Streaming Execs Think TV's Future Looks a Lot Like Its Past (techcrunch.com) 106
An anonymous reader shares a report: We're at a transitional moment in streaming -- user growth is slowing and major players are looking to consolidate, but the long-promised dream of profitability finally seems within reach (especially if you're Netflix). The perfect time, then, for The New York Times to interview many of the industry's big names -- including Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Amazon's Prime Video head Mike Hopkins, and IAC chairman Barry Diller -- about what they think comes next.
There seemed to be broad agreement on most of the big themes: More ads, higher prices, and fewer big swings on prestige TV. These changes are all united by the shift towards profitability, rather than growth-at-all-costs. If the initial prices of many streaming services seemed unsustainably low at launch, it turns out they were -- prices have been steadily rising, while the streamers have also introduced more affordable subscription tiers for viewers who are willing to watch ads. In fact, some execs told The Times that streamers will keep raising prices for the ad-free tiers with the aim of pushing more customers to sign up for ad-supported subscriptions instead. The growth of ad-supported streaming could also affect the kinds of movies and shows that get produced, since advertisers generally want to reach a mass audience -- think of the heyday of ad-supported network TV, with its endless shows about doctors and cops, compared to the more ambitious fare on subscription-supported HBO.
There seemed to be broad agreement on most of the big themes: More ads, higher prices, and fewer big swings on prestige TV. These changes are all united by the shift towards profitability, rather than growth-at-all-costs. If the initial prices of many streaming services seemed unsustainably low at launch, it turns out they were -- prices have been steadily rising, while the streamers have also introduced more affordable subscription tiers for viewers who are willing to watch ads. In fact, some execs told The Times that streamers will keep raising prices for the ad-free tiers with the aim of pushing more customers to sign up for ad-supported subscriptions instead. The growth of ad-supported streaming could also affect the kinds of movies and shows that get produced, since advertisers generally want to reach a mass audience -- think of the heyday of ad-supported network TV, with its endless shows about doctors and cops, compared to the more ambitious fare on subscription-supported HBO.
TV still exists? (Score:2)
Have not noticed that in a long time...
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Thought so.
Media 1% execs promote their own business (Score:2)
Can we slow the flood of 'fellow democrat senators endorse democrat presidential candidate' articles pretending to be news?
What? (Score:3)
TV doesn't have a future if they don't hire some writers.
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TV doesn't have a future if they don't hire some writers.
Hire? I thought LLM's were priced on a subscription basis or pay-per-number-of-uses or something like that.
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You mean if they don't hire writers with original ideas.
No way (Score:3)
think of the heyday of ad-supported network TV, with its endless shows about doctors and cops,
No way I'm going back to that. Hundreds of the exact same show with the same characters. I'll pass on that. May as well just watch YouTube or Twitch at that point.
Re:No way (Score:5, Interesting)
I've rediscovered reading in a big way. Second hand bookstores and Project Gutenberg is the antidote to advertising.
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Reading is great, listening to music is pretty good too!
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Can you recommend anything with good character development and no drama for drama's sake? I can deal with character deaths once in a while but that's about it :D.
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"Drama for drama's sake?" Do you mean "plot"?
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Kim Harrison's books are generally good. And the cover art isn't bad either.
The unfortunate thing about the majority of today's books is they center around magic and medieval type settings. There is not a tremendous amount of sci-fi books coming out.
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The Dresden Files (Jim Butcher), or if you don't mind only a modest amount of character development, but packed a lot of humor and solid storytelling, the Liturgical Mysteries series by Mark Schweizer.
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The greatest character novel in history; Pride and Prejudice. In general I always recommend Jane Austen. Despite writing during their Regency period, her prose is just so damned readable, her characters well-drawn without ponderous amounts of exposition. She had an eye for the human condition that I'm not sure has ever been matched.
Right now I'm more into history. I'm reading Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews, which, sadly, has enormous amounts of drama often ending in death.
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Check out Better World Books for a great place to find used books at very reasonable prices.
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I'd rather endlessly doom scroll algorithmically recommended videos on tiktok, instagram, X, or facebook before doing that, again.
Mostly, I've been reading and sleeping, or writing if I'm not doing that, and don't really particularly miss the subscriptions.
