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The Shutting Down of FilmStruck and the False Promise of Streaming Classics (newyorker.com) 125

Posted by msmash from the looking-back dept.
The FilmStruck indie, arthouse and classic film subscription-streaming service will shut down next month, Turner and Warner Bros. Digital Networks announced this week. The New Yorker's film critic Richard Brody writes: The site isn't accepting any new subscribers, and it's a good bet that it won't be adding films, either. In the year and a half that I've been offering recommendations here of movies to stream, FilmStruck titles have featured prominently. One could keep busy, happy, and cinematically sustained for a long time on the sole basis of FilmStruck movies, and all the more so with the inclusion of movies from Turner Classic Movies. (The movie diet wouldn't be an entirely balanced one: the site does poorly with such domains as American independent filmmaking, African cinema, and the past forty years of film history. Its over-all flaw is its reliance on recognized classics: the programming of the site is more responsive than it is proactive, and it might have been improved by more personalized, idiosyncratic selections that would have made it more like a permanent online film festival.)

The site instead offered various modes of promotional outreach. Some, such as essays, and some home-produced videos, were significant works in themselves, but the site over all diluted its offerings with a home page of diversions and distractions that felt like a tawdry sampling of multiplex ballyhoo raising an unwelcome racket amid the art-house tranquillity. That conspicuously commercial waiting room to the classic-cinema library suggests the culture clash at the heart of the enterprise, the one that arises from its odd original fusion of Criterion with TCM, which was then a part of Time Warner -- and which foreshadowed its doom. That air of doom arises from more than the inherent conflicts of the high-culture outpost and the mass-market colossus. Slate's arts and culture critic Joanna Scutts writes: FilmStruck did not care who you were: It set out to teach you something new, not just to feed you more helpings of what you already know you like. It employed a team of smart women and brought in directors like Barry Jenkins to record short, passionate introductions to films they loved. Its personality shone through tightly curated collections, from a timely gathering of all the previous incarnations of A Star Is Born, to a larger batch of Japanese horror titles, to deep dives into a particular director or cinematographer. It offered up inventive double-feature pairings and led you through its extensive archives in ways that were creative, cheeky, thought-provoking, and unpretentious. It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men. That kind of personality, that kind of discoverability, that kind of curation, can't be replicated by an algorithm. It takes time, money, and effort. It takes thought and education. It takes human beings.
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The Shutting Down of FilmStruck and the False Promise of Streaming Classics More

The Shutting Down of FilmStruck and the False Promise of Streaming Classics

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  • EXCLUSIVE (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28, 2018 @11:09PM (#57552793)

    "It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men"

    WHO CLAIMS THIS?

    • Tells You Their Priorities (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @11:32PM (#57552867)
      Obsession with skin color is a red flag, and probably means they're willing to sacrifice quality to satisfy it. It's very likely that nothing of value was lost here.

    • A few women and the overwhelmingly young white bearded men who champion them.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 )

      "It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men"

      WHO CLAIMS THIS?

      People who hate white men and want to downplay their accomplishments in any field, excise them from history, and steal any power they have for themselves?

      Just a guess.

      • People who hate white men and want to downplay their accomplishments in any field, excise them from history, and steal any power they have for themselves?

        It's sad too really.

        I mean, it *was* largely a bunch of white guys that brought about western culture, economics, industry and technology and societies that we all live in and enjoy today.

        But I'm sure we'll eventually go all 1984 and rewrite them all out of history somehow, as that it just isn't popular today to acknowledge that fact.

        • it *was* largely a bunch of white guys that brought about western culture, economics, industry and technology and societies

          Well sure, when you enslave, kill, invade, repress, marginalise, and otherwise disempower everyone who isn't a white guy, that does rather leave the pitch open for the white guys to dominate!

    • "It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men"

      WHO CLAIMS THIS?

      I thought the same thing when I read this. I would venture to guess that of the people who frequent art houses and frequently watch classic films, the gender is predominately female (or females dragging their males along for the ride) but saying "passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to women" doesn't gain you any points in today's society.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by west ( 39918 )

      > WHO CLAIMS THIS?

      Not certain whose claiming it, but I will say that almost every explainer I've watched (not a classic fan, but I watch occasionally), is an old white man, as am I.

      Not too surprising, since "authorities" such as would make it to air today are likely those who started 40 years ago, when things were much less diverse.

      It's only recently that we've started to care that authorities at least sort of match the audience demographically. This causes some discomfort as doing so requires fracturin

    • Just your typical SJW, is who.

  • Too much video too little time (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I haven't even finished watching "Black Mirror" on Netflix, or "The Motorhome Experiment" on Youtube, or any of the movies I have waiting to watch. I have video games that I bought, still in their shrink wrap because I didn't have time to play them. I always mean to go back to that excellent restaurant I ate at, but it will probably go out of business before I find the time to return to it. I'll probably end up watching the Incredibles 2 in some flight on a tiny screen in the back of the seat in front.

