Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. But the IP dilution and very real costs of beaming 4K video around the world on demand don’t mix well together.
Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.
It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch - the models are vastly different, and perhaps in this case, lethal.
Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Cook in terms of profit, only apple products are still good.
I find that SW has declined to a level previously unimaginable, they are effectively stuck doing live action versions of children's animated TV shows. The mild incompetence of Clone Wars is now a distant memory, the lowest level of quality in a SW fiction project ever has been breached multiple times now by shows such as Boba Fett. The whole universe has no guiding function, expect to retcon as much as possible on top of previously very popular characters.
Marvel has ALWAYS been a milquetoast production company, with some big hits like Iron Man, Avengers films, etc. But most of their production has always been "ok", and having watched The Marvels recently, I felt like they're just going back to their Phase 1 days, where some films were good, many not really (Thor 2, Avengers 2, Iron Man 2).
BUT Marvel has a guideline for where they want to take their content, even if they just recently lost a major actor (only his own fault).
So yeah I do think there's a difference. Marvel is ok, has always been ok, with some moments of brilliance.
Star Wars was a bit all over the place but it definitely had new ideas, every single movie introduced something interesting, be it a location/planet, a character or spaceship. It didn't constantly flirt with the same recycled material ad nauseam, because its creative direction was set, even if sometimes the audience did not like the result.
Current Star Wars creative direction is nil outside of "let's find some other popular side character to wrap a show around, maybe?". There is no story line that makes any sense for the SW being produced, it's just a grab bag of "this worked I guess".
Corporations don't have feelings. It is okay to be mean to multi billion dollar corporations.
They bought an IP to add onto it. If any company wringed anything it was Google buying Motorola for patents and then spitting out the bones to resell.
Right now they're people because they're being criticized. When they do massive layoffs they're just a business doing business things. When it comes to advertising they're people with free speech rights, but when they're committing wage theft they're just businesses and no one goes to jail. When they hire lobbyists it's their right as people, but when they violate laws meant to keep our environment safe they're just companies again and are hit with a small fine.
It's amazingly convenient (for the corporations at least) that they are only people when it benefits them but can drop that title easily when it makes them more money and shields those people from consequences.
As for low-quality content, I work with people that have made very bad entertainment. Nobody starts out thinking they'll make something bad. There might be some lowering of standards when, say, the voice acting manager and the voice actor decide that it's not coming out right, and there's no budget to try another 3 days.CGI gets planned for some amount, and when time and a half that is spent, Leia still looks like she is made of plastic. Maybe the writing sounded good to a decision maker, but they had terrible taste. Nobody tries to make it bad, but sometimes we get to choose between bad, and probably still mediocre, and massively unprofitable.
That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive: Go look at the budget for Dial of Destiny, or the per-episode cost of she-hulk. So high that they'd have to be the most viewed things ever to have a prayer at being worthwhile. People were trying their best, and the output wasn't a total embarrassment... but they were all money losers.
The streaming model requires a conveyor belt of content to work. And movies are expensive to produce, consume a lot of bandwidth, and not really replayable. The constraints tend to give bad content. It’s the whole cheap, fast, and good triangle.
Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.
Still in luck, you are not yet in Hadoop domain :-)
I take issue less with the volume of Star Wars and Marvel content, and more with how Disney makes small gestures toward "genre" while keeping all of that content within a tightly brand-controlled realm where there are no real stakes or diversity and everything needs to be canon. This is one of the areas where I can appreciate WB's approach more with having a variety of movies and shows with vastly different styles and audiences that obviously can't fit together in the same universe.
Mixing in a lot of foreign language content to make their library seem larger is a sad joke and one of the main reasons I no longer subscribe to Netflix.
Edit for clarity: I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor.
I can remember when Blockbuster and video rental stores would put all this in a foreign language section, which was then further broken down by genre.
If I am in Spain, should shows in English be bundled in a "Foreign Language" along with Korean dramas, Japanese animation, and a couple of odd series in Dutch? How is this helpful?
Not saying that language categorization is a bad thing. Being able to filter shows that are available in a specific audio language, or with a specific language available for subtitles, would be a bad thing. But I seriously question the helpfulness of "English" and "Other"
It’s not about filtering out the content, it’s about making it easy to tell whether or not it’s going to start playing with dubbed audio so the viewer can make a better choice.
Just tag the content with the relevant languages and let the user create filters based on them. And assume that the user understands that languages don't form disjoint categories, because the content itself could be multilingual.
Besides, original audio with subtitles is usually superior to dubbed audio.
Netflix added KDramas in order to help it pivot into the Asian market. Most viewers will be watching the shows via subtitles.
The algo is heavily targeted to your own assumed tastes. The one time I did watch one, it was in Korean with English subs.
Maybe you watched a western marketed KDrama like Squid Games? Try watching Beyond Evil, Itaewon Class, Reply 1988, or Mr Queen and see if it reverts to English. I'm kinda curious now
It's part of their Asia pivot. Netflix invests in fairly high quality Asian TV to try and compete for market share within Asia.