The quality of the media (shows and movies) has been horrible for years, and the last great effort the streaming services put into creating original content a couple years ago was the end of it. One or two 'big name' productions where they've put effort i
Just like the 90's, only without the DVR (Score:5, Interesting)
Great... at least I could skip commercials with a DVR. Now you're forced to sit and watch stupid ads, and pay for the privilege.
Not only that but these new 8 episode 'seasons' is absolutely killing good concepts. Wait a year to watch 8 episodes? How did shows in the 90's pull it off with 20+?
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Also the fact that like video games and movies the concept of the "midsize-production" has dissapeared. Either you are working on something small scale or it's full bore "prestige" with $50M+ an episode budgets.
When I think back to the 20+ season dramas of the 90's I think "ST: The Next Generation" or "The X-Files" which when you watch today are still good but also that 85% of the scenes are simply people in a room talking and the effects are really interspersed in. While you had your occasional big setpi
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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how many times you can clearly see a stuntman stand in for one of the lead cast, or, how often we've caught sight of boom mikes or other obvious signs of television production.
Oh do I have a video for you then:
Mr. Plinkett's Super Happy Fun Star Trek: The Next Generation Mistakes Video [youtube.com]
Yeah for sure on TNG has a timless quality I think is actually benefitted by it's very flat lighting which was done for budget but today has a distict stylistic quality to it (The Orville does a nice job grabbing from this compared to current-Trek).
Also great point with how they did stories back then with more "writer for hire" stories like TOS and older sci-fi was pulp writers submitting their own
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Funny you mentioned the lighting.. And the parent mentioned "Yesterdays Enterprise", I just watched that episode last night. It's stark how the Wrong Timelines lighting was so dark - just like STD...
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Lets be honest, the quality in those shows was much lower and there was a lot of filler to get to those 20+ episode seasons.
But at the same time, I so frequently find a season 2 coming out for something I enjoyed but it has been so long since I watched the last season (only 8 episodes) that I don't really remember where things left off and who is who and the previously on is often kind of wanting when these seasons take so long to produce. With the impact of the strikes a lot of things are coming out 2 yea
Clip shows (Score:2)
>>Lets be honest, the quality in those shows was much lower and there was a lot of filler to get to those 20+ episode seasons.
True. I can't even remember the last time I saw a clip show. It was probably on The Simpsons (though they are still doing 20+ episode seasons).
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I don't recall StarTrek ever doing a clip show, but StarGate was famous for them.
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Season two when Riker is injured and he’s being worked on in sickbay.
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Technically the TOS 2-part episode "Menagerie" is a also clip show. It used clips from the never-aired pilot episode so I'll forgive it, but it still has that awkward clip show format.
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I think I repressed that one. Season 3 was when TNG started to find its stride.
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TNG also reused a lot of establishing shots of the ship, as was and remains fairly normal. The bridge was the old movie Enterprise set redressed, IIRC. They re-used a lot of movie special effects too, like explosions, Klingon ships, starbase models and shots etc. Lots of props as well.
It continued into the Voyager era, where much of the impetus to do Borg stories was because they had a load of costumes and props left over from the First Contact movie. In fact large parts of Voyager were just "how can we rec
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>>Lets be honest, the quality in those shows was much lower and there was a lot of filler to get to those 20+ episode seasons.
True. I can't even remember the last time I saw a clip show. It was probably on The Simpsons (though they are still doing 20+ episode seasons).
It's not even about filler episode so much as the style of show.
Prior to streaming most TV shows were episodic, there might be a season long main plot, but the individual episodes were self-contained stories. A viewer could drop in after skipping a season or two and the show would still work since things hadn't changed much. Can you imagine doing that with something like Stranger Things? You couldn't even skip an episode without getting lost. The only similar things back then were mini-series, but those wer
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Yeah, it's hard to make a comic book into a real story.
But before simpletons decided what programming to show the even stupider simpletons, "hour-long" episodes were as long as 52 minutes. Some series' had 35+ episodes per season and no trouble filling time because the writers were creating content for people who had attention spans not measurable by an egg timer.
The fact that such things can't happen on broadcast TV any longer speaks to the decreasing intelligence of the viewers. Sad but true. Being born
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Yeah, it's hard to make a comic book into a real story.
But before simpletons decided what programming to show the even stupider simpletons, "hour-long" episodes were as long as 52 minutes. Some series' had 35+ episodes per season and no trouble filling time because the writers were creating content for people who had attention spans not measurable by an egg timer.
