This may be a shocker to many of you but it costs money to produce TV shows.
Cable was lucrative because of the subscription fees and the fact that channels could still run ads. People are now expecting to pay $10 a month for access to everything ad-free when previously they’d have to pay multiple times this amount to watch shows at scheduled times, and still sit through ad breaks. There was no such thing as an online on-demand catalogue just fifteen years ago.
Now imagine that networks are making far less money per viewer, have to pump out shitloads of original content to keep people subscribed (and in the case of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others, mitigate the risk of copyright holders jacking up fees for third party content), can’t run ads to supplement their income and have to deal with huge levels of inflation because governments had to print a fucktonne of money to bail us out of a financial crisis and a global pandemic.
Piracy has raised a generation of entitled cheapskates that refuse to pay for content, and these are the people who are most likely going to break a lot of studios and publishers.
The only real saving grace here is that this could be the downfall of Disney, which would be a net boon for copyright reform. Disney are the core reason why US copyright law is so fucked and why we’re only now close to seeing Steamboat Willie (first Mickey Mouse cartoon from 1924) enter the public domain.
I hope that downvotes are mainly due to the cheapskate remark, because most of the post is quite correct.
The fact that people think they have a right to enjoy entertaiment that costs millions to produce and which not only make a profit, but also emplys thousands, many super skilled, foe free, is just plain wrong.
Piracy is not even close to the reason any of the streamers are struggling, and even then I’d be surprised to see if Amazon was actually struggling. Piracy itself is a rounding error, and is more of a function of the shitty way that most of the streamers run their business.
There is a lot going on:
Lots of these streamers, and especially Amazon, keep green lighting projects with massive budgets but then forgetting to tell a good story or hire people who seem interested in making the show they’re making. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have insane budgets for what are generously mediocre shows. I can’t even imagine the pitch meeting for WoT. “I want to take a massively beloved cornerstone of the fantasy genre that spans 14 gigantic books and a few novellas, turn it into a TV show with 8 ep seasons, make a ton of changes to the story and lore that is sure to piss off the audience that is most likely to generate word of mouth for us, and for the low, low price of like a billion dollars. You should trust me with this money because I worked on 2 seasons of the hit show (that was on the edge of cancellation basically it’s entire run) Agents of SHIELD and a streaming show on Netflix that was canceled after one season.” By pretty much any measure, this is an insane set of decisions.
This is everywhere - The Witcher, Halo, Star Trek: Discovery (and most of Picard), Secret Invasion, Book of Boba Fett, just about every goddamn “blockbuster” Netflix attempts. It’s either they take a beloved IP and decide to do something entirely different and usually not even good-different (has anyone that worked on Halo even seen an xbox?) or they set up a project with a pitch like “Ryan Reynolds is a big star, Fast and the Furious is a big franchise, make a movie with Ryan and cars or whatever.” Insert meme of the guy getting thrown out of the window for asking “does it need a plot?”
The existence of half of these streamers in general belie the real issues. You can’t tell me that Paramount+ or Peacock should even exist. The whole premise of these goddamn things is “people want to watch 20-40 year old re-runs of Star Trek and Seinfeld, I bet we can charge $15 in perpetuity for that as long as we sprinkle in the occasional new show that makes a point to let our audience know we hate them for liking these shows.”
It’s just a massively, massively mismanaged business on basically every level. Ads is the latest in this fiasco. They should be either small, cheap networks that make a lot of small budget shows, or if they’re going to take some big swings they might want to have a proven strategy of any sort. Quite a lot of the shows that found massive success were made for basically the change you find in the couch cushions. A show like Friends probably cost about $7 for the first season, and didn’t balloon until later seasons when the cast was each making a decent amount and every other episode had a major guest star. Most sci-fi until very recently was extremely cheap. Carter: Sir, we’ve arrived on the planet, looks like the MALP was accurate. O’Neill: It’s really weird how most of the planets we visit look like the woods in Vancouver, BC. Even Game of Thrones which probably started this arms race of spending, didn’t start getting $20+ million budgets until it was a massive, massive hit (worth noting how that show tried to stick closely to the source and didn’t start to suck until they ran out of book) and even then that would be seen as “cheap” compared to a lot of these.
Speaking of entitled cheapskates, most of the good content is older shows not new ones. Most of these streaming providers are coasting on shows and movies made before they existed.
I don’t care about the “cost of new shows” because most of them suck. Just because you have a big CGI budget doesn’t mean you made a good show. Not only that, but good new shows are all cancelled after one or two seasons.
The reason for this is obvious: creating a new show adds another “square” on the Netflix screen. Adding more seasons to an old show doesn’t. Plus you can advertise “new show” and people will just watch to see what it is. Viewers need to stop watching things just because they’re “new”.
Capitalism is fucking the world raw every minute of every day. People will get what they can to mitigate the existentiel crisis they got plunged into. I gladly pay for concerts, cinéma and music CDs, always have. These companies make profits and fatten multimillionnaire executives while providing a poor service. I agree that we’ve gotten used to plentiful content and it’s spoiled us. What’s called for, imho, is a reimagination of distribution schemes and redistribution of wealth. I want actors paid a normal wage, more public funding of cinéma (or at all, depending on the country) and semi-public platforms that don’t seek profit. To give an example of what I mean, there is madelen.ina.fr which is an archive of french tv and cinéma, accessible for 3€ a month, existing under the umbrella of the INA (national institute of tv)
This may be a shocker to many of you but it costs money to produce TV shows.
