Big Streamers Have Been Cutting Their Original Content Output (sherwood.news) 63
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've been mindlessly scrolling through streaming services and have been feeling even less enthused than usual, you may not be entirely to blame: almost all major US streamers have been cutting their original TV output this year, according to new analysis (paywalled) from Variety.
From content monolith Netflix, which released 203 original shows in the first half of 2023 compared with 174 in H1 '24, to Disney+, which has halved its already-slim original TV library as it continues an apparent shift to quality over quantity, shrinkage has hit the streaming world hard. Indeed, of the 8 major streamers Variety studied from Luminate data, only Max and Peacock maintained their output level year over year. All told, the number of original seasons fell 19% at the 8 streamers tracked.
From content monolith Netflix, which released 203 original shows in the first half of 2023 compared with 174 in H1 '24, to Disney+, which has halved its already-slim original TV library as it continues an apparent shift to quality over quantity, shrinkage has hit the streaming world hard. Indeed, of the 8 major streamers Variety studied from Luminate data, only Max and Peacock maintained their output level year over year. All told, the number of original seasons fell 19% at the 8 streamers tracked.
Any group I can join? (Score:3)
Are there any groups or lobbyist organizations I can join where we all threaten to cancel our Netflix subscriptions unless they improve?
Re:Any group I can join? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wednesday for example. Or Fallout. or Twisted Metal... then they wait 2 - 3 years before even beginning the second 'season' and wonder where their viewers went.
Or they have a show like The Witcher, and for some crazy-stupid reason they decide that the actor who is passionate about the show and wants to do it, shouldn't be allowed to talk to the writers, most of whom, apparently, have no idea that there was material this show was based on. So, they fire him. And the viewership drops, so the executive morons are like, "gee, the people have spoken, they don't want this show anymore", when the reality is their built in viewership wanted the show due to the previous material it is supposed to be based off of and the passionate lead who they fired.
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The problem with those big budget shows is one season is like shooting several full length movies. Just massive amounts of people and logistics and then post production and special effects. Then trying to coordinate actors who are all working different projects.
I'm waiting for the final season of Stranger Things. The show started out with middle school kids and now Millie Bobby Brown is married in real life.
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Yup, one of the things that contributed to that (generally accepted) terrible last seasons of Game of Thrones was the fact that many of the actors and staff were burnt out by the huge production schedules and long on location shoots.
In a better world more productions are given the good faith to do more shoots at once, much like Lord of the Rings shot all 3 films over a 2ish year stretch which helped them all feel coherent and release in a reasonable timeframe but Hollywood is risk averse to the point where
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I mean, it doesn't take much imagi
Re:Any group I can join? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with those big budget shows is one season is like shooting several full length movie
Star Trek: The Next Generation was a big budget show for its day and shot 26 episode seasons with each episode clocking in at ~45 minutes. That's nearly 10 full length (2 hour) movies and they did it while giving the cast and (most of the) crew summers off. That wasn't unique to TNG, a lot of broadcast and syndicated shows maintained similar production schedules. Until very recently, a handful of broadcast shows (e.g., NCIS and its ten zillion spinoffs) did the same.
The real reason they cut back on episode count was it enables them to cheap out on paying residuals to writers and actors. You can find plenty of low budget productions that get similarly short seasons. They also nip a lot of shows in the bud before they become popular enough for the cast to demand A List salaries. They figure, probably with some merit, the audience these days is too fragmented for any one show to gain a wide following and the massive library of archival content means they can keep the unwashed masses paying regardless of how little original content they're producing.
On that last point, have you noticed how a lot of the streaming platforms are making it harder to find "My List" in favor of pushing algorithmic suggestions? Recall how the various social media platforms all made it progressively harder to sort your feed chronologically in favor of serving you up what THEY think you'll like. The point is the same, to keep you on the platform as long as possible to put ads in front of your eyeballs, and mark my words, the "ad free" streaming tiers will eventually go away entirely after they've chased the vast majority of us off of them via massive price hikes. Disney's CEO is on record in multiple earnings calls saying they make far more money from the ad supported tiers despite the ad free ones already being more expensive.