Amazon Prime is doing a similar pivot (fairly successfully I might add) in India.
Disney has dropped out of the Asian market because they just couldn't compete Asian competitors or Amazon+Netflix.
Edit: Seems, I wasn't up to date, they are planning to exit India also. Thanks, alephnerd
It's part of their larger pivot away from Asia and towards building a competitive American streaming presence
https://inc42.com/buzz/reliance-to-acquire-walt-disney-india...
https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2023/06/15/disney-shuts-down...
The default audio should be in the source language, with subtitles in your language.
The same would be true if I was watching Netflix in France with my device locale set to fr-FR. I’d just consider English content to be foreign language content instead.
I think the only easy way to tell without watching is by looking at the names of the actors. If they are look like they are from a particular language/region, then it’s usually a sign it’s dubbed.
I was starting to wonder if I was alone with this opinion or if there is just a some Netflix employees here trying to gaslight me. :)
Maybe in Blockbuster in the US in the 1990s putting all “foreign” stuff over in its own corner made sense. But most countries didn’t do that. And content consumption has become a lot more globalized in the past decade.
For many people, easily accessing (and being recommended) interesting foreign content is one of Netflix’s selling points, I’d say.
However, their financial losses this year have exceeded even this ($1.6 billion in first 9 months alone)
Their projection of achieving profitability in the next fiscal year seems, under these circumstances, quite optimistic :)
(They rolled up Hulu after acquiring a majority share with the purchase of Fox)
https://deadline.com/2023/12/comcast-disney-hulu-mike-cavana...
To some extent, Disney are using it as their adult oriented streaming service in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_Pictures?wprov=sfti...
As of the last couple of months, much of hulu's content is available under the disney app. Seems only a matter of time before the hulu app is completely deprecated.
Disney+ apparently has 150 million subscribers.
I love this. I am not being sarcastic but the optimistic and somewhat enthusiasm of fundamental misunderstanding.
>It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy
I am old. But it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance.
But then I also remember for more than 10 years the media went with the idea that "execution eats strategy for breakfast."
How much money did the executive make while it took years for these strategies to fail? How much will they make from the golden parachute if they're actually fired for their failures? Is that really failure, relative to the executive?
David Zaslav and other media execs wanted to try and force the old media philosophy in the streaming environment, which also meant executing a bunch of mid-budget and lower-budget series to try and save money. Except they also shot their only chance of following the actually successful model of Netflix.
Netflix by comparison is like running any other FAANG. Pays well, but you can live a pretty rich-but-anonymous life still. I had to look up who was running NFLX these days, and one of the co-CEOs doesn't even have a picture on his Wiki page.
So far lot of streaming shows are crappy in a way I can't quite put my finger on and its definitely not just about budget.
We multicam sitcom is kind of awful in this regard, but at least usually it’s funny.
I think for many Netflix streaming shows it’s something with the cinematography, framing, and use of extras. I know in older movies you would get a variety of shots (through a window outside, or across a crowded room as character approaches, swooping in from above, etc) I think a lot of Netflix shows become framing shot, then “headshot to headshot” without much diversity of perspective. The also use less extra I think. I’m not sure but I think that is a factor.
But they don’t make shows people want to watch any more. Live action Mulan could have been awesome! But they destroyed the themes of family honor and removed the music and comedy.
Pander fatigue is real. I’ve got kids but I’m letting my Disney sub lapse. Anime is way better than the schlock Disney puts out.
It’s pretty interesting to think about how technology and scalability play into the costs of the streaming model. Netflix’s engineering capabilities are well respected, I find it hard for another company to replicate this success without using better technology to offer the same service: do we know the technological infrastructure quality of Disney+ or Hulu? Have they encountered costly scaling problems that eat into budgets?
I bought puss and boots 2 last year on release, and that movie was excellent.
Kids like repetition. They are perfectly willing to watch the same season of something over and over again even when they could technically choose to watch something brand new
Netflix’s report, first of its kind, showed 20 titles that you will have never heard of unless you use TikTok.
Most people are watching the shows most other people are watching, it’s memetic. People want to feel like they’re a part of something; that is they’re are willing to pay $20/mo in Fear of Missing Out.
Nobody has FOMO for old Disney content. The largest expense for Netflix is creating content, all the shows in that report were from 2022 and 2023.
The kicker is that it’s the opposite of the top of the Steam charts, indicating how bad of a business the streamers are in. Those games are most free and have been around for a long time, sometimes decades.
Both games and TV/movies were threatened by piracy. Yet the result for TV/movies was wildly undercharging for the stuff people were pirating - giving away the old catalogue content on the premise they were competing with $0, simultaneously ceasing to monetize their pay to play audience. Huge mistake: they should have wildly increased enforcement, which would have been much much cheaper and effective. TV/movies just do not have enough secular ways to innovate like games do to completely supplant piracy from a technological and social perspective.
Two takeaways: (1) the pay to watch model model was much more sustainable, because most content makes way more sense to sell for those payers, it was non-FOMO content, it was good content. (2) in order to make most of the highly engaged streaming content sustainable, streamers must innovate in monetization, and it’s not obvious if ads will be enough.
