows overall original content viewing in the U.S. down slightly year over year, about 12 billion hours watched so far in 2026 compared with 12.4 billion at the same point in 2025. The decline is modest, but it raises a real question about sequencing, since it's unclear whether platforms are leaning into library content because it's newly proven its worth, or because the pull of original content has started to soften at the same time. The data doesn't settle that question, and it's worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly.

Deals Are Getting Shorter and Less Exclusive

The whole shape of the licensing business is changing too, beyond individual deals. Total global spending on content is expected to hit $255 billion in 2026, with streaming platforms responsible for around $101 billion of that, and the kind of deals being signed has changed as well. Licensing the same show to several platforms at once, instead of locking it to just one, now makes up 72% of all digital content deals in 2026. Deals are also getting shorter: a library title now typically gets licensed for 3 to 12 months at a time instead of years, with the option to renew rather than a long-term lock-in.

Shorter, more flexible deals let platforms keep repricing and reusing library content again and again, treating it like an asset they actively manage rather than something they buy once and forget about.

allrites has been saying this for years: shorter licensing terms and more flexibility are what content buyers have always needed, especially in an industry that changes as fast as this one. Our licensing model helps platforms and buyers find and license curated, rights-cleared content, including deep catalog titles, quickly, without the long back-and-forth of a traditional deal. As more of the industry's money moves toward reruns and library rights, the sellers and platforms who can move fast, price their content fairly across its whole life, and manage their catalogs well are the ones who stand to gain the most.

The bigger point from all of this data, and from the size of the deals happening right now, is simple: the money hasn't left the industry, it's just moved, sometimes by tens of billions of dollars, into second-window licensing and library rights. The real question is whether content owners and platforms are pricing and selling their catalogs in a way that reflects that.