6 ms·

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 p

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?

wiz21c 2y ago
Maybe the old content distracts the consumers from the new content ? And therefore, they prefer to push the consumers towards the new content ?
sytelus 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- reddalo 2y ago
  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.
- RobertRies 2y ago
  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.
  - soco 2y ago
    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)...
Eisenstein 2y ago
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.
Digit-Al 2y ago
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.
- michaelt 2y ago
  > 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.
  - sandwitches 2y ago
    [dead]
  - another2another 2y ago
    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.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      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.
dehrmann 2y ago
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.
Terretta 2y ago
> 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... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_TV
cyanydeez 2y ago
Its almost like capitalism has no lngterm direcfive and is unreliable.
deanishe 2y ago
> 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.

wiz21c 2y ago

Maybe the old content distracts the consumers from the new content ? And therefore, they prefer to push the consumers towards the new content ?

sytelus 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
reddalo 2y ago
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.
RobertRies 2y ago
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.
- soco 2y ago
  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)...

Eisenstein 2y ago

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.

Digit-Al 2y ago

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.

michaelt 2y ago
> 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.
- sandwitches 2y ago
  [dead]
- another2another 2y ago
  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.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    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.

dehrmann 2y ago

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.

Terretta 2y ago

> 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... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_TV

cyanydeez 2y ago

Its almost like capitalism has no lngterm direcfive and is unreliable.

deanishe 2y ago

> 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.