The Rise Of The Streamers: what’s your opinion about them?

We’re into a rise (and war) of the streamers for the last 4-5 years now.

For me as a movie fan, they are sometimes convienent: lots a choice for 10 bucks a month. But the quality of originals vary to say the least. I hoped they would adopt the HBO philosophy and really care about quality. But it’s been quantity till now. Filling up the catalogue seems to be more important than making the best content possible.

The only and real winners seem to be the talent in front and behind the camera. The amounts of money being spent on creating content is staggering. The amount of ‘first look’ deals are going through the roof.

Me personally, I could live without them. I only have a small amount of time everyday to watch content. Work, family, other hobby’s (music!) take up a day pretty quickly. But I get the feeling the younger generation have adopted them wholly. I could never watch a film on a phone screen. But I see kids watching Netflix on the subway all the time.

What do you think about them up to now? Quality, convinience, cost?

 

A lot of people live on the couch for them I’m sure it’s worth it. You could put a stick puppet to a scratchy 20s jazz record on the screen and if it’s the only thing showing people will watch it.

 

I love 'em. I don't have nearly enough time to watch TV, but the choices and dollar-to-value ratio is higher today than ever before. And if you want to take a break, either financially or from watching, just cancel for a few months, no questions asked.

What more could you realistically ask for?

 

I've never tried any of the pay streamers. The most I've streamed is free YouTube videos.

I see streamers as the evolution of TV, not of movies. TV hasn't much interested me for over 20 years. It panders to its audience, is repetitive, or drags on endlessly rather than telling a concise story. And TV-movies are obviously only on TV because they weren't good enough to get anyone to pay for it. I've never subscribed to a pay cable channel either.

A film or program that is made with the intent that you pay for it directly will always be much higher quality on average than something that you're sold in a bundle. It's also likely to appeal to a more discerning, educated clientele. Broadcast TV with advertising would also inspire higher quality than a streaming service. The worst possible consumer model to inspire quality is buying a giant bundle of programming that's free of advertising. It puts enormous decision-making power in the hands of the studio heads, whose primary motivation will always be to cut costs as much as possible.

 

If your idea of TV (over the past 20 years) is something like CSI: Miami, then sure. But you're missing out on some amazing storytelling (better than 95% of most movies) via pay services.

Most of what is generally considered the "best" TV of the last 20 years (by both critics and the general public) is only available via streaming services free of advertising. For example, The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Dexter, etc.

 

I see it as the same way I saw cable elbow its' way around the Communications Act. We put together a stable architecture of broadcast standards that asserted the airwaves belonged to The People, and that was never good enough for either the elitist among them, or the ones who hadn't yet profited from it. We gave local communities a say in what sort of programming would be tolerated by their own standards of decency, and a path to redress those who crossed it by allowing citizens to ask if those broadcasters deserved to hang on to their licenses (also knows as "a license to print money" by some). There was banality and cheese, yes. But there was also creativity and inspiration. Both television and radio made great strides in excellence, despite the middle-of-the-road offerings of afternoon chat shows and Perry Como.

Cable TV came out of the community access TV movement, where small towns piped-in signals because they were poorly-served by outside signals they couldn't get. What most people don't consider from the whole revolution of cable was, since they didn't broadcast over The Publics' Airwaves, they weren't as culpable for violating community standards of decency. It was "re-regulated" to the marketplace, and we all know how fair the marketplace can be when it comes to the fringes of society - particularly the "lower fringes" (for instance, you never saw "The Homeless Channel" on a cable TV lineup). With no "community" to serve (despite the toothless system of "local charters" granted by city councils), the public got their cafeteria-like bounty, and paid more for it...even though the advertising alone should have paid for it all. The Holy Rollers got religious channels, the Testosterone-Americans got a hundred different sports flavors, the doily-fans got shopping channels...and everybody who had no taste for any of that, still resented paying for those channels they didn't want, just to get a show they wanted to watch when they came home from work. And if you ever wanted any "quality" shows with Emmys attached to them...you still had to pay extra for the premium channels. "The Peoples' Airwaves" was a faded view in the rear view mirror.

On the surface, the streamers look to be a way forward, in choice, in quality, in convenience. What it really is, is the same sort of media giants that weren't allowed to have monopolies back when movie and television studios weren't allowed to own majorities on television station broadcast licenses...now can do anything they want, at any price they can get people to buy. It's ALL about "what the market will bear" now, no-holds-barred, and less about the consumer (let alone, the citizen). You can choose your flavor of programming, just as easily as you could choose your reality when it came to which news channel produced "your" version of news. But, what you can't choose, is which media giant (and their partner corporations) you support every time you set them up for auto-pay so you can keep watching The Expanse, The Handmaid's Tale, Star Trek: The Woke Generation, The Mandelorian/Marvel Universe, or whatever you got sucked into.

