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The Slow Death of Hollywood

mattstoller.substack.com

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Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#31

Post by holy_city »

I just wanted to disagree with the author's assertion :

>[Netflix has] "slowly reconstructed the old vertically integrated studio system. The company is an integrated production and streaming service."

Netflix is probably the least integrated business in Hollywood when it comes to production. To use an analogy, think of content as sausage.

Netflix doesn't make the sausage and they don't care about how it's made. They pay people a lot of money to do it, and that's about it. They're in the business of distributing the sausage. They also buy a lot of bulk sausage that they found at a sausage festival, meaning they had no stake before it was made.

(some) Traditional studios do care a lot about the making of the sausage. To make sausage for them, you have to buy their spices, use their casings, and go to a meat supplier that they recommend and might have a co-ownership stake in with other sausage distributors. That's not a bad thing, making sausage is complicated with a lot of people involved - the studios give you a good deal by removing that complexity, and helps keep your costs down before you get to see a profit.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#32

Post by jonny_eh »

cmiles74 wrote: post #15
jandrese wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that a lot of shows have fairly rough first seasons, good to excellent second and third seasons, and then start running out of ideas in the fourth season. Four seasons is a good length for a TV show. Two is too few most of the time. This is a very rough metric of course. Some shows peak in their first season and go downhill from there. A few manage to reinvent themselves enough each season to avoid going st…

I don't have any data to back this up, but I have been watching TV for many, many years. It seems to me that we have two types of television series... 1) A show that was carefully written over the course of several years and had a pretty large budget when the first season of the show was finally made. These have a good first season and maybe an okay second season but often flounder in their second season. 2) A series…

Ya, 1 fits a lot of the big expensive dramas like The Sopranos and GoT (although waited 5 seasons to flounder), while 2 fits the comedies like The Office and Parks and Rec.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#33

Post by scarface74 »

This entire article is flawed because of the premise that Netflix is a monopoly.

There were 495 active scripted shows in 2018 - 146 more than in 2013 (https://gazette.com/arts-entertainment/the-number-of-scripte...). There are also more avenues than ever to shop around a scripted show including five networks - as opposed to three four decades ago and many cable channels. In the 80s and 90s, most cable channels were just showing reruns of network shows.

You also have multiple streaming services backed by companies with far more money than Netflix either already on the market or coming within the next year. Including Disney, WarnerMedia, Apple, Sony, etc.

My dad was an avid movie goer for decades. Since we got him a Roku TV, he goes to the movies a lot less frequently. There may be a near monopoly on movie screens, but there are a lot more outlets and large screen TVs are incredibly cheap.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#34

Post by pfranz »

WarDores wrote: post #22

I'm typically a "when in doubt, free markets" type, but the three tier system (production, distribution, and retailing) has numerous advantages. The craft beer boom, for example, would never have happened in the absence of a legally-mandated 3 tier system. Not only did this result in greater consumer choice, but it also allowed small businesses to thrive in a sector where there are significant economies of scale. I t…

> The craft beer boom, for example, would never have happened in the absence of a legally-mandated 3 tier system.

Really? I'm not intimately familiar with it, but I've heard the exact opposite. Big distributors are already partnered with the big guys, so small guys had a lot of trouble getting distribution and couldn't do it themselves. There are also silly restrictions. I toured the Budweiser factory in St Louis, got a sample right out of the finishing tanks. We walked 30ft to their Hospitality room where they offered more free drinks, except those were weeks old because they had to go offsite to a distribution center.

I'm not saying the 3 tier system is bad or needs to be abolished, just that I find it odd that it facilitated craft beer. I do think it (and the low shelf life of beer) has kept craft beer regional--which is something I personally like when traveling.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#35

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

Honestly I'm expecting the whole industry to crash hugely. I've received so many free cinema tickets to mainstream cinemas in the past 3 years that I haven't once actually paid to see anything by a major studio in that time, and I'm someone who goes to the cinema once a week on average. Much like MoviePass I assume _someone_ is paying for all those trips I go on for free, and when they stop paying I'm not going to go anywhere near 90% of those films. Meanwhile the specified prices of cinema tickets have grown and grown to the point that I'm honestly appalled when I hear how much people go to see such and such a new blockbuster on release day.

And on the TV side of things Netflix seem focused on making consumable content over anything that endures. I can't think of any shows of theirs that're going to age as well as HBOs finest have and I can see that being an issue in the long term when they don't have these kind of pillars to fall back on. It all seems focused on hyping people up into subscribing and then hoping that they forget about the subscription cost indefinitely.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#36

Post by 0815test »

WarDores wrote: post #22

I'm typically a "when in doubt, free markets" type, but the three tier system (production, distribution, and retailing) has numerous advantages. The craft beer boom, for example, would never have happened in the absence of a legally-mandated 3 tier system. Not only did this result in greater consumer choice, but it also allowed small businesses to thrive in a sector where there are significant economies of scale. I t…

> "when in doubt, free markets"

Monopolies are antithetical to the free market, and vertical integration in industries with high economies of scale does create substantial monopoly concerns! The best market-based solution, so far as we can tell, is precisely to carve out the monopoly-prone "tier" in the industry (this is not always easy as monopoly-potential is not always correctly judged; it's more about inherent lack of contestability creating a sort of undue "power" over the rest of the market, and not so much merely a high market share by any single actor) and require it to act as an open platform to the rest of the market, perhaps even nationalizing it if necessary (this is, after all, the basic rstionale for why many public services are provided by the government). So the regulators in the beer industry may have come out with something quite close to the best known approach, if perhaps not for the same reasons.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#37

