As long as I am given the option to purchase content without advertisements I will do so. If I can't watch a piece of content without ads, I'll either wait until I can or pirate it. Usually the former.
Frankly I think content is just overvalued and the actual creation of content is extremely inefficient, from a financial point of view. My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money.
It's honestly a terrible industry and needs to be disrupted. Market distortion is the only reason films cost what they do, from production to distribution and consumption. And literally everyone in the pipeline has an incentive to keep the market distorted, except people who watch content. Thank god for piracy.
> My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money.
Is it that, or is the industry mind-controlled by parasites to achieve a different goal than delivering quality entertainment cost-effectively? "Hollywood accounting" is a known term, and it doesn't describe being bad at making money - it describes being very good at making money for yourself by purposefully cheating those who actually brought in that money.
(My general heuristic is that, if they're inefficiencies persisting despite competitive pressure, it's because it's these inefficiencies that are the real reason the business is done, and someone is making a good money off them.)
"Hollywood accounting" isn't designed to cheat anyone. It has been used to do so in the past, mostly decades ago. Slight difference.
It refers to the fact that a film as an enterprise is designed as an independent business with equity held by a few investors, and the enterprise gets dissolved when the film finishes post production. It's the only financial model that actually makes sense when you consider how a film is made and by whom. A small group of money people front a large amount of capital to pay hundreds to thousands of subcontractors up front to create an asset with intangible value, and they split the rights to that asset when they're done. Some of the subcontractors gets something that looks like equity, most don't.
It is a source of problems and inefficiencies. But to me the big issues lie before pre and after post, a lot of the work and structure of businesses during the creation of a film is pretty well honed and workers do have different kinds of power than most employees in traditional environments.
Also films are totally different than television and other media, at least financially. Studios work differently than networks.
I’d be interested in hearing more about what you mean by market distortion here.
A lot of the silliness in things like how much stars are paid seems applicable to software development — tiny incremental value adds become very substantial with a large enough audience.
I don't know what it is off the top of my head but I think actor pay isn't that big a slice of the cost.
What I mean by market distortion is really the lack of insight into value creation. How much value is created by whom in the pipeline, essentially. Data driven, direct to consumer enterprises are changing this a bit and that's great. But my experience is that data doesn't change minds of the top stakeholders, and there are incentives to make decisions that are bad for consumers even if the data says that both sides can win.
Netflix doesn't have the problem because they never had ads. Hulu likely signed a deal with ABC (or the production company who make the shows) for those three shows that still have ads before they had the idea to go commercial free. Changing a deal that had a provision about ads is expensive.
Hulu was a joint venture between several networks. There are three old shows that still have commercials due to old contracts that were made before they switched to the new business model.
Given TV deals are complicated (for example, the networks likely have revenue deals with production companies), its not worth a huge renegotiation.
How quickly does Netflix get those shows? I believe Hulu gets them the day after broadcast. Maybe the network licensing term are different depending on the delay between broadcast and streaming?
As far as I know, Netflix negotiates those rights independently so it varies per network. They're doing a new-ish model now, though, where Netflix actually pays to co-produce content with networks in exchange for getting faster and/or exclusive streaming access.
The most high-profile example off the top of my head is the new Michael Jordan doc; they split the cost with ESPN, and Netflix gets next-day international rights and accelerated domestic streaming rights (3 months after broadcast, I think).
How interesting! The list must update with some frequency because I don’t watch any of the shows currently listed in that link yet I’ve encountered the message a handful of times. The three current shows listed are:
I think there’s a chance it will be different: at least now there is the potential to offer customers an ad-free package for an extra cost. Some services like Hulu already do this (offering cheaper plan with ads and a slightly pricier plan with no ads). I think with cable this would have been difficult or impossible to achieve.
One nice thing about this is it makes plain how much the networks make from showing ads to your household. I happily pay a little extra to “outbid” the ad networks.
I mean, you're not wrong, but it's only for three shows, and there are no ads during the shows, only before and after. It was 7 when it first launched, so it doesn't seem like any other shows or new content will ever have ads. But hey, if you watch Agents of Shield, Grey's Anatomy, or How to Get Away with Murder, that surely does suck.
How is this not a false advertising lawsuit in the making? I mean, maybe the effect will be to make it "Hulu Silver", but that's better than blatantly claiming "No Ads" on an ad-containing product.
There is Hulu with no ads where there are three shows with ads.
Then there is Hulu Live TV which is like traditional cable. That gives you shows live and on demand that would usually come with a cable package. This is in addition to the regular Hulu offering.
No, actually: because they started out as ad-only, then added paid subscriptions while still forcing their subscribers to watch ads, and that is when I decided it was not for me. Maybe they've been evolving in a more positive direction if there are only a few shows left with ads?
They've had an ad free* version for years. Six dollars extra and you don't get ads.
*Three shows still have ads since they signed a deal before they released an ad free tier, and the only alternative would removing those three shows from the ad free tier, which is lose-lose.
we actually split Hulu with a friend. we pay the difference between basic and no-ads. it's an auto payment from bank account to bank account every month. life on autopilot.
I think they are bound to. You don’t think as soon as Disney can they aren’t going to start showing ads for everything Disney related?
The worst step back to me from TV -> streaming -> streaming becoming more TV like is content release schedules. The Mandalorian on Disney Plus was a great example, you have all the episodes ready and there isn’t a good reason to keep them sitting behind a time gate. I would be much more likely to subscribe for a month to watch a show in a week than I would be to subscribe for a few months to few one show. Instead you get none of my money
Catering to the customers least interested in keeping the service isn't a great business strategy. Those who do only want to pay for one month to watch the whole show still have the option of subscribing during the last month of airing. Or any time after that.
For sure. It’s one of those things that my use case is probably a very, very small percent of users but it would be nice to be a bit more viewer friendly from that point of view. Right now since they have limited new content it feels like they are stretching them to keep subscribers as long as possible.
That's 100% what they're doing. I imagine most their money is in people who aren't re-evaluating the subscription month to month, and just need some drip of new content to keep justifying inertia.
I think the difference is that the infrastructure is decoupled from the content now. Cable systems and satellite fleets were both traditionally very high barriers for new competitors to overcome. Granted, consolidated media oligopolies may get us to the same place a different way.
HBO also demands a higher fee than something like HGTV or A&E. The one that kills me is ESPN. It is the most expensive channel for a cable operator to carry, and it is also known as a must carry.
ESPN (and consequently sports teams and their players) are about to find out how less valuable they are I think. There are so many options for entertainment that I doubt they will be able to command the wide audience they used to.
Selling ads globally seems like it's more expensive, unless you automate it like Google etc do, so they'd rather stick to just having subscriptions and be considered premium content.
They're not selling ads, but they do run a 15-30 second spot before each episode advertising one of their own shows. That doesn't really bother me for now, but it seems like a slippery slope towards showing two spots, or three, or selling those spots to other advertisers.
Side note, with all of the streaming subscriptions I have, I'm probably not saving any money compared to when I had traditional cable, but there are fewer commercials and the content is so much better.
I assume he means that because HBO does not show ads, it is an open question of whether Netflix would try.
Personally, I will not subscribe to services that show commercials. Commercials are for free services, not for paid services. As soon as you allow them to cross that boundary....
With that in mind I was wondering which Hulu plan was most popular. All I could find was the same widely syndicated Reuters article [1] from January 2019 calling the plan with ads "Hulu's most popular plan". I guess there is a market for streaming with ads.
HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question.