SAG-AFTRA(actors) Strike

[Immoren]

Whether you like it or not the billionaires are absolutely going to try and replace pretty much everything with AI. It's way cheaper long term than relying on human labor.

Except for when the AI robots kill themselves.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07 ... ntain.html

Or collapse from overwork.

https://news.yahoo.com/robot-takes-tumb ... 16468.html

They should go on a strike.

[Cannot think of a name]

I mean yeah? Regardless of the cause the strike doesn't improve it and some of the demands, like adding superfluous writers, would stand to add to the homogeneity rather than fix it. The fact they suck isn't mitigated by the fact it's someone else's fault they suck.

Why movies suck is more about the economics of the business than the quality of writing. Its easier to get viewers for guardians of the galaxy XVI than a new movie about relationships. What is interesting is how over the past 20 years TV has become the medium of good original drama.

Any way unions are legal and the writers have every right to strike. How revenue is generated has changed, both in primary and secondary markets, writers ARE entitled to get paid for their work, and are entitled to negotiate their pay and working conditions

Edgelords have been tripping all over themselves pretending like writers have been calling the shots this entire time.

In 2021 6 spec scripts were sold. By comparison, in 2022 50,000 new scripts were registered with the WGA.

This 'let me put my pants on my head' reach to be edgy is comical if you know even a little bit about how the industry actually works and who makes the calls that everyone has twisted their underwear over. They play top trumps on how bad they decide it has all gotten and then twist themselves in a pretzel to go to bat for the people making those decisions.

The vast, vast, VAST majority of writing work is 'open assignments', which is to say not writers writing their own ideas, but doing their level best to turn some producer's shitty idea into something watchable, generally out of some property their algorithm convinced them would be the key to millions. The guy who created The Fast and the Furious (himself a director of a string of over the top stuff like XXX, Dragonheart, Hurricane Heist...he commissioned the script after reading about street racing and then going to a street race) hasn't been involved in the series since the first one. The two guys who actually wrote the first one haven't been involved in the subsequent series except for a 'story by' credit in the second one. It's producers and stars (who are also producers) driving that forward. All the writers are asking is for part of that streaming residuals they're getting, but edgelords who don't know a fucking thing about the industry act like writers have been tying down the AMPTP and demanding they do nothing but franchises and IP projects.

It's laughable if you spend half a second thinking about it. Even more comical when they come down on the side of producers deciding that mini-rooms are totally acceptable while still complaining about the quality of writing on the shows that force too few writers in too little time for too little money to write the entire series and then not be involved in production.

These are just 'kill your television' parrots practicing their tight five about 'tv and movies these days' and not serious comments that need to be taken seriously. Once they demonstrate an ounce of understanding about how any of it works maybe we can take them seriously, but until then they're just people who like the sound of their own voice.

[Forsher]

IP is just a product of the internet. You can't distribute movies like you used to and that's why they don't make the same kinds of movies that they used to.

It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to the movies or watch whatever was put on television. This gave studios vastly more control over programming and they decided that letting directors do what they wanted was a sound business decision.

The first challenge to this is the home rental market. However, that wasn't really such an extraordinary challenge. Renting a video was a fairly high effort exercise. You had to actually go to the video store, choose what to watch by browsing the shelves (if you didn't already have something in mind) and then you got, what, maybe three movies at a time? Probably one if you were going for a new release (which was more expensive). And on top of that, you will still be choosing to watch a movie.

Then comes Youtube and streaming. Now, you're not up to the mercy of someone else. You can choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it. Television has gone from being a "haha, you watch when I say" to something more like how to watch a movie... sure, you can only rent videos that are available and you can only choose from showing times that exist, but you can actually choose when. And Youtube is even worse! Not only does Youtube offer the consumer a degree of schedule control that was once the near exclusive purview of the film (in fact, more control), but it actively tries to bring only content that the consumer will like to the consumer.

What do you do if your audience is (a) more able to choose to watch things that aren't your stuff and (b) because of that less likely to be in one single location for ease of marketing? Well, you turn to IP. Why? Because IP will reach the consumer where the consumer is. You don't have to pay Youtube or TikTok or whoever to find the audience for your IP adaptation, the news article about your IP adaptation will be brought to the consumer by these companies as part of their business model. But if you don't choose to adapt pre-existing IP, you've got to spend a lot more money to market. And then you don't really have the back end physical media sales and rental revenue streams any more, either.

Also, I'd argue that there's a bit of a competitive advantage thing going on here. Serious adult dramas are simply better suited to television as a medium. If you want to interrogate a tragic hero, having ten hours to do that interrogation is better than having 90 minutes. In contrast, it's harder to profit off a television show so if you want to do something with a massive special effects requirement, the you'll want an indviduated product, like a movie.

[Des-Bal]

Edgelords have been tripping all over themselves pretending like writers have been calling the shots this entire time.

In 2021 6 spec scripts were sold. By comparison, in 2022 50,000 new scripts were registered with the WGA.

This 'let me put my pants on my head' reach to be edgy is comical if you know even a little bit about how the industry actually works and who makes the calls that everyone has twisted their underwear over. They play top trumps on how bad they decide it has all gotten and then twist themselves in a pretzel to go to bat for the people making those decisions.

