America has never had so much TV, and even Hollywood is overwhelmed
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Only the prominent shows survive in the ads business model that currently governs these networks. If an Amazon or Netflix show gets 380,000 viewers and this show convinces the majority of those viewers to keep their subscription, then the respective streaming giant has already accomplished their goal. That's another $3.8M (or whatever the average subscription amount is) in monthly subscription revenue. They're not beholden to advertisers. A typical "Black Mirror" viewer might not overlap with a typical "Marco Polo" viewer or a typical "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" viewer, but, as long as each viewer has a reason to stay subscribed, Netflix doesn't care if said shows were to have a low average number of viewers.
Let's look at a 380,000 viewer show. It's very unlikely that ever single one of those viewers paid for Netflix for a solid year just to get access to that show (which will have all its episodes released at once).
So let's assume it has significant cult appeal, meaning a full 25% of its viewers are primarily subscribed for that show and things like it. (I'd say that's likely to be very high, based on my experience in the narrative video world, but let's be optimistic.) And let's say, based on subscribing for that show and forgetting to cancel for a couple of months (or subsequently being retained by another 380k viewer show), that Netflix gets 3 months' worth of revenue from them.
So that's 380k/4 = 95,000 * $7.99 * 3 = $2.28m revenue attributable to that show.
Of the shows you mention:
Marco Polo cost $90m to produce for the entire season.
Black Mirror doesn't have figures online, but it'll be around $3m per episode if it's similar to other BBC shows. So that's $18m.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt doesn't have figures available, but based on Tina Fey's fees for other shows and general knowledge of how much TV costs, I'll guess at about $3m an episode. (Might be cheaper if they're being clever about it, so could be as low as $2m) So that's $39m.
So, assuming that Netflix are just getting revenue from retained subscribers, and they get the figures above, we're looking at losses of:
$88m for Marco Polo.
$16m for Black Mirror.
$37m for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Obviously the situation is far more complex than that - they'll be financing with coproduction deals, they're looking for growth rather than revenue, they also acquire a lot of content cheaply (very, very cheaply in some cases) through licensing - but it's certainly not rosy enough that they'll be happy with 380k viewers for shows they're making.
Also, the up front production costs do not need to be recaptured on first watching. The 90M to produce Marco Polo creates and asset that can be sold, traded, etc... Eventually Netflix will have so much good, custom content that a new person joining will take years to go through it all if possible. What we are watching now is them bootstrap that process, but it will not always be that way.
OTOH, it would appear in many cases those rights aren't going to Netflix directly. See
https://www.wired.com/2014/03/comcast-bites-netflix-snagging...
, for example.
(Of course, this is how Netflix is getting so many shows made - they're trading those rights to the production company in exchange for not footing the entire production cost.)
It's worth noting, though, that those will scale strongly with the initial success of the show. Breaking Bad DVD sales were huge. The sales of DVDs of, say, "Alphas" on Sci-Fi will not be nearly as impressive.
As for subscribe numbers - I don't have hard figures, but based on years of persuading people to watch video-based narrative content I'd guess 5% of total viewers for a weak show, 10% for a strong show or one that's capturing a new audience, 18% for one that's both very strong and targeted at a radically new audience. Occasional outliers like Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones will probably provide higher capture for the subscription services showing them, but they're 1-3 times a decade phenomena.
I haven't subscribed ever for just a single show but I tend to subscribe for one month to watch a few shows and then unsubscribe for maybe 3-4 months before returning.
I have a UK account but live most of the time in Spain. The offering is similar in size. I have bothered a couple of times to go via vpn to get the US version but not found it so much better that it's worth the extra effort.
I have an amazon prime account too that I have never cancelled. Partly because I sometimes use the free delivery option when I'm in the UK but also with amazon I find new stuff worth watching tends to come along a bit more frequently.
Netflix still has shitty recommendations, and annoying pushing of content I'm not interested in. But by the time I get through all the things I actually want to watch as of today I'd be amazed if there wasn't almost as much new content. In other words I don't think I'll ever run out.
I don't know about Netflix, but anecdotally, I subscribed to HBO just for Westworld alone.
