... bullshit? That's suchn a stupid and naive way to view it lol. Just because fellow consumers didn't agree with your desires, doesn't mean no one had a choice/say. The things that get viewership will get more support. Period.
@@ErgonomicChair I disagree. We won when we had all of the stuff in one place for a reasonable cost. Once the wars began, it was all downhill for the consumer as we were permitted to pay more to get less.
@@Flyingzeke72 People speak with their wallets, they chose to support the stuff as it split off. If we didn't then those storefronts would have died off. Looka t Steam vs EGS, EGS takes hundreds of millions to keep it running, but people refuse to use it. Origin, Uplay, etc all died off because people speak with their wallet. Evetually EGS will have to, too. Their exclusives almost bankrupt companies until they hit steam. People video gamers spoke with their wallets.
We aren't oil. We have agency. We also have an option, but we, as consumers, refuse to exercise it because that would mean quitting our addiction. So, we continue to give these terrible people power to do terrible things rather than simple stop consuming their product.
@@Flyingzeke72 We didn't get less. There was more television and film produced in the last five years than any other five year period in history. That was fueled by the competition and investment that all of these companies made into their streaming platforms.
What's really fun is that the practice of pulling content from streaming is hitting just as physical media is dying, leaving many of the shows and movies pulled unavailable almost anywhere other than piracy.
Meanwhile, the moment I see an email saying my no ad subscription will now have ads, I unsubscribe. I refuse to pay extra because companies make poor financial decisions and then just gouge the consumer as a consequence.
Even when it's not poor financial decisions, "extracting value out of the customer." Capitalism and the never-ending pursuit of infinite growth need to both die. These companies being able to spend several hundred million dollars on a new TV show proves that they're not short on money to begin with. How sad that your company made only $1.3 billion in profit this year rather than the $1.5 you were expecting. Oh to make up the difference my subscription is now $2 more? Fuck right off. Greed will never be happy with consistently profitable. It has to be record profitable every quarter every year.
It's so funny how observers look for complex meta reasons and narratives when the truth is, the show was written bad and so people didn't like it so much.
The truly sad thing is if they had just followed the broad strokes of Anatar's story they could have gone all in on writing a "twist" villain that literally everyone would have known about before watching it; the thing about a really well written twist villain is that while everyone focuses on the aha moment as what makes them good they are actually best on a second watching where you are going back and getting to spot all the clues sprinkled throughout the film or series that you missed on a first viewing. The trick is that you would need to actually keep it subtle enough that anyone not familiar enough with the legendaryium would probably miss it the first time through, but clear enough that anyone who already knew or was seeing for the second time can spot all of those clues.
I watched 7 of the 8 episodes and just as the 8th was starting I was like "..I've been waiting for this show to get good and it hasn't .. and it's not going to. Fuck you Jeffy B I'm not finishing it." Turned it off and never returned. No regrets.
I think that people ultimately realized they didn't have unlimited time to make use of all these subscriptions so there was no point in paying for them.
Honestly, as someone who grew up with cable, satellite TV, and now streaming services, it’ll all end up the same. People picking what ‘plans’ they want so they can enjoy the shows they want, streaming is just the new cable package.
Yup. The entire reason streaming exploded in the first place is because cable sucked. Streaming offered a cheaper and much more convenient alternative, so of course everyone swarmed to it. And now that all those same companies responsible for ruining cable have taken over streaming, its starting to suck the exact same way. They learned nothing, and brought all their problems with them. This won't change until those companies change. Unless they start actually focusing on long term customer satisfaction instead of short term profits, they will inevitably ruin their services, and drive everyone away, every single time. Because focusing short term gains at the expense of long term sustainability is simply bad business.
I still don't understand how a company can conceptually do this. Like I know they lose certain rights things with it but it's not like they were doing anything to begin with that was of much value. It just feels like a loss for art's sake more than anything appreciable financially.
But a lot of the greatest artistic creations were made for profit. And these series and movies often fail to make a profit, let alone maximize it, and there's several cases where creators were actually given a ton of freedom and still made something terrible, Madame Web was like that if I'm remembering right. Most of these things don't suck because of the profit motive, but because the people involved in making them are often bad at what they do and get their jobs via nepotism or other connections. If the industry falls to the point where they desperately need to make money I think we'll see an uptick in quality if anything, it's happened before with disney's "renaissance" era
@@steveman9668 exactly. The people involved either arent very good artists, or have too much interference. A lot of the best stuff, as you rightly point out, has been made for profit.
@@steveman9668Yeah, it's the same in every industry. What the hell does an MBA or hedge fund manager know about coding, writing, acting, journalism, music, publishing, video games, building cars, etc.
There is a MAJOR subject missing in this video, the fact that studios will spend mountains on money on shows but will absolutely not invest in proper writing. Despite the fact that the writing budget is a rounding error compared to special effects. Rings of Powers is the most expansive show ever, and has a writing that would shame Xena Warrior Princess. That's why nobody's hyped it's back. Compare Secret Invasion that would be ridiculed by fanfic writers and Loki. Secret Invasion was way more expensive, but Loki kept people on Disney+. So the real question is, why are studios so in love with bad writing?
Well, Loki left a lot to be desired in terms of story. Silvi is a fascinating character with a lot of potential, but what do they have her do in S2? Work at McDonalds.
writing doesn't have a 'wow' factor to quickly grab people and suit a profit/cost analysis. Select visuals, musical tone, and the delivery of the lines will almost always stand out over the writing because it takes just that much longer for someone to processes words as 'writing' over the other sensations they experience.
Common denominator. Critics detect bad writing. Average viewers just go 'wooow'. Not to say writing has no effect on them, but you're never going to hear that as an explanation for why they did or didn't watch something
Because good writers have opinions, and will tell producers their ideas are stupid. This has a different dynamic in the 60s and 70s, when the producers were all veteran writers, so there was a creative back and forth between producers and writers but both were committed to producing a good show. But for the last few decades the writers have to report to producers with backgrounds in business and finance. Jeff Bezos gave the show runners for Rings of Power some kind of notes or mission statement, and it's the most obvious Writing 101 nonsense. But of course: what does the techbro who spent the last 30 years playing Sauron against the retail sector know about storytelling?
I think you are having a few misconceptions on writing. 1. Something that seems good on paper doesn't always translate well to practical/visual effect. 2. Writing isn't a consistent thing someone can do predictably. Sure, there are a few outliers, but even they aren't 100% reliable. 3. Humans run the pipeline of influence to protect monetary investments, and with that means that a "sales pitch", nepotism, "what have ya done for me lately" will get you farther then raw talent. 4. Writers sell off their scripts, so even if they make something great, in most cases many different people will likely come in afterwords and make minor alterations based on lots of factors (like making lines sound more natural to the hired actor speaking them, making the scene more practical for an effect to be visualized appropriately, to fit an edited time, logistical issues, etc etc etc) long after the writer had left their working position.
I always knew the other foot would drop but was enjoying the ride until then. So when the other foot dropped, I wasn't surprised, just bummed that the ride was over.
@@onuq3r4y478 Yes. Have you? The analogy is that much like cable packages, they were arranged in a way where the provider would split up the top performing channels in order to incentivise you to buy a larger plan that you need. So in order to see the five shows that you are actually interested in, you need to subscribe to 12-15 bundled channels that you will never watch. So in order to see the five shows that you are actually interested in, you need to subscribe to four streaming services that you will otherwise never watch. Unless of course with all those choices, you include the option where you realise that a show is only playing on a service that you don't subscribe to and chose to forget about it.
The big loser of the streaming wars was the consumer. The very moment all those companies decided "Hey, why make some money from giving our stuff to Netflix, if we could make our our streaming service and make a lot of money?", we were fucked. Now you have to carefully juggle your subscriptions between several services to see the shows you like (and may still see them cancelled because they were more about gaining customers than maintaining them). Prices are rising, quality is dropping, and every year they get more draconic about who you can or can't share your account with, and now they're bringing back fucking advertising. I knew quite a lot of people who pirated pretty much all of their media. When Netflix got big, when you could find most stuff there for a reasonable price, most of them stopped pirating. They had found a legal alternative they were willing to pay for. These days they've all gone back to pirating.
It's almost like "piracy" is a service issue... Give people access to what they want, at a reasonable price, and with minimal headaches (multiple subscriptions, ADVERTISING, random and unpredictable "vaulting," etc) and people will pay for it. It's when the MBAs and sociopaths that think LINE MUST GO UP! FOREVER! get involved that the rest of us get screwed. It's not like this companies aren't profitable at the top-line level, it's that they aren't making record profits, quarter over quarter, year over year, that's screwing all of us over.
