9 ms·

The week old Hollywood finally died

68 points by woldemariam 6y ago

unnouinceput 6y ago
Good riddance.
someperson 6y ago
It sucks for the employees and executives laid off (especially during this pandemic), but audiences continue to consume a steady stream of high quality scripted content (ranging from low budget sitcoms to high budget action movies). If executives at Warner Media struggle to meet shareholder expectations as audiences vote with their wallets and opt for streaming services instead of cable bundles then so be it. The executives at Netflix have earned their place (and one day, they too will be replaced).
DrBazza 6y ago
Streaming services may be 'in control' but they're still as bad as, or controlled by, the studios they're replacing. In the UK, suppose I want to watch Forbidden Planet, or Gone With The Wind, or Carry on Screaming. Show me a streaming service that has those films. I either wait 6 months and hope the TV shows them or.... hello bittorrent. Even more recent films. Suppose I want to listen to Louis Armstrong, or Ella Fitzgerald? Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music all have those songs. It's just a shame we didn't have higher bandwidth in the Napster era to do to the studios what it did to record labels.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  That's a "controlled by" problem, not an "as bad as" problem. Region restrictions are primarily imposed by studios, so that they can make different exclusive licensing deals in different regions.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The other thing going on is that Netflix' DVD service drove Blockbuster et al out of business and now the Netflix back catalog is pretty terrible. So you increasingly can't rent a disc if something isn't available streaming--even a la carte. (In fairness, many films are available for Amazon pay-per-view that aren't on all you can eat subscriptions, including 2 of the films you mention.) But it's a mess generally. I don't know if it's Napster/bandwidth given that mechanical licensing for music is much older. In any case though, we've largely moved to a new medium but a lot of content hasn't moved over.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    Blockbuster drove itself out of business Possibly more so than Netflix because of billionaire investor Carl Icahn.
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > The other thing going on is that Netflix' DVD service drove Blockbuster et al out of business and now the Netflix back catalog is pretty terrible. I subscribe to both Netflix DVD and streaming. I don’t much like serialized shows and maintain streaming mainly for my partner and the occasional one off. Netflix’s DVD back catalog is thinning and I’m sort of at a crossroads about what to do. I wish Netflix would spin off the DVD service and give it a chance to thrive.
    - ihuman 6y ago
      > I wish Netflix would spin off the DVD service and give it a chance to thrive. They were going to do that back in 2011, but then cancelled the plans https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-cancels-qwikster-spinoff/ https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-cancels-qwikster-spinoff/
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I canceled my DVD service a year or two ago because I was doing a lot of work travel and I'd end up with discs sitting by my TV for a month. I've renewed it for now during the pandemic. It's fine for recent movies but the back catalog has gotten pretty bad. I've mostly resigned myself to paying for streaming rentals plus buying a Blu-Ray every now and then if I think it's something I might want to rewatch. I suspect there isn't a critical mass for a robust DVD service any longer. RedBox skims some demand for current blockbusters and a lot of people want content right now.
      - CydeWeys 6y ago
        > RedBox skims some demand for current blockbusters and a lot of people want content right now. I really can't emphasize the right now enough. I'm never planning things I want to watch days in advance, so a by-mail service just doesn't work (plus there's the physical hassle of having to mail stuff all the time and dealing with the inevitable hassle of things going missing in the mail). I just can't imagine waiting for something to come in the mail when I could instead fire up BitTorrent and be watching it 30 minutes later. The music industry learned their lesson from piracy but the movie industry still hasn't. Things will hopefully change now given that theaters are a much-reduced experience; they did always have the benefit over music in that whether you buy the music CD on launch day or pirate it digitally, the listening experience itself is identical, whereas seeing a film in theaters on launch day is definitely still quite different than watching some shitty pirated cam version, assuming the shitty cam version is even out by launch day (it isn't always).
- readarticle 6y ago
  Studios aren’t being replaced. This isn’t an article about streaming services replacing studios, it’s an article about streaming executive culture replacing studio executive culture.
- dageshi 6y ago
  You can rent all of these for sub £5 on amazon (probably itunes as well). There isn't a world where you can pay $20 a month and get everything, every movie, every tv show, ever, the finances just don't work.
  - leoedin 6y ago
    Why don't the finances work? As an example: I'm paying for Netflix and Amazon prime. I'm not going to pay for more services because I don't value watching TV more than that. We buy or rent a specific movie maybe once a quarter at most. So total expenditure on TV services is around $20/mo. Almost everyone I know is in a similar situation. Some swap one of those services for something else, many are sharing subscriptions with other households. So right now most people are paying a fairly fixed amount for access to a portion of TV and film. The total money flowing in seems to be enough to support the entire industry. If a service that cost $20/month for access to everything came out, I'd definitely switch. I imagine most of my friends would as well. Then the total money flowing into the industry would be the same, but everyone would have access to all the media.
    - dageshi 6y ago
      It's not enough to support the entire industry, that's the point of the article. $20 a month has never been enough, bearing in mind it's effectively replacing (in north America) cable which used to cost much more than that and those channels used to run ads as well!
