Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

chipotle_coyote

This is not about "cracking the walled garden"; we're comparing, well, not apples and oranges as much as Apples and Netflixes.

This is about laying the groundwork for Apple's new video service -- the question was always whether they wanted to use it as a way to sell overpriced TV pucks, like they've traditionally done with their services, or it was going to be its own thing. they wanted to have everywhere. If you're surprised that they're choosing "have it everywhere," it's probably because you haven't been following the mounting tidbits of Hollywood noise about the original content being produced for Apple. We're not talking about Carpool Karaoke anymore. We're talking new shows from J.J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ron Moore, Damien Chazelle. We're talking about new children's programming with Peanuts and Sesame Street. Shows starring Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carrell, Chris Evans, Reese Witherspoon, Aaron Paul, Jason Momoa. A series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

The point is, there is serious firepower happening here, to the point where it's pretty clear this is not "service as adjunct to hardware." This is Apple establishing an actual entertainment division.

I'm honestly surprised at how much investment tech giants are pouring into 1st party tv/movie production and also by the consensus that these ventures are virtually guaranteed to succeed. From what I've observed over the past decade, the future of our cultural landscape is going to be that of increasing fragmentation to the point that there will no longer be a single, dominant culture for mass media enterprises to appeal to.

The high production value of traditional HollyWood productions are only sustainable due to their mass cultural appeal. The problem is that mass culture is in fact, losing mass. These tech giants appear to have misread the signs of this pending sea change and interpret behaviors such as cord-cutting among younger generations to mean they are merely moving their consumption online and that their consumption habits remain otherwise unchanged. One only has to look at the popularity of services like YouTube and Twitch with Gen Z to see that this is in fact not the case. Younger millenials and Gen Z as a whole have completely changed their consumption habits to prefer niche content made by individual creators (or at most a small group) on the cheap. While YouTube stars like PewDiePie cannot be said to be "niche" due to the simple fact that his content captures more eyeballs per year than literally anything else by an enormous margin, the content itself isn't exactly something that appeals to a universal audience in the way that a traditional HollyWood Blockbuster or hit TV show might. Ironically, while Google was the tech giant best positioned to capture the future (at least in terms of how I see it developing), they've severly damaged the future potential of YouTube by playing games with the monwtization and promotion of popular channels while also making it impossible for new creators to make money before they've built their channel into a relative behemoth.

While Apple, Amazon, Disney, et al are throwing massive amounts of capital trying to capture a slice of the streaming service market, they appear to have missed signs of cultural change which will likely cause that market to stagnate over the coming decade. I can't say that trying to create a YouTube competitor is a better idea at this point in time either as that market just isn't large or stable enough at this point in time to say there is even space for a second major servicd for small content creators. I can say the future of entertainment is going to look a lot more like YouTube, where the attention of tens of millions of eyeballs are spread over tens of thousands of channels, rather than a handful of sources for traditional mass media productions.

I'm not convinced changing millenial habits are the true threat to this idea--there's still space for longer serialized works. "Todd in the Shadows" is not really in meaningful competition with "Game of Thrones" except in the broadest sense of people only having so much time in the day for entertainment. Also, once you have this infrastructure in place, it's not difficult to pivot to shorter works by smaller producers if it seems that's where the money is.

The real problem may just be saturation. The dream of having all streaming entertainment through one service for $12 a month was never realistic (and arguably not really desirable), and I think we may all have to get used to the idea of paying for several services to get everything we want. But there's "paying for several," and then there's "paying for a dozen or more"; the latter just isn't sustainable.

Here's a question: what mass media hit has taken hold in anywhere near to the same form that GoT has in the past 5 years? From my perspective, new noteworthy cultural touchstones like GoT and the Marvel Universe have ceased to exist since roughly 2012. GoT will end in a few months and while the Marvel Universe will continue, it operates on a certain inertia that has built since before the current status quo came into being. What show or other form of video IP will take their place? As of this moment, I see nothing currently on air or on the horizon.

Well, I don't know, but I bet if you or I or anyone else, probably including George R.R. Martin, was asked a couple years before GoT came on the air if it would become this kind of cultural phenomenon, it would have seemed wildly unlikely. These sorts of things are pretty hard to predict. It's possible that there won't be anything else like GoT, but it's possible that something else will become the must-see thing everyone is suddenly talking about.

(Of course, there's no guarantee it will be on any premium streaming service, or indeed any streaming service at all. Or that it will even be video anything. Currently I'm sitting at a Starbucks listening to music that gave me a possible answer to your initial question: it's the soundtrack to "Hamilton.")

Good call with Hamilton. Although I haven't seen it and have 0 interest in seeing it, I'm not only aware of it but relatively familiar with its premise as is practically everyone in the US. That definitely fits my definition of a mass cultural phenomenon.