They did. However, it turns out that often, you're suing upstanding citizens for what the public views as minor infractions. This does not really recoup costs. It does act as a deterrent, both for Joey Public to illegally download your content, but also for them to spend money on acquiring your content legally. For some reason, the big fish are hard to catch, and catching one doesn't move the needle on illegally downloaded content much.
Moreover, they're not just competing with illegally downloaded content. Disney's back catalogue has been sold for literally decades. I bet that before the era of streaming, most folks lived within 10 houses of a legal, viewable copy of Disney's big hits (Lion King, Aladdin, Little Mermaid, etc). And if not, physical media of such movies and series are typically available on 2nd-hand markets for very affordable prices*. That's what the back catalogue of Disney (and others) needs to compete with first and foremost.
* case in point: I bought a 7 season, 24ish episode/season series on Ebay for 50. Watching it with the envisioned company (ie. no binging) took months; streaming would have been more expensive already at 5 bucks per month.
Watching anything unsupervised is of course age-dependent, so I'm not sure I understand the mechanism at work in that part of the comment.
But on the deeper matter of Disney vs. anime:
Obviously anime is a huge basket, so it depends on what studio and creator(s) we're talking about.
There's plenty of amazing, reinforcing, validating, positive anime to be found. The Miyazaki films are, without exception, lovely and perfectly messaged for kids of all ages, including this 41-year-old. There are many other non-Miyazaki works from Studio Ghibli that are similarly friendly.
Disney, on the other hand, absolutely sexualizes and gaslights vulnerable populations. I loved Beauty and the Beast growing up, but in retrospect I realize that it taught a generation of little girls to endure abuse in the hopes of some magical transformation. Aladin is horrifyingly racist and two-dimensional. Pocahontes? Holy fuck.
Compare the Disney and Ghibli renditions of The Little Mermaid and tell me which one is made with greater concern over kids' worldview and mental health, let alone faithful passage of the ecological message of novel.
The Disney formula is very often predicated on a woman whose value is in her sexuality and virginity, with men who are divided into distinctly "good" and "evil" camps who fight over her. It's absolutely the kind of sexualization that is toxic for kids.
I would never hesitate to allow a child to watch any disney movie, but I definitely would hesitate to allow a child to watch Berserk or a lot of the borderline loli content. I remember watching Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and waiting for the hammer to drop on the PE teacher who was constantly creeping on the teenage girls. When the season ended and it never happened I was completely confused, it wasn't until years later I found out that's an actual trope that shows up in a lot of anime.
What I'm saying is that I don't disagree with you that there are plenty of anime that's perfectly fine for children to watch, but the other posters concern is absolutely valid too, there's a lot of anime children shouldn't be watching (opening scene of elfin lied anyone?) and your hand wringing about Disney movies not being perfect doesn't move that needle in the slightest.
For every Berserk or Elfin Lied there's a Bocchi the Rock! or Spy Family.
I'd love to see this backed up by sources. I for one recall seeing streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed.
Anecdotally, I watch and rewatch a lot of old series. Like I'm rewatching Breaking Bad on Netflix right now.
This doesn't contradict OP—Disney's new content is mostly bad, so it's unsurprising that on their platform people are watching older stuff. But would that have been true of Netflix before everything fragmented? And how many people aren't on Disney+ at all because they'd prefer to see new, good content and already finished what little Disney is putting out?
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/tv
Top 10 is pretty dynamic. Longest item there was there for 6 weeks and is new content. Hilariously "Fireplace 4K: Crackling Birchwood from Fireplace for Your Home" beats out Squid Game.
We told ourselves that if we really want to watch movies we'd just rent them off Amazon on a case-by-case basis, but in practice we just completely stopped consuming streaming content as a family. If there are other families like us, then their greed made the whole pie much smaller.
I also tend to rent from Amazon if it's not on netflix, but if it's on neither or I disagree with the rent price or they don't allow you to rent, I just pirate.
I'm ok with them having my money, but once they started pulling everything off of netflix the entire landscape because anti-consumer. Their greed lost them my money.
Assuming they could execute technically on it, then a consumer would have just one subscription to get a ton of great content, and honestly would probably be compelling to have that AND Netflix (all the long tail stuff).
Then they changed their mind and pivoted to streaming, now. They're thinking maybe they should have just been an arms dealer.
If you're an executive at any of these companies: VERTICAL INTEGRATION
If you're an outsider looking in: GREED
Nebula, brilliant, masterclass, dropout, ...
I do recommend all of these. They provide a stream of high quality YouTube like content.
the thing is, this makes your IP a commodity. If netflix truly has a monopoly on the market like this, then they can supress the price of the licensing down to very low, and therefore disney would make very little money from the licensing.
It's good for the consumer, but not for disney.
and netflix would just play hardball, since the scenario proposed by the grandparent post is one where only netflix is doing streaming.