The vast, vast, VAST majority of writing work is 'open assignments', which is to say not writers writing their own ideas, but doing their level best to turn some producer's shitty idea into something watchable, generally out of some property their algorithm convinced them would be the key to millions. The guy who created The Fast and the Furious (himself a director of a string of over the top stuff like XXX, Dragonheart, Hurricane Heist...he commissioned the script after reading about street racing and then going to a street race) hasn't been involved in the series since the first one. The two guys who actually wrote the first one haven't been involved in the subsequent series except for a 'story by' credit in the second one. It's producers and stars (who are also producers) driving that forward. All the writers are asking is for part of that streaming residuals they're getting, but edgelords who don't know a fucking thing about the industry act like writers have been tying down the AMPTP and demanding they do nothing but franchises and IP projects.

It's laughable if you spend half a second thinking about it. Even more comical when they come down on the side of producers deciding that mini-rooms are totally acceptable while still complaining about the quality of writing on the shows that force too few writers in too little time for too little money to write the entire series and then not be involved in production.

These are just 'kill your television' parrots practicing their tight five about 'tv and movies these days' and not serious comments that need to be taken seriously. Once they demonstrate an ounce of understanding about how any of it works maybe we can take them seriously, but until then they're just people who like the sound of their own voice.

Wow in response to that I guess I'll just repeat my fucking comment because that long winded strawman bullshit you just peddled didn't touch anything relating to my point.

I don't care why they suck- that is the province of nerds. May nerds forever dicker over the precise mechanisms of the suck. What I care about is that they suck and that their demands don't really stand to improve that.

Also it's so weird how your analysis of all the poor writers are asking for ignored most of their demands. It's almost like the tired fucking boilerplate unions always good shtick doesn't really gel with the practical reality that an entity singularly focused on advancing the interests of it's members isn't going to be super charismatic.

[Ifreann]

Big "I don't want a solution, I just want to be mad" energy.

[Des-Bal]

Big "I don't want a solution, I just want to be mad" energy.

Oh we can talk about solutions all day in a relevant thread, it doesn't fucking matter if producers, incompetence, or repetition are making writing suck or how to repair that suck has nothing to do with the strike. The union doesn't give a fuck about the substandard output it cares about getting more money getting more jobs and praying that the mean old steam engine just goes away.

[Cannot think of a name]

Big "I don't want a solution, I just want to be mad" energy.

Edgelords gotta edge.

[Des-Bal]

Edgelords gotta edge.

Get a room with that strawman.

[Cannot think of a name]

Edgelords gotta edge.

Get a room with that strawman.

Man, I wish people would learn other logical fallacies, just for the variety. Naming them at random would still be empty posts, but at least it'd be a little different each time.

[Katganistan]

Are you?

I will be when they get back to work.

Then support paying them for the job., or stop whining about non getting the fruits of their labors.

[Ors Might]

To be frank, I don't think writing in movies will improve by continuing to underpay writers or replace them with AI chatbots. Even from a pure consoomer mindset, there's nothing to gain from not complying with their demands.

[Cannot think of a name]

Moving on from "I hate tv/movies thiiiiiiis much" empty posts to something relevant...

...Warner's rebranding of HBOMax went and rebranded the jobs of both directors and writers, creating a catch-all category of above the line behind the camera folks calling them all 'creators' managing to anger both guilds.

“For almost 90 years, the Directors Guild has fought fiercely to protect the credit and recognition deserved by Directors for the work they create,” said DGA President Lesli Linka Glatter. “Warner Bros. Discovery’s unilateral move, without notice or consultation, to collapse directors, writers, producers and others into a generic category of ‘creators’ in their new Max rollout while we are in negotiations with them is a grave insult to our members and our union. This devaluation of the individual contributions of artists is a disturbing trend and the DGA will not stand for it. We intend on taking the strongest possible actions, in solidarity with the WGA, to ensure every artist receives the individual credit they deserve.”

Said WGA West President Meredith Stiehm late Tuesday: “Warner Bros. has lumped writers, directors and producers into an invented, diminishing category they call Creators. This is a credits violation for starters. But worse, it is disrespectful and insulting to the artists that make the films and TV shows that and make their corporation billions. This attempt to diminish writers’ contributions and importance echoes the message we heard in our negotiations with AMPTP— that writers are marginal, inessential, and should simply accept being paid less and less, while our employers’ profits go higher and higher. This tone-deaf disregard for writers’ importance is what brought us to where we are today — Day 22 of our strike.”

Warners says it was an oopsie...

Warner Bros. Discovery has corrected changes it made to director and writer credits in its rollout of Max after receiving harsh blowback from the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild. In a statement today, Max said: “We agree that the talent behind the content on Max deserve their work to be properly recognized. We will correct the credits, which were altered due to an oversight in the technical transition from HBO Max to Max and we apologize for this mistake.”

Probably not gonna help as the DGA negotiations don't seem to be making much progress.

Two weeks into their negotiations, the Lesli Linka Glatter-led union and the Alliance of Motion Picture Producers and Television Producers haven’t “agreed on anything significant,” well-positioned sources say. Not entirely surprising at this juncture in the media-blacked-out talks, the reality of the situation extinguishes the rumor flying around town today that an agreement is close.

[Katganistan]

Perhaps the studio execs should learn to write rather than thinking all those PEOPLE with the THINGS are the same.

[Des-Bal]

(Image)
Man, I wish people would learn other logical fallacies, just for the variety. Naming them at random would still be empty posts, but at least it'd be a little different each time.

You invented an argument nobody made then jerked yourself off for defeating it that is what a strawman is.

Then support paying them for the job., or stop whining about non getting the fruits of their labors.

If the writers demands were "please don't literally enslave us" nobody would be complaining about it.