The fact that such things can't happen on broadcast TV any longer speaks to the decreasing intelligence of the viewers. Sad but true. Being born after 1990 automatically places one in the less intelligent television viewer category.
Yeah... bad look repeatedly insulting people's intelligence while misunderstanding the point and actually getting things backwards.
No one, outside of soap operas, were actually making those 35+ episode seasons with episode to episode continuity and changes. The episodes were standalone so they could later hit syndication and be shown in any order.
The Sopranos was one of the first "long form" television series where they had real plot advancement between episodes, and they did 13 episode seasons.
Long form te
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That's how I feel about 'House of the Dragon'... I just don't care, though I remember it was ok-ish.
Re:Just like the 90's, only without the DVR (Score:5, Informative)
How did shows in the 90's pull it off with 20+?
One thing is the lack of syndication in streaming today. It's the big part of the old model that has basically vanished in the current model. Basically production companies sold shows to network at a break-even cost, sometimes at a slight loss, sometime (for popular shows) they might make an OK profit. The idea was shows that hit that could hit the 80-100 episode count would get sold into syndication where the production company would make the majority of their profit on the show. So it benefited them to have long seasons. And since broadcast TV is linear, the networks wanted shows to cover their broadcast seasons so they liked the 13+back 9 system as well.
Today shows are basically financed up front, which makes them a hell of a lot more expensive. Streamers are also shooting for high-production values and getting bigger named actors involved, so shorter episode counts help with all of that (working on a show can be much more work schedule wise for the actors involved compared to doing movies).
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"seasons" predate viable syndication. half a year of weekly episodes isn't what they started with. Rather, it drizzled down to that. ("Hey, we dan rerun *all* the episodes." It reached or approached that by the end of the 60s. I think Star Trek was just a couple ave that each season, for example.
And *then* they discovered the joy of syndication, particularly with shows (e.g., Gilligan's Island) for which they didn't have to pay residuals.
And then there was the discovery that 100 or so episodes was the
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>"Great... at least I could skip commercials with a DVR. Now you're forced to sit and watch stupid ads, and pay for the privilege."
Exactly. This is why I still use cable and a DVR (TiVo). And have for decades. It is a usable experience. I *will not* watch forced content but can deal with skipping through stuff. And there is some really good content....
However, the good to bad content ratio is getting worse and worse every year. Part of it is because of "reality TV" takeover. And I think another pa
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I've taken to just grabbing stuff from The Pirate Bay and buying the box sets if I like it. Most of the streaming apps refuse to work on VPNs and I can't be bothered to turn mine off just for them. I'd pay for an ad and DRM free download, but they don't offer those, so I have to wait for the discs. I never even remove the plastic wrap, I just download a rip someone else has made and checked, uses less electricity that way.
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Agreed.
I record loads of TV and have done so for years. I also collect my preffered shows as DVD/blu-ray box sets as well as movies too.
When terrestrial TV is switched off I'll largely just revist those recordings and stuff in my collection. I have loads of stuff to watch.
I do watch Netflix and Amazon Prime for the odd current shows and they are useful for watching things like Anime which I'm never going to see broadcast and may not wish to have physically.
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Great... at least I could skip commercials with a DVR. Now you're forced to sit and watch stupid ads, and pay for the privilege.
Not only that but these new 8 episode 'seasons' is absolutely killing good concepts. Wait a year to watch 8 episodes? How did shows in the 90's pull it off with 20+?
The reason is budget, when it costs millions per episode, you're going to reduce the number of episodes. Game of Thrones cost US$6-15 million per ep, depending on season.
I suggest you go back and watch series from the 90s with 20 eps and tell me how many were good. I can tell you how they did 20 episodes per season, fillers. Things like character episodes, clip episodes, holodeck episodes, episodes where they went back in time to the modern day to save on special effects episodes, *shudder* Christmas epi
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> Great... at least I could skip commercials with a DVR. Now you're forced to sit and watch stupid ads, and pay for the privilege.
They didnt like you doing that. VHS, followed by the DVR was something they hated.
Now sit back and take your medicine, they finally won. You could use an adblocker but then they will detect that and punish you.
