What should happen, if we're doing "shoulds", is that it shouldn't be permitted for one company to own both distribution and production, nor for such companies to create long-term exclusivity agreements with one another.
It'd also make it easier to enter both parts of that market, as a production company or a distributor, which is currently something that only a company with an enormous pile of cash and/or ownership of an existing large catalog of material, can realistically do.
The implicit assumption here is that without competition, we'd have all (or most) of the same shows, just on a single service.
I don't think that's true. I think competition between streaming services largely on the basis of original content has produced a lot of good shows that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. It seems to me like there's a lot more variety in things to watch these days, and it's not like I have to pay for every streaming service every month...
Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example? Netflix has started and cancelled a ton of original series, but would they have even been tried at all back when cable TV was king? I don't know, maybe there are some statistics on the variety of TV shows being watched and I'm wrong, but I can't find them.
> Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example?
I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production. However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
More importantly than whether Disney would still be OK, I think it would make it easier for indies and startups to participate in the market.
That's a big "might" there, isn't it equally possible that eventually distribution will converge on a single platform? It's much easier for that kind of thing to happen with streaming than with, say, theaters.
> I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production.
But there is no monopoly right now. I don't think you can slice an industry as thinly as "Star Wars TV shows" and say Disney has a monopoly there. Disney does not have a monopoly in the streaming market, no-one does. They have a monopoly in the same way Walmart has a monopoly on Walmart brand toothpaste, I guess.
At most you can say it's an oligopoly, which I somewhat agree with and yes, it seems like it could be improved.
> However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
If the government bans production companies from distributing their shows, mandating middle men and lower profit margins for the producers, that decreases the incentive to spend as much on production. And it's not clear that forcing a distribution middleman into the transaction is going to lower prices. After all, when Netflix raised prices, people left despite Netflix's "monopoly" on Netflix Original content.
Either of us could be right, it would be great if we could find some data, or some example from another industry to get a clearer picture.
My parents, their parents, and many of their peers have TVs on in the background during virtually every waking moment they spend at home, and have done so since at least the 90s.
People are watching video differently, but I'm not sure it's "a lot more".
Come to think of it, my wife often does this as well (she's in her 30s). She'll put something on and then do something completely different, just the other day I came into the room to find her with netflix running on screen, a youtube video playing on another screen and her staring at her phone looking at something else.
But I find myself, if I'm going to watch something, sit down and focus on it completely, to the point that I often pause and rewind if I didn't quite catch the phrasing of something.
I guess it's just that certain people don't mind passive viewing and can have a lot more inputs without being bothered by it.
So they the only thing they could and started producing content.
In other words, we want as many middlemen as possible in the chain?
In the current environment, I suspect we'll see (are already seeing, to some extent) history repeat itself, but not do anything about it this time, because we're so skittish of regulating markets now.
I don't think you should have to own an extensive catalog of content to launch a streaming service. Nor that you should effectively have to grovel for the patronage of one of a handful of integrated production+distribution mega corporations to undertake production of new media. But that's rapidly where the market's heading, and I don't see any mechanism to change that course short of anti-trust action.
There are, as usual, some benefits to the rents the current monopolistic system produces (extra cash sloshing around to throw at projects, for example—extra R&D money is a typical benefit monopolies produce, and in this case, because the monopolies are on particular content rather than on all content [so far—Disney's getting alarmingly close], there remain incentives to actually spend that money on, if you will, R&D, or the closest thing to it in media production) but at the cost reduced competition on cost & quality, and of making it much harder to enter the market, for new players.