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Television Businesses

TV's Golden Era Proved Costly To Streamers (wsj.com) 111

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Consumers are winning from the streaming revolution but across most of Hollywood, the businesses churning out TV and movies are losing. From a report: Services such as Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+ and Max have become the default entertainment options for homes across America rather than cable, saving many consumers money. For the titans of Hollywood, that shift has been costly. Traditional media and entertainment companies have reported losses of more than $20 billion combined since early 2020 on their direct-to-consumer streaming businesses. Netflix, which brings in profits, is an exception, but the rest of the industry is wondering: While consumers love streaming, is it actually a good business?

Investors now care about profitability rather than growth, a change that makes finding new revenue streams and retaining customers critical. Studios that for years were able to splurge on content to feed viewers' insatiable appetite for new shows and films now must pull back to make the math work. The ad market is weakening, many companies have laid off staff to save money and Hollywood writers are on strike. Market values for Paramount Global, Comcast, Walt Disney and Netflix are down more than $280 billion combined since the end of 2020. Warner Bros. Discovery is worth about half of its total value since its 2022 trading debut as a combined company. The declines have come after many of the stocks rose during the early part of the pandemic, when consumers were stuck at home and hungry for entertainment.
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TV's Golden Era Proved Costly To Streamers More

TV's Golden Era Proved Costly To Streamers

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  • Surprised they didnt see this coming, we all did. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by steveinaccounting ( 6597448 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @08:04AM (#63658208)
    Everyone said it from the start, no one wants 16 streaming platforms with different content on them. We all want all the content in one monthly subscription. Despite this Hollywood decided to split the content across different places and now cannot understand why no one wants to subscribe. Sometimes it is amazing how much money those people get paid to make such obviously bad decisions.

    • Re:Surprised they didnt see this coming, we all di (Score:4, Insightful)

      by battingly ( 5065477 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @08:12AM (#63658220)
      Self delusion is a powerful force. They all saw it as: Consumers will pay for one more streaming service above Netflix and that one streaming service will be us.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Article is paywalled (Score:4, Insightful)

        by HBI ( 10338492 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @08:37AM (#63658294)

        Which actually is poignant, because the majority of content on streamers is paywalled, and if you don't have some compelling reason to subscribe to see it, it might as well not exist. So, similar to the fashion that I won't pay for a WSJ subscription to read this article, I won't pay for 10+ streaming services for content where I have no idea whether it is worthwhile.

        Let's go back to the 90s. The reason people watched Seinfeld was to talk about it at work the next day. Those who didn't watch were shamed into it unless they were incredibly resistant to peer pressure (me). I have not even watched a whole episode of the show and I know who the Soup Nazi is, etc. Now imagine you were running the show on a streaming platform today. It would be a total fail, you'd have a hard time aggregating the audience to make it popular. Moreover, modern shows don't become cultural icons because they are seen by a tiny sliver of the entire population.

        On a more personal note, I was on a TLC reality show back in 2016. My narc ex-wife was insistent on it, and I went along rather than getting divorced at that time. I was concerned about this because I didn't want to be recognized in the street, it doesn't work well with my job. I need not have worried - only two people ever did. If I told you the name, you'd probably know the production company and their prior record, at least. The slivers are even tinier now.

        • Netflix reportedly paid more than $500 million for Seinfeld. So a good show will still be valuable in a diversified streaming market.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

            You missed his point completely. Read his comment again.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nazrhyn ( 906126 )
            I think the point is that it was probably only worth that much because of the history -- its origins in an era where a single TV show can become a "cultural icon", like HBI said.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by acroyear ( 5882 )

          "The reason people watched Seinfeld was to talk about it at work the next day."

          I noted that this was a problem with Netflix's "dump a season at once" philosophy, contrasted with the MCU and Star Trek weekly releases.

          When there's a weekly release, cliffhangers matter. Making predictions matters. Talking about it matters. We're all on the same page, having seen the last, and making predictions on what happens next. For Star Trek and MCU (and others), it has grown an entire market of youtube channels.

          But the b

      • ""We all want to pay $10 a month and see all movies ever made", which was never really going to fly, was it."