None of this shit is going to get better as long as the unwashed masses keep giving them money. If it were up to me, this household would opt out entirely -- an antenna gets me the little bit of TV I need (as opposed to "want") -- but my other half will not consider opting out of the streaming ecosystem even as she grows more and more disillusioned with it. She worked in the industry and can see first hand what the studios are doing to her friends that still do, and yet, she can't help but consume the content.
The NRA likes to say you can have their guns when you pry them from their cold dead hands. Change that from "guns" to "TV" and you'll have >95% of Americans agreeing with the sentiment.
Filler episodes. (Score:2)
The problem with those big budget shows is one season is like shooting several full length movie
Star Trek: The Next Generation was a big budget show for its day and shot 26 episode seasons with each episode clocking in at ~45 minutes. That's nearly 10 full length (2 hour) movies and they did it while giving the cast and (most of the) crew summers off. That wasn't unique to TNG, a lot of broadcast and syndicated shows maintained similar production schedules. Until very recently, a handful of broadcast shows (e.g., NCIS and its ten zillion spinoffs) did the same.
The real reason they cut back on episode count was it enables them to cheap out on paying residuals to writers and actors. You can find plenty of low budget productions that get similarly short seasons. They also nip a lot of shows in the bud before they become popular enough for the cast to demand A List salaries. They figure, probably with some merit, the audience these days is too fragmented for any one show to gain a wide following and the massive library of archival content means they can keep the unwashed masses paying regardless of how little original content they're producing.
On that last point, have you noticed how a lot of the streaming platforms are making it harder to find "My List" in favor of pushing algorithmic suggestions? Recall how the various social media platforms all made it progressively harder to sort your feed chronologically in favor of serving you up what THEY think you'll like. The point is the same, to keep you on the platform as long as possible to put ads in front of your eyeballs, and mark my words, the "ad free" streaming tiers will eventually go away entirely after they've chased the vast majority of us off of them via massive price hikes. Disney's CEO is on record in multiple earnings calls saying they make far more money from the ad supported tiers despite the ad free ones already being more expensive.
Star Trek TNG is the ideal example of why 24 eps per season is not a good idea. You really only get a handful of good eps per season and end up with loads of fillers... Think about every cringe-worthy holodeck episode, clip episode or "went back in time to save on CG" episode. 24 episode seasons end up with 16 or more filler episodes. See also: The Walking Dead and how many "talking and crying" episodes there were, especially in the early seasons.
The real reason is mainly due to the sky-rocketing cost o
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Star Trek TNG is the ideal example of why 24 eps per season is not a good idea. You really only get a handful of good eps per season and end up with loads of fillers... Think about every cringe-worthy holodeck episode, clip episode or "went back in time to save on CG" episode. 24 episode seasons end up with 16 or more filler episodes.
I'll respectfully disagree with you that there were 16 filler episodes per season, with the unspoken implication being those were subpar episodes. There were very few misses during "Peak TNG" (Seasons 3 to 5) and even the oft maligned Seasons 1 and 2 did not have 16+ subpar episodes, IMHO. They did have what they called "bottle episodes", where they had to save on the SFX budget by keeping effects to a minimum, but many of these (e.g., Data's Day) are regarded as the best the show put on the small screen.
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Measure of a Man has almost no special effects in it and it is absolutely unbelievable. Chain of command (There are 4 lights), that whole torture scene is just acting with literally no effects.
Who needs special effects when you have Patrick Stewart.
Honestly I think some of the worst were probably the most expensive. How much did it cost to build an enterprise set that is slowly turning into a mayan temple... god that episode is awful.
