4 ms·

If that happens I think we can say goodbye to expensive and well written shows such as Breaking Bad and the like. A show like that which has been designed to b

If that happens I think we can say goodbye to expensive and well written shows such as Breaking Bad and the like. A show like that which has been designed to be played out for possibly years isn't going to ever get off the ground via a pay as you go per episode, or some type of piecemeal model. There needs to be a significant upfront capital in place to make it worth the time for everyone who would be involved. But if some other company somewhere out there can and will front the money instead, then by all means please do it!

rictic 14y ago
That argument would've had more weight before kickstarter took off. I mean, think of it. A group just raised over $3.5 million in two days on kickstarter to build an opensource and indie-friendly video game console.
- res0nat0r 14y ago
  Unfortunately that is only enough cash to pay for one episode of Breaking Bad according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Development_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Development_histor...
  - rictic 14y ago
    Wow. Huh.
epistasis 14y ago
There are great ways of raising capital for expensive production and marketing, and startups are familiar with all of them. It's easy to imagine a Silicon Valley style VC relationship between a show's producers and the capital, rather than a Hollywood style media conglomerate relationship. However, there are entrenched cultural differences of "how it's done" and an active pool of VCs that know how to pick TV shows, so getting to that style of capital allocation could be difficult.
saalweachter 14y ago
I'm actually looking forward to that. I read a lot of golden and silver age science fiction. One of the things I love about the oldies isn't that they're necessarily better than modern science fiction, it's that they're short. Creatures of Light and Darkness, a fantastic book, is 192 pages. It's a stand-alone story which spans thousands of years, the better part of the universe, and builds such wonderful characters. And the author gets you from here to there in 192 pages. Nowadays, you can't introduce a plot and two characters in 200 pages. 400, 500, 600 pages are the norm. Some of it is style. Sometimes you need 600 pages to tell a story. But a portion of it is that authors are told, by their publishing companies, they need to target a certain size to get their books published, because a book needs to have a certain heft or it will never leave the shelf. And it's a damn shame, because some of these 600 page monstrosities could have been a fantastic 200 page book. Broadcast television also imposes certain constraints upon the show. Some shows work well with this format, for instance, if the show is episodic in nature. If the show is trying to tell a particular story, it works less well. One thing that can go wrong is that not all stories that get turned into a TV show require 18 hours of video to tell. A lot of filler is added, episodic episodes which get dropped into the middle of the story arc to drag things out. If the show's producers and writers are good, they can use these filler episodes to flesh out the characters and the world. But they aren't always good enough. A second thing that can go wrong is that you don't always know when to end your story. A show may get renewed for two or three or four seasons, and if you finished telling the story in the first season, you now have to come up with a completely new story for season two, or reveal that by a fiendish twist your story wasn't actually finished in the season finale like you thought it was. This isn't always as ... satisfying as it could be. Other times, you have to keep putting off finishing the story at the end of each season, which turns entire seasons into filler. This carries the additional risk that you may get canceled in season three and never finish the story you started in season one. I'm generally looking forward to the death of big media producers, because I think the quality of entertainment will go up once people are freed from the constraint of telling all of their stories in twenty to twenty-four 22 or 44 minute episodes.