> Joint-Venture deal with Netflix
which is not the scenario proposed by the GP - and in any case, this is not different from today, where every media company wants to own their own distribution network.
The plumbing companies (like Netflix) look jealously at the content producers, and they desperately want that sweet content revenue.
The content producers (like Disney) look jealously at the plumbing companies, and they desperately want that sweet plumbing revenue.
Sometimes grabbing for the other revenue stream works out (like for Netflix) but most of the time it doesn't.
Disney was so eager to get into the plumbing business that it forgot how to create compelling content and now it can't do either.
> Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.
If it was so fundamental and obvious like you state wouldn't you have been super rich by now by buying netflix stock when it crashed in 2022. Maybe you are ?
Dominant narrative back then was that netflix is nothing specail. Building a stream app is a commodity that anyone can build and the old-world providers have content that people want to watch.
Just because someone was more successful with one strategy than someone else was with a different strategy doesn't mean that the strategy is superior, they could just be a better overall player or even a worse player that happened to outmaneuver a better player, or, even, in the massive multiplayer battle royale that is our economy, a worse player that made bad decisions but happened to luck into ideal market conditions.
I don't think Zoom did anything particularly revolutionary, their product just happened to be the exact right balance at the exact right time.
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”
For a concrete example, before Paramount+ launched I predicted that it would be dead in less than a year.
Clearly I was wrong because it’s still going 2 years later. I still think it will die relatively soon, but predicting exactly when is virtually impossible.
The Mall of Damocles
Little things matter.
Netflix always picks up the exact second you left a show. Apple, Disney and prime sometimes jump back 5 minutes or even more.
Netflix app opens super fast even in my crap old smart TV. Apple, Disney, prime take ages. Even when open the UI is very sloppy.
Netflix adjusts the streaming quality depending on your connection. Which means things download fast / stream reliably and also presumable saves them a tonne of bandwidth.
An then they actually have good content too…
I mean it would really depend how close you're sitting to the screen, wouldn't it?
Netflix also has an advantage in cost management, also due to better engineers that are also better paid, and have been managing their system for far longer. The AWS bill for D+ is not the kind you get when you have good chances to be profitable. I bet a lot of engineering in the next year or two will be used just more efficient use of compute and storage. I bet many teams there are spending far more on servers than on people.
And if D+ could be doing better, and is still unprofitable, imagine the situation in other competitors that are even newer. The total cost of the infrastructure, without even counting the licensing or the marketing, might cost the more than people are paying.
Peacock has no way to remember I want to see my local news channel live. I have to scroll the entire list of all of the channels across the nation and find mine. It's somewhere near the bottom.
Peacock also has the problem if I pause and want to resume somewhere in the last 15 minutes of a show it'll assume I've finished it and restart. Not great when you just wanted to watch the conclusion after getting off of the treadmill. Also not great when combined with the impossible to use scrubbers, it moves far too fast to be accurate. If you get within 5 minutes of what you were aiming for, it's best to just rewatch that 5 minutes again. You can't improve on it.
I could go on for a while about these platforms, they're hot garbage.
What's really great is MAX. If you've already seen an episode (rewatch or whatever) you probably didn't watch to the complete end (ie skipped the credits), especially if auto play is on. You go to watch that episode again and it drops you at the last 5-10s of the episode and you need to quickly scramble to pause-rewind back before it jumps to the next episode.
Disney especially was arrogant enough to assume that they controlled all the IP that people actually want to watch, so they thought they could just pull out of Netflix and everyone would switch. But that's not how movie preferences work. There's no brand loyalty, there are movies (and shows) people like and movies they don't, and each person's set of preferred movies is unique and spread out across studios. Disney isn't Apple.
In the last year, I've had to switch streaming providers four times to access this catalogue. I've moved from Netflix to Paramount to Crave (I'm in Canada) and now I'm back on Netflix. For Christmas, I bought myself a Mini PC and a subscription to Proton VPN. At this point, I've spent enough money on Star Trek and a small amount of movies that I don't feel the moral issues I would if I were pirating indie games or something similar.
Yes pirate, but that's a problem too. I've tried to pirate some stuff that wasn't popular or it was too old and you're just not able to.
Streaming removes a lot of that hassle. Now that the price is becoming too high, people are considering other options, but there is a reason it exists. Streaming is how I let my kids explore media. Yes, I can just give them my childhood favs, but they need a way to try new shows without me directly interfering and it's been great. I would have never picked out my kid's favs for her.
The way the internet works, with peering etc. bandwidth is super, super cheap. It’s basically too cheap to meter. AWS bandwidth pricing has no relationship to actual bandwidth costs and never did.
Netflix has for years been operating open connect, basically they place proxy servers with ISPs (effectively a peering type arrangement). In 2021 Netflix said they spent $1B worldwide on open connect over the previous 10 years. But they spent $19B last year on “cost of revenue” which basically means content.
$20B a year on content. $0.1B a year on their CDN. I can’t imagine Disney, Comcast, etc is much different.
They truly will learn their lessons, or somebody else will.
