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The Business of Hollywood & Streaming


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29 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

This is an example of why we created antitrust legislation century ago. The streaming model is sometimes rigged to make revenue sharing difficult. The actual value of shows are hidden or impossible to calculate. And because the streaming services produce the content, they are both buyer and seller.

Streaming also may not be profitable but it’s perceived as valuable by stock holders and venture capitalists. And they will be perceived as even more valuable if they can decrease their talent costs.

The other extreme would be to create streaming only content (not licensed out to other platforms), that pays residuals in perpetuity (per view), would be guaranteed to lose money if given enough time. 

Edited by ChickenSandwich
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On 9/21/2023 at 1:01 PM, ChickenSandwich said:

The other extreme would be to create streaming only content (not licensed out to other platforms), that pays residuals in perpetuity (per view), would be guaranteed to lose money if given enough time. 

not if you're charging enough per view

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4 hours ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Has ABC revealed what kind of numbers on the double MNF broadcasts? I’d imagine that’ll stick around after the strike. 
 

NBC has Sunday Night Football. That’s 18 weeks out of the year 2 of the 4 networks don’t need scripted TV. 

that's 18 weeks - one night a week, for 2 networks.  broadcast networks are struggling to fill those slots and would still be even with football on 2-3 nights. 

have you seen what thursday night looks like on nbc the past couple years?  40 years of the best comedies of all time, and now it's law and order shows for 3 hours.  another night is all shows based in chicago (chicago fire, etc).  cbs is all procedural spinoffs.  abc seems like mostly reality (idol, dwts, bachelor).  sunday night on fox has animation, which is not affected by the strike. 

each network has ~one night with any type of comedy.  pickings are slim for quality content.

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3 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

that's 18 weeks - one night a week, for 2 networks.  broadcast networks are struggling to fill those slots and would still be even with football on 2-3 nights. 

have you seen what thursday night looks like on nbc the past couple years?  40 years of the best comedies of all time, and now it's law and order shows for 3 hours.  another night is all shows based in chicago (chicago fire, etc).  cbs is all procedural spinoffs.  abc seems like mostly reality (idol, dwts, bachelor).  sunday night on fox has animation, which is not affected by the strike. 

each network has ~one night with any type of comedy.  pickings are slim for quality content.

Yikes. I’d say the last good to great network sitcom was AP Bio and well, we know the story there. 

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On 9/24/2023 at 10:00 PM, Queen Bitch said:

Strike captains are PARTYING tonight. D-day vibes. Every good bar in town is wild. What’s the word for “blackout but much stronger”????

UNION GODDAMN STRONG. SOLIDARITY FOREVER AND EVER, Y’ALL!!!!!!!

Get yo ass a michelada to help with the hangover. Hey, we have power in numbers, fuck them 

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A lot of this sounds like a great win for the writers- I do have one question for those in the industry - does the short length of the new deal worry anyone? Is there fear that 3 years will go by quickly and that at the end of that time the studios might decide the deal wasn't good and would lock out the writers?

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This seems like a healthy negotiation, no?

 

Quote

WGA PROPOSALS (as of 5/1/2023)       AMPTP OFFERS (as of 5/1/2023)                        TENTATIVE AGREEMENT (9/25/2023)

 

 

ESTIMATED VALUE OF DEAL

$429 million/year                                             $86 million/year                                                          $233 million/year

 

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4 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

A lot of this sounds like a great win for the writers- I do have one question for those in the industry - does the short length of the new deal worry anyone? Is there fear that 3 years will go by quickly and that at the end of that time the studios might decide the deal wasn't good and would lock out the writers?

Not working for 6 months to get a 3 year deal would seem like they need a ~20% raise over the 3 years to break even. Not too mention how many writers are not starting back because their projects were cancelled or postponed even after the deal is ratified. But I understand the narrative that both sides want the WGA to claim victory.

In my opinion the strike hurt the writers and the industry but I don’t know if the alternative was better.