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  I agree with you that there are stories that are better suited for alternate formats. But I don't think the death of the big media producers has anything to do with that one way or the other. The markets for that kind of thing aren't the same markets the big media folks, so the new markets can grow regardless of the old ones. Kickstarter and the like are the likely funding venues, online is the likely distribution mechanism. Toes are being dipped. Jane Espenson just funded a season of her webseries on Kickstarter. Dan Harmon and Charlie Kaufman just launched a kickstarter for a $200,000 art film project yesterday. Those are some names who have enough clout to get things done otherwise. But maybe not enough to get the things they want done most (almost no one has that kinda clout). Kickstarter helps them get some of what they want. Don't count on the big media producers dying out, by the way. They're smart, they're connected, and they are survivors. They've been through more startup like situations than almost anyone in silicon valley, and they're the ones that lived through it. Don't underestimate them. TV and movies won't be like the music business. They saw it, and they learned the lessons, even if you don't think they did.
ef4 14y ago
From an economic standpoint, there's no reason to think that the destruction of the TV middle-men would have any impact on the amount of capital available to make shows. The only question is whether there's still a lot of money to be made from advertisers or subscribers if you end up with a good show. And I think the answer is clearly yes. So the incentive to invest will remain as strong as ever, so we can expect a commensurate amount of capital to get invested. The deals will just get structured differently.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
The form of this argument "if Y goes no more X" is very common in disruption scenarios, it is always wrong. But the reasons its wrong are not always obvious. When you have a market (and in this case its Television) there is an 'eco system' which develops to support that market. So for television you get producers, production companies, set dressers, directors, writers, actors, distributors, advertisers, and about a zillion other various bits. They all live and die in the 'value chain' which is the fundamental product being delivered to and then consumed by its customers. Now disruption comes in two flavors, you can disrupt the eco-system and you can disrupt the product. If you disrupt the product, the product dies, the eco system tries with varying levels of success to adapt to adjacent markets. If you disrupt the eco system, parts of the eco system die and other parts replace it. But lets use an actual example for a minute. I was recently in Maine at the Maritime Museum there and they chronicle the rise and fall of the Maine sailing ship business which peaked in the 1860's and then was demolished by the the switch from wood hulled to steel hulled and sail powered to steam powered ships after the American Civil War. At no time was the world ever at risk of not being able to get 'quality ships' but the kind of ships people bought, and how they were made, changed dramatically between the 19th and 20th centuries. Granted that buying a 'tall ship' has becomes something of a challenge since they aren't generally built these days, buying a 'ship' is pretty straightforward. So back to your comment about losing 'expensive and well written shows.' I do not believe that this disruption has changed the desire for quality, episodic entertainment. Rather it is changing the eco-system around how it gets made. You start getting people like NetFlix buying TV shows rather than television networks, or Kickstarter type funding drives. The eco system is changing on content. But I don't think we'll lose quality in the process.