Post by WorldMaker »

cmiles74 wrote: post #7
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #3

"...Netflix’s strategy is straightforward market power exploitation. The company is cancelling shows that subscribers like, so it won’t have to pay creators the amount they would otherwise be able to get for making good commercially successful art. In other words, Netflix is subtly raising prices on subscribers and paying creators less for their work." I wonder if this means in the future, the price for a first and s…

It's hard to guess at the reason that Netflix is canceling these shows, but many shows simply have too many seasons. I suspect it's because the way the networks estimate their viewership (things like Nielsen households or telephone surveys) are less reliable than the detailed metrics that Netflix can track. While everyone misses their favorite show when it's canceled, it could be as simple as viewership has dropped b…

Plus, large numbers of shallow (one or two season) shows plays to Netflix's illusion of choice. The more different "shows" it can show in a carousel the more people feel they are getting from their subscription. That's probably going to be increasingly important to them as other content providers leave the platform, if anything.

I wonder if Netflix had adopted a UX more like Amazon's early on where every individual season shows up at the top level instead of all seasons rolling up into the same "now updated" title card for the entire show, if they would have felt less pressure to do as many parallel shows and might have supported more seasons of existing shows. It's a UX change that likely wouldn't make a big difference to viewership though because that Season X + 1 is probably always going to have diminishing returns of viewership as people fail to complete Season X but feel they need to watch it before X + 1.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#38

Post by NeedMoreTea »

iscrewyou wrote: post #10
cmiles74 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to guess at the reason that Netflix is canceling these shows, but many shows simply have too many seasons. I suspect it's because the way the networks estimate their viewership (things like Nielsen households or telephone surveys) are less reliable than the detailed metrics that Netflix can track. While everyone misses their favorite show when it's canceled, it could be as simple as viewership has dropped b…

I have this gripe that shows DO NOT need to run for 10 seasons. Breaking bad was a great example of a show that didn’t drag on, caught itself when it was starting to and pivoted and finished it strong. Now it’s a classic. Should there still be shows with 10 seasons? Sure. But most of them should be like 3-4-5 seasons. People lose interest. But if they knew that the only need to pay attention for 3-4 seasons, i think…

British shows mostly go the other way. All the classics seem to be one or two series where you wish they'd made one or two more, and series are often 6 or 8 episodes rather than the 10, 12 or "bleeding ridiculous" US series love. As our tv has got more American in style and business we've gained series that just won't die, even though so far past expiry date the corpse is rotting. (Big Brother? Apprentice? Celebrity anything...

The only downside to the shorter seasons is book adaptations often go at breakneck pace and take too many liberties.

As example, The Last Kingdom: First two series were BBC America and 8 episodes that covered 2 books a series. Pretty damn good adaption, pretty faithful to the books even with the brutal fast pace compression, and kept the real historical basis Cornwell is famous for. Maybe a bit tame and a little too "worthy" in places. It's King Alfred christianising early England and killing many heathen Danes, some "worthy" was unavoidable. :)

Third season is Netflix and no BBC, so instant 10 episodes a series, and it's unbelievably fucking shit. The gore, the dialogue, budget and plot all got turned up to 11, all the characters got entirely new personalities and the basis on the books got thrown out the window. Yet it drags and drags, because the highlights are constant now, so no contrast any more. Cornwell's famous historical basis laughed at and pissed on. Shark jumped multiple times. In wanting to make it more showy and mass market they killed any interest of the people who did watch it.

Another reason to think my Netflix sub is nearing its end.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#39

Post by pfranz »

WarDores wrote: post #22

I'm typically a "when in doubt, free markets" type, but the three tier system (production, distribution, and retailing) has numerous advantages. The craft beer boom, for example, would never have happened in the absence of a legally-mandated 3 tier system. Not only did this result in greater consumer choice, but it also allowed small businesses to thrive in a sector where there are significant economies of scale. I t…

> the three tier system (production, distribution, and retailing) has numerous advantages

Do you see cable tv as a successful implementation of this? Every few years I'll see news articles and billboards about "Fox couldn't negotiate a deal with Dish." It'll be unavailable for a few weeks until they reach a deal, but in the meantime both sides blame each other and the customer goes without. Not to mention cable adding commercials after charging a monthly fee and constantly increasing their prices. There's also the complaint about only watching 2-3 things--I only ever watched small a handful of channels (I don't hear similar complaints about Netflix).

I can see people arguing that's the system working, or it's failing due to oligopolies, or the practical friction of changing cable services is just different than buying a DVD from Target.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#40

Post by sek »

I think it's a combination of things, but primarily we are in a low interest environment.

Money is looking desperately for something to invest in and the problem of Hollywood and cable companies was that they made too much money. Netflix was a distributor who figured that out and was creating a low subscription model for content.

When the content producers realised this Netflix was exposed, they knew they would not renew their contracts and as a defensive measure just started producing content like mad. They had all this leverage because the market is flooded with money and they have a pretty stable revenue stream.

Netflix is what Napster was for music, because movies were always too big to pirate it took a little longer. Now it's too late, people don't buy a CD with one song for $12 dollars and they won't pay $100 for a cable subscription any longer.

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