4 ms·

For a while, before Jassy became CEO, people at the company would sometimes jokingly refer to Amazon Studios as "the loss leader for Bezos's sex life." Now tha

by cs702 3y ago

For a while, before Jassy became CEO, people at the company would sometimes jokingly refer to Amazon Studios as "the loss leader for Bezos's sex life." Now that subscriber growth is slowing down at most streaming services, the end of the "golden age of TV" is at hand. Welcome to the "bean-counting age of TV," in which streaming services try to milk subscribers for as much as possible without pissing them off too much. Going forward, I'm expecting cheaper content, greater restrictions, higher prices, a proliferation of tiered subscription plans, and pervasive advertisement. Completely predictable.

afavour 3y ago
> Going forward, I'm expecting cheaper content Netflix's proliferation of reality TV (Love is Blind etc) felt absolutely jarring to me at first but it's just the tip of the iceberg. We're going to look back on the era of prestige TV fondly.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  > Netflix's proliferation of reality TV (Love is Blind etc) felt absolutely jarring to me at first but it's just the tip of the iceberg. This should be seen as a death-kneel for any channel/service, yet those cable channels keep going after decades of truly terrible TV. I wonder what kind of person these shows pander to.
  - afavour 3y ago
    > I wonder what kind of person these shows pander to. An absolutely massive audience that just wants to switch off at the end of the day rather than engage in a deep drama or similar. I'm not exactly defending it but don't underestimate the size of that audience.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Yeah I'll bite. James Cameron said something to the effect of "a ticket to a movie is a promise to give something 100% of your attention for 2 hours" -- and most of the time I'm NOT willing to do that. Reality TV or something is fine much of the time.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Pretty much everyone. You might not seek it out, but if someone else is watching you’ll probably be suckered into some kind of emotional response. A lot of cynics watch and say it’s dumb and fake and vain and overdone; and it is. But it doesn’t take long for them to fall into the trap of exclaiming how dumb a character is, or what have they should have done, or why someone deserved a punishment and then bang. They got you. You felt a glimmer of empathy for the folks on the screen, even if it’s contempt.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    I haven’t looked into the numbers myself, but after reading the great comment below about how mobile game studios essentially bought AAA game publishers instead of the other way around, it’s made me reflect on the recent Discovery acquisition of HBO in a new light. Maybe an empire of cheap and disposable reality TV is far more profitable than expensive, smaller audience-appealing, prestige television. In much the same way that disposable F2P mobile gaming is far more ubiquitous, casual, and profitable than expensive, hobbyist, AAA console and PC gaming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230784
    - fragmede 3y ago
      The metric to look at is viewers per dollar. If Foundation or The Expanse drew in viewers for the millions per episode spent on them, that would be one thing. But if you spend a tiny budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars, max to make an episode of, say, Naked and Afraid, and got commensurate viewership, if not higher, what would you choose, if you're running a business. Combine it with the fact that reality tv contestants don't receive residuals, there are no union writers to pay, it's obvious which direction the American TV business is headed because reality tv is a ridiculously better deal for them. Get the theme song recorded as a work for hire as well and it's pure profit for Discovery. It's not great for the industry but culturally, we're not supportive of strikes worker rights, especially if the media tells us it's okay to hate those workers for being "rich" Hollywood folk (most writers are struggling), and doesn't point out we're supporting scabs by watching reality tv. We may all want to watch Ballers or some other a tv show starring The Rock but he's the highest paid actor in Hollywood and is able to command a share of the revenue from the show. It's not publicly known for him, but the TV show friends had their actors earning a million dollars per episode by the end of it, and they get paid residuals for every time the episode gets watched. Meanwhile in a race to the bottom, reality tv show contestants are often (sometimes literally!) fighting for table scraps from the tv studio. A one time appearance fee $25,000 or lower - and the beauty of it being a contest is you pay the losers even less, if at all! Hell, some of them do if for the exposure and the experience and go home with nothing other than being able to advertise for their restaurant with that claim to fame for their restaurant.
- Arkhaine_kupo 3y ago
  > We're going to look back on the era of prestige TV fondly. I don't think prestige TV is necesirely expensive though. The wire, breaking bad, Andor, the bear, severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets. If anything big budgets have not translated into quality, see GoT, Rings of Power, Stranger Things all getting worse the more moeny thrown at them. prestigue tv is about talent, and having longer story lines, it just allows for more character work than a movie, but not because of that does it have to cost exponentially more.
  - starkparker 3y ago