    Too m

  • In the long run, all streaming is ephemeral (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @11:16PM (#57552823)

    This really goes to show the weakness of streaming. Sometimes a company is streaming exactly what you want, and owns the content - but will just decide to shut down that access anyway because they don't see quite enough profit in it.

    That is why, even though it seems like madness these days, I still prefer to buy a handful of movies I really want to see again off and on.

    You can even imagine some distant future where a corporate AI conglomerate that takes over Netflix vanishes some Netflix original content you enjoyed, for some inscrutable reason...

    • Re:In the long run, all streaming is ephemeral (Score:5, Insightful)

      by grep -v '.*' * ( 780312 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @12:12AM (#57552995)

      You can even imagine some distant future where a corporate AI conglomerate that takes over Netflix vanishes some Netflix original content you enjoyed, for some inscrutable reason...

      I'll be zapped for this, but fine: Disney and The Song of the South. Findable, but basically gone. I understand Disney bought all of the available copies and buried it, intending for it never to be released again. Fantasia? There are a couple of Framing Improvements in the current release. And we won't even talk about the "improvements" to Star Wars from the original 1977? release. (Han shot first. And: Star Trek TMP3: Keep Spock Dead.)

      Also, there are some cartoons which I remember fondly which are now "culturally insensitive". I thought cartoons were supposed to be a caricature of reality. I loved the two hopping minor birds and the little boy always chasing them. (AKA the Coyote?)

      My mom loved Little Black Sambo -- she though he was so ingenious climbing the tree and letting the tigers turn to butter.

      Oh, and there's Polock jokes (I told one today as a matter of fact), there's Blond Jokes which I used to collect (Do you know why a Blond Woman had bruises by her belly button? Gurer ner Oybaq zra, gbb.) and Black and White and Asian and Eskimo and English and American jokes as well.

      In an old popular Nature/Science show, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, I understand JC used cattle-prods and such to make the animals do what he wanted on demand for the camera. I understand he thought it was better to coerce a few animals in order for people to understand the species in general. Now-a-days those shows would probably be burned as heresy. Oh, and if I got it right here, That Terrible Evil Person is also the inventor of scuba, as in underwater scuba gear.

      Having things online is extremely handy. But like all important things, you need multiple copies in your possession or you DON'T actually have them.

      • I don't know why you think you would be zapped, those are all excellent examples (especially Song of the South!).

        A company has the right and means to bury something if they so choose, but if you have a real copy yourself you can play (and better duplicate to back up) then future waves of madness hold little power over your entertainment.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Calydor ( 739835 )

        People don't understand caricatures anymore, and I am not sure what happened to change that. Now everything is taken as literal truth, offhand remarks are thought to have been planned and meticulously worded over the course of years with no possibility of using imprecise words or terms.

        It is the Age of Offense, where people seem to only be truly happy if they've discovered at least two new ways of being offended every day.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          People don't understand caricatures anymore, and I am not sure what happened to change that. Now everything is taken as literal truth, offhand remarks are thought to have been planned and meticulously worded over the course of years with no possibility of using imprecise words or terms.

          It is the Age of Offense, where people seem to only be truly happy if they've discovered at least two new ways of being offended every day.

          People do, it's just that caricatures and other things like satire require thinking an

          • It's usually the nerd types that ignore context, think caricatures real, and let words get to them like a physical beating.

            • I say nerd types because that's how reddit and tumblr and most other internet spots see themselves. As more intelligent than others and usually overly aggressive toward mostly pointless things.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "Oh, and there's Polock jokes (I told one today as a matter of fact),"

        Do you know the origin of these? During WWI, it suddenly became not so popular to be German in the US. Looking at the records of Baby Names of that era, such names as Gertrude, Hilda, and Bertha plummeted in popularity. Percolating out of German-American resentment of being thought cruel, what with all of the raping of Belgian Nuns and the sinking of the Lusitania and all, were Polack and Hunkie/Honkie jokes. Germans may be cruel, but th

      • I'll be zapped for this, but fine: Disney and The Song of the South. Findable, but basically gone. I understand Disney bought all of the available copies and buried it, intending for it never to be released again. Fantasia? There are a couple of Framing Improvements in the current release.

        Not true about Song Of The South. The film exists. Disney actually restored it a few years ago. The reason you can't see it is that the restoration was shown to Bob Iger and he said something like his successor could put it out if he/she wanted to, but he wasn't going to touch it. But it is ready to go and could, in theory, come out in the future. For those who don't know, it doesn't even take place during the time of slavery (it's set in the 1870s or 1880s) but it's become a victim to white people who

        • And yet only a few years ago I saw Birth Of A Nation on DVD, with a box cover showing a Klansman on a horse, on the shelves of a Best Buy.