Black Mirror had an episode about this, you live in a box room where all the walls are screens and you must watch the mandated advertising. Close your eys and the adve
Amazon's crap ads (Score:3)
Well, Amazon's experiment didn't really resonate well with me. Started watching a half-assed show Saturday night, tolerated the initial 15-second ad, but then halfway through the 30-minute episode they had another minute and half of obnoxious ads. Wife and I immediately switched to Netflix and watched something else. If ad-infested content is the only option with streaming then we will cut it out. As it is, we only watch 4-5 hours a week.
Maybe the tik-tok hipsters see it differently, but my time is worth much more than the value of the ads.
Re:Amazon's crap ads (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, that was enough to get both my wife and I to break out in laughter! A solution to every problem...
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Arr, I know where ye can find yer shows without ye ads, matey!
That's exactly what I thought. This is also an answer for lack of syndication. To have access to every show on the market I would have to subscribe to dozens of streaming service. They really should create something like common coin to pay per show. If not I will just torrent what is missing from my subscribed platforms.
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Ar, but we only sail in certain waters...
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we can call that, "the superbowl model" :)
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Stream and rip my friend. Binge rip the series you want to watch and then pause or even cancel your subscription for 3-4 months.
Hit their pocketbooks. They don't care about any negative feedback or lost customers because they're colluding are as an industry are the only game in town. Cancellations are meaningless to streaming companies. They lose some to a another service and gain a few from another.
Stream and rip. Turn off the money faucet.
The Future is Here (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day, Netflix was great. It consolidated media content in to a single, cost effective platform.
As all the big networks realized they could build their own OTT platforms (poorly, I might add), they stopped licensing content to Netflix, and launching their own.
Now, you need to choose some or all of
- Netflix
- Prime
- Disney+
- Crave
- Paramount+
- Hulu
- and others.
Aside from Netflix, they all have ads now, even though you are paying a direct subscription fee.
The logic in the old days was, Ads pay for the broadcast, and subscription fees support the infrastructure.
Both cable companies and media companies got greedy.
Now, the media companies have cut out cable companies for direct media distribution, but on top of paying a subscription fee + being forced to watch ads, we are still paying for infrastructure costs through internet plans.
So, instead of being charged twice to consume media, we are being triple charged.
Welcome to the future.
Piracy is friendly again.
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>Aside from Netflix, they all have ads now, even
>though you are paying a direct subscription fee.
Paramont-super-duper (or whatever they call it) doesn't have ads, at least on anything we've tried so far. Well, there is what is apparently the stub that only appears one enough to display the "you can skip in. . ." for a second or two.
We currently have it as a six month freebie from Walmart+. The basic package has been part for years, but I found it unusable. Rewind ten seconds for some words you coul
Re: The Future is Here (Score:2)
Aside from Disney+ and Netflix everything else shows ads on my subscriptions.
Even my Prime "Stack TV" add on shows ads, which is a subscription on top of a subscription.
Almost every paid streaming service I have has commercials. It's frustrating AF. Even on their most expensive plan
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Hulu's begun announcing that streaming rights on many shows have chamged and they too will soon have commercials, regardless of your plan.
Stream, Rip, Pause. Repeat every 4 months until they stop being greedy whores.
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> I'm so much happier without cable and without commercials.
I think as a zoomer you certainly have no clue what we are actually talking about here.
Enjoy your ad free streaming while you still can, I give it a couple of years before you have nowhere to turn.
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Hey, asshole.
Boomers aren't rhe cause of your fucked up life.
You fucking kids are too dammed quick to generalize and lay blame on the first thought hitting your ill-educated mind.
Go look up the corporate structures, youngster. You'll be fucking hard pressed to even find anyone over 60 controlling anything.
This money hungry bullshit ain't coming from boomers.
Regular (Score:3)
WTF? (Score:2)
>>Back in the old days of tube TV, you just had basic ads. They didn't allow pharma ads, just the basics.
You obviously weren't alive in the "old days". There were ads for tobacco, alcohol, "diet aids" that contained amphetamines and "sleep aids" the contained barbiturates. The only reason there weren't any modern-style pharma ads is because there wasn't really a market for them at the time. If you needed medicine, your doctor prescribed it to you and there was little to no choice in types or brands
"...fewer big swings on prestige TV" (Score:3)
...fewer big swings on prestige TV
This strikes me as the biggest shame here. Hollywood has become so risk adverse it turns out a fraction of the decent movies it used to for me. For quite some time shows on streaming networks have been making up for this as many have enjoyed good budgets and writing, now it seems we're losing that as well.