The "streaming wars" in itself is amazing advertisement for high seas, to be honest. Or, you know, to seeking better entertainment, because frankly all these platform have jack to pay for. Yeah, i'm certainly interested in watching "We're butchering starwars" for the 5th time, or "we are trying to win a reward for most money spend on shittiest written fanfiction ever" that is RoP. Why would people pay for this, i honestly have no idea.
That graph at 9:10 is SO telling. When Disney+ first came out, I couldn't believe the value - I've got two kids, and my wife is a huge Disney fan, and I love everything Marvel/Star Wars, so it was a no-brainer for us to get it. But the price has basically doubled since then - and costs for all services have gone up. Granted, we're pretty good at only retaining the services we use, so we're not spending too much per month, but it's still wild how different the landscape looks than when it first debuted.
It reminds me of comparison charts involving venture capital outfits like food delivery services, airbnb, etc. While they're still living off the VC money (and hemorrhaging tons of money every single month), they are *damn* good values. But as the VC money dries up and they have to wrestle with the "has never actually turned a profit" tiger they've created and saddled, cost-cutting measures come into play and the value flies out the window. It's almost like greed is bad for business or something. You'd think *someone* recognized the value in a lower but steady rate of return rather than the way seemingly every business bets the farm on a home run without having even seen the hitter.
I've been saying it for years, and while I still do not know when it will happen, I do believe it will happen eventually. If the big studios insist on maintaining their model of putting their properties into walled gardens, then eventually someone will develop a new streaming service that allows viewers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a bundle of different streaming services. Some studios may try to maintain their content silo and refuse to let this new service access their channels, but the less successful ones will likely go along with it because the licensing money they'd bring it from this new service would eventually outweigh the subscription money from the smaller user base who'd have to willingly choose to subscribe to their bespoke service over all the others. And over time, as more and more studios license their properties to this new service, we will have successfully reinvented cable TV.
At which point the studios will again try to wall off their content individually and bundling it with shit you don't want. "I know you only want to pay 10$ for the shit you actually watch; but to get that you'll have to also buy 90$ worth of south Kongolese midget wrestling without subtitles" (tm) We already went through at least two such cycles: first with cable-TV and then with early Netflix.
It does seem like it, though at least with the option to opt out of ads (for now lol). I find it impossible to watch regular cable tv shows anymore, it makes you realize just how much time is spent on watching ads instead of a show.
That's one of the main issues with modern technology. The tech industry is no longer interested in making things that would actually be useful for the common man, and hasn't been that way for a very long time. They just want to reinvent stuff that already exists, but puts the techbros as the middleman while everyone else is devalued. Crypto, N/F/Ts, Blockchain, Streaming, A/I Generation, it's all the same crap.
Something that people typically don't consider when talking about how well streaming services are doing is that the incentives for streaming--without ads--are terrible. Streaming companies want subscribers, but they DON'T want subscribers to watch anything. It costs Disney money every time someone fires up Disney+ and watches Moana, both in terms of server usage and in residuals to the creators. But, they don't make any money when you watch Moana; they already got your money. To a corporate exec's balance sheet, the best thing in the world is a million subscribers who never watch anything. I think this, even more than "tax write offs", really explains things like the Batgirl cancellation: someone ran the numbers and said, "A bunch of people will watch this, but no one's going to cancel their subscription if we don't release it, and it won't net us very many new subscribers."
Allow me to sync moana for offline use and their costs would lower by the amount of bandwidth saved. My data cap would be happier too, which is why I'm setting up a Jellyfin Server to rip my DVD's & Bluerays.
That's basically the Netflix model. Good shows get cancelled two seasons in because they found that the first two seasons do best at drawing in new viewers.
@@RorikH But then people are wizing up to not get emotionally invested in any of their shows, which discourage watching them/subbing cause know that'll be cancelled anyway.
@hefoxed Yup, that's probably a great deal of why so many old shows with 200 episodes are getting more views than the 16-episode made-for-streaming ones. Amazon just spent a billion dollars on Lord of the Rings fanfiction and I'm watching 50 year old episodes of Columbo every evening.
These corporations haven't seemed to realise that they aren't competing with each other so much as competing against the customers time and effort, people used to pirate because it was the easier, simpler way to watch what they wanted, then Netflix came along and suddenly most of what they wanted to watch was in one place, it wasn't too expensive and it was simple to access. Now that all of the streaming services are carving their own little fiefdoms and making their own services worse (bumping up prices while bringing in adverts) customers are once again returning to the high seas as the simpler option. I'm sure it won't be long before we'll see the next service that will 'bundle together' the streaming services for an attractive fee to once again make it attractive to customers and the cycle will begin anew.
7:18 Is exactly why i never got on board with any of the streaming platforms. I don't want my collection being dependent on what some company deems worth having up or not. Just let me buy my copy and we'll both go our sepparate ways
Streaming services are anathema to sustainability and profit, they wouldn’t have been possible without the economic disaster known as zero interest rates. But it was never about either of those things, it’s about control.
No, it is not about control. Not as end goal. IT is about creating shareholder value. Look at valuation od Netflix over time vs other media companies and you will understand why everyone was going for streaming.
Furthermore, if you watch original shows on netflix/hulu/whatever, there is a great likelyhood of that show being canceled on a cliffhanger because it didn't generate a million new subscribers or whatever. This forces studies to make bland, generic garbage with mass market appeal. Even something that's barely fringe in the grand scheme of things, Sense8, was canceled for this reason. The backlash was so great the studio quickly gave it the "Firefly" treatment and made a movie to tie up the loose ends.
Inside Job was such a fun premise and then they cancelled it when it was getting good. Tell me what the Council was up to you corporate Bastards, tell meeeeeeeeeeeeee!
@@jerrys.9895 I'm not sure if Austin Powers writers actually liked Powers' lifestyle. The movie obviously points out that he's just a clown with plot armor, but concerning the binary question whether or not the retro-hippie-futurism is supposed to be part of what makes him a clown, I'd answer with yes.
We need a compulsory licensing model for video content like we have for music. A radio station can play whatever song they want as long as they pay the ASCAP fee without any prior licensing agreement with the publisher. If we had the same for TV and movies, then streaming services could compete on their curation, price, and user interface instead of what content they could lock up exclusively in their walled garden.
I feel like it's weird that most people talking about the shift in what services people are paying for don't talk about how more and more things have shifted to monthly payment models overall as we've hit a time of inflated prices on necessities like food while minimum wage has not gone up accross the board
If we're being technical, it was ESPN+ that helped bring the streaming division of Disney to its first profit, because elsewhere, Disney+ and Hulu were still losing money with ESPN+ just making enough from sports (and their big bundle) to offset those losses (which they seek to do for D+ by reducing the amount of content that's made for that service). But Disney will still take this as a victory despite that.
6:56 “It was more important to get a return on investment than it was to *try and starve Netflix*. “ This. This right here is what I despise about capitalism; instead of taking the essentially free money from licensing, these companies are trying to destroy competition to have a monopoly and *everybody* loses because of the greedy investors and executives. I’m so tired of it.
I disagree. It was not only to starve Netflix, it was to create own platform and get that revenue directly. Netflix was the shit on stock market and everyone wanted piece of that pie. And you will not get IT if you give them your best content.
Stop giving the bad company money and it goes away. It really is that simple in concept. I realize it gets murkier in other sectors (pharmacology, food, transportation etc) but we are talking specifically about a form of entertainment. Cancel Premium Streaming Service+++, and read a book. Simple. But, as I know from personal experience, breaking addictions is hard.
I work as a software engineer at one of the FAANG companies (for fear of losing my job, I won't say whom). The idea that the pandy was a sustainable market, rather than a one-time bubble, isn't exclusive to streaming services. All of wallstreet established unsubstantiated expections for stock growth based on that period. Truly a spetical of ignorance and greed.
Streaming started out as affordable, ad free, with a massive library of content. Then, corporations did what they always do. Got greedy. Now we are at a point where they somehow have less content releasing, are full of ads, and are as expensive as traditional cable, which streaming came about as a way to circumvent. Streaming subscriptions are down because these companies increased prices during economic downturn. Instead of trying to keep their subscribers happy, keeping prices the same and lowering production budgets. They have been cutting costs across the board and aggressively monetizing, which most people cannot afford. Then they panic as people leave their service. Honestly it might be time to get a physical disc collection again. And your personal collection wont be crunched by shitty bitrate either. Plus, you'll own your content.