So, a failure is probably worth ~10m and a success can be worth 20+x that. Remember eventually they end up with a back catalog that's large enough to be self sustaining.
For example, a show no one ever even heard of "Tyrant", was canceled for averaging 700,000 viewers.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/netflix-marco-polo-tv-show-bud...
I go to a grocery store that has my niche items, but I also buy popular items that are expected at every grocer.
(My grocery store has to have good tasting cheap milk, full fat large container fage yogurt, fresh & authentic croissants, lemongrass, red lentils, etc.)
If one store has a monopoly on full fat fage yogurt but doesn't have lemongrass, I'll make a compromise of going to the store with lemongrass and buying some other brand of yogurt from them. Making one store visit is important to me.
You can only watch one show at a time, and the marginal effort of "travelling between stores" - flipping from Netflix to Youtube/Amazon/HBOGo/Etc, is essentially zero.
I've never minded the on-screen product placement in movies. It just makes things more immersive, IMHO. Certainly better than the hamfisted style of advertising seen elsewhere. I'm not sure how effective it is at moving product, though.
Actually the Adidas logo was quite out of place in that movie for me - the color was really out of place in the scene (probably to draw attention), they usually try to balance the colors in the scene and this really broke my immersion. The Surface part on the other had was nice, it didn't sacrifice anything and it added an interesting detail.
e.g. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence/show-me-the-money-...
For example, do they take the percentage of a person's viewing habits that the show takes up, multiply it by their monthly subscription revenue, and attribute it to the show for all viewers?
Maybe products could differentiate if producers tried to do something... different. If you do the same thing (with small variations) as everybody else is doing, it's very difficult to captivate the audience, that only see "yet another police show with a twist".
I just read elsewhere that experts estimated that "Fuller House" attracted over 10M viewers. Even if every single one of those viewers cancelled their subscription after binge-watching the show, Netflix might have made nearly $100M in one month from that show. "Fuller House" probably funded several shows that you or I love.
I subscribe because it has X number of good shows, not because it has 1 good show. If Netflix only had "Super duper invaders from Mars" and that was the only show I was interested in, I wouldn't subscribe to them, I'd just pirate it.
Another factor is that Netflix is a multinational; if a (cheap?) show doesn't work in one country, it might work very well in another one. (see the Warcraft movie as a movie example; did okayish in the west, was a huge hit in China).
But it still works as a good example of the economics: "With Netflix spending a reported $100 million to produce two 13-episode seasons of House of Cards, they need 520,834 people to sign up for a $7.99 subscription for two years to break even. ... That sounds daunting, but at the moment, Netflix has 33.3 million subscribers, so this is an increase of less than 10 percent on their current customer base."[2]
[1] http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/caa-agent-discloses-net... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/econom...
Yes, it's less than 10% -- but it's also less than 2% (33.3m * 2% = 666k)? Or what am I not seeing?
The BBC drama Poldark makes use of CGI to nail some of its historical elements, for example: https://www.latitude50.co.uk/journal/on-the-set-of-bbcs-pold...
Both Battlestart Galactica (the remake) and Firefly were fairly low-budget productions which made extensive use of CGI.
> Steve: We have a visual effects supervisor on the show who’s been working with Fincher for around 20 years. Let’s say we’re shooting on stage, and out the window we want to see the Washington monument, we’ll shoot green screen out of the set window. Then we’ll coordinate with the VFX department, telling them that we need to add a certain image out the window, and then we will go back-and-forth on how much expense it will require and how best to accomplish it.
> We actually do a fair amount of digital work in post on the show. All the driving in the show, anything inside the vehicle is done on stage, in a room that is a big three-sided green screen space. The car does not move, the actors are in the car, and the cameras are set up around them. We have very long strips of LED monitors hung above the car. We had a camera crew go to Washington, D.C. to drive around and shoot plates for what you see outside when you’re driving. And that is fed into the LED screens above the car. So as the scene is progressing, the LED screens are synched up to emit interactive light to match the light conditions you see in the scenery you’re driving past (that will be added in post). All the reflections on the car windows, the window frames and door jambs is being shot while we’re shooting the actors in the car. Then in post the green screens are replaced with the synced up driving plates, and it works really well. It gives you the sense of light passing over the actors’ faces, matching the lighting that is in the image of the plate.