        Why not? Those movies have already been made and are just metaphorically sitting on a shelf somewhere earning zero revenue. Making some money is better than making no money and the overhead for running a streaming service should be a known quantity by now. I think maybe the problem is the salaries at the exec level plus the need for streaming revenue to offset the money they're hemorraghing everywh

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HBI ( 10338492 )

          Learn about residuals. [wrapbook.com]

          Just because you think it's worth X doesn't mean others do. This kind of dichotomy between perceived value of a product is what caused all the issues with music licensing over the last 25 years. Lawsuits, convictions and fundraisers all happened, and now we are in something of an agreement as to the value. Do not assume this will be any less painful.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Train0987 ( 1059246 )

            Residuals are a percentage of profit. They will never exceed the revenue generated so any revenue is still better than no revenue. They'll still make more money after paying residuals on a content that is generating revenue than by shelving that content and generating no revenue. Their other costs must be the problem.

          • Just because you think it's worth X doesn't mean others do.

            Nope. But just because I think it's not worth your X means I don't buy it.

            Shocking idea, that someone might, just might, be able to live without your content. I guess I must be a dirty, dirty pirate because the mere idea that I can live without your crap is outlandish.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by HBI ( 10338492 )

              I'm not disagreeing with what will happen, and the producers of this material are going to fight tooth and nail for their valuation until someone proposes a compromise solution that results in a constant revenue stream.

              It's the way the world works.

              • There simply isn't gonna be a compromise. They will have to produce a product that is worth the asking money. Simple as that. And no, sorry, paying 20 bucks per streaming service, only to then find out that any actually good content is behind a second paywall, additional fees, extra "rental fees" and whatever other shit they come up with is not going to convince me.

                It may be good enough for others. It's not for me. I can entertain myself, and if everything fails, I have a lot of books that I still haven't r

        • Other than film history buffs, I don't think that is actually a very big draw. The reason that upstart streamers like Apple, Amazon and Netflix can compete against legacy studios with 100+ years of back catalog like Disney, Paramount and Universal is that most people only care about new releases.

          • I think the biggest problem is these tech companies want to become studios themselves and produce original content of their own. That's where the big money is being lit on fire.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            Which i think speaks to huge failure to market those back catalogs. People care about new releases because for the most part that is what their friends are talking about.

            Now certain genres like disaster, action, etc *might* suffer to some degree for not playing to current audiences as well because of technical advances in special effects and such. However even going back near 40 years.

            Would Blade Runner, Indiana Jones and the *, Star Trek II Wrath of Khan, Days of Thunder, Top Gun, Back to the Future *, .

            • >>How to make old titles "buzzy" enough to get new audiences to watch them is certainly a challenge but it really ought to be license to practically PRINT MONEY for some of these studios if they could solve that.

              I think they are trying to do that (sort of) with all the remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, etc. Unfortunately, they think the only value in their old properties is the brand recognition and not the actual films themselves.

        • Re:Surprised they didnt see this coming, we all di (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @10:56AM (#63658806) Journal

          Well, that was exactly the sales pitch to the studios from Netflix 10 years ago: you have all this content, and you have no way to continue getting money from it other than late night cable reruns that 20,000 people are watching. Netflix would absorb the cost to develop and maintain the streaming platform while making payments to the studios for access to the catalog.

          Then the studios got arrogant when they saw Netflix making money, not realizing the asychronisity Netflix was exploiting: they only needed to build and maintain the platform once and if they did it right, they could scale content without a parallel scaling of distribution costs.

          Now all the content creators are having to bear their own streaming costs while still paying for the content production, and having to produce so much more content in order to keep people subscribed. Netflix is still doing fine because they still have a good (not great) cross-section of other peoples' stuff as well as their own. Everyone else is basically saying "we might have made a mistake here" after spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

          Honestly, Amazon is probably doing the best here because there is incentive to not cancel due to all the other benefits of an annualized Prime membership - people don't want to lose the fast free shipping. The video service is seen as a value-add perk, rather than the thing you're paying for.

          • As I mentioned earlier further down the page I suspect a big part of the problem is these platforms trying to create their own original content instead of just being distributors of other studio's content.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jjhall ( 555562 )

          I think you're spot on. I would even say that value could be a bit higher, but the sentiment is the same. Netflix was absolutely awesome at first because they had such a huge back catalog of movies, and they were adding newer releases all the time. I think the whole industry had it about right when it came to movies. Theater releases at full prices for X time. Release to Redbox and rental stores for a short time, then release to Netflix. Not everyone wants to pay $30 to see a movie in a theater, so th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I think the next evolution in streaming is consolidation back to your $50+/month service. After all, we already see it happening with Warner-Discovery and a few others. The small services will be gobbled up and the streaming prices increased to match.