To be frank, I don't think writing in movies will improve by continuing to underpay writers or replace them with AI chatbots. Even from a pure consoomer mindset, there's nothing to gain from not complying with their demands.

The work requirements are bullshit and AI very well may improve things yes many writers are going to be replaced.

[Nilokeras]

IP is just a product of the internet. You can't distribute movies like you used to and that's why they don't make the same kinds of movies that they used to.

It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to the movies or watch whatever was put on television. This gave studios vastly more control over programming and they decided that letting directors do what they wanted was a sound business decision.

The first challenge to this is the home rental market. However, that wasn't really such an extraordinary challenge. Renting a video was a fairly high effort exercise. You had to actually go to the video store, choose what to watch by browsing the shelves (if you didn't already have something in mind) and then you got, what, maybe three movies at a time? Probably one if you were going for a new release (which was more expensive). And on top of that, you will still be choosing to watch a movie.

Then comes Youtube and streaming. Now, you're not up to the mercy of someone else. You can choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it. Television has gone from being a "haha, you watch when I say" to something more like how to watch a movie... sure, you can only rent videos that are available and you can only choose from showing times that exist, but you can actually choose when. And Youtube is even worse! Not only does Youtube offer the consumer a degree of schedule control that was once the near exclusive purview of the film (in fact, more control), but it actively tries to bring only content that the consumer will like to the consumer.

What do you do if your audience is (a) more able to choose to watch things that aren't your stuff and (b) because of that less likely to be in one single location for ease of marketing? Well, you turn to IP. Why? Because IP will reach the consumer where the consumer is. You don't have to pay Youtube or TikTok or whoever to find the audience for your IP adaptation, the news article about your IP adaptation will be brought to the consumer by these companies as part of their business model. But if you don't choose to adapt pre-existing IP, you've got to spend a lot more money to market. And then you don't really have the back end physical media sales and rental revenue streams any more, either.

Also, I'd argue that there's a bit of a competitive advantage thing going on here. Serious adult dramas are simply better suited to television as a medium. If you want to interrogate a tragic hero, having ten hours to do that interrogation is better than having 90 minutes. In contrast, it's harder to profit off a television show so if you want to do something with a massive special effects requirement, the you'll want an indviduated product, like a movie.

The problem with this is that the two activities (watching Youtube/tiktok/what have you) and TV/movies are not interchangeable. They fill different roles in peoples' media diets - movies as activities to go see with friends, TV as a water cooler activity, TikToks as something you watch on the bus on your phone screen, etc. The transition to an IP, tentpole-dominated landscape has way more to do with who owns/has majority stakes in the studios and what they demand from them (increasing year-on-year profitability, predictable production schedules, etc) than anything else.

[Forsher]

IP is just a product of the internet. You can't distribute movies like you used to and that's why they don't make the same kinds of movies that they used to.

It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to the movies or watch whatever was put on television. This gave studios vastly more control over programming and they decided that letting directors do what they wanted was a sound business decision.

The first challenge to this is the home rental market. However, that wasn't really such an extraordinary challenge. Renting a video was a fairly high effort exercise. You had to actually go to the video store, choose what to watch by browsing the shelves (if you didn't already have something in mind) and then you got, what, maybe three movies at a time? Probably one if you were going for a new release (which was more expensive). And on top of that, you will still be choosing to watch a movie.

Then comes Youtube and streaming. Now, you're not up to the mercy of someone else. You can choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it. Television has gone from being a "haha, you watch when I say" to something more like how to watch a movie... sure, you can only rent videos that are available and you can only choose from showing times that exist, but you can actually choose when. And Youtube is even worse! Not only does Youtube offer the consumer a degree of schedule control that was once the near exclusive purview of the film (in fact, more control), but it actively tries to bring only content that the consumer will like to the consumer.

What do you do if your audience is (a) more able to choose to watch things that aren't your stuff and (b) because of that less likely to be in one single location for ease of marketing? Well, you turn to IP. Why? Because IP will reach the consumer where the consumer is. You don't have to pay Youtube or TikTok or whoever to find the audience for your IP adaptation, the news article about your IP adaptation will be brought to the consumer by these companies as part of their business model. But if you don't choose to adapt pre-existing IP, you've got to spend a lot more money to market. And then you don't really have the back end physical media sales and rental revenue streams any more, either.

Also, I'd argue that there's a bit of a competitive advantage thing going on here. Serious adult dramas are simply better suited to television as a medium. If you want to interrogate a tragic hero, having ten hours to do that interrogation is better than having 90 minutes. In contrast, it's harder to profit off a television show so if you want to do something with a massive special effects requirement, the you'll want an indviduated product, like a movie.

The problem with this is that the two activities (watching Youtube/tiktok/what have you) and TV/movies are not interchangeable. They fill different roles in peoples' media diets - movies as activities to go see with friends, TV as a water cooler activity, TikToks as something you watch on the bus on your phone screen, etc. The transition to an IP, tentpole-dominated landscape has way more to do with who owns/has majority stakes in the studios and what they demand from them (increasing year-on-year profitability, predictable production schedules, etc) than anything else.

That's not really the case. Maybe movies are different, but it's not just Netflix that's killed linear broadcast television, it's also Youtube (and TikTok) that they're losing audiences to.

You only have 24 hours in a day. Realistically, that's more like 16 hours, maybe 18-20 if you starve yourself of sleep. If you're spending eight of those hours at work and four hours on TikTok, you have four hours left to do literally everything else in a day.