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The 26 episode seasons also let them focus on the ensemble cast, something sorely lacking in Star Trek: Michael Burnham, err, I mean Discovery. The TNG movies lost sight of this too, they became all about Data and Picard, with the rest of the cast becoming an afterthought. You don't need a 26 episode season to do this, Strange New Worlds has been pretty effective at it, as did a few of the TOS movies (III and IV come to mind) but it certainly doesn't hurt the cause if you have a lot of episodes to work
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I mean, just as an example, when Captain Jack Sparrow is handcuffe
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It isn't just FX, although that's a lot of it. If you watched Discovery's last season, there's a scene in it where the protagonist meets a version of herself from the past and they end up in this intense stylized kung-fu fight in a corridor. We were bored watching this fight. At this point in time there's absolutely nothing new about this kind of scene. It was well choreographed, Discovery's production team spares no expense on sets, special effects, fight choreography, etc., but what they don't have
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rant
Though, I will say, I worked in Argentina for 8 months once, long ago, and the amount of Spanish I learned, while sufficient for conversation, was just barely sufficient to understand maybe 50% of the spoken Spanish on their tv shows... So, effectively, I was cold turkey'd off of TV. I managed to stay off of tv for about 1-2 years after returning to the USA. those were two of my most productive years ever! Sure, I watched tv but ONLY what I had already recorded at my place, I h
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To be fair the WGA strike screwed up a lot of things so the rest of 2024 is going to be a bit lacking. Silo was another AppleTV show I really enjoyed and the 2nd season may also be a wait until the middle of 2025.
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To be fair the WGA strike screwed up a lot of things so the rest of 2024 is going to be a bit lacking. Silo was another AppleTV show I really enjoyed and the 2nd season may also be a wait until the middle of 2025.
It messed with release schedules, but I doubt it messed with the low count of episodes in what they laughingly call a 'season' now.
Besides, I feel the strike was of their own doing. But that's another whole discussion.
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Oh yeah I meant the delays into 2025. Just the industry has moved on from 20+ episode seasons which is good in some ways and bad in others.
I don't know enough about Hollywood accounting but considering the reputation of Hollywood executives ("Back then, well, Studio Execs, we were just dopes in suits.") and how little they know about writing I am willing to give the writers their due, we kinda need them for actual quality entertainment.
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Re:Any group I can join? (Score:5, Insightful)
built in viewership wanted the show due to the previous material it is supposed to be based off of
That is the biggest mystery of all, which includes not just the Witcher but Cowboy Bebop, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, ...
I understand picking a well-known IP for the built-on audience. But what I don't understand is choosing showrunners who either don't know or don't like the underlying IP and generally giving the middle finger to the aforementioned built-in audience at every opportunity.
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i am confused. It seems these days that these outlets like netflix develop a new show, do 8 episodes (and call that a 'season' I recall when a season meant something like 25 episodes) the show is wildly successful and all the media talking heads are saying nice things, the last episode ends on a cliffhanger, then the production house waits a year or two to 'decide' if they want to do 'season' 2.
If you're a broadcast network you do 25 a season because you expect people to miss episodes and even watch out order if it eventually gets syndicated.
The 8 episode long form seasons requires viewers to see every ep in order and is very hard to fit in a network timeslot since it only occupies 1/3rd of a season.
Basically the streaming services focus on making series the broadcast services can't. If they want a 25 episode run they just buy it.
The one thing I find curious is that the streamers don't try Soap Op
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The one thing I find curious is that the streamers don't try Soap Operas sometimes. A cheaply made show with an episode every day or something. The soaps did well enough on networks, and the sheer volume of contents seemingly created some dedicated viewers.
I don't think there's a lot of market for Soaps any more, they were largely a product of their time when bored people with simple minds couldn't really find that type of mindless, vapid personal Drama anywhere else. The demographic which would watch them is going to be caught up with short-form content on social media platforms, those places "scratch the itch" for that sort of trash far better than the soaps and grocery aisle tabloids ever did.