        At the same time, I forsee monthly prices increasing sharply, likely to the point where companies will offer very attractive annual rates. They'll do this to block hoppers (those who subscribe for a month or two then move to another service) because they'll off

        • They're already trying to kill "hoppers" with releasing a series one episode at a time, as if we're all back in the 1990s waiting for Thursday night to see what happens next after last week's cliffhanger.

          Except that after they've been released, they're still available. So if you don't absolutely have to watch it the instant it becomes available (which is true of about 99.99% of content that isn't a live event), you just wait a month or two and binge it, and then cancel anyway. It's just a time shift, and

        • If they want people to stop hopping, they should stop making it attractive. Right now, the sensible thing is to sub for a month, binge watch the 10-15 episodes of a show you're interested in that came out since last year and cancel for the rest of the year.

      • We get our cheap content from overseas like everything else, that's how we have streaming for less than the cost of basic cable. Netflix bought the rights to "Money Heist/La Casa de Papel" for $2 after its first season for an extreme example of opportunistic overseas shopping by Netflix. Hollywood has priced themselves out of business. Most of what I watch on Netflix is not made in the US.

      • Here's the thing though:
        - yes, people are switching to streaming.
        - no, they are not staying with a particular streaming platform.

        People will give Disney $10 this month, watch the 3 shows they give a crap about, and then cancel and give Paramount+ the $10 next month to catch up on the 2 shows they give a crap about, then the $10 goes to HBO the month after that.

        The balkanization of content has created an opportunity for a terrible customer experience which has each household / customer going through the canc

      • Everyone said it from the start, no one wants 16 streaming platforms with different content on them. We all want all the content in one monthly subscription.

        To be fair, what we said was "We all want to pay $10 a month and see all movies ever made", which was never really going to fly, was it.

        Why wouldn't that fly? We could get every movie ever made for $10 month with the Netflix disc service. Shouldn't the streaming equivalent of that be _less_ expensive?

        • You donâ(TM)t remember UltraViolet? Hollywood Blu-ray Disc pricing for a movie download ($25) or $10-15 to stream it for a limited time. That didnâ(TM)t fly, did it, and all the vendors shutdown their stores with the digital lockers that stored your keys to unlock the DRM. I attended some of the DECE meetings and it was clear they were already too late and too expensive with people used to easily pirating downloads or using other cheap and convenient means. These people are so out of touch wit

      • To be fair, what we said was "We all want to pay $10 a month and see all movies ever made", which was never really going to fly, was it. If it currently costs $50-100 a month to supply the "basic cable" tier (the original one, that includes things like USA and Discovery in their original forms, not the Comcastic "Locals and shopping channels" definition), how is the industry going to supply the same thing - more than the same thing - over the Internet where bandwidth costs money - for a fifth of that? Hollywood is making money, but it's not making 400% profits.

        that $50-$100 per month for the "basic cable" also includes lots of crap channels that nobody wanted or watches. Not unlike the crap streaming channels that nobody watches. The economics of basic cable are really messed up with lots of ways for cable and content executives to steal money from customers and content producers.

        And if we change our demand to "We don't mind how much you charge, we want all the content in one monthly subscription", then things get ugly. And, in fact, if it's a choice between a single $60-100 a month service with "everything", and a collection of different services charging $5-15 a month each, I think most of us would prefer the latter, as it's easier to fit how we stream to our own budgets.

        don't forget there is an upper cap on how much content you can consume. I think we spend something on the order of 8-10 hours a week which is less than I spent grazing cable until my ta

    • They're fighting with each other for growth market dominance. I guess they've reached saturation & now there's an economic slow-down in real terms, i.e. for you & me. Let the belt tightening begin, shrinkage for some & some degree of consolidation. Wouldn't be surprised to see Netflix & Disney buying up a few failing competitors to increase their market share & dominance in the not-too-distant future. With that will come cutbacks in spending on content.

      Enjoy the competitively good qua

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by CohibaVancouver ( 864662 )

      Everyone said it from the start, no one wants 16 streaming platforms with different content on them. We all want all the content in one monthly subscription.

