What I find really interesting is that all these studios who ran TV channels for so many years fumbled the bag when it came to streaming.. It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes.
It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it.
Given the extent to which the tech behind streaming platforms -- storage, CDNs, tie-ups with telecoms -- have been standardized (and democratized, to some extent) by big players like YouTube and Netflix, you would think that a basic ad supported layer of any of these studio specific platforms would make many multiples of what they actually need to put in to setup a basic platform.
The tech's cheap and they already have the content. Most of the older content would be relatively low traffic -- hell, most of these old topical Comedy Central late night shows barely broke a million views when they were new and I don't think jokes about Saddam Hussein and GW's folksy demeanor would click now. How much would it really cost for any big studio to let people view these archives? Am I missing something big that causes somebody like Paramount to go $14B in debt trying to get people to use their streaming service? Is it a function of the business they're in or is it just a case of LA movie studio types not understanding tech?
These studios used to make ton of money because only a few are in town. Now, every teenager is his/her own studio and content pool is so vast that their revues must shrink. They have nowhere to run. I think their end state is to publish on YouTube/Netflix and continue living at fraction of revenue that they are used to. That's what they should prepare for and plan for. Their existence and importance was supported by scarcity imposed by cable network and they need to understand that. But instead they live in fantasy of becoming next Netflix and burn in billions of dollars in debt.
This is compelling and I think many elements of the spirit of this are true. The only thing I would add is that it will be interesting to see if professional, medium/high budget, polished, "produced" content will remain a stable and significant niche that is distinct from user-generated content. And does the high-production-value content directly compete with low-production value user-created content? And what percentage of a user's consumption it will represent in the future? And does the pool of available time for an individual consumer grow to accommodate both?
To put it another way, on some level, all content competes for our time, so it's all in competition. On a different level, a Twitch livestream or TikTok feels like an entirely different category of media from a scripted, high-production-value TV series or movie, and I want both in the world.
While traditional publishers may be losing % of daily media consumption - especially in younger age brackets - it's unclear to me where this trend asymptotes. My intuition is that most people will spend some time on "reels" or livestreams (or whatever), some time on blockbuster movies, some on Broadway plays, and some time on scripted produced "TV style" content. Some will expand their denominator of total time to accommodate additional media sources, others will pick one over the other.
It seems there will be a degree of loss of market share as you allude to, but it's unclear how dramatic it will be and where it stabilizes.
One thing is absolutely 100% for sure though in my opinion: media preservation should be deeply prioritized, and this news seems like a blow to that.
Yesterday was MTV News deleting their archive, right? But on your points: brace yourselves for AI-generated content, with increasing technical quality and probably also increasing entertainment quality. That will be The Flood and might wipe out the small human creators by their lack of discoverability, and replace the studios output because hey AI is cheaper than employing real humans. So what do we do then??? Also no archives because shareholder value (I think I use this term already too much)...
I think their numbers are BS, just like Hollywood's numbers have always been BS. Remember when Lord of the Rings lost money for New Line somehow?
Paramount's supposedly got 71,000,000 subscribers. At ~$10/month, they're making something like $8,500,000,000 / yr in subscriber fees. You gotta be daft to lose money on that.
At like a $1,000,000 / episode (last numbers I heard, might be old) that's 8,500 episodes of television a year. Pretty sure they didn't make anywhere near that much content last year. Seems like mostly all they're doing is taking away content and then charging you for it again. Disney already plays this game pretty extensively.
-2.8% annual return since Jan 2006, 4.25% annual return since Jun 2009, and their 5 and 10 year annual returns are way worse (dqdyj total return calculator doesn’t even provide a percentage return).
I think you're right. People never had all the content we can access today. So the real competitors of those few big providers are now the millions of people creating new content every day on social media, YouTube, etc.
> But instead they live in fantasy of becoming next Netflix and burn in billions of dollars in debt.
Hell, even ~15+ years ago I knew not to fall for cargo-culting arguments of "come work for us; when we're as valuable as Facebook the stock we'll pay you with will make you a billionaire". Yeah, ... sorry, not moving to Silicon Valley and try to haggle for coffee with imaginary invaluable stocks.
So, I can't believe that ... for all their money's worth, these companies can only come up with "when we have as much users as Netflix, we'll be billionaires".
The worst part is that we already had a perfectly viable model: Netflix paid for the rights to everything and gave access to everybody for a reasonable monthly fee. Then the studios got greedy and thought "why should we let a middleman take a slice of our profits?" They took back the rights and started their own streaming services thinking that people would be happy to pay the same amount of money to access the tiny bit of content that they liked from that studio as they were previously paying to get everything. Inevitably, nobody could afford 10 subscriptions, and now their crappy services have reduced subscriber numbers and are either struggling to make a profit or going bankrupt.
> Netflix paid for the rights to everything and gave access to everybody for a reasonable monthly fee. Then the studios got greedy and thought "why should we let a middleman take a slice of our profits?"
To be fair to the studios, sticking with Netflix would have been suicide.
Put yourself at the mercy of someone else's distribution monopoly and you end up a powerless, penniless sharecropper - like people who develop mobile apps.
A good strategy might have been to pool their resources and create a new global channel that they all part-owned and distribute their content there. Like a big new Global TV Channel.