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The one thing I find curious is that the streamers don't try Soap Operas sometimes. A cheaply made show with an episode every day or something. The soaps did well enough on networks, and the sheer volume of contents seemingly created some dedicated viewers.
I don't think there's a lot of market for Soaps any more, they were largely a product of their time when bored people with simple minds couldn't really find that type of mindless, vapid personal Drama anywhere else. The demographic which would watch them is going to be caught up with short-form content on social media platforms, those places "scratch the itch" for that sort of trash far better than the soaps and grocery aisle tabloids ever did.
The writing was probably hacky given the timelines, but given the loads of content and the time the actors got to spend with the characters I suspect those shows demanded a lot of attention to follow what was going on.
Either way, perhaps the traditional format wouldn't work, but 15-30 min segments? No reason Netflix couldn't start competing with scripted short form content.
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And, back in the d
Re: Any group I can join? (Score:2)
Personally I'd start a streaming service for young promising talent. Budget is a few go pros, a complete no go for special effects. A fair but low pay for everyone involved. Lots of trial and error and a big celebration whenever someone hits the right spot. Of course my service would continuously flirt with bancruptcy. I'd have to make sure it would not become to
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Presumably these are (mostly) data-driven desicion (Score:4, Informative)
Since presumably these are data-driven decisions, the data must be telling them:
1. Making new shows is expensive
2. Making new shows is doubly expensive if for a variety of reasons no one is watching the new shows
3. People are watching more reruns
Now.. a smart person in those places would start examining the new fare, and see why exactly it is people are not tuning in in droves.
But.. I doubt there's truly smart people there. Greedy, sure. Maybe even lucky. But smart? A smart CEO wouldn't have left the thing fall to such depths.
But what do I know. I'm just a pleb who spends most of his "TV time" binging old anime on bluray, because blurays can't be cancelled, can't be let go off-license, can't be taken away with no notice. I chew up less bandwidth, and my brain isn't exposed to further new rot. Win/win!
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On conventional "commercial" television, a bigger audience automatically translates into higher revenue/more profits because you can charge more for commercials. Streaming doesn't have that.
This is exactly the direction the streaming companies want to go. They want to switch all of the commercial-free customers into ad-watching customers, because for every ad they show you before/during a show, they get money. So they get the (sometimes) lower monthly fee, but they get paid every time you watch a show.
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Since presumably these are data-driven decisions, the data must be telling them:
1. Making new shows is expensive
2. Making new shows is doubly expensive if for a variety of reasons no one is watching the new shows
3. People are watching more reruns
Now.. a smart person in those places would start examining the new fare, and see why exactly it is people are not tuning in in droves.
But.. I doubt there's truly smart people there. Greedy, sure. Maybe even lucky. But smart? A smart CEO wouldn't have left the thing fall to such depths.
But what do I know. I'm just a pleb who spends most of his "TV time" binging old anime on bluray, because blurays can't be cancelled, can't be let go off-license, can't be taken away with no notice. I chew up less bandwidth, and my brain isn't exposed to further new rot. Win/win!
Inflation makes new shows more expensive, market growth is slowing as most everyone subscribes to one or more service already, so they services are moving from a "spends lots to grab market share" phase to "try and make money" phase.
Hence, fewer new shows.
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3. People are watching more reruns
Now.. a smart person in those places would start examining the new fare, and see why exactly it is people are not tuning in in droves.
Easy.
These content distributors keep seeing viewership numbers go down and responding by producing fewer episodes, not realizing that this is actually driving the decline in viewe
stop adding sports to the plans and jacking the pr (Score:3)
stop adding sports to the plans and jacking the price up.
We need more choice not higher prices with high cost sports forced into the basic price.
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Just say you didn't like The Marvels. It's ok, no one else liked it, either.
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Learn to enjoy the lesbian man hate. (Score:2)
Next time you see lesbian man hate on TV maybe try to think sexy thoughts and you'll be more into it.
