1 Like
I think people underestimate the effort being made behind the scenes over licensing. The early days of Netflix streaming took advantage of studios not seeing the value of that back catalog, and doing a bulk license with Starz via a loophole in their own licensing with the studios.
When I worked for a cable network, every movie on the service was negotiated separately, and often had surprising people involved, like the directors wanting approval over the promos made, etc. Lots of time, lots of lawyers, and lots of overlapping content coming and going. We had to build a tracking system just to manage getting trailers cut in time, getting the movie assets encoded for the servers, etc. The streaming world seems to have a mix of these one-off deals and larger package deals, but they are still being negotiated furiously and individually.
Some content justifies this kind of treatment, but there’s a ludicrously rich vein of TV and movies just sitting in studio vaults as a stranded asset. Some just doesn’t get encoded due to needing some expensive restoration that isn’t justified unless there’s a marketing value.
I think the solution is for the studios to open up licensing in tiers. Some content is evergreen back catalog and would be great as part of a one-stop-shopping service, Some content is older but can best have added value as a curated package that can be marketed. Tentpole releases will stay exclusive for a while, but eventually fall into more of a premium tier that could be spread across services.
The scarcity paradigm doesn’t work for streaming networks any more, they’d be better off leaning in to a combination of abundance and excellent discoverability. I think much work needs to be done on the apps to improve search, personalized recommendations, and curated surfacing of content. There’s so much to watch on Netflix, for example, but try finding it even a week after it’s been featured.
But the real obstacle is simplifying licensing across the services and production companies and distributors. Nobody should be pulling content they produced off their own service, that’s just weird. ‘Out of Print’ is just dumb in today’s world. Streaming services should look more like a library than a specialty bookstore most of the time.
7 Likes
Oh, won’t somebody please think of the tax writeoffs
Thinking that the only measure of value is in what the market says it is leads to this kind of burying of culture…
But that’s what happens when you treat everything like its only value is the money it can rake in… Then burying shit for the tax breaks makes sense…
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