The ShamWow Prestige Theatre Hour (Score:2)
Relying on a business to provide us with products and services was our first mistake.
Something something our own streaming service something blackjack something hookers.
Re: The ShamWow Prestige Theatre Hour (Score:2)
Something something our own streaming service something blackjack something hookers.
Literally doable for years with a Plex/Emby/Jellyfin server. And despite some people saying that no one knows how to pirate content anymore, pirating is actually easier now than before with other tools.
Also if you don't want to make your own Netflix you can choose to subscribe to a pirate streaming service and still come out with a better deal from a price and content selection standpoint.
More ads, higher prices (Score:2)
Re:More ads, higher prices (Score:4, Insightful)
You ask why the consumer would be on board with it, but that's asking the wrong question. These executives don't think in terms of people being people and expecting value for what they pay in. They see people as a solid block of available funding. Now, that block may grow or shrink, but the actions they take, the moves they make within their company, has, in their minds, zero affect on the block of available funding unless it's being manipulated with backroom deals between them and their chronies/buddies in some other boardroom. To them it's simply, "There is this much potential, and we need to gather as much of that potential as we can." They never have been able to put together the concept that raising prices will inevitably lead to less people purchasing the product, because the block is too large and they simply don't want to see negative results for their own actions. Therefore, "More ads, increased fees, less quality" to them is "increase revenue, increase revenue, decrease cost to produce" which is "win, win, win" and has no negative possible outcome.
Greed is God. Profit above all. Logic need not apply until it smashes them in the face like a brick hurled by hurricane force winds.
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Binge rip 24/7 for a month, them pause your subscription for 3 months.
It'd doable with the proper ripper.
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And fewer big swings on prestige TV. Why would the consumer be on board with that? If streaming offers less value than pirating then back to the high seas I go.
Most consumers have no idea how to pirate nor put p with some of challenges, they just want their TV.
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Google can direct them. There're ads for that ;-)
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Luckily, with Plex, all it takes is that one friend that does know how and you can access their entire collection for free. At least until the media picks up on how popular it is and decides to force Plex to scan for pirated media. I know it's coming.
There will always be an alternative. I switched form Plex to Jellyfin for example. Got annoyed by Plex forcing payed content.
They'll fuck this up too... (Score:3)
Finally, we got "what we asked for" and got a la carte content. And now they're breaking that using the same methods they used the last time around. We've seen this movie before. I'm literally down to a single streaming service and now that Prime is injecting commercials I'll probably blow that off too.
Wake me up when it's over.
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One thing that has held so far was breaking up sports and news from other TV viewing.
As individual sports get their own streaming services, it's a huge benefit over the days of having to subscribe to a bunch of sports channels showing a dozen or more different sports when you only really are interested in one or two. As someone who really dislikes news delivery via talking head or political talk shows consisting of people shouting over each other, I don't want to have to subsidize 24/7 news channels.
Histori
I will not watch ads (Score:3)
No. Never. Ever. Period. No Exceptions
I will pay for ad-free as long as the stuff I pay for is worth the price
If not, I will find something else to do
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I wonder about pricing and cost. Have we reached the point where we aren't just paying ad companies to support ad companies rather than pay for the show? Let's say there was a normal, ad-supported TV show. While it might have good ratings, it might not have the long tail revenue of Seinfeld or Big Bang Theory, so they want enough ad revenue to get 200% ROI from the first run and one repeat.
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Hulu's broadcasting that some shows will have ads regardless of your subscription tier.
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Same. I will watch TV with ads or not at all.
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I subscribe to Disney+ here in Australia right now (on the standard plan since | only need it on my PC and I don't need anything above 1080p and stereo audio) and there is enough content on there (old and new) that I feel I am getting my moneys worth.
The day Disney+ removes the option to buy a plan without ads is the day I drop Disney+
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News I can use. Thank you so much.
Next up, the "I don't own a TV guy."
Took a sip of coffee, then read "prestige tv" (Score:2)
Now I have to clean my keyboard. On the plus side, I haven't laughed that hard in a while.
I'm glad I kept my eyepatch and peg leg (Score:3)
If TV is going to go back to the past, so am I. Where's the good place to host seed boxes now?