Now those numbers are exaggerations. This survey, for example, has online video at 94 minutes a day and Streaming Video On Demand (which can include movies) at 113 for youth audiences. There's also some 70 minutes of gaming in there, but I suspect that probably overlaps same as listening to music and social media use.

But even just switching to watching movies on platforms like Netflix is a big problem for box office driven companies. Look at how Disney is ditching content made for streaming in general and even for its own platform. It's all very well to say that they would've been better off not creating Disney+ and leasing content to Netflix, but if Netflix is a monopsonist that argument seems much less credible. (I guess there was always Prime and Apple as rival bidders.)

predictable production schedules, etc)

Maybe Kevin Feige is just completely incompetent, but DC and Star Wars have had the exact same problems with completely unpredictable production schedules that the MCU has. IP definitely does not help create predictability. Arguably, it has the opposite effect. Because you have to maximise the return per IP, you need to have a density of releases so if one release goes wrong, the knock on effect spreads like a disease to everything else you're doing with the IP and that effects the rest of your business as well. Or you push products out in a state that they're not going to be received well in.

[Cannot think of a name]

IP is just a product of the internet. You can't distribute movies like you used to and that's why they don't make the same kinds of movies that they used to.

It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to the movies or watch whatever was put on television. This gave studios vastly more control over programming and they decided that letting directors do what they wanted was a sound business decision.

The first challenge to this is the home rental market. However, that wasn't really such an extraordinary challenge. Renting a video was a fairly high effort exercise. You had to actually go to the video store, choose what to watch by browsing the shelves (if you didn't already have something in mind) and then you got, what, maybe three movies at a time? Probably one if you were going for a new release (which was more expensive). And on top of that, you will still be choosing to watch a movie.

Then comes Youtube and streaming. Now, you're not up to the mercy of someone else. You can choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it. Television has gone from being a "haha, you watch when I say" to something more like how to watch a movie... sure, you can only rent videos that are available and you can only choose from showing times that exist, but you can actually choose when. And Youtube is even worse! Not only does Youtube offer the consumer a degree of schedule control that was once the near exclusive purview of the film (in fact, more control), but it actively tries to bring only content that the consumer will like to the consumer.

What do you do if your audience is (a) more able to choose to watch things that aren't your stuff and (b) because of that less likely to be in one single location for ease of marketing? Well, you turn to IP. Why? Because IP will reach the consumer where the consumer is. You don't have to pay Youtube or TikTok or whoever to find the audience for your IP adaptation, the news article about your IP adaptation will be brought to the consumer by these companies as part of their business model. But if you don't choose to adapt pre-existing IP, you've got to spend a lot more money to market. And then you don't really have the back end physical media sales and rental revenue streams any more, either.

Also, I'd argue that there's a bit of a competitive advantage thing going on here. Serious adult dramas are simply better suited to television as a medium. If you want to interrogate a tragic hero, having ten hours to do that interrogation is better than having 90 minutes. In contrast, it's harder to profit off a television show so if you want to do something with a massive special effects requirement, the you'll want an indviduated product, like a movie.

The problem with this is that the two activities (watching Youtube/tiktok/what have you) and TV/movies are not interchangeable. They fill different roles in peoples' media diets - movies as activities to go see with friends, TV as a water cooler activity, TikToks as something you watch on the bus on your phone screen, etc. The transition to an IP, tentpole-dominated landscape has way more to do with who owns/has majority stakes in the studios and what they demand from them (increasing year-on-year profitability, predictable production schedules, etc) than anything else.

Belief that tick-tock etc was reshaping audience expectations is what gave us Quibie...

A lot of peoples misconceptions come from the belief that the industry has been led by the same people the entire time with the same kinds of goals.

Some perspective gets lost. First of all, with the domination of large IP based movies now creates the idea that this is significantly different when it's really just a variation on a theme that has been present all along.

There are a lot of Golden Age movies that themselves are IP. All of Disney was based on fairy and folk tales. Mary Poppins was a book series. Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Grapes of Wrath etc etc etc.

The 'comic book movie' of its time, musicals obviously were largely adapted from already popular Broadway musicals. Westerns ended up being their own franchise either via director or star or both.

Sequelization was common enough for a long time for Back to the Future II (itself a sequel) to make fun of excessive Jaws sequels.

Prior to the late sixties there was a 'studio system' where studio heads contracted talent and churned out top down product. Even Citizen Kane was a duress product by Orson Welles who was pressured into making a movie instead of the prolific theatrical and radio talent deciding he wanted to change filmmaking forever.

In the seventies there was a brief moment of auteur driven films where directors were given a freer reign which gave us Apocalypse Now and Godfather (both adaptations, so IP) but also gave us Heaven's Gate with massive cost overruns.

It was Jaws and Star Wars that provided the tent pole model that existed where one large broadly popular movie would support more riskier prestige efforts and cover studio costs.

The independent streak from the 90s was commoditized before it really got going so while it did give us some interesting artistic achievements were kind of smothered in its bed with a handful of survivors milling about doing interesting movies still.

What Marvel managed to do was introduce the idea that you could just make bangers. It wasn't their intent, necessarily, but rather an off shoot of Stan Lee's vision of licensing the Marvel universe as a whole. I had contended as well as Lee that the only real way of adapting comic books is to allow them to occupy the same world. Otherwise you were using 1/3 of each film to not just introduce your superhero character, but the idea of superheroes in general in an otherwise superheroless world. And since most of Marvels stories were inter-related the only way to tell them was to have other heroes already co-exist.