rictic 14y ago

That argument would've had more weight before kickstarter took off. I mean, think of it. A group just raised over $3.5 million in two days on kickstarter to build an opensource and indie-friendly video game console.

res0nat0r 14y ago
Unfortunately that is only enough cash to pay for one episode of Breaking Bad according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Development_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Development_histor...
- rictic 14y ago
  Wow. Huh.

epistasis 14y ago

There are great ways of raising capital for expensive production and marketing, and startups are familiar with all of them. It's easy to imagine a Silicon Valley style VC relationship between a show's producers and the capital, rather than a Hollywood style media conglomerate relationship. However, there are entrenched cultural differences of "how it's done" and an active pool of VCs that know how to pick TV shows, so getting to that style of capital allocation could be difficult.

saalweachter 14y ago

I'm actually looking forward to that. I read a lot of golden and silver age science fiction. One of the things I love about the oldies isn't that they're necessarily better than modern science fiction, it's that they're short. Creatures of Light and Darkness, a fantastic book, is 192 pages. It's a stand-alone story which spans thousands of years, the better part of the universe, and builds such wonderful characters. And the author gets you from here to there in 192 pages. Nowadays, you can't introduce a plot and two characters in 200 pages. 400, 500, 600 pages are the norm. Some of it is style. Sometimes you need 600 pages to tell a story. But a portion of it is that authors are told, by their publishing companies, they need to target a certain size to get their books published, because a book needs to have a certain heft or it will never leave the shelf. And it's a damn shame, because some of these 600 page monstrosities could have been a fantastic 200 page book. Broadcast television also imposes certain constraints upon the show. Some shows work well with this format, for instance, if the show is episodic in nature. If the show is trying to tell a particular story, it works less well. One thing that can go wrong is that not all stories that get turned into a TV show require 18 hours of video to tell. A lot of filler is added, episodic episodes which get dropped into the middle of the story arc to drag things out. If the show's producers and writers are good, they can use these filler episodes to flesh out the characters and the world. But they aren't always good enough. A second thing that can go wrong is that you don't always know when to end your story. A show may get renewed for two or three or four seasons, and if you finished telling the story in the first season, you now have to come up with a completely new story for season two, or reveal that by a fiendish twist your story wasn't actually finished in the season finale like you thought it was. This isn't always as ... satisfying as it could be. Other times, you have to keep putting off finishing the story at the end of each season, which turns entire seasons into filler. This carries the additional risk that you may get canceled in season three and never finish the story you started in season one. I'm generally looking forward to the death of big media producers, because I think the quality of entertainment will go up once people are freed from the constraint of telling all of their stories in twenty to twenty-four 22 or 44 minute episodes.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
I agree with you that there are stories that are better suited for alternate formats. But I don't think the death of the big media producers has anything to do with that one way or the other. The markets for that kind of thing aren't the same markets the big media folks, so the new markets can grow regardless of the old ones. Kickstarter and the like are the likely funding venues, online is the likely distribution mechanism. Toes are being dipped. Jane Espenson just funded a season of her webseries on Kickstarter. Dan Harmon and Charlie Kaufman just launched a kickstarter for a $200,000 art film project yesterday. Those are some names who have enough clout to get things done otherwise. But maybe not enough to get the things they want done most (almost no one has that kinda clout). Kickstarter helps them get some of what they want. Don't count on the big media producers dying out, by the way. They're smart, they're connected, and they are survivors. They've been through more startup like situations than almost anyone in silicon valley, and they're the ones that lived through it. Don't underestimate them. TV and movies won't be like the music business. They saw it, and they learned the lessons, even if you don't think they did.

ef4 14y ago

From an economic standpoint, there's no reason to think that the destruction of the TV middle-men would have any impact on the amount of capital available to make shows. The only question is whether there's still a lot of money to be made from advertisers or subscribers if you end up with a good show. And I think the answer is clearly yes. So the incentive to invest will remain as strong as ever, so we can expect a commensurate amount of capital to get invested. The deals will just get structured differently.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

The form of this argument "if Y goes no more X" is very common in disruption scenarios, it is always wrong. But the reasons its wrong are not always obvious. When you have a market (and in this case its Television) there is an 'eco system' which develops to support that market. So for television you get producers, production companies, set dressers, directors, writers, actors, distributors, advertisers, and about a zillion other various bits. They all live and die in the 'value chain' which is the fundamental product being delivered to and then consumed by its customers. Now disruption comes in two flavors, you can disrupt the eco-system and you can disrupt the product. If you disrupt the product, the product dies, the eco system tries with varying levels of success to adapt to adjacent markets. If you disrupt the eco system, parts of the eco system die and other parts replace it. But lets use an actual example for a minute. I was recently in Maine at the Maritime Museum there and they chronicle the rise and fall of the Maine sailing ship business which peaked in the 1860's and then was demolished by the the switch from wood hulled to steel hulled and sail powered to steam powered ships after the American Civil War. At no time was the world ever at risk of not being able to get 'quality ships' but the kind of ships people bought, and how they were made, changed dramatically between the 19th and 20th centuries. Granted that buying a 'tall ship' has becomes something of a challenge since they aren't generally built these days, buying a 'ship' is pretty straightforward. So back to your comment about losing 'expensive and well written shows.' I do not believe that this disruption has changed the desire for quality, episodic entertainment. Rather it is changing the eco-system around how it gets made. You start getting people like NetFlix buying TV shows rather than television networks, or Kickstarter type funding drives. The eco system is changing on content. But I don't think we'll lose quality in the process.