Us who sail the high seas didn't. These studios have gotten into billions upon billions of dollars in debt and we've gotten more television than we've ever gotten before, we're still swimming in an excess of TV at the megacorporations' expense.
Yeah, I don't get it; these corporate entities have all the money in the world, they pay no taxes, I don't know why I'm supposed to care about their expenses. I'm simply not going to pretend that Amazon is sad that it spent a billion bucks on a 4-feature length series when Disney can spend that much on a single film and still makes bank. They aren't drowning anytime soon. Same thing goes for all these studios under Microsoft making games or any other modern day product. You only lose as a consumer if you don't pick and choose wisely and spend judiciously. These mega companies have weathered decades and are more profitable than ever. A quarter or two or even a year or two of swings or outright losses have no major impact.
Ever since I went full yarr harr harr I've been happier with my content than ever. Now I only support things that respect me. I only pay for Criterion and Mubi and buy physical media (mostly from Criterion Collection). tl;dr Plex + yo ho ho + Criterion is the sweet spot for me, these streaming services can rot for all I care, enough is enough
Ever since I went full yarr harr harr I've been happier with my content than ever. Now I only support services that respect me. I pay for Criterion Channel + Mubi and download the rest. I also buy physical media when the stuff I want is available. Oh and no one is going to remotely delete my things from my server.
@@JackShoreman You're not supposed to care, but the reason they still make profits is not because paying subscriber care, it's because to their target demographic the convenience of a streaming service is worth it over the inconvenience of pirating those shows and movies instead. I'd even go so far as say that it's more ethical to sail the high seas when it comes to certain properties. If enough people do it it might lead to industry collapse, but isn't that kind of a good thing? Streaming services having monopolies of how things get done, who gets hired for what, and what stories are being told in the first place, all informed by algorithms and auctioned around between each other so they can report quarterly gains. As a rule of thumb, if there's a way to support creators of a piece of media that you enjoy directly then that's the best way to acquire the media that you want. If you're just paying a mega conglomerate and the people making it already got paid when they sold it for distribution...Yar har har.
"Binging Sucks" for a television show. Watch everything in just a couple of days and then forget it. No 'watercooler interest' growth. Tell creators to limit content to 'binging" size of 6-8 episodes. 2 year delays between 'seasons'. All the worst things.
simply put seasons are too short, to prevent binging. releasing shows weekly or spliting up episodes only work if your friend ground peer pressures you into watching as they come out. when the best experience is always watching in one go. seasons no longer produce episodic content. they are all 100% focused on one over arching narrative, which means there is no ohh this episode is great the story in it was spectacular. you dont have the great episode any more. you have the good season. the problem is we live in a world were content is abundant. there is too many streams of content out there.
A good example of this is Smiling Friends. They aired the entirety of Season 1 for the premiere. Then in season 2 they didn't do that, and there was clearly way more attention put on every individual episode. Qwimbly probably wouldn't have been a thing if everyone had just watched that episode and moved on to the next a minute later.
If I give you 8 candies and tell you that you won't get more candy for a long time, it's not my fault that you are them all at once. That's your fault, and some of us are capable of restraint.
@@JrIcify To me it sounds like a good way to do _new_ shows (S1 is available all at once, and S2+ are weekly). If a new show is weekly show and it doesn't pick up/hook you by episode 2 or 3, it's much easier to fall off. No one wants to wait another week (or several) to see if the show is any good. But if it's available all at once, there's less pressure on each episode to prove it because you can jump right into the next episode (or scroll through) to see if it picks up. Less of an investment to remember to give it a shot across weeks/months and just try it now. And if there's a season 2, either you're invested or (hopefully*) the show has proven itself so you can watch season 1, and then catch up. *Some shows order 2 seasons at the start so it may not mean it proved itself.
@@puppetpalclem If you just like sitting alone in the dark eating candy and never talking about it with anyone then that's fine. But you missed the point pretty hard with that metaphor.
Hearkens to previous bubbles going back to the tech bubble of the 1990s. I remember back then there were so many investors who said, "Yes, we all knew it was a bubble, inflated beyond reason, but you didn't want to be the one financial advisor who didn't go for the record returns for your clients or companies." Same thing happened with the financial crisis of 2008. So here in the 2020s, no studio was willing to see Disney or Paramount pull a rabbit out of a hat uncontested and be the One, the successful alternative to Netflix with a lock on eyeballs across the world, and be out there making less money from peddling their own content to someone else's streaming service. These bubbles are inevitable, since nobody in any boardroom or middle management office will ever be satisfied with "enough" or "comfortable".
Intersting video! I do have to say, that plot at 8:38 is terrible. Change the scale! If all the data falls in the 400-900 shows range, then get rid of the dead space below 400 and above 900. That will only help to make the actual difference in the number of shows more clear :)
I'm proud to say that the only streaming service I'm subscribed to is Jellyfin running on a tiny computer located on my shelf. It's never taken away content, raised its price, forced me to watch ads, or degraded its service. I can freely share my account with whomever I want, and my entire library is in one place without vendor fragmentation.
I left Netflix when they rolled out the household limitation on account usage. It's an anti-consumer move that only serves to benefit them. Then they raised prices again.
Traditional release is still the way to go. Even if you make a movie specifically for your platform, it will do much better on that platform if you give it even a short theatrical release.
I was done with streaming services all the way back when I was expected to get something besides Hulu or Netflix to watch stuff. I can't believe people are out here seriously paying for like 5 different monthly subscriptions minimum to watch tv. I also dont know how people even see value in the first place in most of those subscriptions.
Me personally I take advantage of bundles and add-ons provided by other services I'm attached to. ad-Netflix - free with T-Mobile. Ad-Peacock - free with Instacart+. With the Disney/Hulu/Max bundle and ad-Paramount+ I pay about 40 bucks total for streaming right now
Although I have to wonder why - Disney owns everything on it's platform, so it's only real expense is "pushing the bits down the wire to your TV". So either they don't charge enough to pay for the server costs... or there's some Hollywood accounting at work.
As usual, an informative and entertaining episode, and I love your puns. My only real gripe with the video is at 6:40, while talking about WB opting not to release Batgirl and a Scooby-Doo film, you show a clip of Wile E. Coyote Vs. Acme, which they also tossed in the trash. Sorry to pick nits, but Wile E. Coyote and Scooby-Doo are NOT the same.
at this point, [very legal obtaining of films, television, games, books, and other media] is not only justified but a moral imperative, the only way some of our media will be preserved otherwise.
I have to believe at a certain point all the execs across the platforms realised that they can just repeat the cable model with their streaming services - As long as each change (raising prices, adding ad tiers, etc) is slowly rolled out, the average person will just shrug and accept it. Streaming is still relatively cheap now compared to cable (based on your area), but it won't be for long.
That was the plan all along. Destroy traditional tv by offering seemingly unlimited content at next to no cost, and once you've taken over the industry and audiences are hooked on the convenience, start squeezing them for money and never stop.
I am a bit happy about this as we do have things coming back to normal tv. The way streaming was going before it felt like it was being forgotten. So I am glad some things do get duo premiers as the last of us did and now the penguin for hbo. Good one Darren.
I don't know if it was Darren or whoever helped with editing, but the Doctor Evil cuts were perfectly timed and selected. Bravo. Also, I'm not convinced that's not actually David Zaslov.
But people often prefer to drain the well completely just to be sure that nothing can be squeezed out , rather than leaving it half full so that other people might drain it.
thought i should point out that Plex lets you build your own streaming library out of content you have on your local device and then allows you to share it with friends and family.
It was always going to be a bubble that burst - too many services, and too much expensive content. It's the consumer that pays and the talent that is underpaid while the executives continue to coin it in even when they make bad business decisions. A failed series like Space Force is a perfect example of why so much streaming doesn't make sense. With the big names attached and a big budget from Netflix, it should have done well. But while there were a few laughs, it never really resonated with audiences and was left hanging in the wind before its inevitable cancellation. I don't currently pay for any streaming services and I don't see that changing. I don't have the fear of missing out on something big. After all, I always had that - in the past before we got cable or satellite TV, in the 2000s when a row between UK cable companies saw 24 pulled from our local service mid-season, or the current situation where as a Star Trek fan I can't keep up with the new output because it is spread too thin.
For about 10 or so years I hung up my hat and paid for TV. We had Netflix, Max, and Amazon Prime, and 99% of what we wanted was in those places. Those were good times. Now, in 2024, everything has been removed, splintered off, and carved out to a dozen streaming services. On top of that, S-tier levels of enshittification where prices keep going up, entire series are deleted, and now they have the balls to force ads on even paid tiers. No thanks, Hollywood. We cancelled literally every streaming service, saving hundreds a year now, and we don't have to worry about shows or movies disappearing on our Plex. Keep doing you, streaming services.