Hard to remember but for the first couple of years Marvel was an independent studio whose only interest was adapting its own material. But this proved that you could have a franchise that didn't have to wait two to three years between movies but could release 2-4 a year.

This coincides with tech companies entering the sphere. Sony had long ago invested in the content side of the business because content sold DVD players.

Now that we're in the era where Sony has been joined by things like Netflix and Amazon along with studios being taken over by investment dollars instead of the studio heads that still at least on some level thought of themselves as filmmakers, the landscape evolves again with the 'why can't they all be blockbuster movies' mentality with less interest in risking things on a mid-level movie (the 40-50 million movie)-which is the thing we're really missing out on now. There are still plenty of small movies done for little money, an embarrassment of riches for the blockbuster movies, but less interest in rolling the dice in the middle. It's less an audience problem than it is a risk aversion problem by studio heads that are focused on stock prices and company valuations.

A byproduct of that is what the guilds are fighting, of studios trying to make film workers more like tech workers. But tech workers didn't have 100 years of being an industry and guilds protecting those workers like movies do, so they're in a unique position to go, "No. Fuck you pay me."

The total cost of what the WGA is asking for is less than they pay any one of the studio heads, so pleading poverty or 'changing landscape' (the latter of which is their go to excuse which has diminishing returns as an excuse since they somehow managed to make buckets on each new variation) sort of falls flat.

Essentially film workers have the privilege of doing what everyone should be doing, fighting back against the squeezing of the workers and creators by the ownership class. The rally they held on Friday that I completely misread in part was meant to spread the fight from just the WGA to the other unions to come together and all fight in their fields for the same thing. After 30 years of real wages being suppressed its long past time.

[Nilokeras]

That's not really the case. Maybe movies are different, but it's not just Netflix that's killed linear broadcast television, it's also Youtube (and TikTok) that they're losing audiences to.

You only have 24 hours in a day. Realistically, that's more like 16 hours, maybe 18-20 if you starve yourself of sleep. If you're spending eight of those hours at work and four hours on TikTok, you have four hours left to do literally everything else in a day.

Now those numbers are exaggerations. This survey, for example, has online video at 94 minutes a day and Streaming Video On Demand (which can include movies) at 113 for youth audiences. There's also some 70 minutes of gaming in there, but I suspect that probably overlaps same as listening to music and social media use.

That doesn't prove anything about how interchangeable the different media are. People watch different things at different times and on different devices. Watching Instagram reels on the bus while you commute to work doesn't cut into the time you spend watching Succession the night it comes out.

But even just switching to watching movies on platforms like Netflix is a big problem for box office driven companies. Look at how Disney is ditching content made for streaming in general and even for its own platform. It's all very well to say that they would've been better off not creating Disney+ and leasing content to Netflix, but if Netflix is a monopsonist that argument seems much less credible. (I guess there was always Prime and Apple as rival bidders.)

There are different business models at work in the streaming world. The history of it, after all, goes something like this: Netflix comes along in the wake of YouTube and during the golden age of zero percent interest pitches the same sort of strategy Uber did to VC firms: hook us up to the infinite money hose so we can buy up streaming rights from a bunch of studios who are stuck in the DVD era and let us translate first-comer advantage into an unbeatable monopoly that can dictate terms to the studios and print money forever.

That was the golden era of Netflix having a huge library, and it had meteoric growth because of it. Those studios woke up and smelled the coffee though and detected a different opportunity: a way to cut theatres and distributors out of their supply chain and boost their own profit margins. So they started pulling media from Netflix's library and spinning up their own: Disney+, Paramount+, HBO Max, etc. Other tech giants smelled the opportunity Netflix was attempting to exploit and threw their weight into the arena: Apple TV and Amazon Prime among them. They notably don't particularly care about profitability in the short term: they're happy to have an entire media production arm as a loss leader to boost their other lines of profit, and if they take over a chunk of the streaming landscape so much the better.

What we're looking at now is a landscape where nobody is really succeeding at their goals. Netflix failed, like Uber, to translate its first-comer status on the streaming landscape into a monopoly and is now torn between what it actually is (a large-ish studio that produces movies/TV and has a library of content on its streaming platform) and what its investors want it to be (that soon-to-be monopolist that is growing its subscriber count every quarter on the path to world domination). Disney and the other studios failed to successfully cut out theatres and distributors, and now have a big streaming arm and the costs of theatre releases. Apple and Amazon Prime have failed to really produce anything that really makes them stand out of the pack, and have things like the gigantic but mediocre Lord of the Rings series sitting on their budget.

Now that interest rates are no longer effectively zero there's a lot of pressure to cut costs and demonstrate improved profitability by the investors, so these companies are scrambling to find economies: things like killing shows before the third season or removing back catalog items to deny residual payments to the creators, becoming increasingly conservative in their creative choices and not wanting to take risks.

Maybe Kevin Feige is just completely incompetent, but DC and Star Wars have had the exact same problems with completely unpredictable production schedules that the MCU has. IP definitely does not help create predictability. Arguably, it has the opposite effect. Because you have to maximise the return per IP, you need to have a density of releases so if one release goes wrong, the knock on effect spreads like a disease to everything else you're doing with the IP and that effects the rest of your business as well. Or you push products out in a state that they're not going to be received well in.

Of course it doesn't actually do any of the things it promises. But the capital investment firms who bought up the companies thought it was a great idea because that's how they would orient the business, but because they don't actually understand all that much about how the movie business actually works it backfired.