I stopped subscribing to Netflix around 2 years ago because that "sophisticated production tooling" was producing almost purely garbage tier content. With the exception of Black Mirror, there were no compelling new shows - and Black Mirror on its own was not worth the monthly subscription.
It seems to me this is a continuing example of fantasy businesses. We will deliver products the next day for free. Oops the next three days. Oops a week later. Oops, not for free. We will have free movies. We will make money by producing a constant stream of quality movies. Oops, pablum movies. Oops we have to put ads in the movies.
A business is a thing that provides value to customers which the customers are willing to pay for. If you give your product away, or have get money from other sources to provide for your customers, then you are not a business. Lock in and other anti-customer practices do not make something into a business. Massive tax fraud does not make a business. And yes, I realize Amazon, Microsoft and Apple make money. At least for now.
If people cancel in droves they reconsider their position.
Maybe this is an annual payment thing? Because I paid monthly and cancelled the other day online and it offered to refund me back $2 and some change left in my current month.
Now watching them all burn cash and now scramble to consolidate, maybe I think NFLX was right all along. They have a deep catalog of licensed content from other studios. They churn out absolutely endless amounts of mid content with no name actors at low cost. They have the highest subscriber base with which to attract advertisers to the ad supported tier. They have tons of people on the paid tiers.
Most of the high budget flop boondoggles you keep reading about in streaming shows have been newer players. NFLX was and continues to be the only ones making money.
Think of it as reversion-to-mid wars. NFLX churns out lots of decent forgettable mid but watchable 8 episode series, occasionally renews them for 2-3 seasons. The big brand studio streamers are instead taking expensive IP and high paid actors to ... churn out sequels/spioffs/prequels which turn out to just be high budget mid content. NFLX is very smart here.
But it is also completely mid / forgettable in a totally different way. A lot of the content is longer than a movie but shorter than a series. You get 5-10 episodes of ~40min length, enjoy it, and never ever think about it again. Rinse & repeat.
A lot of the actors I jokingly refer to as "poor mans __" because they often cast people that sort of look like someone famous. They have a nack for casting decent early career actors/actresses. Sort of a corporatized studio that realized they didn't need prestige names. Maybe, darkly, they've also identified the fact that a lot of people "give it a shot" in acting and then move on, and they can be had a lot more cheaply than someone with a decade of film&TV under their belt. If you live in LA/NYC you've probably got a few of these types in your friends circle.
That's what Marvel used to do (dozens of A+ list actors in Hollywood were no-name when Marvel drafted them, think about Chris Pratt), but they lost the plot and started pulling in big actors.
I think the effect extends beyond artistic domains as well: how many times have we seen large organizations get burned by 'safely' spending billions of dollars on contractors and getting bad software anyway when they might have simply done their best to hire smart people and then pray for a fraction of the cost.
The content isn't king, at least not like the media conglomerates believe.
https://youtu.be/iIRZNlacGMI (second half)
>But no deals emerged, leading some investors to conclude there is little appetite among private equity or tech companies for acquiring legacy businesses.
Definitely dead.
That is observation I can agree with. Same can be said with finance and airlines - both business models cant stand on their own with out help from the tax payer.
> But no deals emerged, leading some investors to conclude there is little appetite among private equity or tech companies for acquiring legacy businesses.
Probably also a product of increasing interest rates - risky investors (PE, VC, etc) can't pencil deals, the economics no longer work.
No, thanks, the ability to pause/rewind/fast-forward, choice of sub/dub, and the ability to actually choose what to watch and when are something I am not willing to give up or negotiate on.
With cable, you are watching a series that airs one episode per week, and then you missed an episode because you had something scheduled for that time slot the show was running on? Too bad, wait for a rerun, or plan ahead by recording it with a DVR, or by using some other subpar workaround with high friction. The show you care about runs at an inconvenient time slot for your schedule? Too bad. Want to watch with subs instead of a dub? Too bad.
I can keep going with that list even further, but I think the point I am making is pretty clear already. Makes me often wonder what people clamoring for the “good old days of cable” are actually smoking.
FWIW, depending on the channel/show, one could do this with cable all the way back in the VCR era. Some shows had secondary audio programs with alternative languages and had multiple closed caption streams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_audio_program
I do agree, loads of content never bothered with this though and for sure managing recordings with a VHS or even a DVR was a lot messier than just clicking "play" on a stream. Just pointing out the tech technically existed back then to enable those choice of sub/dub options
> Makes me often wonder what people clamoring for the “good old days of cable” are actually smoking.
Fully agreed on this point.
I am a person that can handle a good amount of "pain" while using technology (I like using Linux as a desktop, but my laptop's camera won't work on my monitor, sleep mode is broken, etc etc etc) so I am fine with browsing in my phone and casting to my TV. So I'll now get to the arduous task of convincing my wife to unsubscribe to at least some of the freaking too many stream services we are subscribed to (disney+, Star, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and two or three local to my country).
So many products and services have been ruined by the need for a subscription/ recurring revenue model instead of a consumption / one time purchase model.