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I suspect a lot of people buy or rent more than you and your friends. For example, many people have either a cable TV or online streaming subscription that's another $50-100/month. HBO would be another $15 or so. And so forth. There is an argument that, at some point, there are only so many hours in the day and a Spotify for video (i.e. most content for one monthly fee) makes sense but that's probably a $100-200/month fee in the US (assuming you could get most players to cooperate). YouTube TV alone is $65/month these days.
- deleted 6y ago
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- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > In the UK, suppose I want to watch Forbidden Planet, or Gone With The Wind, or Carry on Screaming. Show me a streaming service that has those films They're on Amazon UK. You can stream them right now. What are you talking about?
- jp555 6y ago
  Napster pitched a $10/month all-you-can-eat subscription, and the Music industry said NO WAY! Then they were crushed by reality and we got multiple suppliers of Napster's $10/month-for-all-music offer. Imagine if Napster had got what it wanted and became the only supplier of music? I doubt they'd still be seen as the good guy.
  - solarhoma 6y ago
    The monopolies are always seen good in their infancy. You always forgive them for mistakes as they are new and fresh. Then they begin making significant mistakes as they age. And finally become too powerful and you realize they are truly a monopoly. See Google. Everyone ‘welcomed their new google overlords’. Now we see how awful they are for the world.
    - jp555 6y ago
      "in the case of Apple, the company’s strategy was doomed right up until it was illegal, or so it seems with the App Store." Ben Thompson (https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-epic-and-the-app-store/ https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-epic-and-the-app-store/) LOL
- iwasakabukiman 6y ago
  I feel like you are purposefully ignoring the fact that you can easily get all of those movies (and tons of others not on streaming services) on DVD or Blu-ray for relatively cheap. As another commenter said, you can also rent them from any number of services for $2-$4.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    What am I going to play a DVD on?
    - zxcvbn4038 6y ago
      Black box above the betamax and below the 8-track player - you may need to move all the floppy disk boxes on the floor first. ;)
    - ghaff 6y ago
      An external USB DVD player is about $15.
    - iwasakabukiman 6y ago
      I feel like you're purposefully making this hypothetical difficult and throwing up as many roadblocks as possible. The obvious answer is that either you own a DVD player or you can get one for next to nothing. Amazon has region free ones for $25.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        ewaste ftw
    - bitwize 6y ago
      Eighth generation consoles (except the Switch) have a drive that can play DVDs and Blu-Rays.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    While I don't love the current state of affairs, I dropped cable TV recently (which I hardly ever watched) and I sort of take the attitude that it makes sense to keep my monthly subscriptions down and periodically buy, whether disc or streaming, or rent a la carte things I want to watch--especially given that I don't really watch all that much.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Even record labels came out unscathed, relatively. It's not like we live in a world where artists record songs, and get paid by streaming services. Record labels get paid, and they pay artists with hollywood accounting. All the control is still with them. They have much less control of what becomes popular. Recording has no need for upfront, risky capital anymore... Once upon a time, you needed a lot of money to cut & press a commercial album. A warehouse full of records, physical distribution, the advertising to make that work. The "record deal" was essential because someone had to fund an album. The record industry was built around this, with the portfolio of "signed artists" being their primary asset. Napster, Youtube & Spotify haven't really changed this... They've affected it, but the system survived irrelevance. The reality of content industries (and many other ones) is that centralisation is everything. The big hollywood studios, record labels & such will take the lions share. If they don't, it will be netflix, youtube, spotify & such. Someone will be in position to dictate terms, and it's not the artists.
reedwolf 6y ago
Unpaywalled: http://archive.vn/wcuxy http://archive.vn/wcuxy
deleted 6y ago
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rendall 6y ago
"TikTok has succeeded as Quibi — Hollywood’s premium alternative to user-generated content — struggles to find an audience." I had never until this very moment even heard of Quibi
- BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
  That's because it's not only poorly marketed but also a completely awful idea. It's 8-minute shows, chunks so small that it's hard to get invested because a full season can be less than a feature-length movie but has the ambitions of one. Some episodes are actually less than 8 minutes, most show concepts are horrid (they relaunched Punk'd!) and the people at the helm are... unusual. This interview gives great insight into the mess it is: https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.html https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.htm... My favorite quote from that: "When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, “I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.”"
  - dayofthedaleks 6y ago
    Non-paywalled Vulture Quibi story: https://web.archive.org/web/20200818123029/https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200818123029/https://www.vultu...
  - toyg 6y ago
    I wouldn’t call Whitman and Katzenberg “unusual”. Katzenberg, by all accounts, is stereotypical power-Hollywood. Whitman is an average tech ceo. Their coupling might be a bit unusual, but it makes sense in from an “opposites attract / complement” point of view. I do agree that 8-minute video-chunks are silly, that’s youtube territory and people are not going to pay for that as long as YT is free.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    I often find myself thinking, I have spare 8 minutes, I wonder what I would do with them. As oppose to spare few mins. Mobile phones provide distractions for spare few moments. 8mins is not a timeframe we randomly waste. Its a commitment, clearly a commitment nobody want to make.
optimalsolver 6y ago
I'll be back.
- nickpeterson 6y ago
  It may take awhile judging by your username.
agustif 6y ago