> And as you mentioned, one of the bigger computer-generated things that we did in the first season was the VFX extension of the exterior of The Francis J. Underwood Library. That was a one-story building on location, which was not very modern. We added some elements to it when we shot it, then in post the top of the building was extended per the design that we did in the Art Department to create the modernist look of that building. There were a few other spots where we did visual effects work to enhance things on the show.
From http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2013/12/29/production-design-o...
If you want to assess the budget, look at the budget.
Let me say it again: TV is dead. Entertainment has changed. People want a 2 way relationship with entertainers. They want to like, snap and follow. As technology makers we should take action and build escuche for that. Hell, musica.ly showed that there is a segment of the population who will pay attention to their peers in short self made music videos (this is the new mtv, btw).
I don't think your average viewer really cares that much about social media interaction when it comes down to it. No one is not going to watch Stranger Things on Netflix because they couldn't snapchat with the show's creators. People just want to easily access content on their own time (on-demand, on their devices) and without a lot of intrusive interruptions (ads). Netflix, Youtube, etc are successful because they achieve both of these, not because they are creating "2-way relationships with entertainers".
Note: I'm not being snarky, sarcastic or rude. Just proving a point in a friendly way. :)
The thing is, there is so much great material that one could waste too much time. I have written about 20 books and when people ask how I can write so much, for 30 years my joke has been that I write because of the low quality of TV, so what else to do in the evening? I am glad that YouTube and tons of great stuff were not available 25 years ago because I probably wouldn't have spent so much time writing. Now that I am in my 60s, I am glad for the entertainment.
In summary, aspiration scales very well. In more detail:
You're very close to correct. People want to pretend or aspire that they could get into a twitter conversation with their favorite actor or whoever. Less than 1 in a hundred thousand viewers do, of course. Its similar to my grandparents generation sending physical postal fan mail to pretend they could have, I donno, one of the Beetles maybe, as a penpal, but nobody actually had a relationship like that. They just want to feel cozy that they could, if they want. Fanmail in 1960s IS twitter in 2010s.
In that way I'm not seeing any problem with simulating that on enormously larger scale legacy TV. TV has cratered such that popular show in my parents generation meant 1 in 3 americans watched an episode of MASH, now legendary ratings mean roughly 1 in 30 Americans watch Survivor and all of them can feel cozy that they could have a personal relationship, well, as personal as twitter gets anyway, with Jeff Probst if they wanted, although statistically rounding down to zero none of them want to actually tweet him.
Yes its easier in theory to talk to a guy with 1e3 viewers than a guy with 1e7 viewers, but since people are cozy because of the feeling they could if they wanted to, they never actually do it on a statistical basis.
Maybe rephrased its infinitely more important that Lady Gaga respond to "a" fan's tweet, so all her fans can feel they're that one lucky fan, than to have Lady Gaga respond to a fixed fraction of her total fanbase.
How about phrasing it like "The now mandatory use of social media for a famous person scales to a very small fixed constant number regardless of the number of fans".
Btw, follow me on twitter and snapchat @pryelluw. :)
Personally, I find myself enjoying 10-minute youtube videos from Lindybiege and Nerdwriter much more than traditional 2-hour documentaries, for once. It's just better content, regardless of the delivery method. But it could never been created in the age of TV networks; they didn't have any incentive to save viewers time and put out interesting stuff in small chunks.
Why accept a forced programming on you at specific times when you can chose what you want to watch whenever you want.
Even my 70+ father is making youtube videos about everything photos and watching/commenting similar channels of his own.
However the plot development of the AI by Nolan is a bit complex and layered which in many way makes it intriguing but also I think leaves casual viewers struggling to engage. A core fan base is already engaged but the numbers show that inspite of being clearly imho some of the best television in a long time it might not be renewed because its too expensive to develop.
I personally think the weekly format is not friendly to this kind of complex show, viewers are not able to hold the strings together in their head or have no desire to keep track. At least 2 episodes a week or more can help alleviate this but that changes the economics and dynamics of how these shows are written and shot and in the interim there is room for HNs favourite word 'disruption'.