Add-up your monthly cost of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Hulu, HBO Max, and see how that compares with your Cable TV bill ten years ago.

Once Netflix stopped being about "flix" that arrived in your mailbox, it was open season on which companies wanted a slice of that pie. Apple suddenly makes teevee shows. The Worlds Largest Bookstore makes teevee shows. GoogleTube is running movies on their platform now. God help us all if FaceBook/Meta decided to start making their own teevee shows, and you could only watch them there. Or whatever consortium of churches (don't think they're not thinking about it).

And it's all without being "hamstrung" by the "bonds" of "demon regulation" with the benign, innocent concept that, "the airwaves belong to the people". Once we lost our stake in it...we're choking on the very air we breathe, literally and figuratively.

 

Lotsa junk on offer...

 

I'm more concerned about a burst in the "Streaming Service Bubble" just like with tech and real estate from the same lack of transparency on what/who is financing all this content it seems not many have time enough to surf through to find what's good.

I'm not set up for streaming service and I don't want to, but I really don't like my cable TV big three networks advertising movies and series content I know I'll never see, but can only hope it will come out on disc.

 

Interesting take by Quentin Tarantino on why we should see movies at the theater instead of streaming at home...

It's a discussion on Carpenter's The Thing but at 4:20 mark he explains the importance of theaters.

 

Streaming Rules.

I have a closet full of DVDs (including a sizable Criterion Collection), go the theater (live plays) often and subscribe to cable tv. Still, streaming has enabled me to see movies and tv series I would never have been exposed to otherwise.
Best thing about the internet, imo.

 

Interesting perspective on the streaming service business model I hadn't considered. Makes complete sense. Instead of relying on the few companies that fund the production of media content good or bad by sponsoring with ads, they get an entire global population of subscribers to fund the production where quality won't matter because there's more people to spread the losses until their reputation tanks and they lose more unhappy subscribers who can't get their money back after cancelling as SamS suggests.

But then the subscriber has the additional cost of broadband service that charges by the gig streaming that amount of data over the airwaves? And what do you bet these streaming service companies are getting compensated on the back end investing in broadband companies.

Financially nobody loses except the customer as usual.

 

All of the streaming services are publicly held companies. You can see every dollar of investment, revenue and expenses via a simple internet search.

 

Guess there were a lot of folks who didn't take your advice noticing all the transparency during the housing market crash of 2008. Even the SEC wasn't watching and didn't do anything afterward.

 

Totally. A mortgage-backed security for $500K is almost the same thing as spending $5 for a month of Paramount+.

 

I'm ok with streaming. Can't stop progress.....

 

I'm from Europe, so I'm not familiar with 'cable' in the American sense. But most of these shows you mention were cable shows, not streaming. This is what I meant with the HBO-philosophy in my first post. HBO and FX really wanted to make premium shows that was worth the extra cost for cable. Streamers seem to be about filling up the catalogue. It's more fast food/take out food than a nice meal in a good restaurant.

There are only a handful of streamer shows that I would put in this category: The Crown, Marco Polo (canceled), House of Cards (canceled/run ended), Defending Jacob

Nice point of view, but I don't have the 'community' feeling he is describing. For one, some moviegoers in a theater annoy the hell out me: feet on chairs, phones ringing, talking during the movie etc. QT is one thing and one thing mostly: a hopeless romantic.
I do get the point about the experience. I still remember seeing certain movies in the theater when I was a kid. As a film buff, those memories are worth something. But who knows, maybe 50 years from now some old fart starts reminiscing about the time he first saw The Irishman when he was home alone during a pandemic.

Good point, there are tons a small or indie films I would never have seen if it wasn't for streamers picking those up for their library.

That's my question. Is it progress? Or is it excess?

 

The one thing I am cautious about with streaming services, whether HBO Max or Netflix, is how their business model is very different from network TV or cable TV. For network or cable TV, it's about getting high viewer numbers, to sell ads during the program. The will grind out a show as long as they can, until viewership drops off to the point of not justifying any more shows. For streaming services, it's about getting new paid subscribers: they are more focused on adding new viewers, than holding on to existing viewers. The difference has led to some good things: streaming services have picked up TV shows that were cancelled on network or cable TV: it's a way for streaming services to invite an established fan base to subscribe to the streaming service, so they can continue their show. The negative is that even if a show has a good audience, the streaming service isn't always looking to continue it because later seasons don't attract new viewers (and the existing audience has already subscribed, and their data can anticipate whether they keep the service anyway).