I've this crazy idea for a de-centralized pirate-media aggregator that could fix piracy by going the pay what you want route. I would only pay back to creators directly, no copyright holders, no studios.. Wonder how that would go...
- dageshi 6y ago
  If it's a free choice between paying and not paying for a product, most people will simply not pay because that's the simplest option. Paying what you want actually is much more complicated because you end up having to try and establish the value of something to you, again much easier to just pay zero. On the otherhand, people will support people directly to create, patreon already fills that niche, but in that respect "you" the creator are the product not just what you create.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    > most people will simply not pay because that's the simplest option. I would disagree with that. If you are young and tech/internet savy and have time then sure. But if I get back home after days work. All I have time/strength for is to put on netflix to watch the show i heard from a friend. Convenience trumps piracy. As long as its more convenient. The moment I need to figure out if that show is on Netflix Hulo or Amazon, etc the convenience factor is diminishing. I will check if its no netflix, no... hbo... no ah fuck it, piratebay it is. > On the otherhand, people will support people directly to create, patreon already fills that niche, but in that respect "you" the creator are the product not just what you create. I have monthly budget for patreon to support people I like. There is a lot of high quality niche content that I want to see being made so I chip in.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    Have people put their card details in first to minimise friction later on?
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Piracy is already back on the uptick because of all the streaming services. Wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years, the industry goes through another panic like they did 20 years earlier with online piracy.
halfFact 6y ago
I've been completely disconnected to Hollywood as I've found better content on YouTube. I admittedly like non fiction, and my wife likes the occasional comedy. Both of these are often better than anything you can get from Hollywood because it's more niche. I guess I don't understand the problem. People really like their old school classics?
apress 6y ago
Coca Cola sold Columbia Pictures to Sony and Rupert Murdoch bought 20th Century Fox in the 1980s, General Electric got Universal Studios 20 years ago, sold it to Comcast, Stephen Spielberg sold Dreamworks to Sumner Redstone, who had taken Paramount off Gulf+Western, but sure NETFLIX brought a "ruthless new culture" to Hollywood.
dalbasal 6y ago
I think considering TikTok a threat to hollywood, or a sign of diminishing relevance is naive... disingenuous even. The medium, art and distribution methods shift. This isn't the first time. Television encroached on film. VHS. Cable. DVD box sets. Home cinema. The rise of the cinematic series. Shifts sometimes hurt, they may even have some casualties.... but this is not dying. Hollywood, and old media generally, are in much better shape than I had expected. Remember "information wants to be free?" Remember the initial response to ipod? The scoffs around early DRM? Disintermediation? The end of record labels? None of this came to pass. The true economics of "content" is centralisation, exclusivity and manufactured scarcity. Tiktok (youtube moreso) demonstrates the point. It doesn't matter that you have millions of viewers. That doesn't translate into money, power or value. 0.1% of the viewership is not worth 0.1% of the money. It doesn't divide. Centralisation itself is where the value is. Content is not a "sum of parts" game. For success, you need centralisation & control. Theatres, PPV services, cable deals, streaming services... This is why spotify is buying the top podcasts, to exclude them from itunes & youtube. Porn is the counterexample. As a pariah, it had no ability to affect DRM, Copyright, other legal frameworks and the details of how they will be implemented. When online payments started working, Porn had its "DVD Boom." When streaming started working, the industry collapsed again. That's what a free media market looks like. Extremely high volatility. The record industry & hollywood have never dealt with this kind of thing. Never will, probably. The main thing shaking up hollywood is that they're being introduced to startup/tech economics. Market caps. Short term equity plays. This takes some getting used to, but the structure is as secure as ever. They're just learning that just because investors have valued something @ $Xbn doesn't mean it will make $Xbn.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Really if TikTok is a threat to Hollywood they should hang their heads in shame if absolute amateurs with short clips can do a better job than professionals. One thing I don't get about porn is why it remains so pariahed despite it being a foregone "pretty much everyone watches it at least occassionally single or couples". You still wouldn't list it on your LinkedIn profiles but you would think advertisers would be less afraid of it and you would see at least contraception ads preferred there as opposed to mostly circular porn advertising. There are few who would be offended by products for the recreationally sexually active who would actually use the product. Instead the only online ads I have seen for contraception are work youtube when it mistakes me for a woman.
jjk166 6y ago
It's the classic innovation implosion: Prior to video streaming progressing to a viable point, there was no reason for anyone in the industry to have the skills to work with it. Netflix comes along with a business model of providing these services to the industry by hosting their content on its platform There is massive success, everyone is making lots of money doing what they are good at The industry, lacking the skills to recognize the value netflix provided them in technical skill, tries to get a larger cut of the pie because "how hard could it be?" Very hard. The competition leads to cannibalization of the market and the industry has a lot of catch up to do just to get to Netflix's level. Meanwhile the carpet being pulled out from under netflix allows other, actually technically competent, competitors to pick up real gains. Where before the industry were the customers of the streaming partners, now they are competitors. Both are out of their comfort zone, but there is a lot more free-floating talent from the long term industry than the new niche technology, so