    > Andor ... severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets Severance S2 reportedly costs $15–20 million per episode to make, and Apple+'s average original series budget is ~$10M/ep.: https://www.gq.com/story/severance-season-2-delayed-behind-the-scenes-drama https://www.gq.com/story/severance-season-2-delayed-behind-t... Andor S1's budget was reportedly $250M for 12 episodes ($20.8M/ep): https://www.ign.com/articles/andor-season-1-reported-budget-250-million https://www.ign.com/articles/andor-season-1-reported-budget-... Which is more expensive than the combined budgets for The Mandalorian S1 and the upcoming Skeleton Crew S1. Tony Gilroy outright said: “We got lucky making this during the gold rush a few years ago. A lot of people now have cold feet, and you can’t do this show inexpensively.” https://fandomwire.com/we-got-lucky-you-cant-do-this-show-inexpensively-andor-beats-pedro-pascals-the-mandalorian-as-most-expensive-star-wars-show-ever-made-with-250m-budget/ https://fandomwire.com/we-got-lucky-you-cant-do-this-show-in...
    - prepend 3y ago
      That’s weird about Andor’s budget. They don’t have complicated effects and no huge names in the cast. At least Severence had lots of named actors.
      - Apocryphon 3y ago
        Really lavish sets and impressive costuming, though.
miohtama 3y ago
I’m expecting more BitTorrent.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  Yes, indeed. MUBI is the only one that, even though it’s kinda the costliest, doesn’t not make sense. I somehow like for its nature and the way it has so far stuck to it. “Good” cinema and no gimmicks and just for its target audience. Not sure whether they’re making money.
tiffanyh 3y ago
Can you explain more your "loss leader" comment. What's the background on why that comment was being made?
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Supposedly Bezos liked being a part of Hollywood, meeting the celebrities, being at the parties, and potentially meeting women. I always took the last part to be an exaggeration, but it did sound like he cut the division a lot of slack on spending because he liked the idea of it.
  - TradingPlaces 3y ago
    Part of a VERY long history of non-media companies buying studios and regretting it later. It’s sexy and sounds good until you get into the actual business part, which is terrible.
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    >it did sound like he cut the division a lot of slack on spending because he liked the idea of it. My understanding is that Bezos approved Amazon taking over the airing of the canceled The Expanse because he likes the book series the show is based on.
hgdfhgfdhgdf 3y ago
Fortunately, capitalism ensures you will have other choices besides Amazon.
- malchow 3y ago
  Or the choice to buy no tv content at all, a choice that our less-capitalist forefathers in the UK do not have !
  - hgdfhgfdhgdf 3y ago
    It is indeed quite telling that our less-capitalist forefathers in the UK do not produce streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.
    - dijit 3y ago
      That's not strictly true, there are plenty of streaming services that come out of the UK but they are tailored for the UK market; BritBox being the most prominent. The parent was making a jibe at the TV License which is mandatory if you own a tv or "streaming capable device" (because the BBC can stream now.. sigh).
    - happymellon 3y ago
      Like Dave, NowTV and Britbox?
  - happymellon 3y ago
    I'm not sure I understand. As someone in the UK, I can buy a subscription to Amazon Prime Video, or not, I can buy a subscription to Netflix, or not. I can pay for a BBC licence so I can watch iPlayer, or not. I can watch free TV on ITVx or Channel 4 switching a subscription for adverts. What do I not have?
unsupp0rted 3y ago
I have the opposite perspective: studios will stop looking for ways to give audiences what they don’t want (and stop calling them toxic for not wanting it). People are voting with their wallets. Hollywood in the 90s was much better at entertaining people and therefore much better at getting their money. Studios will start making shows with good writing again. Apple TV often already is, with some glaringly bad exceptions like Foundation and parts of Ted Lasso season 3. Severance, for example, is good enough on its own for me to pay for the whole subscription. Making entertaining and thought-provoking original content, without calling their audience sexists or racists when the writing or casting misses the mark, will be profitable and that profit will fund the next wave of prestige tv.
- thmsths 3y ago
  Foundation is an interesting case because while the parts they adapted from the books are atrocious, the original story line about the three emperors is pretty good. It feels like the writers simply wanted to do their own show but were constrained by the producers.
ncallaway 3y ago
I’m worried about when they start dropping monthly plans in an attempt to stop people from rotating between different streaming platforms.
screye 3y ago
Is there anything wrong with that ? Their 'Infinite resources and big property given to random nobodies'(LOTR) or 'big creators given infinite resources to create a no-name property'(Woody Allen - Miley Cyrus show) both failed. Their big hits have been episode-1-viral TV shows like The-Boys that they could fun risk free or established brain-dead guaranteed hits like The-Grand-Tour. Netflix & Prime need to start learning from HBO. Running a sustainable subscription business is a tried-and-tested model. But, their obsession with establishing monopoly through loss-leaders means they will never reach monetary-sustainability as long as they're in their 'growth' phase. This is peak "uber vs lyft" where everyone was getting hyper-subsidized rides while both were bleeding money by the million.
m463 3y ago
I watched "Air" with Matt Damon in the theater, and noticed it was an amazonstudios movie. It was kind of ok, but wow it really lacked the polish that many hollywood movies have. It could have just been so much better. I think nickle-and-diming movies will just lead to the sort of thing amazon is famous for. Lots of product, all of it cheaply made, with very little to differentiate it or make it memorable. Personally I think there is also money in excellence.