I see so many products (mostly software) I would gladly pay $20 one time for but balk at paying $5/month in perpetuity for.
Content in particular should be owned or rented, not subscribed to.
* an intermittent fasting tracking app
* A Pomodoro timer app
* So many apps want a subscription (!) to remove ads
* Picker Wheel, an app that lets you spin a wheel of random choices
* several apps that let you "access" a video library of exercises
* Canva, Figma, Adobe, LucidChart, most design apps
By contrast, Ableton and most DAWs still have a completely reasonable one-time payment model, and then upgrade / expansion packs to fit your needs.
For exercise I never felt like tech helped me at all. If it's a huge problem fdroid will probably have it free. I'm doing self hosting some cloud services and I've gone back to paper for so many since they're needlessly complex like taiga.io
I just meant I've seen the subscription model in a lot of places where it makes no economic sense.
I've gone back to buying physical media and just put everything on my Plex server. The perpetual 'rental' model is a failing one and is not consumer friendly.
First we had cabe TV and for a time it was good.
Then there came the dawn of the internet and with it piracy and lawsuites.
Then came the age of the streaming services, and for a time it was good again. It resembled the cable age of old, but with the power of choice!
Or so it seemed. Then came competing services. Monopolies fuelled by publishing rights. The user had again to pay for each extra subscriptions, just like in the old days, with movie packages, sports packages and whatnot.
Streaming is so bad now it makes sense to pirate stuff again. (This comment doesn't condone illegal practices).
We kinda came full circle.
Maybe this was because VCs were footing the bill. Once companies have to be profitable the fun seems to end.
And I can tell you I unequivocally prefer cab over uber, cab drivers are humans, uber drivers are fleshy extensions of an algorithm.
By this I mean I can ask a cab driver to wait and take me home, I cannot ask that of an uber driver.
Cable was supposed to be free of commercials. Streaming was supposed to be free of commercials.
Thankfully books are still free of commercials.
https://lithub.com/the-time-terry-pratchetts-german-publishe...
stop it, when people say it's ad-free they mean the content wasn't disrupted with an ad.
stop attacking a strawman.
> free of commercials
This isn't "not disrupted by ads". This means no ads. Free of commercials, not limited commercials.
Ad-free means ad-free. No mustard means no mustard not just no grey poupon. Not a hard concept to understand.
And once again, cable had interruptive ads since the first cable was connected to the first subscriber. So even scoped to just pre-roll ads you're still denying highly documented history.
National cable networks were making many millions in ad revenues the first few years into their existence. This means they ran ads. Aka, not free of commercials.
The only way the above makes sense is to add a ton of qualifiers. "The whole point of a few premium channels on some cable networks 20 years into cable's history was limited to no advertising." Cable's original point was by no means "freedom from ads."
And even this statement of "Streaming was supposed to be free of commercials" just ignores the fact Hulu had ad-supported streaming in 2007, pretty early in the commercial OTT streaming industry growth. YouTube started having ads in 2008. But I guess if you've been doing enough drugs to think Netflix started it's streaming business in the 90s you'd see that as late. The rest of us in reality see that's still pretty early in the commercial streaming world.
stop denying reality.
stop it.
This is literally what they said. If they wanted to say something else they should say something else, because cable was not free of commercials. This is not a straw man.
And once again, cable had interruptive ads since the first cable was connected to the first subscriber. Cable's original point was by no means "freedom from ads."
stop it.
Personally I watch YouTube 90 percent of the time (short to long form content) as its algorithm is the best .. it continues to feed me exactly what I'd like to watch day in/day out. Other percentage TikTok (rather Facebook reels for myself) and some HBO max. I canceled all the others I subscribed to in 2023(Disney, Hulu, peacock, etc) and never even bothered using friends account for Paramount.
https://the-media-leader.com/just-how-big-is-warner-bros-dis...
The money bugs won’t let this continue and big shakeups are coming.
But now all these services are rapidly pushing towards $20/month. My usage pattern is to sign up for Netflix about one month a year, binge what I want then cancel. I'll probably do similar with Hulu too. I only have HBO because it's bundled with my ISP.
Netflix's big mistake was movies. The only thing that makes movies economical is theatrical releases. I'm sure Netflix has lost billions trying to create top-tier movies.
Disney's big mistake was thinking their back catalog and milking the Marven and Star Wars properties could carry their platform.
But there were always going to be losers in the "me too" streaming gold rush. But we saw cable haemorrhage customers due to continual price hikes. I'm surprised there hasn't been more focus on controlling costs. Below a certain level customers will just keep a service forever.
What I think Netflix needs to do is build out regional content in a much bigger way. This means have a studio in Spain producing Spanish language content, another in Germany and so on. These should be completely focused on producing content desired by those local markets.
Then you cherrypick content to internationalize with dubbing. For whatever reason, the voice acting I've seen on virtually every dub is awful. And it seems to be the same small group of people that does it too. Money Heist springs to mind. Even "3%", which is a great show, has some awful dubbing.