[Cannot think of a name]

That was the golden era of Netflix having a huge library, and it had meteoric growth because of it. Those studios woke up and smelled the coffee though and detected a different opportunity: a way to cut theatres and distributors out of their supply chain and boost their own profit margins. So they started pulling media from Netflix's library and spinning up their own: Disney+, Paramount+, HBO Max, etc. Other tech giants smelled the opportunity Netflix was attempting to exploit and threw their weight into the arena: Apple TV and Amazon Prime among them. They notably don't particularly care about profitability in the short term: they're happy to have an entire media production arm as a loss leader to boost their other lines of profit, and if they take over a chunk of the streaming landscape so much the better.

What we're looking at now is a landscape where nobody is really succeeding at their goals. Netflix failed, like Uber, to translate its first-comer status on the streaming landscape into a monopoly and is now torn between what it actually is (a large-ish studio that produces movies/TV and has a library of content on its streaming platform) and what its investors want it to be (that soon-to-be monopolist that is growing its subscriber count every quarter on the path to world domination). Disney and the other studios failed to successfully cut out theatres and distributors, and now have a big streaming arm and the costs of theatre releases. Apple and Amazon Prime have failed to really produce anything that really makes them stand out of the pack, and have things like the gigantic but mediocre Lord of the Rings series sitting on their budget.

Now that interest rates are no longer effectively zero there's a lot of pressure to cut costs and demonstrate improved profitability by the investors, so these companies are scrambling to find economies: things like killing shows before the third season or removing back catalog items to deny residual payments to the creators, becoming increasingly conservative in their creative choices and not wanting to take risks.

This is pretty accurate and has a historical connection as well.

There was a ruling that was dubbed "The Paramount Decree" that argued that studios could not own theaters as it violated anti-trust vertical integration. Prior to that studios like Paramount owned their own theaters giving them a guaranteed venue for their products that could exclude other studios.

That was actually reversed in 2020 but theaters aren't as big a priority as they were when the Paramount Decree was started (though there was that brief period where Amazon floated the idea of buying out AMC before a bunch of rogue reddit investors accidentally saved the chain) so they're not as interested in that anymore.

But streamers expand on a change that happened with The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the strangely important ruling no one realizes. That allowed broadcast channels to own more of their own programming, but streamers are not bound by those restrictions.

So the situation you laid out exists. Content drives membership and the idea is membership is the gold in dem' dar' hills.

I think one of the big changes is going to be the apparent shrinking of the streaming market on the venue side. Paramount is losing crazy money trying to have its own exclusive platform that it has to support and promote and needs constant growth while Sony sat it out and just soaked up licensing fees for the content it already has (after being the tech company that started the content acquisition to drive hardware sales...which didn't help miniDiscs but that's another story). That won't necessarily mean that the firehose of content will shut off but they might start finding that it's more profitable to let someone else build the pipe and just sell them the...stuff for the pipe. That simile started to fall apart.

There was a pretty decent article on this but I forgot where I ran across it.

[Forsher]

Watching Instagram reels on the bus while you commute to work doesn't cut into the time you spend watching Succession the night it comes out.

Yes, which is accounted for by not reporting Online Video and Social Media as eating a combined 200 or so minutes a day. They are separate categories of audience in that survey.

What demonstrates the interchangeability is (1) the scarcity of hours and (2) the decreases in use of alternative media.

Now that interest rates are no longer effectively zero there's a lot of pressure to cut costs and demonstrate improved profitability by the investors, so these companies are scrambling to find economies: things like killing shows before the third season or removing back catalog items to deny residual payments to the creators, becoming increasingly conservative in their creative choices and not wanting to take risks.

Which means that you can't blame interest rates for the phenomenon we're trying to explain.

All your historical analysis has done is demonstrate that Disney etc wanted to kill the theatrical release model. Why is that? Because the fundamental market relationships changed and that necessitated adaptation. They thought killing cinemas would help because they believed, with good reason, that their audiences have gone elsewhere.

Of course it doesn't actually do any of the things it promises. But the capital investment firms who bought up the companies thought it was a great idea because that's how they would orient the business, but because they don't actually understand all that much about how the movie business actually works it backfired.

Marvel and LucasFilm were bought by a movie studio (Marvel, of course, had originally been bought by a toy company). DC was bought by a movie studio that merged with another media company, after having spent six years being a subsidiary of a telecom.

It's less an audience problem than it is a risk aversion problem by studio heads that are focused on stock prices and company valuations.

Yes, CTOAN that's the whole fucking point: the audience is harder to market to, which makes studios more risk averse because they have to find ways of reaching the audience. No-one is saying that audiences have lost interest in other kinds of movies, what I am saying is that films which were once fairly straightforward to bring to a low competition environment are now not. If you have to spend $100 million to reach an audience which is all over the fucking place to tell them your $50 million movie exists, you are not going to make a $50m movie because to make a profit, the film will have to make $300m or even more. In the 1990s, a $300m film was a top ten highest grossing film of the year.

Previously if you made a $30m movie, you just needed that film to gross $80m and you've probably made a profit. You didn't need to market everything like a blockbuster because an ad run during the television shows your target audience watched, a few talk show appearance and maybe some billboards found your audience. Now, a mid budget movie has an audience which is watching television who knows when and who knows where... and a lot of those platforms don't even have ads in the first place.