by cs702 3y ago

afavour 3y ago

> Going forward, I'm expecting cheaper content Netflix's proliferation of reality TV (Love is Blind etc) felt absolutely jarring to me at first but it's just the tip of the iceberg. We're going to look back on the era of prestige TV fondly.

nullindividual 3y ago
> Netflix's proliferation of reality TV (Love is Blind etc) felt absolutely jarring to me at first but it's just the tip of the iceberg. This should be seen as a death-kneel for any channel/service, yet those cable channels keep going after decades of truly terrible TV. I wonder what kind of person these shows pander to.
- afavour 3y ago
  > I wonder what kind of person these shows pander to. An absolutely massive audience that just wants to switch off at the end of the day rather than engage in a deep drama or similar. I'm not exactly defending it but don't underestimate the size of that audience.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Yeah I'll bite. James Cameron said something to the effect of "a ticket to a movie is a promise to give something 100% of your attention for 2 hours" -- and most of the time I'm NOT willing to do that. Reality TV or something is fine much of the time.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Pretty much everyone. You might not seek it out, but if someone else is watching you’ll probably be suckered into some kind of emotional response. A lot of cynics watch and say it’s dumb and fake and vain and overdone; and it is. But it doesn’t take long for them to fall into the trap of exclaiming how dumb a character is, or what have they should have done, or why someone deserved a punishment and then bang. They got you. You felt a glimmer of empathy for the folks on the screen, even if it’s contempt.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  I haven’t looked into the numbers myself, but after reading the great comment below about how mobile game studios essentially bought AAA game publishers instead of the other way around, it’s made me reflect on the recent Discovery acquisition of HBO in a new light. Maybe an empire of cheap and disposable reality TV is far more profitable than expensive, smaller audience-appealing, prestige television. In much the same way that disposable F2P mobile gaming is far more ubiquitous, casual, and profitable than expensive, hobbyist, AAA console and PC gaming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230784
  - fragmede 3y ago
    The metric to look at is viewers per dollar. If Foundation or The Expanse drew in viewers for the millions per episode spent on them, that would be one thing. But if you spend a tiny budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars, max to make an episode of, say, Naked and Afraid, and got commensurate viewership, if not higher, what would you choose, if you're running a business. Combine it with the fact that reality tv contestants don't receive residuals, there are no union writers to pay, it's obvious which direction the American TV business is headed because reality tv is a ridiculously better deal for them. Get the theme song recorded as a work for hire as well and it's pure profit for Discovery. It's not great for the industry but culturally, we're not supportive of strikes worker rights, especially if the media tells us it's okay to hate those workers for being "rich" Hollywood folk (most writers are struggling), and doesn't point out we're supporting scabs by watching reality tv. We may all want to watch Ballers or some other a tv show starring The Rock but he's the highest paid actor in Hollywood and is able to command a share of the revenue from the show. It's not publicly known for him, but the TV show friends had their actors earning a million dollars per episode by the end of it, and they get paid residuals for every time the episode gets watched. Meanwhile in a race to the bottom, reality tv show contestants are often (sometimes literally!) fighting for table scraps from the tv studio. A one time appearance fee $25,000 or lower - and the beauty of it being a contest is you pay the losers even less, if at all! Hell, some of them do if for the exposure and the experience and go home with nothing other than being able to advertise for their restaurant with that claim to fame for their restaurant.
Arkhaine_kupo 3y ago
> We're going to look back on the era of prestige TV fondly. I don't think prestige TV is necesirely expensive though. The wire, breaking bad, Andor, the bear, severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets. If anything big budgets have not translated into quality, see GoT, Rings of Power, Stranger Things all getting worse the more moeny thrown at them. prestigue tv is about talent, and having longer story lines, it just allows for more character work than a movie, but not because of that does it have to cost exponentially more.
- starkparker 3y ago
  > Andor ... severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets Severance S2 reportedly costs $15–20 million per episode to make, and Apple+'s average original series budget is ~$10M/ep.: https://www.gq.com/story/severance-season-2-delayed-behind-the-scenes-drama https://www.gq.com/story/severance-season-2-delayed-behind-t... Andor S1's budget was reportedly $250M for 12 episodes ($20.8M/ep): https://www.ign.com/articles/andor-season-1-reported-budget-250-million https://www.ign.com/articles/andor-season-1-reported-budget-... Which is more expensive than the combined budgets for The Mandalorian S1 and the upcoming Skeleton Crew S1. Tony Gilroy outright said: “We got lucky making this during the gold rush a few years ago. A lot of people now have cold feet, and you can’t do this show inexpensively.” https://fandomwire.com/we-got-lucky-you-cant-do-this-show-inexpensively-andor-beats-pedro-pascals-the-mandalorian-as-most-expensive-star-wars-show-ever-made-with-250m-budget/ https://fandomwire.com/we-got-lucky-you-cant-do-this-show-in...
  - prepend 3y ago
    That’s weird about Andor’s budget. They don’t have complicated effects and no huge names in the cast. At least Severence had lots of named actors.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Really lavish sets and impressive costuming, though.

