The great cancellation: why megabucks TV shows are vanishing without a trace

I'm sure the studios still be considered the copyright owners, but I don't think there's any ethical reason why they could possibly sue you for releasing something thst they cannot ever release themselves for tax purposes. They binned their shows, so why should the law protect their copyright?

The real scandal here is how little viewership streaming shows get and how little revenue they generate off of that viewership. Particularly for how expensive these shows are.

I wrote a couple of comments elsewhere in the thread about some specifics and consequences. But the takeaway is that the last decade+ of super expensive “prestige” shows on streaming has been a huge bubble that isn’t supported by the underlying revenue generated by the shows. In 2022 Netflix spent $16 billion on producing shows [https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/netflix-content-spendi...] to generate shockingly few viewing hours (which is why they will never agree to WGA demands to release viewership numbers in order to pay writers residuals; their stock would go to 0 if those numbers ever became public). The future of streaming is ad-supported cheaply produced reality TV, ie exactly what niche cable looked like in 2008.

Just because they value it at $0 doesn’t mean it has no potential future value. It just means when they claim they value they won’t have any costs to deduct. So future profit margins are higher.

The path to profitability is reruns of Cheers, low budget quiz shows and (scripted) reality TV.

I think the streaming accounting isn’t as directly attributable so it probably means that costs are allocated over long periods because the single show is a very small percentage of the overall library.

So you spend $5B on shows and lump them into your library and some are watched and some aren’t, but they all pay out sort of the same. So you amortize that $5B equally over the whole schedule.

By removing shows you think won’t get you viewers you amortize the whole cost immediately.

But in the olden days revenue was more clearly attributed. So if you payed $5B for 100 shows each and the costs were equal (not really but let’s say) then each show has $50M in costs. You can run them all and when you don’t sell ads then you know they suck and can close those ones down. There’s no risk to run and see because you have revenue for each show.

And with old cable, shows paid out based on plays. So you could just not play those old shows.

But with streaming, just to have them available for streaming, even if no one views them, they make revenue for tax purposes.