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  • 1 month later...

So to recap: both strikes are over, both got good new deals, paramount+ is killing it, netflix is killing it and the summer box office season was a success and fun? Sounds like things are looking up!

1 hour ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Sounds like the studios and SAG have a tentative deal. 
 

Thanks for pushing Dune II back 6 months for no GD reason. 

Not to derail, but would you recommend reading the book or watching the movie?

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1 minute ago, BeardIP said:

So to recap: both strikes are over, both got good new deals, paramount+ is killing it, netflix is killing it and the summer box office season was a success and fun? Sounds like things are looking up!

Not to derail, but would you recommend reading the book or watching the movie?

I’m a big audiobook guy. I’d probably go audiobook, then Dune 2021, and Dune 1984. 2021 is a much better film, but I enjoy them both. 1984 does a good job of embracing the weird. 

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Everyone has smashed on HBO for the stupidity of moving away from their brand to be Max and other related terrible business decisions, so it's funny to see all those opinions validated with the stock and earnings as the stock is getting crushed down 20%, especially as their competitors are killing it (Disney, Netflix and Paramount all had great earnings calls):

Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) ↓ 19.04% ↓

  • I guess this is what happens when you take one of the most beloved, storied, and respected brands in all of the media with HBO and turn it into some nonsense “Max” just to show that you’re in charge now. Nicely done by CEO David Zaslav.

  • Zaslav apparently just woke up from a 5-year coma as he was bold enough on the call to say that media is going through a “generational disruption” with streaming. Just wait until this guy learns about AI or mobile phones.

  • Warner Bros did have a disgusting quarter, however, reporting a wider than expected loss at $0.17/sh on $9.98bn in revenue vs. expectations for a $0.06/sh loss on the same top-line value.

  • Max and Discovery Plus subscribers totaled 95.1mn subscribers, missing the 95.4mn expected, while the firm’s TV networks saw ad revenue dive 17%. Once again, Zaslav, nicely done.

Edited by BeardIP
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9 hours ago, Queen Bitch said:

So deeply proud of my sister union. They stood strong and got what they deserved. (Hopefully at least, no one has seen the deal.)  

Contracts for IATSE and Teamsters are up next summer, hopefully they get fair deals and we aren't doing this shit again in eight months :/

From reading the NYT this morning it sounds like you writers did a better job and got more than the actors potentially, it's slowly coming out:

Quote

 

SAG-AFTRA faced pressure to resolve its fight. A-list members like George Clooney and Reese Witherspoon pushed Drescher and others for ways to bridge differences with the studios. Lesser-known actors and crew members privately grumbled about being out of work for so long. And local officials noted that California’s economy alone had lost some $5 billion.

SAG-AFTRA didn’t get one of its biggest asks: a percentage of streaming revenue, which studios bargained down to a new residual payment based on performance metrics.

Still, the outcome demonstrated the renewed strength of American labor unions. The Writers Guild of America, which ended its work stoppage in September, also won big financial concessions from Hollywood studios. And the United Automobile Workers, which adopted a similarly hard-nosed bargaining strategy against the big Detroit automakers, achieved some of its biggest financial gains in years.

But economic reality may cloud those accomplishments. While Hollywood actors may be paid more for their roles, there may be less work to go around. Media companies, eager to stanch streaming-related losses, have cut their spending on content: Disney’s Hulu, for instance, will produce about a third fewer shows in 2024 than it did in 2022. (More on Disney below.)

 

 

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On 11/9/2023 at 2:21 PM, longhornmatt said:

He is the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time in so many ways.  Fucking around on TikTok and YouTube replaces trash tv as a pastime way more than event television.  They needed to lean heavier into Game of Thrones / Stranger Things type productions to compete instead of going the opposite direction into Discovery Honey Boo Boo Chile mode.  Nobody needs a subscription or a cable channel to see stuff equivalent to low budget tv anymore. 