the streaming platforms can become content producers faster than the reverse. Repeated botched attempts at competition with the streaming services drains the industry of both capital and morale. Acquisitions happen at an accelerated rate as small companies run out of steam and larger ones need to demonstrate something that looks like success to investors. Innovative but risky projects get axed as the call to cut costs grows and the heads of their benefactors roll. Seemingly safe projects repeating what worked in the past are the only ones that survive long enough to produce results, but their failure to make up for the losses continues the downward spiral of morale. A few players are large enough to shield a division from the worst of it, and they can develop a viable competitor. Others luck out on a convenient merger that actually gets them the resources they need. These become players alongside the newcoming streaming services, but their positions are much reduced in stature. For the bulk of the industry though, there is no recovery - those who can jump ship do, and those who can't re-prioritize to stay afloat just long enough to retire. It happened with the rail companies, it happened with cameras, its happening with traditional media. It's much easier for a competitor to destroy your empire than it is for you to seize theirs intact.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Competence (IMO) plays a role for a short while. Netflix may have been especially competent early on, but that doesn't matter anymore. Streaming is a commodity. Now they have to compete in other spheres. Hence the exclusive content strategies. I'm sure there was a time when printing newspapers was technically hard. You needed chemistry, mechanical engineering... Some people/companies probably succeeded by being good at it. Eventually though, printing becomes a commodity. Being competent doesn't matter anymore. You buy a machine. The machine is competent. I agree on the competition point. We know the game at this point. The difference between owning 25% and 5% is not 5-to-1. It's 100-to-1. All the returns are tied to centralisation, bottlenecks. It looks like Netflix and the old studios will meet in the middle. A cluster of content generation & platforms. They'll eventually find an equilibrium where the major compete more modestly, focusing mostly on keeping out newcomers.
api 6y ago
Old Hollywood died when they stopped creating anything and started doing nothing but sequels and comic book films. The record industry died when it stopped discovering, polishing, and promoting real creativity and instead started manufacturing pop that all sounds the same because its written by the same couple Swedish guys. There have been no major new breakthrough styles of music since the early 1990s because the industry stopped performing its talent scout function, which was its primary value add. People will support you if you have something to support. Add no value and you are redundant and the market will go around you. If the streamers ever stop making fabulous original content, they too will be disrupted.
deleted 6y ago
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brian_herman__ 6y ago
Did they use the wrong week? Shouldn't it be weak?
v77 6y ago
Hell hath no fury like print media commenting on tech companies encroaching on their space. When did anyone actually love studio executives and their excessive compensation?
- fmajid 6y ago
  Yes. The actual talent is doing very well with the streaming boom, even if it's not sustainable.
madrox 6y ago
As someone who worked on early Disney streaming efforts and watched the recent Disney restructuring that saw massive layoffs, I find this article disingenuous and blatantly anti-tech. The fact is, content consumption is more pro consumer than ever, and I think anyone who argues otherwise is looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. Content delivery has changed and the business models have followed, but this business is all full of the same people. Disney was full of ex-Warner people and vice versa. Many of my ex-Disney colleagues are now at Netflix. The only thing that’s really different right now is the pandemic. Many of the people who’d normally jump from Warner to another company are having trouble getting new jobs right now because Hollywood production is still not at 100%, which means no one is hiring. Doesn’t matter if a Hollywood exec can do their job on zoom. Production can’t. Tech hasn’t solved that yet. So I’m disappointed that the only thing this article has to say is “look at yet another example of how tech ruined everyone’s fun.” Between this and the Blockbuster Airbnb you’d think everyone is longing to go back to the 90s.
btbuildem 6y ago
Oh cry me a river.. execs routinely fire people with less than a day's notice. People in leadership positions are expected to have a long-term vision of their industries, if they're surprised by this, it just validates the change of guard.
sradman 6y ago
> The corporate shifts at WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal in recent days signal that the technological shift you’ve been reading about for years is finally taking concrete form, accelerated by the pandemic. Echoes of the collapse of Blockbuster. For those familiar with Clayton Christensen's overlapping s-curves [1], the only remaining questions were the timing of the transition and whether any of the leaders in the old ecosystem could navigate the disruption; the pandemic pulled the rug out from under old Hollywood. I'm curious how the social aspects unfold if/when the pandemic subsides. The summer blockbuster directly targeted teenaged boys and their dates (indirectly). Will a new public space emerge as an alternative meeting place for teenagers or will the smartphone be the main platform for teenage courtship moving forward? Is the first date now an anachronism or maybe I'm the anachronism that missed this already long established shift. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Was expecting to read about Olivia de Havilland et al. Oh, you mean the old Hollywood of uh… five to ten years ago.
kazinator 6y ago
> (Like much of his industry, Mr. Redstone, who died last week at age 97, held on far longer than anyone expected. Picture reminds me of one of the Duke brothers played by Ralph Bellamy in Trading Places (1983 film starring Eddie Murphy).
RickJWagner 6y ago
And not a moment too soon. Complete financial corruption, a hedonistic set of self-righteous celebrities, endless re-hashed content, #metoo running rampant (combined with the self-righteous hypocrites!) etc. I can't wait until Hollywood is remade, more inline with reality.