Fucking Man! I'd rather EAT MY WOKE BLACK GIRLFRIEND'S PUSSY than your FILTHY DIRTY NASTY WHITE WANG!
Honestly I don't know what you're even talking about. I guess The Boys is pretty woke but it's actually awesome.
Is The Peripheral woke?
Maybe just get yourself a crunchyroll subscription and you can watch nothing but big titty harem stuff. The free streaming apps have a good selection of exploitation flicks
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Where does To Kill A Mockingbird rank on the woke scale?
Yea, they're doing this while simultaneously (Score:2)
increasing all of their prices. Coincidence? No. Greedflation strikes again.
Obsolete (Score:2)
There are small dogs on Instagram that get more weekly viewers than Disney+
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apparent shift to quality over quantity (Score:2)
Yeah, let's pretend that's it. Dear exec, we're unworthy idiots, so we'll eat that right up.
We've been cutting our subscriptions (Score:2)
I know I'm not alone, but there has been a trend in cutting back subscriptions.
1) People do not want to pay for ads, if you're offering an ad tier it better be free.
2) Mass market content blows, I won't pay money for it, and I won't watch it at any price.
On the other hand, the "premium" experiences are few and far between, have limited runs and are distributed across too many different exclusive streamers. So people are being very choosey.
Streaming services, not streamers (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on people terms have meanings.
Disney+, Netflix, Discovery Plus, etc are all streaming services.
Streamers would be the individuals on Kick, Twitch, or Youtube.
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Disney+, Netflix, Discovery Plus, etc are all streaming services.
They are both services and streamers. Because they produce their own stuff. Show me how my daughter can upload her twerking video to Disney+ and I'll change my mind.
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Show me how my daughter can upload her twerking video to Disney+ and I'll change my mind.
Paramount and Nickelodeon might be easier.
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Come on people terms have meanings.
Disney+, Netflix, Discovery Plus, etc are all streaming services.
Streamers would be the individuals on Kick, Twitch, or Youtube.
Netflix streams stuff to my computator, therefore, Netflix = Streamer.
The term "streamer" refers to someone who produces "live stream" content, most commonly on Twitch or YouTube.
SAG-AFTRA strikes (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There is no magic, there is a significant delay between writing, filming and release. Not having stuff written or filmed will cause significant issues for like a year or more.
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I thought this, too...but something tells me that it's still working in favor of the services.
Netflix and friends can gauge their churn levels when the content levels get reduced. Will customers ditch the services, or will they retain their subscriptions anyway?
If the levels remain about the same, then the message will be that the services can get the same money for half the output. Not only will this all but guarantee a reduced quantity of new content, but it'll be used as a way to bargain with SAG/AFTRA s
Good (Score:2)
There is so much stuff on OTA TV to binge watch, I'll never get caught up with streaming content.
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Like what? There used to be a lot of, but not anymore.
biznus model (Score:2)
If they're putting out more shows than are necessary to keep revenue growing, then they're wasting money. They're in the business of growing revenue in any way they can. Like all businesses.
"If you've been mindlessly scrolling through streaming services and have been feeling even less enthused than usual"
It's because you have no sweat equity in the process. We used to have to walk down to the local independent video rental joint to pay $2.50 to rent a VHS tape to watch on our 30" 4:3 analog cathode-ray-tube
Finally (Score:2)
Quality over quantity. Finally. Finally, someone at the top realised that you can't just produce shit all the time and hope that it sticks.
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Disney+ "Quality"? (Score:2)
" Disney+, which has halved its already-slim original TV library as it continues an apparent shift to quality over quantity,"
Quality, like perhaps The Acolyte?
lol
Quantity over quality (Score:3)
This was the studios motto for the past few years. If they drop even more garbage shows and focus on actual content people would be willing to pay (versus content they make to please a very minor but extremely vocal group), then perhaps they may make some cash again and reclaim lost subscribers. Until then, I have no regrets to be subscription free for the past 2 years - and counting.
schoolbot error (Score:1)
streamers streaming services