This deal is an indicator of huge changes in global film & TV production. Hollywood's struggles amplified after the writer's strike with a perfect storm of issues around unionisation, technology, fragmenting audiences, new formats, asset liabilities and enormous competition to the east. Now LA soundstages are empty while production centres in Europe, UK, India, China, Nigeria are booming and vast new studios cropping…
Hollywood was premised on economies of scale. Concentrate a lot of talent in one place and then put infrastructure in place for block buster productions to happen (studios, tech, money).
That's being disrupted by several things:
- LA and the US are no longer cheap places to be. A lot of blockbuster content is filmed outside the US at this point. Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. LA and Hollywood are still important but mainly because that's where the money is. It's not necessarily where the money is being spent.
- Independent content producers self publishing content on platforms like Youtube and growing audiences rivaling those of popular TV shows.
- AI is starting to drive down the cost of special effects, digital processing, etc. And it's probably also going to erode the value of needing actors at all for especially a lot of the less glamorous roles (think all the extras in big movie productions). This is a sensitive topic in particularly Hollywood. But not enough to delay the inevitable by very long.
All this is driving down the cost of creating decent quality things that people still want to pay for. That's a critical distinction. There's a lot of ad sponsored stuff that people don't really pay for as well. To make money, you need quality. AI is working its way up the chain here, with increasingly better stuff. But most of it is still pretty low value.
But things like soap operas, third rate series that Netflix bulk purchases from places like South Korea, etc. are all fair game for AI.
Netflix adding the WB back catalog is a great move for them. Their own back catalog isn't strong enough to keep people and expanding with newly created production it is a very slow and expensive process. And they've had some flops and cost control issues. There just isn't enough there to keep me permanently. I tend to sign up for just a few months and then cancel. I'm probably going to cancel soon again. HBO did not actually offer their streaming services in Germany until recently. And I was considering trying that for a while. Now I might not have to.