68 points by woldemariam 6y ago

Good riddance.

It sucks for the employees and executives laid off (especially during this pandemic), but audiences continue to consume a steady stream of high quality scripted content (ranging from low budget sitcoms to high budget action movies). If executives at Warner Media struggle to meet shareholder expectations as audiences vote with their wallets and opt for streaming services instead of cable bundles then so be it. The executives at Netflix have earned their place (and one day, they too will be replaced).

DrBazza 6y ago

Streaming services may be 'in control' but they're still as bad as, or controlled by, the studios they're replacing. In the UK, suppose I want to watch Forbidden Planet, or Gone With The Wind, or Carry on Screaming. Show me a streaming service that has those films. I either wait 6 months and hope the TV shows them or.... hello bittorrent. Even more recent films. Suppose I want to listen to Louis Armstrong, or Ella Fitzgerald? Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music all have those songs. It's just a shame we didn't have higher bandwidth in the Napster era to do to the studios what it did to record labels.

JoshTriplett 6y ago
That's a "controlled by" problem, not an "as bad as" problem. Region restrictions are primarily imposed by studios, so that they can make different exclusive licensing deals in different regions.
ghaff 6y ago
The other thing going on is that Netflix' DVD service drove Blockbuster et al out of business and now the Netflix back catalog is pretty terrible. So you increasingly can't rent a disc if something isn't available streaming--even a la carte. (In fairness, many films are available for Amazon pay-per-view that aren't on all you can eat subscriptions, including 2 of the films you mention.) But it's a mess generally. I don't know if it's Napster/bandwidth given that mechanical licensing for music is much older. In any case though, we've largely moved to a new medium but a lot of content hasn't moved over.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  Blockbuster drove itself out of business Possibly more so than Netflix because of billionaire investor Carl Icahn.
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > The other thing going on is that Netflix' DVD service drove Blockbuster et al out of business and now the Netflix back catalog is pretty terrible. I subscribe to both Netflix DVD and streaming. I don’t much like serialized shows and maintain streaming mainly for my partner and the occasional one off. Netflix’s DVD back catalog is thinning and I’m sort of at a crossroads about what to do. I wish Netflix would spin off the DVD service and give it a chance to thrive.
  - ihuman 6y ago
    > I wish Netflix would spin off the DVD service and give it a chance to thrive. They were going to do that back in 2011, but then cancelled the plans https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-cancels-qwikster-spinoff/ https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-cancels-qwikster-spinoff/
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I canceled my DVD service a year or two ago because I was doing a lot of work travel and I'd end up with discs sitting by my TV for a month. I've renewed it for now during the pandemic. It's fine for recent movies but the back catalog has gotten pretty bad. I've mostly resigned myself to paying for streaming rentals plus buying a Blu-Ray every now and then if I think it's something I might want to rewatch. I suspect there isn't a critical mass for a robust DVD service any longer. RedBox skims some demand for current blockbusters and a lot of people want content right now.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      > RedBox skims some demand for current blockbusters and a lot of people want content right now. I really can't emphasize the right now enough. I'm never planning things I want to watch days in advance, so a by-mail service just doesn't work (plus there's the physical hassle of having to mail stuff all the time and dealing with the inevitable hassle of things going missing in the mail). I just can't imagine waiting for something to come in the mail when I could instead fire up BitTorrent and be watching it 30 minutes later. The music industry learned their lesson from piracy but the movie industry still hasn't. Things will hopefully change now given that theaters are a much-reduced experience; they did always have the benefit over music in that whether you buy the music CD on launch day or pirate it digitally, the listening experience itself is identical, whereas seeing a film in theaters on launch day is definitely still quite different than watching some shitty pirated cam version, assuming the shitty cam version is even out by launch day (it isn't always).
readarticle 6y ago
Studios aren’t being replaced. This isn’t an article about streaming services replacing studios, it’s an article about streaming executive culture replacing studio executive culture.
dageshi 6y ago
You can rent all of these for sub £5 on amazon (probably itunes as well). There isn't a world where you can pay $20 a month and get everything, every movie, every tv show, ever, the finances just don't work.
- leoedin 6y ago
  Why don't the finances work? As an example: I'm paying for Netflix and Amazon prime. I'm not going to pay for more services because I don't value watching TV more than that. We buy or rent a specific movie maybe once a quarter at most. So total expenditure on TV services is around $20/mo. Almost everyone I know is in a similar situation. Some swap one of those services for something else, many are sharing subscriptions with other households. So right now most people are paying a fairly fixed amount for access to a portion of TV and film. The total money flowing in seems to be enough to support the entire industry. If a service that cost $20/month for access to everything came out, I'd definitely switch. I imagine most of my friends would as well. Then the total money flowing into the industry would be the same, but everyone would have access to all the media.
  - dageshi 6y ago
    It's not enough to support the entire industry, that's the point of the article. $20 a month has never been enough, bearing in mind it's effectively replacing (in north America) cable which used to cost much more than that and those channels used to run ads as well!
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I suspect a lot of people buy or rent more than you and your friends. For example, many people have either a cable TV or online streaming subscription that's another $50-100/month. HBO would be another $15 or so. And so forth. There is an argument that, at some point, there are only so many hours in the day and a Spotify for video (i.e. most content for one monthly fee) makes sense but that's probably a $100-200/month fee in the US (assuming you could get most players to cooperate). YouTube TV alone is $65/month these days.
deleted 6y ago
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chrisseaton 6y ago
> In the UK, suppose I want to watch Forbidden Planet, or Gone With The Wind, or Carry on Screaming. Show me a streaming service that has those films They're on Amazon UK. You can stream them right now. What are you talking about?
jp555 6y ago
Napster pitched a $10/month all-you-can-eat subscription, and the Music industry said NO WAY! Then they were crushed by reality and we got multiple suppliers of Napster's $10/month-for-all-music offer. Imagine if Napster had got what it wanted and became the only supplier of music? I doubt they'd still be seen as the good guy.
- solarhoma 6y ago
  The monopolies are always seen good in their infancy. You always forgive them for mistakes as they are new and fresh. Then they begin making significant mistakes as they age. And finally become too powerful and you realize they are truly a monopoly. See Google. Everyone ‘welcomed their new google overlords’. Now we see how awful they are for the world.
  - jp555 6y ago
    "in the case of Apple, the company’s strategy was doomed right up until it was illegal, or so it seems with the App Store." Ben Thompson (https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-epic-and-the-app-store/ https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-epic-and-the-app-store/) LOL
iwasakabukiman 6y ago
I feel like you are purposefully ignoring the fact that you can easily get all of those movies (and tons of others not on streaming services) on DVD or Blu-ray for relatively cheap. As another commenter said, you can also rent them from any number of services for $2-$4.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  What am I going to play a DVD on?
  - zxcvbn4038 6y ago
    Black box above the betamax and below the 8-track player - you may need to move all the floppy disk boxes on the floor first. ;)
  - ghaff 6y ago
    An external USB DVD player is about $15.
  - iwasakabukiman 6y ago
    I feel like you're purposefully making this hypothetical difficult and throwing up as many roadblocks as possible. The obvious answer is that either you own a DVD player or you can get one for next to nothing. Amazon has region free ones for $25.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      ewaste ftw
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Eighth generation consoles (except the Switch) have a drive that can play DVDs and Blu-Rays.
- ghaff 6y ago
  While I don't love the current state of affairs, I dropped cable TV recently (which I hardly ever watched) and I sort of take the attitude that it makes sense to keep my monthly subscriptions down and periodically buy, whether disc or streaming, or rent a la carte things I want to watch--especially given that I don't really watch all that much.
dalbasal 6y ago
Even record labels came out unscathed, relatively. It's not like we live in a world where artists record songs, and get paid by streaming services. Record labels get paid, and they pay artists with hollywood accounting. All the control is still with them. They have much less control of what becomes popular. Recording has no need for upfront, risky capital anymore... Once upon a time, you needed a lot of money to cut & press a commercial album. A warehouse full of records, physical distribution, the advertising to make that work. The "record deal" was essential because someone had to fund an album. The record industry was built around this, with the portfolio of "signed artists" being their primary asset. Napster, Youtube & Spotify haven't really changed this... They've affected it, but the system survived irrelevance. The reality of content industries (and many other ones) is that centralisation is everything. The big hollywood studios, record labels & such will take the lions share. If they don't, it will be netflix, youtube, spotify & such. Someone will be in position to dictate terms, and it's not the artists.