Eh, people aren't as stupid as you make them to be. Remember, even an average housewife could follow the utterly complex web of a 1000+ parts of Santa Barbara soap opera. Asking people to follow a < 20 part show isn't anything special.
There are some shows that hint at things, imply things, and don't outright scream "remember this it's important" which can make bringing the threads together over the course of weeks hard without continual "last time on [showname]".
These stories are served better when the episodes aren't spread out over the course of half a year.
This place.
(Indeed, the idea that you can fund a nascent business at a deep discount in return for a share of ownership in the hope of large returns is as old as money)
They clearly sell rights for prominent placement of products in TV shows that have no commercials. It’s kind of funny sometimes (e.g. in The Punisher there was an interview scene with a prominently placed can of “Country Time” lemonade, and the thing magically rotated each time the camera moved so the full logo on the can was always visible). And this is fine; it’s silly but it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the show.
Conversely, the aggressive nature of traditional commercials has been destroying regular TV. The commercials themselves are stupid of course but networks behave obnoxiously and desperately too. I recently decided to watch an old Star Trek: TNG episode (where I definitely remember how the episode went) and they did some serious editing to jam in as many commercials as they could! They honestly damaged the story line: at times, characters would directly refer to something that I know was in the original cut of the episode but omitted from the oh-god-make-more-room-for-commercials version. Hey, networks: when you start removing plot elements or making obvious edits that even break the background music, you are being desperate. When your ad for the next show is now taking up like 1/6 of my television screen and never goes away, you are being desperate. Don’t CRANK up the volume during commercials and make them go on and on and on for many, many minutes. And don’t disrespect the hundreds of people who work on TV shows by making it impossible to read credits.
God bless 0% interest rates.
From outside America it is easy to see what's really going on with your abundance of food and TV.
Thing is, not only this is stating the obvious, this is also true outside of america.
There's also the insane amount of waste the other guy mentioned but I'll leave that aside.
I'm also not 100% sure the impact of shipping individually wrapped ingredients in dry ice directly to your door is really that much less than takeout.
I mostly agree with your assessment though. I have a pretty well-stocked pantry, a thick binder of recipes, and Blue Apron et al don't really solve a problem I have to any great degree. As you say, they're not really quick weeknight meals and I really have to plan when I'll have a week where 3 meals + leftovers fit with my schedule.
I wouldn't rule out trying one of these services again but they don't fit me especially well--and are pricey.
Yeah, but those people are gonna realize this is still a lot of work and then end up wasting some of them, probably.
cheap?
I'm surprised to see Designated Survivor listed there, watching it felt like it was yanked from network TV and stuck on netflix. It has frequent recaps, obvious gaps where commercial breaks should be, and the same few ideas hyped through the season.
But I guess that's why netflix works, one person's trash is another person's treasure. We all find something that interests us.
I'll be sure to check more closely next time I'm logged on.
I'd turn it on, and not even know what was on, but lately--there's been some shows that suprised me.
West World is one. As a kid, the movie West World was my favorite movie. Future world was second. I watched those two movies so many times.
TV is about as creative as my wife as I saying good morning to each other for a couple decades now, its very proper and scripted and we're programmed in our genetics or culture to enjoy that kind of familial tribe repetition, but its a stretch to call it "creative". Likewise watching "The Middle" or something, is equally repetitive and predictable and therefore as a pseudo-social activity its enjoyable.
TV isn't precisely addictive, its fake-socializing. Firefly wasn't merely crack, it was one of your friends getting Fed over by some goon hollywood execs. A series getting cancelled isn't like going cold turkey on drugs, its more like an old friend or family member moving away. Kids who pretend to have fake friends really freak out people in modern culture because your fake friends are supposed to be on channel 12 at 8pm on Mondays, its a huge social mistake for your fake friends not to be on the TV or to be on IRC or in a video game. At least its a mistake right now, culture will likely shift soon enough.
This also hits pro sports BTW. The Green Bay Packers are not my crack dealer, they'd my very large fake extended family / tribemates. That's why if I'm on twitter they better be on twitter with me. Even if the weird alpha/beta nature of our relationship means they do all the action and all the talking, and I do all the passive watching and listening, that tribal affiliation runs strong.