      Every time I read this (or a variation of this) I have to chuckle.

      I'm GenX - I'm old enough to remember the 90s, when everyone was complaining that the cable companies bundled channels together. If you wanted TBS, you also had to get TNT and A&E in a bundle.

      "Let me buy channels a la carte!" people would cry.

      Fast-forward 30 years and the

      • Re: Surprised they didnt see this coming, we all d (Score:5, Insightful)

        by CrappySnackPlane ( 7852536 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @09:37AM (#63658498)

        But you're comparing apples with apple juice. People wanted to pay $1.99/month for TBS. They didn't (and don't) want to pay $19.99/month for the Ted Turner Package including TBS, TNT, TCM, and the Turner Shopping Network and the Turner Atheist Jesus Televangelism Network.

        You're GenX, you remember how cable worked. You had a $49.99/month Basic package that was basically motel cable - networks, CNN, News8, USA, ESPN, mayyyybe MTV and Nickelodeon towards the end of the 90s. Then you had an $79.99/month package that would throw in the semi-premiums like ESPN2, MTV2, TV Land, History Channel, FX and so on. Then there was the final tier where you'd get your HBO and Skinimax and Starz.

        Sports fans didn't want to pay an extra $30 for a bunch of channels they didn't give a shit about plus ESPN2. Old fogies didn't want to pay an extra $30 for a bunch of channels they didn't give a shit about plus TV Land. And fucking nobody wanted to pay a single penny extra for Starz.

        People want the option to add a bit of pepper on their french fries. They resent having to buy a whole shaker. This should be obvious, and it should be equally obvious how the current situation isn't offering to give people a bit of pepper with their Netflix. It's just a bunch of differently-colored shakers with differently-colored peppercorns inside.

        • People wanted to pay $1.99/month for TBS.

          They wanted to pay around $4 per month in 1990, which is equivalent to $9 today. The cheapest Netflix package is $8 per month today.

      • Fast-forward 30 years and the streaming providers are a la carte and people are screaming "Let me just pay one price!"

        You are confusing 'one price' with 'one platform'. We wanted our one cable provider to allow us to pick and pay for just the channels we wanted. Then we could just turn on or TV and surf through the channels that we paid for. Easy, and for the right price.. But now, with the several streaming platforms, we have to keep looking around for the show/movie we want. It's ridiculous. I actually google 'stream (show/move) X' to see which of my various streaming platforms has the thing I want to watch, and ho

    • Agreed. They created this zero sum game, but as it turns out, no single service has all the content viewers want. The studios just tried to turn streaming back into cable TV, forcing everyone to buy subscriptions just like they used to have to buy packages. The networks and studios saw what Netflix was doing, in many cases with their content, and instead of finding a way to use a well-established and pretty functional platform, they decided they'd play the zero sum game, doubtless each one imagining that th

    • They did see this coming. It's a surprise to nobody. The whole strategy was to spend big on content to grow the subscriber base and win a position as one of the top streaming services. It may not have been clear exactly when the shift from growth to profit would be, but it should have been fairly predictable knowing number of cable subscribers before this all started as a likely long-term ceiling.

      My question is, what is the total revenue for streaming now, and what is the total spending? That will indic

      • You obviously have never run a major corporation. All $Billion-earning executives know that Profit is stage 3 and Growth is stage 1.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The problem is they believed us. The massive investment in content was because they all wanted to one of the few streaming services left standing.

      Thing is, because there are good shows on so many different platforms, people got used to switching subscriptions around regularly to catch them all. Too many platforms survived and now they are all struggling with retention as people subscribe for a month or two at a time.

      Now those idiots are cancelling good shows, while making it harder to watch them. Paramount

    • it has been that way all along, ever since tv began the executive morons, well convinced of their own brilliance, would move tv successful tv shows around to varying time slots, then when those same shows started to lose audience (because now they were opposite other well-loved shows) would then blame the show for that shrinking market share and cancel it, never once taking responsibility for killing it by moving it!

    • Oh, they saw it coming too. They just figured they would be one of the survivors, not realizing that all of their competition also thinks they would be one of the survivors.