reedwolf 6y ago

Unpaywalled: http://archive.vn/wcuxy http://archive.vn/wcuxy

deleted 6y ago

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rendall 6y ago

"TikTok has succeeded as Quibi — Hollywood’s premium alternative to user-generated content — struggles to find an audience." I had never until this very moment even heard of Quibi

BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
That's because it's not only poorly marketed but also a completely awful idea. It's 8-minute shows, chunks so small that it's hard to get invested because a full season can be less than a feature-length movie but has the ambitions of one. Some episodes are actually less than 8 minutes, most show concepts are horrid (they relaunched Punk'd!) and the people at the helm are... unusual. This interview gives great insight into the mess it is: https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.html https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.htm... My favorite quote from that: "When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, “I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.”"
- dayofthedaleks 6y ago
  Non-paywalled Vulture Quibi story: https://web.archive.org/web/20200818123029/https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200818123029/https://www.vultu...
- toyg 6y ago
  I wouldn’t call Whitman and Katzenberg “unusual”. Katzenberg, by all accounts, is stereotypical power-Hollywood. Whitman is an average tech ceo. Their coupling might be a bit unusual, but it makes sense in from an “opposites attract / complement” point of view. I do agree that 8-minute video-chunks are silly, that’s youtube territory and people are not going to pay for that as long as YT is free.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  I often find myself thinking, I have spare 8 minutes, I wonder what I would do with them. As oppose to spare few mins. Mobile phones provide distractions for spare few moments. 8mins is not a timeframe we randomly waste. Its a commitment, clearly a commitment nobody want to make.

optimalsolver 6y ago

I'll be back.

nickpeterson 6y ago
It may take awhile judging by your username.