          And let's not forget Cartoon Network. They supposedly had a shelf section which was labeled, "Never to be broadcasted."

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I typed " Gurer ner Oybaq zra, gbb" into Google translate thinking it might detect rot13 (it doesn't). Instead, it detected Bengali, with the translation "Grab the web of molasses, ga". No idea where the "ga" came from.

  • If there's a lesson to be learned here... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trudyscousin ( 258684 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @11:18PM (#57552825)

    ...it's to buy and own your own media.

    Don't misunderstand me. This service sounds like something to which I'd have subscribed, had I known about it. I have no idea why the service shut down, but you can bet it was due to licensing arrangements and the like. All you know is that you are now deprived of something valuable.

    I know that streaming is the shit right now, and that guys like me who still buy audio and video discs and run their own home media servers are viewed as retrogrades. On the other hand, I'm not subject to the caprices of those who run those services, or those who cause those services to be shut down. I get to watch La Jetee any time I like.

    Here's hoping FilmStruck comes back, or something even better replaces it.

    • Re:If there's a lesson to be learned here... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @12:25AM (#57553043)

      I’m like you - if I like a movie enough that I’ll want to see it again, I buy it. And if I’d have known about this service, I’d certainly have subscribed. But overall the golden age of movie access is over.

      For a number of years, Netflix was the perfect service for us. We put together a queue of all the movies that we wanted to watch, and Netflix pretty much had them all on DVD. We kept plugging away at the queue, which despite our best efforts somehow managed to keep growing as we added new releases and whatnot. 99% of the time we’d watch one of the movies, and whether we liked it or not, had no plans to watch it again. The other 1% we might buy right away, or it might get added to a birthday or Christmas list.

      But as Netflix has moved on to streaming and then to focusing on their own content, their catalog has degraded horribly. Seems like a quarter of our DVD queue is “long wait” or “availability unknown”. Our streaming queue is less than half what it was three years ago. I can’t remember the last time we added something to the queue. We are still subscribed mainly because my wife won’t agree to stop... but she doesn’t seem to watch much either.

      Anyway, I realize that’s all tangential at best to this story, except to again demonstrate that the initial promise of the internet to us movie lovers has mostly fizzled out - this is just another example. Maybe it’s what the old guys running the studios had planned, all along.

      • It is indeed interesting that streaming and the promise of the internet has actually reduced the availability of legal content. The video store had more than Netflix.

        I am surprised that the independents do not get together and create a site.

        • Well you can still buy streams from ITunes or Amazon Video, it just doesn't seem like a good value for $2 or $4 when you pay $7 for a month of streaming the free stuff, whereas that would've been fine for a rental back in the day. Perception of the economics has changed.

        • The video store had more than Netflix.

          I am surprised that the independents do not get together and create a site.

          There's a few problems going on:

          -Content creators are deciding they want a larger piece of the pie, and pulling content from Netflix with the hope that people will spend another $10 per month on another video streaming service. I want to spend it for all my content, I'm not going to pay $10/month for one show I want to watch.

          -At Blockbuster I could wander the aisles in different categories and see the entire selection. With Netflix, even though it claims to have a catalog of ~4000 movies and ~1000 TV shows,

      • But as Netflix has moved on to streaming and then to focusing on their own content, their catalog has degraded horribly. Seems like a quarter of our DVD queue is “long wait” or “availability unknown”. Our streaming queue is less than half what it was three years ago. I can’t remember the last time we added something to the queue. We are still subscribed mainly because my wife won’t agree to stop... but she doesn’t seem to watch much either.

        Anyway, I realize that’s all tangential at best to this story, except to again demonstrate that the initial promise of the internet to us movie lovers has mostly fizzled out - this is just another example. Maybe it’s what the old guys running the studios had planned, all along.

        You might want to check Amazon. Even sticking to what's included in Prime, it's a vast quirky catalog, with more than I could ever watch.

    • I know that streaming is the shit right now, and that guys like me who still buy audio and video discs and run their own home media servers are viewed as retrogrades.

      I just finished setting up a NAS/DLNA server for my home. Spent close to two months ripping my entire CD and DVD collections, and "acquiring" everything else that I had bought on digital or have on VHS/vinyl, (which isn't so hard in the case of music, which is downloadable DRM-free from Apple and Amazon, where I bought a fair amount of stuff. The movies, well, that was different.)

      Going forward, I'm planning on either buying physical CDs, or more likely, DRM-free downloadables for music, and the "Disc+Digita

      • I just finished setting up a NAS/DLNA server for my home.