The streaming wars have erased great shows like Swamp Thing, or Infinity Train, no physical releases for either of them, so piracy is the only justified solution
The things about Streaming services is their metrics for success were totally missfocused, none of these companies had ever dealt with a pricing model like this before. It's hook and retain ROI, some shows bring people through the door others keep them using, but they pushed all of their budgets into Hook (Not the robin Williams movie), as though retain would just take care of itself (or more relied on older content to take care of it). The smaller/mid tier story telling that is often the birthing ground for massive hits all but vanished. Breaking Bad, House, Modern Family weren't big budget productions (at least until wages were renegotiated for later seasons) they relied on the network model to bring in audiences and won big audiences. They are readjusting to this, but as you mention they are relying on older staples to maintain this level of interest, I'm interested to see if they can redistribute their production budgets to actually produce a range of content rather than 10 massive budget shows a year.
And then they make 1 season of 8 episodes of great show and everyone and their mom watches it and then they cancel it. But the witcher will get 7 seasons. What's even the point of watching anything new anymore?
I'm not at all plugged into new show releases, but usually they find me anyway through social osmosis. This video is the first time I hear about rings of power having second season.
One of the things that really bums me out with streaming is the same thing everyone's been talking about with movies - it's all rehashes. Obviously not all of it, there's plenty of good new stuff coming out, but all the big stuff that they really push is all known IPs (mostly nostalgia bait). Amazon spent a billion dollars making what is to me just a worse version of some 25-year-old movies I really like. Disney is spending infinite amounts of money panicking because it can't figure out if I want blind prequel nostalgia, blind OT nostalgia, or blind nostalgia for a couple of Cartoon Network cartoons, and in between is making like 40 episodes of homework that it tells me I HAVE to do before the next Marvel movie. Netflix at least is a little bit less reliant on nostalgia, but is continuing their hallmark tradition of "release 3 really interesting episodes, 4 really average episodes, drop the worst season finale you've ever seen, then cancel the show." And none of that is the end of the world. But when the monthly subscription for every single one of those seems to go up by two bucks every other time I turn on my TV, I start being a little bit more critical.
1. The puns were so good I had to delay watching this video so that I could show my wife the next day. 2. It's crazy that executives for both video games and streaming companies all thought the covid boom for at home entertainment was going to be permanent and went on massive spending sprees.
My favorite comment about _The Acolyte_ and Disney refusing to throw good money after bad: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if 180 million dollars suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced"
8:30 - "Have studios already conditioned audiences to expect these sorts of films on streaming and not to go to cinemas?" That's what my worry has been, however the massive success of 'Inside Out 2' blindsided me. Obviously a Pixar sequel like that will perform better than 'Elemental', 'Lightyear' etc. but I really thought that due to Disney's approach of training audiences to just "Wait 3-4 months for Disney+" would hinder its box office but now it's the highest grossing animated movie of all time. We'll have to wait and see if that film's success is an indicator of the pattern breaking or if it was just an anomaly.
Yeah, I'll just stick with my Plex server. It doesn't randomly remove my TV shows and movies, and I can stream from it just like any other streaming service.
The problem is that people have limited time. There are a limited number of people on earth, and a limited number of hours in the day. If one new show takes up 8 hours, that's a couple days you lose. If you want to do other things in life, then something needs to go.
The part about the Rings of Power that bothers me the most is that they spent all that money on the first season but they didn't hire any real career writers. All of the writing credits were smalltime tv producers who had only ever done minor writing gigs like a one-off episode of Law & Order or a episode from some generic high school drama. It's insane how much they disrespected Tolkien by letting these hacks butcher his work, just to save a buck. That kind of disconnect from the artform is what's killing movies and tv these days.
To summarize: An industry that only knew how to operate on cable and make movies treated streaming like an alternative to cable stations and made shows as if they were movies.
Alien Romulus was supposed to go to streaming and instead is currently the biggest horror film of the year. Heck, I just found out there's a live-action Peter Pan movie that dropped on Disney+, but I hadn't heard a thing about it prior?! While I don't have much interest in another Peter Pan film, I'm sure it would have made the company more money in theatres, than it currently is buried on D+.
I would be really interested to see how Dropout fits into all this. They have pretty low prices compared to other streaming services, and (meaning no disrespect to them) I suspect that their production costs are closer to legacy television like Seinfeld or Star Trek than they are to the mega-shows like Stranger Things or Rings of Power, and people don't like them any less for the savings. I wonder if scaling back might be a route to sustainability. Good luck ever selling that idea to investors, though.
Both in film and video games, I keep wondering why not just spend less money. Like I don't think the extra budget really translates to bigger audiences, right? And most recent shows have been terrible. So why not cut the budgets in half and make twice as many shows? That way you can still put out the same number of duds, but have extra chances at accidentally making hits? Or you can now make a couple seasons or twice as many episodes so a show has room to grow.
Barring substantial changes brought on by the strikes, I would expect that any cost-cutting would also involve cutting everyone's pay while working them harder than before. It's already been happening in almost every other industry over the last half-decade, if not longer.
A streaming service does not get money from producing shows, so more content isn't relevant. A big show that draws in new subscribers is relevant. Most expensive series ever made attracts a lot more subscribers than "we made two new series that are good"
![YoungBoy Never Broke Again - Missing Everything [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dTYeMZGzOzw/mqdefault.jpg)
We, the consumer, were never fighting the streaming wars. We are the oil being fought over. There never was an option for us to win.
... bullshit? That's suchn a stupid and naive way to view it lol. Just because fellow consumers didn't agree with your desires, doesn't mean no one had a choice/say. The things that get viewership will get more support. Period.
@@ErgonomicChair I disagree. We won when we had all of the stuff in one place for a reasonable cost. Once the wars began, it was all downhill for the consumer as we were permitted to pay more to get less.
@@Flyingzeke72 People speak with their wallets, they chose to support the stuff as it split off. If we didn't then those storefronts would have died off.
Looka t Steam vs EGS, EGS takes hundreds of millions to keep it running, but people refuse to use it. Origin, Uplay, etc all died off
because people speak with their wallet. Evetually EGS will have to, too. Their exclusives almost bankrupt companies until they hit steam.
People video gamers spoke with their wallets.
We aren't oil. We have agency. We also have an option, but we, as consumers, refuse to exercise it because that would mean quitting our addiction. So, we continue to give these terrible people power to do terrible things rather than simple stop consuming their product.
@@Flyingzeke72 We didn't get less. There was more television and film produced in the last five years than any other five year period in history. That was fueled by the competition and investment that all of these companies made into their streaming platforms.
What's really fun is that the practice of pulling content from streaming is hitting just as physical media is dying, leaving many of the shows and movies pulled unavailable almost anywhere other than piracy.
I literally could not find la dolce vita on any streaming service. Amazon straight up said "unavailable", so i...pirated it
People keep saying that physical media is dying but I can still buy new releases on CD, DVD and Blu-Ray in my local shop.
Piracy has less adds and doesn't get removed when some big company wants to save a couple bucks.
The fact I can't get Infinity Train on DVD is a crime...
@@georgesears2916 combined with the fact that you have to use 2-3 different streaming services to watch the whole thing just makes it even worse
Meanwhile, the moment I see an email saying my no ad subscription will now have ads, I unsubscribe.
I refuse to pay extra because companies make poor financial decisions and then just gouge the consumer as a consequence.
Even when it's not poor financial decisions, "extracting value out of the customer." Capitalism and the never-ending pursuit of infinite growth need to both die. These companies being able to spend several hundred million dollars on a new TV show proves that they're not short on money to begin with. How sad that your company made only $1.3 billion in profit this year rather than the $1.5 you were expecting. Oh to make up the difference my subscription is now $2 more? Fuck right off. Greed will never be happy with consistently profitable. It has to be record profitable every quarter every year.
The main reason for the lack of hype around the rings of power s2 is the rings of power s1
It's so funny how observers look for complex meta reasons and narratives when the truth is, the show was written bad and so people didn't like it so much.
The truly sad thing is if they had just followed the broad strokes of Anatar's story they could have gone all in on writing a "twist" villain that literally everyone would have known about before watching it; the thing about a really well written twist villain is that while everyone focuses on the aha moment as what makes them good they are actually best on a second watching where you are going back and getting to spot all the clues sprinkled throughout the film or series that you missed on a first viewing. The trick is that you would need to actually keep it subtle enough that anyone not familiar enough with the legendaryium would probably miss it the first time through, but clear enough that anyone who already knew or was seeing for the second time can spot all of those clues.
