TV is broken. The streamers broke it. A thing that worked beautifully and made everyone tons of money is now a thing that frustrates and maddens both fans and artists. It can be saved... but only if studios abandon the Wall Street fantasy of infinite growth instead of doubling down on it.
Today in “this could easily run for 10 seasons & employ a lot of talented people & make many viewers happy & help retain subscribers but the powers that be decided to NOT do all that for Reasons” 😡
Audiences are hungry for a schedule! A shared experience! Something to look forward to on our Tuesday nights!! Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face 💔
What I really respect about Lower Decks is it managed to come out at the same time every year for 5 years in a row, which is something none of the other recent Trek shows managed. We're losing a pretty consistent one this year
The crazy thing is… they can have that growth — but not in a subscription model. There are 340 million Americans, and they’re not all getting accounts. So once you hit market saturation, the only way to raise revenues is to raise fees, which costs you subscribers.
BUT in an *ad-supported* streaming model, growth can scale infinitely, driven by advertizers’ desire to have their ads in hit shows. It’s a model that worked for *decades* in broadcast and cable.
And if *I* know this, with my BFA in Theatre Studies — then why the fuck didn’t a bunch of MBA CEOs??
Because the MBA is about knowing Business (make stock price go up) not anything about a particular business. In fact, the very idea that a given business might have its own quirks and details that need to be understood and mastered to be any good at is anathema.
But they can't abandon that model. It's built into the structure. The reason why capitalism destroys everything is not just because the capitalists are greedy, evil people, but because that's the way their system is built.
The inevitable rebuttal to this argument is 'why do you love ads so much?', which, I don't. I hate them. But the idea that you could base the entire media industry on cheap subscribers' fees without them (or government funding, or ad support from elsewhere) was always insane and doomed to fail
I've said this before, but the only ad-free models that work are either public (PBS) or premium add-ons supported by revenue by the other channels owned by the conglomerate (HBO, TCM).
With something like Netflix, the plan was always to establish an unbreakable monopoly and then jack the subscription price up to what it was actually worth to make, a la Uber. But now that's going to happen (being the biggest fish in the pond is not the same thing), so now for plan B
By the way, just to show the disparity here - Netflix, from multiple accounts, makes significantly more money from the cheapest with-ads-tier subscriber than they do from the most expensive ad-free-tier subscriber - from their perspective, the new goal is to make the latter the former ASAP
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel"
-Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum
Just want to point out that Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Discovery are all on cable on Canada. Not disputing that they were made because of streaming, but they port over to cable just fine.
I could see it on a Viacom-owned channel like Comedy Central or Spike TV in the 00s, but this is one of those 'you expanded too much without a solid foundation' issues - it might not have gotten there without streaming, but now it's going to be among the many being culled in the correction
It isn't *just* TV
Its software. Computer hardware. Financial services. Banks.
They're all bending over backwards to find a way to include this bullshit-pseudo AI nonsense into anything & everything they can, as it's The New Hotness (NFT 2.0) From Above
Its wasteful & stupid, just like them
Maybe dont watch tv.
Play games on the tv
Screw the tv
**HBO is a joke but i subscribe when there's a series i want and then cancel when done. **Same with Disney.
**amazon rarely has anything
**Netflix is fairly good.
**HULU is good.
Just dont watch tv.
Wall Street is a product of Capitalism.
Capitalism is the problem.
Capitalism needs to be taken behind the shed and put down for our continued survival. Then, maybe TV will improve. But I’m not holding my breath on it. 🤷♂️🫠
TV was dying before the streamers got to it. Most of the programming schedule across nearly all of cable and broacast television being reality programming and police procedurals made TV not worth the time it took to turn it on.
