Heard it at a festival a few weeks ago and it hit

Edit: it was the same festival from the article.

Just to add to the other users great points-

Acquisitions by streamers/broadcasters can be by program (by season, run of season commitments, life of series commitments), they can also be acquired through output agreements with certain distributors (this gives one streamer/broadcaster priority over the programs they want from that company up to a certain spend per year), and then also through company mergers and acquisitions (like the Disney/Fox example above - this is when you’ll start to see the catalogue switch between streamers but licence periods from the old deals still need to be honoured so they’re often on both for a little bit).

Outside of that most new programs are under exclusive licence to one channel, or exclusive licence per broadcast segment (streaming, pay tv, free to air). Older programs can be under exclusive licence too (so one place has the whole series) and that is a premium cost. Having programs across multiple services may seem like it diminishes value but depending on the show it can also just mean it’s evergreen and has value everywhere so exploit it for what they can.

Before shows are made, production companies aim to get a distributor on board who will pitch to streamers/broadcasters or to get funding as a commissioned program. The first protects the inherent rights in the program and the latter gets the producers money up front by selling off those rights to the network. The show you mentioned is a co-production between 20th Century Fox and a smaller production company, Disney are both the distributor for S1-S3 after buying out Fox, and now also the network/acquirer for those seasons. The next season depends on if Disney take their first look option to continue on as co-producer - if not, and depending how the rights were structured, the production company could pitch the series elsewhere or Disney might still act as the distributor and decide whether to pitch elsewhere/sell (without offering financial backing to commissioning the production).

Obviously hard to know how anything will pan out without seeing how the deals were structured. It’s a super interesting area though - Deadline usually have info on all those deals as they go down.

In Australia, we have a service called Binge which is the streaming arm of a pay tv network. They mostly have Fox, HBO and AMC shows but now HBO and AMC are launching in Australia, those shows will start to move over while the Fox/Disney stuff is already on its way out. Binge doesn’t have too much commissioned/owned content so they’ll need to pivot to investing in that type of content if they want to stay relevant (this also means they become the distributor and the production company which as we can see from all these mergers and acquisitions is the sweet spot media companies want to be in).

Edit: Orville is actually licensed to segments (like I mentioned above) in Australia which is cool - linear tv service + that channels streaming arm (which is a free public broadcaster) + Disney+. So you can see here there’s value having a non exclusive licence if you can see where you can attract a wider audience base (ppl watching on this particular linear tv network and the free streaming platform aren’t likely to cross over but might eventually if they recognise the programming on D+).