      Some of them, if not all of them, will be wrong. And the only way to find out is for them to compete for our business. This article is basically an industry complaint that they have to actually try again, and they don't know how to after decades of churning out bullshit that people don't want to see, but they're gonna pay for it anywa

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hollywood decided to split the content across different places

      That's pretty much when I stopped watching most Hollywood, deciding to stick with Netflix which for me effectively became a foreign content aggregator. So it's subtitles all the way down, but there's still a decent selection for the amount of time spent viewing. I kept a DVD subscription for the occasional new release, but I guess that's no more.

  • As with so much related to the internet, over excited corporates threw money at projects without any real idea whether they would be profitable. To be fair, sometimes they were, but many were not. The good news is that the golden age has created some great stuff that wouldn't have got greenlit otherwise. The bad news is that it can't last, and there are going to be a lot of unneeded people in the production industry as a result. The really scary thing is that the Writers' Guild strike might trigger exactly

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jhoegl ( 638955 )
      They have been regurgitating old movies for the past 30 years.

      right now the industry is running the safety gauntlet, but lets review on what made streaming great

      Netflix took risks, found a few good new ones, and of course, some bad ones. But that is what brought people to the platform, not offering crap thats already been on TV.

      When you show things that are available everywhere, the draw is reduced.

      Netflix started playing the safety game, added ads, and started down the policy making of "we are

      • They have been regurgitating old movies for the past 30 years.
        right now the industry is running the safety gauntlet, but lets review on what made streaming great
        Netflix took risks, found a few good new ones, and of course, some bad ones. But that is what brought people to the platform, not offering crap thats already been on TV.

        I submit that, to extent, the opposite is also true.

        There were lots of people who were happy to use Netflix to leave Friends or The Office on in the background, but both went to Peacock. There were those who appreciated having a good number of Disney movies on the platform, but they ended up on D+. I was halfway through watching Star Trek DS9 on Netflix when it got moved to Paramount+. None of these are new or risky, but they were of value...but since all these companies wanted to cut the middleman, Netflix

  • Who wants to pay for 150 channels (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LondoMollari ( 172563 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @08:16AM (#63658228) Homepage

    of reality TV? I sure do not want to. This is exactly why I dropped my cable subscription two months ago and have not looked back once. Nearly $100 a month for garbage TV means I’ll put your TV lineup in the garbage where it belongs.

    • I had never been without cable nearly my entire life until 2014. I realized I was paying $165 per month to watch 3 channels a few hours a week and one of them was over the air. They announced that March they were raising the price ($175) after already raising it in January. I cut the cord that spring and never missed it. That's $19,000 to date assuming no additional semi-annual increases.
      • we did the same. We discovered that we were watching maybe 12 channels of the 2000+ that our subscription offered, a short discussion with our cable provider about getting JUST those 12 - 15 channels and they said the only way was via the $140/month subscription we had... so we cut them out, got Disney+, Paramount +, and a couple of others and now spend about $100/month, but the only stuff we have is the actual stuff we want to watch (Disclaimer, I already had Prime and kept it for other reasons, so I am no

    • of reality TV?

      Literally no one here is talking about reality TV or cable TV other than you. The topic of discussion is the TV/movie companies who entered the streaming business and churned out garbage serial shows and movies like Star Trek Picard, and Disney's Lightyear, shows that were supposed to be headlines to sell streaming subscription turned out not only to lose money but to not raise streaming revenue either.

      • Yeah, because there's no releases of shitty reality [netflix.com] TV [netflix.com] to streamers that generate millions in revenue for comparatively low production budgets to scripted drama or shows casting big name stars.

        Reality TV is very much in the conversation, even if you or I don't watch it, because there's millions of people that do.

        • No it's not. Most people don't watch that shit, and companies do not spend lots of money making it. They are by definition fillers, borderline non-content that neither shows up in a list of things people watch, nor does it show up as more than a rounding error on expenditure in the content that is *actually being discussed here*.

          We get it, no one likes reality TV. But this isn't the place to rant against it because again, this is literally not what the article is about.

  • apart from being an early mover in the industry and its brand name, does not come from major shows. From my experience, compared to all other streaming services, it has the best portfolio of reality TV that serves all kinds of niches. Baking contests, home improvement, douchebag drama, Arctic expeditions, Storage auctions, it has it all. I don't know what percentage of viewership goes to those but I feel it is a crucial part of it being profitable. While big shows cost 100s of millions of dollars to produce

  • Traditional media and entertainment companies have reported losses of more than $20 billion...

