The Writers Guild of America’s new contract tilts streamers toward shelving content, but there’s a solution emerging.
So the solution is ad supported services, if I understood the takeaway of the article? Because that’s no solution I’m willing to participate in.
you could mix the two concepts… ad-free subscription service and residuals/licensing based on viewership.
it’s not like the subscription services don’t have the metrics to take a piece of the subscription money coming in, and divvy it up based on total views each title gets each month.
Yeah, that would probably level everything out, but I’m guessing that these subscription services are trying to avoid becoming the open book that Hollywood is. If you’re visibly the 4th most successful streaming service, customers might start to bandwagon.
There’s a reason I abandoned the mainstream video streaming platforms years ago and really only subscribe to smaller ones that make all their own content. Much better experience imo even though I don’t get normal shows that way
Much happier these days on my ship for those.
I think many of them may think about how they want to go about things. They see the fragmentation is not working for them except for maybe the big names like netflix and disney. It looks to me like amazon wants to get more away from original shows and position themselves as the place that gets other streaming services content second somewhere down the line.
I think there’s an argument to be made that the platforms have been pouring in so much money trying to win the streaming wars that they haven’t considered the fact of whether the income from subscriptions is actually sufficient to fund this level of content creation spread across so many platforms.
Consumer will only subscribe to so many services, and while I don’t know that equilibrium is, I’m pretty sure it’s lower than what we have right now.
I feel like good government has a role in preventing this. Is access to the new Willow TV series of moral imperative? Perhaps not. But should Disney, or anyone else, be allowed to produce content for clicks with the express purpose of disintegrating it 8 weeks later? I think the audience, writers, cast, crew, and creative executives would all agree that’s a no. I think only the accountants would say yes to this question.
This is the same reason that copyright exists, and why Disney has fought so hard against it all these years. Works of significant cultural value cannot be entrusted to the hands of a profit seeking cadre. And civil society has an important role in preventing that from happening. Obviously the 150 year, or whatever it is, copyright expiration is not going to save us here. But this is a very analogous fight. I think legislation has got a role to play in it.