It's not about TikTok influencing peoples' tastes, it's about the fact that if someone is watching a stream of content which is unique to them, that's a one to one marketing relationship not a one to many marketing relationship. That is so much more expensive... you need to have a product which is going to reach the attention of Joe TikToker without having to pay for gaining that attention. IP provides that. To be clear, IP has always provided that. It just wasn't a borderline competitive necessity in decades past.

What's going on, is that mid budget movies now have to be marketed like blockbusters to make money. Which means they have to perform like blockbusters, not like mid budget movies.

Think of it this way... a $250m movie is five times the budget of a $50m film, but once you add in marketing costs of $150 and $100m respectively, the multiple goes from 5 to 2.67 (2dp). Using the now standard 2.5 times profitability heuristic, the film which is seemingly a fifth of the price doesn't have to gross a fifth/20% of $1b but 37.5%, which is 1.875 times more than you'd think based on the production budget. And these ratios don't change if you use a different heuristic.

[Nilokeras]

This is pretty accurate and has a historical connection as well.

There was a ruling that was dubbed "The Paramount Decree" that argued that studios could not own theaters as it violated anti-trust vertical integration. Prior to that studios like Paramount owned their own theaters giving them a guaranteed venue for their products that could exclude other studios.

That was actually reversed in 2020 but theaters aren't as big a priority as they were when the Paramount Decree was started (though there was that brief period where Amazon floated the idea of buying out AMC before a bunch of rogue reddit investors accidentally saved the chain) so they're not as interested in that anymore.

But streamers expand on a change that happened with The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the strangely important ruling no one realizes. That allowed broadcast channels to own more of their own programming, but streamers are not bound by those restrictions.

Which is another connection back to the tech darlings of Silicon Valley: a huge portion of the tech giants we see today are the way they are because they were pitched as ways to use new technologies to dodge regulatory oversight over a particular sector of the economy, usually labour laws. Uber is the quintessential example: the pitch to venture capital firms was that they have this app with a GPS system and payments platform that will allow people to 'ride share', charging fees to take people from point A to point B which the company takes a cut of. Marketing around its introduction spins it as a fun way to make a few extra bucks on your commute to work, but the real intent was essentially to destroy the taxi industry by creating a new class of 'ride sharing' activity that can viciously undercut taxi fares and with VC money inflating the company rapidly grow to monopolize the industry before governments wake up to what's going on, at which point Uber can browbeat them into creating a beneficial regulatory environment.

They failed of course because other companies sprang up as competitors (it's not hard to jam a payments processor and GPS system into an app), taxi companies fought back, cities hesitated to allow Uber in, and now the never once profitable Uber is facing a difficult future because they have not become the golden egg-laying monopolist but a large but not dominant player in a ride sharing sector. And of course they too have succumbed to the demand for metric-based growth and fixed sources of income by trying to introduce the Uber One subscription service.

That was doubtlessly part of the pitch to investors for Netflix too: inflate us full of money like a tick on a deer's rump and we'll scoop up a huge amount of valuable IP rights for cheap from a bunch of studio dinosaurs and we'll translate it into such rapid and meteoric growth to a monopoly that we can use to finally bypass the regulatory environments that stymied regular media's quest for total vertical control. Everyone will have a Netflix subscription and none of the studios would dare to try and launch a competitor because no one of them would have a strong enough library to compete with the rest of the media landscape, which we'll control.

They failed too, of course, and now we're treated to updates on Netflix's subscriber counts as though it was the World Health Organization chasing down the last carriers of a once-deadly disease in the remotest parts of Africa.

So the situation you laid out exists. Content drives membership and the idea is membership is the gold in dem' dar' hills.

I think one of the big changes is going to be the apparent shrinking of the streaming market on the venue side. Paramount is losing crazy money trying to have its own exclusive platform that it has to support and promote and needs constant growth while Sony sat it out and just soaked up licensing fees for the content it already has (after being the tech company that started the content acquisition to drive hardware sales...which didn't help miniDiscs but that's another story). That won't necessarily mean that the firehose of content will shut off but they might start finding that it's more profitable to let someone else build the pipe and just sell them the...stuff for the pipe. That simile started to fall apart.

There was a pretty decent article on this but I forgot where I ran across it.

As people elsewhere have pointed out, they've just recreated cable again, and like you said, with the additional burden of a bunch of VC's breathing down their necks demanding 5% quarter on quarter subscription growth for all of these services, each with their own blockbuster attention grabbing properties that will drive said growth. Hence the scramble to try and save money absolutely everywhere they can, including memory holing expensive new shows as well as back catalog items to save money on residuals or their imminent pivot to trying to save on labour through large language models and deepfakes.

It's an industry that, like so many others, is being strip mined by a rapacious investor class that only cares about quarter-over-quarter growth so they can trade shares and skim companies profits for as long as they can before discarding the husks.

[Cannot think of a name]

This is pretty accurate and has a historical connection as well.

There was a ruling that was dubbed "The Paramount Decree" that argued that studios could not own theaters as it violated anti-trust vertical integration. Prior to that studios like Paramount owned their own theaters giving them a guaranteed venue for their products that could exclude other studios.

That was actually reversed in 2020 but theaters aren't as big a priority as they were when the Paramount Decree was started (though there was that brief period where Amazon floated the idea of buying out AMC before a bunch of rogue reddit investors accidentally saved the chain) so they're not as interested in that anymore.

But streamers expand on a change that happened with The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the strangely important ruling no one realizes. That allowed broadcast channels to own more of their own programming, but streamers are not bound by those restrictions.