People always wonder what will happen to jobs that get automated. New jobs that cannot be automated will be created as labor gets freed up.
For example, a significant entertainment industry cannot exist when 90% of the population needs to work on the farm to stave off famine.
>> flowed to the armies of decorators
Replaceable by better CG.
>> drivers
Replaceable by autonomous vehicles.
>> caterers
Do they even get paid much?
>> painters and other workers who are
... mostly replaceable by better CG.
If big studio will end up having to really cut down costs, they surely will.
Perhaps that's less "significant" than "unusually well preserved."
The first round of labour replacement was based, mostly, on providing power to replace muscle, or in automating highly repetitive motion (cotton ginning, weaving, some forms of wood and metal-working). But the processing wasn't so automated that you could replace the mind of a worker who had to be there to manage the process. Per-worker efficiencies improved, yes.
What we're seeing now is increasingly a replacement of skill and talent, especially at high levels of training, and at an ever-increasing rate. This has been under way for a while -- the first automated manufacturing and metalworking processes of the 1960s, increasingly back-office operations, etc.
It's not entirely clear to me where labour has left to go. Moving off the farm into the factory was a net benefit. Moving from the radiology lab, or law office, or machine floor, or analytics desk, to dog-walking or yoga studio or elder-care maybe not so much.
If we're all going into content-production, there's the question of how much content people can or will consume. Publishing in the US hit a peak of about 500 - 600k titles (by copyright office registrations) in the 1990s, of which about 300k were books. With online self-publication, the number's closer to 1-2 million according to R.R. Bowker, who issue ISBNs to new titles.
That's a title per every 300 Americans.
http://www.copyright.gov/reports/annual/2015/ar2015.pdf http://www.bowker.com/documents/isbn-output-report-2002-2013...
There are counterarguments. Baumol's cost disease isn't just the observation that, despite all technological improvements, you still need four performers for a string quartet, but that the wages of those performers must increase despite the constancy of their output.
(And yes, there are other factors at play: recording technology means their output can reach many more billions than in earlier times, Baumol and I are ignoring that for the moment.)
There are a number of probable consequences -- that net production of such goods will decrease, that they will become luxury or status items, that labour cost will become an increasingly high-priced factor of inputs, and more. At heart remains the fact that an economy must provide for the upkeep and maintenance of its citizens, to the extent that's possible at all (hat-tip, Malthus), arguably that's the primary goal of an economy. Designing the resource and purchasing-power allocations to provide for this becomes interesting.
For context though, I saw a really well respected Executive Producer discussing how he invested in films (recently "The Revenant") and was getting critical acclaim and doing well. He was grateful for his partnership with Fox for distribution...then noted that revenue wise, Fox Studios for film was approximately $700 Million of revenue in a given year, whereas Fox News was $1.X Billion and Fox Sports was also $1.X Billion.
In the big picture competition is extremely fierce and spread out even beyond the Sitcom-with-Kevin-James / NCIS-Your-Mom's-Backyard / Zombies-who-break-into-song-and-dance-numbers pieces that get cranked out year after year and don't stick.
A citizen is a normal person in contrast to the military (and unfortunately, lately the police).
A consumer is a normal person in contrast to manufacturers/media companies.
define 'citizen' - > a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized.
Oh indeed. Not sure how that happened.
In any case, my point is that the words are used in different contexts to emphasise different things. People don't talk about "citizens" in the context of the media market, because legal nationality isn't really relevant to the topic.
Better to just call them people, which is factually correct, implies they should have equal treatment, and is somewhat more relevant WRT the commercial nature of TV unless you're trying to use TV commercials to sell something that would appeal to people based strongly on nation of citizenship like Mexico flags or immigration lawyer or language learning products or similar.
But for television and movies, I'm just sitting back and enjoying it the way I would a good meal or a good cocktail. I'm not interacting with it in the way I'd interact with a video game or a board game. I'm not using it to create anything except maybe in the most abstract way of "enabling me to make connections with other people who also like the show/movie".
