In 2011, Netflix agreed to carry The CW’s shows for four years in a deal worth nearly $1 billion. That deal has now expired, and The CW is considering other partners even though Netflix remains the market leader among streaming services with more than 70 million subscribers in more than 190 countries, according to Netflix.

One factor complicating talks, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint, is Netflix’s desire to obtain global rights to acquired shows. Should studios allow Netflix to do that, they lose the ability to sell a show to the highest bidder in territories across the globe, potentially leaving a lot of money on the table. That’s increasingly becoming a sticking point that even Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos acknowledged during last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“Over the last 70 years, consumers have been at the mercy of others when it comes to television. The shows and movies they want to watch are subject to business models that they do not understand and they do not care about. All they know is frustration,” he said, according to Adweek.

“That’s the insight Netflix is built on, whether it’s an unfair late fee for a DVD, a discriminatory patchwork of global content availability or technologies that confound common sense and human happiness, our job as business people and as innovators is to make it easy for people to find the entertainment that they love.”

Last November, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes also indicated that Time Warner’s massive TV studios, Warner Bros., would be pulling back from selling content to streaming services in favor of airing episodes on-demand on cable and satellite services.

Time Warner is focused on “delivering even more value to consumers, especially those who subscribe to the traditional bundle,” Bewkes said, according to the AP.

CW Chief Mark Pedowitz, speaking to reporters at Winter TCA in Pasadena, didn’t rule out the network making another deal with Netflix, and wouldn’t say with whom else the network is speaking, but both Amazon and Hulu have been coming on strong in the race to acquire subscribers. And the streaming space, more so than cable, allows users to pretty easily “churn” their subscriptions, coming and going as they please, essentially, because subscribing to a streaming service is as easy as creating a user name and password to a website.

Should The CW move on from Netflix, any new deal would only affect the network’s newer shows. Shows that currently air on Netflix as part of the 2011 pact would remain on The CW for many years, reports the WSJ.

Brief Take: The CW, owned by CBS and Warner Bros., is just one example of how studios are reconsidering the way they sell shows to streaming services, which are becoming competitors as traditional studios and networks launch their own such services.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal

Pictured (L-R) in cube image: Cast of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, premiering on The CW on January 21: Franz Drameh as Jefferson “Jax” Jackson, Victor Garber as Professor Martin Stein, Brandon Routh as Ray Palmer/Atom, Falk Hentschel as Carter Hall/Hawkman and Arthur Darvill as Rip Hunter.

Photo: Jeff Weddell/The CW—© 2015 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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