Netflix stock has trended lower since the short-lived excitement following the company’s third-quarter earnings report. The strong earnings results boosted Netflix stock to a new all-time high, but the shares have been sliding ever since.

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Netflix to spend $8 billion on content in 2018

The company’s management has revealed that they’ve earmarked a massive $8 billion for original content next year as the company wades further into movies with 80 new ones to be added to its growing pile of hit series. According to the Harvard Business Review, no other online player is planning to spend as much as Netflix on original content, so it seems investors had a good, long think about that $8 billion, especially given the bottom-line miss.

The company did increase its monthly subscription prices to help offset all this content spending, so while it hasn’t yet reached HBO’s $15 monthly subscription price, it’s heading in that direction. Even names like Disney are starting to catch a whiff of something that smells like cable TV, if the end of its deal with Netflix is any indication. Disney doesn’t typically run its movies or on competing cable TV networks and instead reserves them for its own channels.

Netflix to become like old-school TV?

In a post for Harvard Business Review, Joshua Gans suggests that Netflix is starting to look like “an old-school TV network” and predicts that give years from now, there could be “a set of online channels with the expectation that consumers will subscribe to all or most of them.”

Indeed, the TV industry is definitely heading in this direction, but he also makes an even more interesting prediction that should be of interest to investors who are worried about how much Netflix is spending on original content. If Gans is correct, then Netflix won’t have to be shelling out billions and billions of dollars for many more years because all the content that’s currently being bought by traditional TV players will be for sale cheap when they start to really struggle.