Cable programming stalwarts FX and Turner have thrown down the first gauntlet in what is shaping up to be heated battle for binge watchers as studios, networks and streaming services struggle to make financial sense out of a rapidly changing television industry.

As we reported Monday, FX is launching its own FXNow app later this year to stream a range of 21st Century Fox content, including Films and shows from FXX and FXM. Today, New York magazine went deep on the backstory behind FX’s move, and its clashes with Netflix.

The main sticking point for everyone involved? In-season streaming and VOD.

As Chuck Saftler, president of program strategy and COO at FX said on Monday: “To only having a rolling five [episodes] and someone hears that ‘The Americans’ is a great show and we’re on episode 11 and they can’t go back to watch the beginning of that series in our platform, that doesn’t make any sense. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a really valuable window for Netflix, as we’re going into season 2; we just want to own the in-season experience.”

Except Netflix doesn’t see that window as having as much value if the season has already been “spoiled” by a network that got to stream it in its entirety.

As New York mag’s Josef Adalian reported:

”[Studio] executives say Netflix brass have said they believe that any expanded online exposure of a season makes it less special when it finally goes live with them. Last month, the streaming giant’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos all but confirmed this toThe Wall Street Journal, saying, ‘The less exploited shows are through on-demand services, the more valuable they are to us’.”

The amount Netflix has been penalizing producers for increased in-season exposure has ranged anywhere from 20 to 50 percent per episode, the magazine reported.

And it might be that the networks are actually just serving as the proxy fighters for the real shot callers in this fight: the cable companies. Adalian again:

“At least two industry executives Vulture spoke with for this story suggested that this battle is actually being waged on behalf of the cable and satellite companies that distribute these networks. After all, Netflix has been seen as something of an existential threat to the TimeWarner Cables and DirectTVs of the world since it offers a ton of content for a fraction of their price. In response, cable companies have been demanding networks make as much of their content as possible available for their video on demand platforms to entice (or hold on to) subscribers.”

The fight is already having an impact on future programming at the networks. At least one pilot was abandoned by TNT and TBS over the issue, while FX has lost one show, and another is in limbo as the sides try to iron out stacking and VOD concerns.

Read More: New York Magazine

Brief Take: With millennials cutting their cable cord in ever larger numbers, the networks and cable providers need to come up with a streaming solution fast, or risk Netflix toppling the entire industry business model.

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