I will argue that Hamilton debuted almost 4 years ago now which is a long time ago in cultural terms. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic but I feel like there were at least 3 or 4 mass cultural phenomenons popping into existence each year back in the 80's and 90's.

I think your analysis is close to correct but missing an important point. Cultures you’re talking about strongly push progresivism, to the point that traditional shows look more like hour-long Public Service Announcement than a show. It’s overcharged with girls who take the lead (even in action movies that are still mostly watched by boys) as a way to push a cultural change, but also cluttered with constant disparaging of boys. Not even talking about white males because they’ve been targetted long enough that they probably don’t even watch TV/Hollywood anymore, apart from progressist white males who cheer at people who say whiteness ought to be banned.

The reason people rush on small creators is they’re politically incorrect, meaning they’re non-PSA shows. People are so upset of being told that they’re sexist if they don’t date a transsexual, that they’re able to trade the quality of image/montage/content of traditional TV shows for a content that doesn’t constantly give lessons or disparage them.

What you call fragmentation will be instantly reunified if a platform ever succeeds to get rid of the pressure to put PSA-compatible characters under the customers’ eye. They’re tired of being the product.

Er...what?

I have no doubt that this may be the reason that you personally have abandoned mainstream media in favor of more niche sources, but to attribute that motivation to an entire generation is a huge amount of projection. It has everything to do with convenience and shifting habits, not a rebellion against political correctness.

Not everything is about right vs left culture wars.

Exactly. For example:

> The reason people rush on small creators is they’re politically incorrect, meaning they’re non-PSA shows.

When I think of small creators [1] that I personally enjoy (e.g. Vsauce's Michael Stevens, Veritasium's Derek Muller, Game/Film Theory's Matthew Patrick, Because Science's Kyle Hill), those are all Youtube success stories, and none of them fit this description even a little bit. Grandparent is just mistaking his particular bubble for the average.

[1] Those all have subscribers in the millions, but I still consider them small media startups compared to the scale of traditional media conglomerates.

You and I are on much the same page, I just omitted much of that from my post to make it a more universal rejection of this trend. Your analysis is correct in that it is rapidly accelerating this process but even if it was removed, the inherent truth that there will no longer be a single mass culture to market mass media to rings true. They are boxed in no matter what direction they head in.

> While Apple, Amazon, Disney, et al are throwing massive amounts of capital trying to capture a slice of the streaming service market, they appear to have missed signs of cultural change which will likely cause that market to stagnate over the coming decade.

The difference between Disney and the other two being that Disney would be spending that money anyway, and already owns every major entertainment franchise there is to own (and the merchandise rights to it). For Disney an additional streaming service is just a way of further monetizing what they already have.

> Younger millenials and Gen Z as a whole have completely changed their consumption habits to prefer niche content.

I'd say it's always been this way, for every generation, but now there are finally options that cater to these niches since it's no longer necessary to consider mainstream appeal and resort to the lowest common denominator - a limitation of the linear broadcast format. I'm confident Youtube would have been just as valuable for earlier generations.

This is the correct analysis. If you have any doubts that Apple can pull something like this off, you don't have to look very far. Right from the early days of the iPod Apple had the biggest players on the scene on board: Jimmy Iovine in that case.

Apple is a much more powerful company than it was then and I see it as very likely they'll pull off a Netflix-sized coup.

This is excellent insight, chipotle_coyote. The article is a poor take.

For anyone who might not be aware of the history, Apple media products have always extended outside of the "walled garden". QuickTime appeared on Windows in 1991, iTunes for Windows was introduced in 2003, and Apple Music has been available on Android since 2015. AirPlay has been supported by 3rd-party devices for quite some time (close to a decade. IIRC).

Then the player to watch for would be Disney. Huge, long history in the area, Mickey Mouse knows everyone in the entertainment business.

Even though Apple has a gigantic pile of cash there's a real question as to whether they can actually make money this way. One could question whether you can just hire a bunch of famous movie people and then have a movie empire.

I'm looking forward to the fight though. There's a good case that we're currently in one of the most productive eras in storytelling, mainly thanks to these titans clashing.

Disney is definitely the elephant in the room, given all the properties they have rights to and/or controlling interest in. I don't know whether as an outsider, Apple can buy their way into this game, either -- although it worked for Microsoft in video game consoles, and if any outsider company has the money to try, it's Apple.

It’s really worth mentioning here that Disney CEO Bob Iger has been on Apple’s board of directors since 2011. Also that when Disney acquired Pixar under Iger, Steve Jobs became the single largest shareholder of the Walt Disney Company.

It is, but it's also worth noting that Disney is so far a notable holdout from supplying Apple with 4K copies of movies for iTunes. I'm not sure the two companies are all that buddy-buddy with one another these days.

In other words, it's an iTunes-comes-to-Windows event?

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