And I'm fine with that. I like the new popularity of serialized television as much as the next guy because it can be more akin to reading a novel in its own way. I'm being entertained and sometimes mentally stimulated by it even though I'm not creating or doing anything else.
And other times I prefer something interactive like a game or something creative like my ongoing quest to get better with hobby electronics. If anything, my only complaint is that I sometimes feel like I've already watched everything I'm interested in seeing. Skimming Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or rentals from the Play Store(or even torrents when I get really bored and run out of ideas) for stuff to watch is a lot more common now than it was 5 years ago when I hadn't been using the services for as long.
I guess I just treat Netflix and Amazon the way I used to treat basic cable: I can't always count on a specific thing being there but if I skim through the options, there's usually something to watch. For the relatively low cost, I find it generally worthwhile.
(Yes, I hate the word "content" in this context too)
I wonder if we will see something similar with the steaming companies.
The article strikes me as a bit unfocused. Although I only skimmed it.
I've personally grown a bit tired of most TV shows and movies. I still consume my fair share of media, but I've slowly been shifting my focus more towards book series (or more specifically, audiobooks). I'm not interested in watching TV shows that don't have an overarching plot or direction, with the major example of this being Lost. So far my experience has been that you tend to get a more cohesive story.
If you've grown weary of watching TV, I'd suggest trying out audiobooks. You can even listen to em while you're out walking about, driving, or eating alone. I've had an Audible subscription for a few years now, and I seriously love it. Maybe I still have really shallow tastes, but so far I've found that if you pick up any book with a few thousand ratings and 4 to 5 stars, it'll probably be really good.
With that said, I'm a huge sucker for movie adaptations and I'd probably watch the adaptation for most of the books I've read. Even though they'll often butcher huge parts of the story (totally understandable, different mediums), it's really enjoyable to contrast your own imagination with that of the creative staff in the production. The most recent example of this for me was The Martian. My mental image of the main character was consistent while I read the book, but when I watched the movie I realized I hadn't accounted for the fact that he was starving.
It's because the link has the #comments anchor. The submitter probably didn't realize this.
If someone wants to try out audiobooks and doesn't mind older books that are in the public domain, there is this youtube with hours of listening: https://www.youtube.com/user/rt20bg/featured
YouTube is the new TV. And that's 1000x the number of "traditional" channels.
Which is apparently what the masses yearn for (and always have).
If you have netflix, there is for example a charming mini-series about real-life modern-day Chicagoans. I found it just delightful but it was something I saw by chance.
I guess I just don't like the comedians-acting-serious-and-not-being-funny genre. I had the same issue with Togetherness, and numerous others I'm not getting off the top of my head. I think they to me just fall flat somewhere between funny and warm, and succeed in neither.
For counterexamples, Louie was both funny and "real", and his subsequent shows Horace & Pete as well as Better Things are not really funny, but just genuinely good, and have substance.
But as always, YMMV.
But back to your point: YMMV. A strong part of me thinks a realistic recommendation engine will never work: the human brain doesn't know if it likes something until it encounters it, given environmental, emotional and cultural cues at the time.
That's what I keep repeating to people who say that "oh, we're just making what our customers want!". No, customers don't want shit by themselves; it's mostly the options available and marketing effort around them that create shopping patterns.
"The audience really wants to feel Cleopatra's anguish when she's talking to Antony" well, um, no? I mean we all know we're supposed to feel you'd like to think that, and its clear how you want to direct the part, but WRT the audience...
And conversely, just because the audience likes a previous thing, does not mean they will like a soulless copy of that fed to them for the 6th time, even if available options and marketing kind of worked the first 5 times.
I really hate that school of product development. Thanks for reminding me ;)
But you are right, I've scrobbled 100s of thousands of songs to last.fm, and those recommendations hit at best 50% of the time. I'm hoping machine learning could help here, as I'd always like a good recommendation, seeing as I seem to be picky.
Perhaps my TV watching habits are not representative, but I would not waste my time with content below rating 8.0.
Yes yes, I know IMDB ratings can't be directly applied to subjective tastes, which is more than evident due to the multitude of series with good 8.5+ ratings that I can't stand. Then again, I can't remember a single good one being below 8.0.
There is some absolutely great TV and film out there.