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The Slow Death of Hollywood

mattstoller.substack.com

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Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#71

Post by mrkurt »

delinka wrote: post #67
addicted wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the complaints about cable, what we are transitioning into is significantly worse, with a bunch of different concentrated streaming services. The Fox-Dish battles were basically what helped keep prices lower for viewers. Right now, customers have no big player on their side, so essentially the only way to fight Netflix price increases is on a purely individual level, which rarely works. Dish would concentrate…

People have clamored for a la carte pricing for a long time. Well, the direction we're headed is a response to that, albeit not a good response from the view of consumers. We'll have to start managing which services we pay for - subscribe, binge, unsubscribe, move to the next service, repeat. The smaller players will sell out to the bigger players. The bigger players will gain additional leverage against content prov…

The direction we're headed isn't a la carte pricing, it's bundled pricing from different companies.

The thinking is a lot longer term than it seems. The US stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and if that continues it's going to take a lot longer than 3 years for anyone but consumers to feel the pain. We're watching Disney and Netflix execute a 2 decade "gather all the market power and reap the benefits" plan. There's really no one to threaten them.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#72

Post by mrkurt »

jpalomaki wrote: post #66

One thing Netflix has not yet cracked is how to keep me constantly hooked and to stop me from quitting once in a while. As I can just catch up with the missed episodes later, I don’t see problem canceling the subscription.

You're unique. Most people just keep paying for it.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#73

Post by freerootkit »

Price of 1 movie ticket: $15 Price of small popcorn: $8 Price of small drink: $8 Price of small candy: $5 Total: $36

Time it took to drive to theater: 10 mins Time it took to wait in line for food: 10 mins Time it took to watch trailers: 25 mins Total: 45 mins

Buying the movie and watching it my house costs no more than $20 (when it first comes out) and I can make whatever I want to eat and don't have to drive anywhere. So I save money and time. Oh and I almost forgot, no children or people next to me coughing if I stay home.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#74

Post by mrkurt »

goldcd wrote: post #18

I'm actually OK with the cancellations. Maybe I'd have liked more Santa Clarita Diet - but had given up watching Orange is the New Black and the Marvel stuff. I'd loved them, liked them, then maybe was watching out of a "sense of duty".. There's only so much TV I can/should ever watch, so if there's going to be anything new, they've got to stop making something old.

You might be, but the people it really hurts are the creators.

Orange is the New Black went 6 seasons. The creators likely made all their money in seasons 3+, because they proved its worth in seasons 1 and 2 and had leverage to negotiate higher compensation.

The problem isn't so much cancelling mediocre series after two seasons, it's when they cancel things with a huge following because they've managed to disconnect what people pay from the quality of the content.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#75

Post by mrkurt »

cmiles74 wrote: post #11

> The centralization of power in a few studios and chains is global. In 2015, the U.S.-China Security Review Commission noted that Hollywood now obeys Chinese censors pretty much for all films, even those made and distributed solely in the West. Unless this system is restructured, it is unlikely we will see any critical depictions of Chinese government actors again, which has its parallels to the Studio System in the…

> I don't know what the solution might be, I struggle to keep a positive frame of mind in this regard. I do think it's unlikely that the government will step in an break these companies up, especially when they have so much money under their control.

I'm not usually optimistic about it, but there's some political noise about actually enforcing the Sherman Act again. We're not _that_ far removed from a DoJ that blocked Microsoft mergers, and there's hopefully enough political pressure to staff the FTC/DoJ some people with spines instead of rubber stamps.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#76

Post by holy_city »

jpalomaki wrote: post #63
holy_city wrote: post #31

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…

Netflix also has lots of detailed data about what kind of ingredients people want in their sausage. Would make sense for them to start being quite specific with the suppliers what they want to get. This is not just on high level. You could track on individual episodes and even inside episodes (for example do you pause, switch to another app).

The "ingredients" in this analogy are mostly human capital/contractors and locations used in pre/production/post. For example, Netflix doesn't really have the ability to see how much the choice of caterer on set influences their churn.

That's contrived, but I hope it illustrates the point. There are dozens to hundreds of these contractors who work on serious productions, and some studios are more integrated than others when it comes to hiring them for different phases of the process. And the sheer amount of real estate and personnel involved in these ecosystems is beyond what Netflix is capable of exploiting today.

And while Netflix is uniquely capable of collecting some extremely useful data (which they guard like the crown jewels), I'm not aware of them getting granular with production pipelines to see how changes influence their revenue. And if they were, I'd be skeptical given the amount of variance, since every production is different despite massive efforts to standardize the process. It's a very human problem domain.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#77

Post by pfranz »

addicted wrote: post #49
pfranz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 addin…

For all the complaints about cable, what we are transitioning into is significantly worse, with a bunch of different concentrated streaming services. The Fox-Dish battles were basically what helped keep prices lower for viewers. Right now, customers have no big player on their side, so essentially the only way to fight Netflix price increases is on a purely individual level, which rarely works. Dish would concentrate…

I kind of agree with you on that. People don't seem to have much sympathy about multiple subscriptions services. The mantra is to cancel subscriptions to whatever you're not watching ATM, but with young children that's untenable (I'd prefer to just outright buy, but discoverability and availability doesn't always work like that).

It does suck when Comcast is fighting with ESPN and you don't care because your kid just wants to watch the Disney channel.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#78

Post by segmondy »

Hollywood is dying because most of their movies are garage. There have been very few good movies made lately or perhaps I'm just getting old. I use to go to the movies once or twice a month a long time ago, now I can go a whole year without going. Besides the quality going down, it costs too much too.

The remake fatigue is also real. Very few original content. It's either a remake of something from the past, another country or a sequel.

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#79

Post by williamDafoe »

thrusong wrote: post #52
JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #35

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…

One of the most frustrating things for me regarding ticket prices is that no theatres in my hometown (Winnipeg, Manitoba) offer matinee pricing anymore. I'm guessing this is possibly because of the Cineplex monopoly since they bought out Famous Players. I get so pissed off with paying $16 to see a movie by myself in an empty auditorium during the day when it used to be $8 a seat. What happened to supply and demand? A…

When I was a kid in the mid 70s movies cost $3.00 in the Midwest. Westegg says that inflation is up 10x since then. Any movie less than $20 is actually a bargain. However, my dad's salary was 7,000x a movie ticket (Midwest CS professor before salaries exploded).

Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood

#80

Post by pfranz »

delinka wrote: post #61
pfranz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, go…

I feel like you contradict yourself. You point out that "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." Right, the legally mandated change solved this problem for the little guys.

I'm not following you but maybe I wasn't clear. Yes, producers and distributors are separate, but distributor's main clients are the few large producers. Small guys have trouble getting distribution either because it's not worth the time of the distributors or the large producers strong-arm the distributors. If producers could distribute, they'd just drop their product off at the bar/store themselves.
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