I watched 7 of the 8 episodes and just as the 8th was starting I was like "..I've been waiting for this show to get good and it hasn't .. and it's not going to. Fuck you Jeffy B I'm not finishing it." Turned it off and never returned. No regrets.
There wasn't much hype for s1 in the first place
I think that people ultimately realized they didn't have unlimited time to make use of all these subscriptions so there was no point in paying for them.
Honestly, as someone who grew up with cable, satellite TV, and now streaming services, it’ll all end up the same. People picking what ‘plans’ they want so they can enjoy the shows they want, streaming is just the new cable package.
It's all one big cycle
Except now you need to keep a spreadsheet and watch the trade papers to see what package you want at different times of the year. Convenience!
Yup. The entire reason streaming exploded in the first place is because cable sucked. Streaming offered a cheaper and much more convenient alternative, so of course everyone swarmed to it. And now that all those same companies responsible for ruining cable have taken over streaming, its starting to suck the exact same way. They learned nothing, and brought all their problems with them.
This won't change until those companies change. Unless they start actually focusing on long term customer satisfaction instead of short term profits, they will inevitably ruin their services, and drive everyone away, every single time. Because focusing short term gains at the expense of long term sustainability is simply bad business.
My favorite cable package will always be the one with "bay" at the end.
@@pirojfmifhghek566 Yarr!
"I just hope you don't go _Sauron_ me..."
That was a real groaner!
I commit to the bit.
Never change Darren never change.
@@Darren_Mooney Don't ever change, Darren. The puns are great! :D
@@Darren_Mooney This time you went too far-
amir
@@inventiveusername5191 I hope I didn’t Bor-amir you.
Max removing a ton of animated content like infinity train for a tax write-off is fucking awful
Rip Final Space
I still don't understand how a company can conceptually do this. Like I know they lose certain rights things with it but it's not like they were doing anything to begin with that was of much value. It just feels like a loss for art's sake more than anything appreciable financially.
@@syaieya I agree with whoever said that if studios do this as a tax write-off, the product should immediately enter the public domain.
why does no one seem to have the slightest clue what a tax write off is but insist on saying it so often
@@r6scrubs126 okay. They did it because they don't want to pay the writers royalties.
Gosh golly, it's almost like the incentive to make maximum profit is antithetical to the creation of art or something.
It's almost like the idea of endless growth in a limited reality is destined to fail or something.
@@anezay4987 the problem is artists need to eat too
But a lot of the greatest artistic creations were made for profit. And these series and movies often fail to make a profit, let alone maximize it, and there's several cases where creators were actually given a ton of freedom and still made something terrible, Madame Web was like that if I'm remembering right. Most of these things don't suck because of the profit motive, but because the people involved in making them are often bad at what they do and get their jobs via nepotism or other connections. If the industry falls to the point where they desperately need to make money I think we'll see an uptick in quality if anything, it's happened before with disney's "renaissance" era
@@steveman9668 exactly. The people involved either arent very good artists, or have too much interference. A lot of the best stuff, as you rightly point out, has been made for profit.
@@steveman9668Yeah, it's the same in every industry. What the hell does an MBA or hedge fund manager know about coding, writing, acting, journalism, music, publishing, video games, building cars, etc.
There is a MAJOR subject missing in this video, the fact that studios will spend mountains on money on shows but will absolutely not invest in proper writing. Despite the fact that the writing budget is a rounding error compared to special effects. Rings of Powers is the most expansive show ever, and has a writing that would shame Xena Warrior Princess. That's why nobody's hyped it's back. Compare Secret Invasion that would be ridiculed by fanfic writers and Loki. Secret Invasion was way more expensive, but Loki kept people on Disney+.
So the real question is, why are studios so in love with bad writing?
Well, Loki left a lot to be desired in terms of story. Silvi is a fascinating character with a lot of potential, but what do they have her do in S2? Work at McDonalds.
writing doesn't have a 'wow' factor to quickly grab people and suit a profit/cost analysis. Select visuals, musical tone, and the delivery of the lines will almost always stand out over the writing because it takes just that much longer for someone to processes words as 'writing' over the other sensations they experience.
Common denominator. Critics detect bad writing. Average viewers just go 'wooow'. Not to say writing has no effect on them, but you're never going to hear that as an explanation for why they did or didn't watch something
Because good writers have opinions, and will tell producers their ideas are stupid. This has a different dynamic in the 60s and 70s, when the producers were all veteran writers, so there was a creative back and forth between producers and writers but both were committed to producing a good show. But for the last few decades the writers have to report to producers with backgrounds in business and finance. Jeff Bezos gave the show runners for Rings of Power some kind of notes or mission statement, and it's the most obvious Writing 101 nonsense. But of course: what does the techbro who spent the last 30 years playing Sauron against the retail sector know about storytelling?
I think you are having a few misconceptions on writing.
1. Something that seems good on paper doesn't always translate well to practical/visual effect.
2. Writing isn't a consistent thing someone can do predictably. Sure, there are a few outliers, but even they aren't 100% reliable.
3. Humans run the pipeline of influence to protect monetary investments, and with that means that a "sales pitch", nepotism, "what have ya done for me lately" will get you farther then raw talent.
4. Writers sell off their scripts, so even if they make something great, in most cases many different people will likely come in afterwords and make minor alterations based on lots of factors (like making lines sound more natural to the hired actor speaking them, making the scene more practical for an effect to be visualized appropriately, to fit an edited time, logistical issues, etc etc etc) long after the writer had left their working position.
Idk what this "We" nonsense is. Streaming was always going to turn back into cable and people were predicting this over a decade ago
I remember reading cracked articles about this back in the day cracked wasnt just buzzfeed
I always knew the other foot would drop but was enjoying the ride until then. So when the other foot dropped, I wasn't surprised, just bummed that the ride was over.
. . . And just like cable, god willing, we're going to drive it under too.
How is it anything like cable? You have so much more choice? Did you ever pay for a cable plan??
@@onuq3r4y478 Yes. Have you? The analogy is that much like cable packages, they were arranged in a way where the provider would split up the top performing channels in order to incentivise you to buy a larger plan that you need.
So in order to see the five shows that you are actually interested in, you need to subscribe to 12-15 bundled channels that you will never watch.
So in order to see the five shows that you are actually interested in, you need to subscribe to four streaming services that you will otherwise never watch.
Unless of course with all those choices, you include the option where you realise that a show is only playing on a service that you don't subscribe to and chose to forget about it.
The big loser of the streaming wars was the consumer. The very moment all those companies decided "Hey, why make some money from giving our stuff to Netflix, if we could make our our streaming service and make a lot of money?", we were fucked. Now you have to carefully juggle your subscriptions between several services to see the shows you like (and may still see them cancelled because they were more about gaining customers than maintaining them). Prices are rising, quality is dropping, and every year they get more draconic about who you can or can't share your account with, and now they're bringing back fucking advertising.
I knew quite a lot of people who pirated pretty much all of their media. When Netflix got big, when you could find most stuff there for a reasonable price, most of them stopped pirating. They had found a legal alternative they were willing to pay for. These days they've all gone back to pirating.
It's almost like "piracy" is a service issue...
Give people access to what they want, at a reasonable price, and with minimal headaches (multiple subscriptions, ADVERTISING, random and unpredictable "vaulting," etc) and people will pay for it. It's when the MBAs and sociopaths that think LINE MUST GO UP! FOREVER! get involved that the rest of us get screwed. It's not like this companies aren't profitable at the top-line level, it's that they aren't making record profits, quarter over quarter, year over year, that's screwing all of us over.
That sounds a bit entitled though.
@@sonkeschmidt2027 On the studios' parts, yes.
Why don't we the consumers actually exercise our duty and stop consuming their products? There are other, better, forms of entertainment.
The "streaming wars" in itself is amazing advertisement for high seas, to be honest.
Or, you know, to seeking better entertainment, because frankly all these platform have jack to pay for. Yeah, i'm certainly interested in watching "We're butchering starwars" for the 5th time, or "we are trying to win a reward for most money spend on shittiest written fanfiction ever" that is RoP.
Why would people pay for this, i honestly have no idea.
That graph at 9:10 is SO telling. When Disney+ first came out, I couldn't believe the value - I've got two kids, and my wife is a huge Disney fan, and I love everything Marvel/Star Wars, so it was a no-brainer for us to get it. But the price has basically doubled since then - and costs for all services have gone up. Granted, we're pretty good at only retaining the services we use, so we're not spending too much per month, but it's still wild how different the landscape looks than when it first debuted.