While not global, that was essentially what Hulu was originally for the US. A single streaming platform co-owned by many of the big networks. You could watch FOX, NBC, ABC, and other shows all on a single streaming platform.
Notably absent at the time though were many of the big cable networks and movie studios.
Interestingly Disney was not an original partner of Hulu and was late to the game. ABC was added several years into Hulu's history. The original partners were GE (before they sold NBC Universal to Comcast), News Corporation (Fox), and a private equity firm. That Hulu did not just become Peacock (or really that Comcast didn't need to create Peacock because it might have already majority owned Hulu in that alternate timeline) and is now a Disney property is a fascinating story in GE's mistakes, Disney's ambitions, and Hulu's seeming lack of ambitions, with a soupçon of the usual private equity meddling.
You're right about Disney not being original, I was wrong about that. But they became a partner two years into its existence. I don't know if I'd call that late to the game.
This system is not stable though. Every participant would think "why should I be content with X/N divided revenue if my content is so hot that if I pull out I would get much better revenue because everybody watches my content anyway?" Of course, they miss the point that everybody watches their content as part of the "one subscription" deal but it would be much different when it "50 subscriptions, all alike" deal - but everybody thinks they would be the ones that everybody would subscribe to, and the others would be the ones who will be left out.
Also, such channel would likely attract attention of the regulators as a clear example of a cartel.
Would you really have preferred Netflix to be your monopolistic cable company raising rates all the time whenever they decided to and blaming it on a new contract with Disney or a union strike with the Writer's Guild? How much would you pay for Netflix a month before that got to be too irritating? $50? $150?
The cable companies got to do it for so long because of the natural monopolies of shared physical infrastructure. To be fair, Netflix has been a major internet infrastructure company and there are arguments to be made about their colocation and peering agreements and the natural monopolies there that gave them an early streaming edge, even if the internet in its early days decided those sort of infrastructure agreements shouldn't create or promote monopolies. But beyond that first mover advantage and with the internet's spirit that peering and colocation are regulated fairly and not monopolistically, who would have gave Netflix the right to become the internet's TV monopoly? Would you have voted for a President who made it a campaign promise to make sure that FCC Regulators declared Netflix a legal monopoly in charge of TV streaming?
Netflix only really ever had the first mover advantage, and it is probably a good thing in the eventual long term that Netflix didn't win everything. It goes that Netflix's early model while it felt "perfectly viable" from a consumer standpoint at the time was obviously not perfectly viable in the long term as a stable situation. The situation we are in now of too many streaming services and cutthroat competition between them maybe isn't sustainable in the long term and certainly doesn't feel "viable" to us as consumers. But it certainly seems more viable and preferable than the timeline where you need to send letters to your local Congress representatives in the hopes that they might legislate Netflix price increases and put FCC pressure on Netflix to serve the content they promised to serve.
Literally no part of that was viable - Netflix didn't even buy 5% of US produced current TV content, less than 10% of film, maybe 1% if we generously round up of archive content, and most of what they bought was already paid for by Network airings or earlier windows.
And even then, Netflix was burning billions of dollars of cash every year to keep operating.
> It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it. ... The tech's cheap and they already have the content.
This might not be evident, but ViacomCBS/Paramount back catalog is by and large available on Pluto.TV.
In their app it's available played back from VOD as if linear television in highly targeted "channels" which is convenient if you want to have something "on in the background".
More conveniently, it is also available as an Apple TV "Channel" for PlutoTV that makes too many old shows to ever watch available as VOD.
This also seems to be a catalog behind various house branded linear+VOD TVs, e.g. Samsung, Vizio, Comcast... The tell you're looking at a Pluto white label seems to be the TV grid organization by genre.
Because of the rights, it has all the old Star Trek related series, the old Doctor Who, and countless shows of every variety that had been on CBS, Paramount, Viacom, etc. in the past. If you watched 8 hours a day with no repeats, you'd have over 35 years of TV ahead of you...
Ask a media company head in 2005 for a half a billion dollars to roll out a subscriber service which 23% of the US adult population could even use, which needed a custom decoder box, and which they could charge $10 a month for, and which would eventually destroy the market they were currently making all their money in.
It's more a failure of management. All the big, legacy players were co-owners of Hulu around 2010. The success of Netflix, and to a lesser extent HBO Max, give them envy, and they all went off on their own to build something. The problem was there were more streaming services than people wanted.
> It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes.
I think you ought to give them a bit more credit than that.
I think the problem is that launching a streaming service is basically going into competition with their cable partners. It wasn't worth jeopardising their cable revenue at that time.
It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it.
Given the extent to which the tech behind streaming platforms -- storage, CDNs, tie-ups with telecoms -- have been standardized (and democratized, to some extent) by big players like YouTube and Netflix, you would think that a basic ad supported layer of any of these studio specific platforms would make many multiples of what they actually need to put in to setup a basic platform.
The tech's cheap and they already have the content. Most of the older content would be relatively low traffic -- hell, most of these old topical Comedy Central late night shows barely broke a million views when they were new and I don't think jokes about Saddam Hussein and GW's folksy demeanor would click now. How much would it really cost for any big studio to let people view these archives? Am I missing something big that causes somebody like Paramount to go $14B in debt trying to get people to use their streaming service? Is it a function of the business they're in or is it just a case of LA movie studio types not understanding tech?