Cable was lucrative because of the subscription fees and the fact that channels could still run ads. People are now expecting to pay $10 a month for access to everything ad-free when previously they’d have to pay multiple times this amount to watch shows at scheduled times, and still sit through ad breaks. There was no such thing as an online on-demand catalogue just fifteen years ago.
Now imagine that networks are making far less money per viewer, have to pump out shitloads of original content to keep people subscribed (and in the case of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others, mitigate the risk of copyright holders jacking up fees for third party content), can’t run ads to supplement their income and have to deal with huge levels of inflation because governments had to print a fucktonne of money to bail us out of a financial crisis and a global pandemic.
Piracy has raised a generation of entitled cheapskates that refuse to pay for content, and these are the people who are most likely going to break a lot of studios and publishers.
The only real saving grace here is that this could be the downfall of Disney, which would be a net boon for copyright reform. Disney are the core reason why US copyright law is so fucked and why we’re only now close to seeing Steamboat Willie (first Mickey Mouse cartoon from 1924) enter the public domain.
I hope that downvotes are mainly due to the cheapskate remark, because most of the post is quite correct. The fact that people think they have a right to enjoy entertaiment that costs millions to produce and which not only make a profit, but also emplys thousands, many super skilled, foe free, is just plain wrong.
Piracy is not even close to the reason any of the streamers are struggling, and even then I’d be surprised to see if Amazon was actually struggling. Piracy itself is a rounding error, and is more of a function of the shitty way that most of the streamers run their business.
There is a lot going on:
Lots of these streamers, and especially Amazon, keep green lighting projects with massive budgets but then forgetting to tell a good story or hire people who seem interested in making the show they’re making. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have insane budgets for what are generously mediocre shows. I can’t even imagine the pitch meeting for WoT. “I want to take a massively beloved cornerstone of the fantasy genre that spans 14 gigantic books and a few novellas, turn it into a TV show with 8 ep seasons, make a ton of changes to the story and lore that is sure to piss off the audience that is most likely to generate word of mouth for us, and for the low, low price of like a billion dollars. You should trust me with this money because I worked on 2 seasons of the hit show (that was on the edge of cancellation basically it’s entire run) Agents of SHIELD and a streaming show on Netflix that was canceled after one season.” By pretty much any measure, this is an insane set of decisions.
This is everywhere - The Witcher, Halo, Star Trek: Discovery (and most of Picard), Secret Invasion, Book of Boba Fett, just about every goddamn “blockbuster” Netflix attempts. It’s either they take a beloved IP and decide to do something entirely different and usually not even good-different (has anyone that worked on Halo even seen an xbox?) or they set up a project with a pitch like “Ryan Reynolds is a big star, Fast and the Furious is a big franchise, make a movie with Ryan and cars or whatever.” Insert meme of the guy getting thrown out of the window for asking “does it need a plot?”
The existence of half of these streamers in general belie the real issues. You can’t tell me that Paramount+ or Peacock should even exist. The whole premise of these goddamn things is “people want to watch 20-40 year old re-runs of Star Trek and Seinfeld, I bet we can charge $15 in perpetuity for that as long as we sprinkle in the occasional new show that makes a point to let our audience know we hate them for liking these shows.”
It’s just a massively, massively mismanaged business on basically every level. Ads is the latest in this fiasco. They should be either small, cheap networks that make a lot of small budget shows, or if they’re going to take some big swings they might want to have a proven strategy of any sort. Quite a lot of the shows that found massive success were made for basically the change you find in the couch cushions. A show like Friends probably cost about $7 for the first season, and didn’t balloon until later seasons when the cast was each making a decent amount and every other episode had a major guest star. Most sci-fi until very recently was extremely cheap. Carter: Sir, we’ve arrived on the planet, looks like the MALP was accurate. O’Neill: It’s really weird how most of the planets we visit look like the woods in Vancouver, BC. Even Game of Thrones which probably started this arms race of spending, didn’t start getting $20+ million budgets until it was a massive, massive hit (worth noting how that show tried to stick closely to the source and didn’t start to suck until they ran out of book) and even then that would be seen as “cheap” compared to a lot of these.
Speaking of entitled cheapskates, most of the good content is older shows not new ones. Most of these streaming providers are coasting on shows and movies made before they existed.
I don’t care about the “cost of new shows” because most of them suck. Just because you have a big CGI budget doesn’t mean you made a good show. Not only that, but good new shows are all cancelled after one or two seasons.
The reason for this is obvious: creating a new show adds another “square” on the Netflix screen. Adding more seasons to an old show doesn’t. Plus you can advertise “new show” and people will just watch to see what it is. Viewers need to stop watching things just because they’re “new”.
Capitalism is fucking the world raw every minute of every day. People will get what they can to mitigate the existentiel crisis they got plunged into. I gladly pay for concerts, cinéma and music CDs, always have. These companies make profits and fatten multimillionnaire executives while providing a poor service. I agree that we’ve gotten used to plentiful content and it’s spoiled us. What’s called for, imho, is a reimagination of distribution schemes and redistribution of wealth. I want actors paid a normal wage, more public funding of cinéma (or at all, depending on the country) and semi-public platforms that don’t seek profit. To give an example of what I mean, there is madelen.ina.fr which is an archive of french tv and cinéma, accessible for 3€ a month, existing under the umbrella of the INA (national institute of tv)