agustif 6y ago

I've this crazy idea for a de-centralized pirate-media aggregator that could fix piracy by going the pay what you want route. I would only pay back to creators directly, no copyright holders, no studios.. Wonder how that would go...

dageshi 6y ago
If it's a free choice between paying and not paying for a product, most people will simply not pay because that's the simplest option. Paying what you want actually is much more complicated because you end up having to try and establish the value of something to you, again much easier to just pay zero. On the otherhand, people will support people directly to create, patreon already fills that niche, but in that respect "you" the creator are the product not just what you create.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  > most people will simply not pay because that's the simplest option. I would disagree with that. If you are young and tech/internet savy and have time then sure. But if I get back home after days work. All I have time/strength for is to put on netflix to watch the show i heard from a friend. Convenience trumps piracy. As long as its more convenient. The moment I need to figure out if that show is on Netflix Hulo or Amazon, etc the convenience factor is diminishing. I will check if its no netflix, no... hbo... no ah fuck it, piratebay it is. > On the otherhand, people will support people directly to create, patreon already fills that niche, but in that respect "you" the creator are the product not just what you create. I have monthly budget for patreon to support people I like. There is a lot of high quality niche content that I want to see being made so I chip in.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  Have people put their card details in first to minimise friction later on?
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Piracy is already back on the uptick because of all the streaming services. Wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years, the industry goes through another panic like they did 20 years earlier with online piracy.

halfFact 6y ago

I've been completely disconnected to Hollywood as I've found better content on YouTube. I admittedly like non fiction, and my wife likes the occasional comedy. Both of these are often better than anything you can get from Hollywood because it's more niche. I guess I don't understand the problem. People really like their old school classics?

apress 6y ago

Coca Cola sold Columbia Pictures to Sony and Rupert Murdoch bought 20th Century Fox in the 1980s, General Electric got Universal Studios 20 years ago, sold it to Comcast, Stephen Spielberg sold Dreamworks to Sumner Redstone, who had taken Paramount off Gulf+Western, but sure NETFLIX brought a "ruthless new culture" to Hollywood.

dalbasal 6y ago

I think considering TikTok a threat to hollywood, or a sign of diminishing relevance is naive... disingenuous even. The medium, art and distribution methods shift. This isn't the first time. Television encroached on film. VHS. Cable. DVD box sets. Home cinema. The rise of the cinematic series. Shifts sometimes hurt, they may even have some casualties.... but this is not dying. Hollywood, and old media generally, are in much better shape than I had expected. Remember "information wants to be free?" Remember the initial response to ipod? The scoffs around early DRM? Disintermediation? The end of record labels? None of this came to pass. The true economics of "content" is centralisation, exclusivity and manufactured scarcity. Tiktok (youtube moreso) demonstrates the point. It doesn't matter that you have millions of viewers. That doesn't translate into money, power or value. 0.1% of the viewership is not worth 0.1% of the money. It doesn't divide. Centralisation itself is where the value is. Content is not a "sum of parts" game. For success, you need centralisation & control. Theatres, PPV services, cable deals, streaming services... This is why spotify is buying the top podcasts, to exclude them from itunes & youtube. Porn is the counterexample. As a pariah, it had no ability to affect DRM, Copyright, other legal frameworks and the details of how they will be implemented. When online payments started working, Porn had its "DVD Boom." When streaming started working, the industry collapsed again. That's what a free media market looks like. Extremely high volatility. The record industry & hollywood have never dealt with this kind of thing. Never will, probably. The main thing shaking up hollywood is that they're being introduced to startup/tech economics. Market caps. Short term equity plays. This takes some getting used to, but the structure is as secure as ever. They're just learning that just because investors have valued something @ $Xbn doesn't mean it will make $Xbn.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Really if TikTok is a threat to Hollywood they should hang their heads in shame if absolute amateurs with short clips can do a better job than professionals. One thing I don't get about porn is why it remains so pariahed despite it being a foregone "pretty much everyone watches it at least occassionally single or couples". You still wouldn't list it on your LinkedIn profiles but you would think advertisers would be less afraid of it and you would see at least contraception ads preferred there as opposed to mostly circular porn advertising. There are few who would be offended by products for the recreationally sexually active who would actually use the product. Instead the only online ads I have seen for contraception are work youtube when it mistakes me for a woman.