It reminds me of comparison charts involving venture capital outfits like food delivery services, airbnb, etc. While they're still living off the VC money (and hemorrhaging tons of money every single month), they are *damn* good values. But as the VC money dries up and they have to wrestle with the "has never actually turned a profit" tiger they've created and saddled, cost-cutting measures come into play and the value flies out the window.
It's almost like greed is bad for business or something. You'd think *someone* recognized the value in a lower but steady rate of return rather than the way seemingly every business bets the farm on a home run without having even seen the hitter.
Always remember, a $5/month VPN is significantly cheaper than ALL streaming services combined.
@@maxweber06 *Homer yelling at his brain* Explain how!
also by signing up for Disney+ (even a free trial) you have forever waived your right to sue Disney for anything... ever... apparently.
I've been saying it for years, and while I still do not know when it will happen, I do believe it will happen eventually. If the big studios insist on maintaining their model of putting their properties into walled gardens, then eventually someone will develop a new streaming service that allows viewers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a bundle of different streaming services. Some studios may try to maintain their content silo and refuse to let this new service access their channels, but the less successful ones will likely go along with it because the licensing money they'd bring it from this new service would eventually outweigh the subscription money from the smaller user base who'd have to willingly choose to subscribe to their bespoke service over all the others. And over time, as more and more studios license their properties to this new service, we will have successfully reinvented cable TV.
At which point the studios will again try to wall off their content individually and bundling it with shit you don't want. "I know you only want to pay 10$ for the shit you actually watch; but to get that you'll have to also buy 90$ worth of south Kongolese midget wrestling without subtitles" (tm)
We already went through at least two such cycles: first with cable-TV and then with early Netflix.
It does seem like it, though at least with the option to opt out of ads (for now lol). I find it impossible to watch regular cable tv shows anymore, it makes you realize just how much time is spent on watching ads instead of a show.
You know I'm pretty sure there was a Revenge of the Sith meme that summed this up fairly neatly.
That's one of the main issues with modern technology. The tech industry is no longer interested in making things that would actually be useful for the common man, and hasn't been that way for a very long time. They just want to reinvent stuff that already exists, but puts the techbros as the middleman while everyone else is devalued. Crypto, N/F/Ts, Blockchain, Streaming, A/I Generation, it's all the same crap.
@@TheMichaellathrop It's like poetry. They rhyme.
The Streaming Wars is pretty much exactly as Aliens vs. Predator. No matter who wins, we lose.
Something that people typically don't consider when talking about how well streaming services are doing is that the incentives for streaming--without ads--are terrible. Streaming companies want subscribers, but they DON'T want subscribers to watch anything. It costs Disney money every time someone fires up Disney+ and watches Moana, both in terms of server usage and in residuals to the creators. But, they don't make any money when you watch Moana; they already got your money. To a corporate exec's balance sheet, the best thing in the world is a million subscribers who never watch anything. I think this, even more than "tax write offs", really explains things like the Batgirl cancellation: someone ran the numbers and said, "A bunch of people will watch this, but no one's going to cancel their subscription if we don't release it, and it won't net us very many new subscribers."
Allow me to sync moana for offline use and their costs would lower by the amount of bandwidth saved. My data cap would be happier too, which is why I'm setting up a Jellyfin Server to rip my DVD's & Bluerays.
That's basically the Netflix model. Good shows get cancelled two seasons in because they found that the first two seasons do best at drawing in new viewers.
@@RorikH But then people are wizing up to not get emotionally invested in any of their shows, which discourage watching them/subbing cause know that'll be cancelled anyway.
@hefoxed Yup, that's probably a great deal of why so many old shows with 200 episodes are getting more views than the 16-episode made-for-streaming ones. Amazon just spent a billion dollars on Lord of the Rings fanfiction and I'm watching 50 year old episodes of Columbo every evening.
That Makes No Sense
9:40 I support using "Hour of She-hulk" as a financial metric.
These corporations haven't seemed to realise that they aren't competing with each other so much as competing against the customers time and effort, people used to pirate because it was the easier, simpler way to watch what they wanted, then Netflix came along and suddenly most of what they wanted to watch was in one place, it wasn't too expensive and it was simple to access. Now that all of the streaming services are carving their own little fiefdoms and making their own services worse (bumping up prices while bringing in adverts) customers are once again returning to the high seas as the simpler option. I'm sure it won't be long before we'll see the next service that will 'bundle together' the streaming services for an attractive fee to once again make it attractive to customers and the cycle will begin anew.
Darren does great work; quickly becoming my most looked forward to SWG releases.
"I just hope you don't go...Saur-on me."
...We ride at dawn.
7:18 Is exactly why i never got on board with any of the streaming platforms. I don't want my collection being dependent on what some company deems worth having up or not. Just let me buy my copy and we'll both go our sepparate ways
Streaming services are anathema to sustainability and profit, they wouldn’t have been possible without the economic disaster known as zero interest rates. But it was never about either of those things, it’s about control.
Anathema is such a great word.
No, it is not about control. Not as end goal. IT is about creating shareholder value. Look at valuation od Netflix over time vs other media companies and you will understand why everyone was going for streaming.
Furthermore, if you watch original shows on netflix/hulu/whatever, there is a great likelyhood of that show being canceled on a cliffhanger because it didn't generate a million new subscribers or whatever. This forces studies to make bland, generic garbage with mass market appeal. Even something that's barely fringe in the grand scheme of things, Sense8, was canceled for this reason. The backlash was so great the studio quickly gave it the "Firefly" treatment and made a movie to tie up the loose ends.
Inside Job was such a fun premise and then they cancelled it when it was getting good. Tell me what the Council was up to you corporate Bastards, tell meeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I approve of the shameless use of Austin Powers clips.
Another series of movies about a beloved societal ideal that never really existed falling into irrelevance.
That’s all Jesse! Great stuff!
@@jerrys.9895 I'm not sure if Austin Powers writers actually liked Powers' lifestyle. The movie obviously points out that he's just a clown with plot armor, but concerning the binary question whether or not the retro-hippie-futurism is supposed to be part of what makes him a clown, I'd answer with yes.
@@deadhead4077 I hope it's a good 4K and not some AI crap
We need a compulsory licensing model for video content like we have for music. A radio station can play whatever song they want as long as they pay the ASCAP fee without any prior licensing agreement with the publisher. If we had the same for TV and movies, then streaming services could compete on their curation, price, and user interface instead of what content they could lock up exclusively in their walled garden.
It's incredibly sad how deep this comment is buried.
It is always The People that lose every war, that's our role in them.
Maybe this is why more people are watching indie animated shows or just indie film projects on RUclips
I feel like it's weird that most people talking about the shift in what services people are paying for don't talk about how more and more things have shifted to monthly payment models overall as we've hit a time of inflated prices on necessities like food while minimum wage has not gone up accross the board
If we're being technical, it was ESPN+ that helped bring the streaming division of Disney to its first profit, because elsewhere, Disney+ and Hulu were still losing money with ESPN+ just making enough from sports (and their big bundle) to offset those losses (which they seek to do for D+ by reducing the amount of content that's made for that service). But Disney will still take this as a victory despite that.
I really like the attention to detail that when you do a reverse shot on Sauron, the caption is reversed too.
Jesse rules!
6:56 “It was more important to get a return on investment than it was to *try and starve Netflix*. “
This. This right here is what I despise about capitalism; instead of taking the essentially free money from licensing, these companies are trying to destroy competition to have a monopoly and *everybody* loses because of the greedy investors and executives.
I’m so tired of it.
I disagree. It was not only to starve Netflix, it was to create own platform and get that revenue directly. Netflix was the shit on stock market and everyone wanted piece of that pie. And you will not get IT if you give them your best content.
Stop giving the bad company money and it goes away. It really is that simple in concept. I realize it gets murkier in other sectors (pharmacology, food, transportation etc) but we are talking specifically about a form of entertainment. Cancel Premium Streaming Service+++, and read a book. Simple. But, as I know from personal experience, breaking addictions is hard.
I work as a software engineer at one of the FAANG companies (for fear of losing my job, I won't say whom). The idea that the pandy was a sustainable market, rather than a one-time bubble, isn't exclusive to streaming services. All of wallstreet established unsubstantiated expections for stock growth based on that period. Truly a spetical of ignorance and greed.
Darren making more puns? That makes me glad-riel.