They've Lost Many Consumers on Ads (Score:2)
I think they may be rather optimistic on the idea of reintroducing ads (at least the traditional TV ads that directly interrupt the boradcast). They have at least three problems:
1) People have become accustomed to ad-free content, and very few are eager to switch back. Every once and a while I will visit someone's house (usually someone over 50) who still subscribes to linear TV with ads and find them incredibly jarring. There is already a generation being raised on TV without ads. Kids who are 10-15 years
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Another issue is none of the services make use of a show's natural commercial breaks. They just algorithmically decide it's time to annoy the viewer and insert a commercial break. Many times this results in: start of an action; inserted commercial; completion of an action; coming-up-preview-announcement; episode recap; next commercial break. Ain't happening.
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I've seen this happen mid dialog on things like Stack TV.
I wasn't even watching it (my wife was) and I was livid.
They learned nothing from the first cable cutting (Score:3)
Viewers don't want to spendn$10- 15 extra a month to watch one or two decent series on anyone's streaming service And rhey sure as fuck fom't want commercials. Forcing consumers to add entire channels of steaming shit and advertising from a studio to their streaming subscription for a single series makes those new 12-20TB drives look very attractive. The studios have forgotten how piracy hurt them before and they need a reminder.
Binge streaming into ripper app for a week or two will make that content local forever for the cost of some drive space and a month's streaming subscription. Stream and rip, then pause your subscription for 3-4 months. Hurting their bottom line is they only thing they'll notice. Your outraged emails and social media posts are nothing more than masturbation. They accomplish nothing
I'm not advocating piracy. Just sanity. Charge a reasonable amount to view a series and profits will rise. Just like broadcast channels, streaming services are full of garbage shows. Stop forcing people to pay for shit they don't want. Let us pick our programming.
MBAs and lawyers fuckaway everything they touch. Steel, textiles, automobiles, computer chips, etc. If there's a way to make a fast buck now, they'll fuck everything and everyone and the future to get that dollar.
Hang them all.
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>"Binge streaming into ripper app for a week or two will make that content local forever for the cost of some drive space and a month's streaming subscription. Stream and rip, then pause your subscription for 3-4 months."
And instead of "learning their lesson" what they WILL do is one or more of the following:
1) Start limiting the number of shows an account can watch to something they define is "reasonable" or "normal"
2) Charge overages for what they define isn't "reasonable"
3) Raise prices of monthly-onl
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You're either terribly niave or very young.
Before you begin by responding with ire at my assumptions, may I suggest you examine the history of torrents, USENET, and anonymous file sharing sites?
If you still feel your statements about their reactions are pertiinent (no argument that they're valid) and want the to scream at me for my assessment of you, feel free. No one cares that the streamers will get bitchy at binger-ers anymore than they did when rhe music labels wanted a war. It was simply business as us
Expect yet another big increase in piracy (Score:2)
Simple solution (Score:3)
Go back to the founding father's copyright terms. 7 years, renewable to 14.
Every show made before 2020 would today be free of copyright for any streaming service to provide, including Joe's Basement Streaming.
Instant competition and shakeup of the streaming world would ensue.
atsc 3.0 may be on the path to pay tv over the ai (Score:2)
atsc 3.0 may be on the path to pay tv over the air coming back like was in place in the 80's.
Sponsored Content (Score:2)
Just say "no" to ads (Score:2)
One of my streaming providers introduced ads in shows for the cheaper option and the so called ad free tier would show ads if you paused a show. I immediately unsubscribed as I won't tolerate this and I'll drop any other service that does this. We've had an ad free experience for so long that going back to even a short break is intolerable so increase prices if you must, but forget about ads.
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You won't escape - shows are rife with blatant product placement to the point characters will have out of place dialogue praising products.
And live video replacement technology already exists for broadcast sporting event billboards. It won't be long before TV shows have zones in sets intended to have current ads inserted into them regardless of when you stream them.
How many original ideas are left (Score:1)
HAHAHAHAHA (Score:2)
Told them so!
I'll stick to Freeview/Freesat as long as they transmit. After that I'm fine with my extensive dvd/bluray collection.
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Hey, you'll want to avoid annoying the pussy snowflakes. They'd rather stay sheltered in their cocoons and ignore reality.