Yes that is part of streaming revenue
Knives out was used as an example earlier. Netflix paid big money to aquire it as sequels and knives out was a massive hit relative to its budget.
Paramount paid half of the production costs and basically gain nothing from streaming rights. No one's paying them money to stream HAT. If one sub division pays another it's still Paramount at the end of the day. In effect they're competing with themselves.
That leaves VOD and first cluck metrics for additional streaming income you can directly measure.
The idea that you think if they paid for it to begin with that them then streaming it themselves means they don't make that streaming money from it is...so fundamentally misunderstanding how streaming revenue works I don't even know where to begin.
Yes, people pay them money to stream HAT. EVERYTHING they stream counts for part of the revenue from what they make from streaming and there are formulas which help determine what portion you can attribute to any particular content. I posted some of those formulas earlier.
This is literally one of the top reasons why all the writers in Hollywood are on strike right now.
That you think streaming content streamed by the company which produced that content "doesn't count" for revenue and is "setting money on fire" is just wrong on such a basic level that I truly am struggling to find the words to try and even begin to explain it. It's like I'd have to start by explaining what content means for an entertainment based content company, or what a subscription service is and how and why it works as a source of revenue, or how companies acquire content to begin with. And if I'd have to explain that basic level stuff, how did you even find yourself in this conversation in the first place? Did you really think "Produced by Netflix" on Netflix shows they stream through Netflix were shows they were losing money on because they didn't sell it instead to a competitor (at the discount wholesale rate you sell things to a competitor for)?
I guess I will start with an even more basic analogy. Let's say my company makes widgets and sells widgets. They can sell the widgets they make to another retailer of widgets for wholesale prices, or they can sell those widgets they make to the end consumer for retail prices themselves. If they sell it to the end consumer at retail prices themselves, have they "burned money" by doing that because they don't get to sell those same widgets to the third party retailer at wholesale rates?
Streaming companies sell content. That's their business. They can buy that content from another producer of content and re-sell it themselves, or they can make that content themselves and re-sell it themselves. Making it themselves and re-selling it is usually more profitable than buying it from someone else because they cut out a middle man in the process. That's how most products work and fundamentally streaming is no different.