Streaming started out as affordable, ad free, with a massive library of content. Then, corporations did what they always do. Got greedy. Now we are at a point where they somehow have less content releasing, are full of ads, and are as expensive as traditional cable, which streaming came about as a way to circumvent. Streaming subscriptions are down because these companies increased prices during economic downturn. Instead of trying to keep their subscribers happy, keeping prices the same and lowering production budgets. They have been cutting costs across the board and aggressively monetizing, which most people cannot afford. Then they panic as people leave their service. Honestly it might be time to get a physical disc collection again. And your personal collection wont be crunched by shitty bitrate either. Plus, you'll own your content.
Us who sail the high seas didn't. These studios have gotten into billions upon billions of dollars in debt and we've gotten more television than we've ever gotten before, we're still swimming in an excess of TV at the megacorporations' expense.
Yeah, I don't get it; these corporate entities have all the money in the world, they pay no taxes, I don't know why I'm supposed to care about their expenses. I'm simply not going to pretend that Amazon is sad that it spent a billion bucks on a 4-feature length series when Disney can spend that much on a single film and still makes bank. They aren't drowning anytime soon. Same thing goes for all these studios under Microsoft making games or any other modern day product. You only lose as a consumer if you don't pick and choose wisely and spend judiciously. These mega companies have weathered decades and are more profitable than ever. A quarter or two or even a year or two of swings or outright losses have no major impact.
Ever since I went full yarr harr harr I've been happier with my content than ever. Now I only support things that respect me. I only pay for Criterion and Mubi and buy physical media (mostly from Criterion Collection).
tl;dr Plex + yo ho ho + Criterion is the sweet spot for me, these streaming services can rot for all I care, enough is enough
i wouldnt consider that much of a treasure, let alone worth the hard drives its sitting on 😂
Ever since I went full yarr harr harr I've been happier with my content than ever. Now I only support services that respect me. I pay for Criterion Channel + Mubi and download the rest. I also buy physical media when the stuff I want is available. Oh and no one is going to remotely delete my things from my server.
@@JackShoreman You're not supposed to care, but the reason they still make profits is not because paying subscriber care, it's because to their target demographic the convenience of a streaming service is worth it over the inconvenience of pirating those shows and movies instead. I'd even go so far as say that it's more ethical to sail the high seas when it comes to certain properties. If enough people do it it might lead to industry collapse, but isn't that kind of a good thing? Streaming services having monopolies of how things get done, who gets hired for what, and what stories are being told in the first place, all informed by algorithms and auctioned around between each other so they can report quarterly gains. As a rule of thumb, if there's a way to support creators of a piece of media that you enjoy directly then that's the best way to acquire the media that you want. If you're just paying a mega conglomerate and the people making it already got paid when they sold it for distribution...Yar har har.
I appreciate the puns.
He's a master
He's my favorite movie media pundit 😉
@@Semicolon42 i see what you did there
Dropping a W.B. Yeats quote amongst all the terrible puns is a work of art
An excellent take. It'll be interesting to see how much of streaming dies off as it pushes people simply too far.
"Binging Sucks" for a television show. Watch everything in just a couple of days and then forget it. No 'watercooler interest' growth. Tell creators to limit content to 'binging" size of 6-8 episodes. 2 year delays between 'seasons'. All the worst things.
simply put seasons are too short, to prevent binging. releasing shows weekly or spliting up episodes only work if your friend ground peer pressures you into watching as they come out. when the best experience is always watching in one go. seasons no longer produce episodic content. they are all 100% focused on one over arching narrative, which means there is no ohh this episode is great the story in it was spectacular. you dont have the great episode any more. you have the good season.
the problem is we live in a world were content is abundant. there is too many streams of content out there.
A good example of this is Smiling Friends. They aired the entirety of Season 1 for the premiere. Then in season 2 they didn't do that, and there was clearly way more attention put on every individual episode. Qwimbly probably wouldn't have been a thing if everyone had just watched that episode and moved on to the next a minute later.
If I give you 8 candies and tell you that you won't get more candy for a long time, it's not my fault that you are them all at once. That's your fault, and some of us are capable of restraint.
@@JrIcify To me it sounds like a good way to do _new_ shows (S1 is available all at once, and S2+ are weekly). If a new show is weekly show and it doesn't pick up/hook you by episode 2 or 3, it's much easier to fall off. No one wants to wait another week (or several) to see if the show is any good. But if it's available all at once, there's less pressure on each episode to prove it because you can jump right into the next episode (or scroll through) to see if it picks up. Less of an investment to remember to give it a shot across weeks/months and just try it now. And if there's a season 2, either you're invested or (hopefully*) the show has proven itself so you can watch season 1, and then catch up.
*Some shows order 2 seasons at the start so it may not mean it proved itself.
@@puppetpalclem If you just like sitting alone in the dark eating candy and never talking about it with anyone then that's fine. But you missed the point pretty hard with that metaphor.
I like puns but get better puns 😂
Self-contradictory.
Hearkens to previous bubbles going back to the tech bubble of the 1990s. I remember back then there were so many investors who said, "Yes, we all knew it was a bubble, inflated beyond reason, but you didn't want to be the one financial advisor who didn't go for the record returns for your clients or companies." Same thing happened with the financial crisis of 2008. So here in the 2020s, no studio was willing to see Disney or Paramount pull a rabbit out of a hat uncontested and be the One, the successful alternative to Netflix with a lock on eyeballs across the world, and be out there making less money from peddling their own content to someone else's streaming service. These bubbles are inevitable, since nobody in any boardroom or middle management office will ever be satisfied with "enough" or "comfortable".
As someone who works in this industry, this is some spot on analysis!
Thank you!
I have not been subscribed to any of these services for literally 6 years. Somehow, I'm getting along splendidly.
Intersting video! I do have to say, that plot at 8:38 is terrible. Change the scale! If all the data falls in the 400-900 shows range, then get rid of the dead space below 400 and above 900. That will only help to make the actual difference in the number of shows more clear :)
Puns are the height of comedy. Never stop.
I'm proud to say that the only streaming service I'm subscribed to is Jellyfin running on a tiny computer located on my shelf. It's never taken away content, raised its price, forced me to watch ads, or degraded its service. I can freely share my account with whomever I want, and my entire library is in one place without vendor fragmentation.
I did enjoy the Dr Evil throughout this xD
Also, more puns please, the more tortured the better :p
I left Netflix when they rolled out the household limitation on account usage. It's an anti-consumer move that only serves to benefit them. Then they raised prices again.
Traditional release is still the way to go. Even if you make a movie specifically for your platform, it will do much better on that platform if you give it even a short theatrical release.
You know who won the streaming wars?
🏴☠🏴☠🏴☠
I was done with streaming services all the way back when I was expected to get something besides Hulu or Netflix to watch stuff. I can't believe people are out here seriously paying for like 5 different monthly subscriptions minimum to watch tv. I also dont know how people even see value in the first place in most of those subscriptions.
Me personally I take advantage of bundles and add-ons provided by other services I'm attached to. ad-Netflix - free with T-Mobile. Ad-Peacock - free with Instacart+. With the Disney/Hulu/Max bundle and ad-Paramount+ I pay about 40 bucks total for streaming right now
Amen. Say it louder for the people in the back!
Puns in the opener were better than the show in question tbh
The snake has eaten its own tail, and is beginning to choke.
I love how your puns go there and back again
Every streaming service is a loss leader too
Although I have to wonder why - Disney owns everything on it's platform, so it's only real expense is "pushing the bits down the wire to your TV". So either they don't charge enough to pay for the server costs... or there's some Hollywood accounting at work.
No, it is not. Netflix is profitable. Disney+ i think recently broke even or is very close
@@michal1743 It was for like 15 years
As usual, an informative and entertaining episode, and I love your puns. My only real gripe with the video is at 6:40, while talking about WB opting not to release Batgirl and a Scooby-Doo film, you show a clip of Wile E. Coyote Vs. Acme, which they also tossed in the trash. Sorry to pick nits, but Wile E. Coyote and Scooby-Doo are NOT the same.
Using Dr. Evil as a framing device for this video was utter genius 🤣
The Streaming Wars weren't worth fighting.
"I love the smell of streaming in the morning! Smells like... content..."
Tried Netflix for a month in 2018.
Went back to sailing the high seas immediately after and never looked back.
at this point, [very legal obtaining of films, television, games, books, and other media] is not only justified but a moral imperative, the only way some of our media will be preserved otherwise.
The dad jokes got the like clicked. Oh Captain my Second Captain, you are the Wind in my sales.
Appreciate the dedication to increasingly groan-inducing puns and also austin powers!