For better or worse, I think the streaming services will mean a lot more new shows, but less willingness to continue shows for as many seasons as network or cable TV has. That may mean streaming services end shows a bit before their peak, whereas network and cable TV end shows long after their peak.

The OP's premise makes no sense. He says HBO "really cares about quality," but the "streamers" are more about quantity than quality. The he lists out a bunch of exceptions, which are big-budget, high quality productions made by the "streamers". The streaming services all do big-budget, high quality productions: Netflix, AppleTV+, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max. Look at who is getting nominated for Emmy awards these days. As for HBO, cherry picking one or two great shows is ignoring the huge amount of low-budget shows they have - it has many talk shows, and for every Sopranos, they also had more than a few low-budget, garbage shows, like "Real Sex" or "Taxicab Confessions". I think the OP is confusing his personal viewing habits and tastes with what's actually out there.

 

Thanks for playing then

 

Can't even get HBOmax to stream on my Mac!
Boo to it all!

 

Why not? It has always worked for me, going to hbomax.com

 

Every time I click on a show or movie, it says, ".......
Oh, wait! it WORKS now!
Hooray!!!!

 

For streaming services, it's about getting new paid subscribers: they are more focused on adding new viewers, than holding on to existing viewers.

^They want both. They want to hold onto subscribers and add new ones.

I don't have a problem with streaming. I canceled my cable b/c they just didn't offer much that appealed to me and I was paying $130. to Suddenlink. I didn't watch sports very much, the movies they showed were the same old same ones they've showed in the past over and over again. You couldn't find any old films. I was subbing to Netflix one physical disc, which I still do, but dropped cable so I could subscribe to something more to my satisfaction. I bought an antenna for local networks and a Roku too. Everybody is on the go these days, and if someone wants to watch something on their phone that's fine with me.

 

I have limited time in front of the TV so being able to watch a show or movie on my phone is great. There are many programs that I've enjoyed which I wouldn't have if I was shackled to the television.

I have a huge dvd/bluray collection. And I like owning things. But I find myself using the physical discs less and less. It's easier to just go to Vudu and just stream the thing. Granted, there are many things I don't have digitally, but for those I do....

I understand the risks of a streaming service pulling the rug out from under me, so if it's something I really like I'm going to buy the disc and own it.

But as I walk into my media room, with one entire wall of vinyl records, and one entire wall of DVDs, blu-rays, and CDs, not to mention discs hidden in every crevice of the house, I've surpassed the point of finding my collection more of a burden than something I take pride in.

Late at night when my daughter was young and sleeping in our room with us the only way I could entertain myself in the darkness was via my trusty discman. But then I figured out that my phone could play all those same albums without my having to rummage through a pile of jewel cases in the dark. This was a huge step for me.

So yeah.... I own stuff, and continue to own stuff, but I envy the streamers, who can just pick up and walk away at any given moment.

 

The thing that bothers me most about the streaming paradigm, is the "market-share" battle. Companies like the Mouse House are very territorial, and worked to take the Disney and Marvel properties that were previously scattered all throughout the entertainment landscape, so whatever they could was only available through Disney+. HBO Max set a similar course. Before this, a lot of catalogues would circulate, first showing up on Netflix, then Hulu, then Amazon Prime, etc. Not so much anymore, once the mega-media congloms try to sit on their own properties.

And it's harder for me, because I have two old televisions. The Am Prime app expired on my oldest some time ago, and we could never get the Netflix app to even load on it. My "newer" set was a 2015 model bought in 2016, and even when I signed up for a trial of CBS AllAccess, there was no app for it in the repository of course. Finally, once they changed to Paramount+, they re-jiggered what they had screwed-up with the earlier rollout, and I was at least able to get Paramount+...through my Amazon Prime app! So at least we have one set still streaming.

 

Any streaming platform wants both to add new subscribers, and hold on to existing subscribers.

But their behavior seems to show them taking very big bets on customer acquisition. Netflix has taken on an enormous amount of debt -- it's up to about $17 billion these days -- to produce lavish, big budget shows. It's gotten to the point where many business analysts question how sustainable their business model is. You can't maintain a business forever that entices people to stay by putting out shows that costs $10 to $13 million an episode, like some of Netflix's biggest shows cost.

With existing subscribers, Netflix still has a lower churn than other streaming platforms. Who knows what data the executives are looking at, and making decisions on internally. But one big part of their strategy of getting people to stay on the platform is how well they get subscribers to watch other stuff on the platform. This is their algorithms on smartly pushing out "other shows you may like" to subscribers, plus tricks like starting previews for other shows when one show has ended, or changing the thumbnails of shows frequently to catch viewer's attention.