Which is another connection back to the tech darlings of Silicon Valley: a huge portion of the tech giants we see today are the way they are because they were pitched as ways to use new technologies to dodge regulatory oversight over a particular sector of the economy, usually labour laws. Uber is the quintessential example: the pitch to venture capital firms was that they have this app with a GPS system and payments platform that will allow people to 'ride share', charging fees to take people from point A to point B which the company takes a cut of. Marketing around its introduction spins it as a fun way to make a few extra bucks on your commute to work, but the real intent was essentially to destroy the taxi industry by creating a new class of 'ride sharing' activity that can viciously undercut taxi fares and with VC money inflating the company rapidly grow to monopolize the industry before governments wake up to what's going on, at which point Uber can browbeat them into creating a beneficial regulatory environment.

They failed of course because other companies sprang up as competitors (it's not hard to jam a payments processor and GPS system into an app), taxi companies fought back, cities hesitated to allow Uber in, and now the never once profitable Uber is facing a difficult future because they have not become the golden egg-laying monopolist but a large but not dominant player in a ride sharing sector. And of course they too have succumbed to the demand for metric-based growth and fixed sources of income by trying to introduce the Uber One subscription service.

That was doubtlessly part of the pitch to investors for Netflix too: inflate us full of money like a tick on a deer's rump and we'll scoop up a huge amount of valuable IP rights for cheap from a bunch of studio dinosaurs and we'll translate it into such rapid and meteoric growth to a monopoly that we can use to finally bypass the regulatory environments that stymied regular media's quest for total vertical control. Everyone will have a Netflix subscription and none of the studios would dare to try and launch a competitor because no one of them would have a strong enough library to compete with the rest of the media landscape, which we'll control.

They failed too, of course, and now we're treated to updates on Netflix's subscriber counts as though it was the World Health Organization chasing down the last carriers of a once-deadly disease in the remotest parts of Africa.

I've mentioned this before in the thread but it relates, these streamers spent big money on 'overall' deals that haven't necessarily yielded results that justify those big deals. The poster child for this is the $250 million overall that WB has with Bad Robot (JJ Abrams) that the new bosses aren't happy with.

There was a rash of these big ticket overall deals as streamers tried to create a killer content draw that would draw prestige viewing in the way HBO did when it started making original programing back when "whither cable?" was the issue.

A prevailing theory that's starting to show up in articles is that a prolonged strike might be by design so that these streamers can opt out of those deals via force majure.

So the situation you laid out exists. Content drives membership and the idea is membership is the gold in dem' dar' hills.

I think one of the big changes is going to be the apparent shrinking of the streaming market on the venue side. Paramount is losing crazy money trying to have its own exclusive platform that it has to support and promote and needs constant growth while Sony sat it out and just soaked up licensing fees for the content it already has (after being the tech company that started the content acquisition to drive hardware sales...which didn't help miniDiscs but that's another story). That won't necessarily mean that the firehose of content will shut off but they might start finding that it's more profitable to let someone else build the pipe and just sell them the...stuff for the pipe. That simile started to fall apart.

There was a pretty decent article on this but I forgot where I ran across it.

As people elsewhere have pointed out, they've just recreated cable again, and like you said, with the additional burden of a bunch of VC's breathing down their necks demanding 5% quarter on quarter subscription growth for all of these services, each with their own blockbuster attention grabbing properties that will drive said growth. Hence the scramble to try and save money absolutely everywhere they can, including memory holing expensive new shows as well as back catalog items to save money on residuals or their imminent pivot to trying to save on labour through large language models and deepfakes.

It's an industry that, like so many others, is being strip mined by a rapacious investor class that only cares about quarter-over-quarter growth so they can trade shares and skim companies profits for as long as they can before discarding the husks.

There is a awareness that venture capital has come to mine the entertainment industry for parts and hollow it out and move on to the next short term returns cash cow, and is certainly something that the guilds are fighting against to preserve the future of their industry. They don't frequently have to contend with strong unions, but now they've managed to do something no one else has managed to do, get all those unions and guilds to work together. Hopefully they win and that spills out to more vulnerable workers (I mean, being vulnerable is built into working in film, but that's what's oddly giving them an advantage here. Everyone who is striking already plans for unplanned work stoppages because all manner of shit can mean you're suddenly not working for months at a time).

It'll be interesting to see what the mood is tomorrow. A little bit of the death march has been setting in as the rote of picketing sets in, but the theme days have sort of abated that a little.

[Forsher]

Again, the substitution value of Youtube over TV is a bit of a distraction from the fact that advertising to people watching Mr Beast in 2023 is enormously different to advertising to people who are watching... uh, The Fresh Prince of Be Air in 1993... but here's a think piece about the substitution value of Youtube and what it means for the strike.

[San Lumen]

Yeah who needs people to do anything. Just have AI replace most jobs and we can get Detroit: Become Human as our future or I Robot. AI should never be a replacement for script writing.

Whether you like it or not the billionaires are absolutely going to try and replace pretty much everything with AI. It's way cheaper long term than relying on human labor.

I wish AI would just be unplugged. If I could do it I would.

[Nilokeras]

Again, the substitution value of Youtube over TV is a bit of a distraction from the fact that advertising to people watching Mr Beast in 2023 is enormously different to advertising to people who are watching... uh, The Fresh Prince of Be Air in 1993... but here's a think piece about the substitution value of Youtube and what it means for the strike.

A strange argument considering the decline being opined is of traditional linear TV accessed through cable, not TV shows more broadly.