This is actually a video for Austin Powers clips and puns than something about streaming wars.
It can be three things.
I have to believe at a certain point all the execs across the platforms realised that they can just repeat the cable model with their streaming services - As long as each change (raising prices, adding ad tiers, etc) is slowly rolled out, the average person will just shrug and accept it. Streaming is still relatively cheap now compared to cable (based on your area), but it won't be for long.
That was the plan all along. Destroy traditional tv by offering seemingly unlimited content at next to no cost, and once you've taken over the industry and audiences are hooked on the convenience, start squeezing them for money and never stop.
I am a bit happy about this as we do have things coming back to normal tv. The way streaming was going before it felt like it was being forgotten. So I am glad some things do get duo premiers as the last of us did and now the penguin for hbo. Good one Darren.
I don't know if it was Darren or whoever helped with editing, but the Doctor Evil cuts were perfectly timed and selected. Bravo. Also, I'm not convinced that's not actually David Zaslov.
who could have guessed that infinite growth isn't sustainable, especially with the cost of living crisis?
But people often prefer to drain the well completely just to be sure that nothing can be squeezed out , rather than leaving it half full so that other people might drain it.
@@sonkeschmidt2027 I am so sad that that's true
thought i should point out that Plex lets you build your own streaming library out of content you have on your local device and then allows you to share it with friends and family.
It was always going to be a bubble that burst - too many services, and too much expensive content. It's the consumer that pays and the talent that is underpaid while the executives continue to coin it in even when they make bad business decisions. A failed series like Space Force is a perfect example of why so much streaming doesn't make sense. With the big names attached and a big budget from Netflix, it should have done well. But while there were a few laughs, it never really resonated with audiences and was left hanging in the wind before its inevitable cancellation.
I don't currently pay for any streaming services and I don't see that changing. I don't have the fear of missing out on something big. After all, I always had that - in the past before we got cable or satellite TV, in the 2000s when a row between UK cable companies saw 24 pulled from our local service mid-season, or the current situation where as a Star Trek fan I can't keep up with the new output because it is spread too thin.
Not going to pay up the nose fore several streaming services. Pack it in a bundle or something.
Those puns brightened my day, thanks
For about 10 or so years I hung up my hat and paid for TV. We had Netflix, Max, and Amazon Prime, and 99% of what we wanted was in those places. Those were good times.
Now, in 2024, everything has been removed, splintered off, and carved out to a dozen streaming services. On top of that, S-tier levels of enshittification where prices keep going up, entire series are deleted, and now they have the balls to force ads on even paid tiers.
No thanks, Hollywood. We cancelled literally every streaming service, saving hundreds a year now, and we don't have to worry about shows or movies disappearing on our Plex.
Keep doing you, streaming services.
Those puns were absolutely atrocious.
Never apologise for them.
I never will.
I've got one thing say:
*_YAAAARRRR!!!_*
The streaming wars have erased great shows like Swamp Thing, or Infinity Train, no physical releases for either of them, so piracy is the only justified solution
The things about Streaming services is their metrics for success were totally missfocused, none of these companies had ever dealt with a pricing model like this before. It's hook and retain ROI, some shows bring people through the door others keep them using, but they pushed all of their budgets into Hook (Not the robin Williams movie), as though retain would just take care of itself (or more relied on older content to take care of it). The smaller/mid tier story telling that is often the birthing ground for massive hits all but vanished. Breaking Bad, House, Modern Family weren't big budget productions (at least until wages were renegotiated for later seasons) they relied on the network model to bring in audiences and won big audiences. They are readjusting to this, but as you mention they are relying on older staples to maintain this level of interest, I'm interested to see if they can redistribute their production budgets to actually produce a range of content rather than 10 massive budget shows a year.
And then they make 1 season of 8 episodes of great show and everyone and their mom watches it and then they cancel it. But the witcher will get 7 seasons. What's even the point of watching anything new anymore?
justice for lockwood and co!
The pun game is strong with this one.
TV so bad that it ain’t even worth asking a pirate.
I'm not at all plugged into new show releases, but usually they find me anyway through social osmosis. This video is the first time I hear about rings of power having second season.
One of the things that really bums me out with streaming is the same thing everyone's been talking about with movies - it's all rehashes. Obviously not all of it, there's plenty of good new stuff coming out, but all the big stuff that they really push is all known IPs (mostly nostalgia bait). Amazon spent a billion dollars making what is to me just a worse version of some 25-year-old movies I really like. Disney is spending infinite amounts of money panicking because it can't figure out if I want blind prequel nostalgia, blind OT nostalgia, or blind nostalgia for a couple of Cartoon Network cartoons, and in between is making like 40 episodes of homework that it tells me I HAVE to do before the next Marvel movie. Netflix at least is a little bit less reliant on nostalgia, but is continuing their hallmark tradition of "release 3 really interesting episodes, 4 really average episodes, drop the worst season finale you've ever seen, then cancel the show." And none of that is the end of the world. But when the monthly subscription for every single one of those seems to go up by two bucks every other time I turn on my TV, I start being a little bit more critical.
In the age of the Streaming Wars the Public Domain is King.
Change my Mind.
1. The puns were so good I had to delay watching this video so that I could show my wife the next day.
2. It's crazy that executives for both video games and streaming companies all thought the covid boom for at home entertainment was going to be permanent and went on massive spending sprees.
My favorite comment about _The Acolyte_ and Disney refusing to throw good money after bad: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if 180 million dollars suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced"
I like the puns. Keep them up Daren. You have all my Mooney.
8:30 - "Have studios already conditioned audiences to expect these sorts of films on streaming and not to go to cinemas?"
That's what my worry has been, however the massive success of 'Inside Out 2' blindsided me. Obviously a Pixar sequel like that will perform better than 'Elemental', 'Lightyear' etc. but I really thought that due to Disney's approach of training audiences to just "Wait 3-4 months for Disney+" would hinder its box office but now it's the highest grossing animated movie of all time.
We'll have to wait and see if that film's success is an indicator of the pattern breaking or if it was just an anomaly.
Yeah, I'll just stick with my Plex server. It doesn't randomly remove my TV shows and movies, and I can stream from it just like any other streaming service.
first 90 seconds needs more puns.
The problem is that people have limited time.
There are a limited number of people on earth, and a limited number of hours in the day. If one new show takes up 8 hours, that's a couple days you lose. If you want to do other things in life, then something needs to go.
The part about the Rings of Power that bothers me the most is that they spent all that money on the first season but they didn't hire any real career writers. All of the writing credits were smalltime tv producers who had only ever done minor writing gigs like a one-off episode of Law & Order or a episode from some generic high school drama. It's insane how much they disrespected Tolkien by letting these hacks butcher his work, just to save a buck. That kind of disconnect from the artform is what's killing movies and tv these days.
Darren, I love your puns. Don't let people going looney of mooney worry you. Please keep on with your opening puns.
Love the puns. Never stop. Add more.
Your puns make me violently angry.
Keep up the good work.
Came for the critique, stayed for the puns.
To summarize: An industry that only knew how to operate on cable and make movies treated streaming like an alternative to cable stations and made shows as if they were movies.
Alien Romulus was supposed to go to streaming and instead is currently the biggest horror film of the year. Heck, I just found out there's a live-action Peter Pan movie that dropped on Disney+, but I hadn't heard a thing about it prior?! While I don't have much interest in another Peter Pan film, I'm sure it would have made the company more money in theatres, than it currently is buried on D+.
I love your puns, never change Darren
I would be really interested to see how Dropout fits into all this. They have pretty low prices compared to other streaming services, and (meaning no disrespect to them) I suspect that their production costs are closer to legacy television like Seinfeld or Star Trek than they are to the mega-shows like Stranger Things or Rings of Power, and people don't like them any less for the savings. I wonder if scaling back might be a route to sustainability.
Good luck ever selling that idea to investors, though.
Both in film and video games, I keep wondering why not just spend less money. Like I don't think the extra budget really translates to bigger audiences, right? And most recent shows have been terrible. So why not cut the budgets in half and make twice as many shows? That way you can still put out the same number of duds, but have extra chances at accidentally making hits? Or you can now make a couple seasons or twice as many episodes so a show has room to grow.
Barring substantial changes brought on by the strikes, I would expect that any cost-cutting would also involve cutting everyone's pay while working them harder than before. It's already been happening in almost every other industry over the last half-decade, if not longer.
A streaming service does not get money from producing shows, so more content isn't relevant. A big show that draws in new subscribers is relevant. Most expensive series ever made attracts a lot more subscribers than "we made two new series that are good"