During last week’s upfront presentations in New York, a somewhat arcane business issue grabbed the spotlight away from the big networks’ debut of next season’s new shows.

That issue is known as “stacking,” and it refers to the practice of making episodes available for viewers to binge-watch or catch up with current episodes. Stacking has gotten increasingly controversial over the years as Netflix, in particular, has pushed studios to not allow their network clients to make more than five episodes at a time available to viewers in order to keep shows from being too exposed before making their way to Netflix.

For a couple of years, studios were walking that balance beam, selling shows to networks but limiting those networks’ stacking rights to just five or so an episode in order to keep the price high when the studios, in turn, sold those repeats to Netflix and its SVOD brethren such as Amazon and Hulu.

But the networks — led by industry leaders such as FX’s John Landgraf — started pushing back. Most networks now offer their own streaming and on-demand services and they would much rather have viewers come to their services to catch up than push those viewers to SVOD services, where they very well may stay and wait until the next season of their favorite show becomes available months after it airs on broadcast.

Early in this upfront season, Warner Bros. and ABC announced a licensing deal that would allow ABC to post all current episodes of Warner Bros.-produced shows on ABC’s platforms, from streaming service Watch ABC to on-demand services offered on pay-TV set-top boxes.

RELATED: ABC Gets Rights to Air Full, Current Seasons of New Warner Bros.-Produced Shows on VOD Platforms

That agreement was the start of a trend, with CBS, FOX and NBC all saying they’ve acquired so-called in-season stacking rights from most of their producers for the 2016-17 broadcast season.

“It is one of the biggest sources of as-yet untapped value for these companies,” said Michael Morris, an analyst with Guggenheim Securities, according to Bloomberg Business Report.

It’s also become a major sticking point in negotiations between studios and networks: “I have an NBC show that was destined to get picked up, that I was told was getting picked up, and at the last minute it didn’t because another studio made a better deal in regards to stacking for their show,” Leslie Siebert, a partner at the Gersh Agency, told Bloomberg. “That was a major factor.”

This shift in thinking is part of the reason Netflix has turned toward a strategy of predominantly originals. When it buys shows in first-run — meaning they haven’t aired elsewhere and are exclusive to Netflix — the streaming service doesn’t have to worry about issues like stacking and other network concerns.

READ MORE: Deadline, Bloomberg

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