There is an interesting read I'll link (it's a bit long, by our 2023 standards to your TikTok and Youtube Shorts point), but it makes the opposite case. That Prestige TV is dying/dead.

It starts by giving a background history (HBO started it with experimental, gritty stuff like Oz) and then ushered in by the "three HBO Davids: Chase, Simon, and Milch—the headstrong, high-strung men who reinvented the Mob drama (“The Sopranos”), the crime procedural (“The Wire”), and the Western (“Deadwood”), respectively."

Then how HBO became the envy of Hollywood (“Get me the next ‘Sopranos’!” was the rallying cry).

Then Netflix came and disrupted and changed the whole game with one show: House of Cards.

Regarding House of Cards I'll quote, "The show’s natural home was HBO, which offered to shoot the pilot and see. Fincher had lined up big stars, Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, and wanted a thirteen-episode commitment. That wasn’t the way business was done, certainly not at HBO, which was mired, Biskind says, in “internecine warfare, bad calls, and overdevelopment.” Then Fincher got an offer that blew HBO out of the water: a hundred million dollars for not one but two full seasons. It came from Netflix."

Netflix was the beginning of the tech bros/companies flooding the space with money.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/06/the-twilight-of-prestige-television

Edited by BeardIP
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This is just cable TV all over again. I have Prime (Good for many other things so it’s worth it) and then Britbox, Acorn TV (More UK TV) and PBS Masterpiece (Again mostly British stuff). I will not go back down the cable route again and buy several other streaming services just to watch one show. I can get so much from those streaming services I have that I don’t care what else I do not get to see. 

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5 hours ago, UpperWestside said:

This is just cable TV all over again. I have Prime (Good for many other things so it’s worth it) and then Britbox, Acorn TV (More UK TV) and PBS Masterpiece (Again mostly British stuff). I will not go back down the cable route again and buy several other streaming services just to watch one show. I can get so much from those streaming services I have that I don’t care what else I do not get to see. 

I pay for Britbox too; didn’t know there were many of us out there.

Ive found that you can actually watch a lot of great older movies, in full, on YouTube. That’s how I just watched Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Why would I rent it for $3.99 on Prime when it’s free on YT?

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12 hours ago, henrygandorf said:

 

I'm not quite sure what the complaint is here. In the past, you had to physically drive yourself, take a bus, or walk to the nearest home video rental store and hope the movie you wanted was in stock. If it wasn't, you just had to make do with something else. Or you had to wait on Netflix to physically mail you the DVD. Or you had to drive down to a store to buy the DVD and spend $20-$30 to do so. Is going to my Apple TV and typing the movie I want to rent into search that big a deal when it does everything for me? 

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What I miss is having all of the shows I wanted to watch just appear on my DVR when they aired.  I had to start a list of shows to remember what I want to watch on what platform.  That is the most annoying aspect to me.

Edited by kevwun
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3 hours ago, mdmost said:

I'm not quite sure what the complaint is here. In the past, you had to physically drive yourself, take a bus, or walk to the nearest home video rental store and hope the movie you wanted was in stock. If it wasn't, you just had to make do with something else. Or you had to wait on Netflix to physically mail you the DVD. Or you had to drive down to a store to buy the DVD and spend $20-$30 to do so. Is going to my Apple TV and typing the movie I want to rent into search that big a deal when it does everything for me? 

so you're saying it's better now than in the mid 90's?  well i would hope so. 

i think the bigger complaint here is that while some movies are hard to locate, others just aren't available anywhere for free.  and many of these were available weeks/months ago on a platform they pay for.  this is not a personal problem for me, because i've been using torrents for 20 years.  my nephew wanted to watch mad men, which went from netflix to prime to freevee to amc+ which i'm pretty sure is fake because nobody i know has it.  so i downloaded the entire series and wetransfer'd it to him, which he then downloaded and dumped onto a usb drive and put in the back of his tv.  the whole process took an hour.

i had hundreds of dvds, and most of which i did not pay $20-$30 for, but we no longer own a dvd player and i don't really miss those days.  i think the point is that when you pay for (or have access to) multiple streaming services, you expect to have everything at your fingertips.  at certain points this was the case, now, not so much.

