And the real question is: will history repeat itself with Netflix, et al?
HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question.
HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question.
Frankly I think content is just overvalued and the actual creation of content is extremely inefficient, from a financial point of view. My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money.
It's honestly a terrible industry and needs to be disrupted. Market distortion is the only reason films cost what they do, from production to distribution and consumption. And literally everyone in the pipeline has an incentive to keep the market distorted, except people who watch content. Thank god for piracy.
Is it that, or is the industry mind-controlled by parasites to achieve a different goal than delivering quality entertainment cost-effectively? "Hollywood accounting" is a known term, and it doesn't describe being bad at making money - it describes being very good at making money for yourself by purposefully cheating those who actually brought in that money.
(My general heuristic is that, if they're inefficiencies persisting despite competitive pressure, it's because it's these inefficiencies that are the real reason the business is done, and someone is making a good money off them.)
It refers to the fact that a film as an enterprise is designed as an independent business with equity held by a few investors, and the enterprise gets dissolved when the film finishes post production. It's the only financial model that actually makes sense when you consider how a film is made and by whom. A small group of money people front a large amount of capital to pay hundreds to thousands of subcontractors up front to create an asset with intangible value, and they split the rights to that asset when they're done. Some of the subcontractors gets something that looks like equity, most don't.
It is a source of problems and inefficiencies. But to me the big issues lie before pre and after post, a lot of the work and structure of businesses during the creation of a film is pretty well honed and workers do have different kinds of power than most employees in traditional environments.
Also films are totally different than television and other media, at least financially. Studios work differently than networks.
A lot of the silliness in things like how much stars are paid seems applicable to software development — tiny incremental value adds become very substantial with a large enough audience.
What I mean by market distortion is really the lack of insight into value creation. How much value is created by whom in the pipeline, essentially. Data driven, direct to consumer enterprises are changing this a bit and that's great. But my experience is that data doesn't change minds of the top stakeholders, and there are incentives to make decisions that are bad for consumers even if the data says that both sides can win.
Netflix has no such network licensing problems.
Hulu was a joint venture between several networks. There are three old shows that still have commercials due to old contracts that were made before they switched to the new business model.
Given TV deals are complicated (for example, the networks likely have revenue deals with production companies), its not worth a huge renegotiation.
The most high-profile example off the top of my head is the new Michael Jordan doc; they split the cost with ESPN, and Netflix gets next-day international rights and accelerated domestic streaming rights (3 months after broadcast, I think).
https://help.hulu.com/s/article/hulu-no-ads?language=en_US#s...
The additional shows you can get on demand without Hulu Live TV have ads. But that’s more akin to traditional cable.
- Grey’s Anatomy
- Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD
- How to Get Away with Murder
One nice thing about this is it makes plain how much the networks make from showing ads to your household. I happily pay a little extra to “outbid” the ad networks.
Hulu (No Ads)
Get First Month Free
then $11.99/month
A few excluded shows play with ads.
[from here https://signup.hulu.com/plans]
That last line kills me.
It's like H2G2, you can't have Tea and No Tea unless you remove your common sense particle.
Yeah, I guess that isn't as bad as it seems if there are just a few. I didn't bother to look up what "excluded" meant.
edit: Incredibly, there seem to be multiple reasons why you can see ads when on the "No Ads" plan; and they have an entire page dedicated to these reasons: https://help.hulu.com/s/article/ads-no-commercials?language=...
Then there is Hulu Live TV which is like traditional cable. That gives you shows live and on demand that would usually come with a cable package. This is in addition to the regular Hulu offering.
Because it says "A few excluded shows play with ads." And its three shows out many hundreds.
*Three shows still have ads since they signed a deal before they released an ad free tier, and the only alternative would removing those three shows from the ad free tier, which is lose-lose.
The worst step back to me from TV -> streaming -> streaming becoming more TV like is content release schedules. The Mandalorian on Disney Plus was a great example, you have all the episodes ready and there isn’t a good reason to keep them sitting behind a time gate. I would be much more likely to subscribe for a month to watch a show in a week than I would be to subscribe for a few months to few one show. Instead you get none of my money
(I hope. There hasn't been much of a market for privacy)
What do you mean? Is HBO or HBO Go adding commercials?
Side note, with all of the streaming subscriptions I have, I'm probably not saving any money compared to when I had traditional cable, but there are fewer commercials and the content is so much better.
Personally, I will not subscribe to services that show commercials. Commercials are for free services, not for paid services. As soon as you allow them to cross that boundary....
With that in mind I was wondering which Hulu plan was most popular. All I could find was the same widely syndicated Reuters article [1] from January 2019 calling the plan with ads "Hulu's most popular plan". I guess there is a market for streaming with ads.
1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hulu-prices/hulu-cuts-pri...