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It’s not every day that three major media companies telegraph their streaming strategies at the same time, but Monday —as Variety reported— was was one such day.

According to Variety:

Streaming service Netflix and broadcast network The CW are nearing a five-year deal that would give Netflix full seasons of CW’s shows — like Arrow and The Flash — within two weeks of the end of each show’s season. The deal should be announced this week.
Streaming service Hulu bowed out of negotiations with The CW to continue carrying CW shows during the 2016-17 TV season. The story didn’t say whether Hulu would continue to have previous seasons of CW shows, but that seems unlikely.
Streaming access to episodes during the season will only be available on The CW’s web and streaming platforms and on satellite and local cable providers’ on-demand tiers, and that will only be for the so-called “rolling five,” i.e., the five most recent episodes that have aired on The CW.

Assuming everything goes as planned, the 2016-17 seasons of The CW’s shows that begin airing in October would be available only on satellite, cable and other pay-TV outlets until sometime next May or June when the those full seasons would become available on Netflix.

What do the moves say about The CW, Netflix and Hulu and their respective streaming strategies?

For The CW, which is owned jointly by CBS and Warner Bros., moving from the in-season, next-day model with Hulu to the end-of-season model with Netflix appears to run counter to the deal announced in March (and that we wrote about here) that will put all shows that Warner Bros. produces for ABC for the next two years on ABC’s streaming apps during the season.

That’s no inconsistency. At its core, Warner Bros. — which produces or co-produces most of The CW’s lineup — is a studio looking to maximize the license fees for its shows. ABC is paying Warner Bros. a premium for the right to stream all episodes of future shows during the season, and Netflix is paying a premium to get The CW’s new seasons only weeks after they end.

It’s also possible that The CW was saving in-season streaming rights to launch its own freestanding streaming service like CBS All Access, though that seems less likely with the Netflix deal. If Netflix is paying the nearly $1 billion over five years than Variety reported, The CW may very well have agreed not to launch a freestanding service.

For Netflix, The CW’s lineup of DC Comics shows (Supergirl, Arrow, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow), serialized teen dramas (Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries), and female-skewing smart comedies (Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin) will provide fresh hits of content for three different slices of its buffet programming strategy.

Netflix’s programming doesn’t lean toward high-brow, low-brow, foreign-language, superhero, police procedurals, animated or any other kind of TV show. Netflix buys all of them and let’s the recommendation engine sort it out. Do you like Netflix original Lady Dynamite? Maybe you’ll like Crazy Ex Girlfriend! Between original series, off-network series and films, Netflix is spending $6 billon this year on content. The more shows they have, the likelier you are to keep your subscription.

Hulu is similar to Netflix in many respects — it’s a streaming service with a monthly fee that allows you to stream TV shows and films to mobile and TV-connected devices — but it’s not built on an everything-to-everyone model. Hulu is jointly owned by the parent companies of NBC, ABC and FOX and serves primarily as an additional revenue stream for their shows.

For those parent companies, Hulu is also a hedge against cord-cutting. If you drop your cable subscription, NBC, ABC and FOX hope you’ll pay $12 a month to subscribe to their streaming service or pay $8 a month and let them make up the difference by showing you ads.

Hulu, which also has shows from Viacom networks like Comedy Central and MTV and a handful of originals like The Path and Casual, also differs from Netflix in how it distributes its shows. Where the norm on Netflix for original and off-network series is put out a full season at one time, Hulu’s model is to drop one new episode a week like the broadcast, cable and premium networks.

In that sense, Hulu and Netflix were competing for different versions of The CW catalog — Hulu week by week and Netflix all at once at the end of the season — and the version that Hulu wanted would almost certainly have cost more than what Netflix ultimately paid.

Hulu is also probably shaving costs a bit as it negotiates carriage deals with the big cable companies for the Sling TV-like, cable-killer streaming service it plans to launch in 2017. Hulu is letting go of its Criterion Collection film catalog and would rather maximize the number of cable networks it can fit in its basket for the new service than adding an expensive network lineup to its already established $12/$8-a-month service.

The streaming business is still growing and changing, but the big players — with the exception of Viacom, which is dragged down both a management crisis and operational challenges — are showing clearer and clearer signs of how they think they fit into it.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.