jjk166 6y ago

It's the classic innovation implosion: Prior to video streaming progressing to a viable point, there was no reason for anyone in the industry to have the skills to work with it. Netflix comes along with a business model of providing these services to the industry by hosting their content on its platform There is massive success, everyone is making lots of money doing what they are good at The industry, lacking the skills to recognize the value netflix provided them in technical skill, tries to get a larger cut of the pie because "how hard could it be?" Very hard. The competition leads to cannibalization of the market and the industry has a lot of catch up to do just to get to Netflix's level. Meanwhile the carpet being pulled out from under netflix allows other, actually technically competent, competitors to pick up real gains. Where before the industry were the customers of the streaming partners, now they are competitors. Both are out of their comfort zone, but there is a lot more free-floating talent from the long term industry than the new niche technology, so the streaming platforms can become content producers faster than the reverse. Repeated botched attempts at competition with the streaming services drains the industry of both capital and morale. Acquisitions happen at an accelerated rate as small companies run out of steam and larger ones need to demonstrate something that looks like success to investors. Innovative but risky projects get axed as the call to cut costs grows and the heads of their benefactors roll. Seemingly safe projects repeating what worked in the past are the only ones that survive long enough to produce results, but their failure to make up for the losses continues the downward spiral of morale. A few players are large enough to shield a division from the worst of it, and they can develop a viable competitor. Others luck out on a convenient merger that actually gets them the resources they need. These become players alongside the newcoming streaming services, but their positions are much reduced in stature. For the bulk of the industry though, there is no recovery - those who can jump ship do, and those who can't re-prioritize to stay afloat just long enough to retire. It happened with the rail companies, it happened with cameras, its happening with traditional media. It's much easier for a competitor to destroy your empire than it is for you to seize theirs intact.

dalbasal 6y ago
Competence (IMO) plays a role for a short while. Netflix may have been especially competent early on, but that doesn't matter anymore. Streaming is a commodity. Now they have to compete in other spheres. Hence the exclusive content strategies. I'm sure there was a time when printing newspapers was technically hard. You needed chemistry, mechanical engineering... Some people/companies probably succeeded by being good at it. Eventually though, printing becomes a commodity. Being competent doesn't matter anymore. You buy a machine. The machine is competent. I agree on the competition point. We know the game at this point. The difference between owning 25% and 5% is not 5-to-1. It's 100-to-1. All the returns are tied to centralisation, bottlenecks. It looks like Netflix and the old studios will meet in the middle. A cluster of content generation & platforms. They'll eventually find an equilibrium where the major compete more modestly, focusing mostly on keeping out newcomers.

api 6y ago

Old Hollywood died when they stopped creating anything and started doing nothing but sequels and comic book films. The record industry died when it stopped discovering, polishing, and promoting real creativity and instead started manufacturing pop that all sounds the same because its written by the same couple Swedish guys. There have been no major new breakthrough styles of music since the early 1990s because the industry stopped performing its talent scout function, which was its primary value add. People will support you if you have something to support. Add no value and you are redundant and the market will go around you. If the streamers ever stop making fabulous original content, they too will be disrupted.

deleted 6y ago

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brian_herman__ 6y ago

Did they use the wrong week? Shouldn't it be weak?

v77 6y ago

Hell hath no fury like print media commenting on tech companies encroaching on their space. When did anyone actually love studio executives and their excessive compensation?

fmajid 6y ago
Yes. The actual talent is doing very well with the streaming boom, even if it's not sustainable.

madrox 6y ago

As someone who worked on early Disney streaming efforts and watched the recent Disney restructuring that saw massive layoffs, I find this article disingenuous and blatantly anti-tech. The fact is, content consumption is more pro consumer than ever, and I think anyone who argues otherwise is looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. Content delivery has changed and the business models have followed, but this business is all full of the same people. Disney was full of ex-Warner people and vice versa. Many of my ex-Disney colleagues are now at Netflix. The only thing that’s really different right now is the pandemic. Many of the people who’d normally jump from Warner to another company are having trouble getting new jobs right now because Hollywood production is still not at 100%, which means no one is hiring. Doesn’t matter if a Hollywood exec can do their job on zoom. Production can’t. Tech hasn’t solved that yet. So I’m disappointed that the only thing this article has to say is “look at yet another example of how tech ruined everyone’s fun.” Between this and the Blockbuster Airbnb you’d think everyone is longing to go back to the 90s.

btbuildem 6y ago

Oh cry me a river.. execs routinely fire people with less than a day's notice. People in leadership positions are expected to have a long-term vision of their industries, if they're surprised by this, it just validates the change of guard.

sradman 6y ago

> The corporate shifts at WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal in recent days signal that the technological shift you’ve been reading about for years is finally taking concrete form, accelerated by the pandemic. Echoes of the collapse of Blockbuster. For those familiar with Clayton Christensen's overlapping s-curves [1], the only remaining questions were the timing of the transition and whether any of the leaders in the old ecosystem could navigate the disruption; the pandemic pulled the rug out from under old Hollywood. I'm curious how the social aspects unfold if/when the pandemic subsides. The summer blockbuster directly targeted teenaged boys and their dates (indirectly). Will a new public space emerge as an alternative meeting place for teenagers or will the smartphone be the main platform for teenage courtship moving forward? Is the first date now an anachronism or maybe I'm the anachronism that missed this already long established shift. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Was expecting to read about Olivia de Havilland et al. Oh, you mean the old Hollywood of uh… five to ten years ago.

kazinator 6y ago

> (Like much of his industry, Mr. Redstone, who died last week at age 97, held on far longer than anyone expected. Picture reminds me of one of the Duke brothers played by Ralph Bellamy in Trading Places (1983 film starring Eddie Murphy).

RickJWagner 6y ago

And not a moment too soon. Complete financial corruption, a hedonistic set of self-righteous celebrities, endless re-hashed content, #metoo running rampant (combined with the self-righteous hypocrites!) etc. I can't wait until Hollywood is remade, more inline with reality.