So Netflix kind of does this but not nearly enough. Like there are Turkish shows produced in Germany that are popular in Spain for whatever reason. Or Korean soaps that have a non-Korean audience. I'm honestly shocked at how bad the dubbing and voice acting ecosystem still is.
But for dubs it seems like they have like 6 people on staff whose job it is to do the dubs and they're just bad at it. It's clear it's not taken seriously. Being bad at it isn't the end of it either. The voice just has to be appropriate to the presentation and demeanour of the character.
This shouldn't be an afterthought.
But they will be good at it not in the way you like, but the way producers like - do everything acceptably in one take etc.
Dubbing is a pretty extreme industry, from what I've heard. I used to know someone who had contracts to dub Disney stuff - they had ridiculous (and possibly illegal) contracts with huge penalties for quitting, since Daisy Duck better not start sounding different...
I have also witnessed Norwegian children's TV "dubbed" by a broken nynorsk TTS engine.
Ah no. Home releases have been for very long the single biggest profitable part of a movie's life cycle. That's why Netflix doesn't waste its time with theatrical unless it has to, ie when they employ Scorcese and he puts in his contract, I'm assuming.
https://stephenfollows.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/how-mo...
https://stephenfollows.com/how-movies-make-money-hollywood-b...
Second, from the article:
> Video on Demand performed very poorly for these blockbusters, with almost half of the films earning under 1% of their total income from VOD.
So the digital home entertainment income is revenue from jsut having the content available on Netflix, Hulu or whoever.
Third, even here 20%+ of the revenue came from theatrical release. Given how much a concern there is around the decline in physical media sales, losing that 20% seems like a far bigger deal, which is my point. Netflix basically loses that 20% off the bat.
Fourth, these are averages. There is a long tail in theatrical earnings where the biggest blockbusters can make over a billion. By having streaming-only income you basically lose all your blockbuster potential.
Lastly, just speculating here but as soon as the windows come down between theatrical release, paid VOD release and streaming release come down, it hurts all theatrical and paid VOD release revenue because a lot of people will just wait. This comes into play with simultaneous streaming and theatrical releases, which seem to make even less economic sense.
There may even be a pricing structure potential for new series or legacy rentals.
Smells like Hollywood accounting [1].
Doesn't seem too surprising to me.
Everything is low quality mass market crap.
At this point I’m only watching pre 2016 content or foreign stuff. It’s just so bad.
And this is the stuff writers went striking over. I mean I’m not surprised they are threatened by AI, it’s not hard to copy American films and tv at this point.
It’s like no one, not even hbo appreciates the importance of artistry any more. It’s all data driven, but what you get then is standardized crap. It might work for some industries, but definitely not tv.
There is also a wealth of content from other countries and languages, which could be translated with a little AI assistance to do lip sync etc.
With far more content than anyone could reasonably watch in a lifetime, I really don't see why anyone is investing big money into making new stuff.
Or parts are simply outdated and won't be understood by viewers - like a key element of a plot being that someone erased an answerphone tape - perhaps in todays world you'd replace that with messages showing one tick only...
It's educational, historic.
Sounds like clearplay and vidangel have a new target consumer base and media pool.
After watching kids grow, it struck me.
That's how we learn. New stuff = different stuff = learning. My kids would look at the floor for a bit as babies, it would be interesting. After a while, watching the same "old" tiles would become boring, not much to learn from there (color, hardness, temperature, grip, etc). So they'd start looking for lint, pebbles, bits of paper or dirt on the floor, cause that was new :-)
Content creation piggy backs on this intuitive understanding and hacks it, since as you say, old content can have great educational and entertainment value.
But I think it all boils down to "new = potential for learning" being wired into our brains.
"New content" is something that did not exist before.
I'm willing to bet that any given adult has a huge trove of extant material that would be interesting if they could only discover it. But the cult of the new opposes that.
This is most obvious in certain “genres” of entertainment but it has always existed - romance novels, simplistic comics, etc.
Times change, genres evolve and twist and become something new. Spaghetti Westerns blew up and had a mass craze, then died off. Weird westerns gained momentum and survived to this day. Film depictions of what the future looks like will be vastly different in the 60s/70s versus how it is today. Modern shows like Andor show that aspect of retrofuturism mixed with modern designs. Animation was mostly restricted to childrens work in comparison to today where you have things like Scavanger's Reign.
This is without talking about the change in attitudes towards various minority groups.
So a sizeable chunk of the potential audience picks one channel at a time & chops and changes between them, cutting revenues by 4x, or else they drop them altogether because it just gets boring trawling through the piles of low-grade content trying to find something worth watching.
Myself, I'm catching up on all the films made before 1980.
When you run the a streaming service you get data on when people go and take a toilet break.
This is not very useful for already existing catalog, but when you write new content there will be pressure to adapt the material to the data and so all the new stuff ends up being bland and boring ("we get 3% more viewership if the leading lady is blond with shoulder length hair", means that every tv show will be blond festival).
They weren’t perfect, but I want normal Hollywood studios to come back. There was a lot more on the line when it came to creating movies/series and a lot more effort went into creating them. It took actual talent to make something great, not data.