miohtama 3y ago

I’m expecting more BitTorrent.

crossroadsguy 3y ago
Yes, indeed. MUBI is the only one that, even though it’s kinda the costliest, doesn’t not make sense. I somehow like for its nature and the way it has so far stuck to it. “Good” cinema and no gimmicks and just for its target audience. Not sure whether they’re making money.

tiffanyh 3y ago

Can you explain more your "loss leader" comment. What's the background on why that comment was being made?

danpalmer 3y ago
Supposedly Bezos liked being a part of Hollywood, meeting the celebrities, being at the parties, and potentially meeting women. I always took the last part to be an exaggeration, but it did sound like he cut the division a lot of slack on spending because he liked the idea of it.
- TradingPlaces 3y ago
  Part of a VERY long history of non-media companies buying studios and regretting it later. It’s sexy and sounds good until you get into the actual business part, which is terrible.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  >it did sound like he cut the division a lot of slack on spending because he liked the idea of it. My understanding is that Bezos approved Amazon taking over the airing of the canceled The Expanse because he likes the book series the show is based on.

hgdfhgfdhgdf 3y ago

Fortunately, capitalism ensures you will have other choices besides Amazon.

malchow 3y ago
Or the choice to buy no tv content at all, a choice that our less-capitalist forefathers in the UK do not have !
- hgdfhgfdhgdf 3y ago
  It is indeed quite telling that our less-capitalist forefathers in the UK do not produce streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.
  - dijit 3y ago
    That's not strictly true, there are plenty of streaming services that come out of the UK but they are tailored for the UK market; BritBox being the most prominent. The parent was making a jibe at the TV License which is mandatory if you own a tv or "streaming capable device" (because the BBC can stream now.. sigh).
  - happymellon 3y ago
    Like Dave, NowTV and Britbox?
- happymellon 3y ago
  I'm not sure I understand. As someone in the UK, I can buy a subscription to Amazon Prime Video, or not, I can buy a subscription to Netflix, or not. I can pay for a BBC licence so I can watch iPlayer, or not. I can watch free TV on ITVx or Channel 4 switching a subscription for adverts. What do I not have?

unsupp0rted 3y ago

I have the opposite perspective: studios will stop looking for ways to give audiences what they don’t want (and stop calling them toxic for not wanting it). People are voting with their wallets. Hollywood in the 90s was much better at entertaining people and therefore much better at getting their money. Studios will start making shows with good writing again. Apple TV often already is, with some glaringly bad exceptions like Foundation and parts of Ted Lasso season 3. Severance, for example, is good enough on its own for me to pay for the whole subscription. Making entertaining and thought-provoking original content, without calling their audience sexists or racists when the writing or casting misses the mark, will be profitable and that profit will fund the next wave of prestige tv.

thmsths 3y ago
Foundation is an interesting case because while the parts they adapted from the books are atrocious, the original story line about the three emperors is pretty good. It feels like the writers simply wanted to do their own show but were constrained by the producers.

ncallaway 3y ago

I’m worried about when they start dropping monthly plans in an attempt to stop people from rotating between different streaming platforms.

screye 3y ago

Is there anything wrong with that ? Their 'Infinite resources and big property given to random nobodies'(LOTR) or 'big creators given infinite resources to create a no-name property'(Woody Allen - Miley Cyrus show) both failed. Their big hits have been episode-1-viral TV shows like The-Boys that they could fun risk free or established brain-dead guaranteed hits like The-Grand-Tour. Netflix & Prime need to start learning from HBO. Running a sustainable subscription business is a tried-and-tested model. But, their obsession with establishing monopoly through loss-leaders means they will never reach monetary-sustainability as long as they're in their 'growth' phase. This is peak "uber vs lyft" where everyone was getting hyper-subsidized rides while both were bleeding money by the million.

m463 3y ago

I watched "Air" with Matt Damon in the theater, and noticed it was an amazonstudios movie. It was kind of ok, but wow it really lacked the polish that many hollywood movies have. It could have just been so much better. I think nickle-and-diming movies will just lead to the sort of thing amazon is famous for. Lots of product, all of it cheaply made, with very little to differentiate it or make it memorable. Personally I think there is also money in excellence.