Why Arrested Development on Netflix could change everything
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This is all just my opinion, but in a digital world where there is way too much entertaining stuff to view, be it TV, movies, videos on Youtube, Reddit, online newspapers like the NYT, that something big has happened for me: there are no more "must have" TV shows, movies, or books. For example, if HBO won't let me watch a special on the web for a fair price I don't care if I miss it.
Seriously, I will probably take 5 Coursera online classes this year, read 15 non-technical fiction books, 15 technical books, write several hundred pages in my own book projects, etc. Plenty of fun stuff to do.
This is similar to travel: when we go to a foreign country I don't worry about "seeing everything", rather, I just want to enjoy myself and get a feel for the people and place.
Same with digital entertainment: just graze a little.
Netflix is the absolute best value for me in entertainment.
The worst part is even if it's a high profile sport, and the league itself will accept some ridiculous amount of money for access, you're STILL at the beck and call of regional blackouts and restrictions.
Completely agree. I get annoyed when people argue for piracy because they don't have a legal way of getting something (because of say regional restriction) or the legal way is more annoying (i.e. DRM). There is a sense of entitlement to all entertainment despite the fact that there are incredible amounts of alternatives available.
Should I just wait for an hypothetic way to see them in the future like the old days ? Maybe I should, I know I won't because I just not think like that anymore, for better or worse.
Hulu is an attempt by NBC/Fox/Disney to dip their toes into the waters of online streaming. I appreciate the effort, but in the end, Netflix is a much better service for the price, and plenty of people would just as soon use the free options available instead.
It allowed access to older episodes of some shows (in some cases, the full series was available whereas only the last 5 episodes were available free).
But you still had to watch the advertisments, and the price was on par with Netflix (which made it substantially more expensive before Netflix's pricing switch). Nothing makes $10/month sting like being forced to watch the same advertisment over and over as a 'premium' member. Hulu's advertisements are far less varied than regular television, so I always half-felt like they were going for the subliminal-message-manipulation angle, since I would see the same ad during all three commercial breaks for the same show.
Also, they arbitrarily blocked access from certain mobile devices, which meant that I couldn't always watch it when I wanted to.
In the end, it wasn't worth the money, by a long shot.
Netflix = old content not currently on TV.
Two different uses. If you want to watch current television without cable, you need Hulu.
In other words, access to specific parts of the culture is still a big deal.
In this sense, there is "must have" entertainment. I'm not going to waste time on anything but that I'm most interested in.
My guess is, that five years from now, both Netflix and YouTube will look like networks or producers than just distributors.
[1] http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/episodes/ [2] http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/pa-the-series [3] http://www.youtube.com/user/VaultShow
I'm not a big Wil Wheaton or Felicia Day fan, but I'm really enjoying Tabletop. Fun show with excellent production values. I just wish the episodes were a little longer (ie, fewer cuts) for some of the more complex games.
Internet broadcasting just keeps getting better and better. It's probably not a great model for fiction where you have to pay writers and real actors, but for entertaining nonfiction it's perfect.
Check out "The Vault" that I linked to above. Very reminiscent of Lost and (so far) of excellent quality. I gather from some of what I've read that they've received outside funding for the show.
Arrested Development may be news to some folks here, but the age of producing shows for internet distribution has been our path for quite some time. Not only are shows being produced in this fashion for the internet now, but we're increasingly recruiting new talent via the internet. Just look at the star of Community, Donald Glover. This is a brilliant comedic actor who first got his major break by producing a set of YouTube videos that went viral with the other comedians in the Derrick comedy group, a group which was later picked up by College Humor and several of which, including Donald, have been tapped by mainstream American television now.
I could only see Arrested Development 'changing everything' if you weren't already aware that things have already changed.
My bet is that it won't take that long, a few weeks or a month at most.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure whoever made the decision to go ahead with this model knows that there's going to be piracy. You would have to be living under the world's largest rock to not consider that possibility.
(I giggled the first time someone told me about this, but Wikipedia has an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene)
(And a good thing too, since once again there will probably be no way for this non-American to actually buy the damn thing...)
...just like it does for every single other movie and TV show out there.
Using the TV model, the maximum amount of shows I can provide are limited by the amount of prime-time hours in a week. I think this creates a very long tail of shows that many people would be interested in watching, but not enough that these shows compete for prime time space. These shows are usually cancelled, and nobody makes money.
But with streaming video, Netflix is not limited at all by a viewing schedule, and they can sell as many shows as they want. Even if a show is only popular among a small audience it can still be profitable.
Pay-per-on-demand-show is coming, and that will be the upset. The only demographic beholden to the TV station model are the baby-boomers who think this streaming stuff is weird.
I think this is the beginning of an entirely new format. So far we've been restricted to the video equivalent of serials and short stories with TV shows and movies respectively. Its time for the rise of the video long-form novel.
There are certain stories (like Firefly IMHO) that really need this format to work. They make terrible serials from a network execs POV (because if you miss an ep or two, it becomes really hard to get into it later) and movies that only a fan could love by jamming too much story into 2 hours.
I'm so happy to hear that Netflix are bringing it back. It ushers in an interesting new era in tv.
You're not spoon-fed the comedy and queued for laughter. There weren't many American shows like that when it aired, and that was one of the reasons it got canned. They even hinted at this in the script for the last season, along with the characters practically begging some other network to pick up the show.
http://o.canada.com/2012/04/24/the-good-news-about-arrested-...