    TL;DR - No loss here, just choosing the right vendor. No $20 billion loss either to the investors. The content owners are being smarter.

    The streaming services are all owned by the same companies that had the content to begin with. They'er just releasing it in ways that help them not pay others. Their investorrs are happy.

    There's no "loss" here. If you can sell your goods and deliver them one way vs another way and that saves you money, that's not a "loss" but a refactoring of how we do business. Amazo

  • Because they have a lot of debt [fool.com]. While most of that was financed under low interest rates, Netflix is going to have to pay that down aggressively or risk refinancing in unfavorable credit conditions at some point.

    This is why the whole '"game pass" idea is likely to fail as well. Realistically, this model will probably only thrive in music in the long run because most professional musicians use professional recordings as a way to sell concerts and merch.

  • A site that asks what I watch or want to watch and it then provides the cable-TV and streaming services that match my viewing wants plus the packages I need to subscribe to and pricing?

    I understand the confusopoly [wikipedia.org] is designed to make this difficult. Maybe ChatGPT can help.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )

      A site that asks what I watch or want to watch and it then provides the cable-TV and streaming services that match my viewing wants plus the packages I need to subscribe to and pricing?

      I use JustWatch [justwatch.com] to figure out if such-and-such show is available on this-or-that service. (They're a metasearch: searching the services' searches. This allows them to keep track of when shows get added/dropped from a service.) What you'll get for results is which services have the show, whether available to stream (i.e.,

  • So for cable, I pay $80 a month for 200 channels who I assume get a small percentage of that money. Then I get ads. With streaming TV I'm paying $6-20 directly to the company streaming. Some of those still show ads. It seems like they should be making more money than they were on cable.

  • Doctorow's "Enshitification Cycle" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by neBelcnU ( 663059 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @08:54AM (#63658340) Journal

    "...Investors now care about profitability rather than growth..."
    This is merely the end-stage of Cory Doctorow's Enshitification Cycle of business:
    First, the company blows money on attracting customers, at the expense of vendors/suppliers and shareholders.
    Then it blows money attracting vendors/suppliers. at the expense of customers and shareholders.
    Finally, the permanent stage is paying shareholders at the expense of customers and vendors/suppliers.

    Hollywood, and specifically, streaming Hollywood has simply reached the final stage. Praise* shareholders, amen.

    *Praise, in the form of money.

  • When streaming services take off a show, and pirates haven't bothered to rip it, the show becomes lost if no one at the company sells the rights to another and the hard drives containing the films are deleted (most tv shows are digital now with no film backups now). This also happens when a show is retrospectively is declared not woke anymore (Just like you can't call Sir Topham Hatt the Fat Controller Anymore). Unlike in the previous eras where we have physical media back ups, films can be lost forever and

  • The mistake was building their own platforms (Score:3)

    by juancn ( 596002 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @09:26AM (#63658448) Homepage
    The should have never built streaming services, they should have negotiated licensing deals with Netflix for example. The infrastructure costs are huge and non-trivial.
    • It isn't marketed that way to the media services or other businesses, though, AWS and Azure do everything for you and just send you the (very high) bill!

    • Most of them DID negotiate licensing deals with Netflix, but then they turned around and created their own services after they felt they had learned enough about the business from their time with Netflix.

      They were universally wrong.

      What they didn't (and couldn't) learn previously (since it wasn't happening yet) was what an uphill battle it would be to retain steady customers in a market where everyone and their mom had their own streaming service. It was only possible for Netflix because they had the majori

    • They already did. Then they got greedy and wanted to cut out the middle man and stream it themselves. You used to be able to get most content from netflix for a single subscription. Then the studios pulled their collections into their own paywalled gardens and expected that customers were going to pay for a dozen different streaming services. Now customers just subscribe to one for a couple months, get their fill of that studios content that they want, cancel the sub and move on to another platform. wash ri

  • Studio Greed Did This (Score:3)

    by skogs ( 628589 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @09:30AM (#63658464) Journal

    They saw Netflix making some money off their old shows. Then they wanted more than what Netflix was paying them so they built their own.
    Now Netflix has less content and therefore less value.
    Also, when restricted to the studios' own catalog, they have significantly less value.

    What used to be a win-win-win
    (netflix makes money, studios get paid by netflix, consumers ok)
    has turned into lose-lose-lose
    (netflix weaker, studios offerings very limited and they have to pay to maintain it as well as suffer directly user anger, consumers angry).