The same is happening in the music industry. I know pop music has more or less sounded the same throughout time...but these days its almost indistinguishable. Studios just pick a public figure to sing a generated song, it goes viral for a few months, rinse repeat. I have a hard time telling the difference between artists these days. Their vocal range/tone is almost identical in some cases.
We have an over abundance of choice when it comes to media and I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Its now a chore to sort through the garbage and find actual talent.
Sorry for the rant!
The problem is that hard-core users are very vocal and dominate the conversation.
My normie take is that most households will do just fine by having max 2 stream services, which they can regularly switch up. Many may have additional ones via account sharing. That should give you plenty of high quality stuff to watch, "high quality" meaning better than TV.
Multiple streaming services fighting for your eye balls and them not being guaranteed of your business is a good thing. It's how a market is supposed to work. Competition. It's frightening how easily consumers would want to give that up for slightly more convenience of having everything under one roof.
Everything under one roof would mean total price control on the supply side, even more flat repetitive content, the providers having total leverage over producers, etc.
Our behavior enables monopolists. Stop doing that.
As others have mentioned here, the majority of new content recently is mid-level sequels, spin-offs, prequels, etc. It's becoming much harder to differentiate, so people stick with what they know: Netflix, Disney, HBO/Max. I just don't see enough of a market for the other providers to persist long-term (given the high-cost of managing a streaming infrastructure).
I feel like Disney, in particular, should consider spinning off a few of their larger brands, like Marvel and Star Wars, opening them up for licensing revenue and new creative direction.
If we passed some regulation to force it to be leased to wanting distributors at equal cost we could kill exclusivity and the middle man margins and just get on with it with a nice, basically free option like SFlix.
honestly it was pretty bad, and completely controlled by media organizations who used it to gaslight the poplace as badly as tiktok does today
i think there's both every reason and right to maintain private platforms even if its annoying to consumers, being forced to be lumped in with others comes with regulations that eventually turn into tyranny
You can trick someone without deliberately working to make them doubt their own sanity.
The old definition is clearly emotional abuse, but the new definition does not seem to meet that standard.
Is this just another case in which you have to add extra qualifiers as in "I have OCD, but what I mean is real, diagnosed, legitimate OCD rather than whatever the kiddos on Tic Tac say"?
Disney, for example, thrived on scarcity and quality. You'd clamor to see that rare release in theaters, and show up for streaming wherever it ended up. Instead they decided to produce like a dozen Star Wars / Marvel series a year. Their movies have been lackluster. They push them to streaming really fast, kneecapping the box office. It all just becomes noise instead of an event reinforcing their brand.
Some studios, like Sony, have just ignored trying to compete on Streaming, and just focus on the quality. Sell it to Netflix later, as Netflix increasingly is in the "quantity over quality" business.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/13/tim-gurner-u...
For instance, AMC+‘s „The North Water“ or Starzplay’s (yes, really) „Counterpart“. Any more recommendations?
Patriot
Cobra Kai
House of Cards
Glow
They seem to only want to produce the "Power" series with regularity at this point, and really low effort soft core adult TV series
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is terrific and has the spirit of the original series.
Star Trek: Lower Decks is also amazing in a very different way. It's like the writers made an adult cartoon show for all the super fans that references every meme, while still being very endearing and true to trek.
Star Trek: Picard, is also supposedly really good, but I have only seen one episode so far.
What does that mean?
Sale through a single ecosystem probably means buy individuals things when they’re on sale through iTunes or physically or something.
Is there an economic or psychological principle that explains this? Something like "people want lots of free choices but only one paid option". (On further thought, this might just be an implication of the trivial "people want to spend less".)
Nothing prestige, almost entirely NFLX. A lot of it is back catalog licensed stuff. NCIS, Criminal minds, lol. Disney+ on the scoreboard with basically a couple kids shows plus the Simpsons.
Previous year stats pretty similar - https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-grew-its-aud...
Prestige stuff like Game of Thrones, Succession, even each of the Disney+ Star Wars shows is $100M/season. None of these make the scoreboard for views.
Meanwhile most people are watching boomer reruns and midbrow stuff. Even Seinfeld licensing only cost $100M/year for NFLX to end up one of the top 10 viewed shows.
The problem is and always was the so-called "rights holders", who are just another form of landlord, looking to milk their licenses for as much as we can bare. Their power needs to be diminished. Whoever cracks that nut will revolutionise the media industry in my opinion.
Spotify has the whole catalog, and the rights holders can't stop them. But Spotify does have to pay a certain industry fixed royalty per play.
The trick will be that movies & TV have wildly different production costs and replay value vs. music singles, so the scheme would have to account for this in a way that is fair.
Since you seem to think the content has nearly no value, go ahead and populate your federated world with your own content.
website seems to be down. I read this link instead
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/12/28/shakeout-has-...
warner is up 22% this year.
comcast 26%
>The world’s largest traditional entertainment companies face a reckoning in 2024 after losing more than $5 billion in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.