 

2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Everyone makes fun of me for my shelves of DVDs and Blu Rays, but when I want to watch something, there it is.  Even if the internet goes down.  I can still watch Band of Brothers or Little Big League or The Cell.

oh fuck yeah.

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2 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

so you're saying it's better now than in the mid 90's?  well i would hope so. 

i think the bigger complaint here is that while some movies are hard to locate, others just aren't available anywhere for free.  and many of these were available weeks/months ago on a platform they pay for.  this is not a personal problem for me, because i've been using torrents for 20 years.  my nephew wanted to watch mad men, which went from netflix to prime to freevee to amc+ which i'm pretty sure is fake because nobody i know has it.  so i downloaded the entire series and wetransfer'd it to him, which he then downloaded and dumped onto a usb drive and put in the back of his tv.  the whole process took an hour.

i had hundreds of dvds, and most of which i did not pay $20-$30 for, but we no longer own a dvd player and i don't really miss those days.  i think the point is that when you pay for (or have access to) multiple streaming services, you expect to have everything at your fingertips.  at certain points this was the case, now, not so much.

 

oh fuck yeah.

Justwatch app is pretty easy for figuring out where everything is and on what service. TV series were always going to be an issue because of the way the rights change. Movies are a lot simpler other than if the movie isn't available. Apple TV makes it all pretty simple given iTunes usually has everything either for rent or purchase. Locally, you can run down to Half Priced Books and get pretty much anything you want for an affordable price on DVD. I just get tired of these, oh things were so much easier before all this like things are really that hard. We want everything at the push of a button which they pretty much delivered to us. You just have to figure out where it is and pay for it. 

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4 minutes ago, mdmost said:

Justwatch app is pretty easy for figuring out where everything is and on what service. TV series were always going to be an issue because of the way the rights change. Movies are a lot simpler other than if the movie isn't available. Apple TV makes it all pretty simple given iTunes usually has everything either for rent or purchase. Locally, you can run down to Half Priced Books and get pretty much anything you want for an affordable price on DVD. I just get tired of these, oh things were so much easier before all this like things are really that hard. We want everything at the push of a button which they pretty much delivered to us. You just have to figure out where it is and pay for it. 

i didn’t write the tweet, just thought it was funny. 

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45 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

so you're saying it's better now than in the mid 90's?  well i would hope so. 

i think the bigger complaint here is that while some movies are hard to locate, others just aren't available anywhere for free.  and many of these were available weeks/months ago on a platform they pay for.  this is not a personal problem for me, because i've been using torrents for 20 years.  my nephew wanted to watch mad men, which went from netflix to prime to freevee to amc+ which i'm pretty sure is fake because nobody i know has it.  so i downloaded the entire series and wetransfer'd it to him, which he then downloaded and dumped onto a usb drive and put in the back of his tv.  the whole process took an hour.

i had hundreds of dvds, and most of which i did not pay $20-$30 for, but we no longer own a dvd player and i don't really miss those days.  i think the point is that when you pay for (or have access to) multiple streaming services, you expect to have everything at your fingertips.  at certain points this was the case, now, not so much.

 

oh fuck yeah.

Serious question because I get that you are in the industry. Why do you think you don't have a more acute sense of honesty and integrity and obligation for paying for an artist, actor, writer, directors work? These are your people and, potentially and probably, you. Why go all-in using torrents and pirating stuff instead of paying into the ecosystem that ostensibly feeds you as well? I can see the laymen and disconnected to the Hollywood industry nobody having no moral qualms about it, but I would guess being inside the circle you'd feel differently, but that would be a wrong guess.

Not a moral attack, just genuinely curious.

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