    For instance I installed CBS All Access at least a half dozen times .... kept glitching out ... over a couple years. Installed the replacement Paramount Plus ... same bullshit idiot coders that make the stream stutter or app completely crash. Netflix didn't have this problem. If Paramount would quit being greedy idiots, they could get paid by netflix, who gets paid by me ... because perfectly working platform.

    Don't get me started on Amazon's 'watchlist' being 9000 rows down ... for real...I put it on a to-watch-list....give me the #$^%@# list when I start up the program.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nazrhyn ( 906126 )
      Several platforms make it hard to find the watch list. I'd like to think that there must be some research behind the UX that I just don't grok, but perhaps that's me being too optimistic.

    • Or Amazon's utter garbage when it comes to starting back on episodic content from the last time you streamed vs starting you on the most current season that you streamed content....

      Like "hello, another family member watched the series, and now I'm playing catch up....

  • They figured out they were losing money and just started churning out pure bullshit instead of quality. Meanwhile they're paywalling every single classic work they own behind extra-premium services, basically holding their prior good works hostage. Fuck these companies.

  • And they were sued into oblivion. This service actually purchased hundreds of DVDs and would stream one playing per owned DVD. Sort of like how a pub might have some TVs going in the background. They would buy a StarTrek DVD and stream episode 1 to anyone who wanted to watch it... But only one person per DVD could watch. This makes a lot of sense to me, but not to studio execs. So that model died... But as far as I'm concerned, that was the most fair approach. I was hoping NetFlix would end up like th

  • Why is this a surprise?

    Before streaming tons and tons of crap were bundled with a few watchable shows and sold as a bundle. Lots and lots of channels never watched by users were still subsidized by their monthly cable bill. Now that it is unbundled people that subsidy is gone. Net revenue is down.

    Password sharing cuts revenue. Remote presence devices like Sling defeats thwarts attempts to cut down password sharing.

    I think it will all end up with pay per view. Charge show by show, minute by minute. Rev

  • If I want to watch Outlander, I don't really care who delivers it to my TV.
    Britannia is not a substitute.
    I care about price and convenience, not HBO vs. Netflix.
    Costs for a streaming service used to be dominated by bandwidth. Bandwidth costs plummeted, and that changed.

    The first "streaming service" middleman who charges only a small fee to connect the people who create video directly to the people who watch video will crush all the others.
    And frankly, good riddance to the others.
    I'd much rather pay Mutant

  • These are also the same companies that cook the book that make it look like every single movie is created at a loss in order to not have to pay taxes. Its the company having one division pay another, so the money still stays close to home, but amount to "losses" on production. They've been playing this bullshit game for decades now, and have figured out how to apply the same bullshit math to their streaming services. That's why all the big studios are operating "at a loss" compared to Netflix being an indep

  • The ONLY link in the whole article is to a paywalled source?

    Why don't you just light it on fire and put it on my front porch?

  • short term thinking (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jayhawk0123 ( 8440955 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:22PM (#63659164)

    1- the splintering of content to various streaming services pissed off a lot of subscribers. And few find actual value in the hassle and benefit of multiple streaming services. (I have 3 and that's already frustrating to navigate)
    2. making shows and movies with budgets larger than movie theater films is irresponsible. And selling it as a "we'll add millions of new subscribers because we launched this new show with 8 episodes a year for $500 million" is just stupid. How many new subscribers would you actually need to pay that investment back? It's become a dick measuring contest between the various studios/streaming services and they've run themselves into the ground. Bring back shows with 20+ episodes and guarantee a run of 3 years with a much lower budget. You don't need Hollywood's A+ stars to do a fucken tv series. Just decent writers and competent directors/producers.
    3. let a series build it's viewer base- this stupidness of canceling an 8 episode series because it didn't reach top 5 is stupid, not every show needs to be a top level.. some can be filler.
    4. Add more international content to the big 2- Netflix, Prime- i.e. British shows - stuff from Channel four, Dave, etc to beef up content.
    5. FIX the interfaces and algorithms - the difficulty in finding and navigating the menus is cumbersome and slow. The algorithms to suggest content is worse than you tubes and you end up pigeonholed or sent into a mess of completely useless suggestions.
    6. increase the price as needed... but add some actual value for consumers.

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