        We’ve got an old 2006 MacBook Pro we use for this purpose. It doesn’t take much horsepower to stream video, and it sure makes finding the movie you want to watch a lot easier when you don’t have to dig through a couple hundred DVD/Blu-Ray cases sitting on a shelf somewhere!

  • Who? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ChoGGi ( 522069 ) <slashdot@ch[ ]i.org ['ogg' in gap]> on Sunday October 28, 2018 @11:24PM (#57552839) Homepage

    They had better advertising when closing down then any other time, I probably would've signed up if I'd known.

    • Being an exclusive hipster service nobody has heard of grants more status than allowing in the unwashed masses.

  • "It employed a team of smart women" (Score:3, Funny)

    by bistromath007 ( 1253428 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @12:18AM (#57553019)
    I've never even heard of it before today, but I still know exactly what happened to it.

    • Re:"It employed a team of smart women" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @03:04AM (#57553365) Homepage
      I've never heard of it either, which is almost certainly exactly why it is now folding, regardless of the makeup of its leadership team. Still, that's a really crap turn of phrase from Joanna Scutts at Slate, who probably needs to either think a little more about what she's writing or get a better editor. Clearly, since the company is apparently folding, these "smart women" can't actually have been all that smart since they failed to come up with a sustainable business model, because I highly doubt that she's suggesting the alternative; that even a group of the smartest of women are not actually capable of running a successful company.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by elrous0 ( 869638 )

        I highly doubt that she's suggesting the alternative; that even a group of the smartest of women are not actually capable of running a successful company.

        Nope. She'll just blame the evil white male patriarchy for any failings.

      • Why can't a professional woman over 30 play hide and seek?

        Because nobody will look for her.

  • (The movie diet wouldn't be an entirely balanced one: the site does poorly with such domains as American independent filmmaking, African cinema, and the past forty years of film history. Its over-all flaw is its reliance on recognized classics: the programming of the site is more responsive than it is proactive, and it might have been improved by more personalized, idiosyncratic selections that would have made it more like a permanent online film festival.)

    Well, Richard, why don't you start up your own fuck

  • Horrible marketing (Score:3)

    by indytx ( 825419 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @06:27AM (#57553889)

    Granted, I spend zero time looking for the next cool thing, but I had never heard of this service before, and I probably would have subscribed had I known about it. My kids are too young to watch some of my favorite movies from when I was a child, but so many of the classics that used to be shown on Turner Classic Movies are appropriate for many ages, and those films are not available on Netflix or Amazon. Looking at the comments, the management completely missed an entire category of film buffs. More "old white men" subscribing to the service might have kept it afloat. I bet they had interesting advertising algorithms.

    • They probably did something silly and advertised it on CBS reruns of Big Bang Theory instead of social media. Between not watching broadcast TV or listening to broadcast radio, using ad blockers and subscribing to advertising-free streaming sources, you probably need a deft hand to advertise this sort of thing to the target audience anyway, and deep pockets for their word of mouth to get you to critical mass.

  • I resent (Score:2, Troll)

    by Sqreater ( 895148 )
    I resent the use of the phrase "old white men" - a tryptych of abuse- to describe something you don't like. Hyper-liberal women really push women's privilege when they use this odious combination to describe men. They don't expect to be taken as hypocrites.

  • It employed a team of smart women

    It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men.

    Gee, with an approach like that, how could it fail????

  • AT&T and Warner Bros also pulled the plug on a service called DramaFever that showed Korean dramas without any warning what so ever. When I found out they shut down that service, I was so upset! That was my escape from everyday life. Those scumbags have gained my animosity and I won't be buying or watching anything from them.

  • It made what could have been an article about streaming services, how they are managed and advertised, became a SJW discussion.

  • Old guy here, I have seen pretty much every old movie so there's not much missing for me. No need to watch Ben Hur or Singing In The Rain three times a month. Now what would interest me are old movies ***rarely*** shown if any. If want to watch Diana Dors and Mamie Van Doren movies, probably buy the DVD. Trudyscousin posted about buy your own discs which many perceive as retrogrades but with your own media you have control.

    Regarding old movies, back in the 1950s there were several major movie studios and

    • As an old white guy I can say I enjoyed watching movies from around the world and that spanned the generations. I had at least 1 more year of serious mining of their collection, maybe longer as they kept adding new stuff.

      As for buying watching movies, I found I don't watch many movies more than one or twice. Some I do, but those are definitely the minority. FilmStruck was a great resource. I hope someone else will pick up the banner once they are gone!

  • The real reason it's shutting down because Hollywood doesn't want the new generations to see the old movies in order to compare them to the crap the studios put out today.

  • Granted, I spend zero time looking for the next cool thing, but I had never heard of this service before, and I probably would have subscribed had I known about it. My kids are too young to watch some of my favorite movies from http://trichejeuxmobiles.onlin... [trichejeuxmobiles.online]

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