The week old Hollywood finally died

In the UK, suppose I want to watch Forbidden Planet, or Gone With The Wind, or Carry on Screaming. Show me a streaming service that has those films. I either wait 6 months and hope the TV shows them or.... hello bittorrent. Even more recent films.

Suppose I want to listen to Louis Armstrong, or Ella Fitzgerald? Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music all have those songs.

It's just a shame we didn't have higher bandwidth in the Napster era to do to the studios what it did to record labels.

The fact is, content consumption is more pro consumer than ever, and I think anyone who argues otherwise is looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. Content delivery has changed and the business models have followed, but this business is all full of the same people. Disney was full of ex-Warner people and vice versa. Many of my ex-Disney colleagues are now at Netflix.

The only thing that’s really different right now is the pandemic. Many of the people who’d normally jump from Warner to another company are having trouble getting new jobs right now because Hollywood production is still not at 100%, which means no one is hiring. Doesn’t matter if a Hollywood exec can do their job on zoom. Production can’t. Tech hasn’t solved that yet.

So I’m disappointed that the only thing this article has to say is “look at yet another example of how tech ruined everyone’s fun.” Between this and the Blockbuster Airbnb you’d think everyone is longing to go back to the 90s.

The medium, art and distribution methods shift. This isn't the first time. Television encroached on film. VHS. Cable. DVD box sets. Home cinema. The rise of the cinematic series.

Shifts sometimes hurt, they may even have some casualties.... but this is not dying. Hollywood, and old media generally, are in much better shape than I had expected.

Remember "information wants to be free?" Remember the initial response to ipod? The scoffs around early DRM? Disintermediation? The end of record labels? None of this came to pass.

The true economics of "content" is centralisation, exclusivity and manufactured scarcity. Tiktok (youtube moreso) demonstrates the point. It doesn't matter that you have millions of viewers. That doesn't translate into money, power or value. 0.1% of the viewership is not worth 0.1% of the money. It doesn't divide. Centralisation itself is where the value is. Content is not a "sum of parts" game.

For success, you need centralisation & control. Theatres, PPV services, cable deals, streaming services... This is why spotify is buying the top podcasts, to exclude them from itunes & youtube.

Porn is the counterexample. As a pariah, it had no ability to affect DRM, Copyright, other legal frameworks and the details of how they will be implemented.

When online payments started working, Porn had its "DVD Boom." When streaming started working, the industry collapsed again. That's what a free media market looks like. Extremely high volatility.

The record industry & hollywood have never dealt with this kind of thing. Never will, probably.

The main thing shaking up hollywood is that they're being introduced to startup/tech economics. Market caps. Short term equity plays. This takes some getting used to, but the structure is as secure as ever. They're just learning that just because investors have valued something @ $Xbn doesn't mean it will make $Xbn.

I had never until this very moment even heard of Quibi

The record industry died when it stopped discovering, polishing, and promoting real creativity and instead started manufacturing pop that all sounds the same because its written by the same couple Swedish guys. There have been no major new breakthrough styles of music since the early 1990s because the industry stopped performing its talent scout function, which was its primary value add.

People will support you if you have something to support. Add no value and you are redundant and the market will go around you.

If the streamers ever stop making fabulous original content, they too will be disrupted.

Echoes of the collapse of Blockbuster. For those familiar with Clayton Christensen's overlapping s-curves [1], the only remaining questions were the timing of the transition and whether any of the leaders in the old ecosystem could navigate the disruption; the pandemic pulled the rug out from under old Hollywood.

I'm curious how the social aspects unfold if/when the pandemic subsides. The summer blockbuster directly targeted teenaged boys and their dates (indirectly). Will a new public space emerge as an alternative meeting place for teenagers or will the smartphone be the main platform for teenage courtship moving forward?

Is the first date now an anachronism or maybe I'm the anachronism that missed this already long established shift.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Prior to video streaming progressing to a viable point, there was no reason for anyone in the industry to have the skills to work with it.

Netflix comes along with a business model of providing these services to the industry by hosting their content on its platform

There is massive success, everyone is making lots of money doing what they are good at

The industry, lacking the skills to recognize the value netflix provided them in technical skill, tries to get a larger cut of the pie because "how hard could it be?"

Very hard. The competition leads to cannibalization of the market and the industry has a lot of catch up to do just to get to Netflix's level. Meanwhile the carpet being pulled out from under netflix allows other, actually technically competent, competitors to pick up real gains.

Where before the industry were the customers of the streaming partners, now they are competitors. Both are out of their comfort zone, but there is a lot more free-floating talent from the long term industry than the new niche technology, so the streaming platforms can become content producers faster than the reverse.

Repeated botched attempts at competition with the streaming services drains the industry of both capital and morale. Acquisitions happen at an accelerated rate as small companies run out of steam and larger ones need to demonstrate something that looks like success to investors. Innovative but risky projects get axed as the call to cut costs grows and the heads of their benefactors roll. Seemingly safe projects repeating what worked in the past are the only ones that survive long enough to produce results, but their failure to make up for the losses continues the downward spiral of morale.

A few players are large enough to shield a division from the worst of it, and they can develop a viable competitor. Others luck out on a convenient merger that actually gets them the resources they need. These become players alongside the newcoming streaming services, but their positions are much reduced in stature. For the bulk of the industry though, there is no recovery - those who can jump ship do, and those who can't re-prioritize to stay afloat just long enough to retire.

It happened with the rail companies, it happened with cameras, its happening with traditional media. It's much easier for a competitor to destroy your empire than it is for you to seize theirs intact.

I admittedly like non fiction, and my wife likes the occasional comedy. Both of these are often better than anything you can get from Hollywood because it's more niche.

I guess I don't understand the problem. People really like their old school classics?

Picture reminds me of one of the Duke brothers played by Ralph Bellamy in Trading Places (1983 film starring Eddie Murphy).

I would only pay back to creators directly, no copyright holders, no studios..

Wonder how that would go...