Donald Glover Eight Actors Who Turn Television Into Art New York Times Magazine
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The Great Race to Rule Streaming Telly
In their rush to match Netflix, competitors similar HBO, Hulu and Amazon are ordering a slew of content — ushering out the age of "prestige Tv set" and ushering in an age of anything goes.
Credit... Illustration past Giacomo Gambineri
When Nick Weidenfeld heard what happened at HBO last summer, he was thrilled. "Everyone I knew was texting that article effectually, saying, 'What the [curse]!' " Weidenfeld, an independent TV producer, recently recalled. A lot of people who work in Hollywood were spooked by the news, only not him: "I thought it was amazing."
Weidenfeld was discussing the events of June nineteen, 2018, every bit reported in The Times: Around noon that twenty-four hours, Richard Plepler, then HBO'southward chief executive officer, met with his new dominate, John Stankey, at the network'southward Manhattan headquarters. AT&T had recently completed its $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner — whose holdings included Warner Bros. and HBO — and chose Stankey to caput up the resulting umbrella company, WarnerMedia. Plepler's conversation with Stankey, framed every bit a visitor town hall, unfolded before some 150 HBO employees, who soon discovered that the new guy had large changes in mind.
"It's going to be a tough year," Stankey told Plepler. HBO's tightly curated cluster of shows, released seasonally and in weekly batches, no longer amounted to a tenable strategy. "Information technology's not hours a calendar week, and information technology'due south not hours a month," he said. "Nosotros demand hours a mean solar day. You are competing with devices that sit down in people'southward easily that capture their attention every 15 minutes." Always more hours of overall lookout man-time were necessary to generate always more information on viewing habits to help AT&T bulldoze ever more lucrative "models of advert" and subscriptions, Stankey declared. What was required of Plepler was a reconsidered network, "broad enough to make that happen," as Stankey put information technology — considering "nosotros've got to make money at the end of the mean solar day, right?" When Plepler pointed out that HBO was already profitable, Stankey agreed, but so he added, "Just not plenty."
"It'due south so proficient he said it," Weidenfeld told me, sinking into a booth at Mama Shelter, a hotel in Hollywood where he likes to take working lunches and rough out deals. Weidenfeld, who is 39, sported a full beard and wore a colour-blocked fleece pullover. His business lies in helping creators devise and develop shows, and then in selling them to networks and platforms — and thank you to the industrywide hunger for "hours a mean solar day," business organization is booming. In the past few years Weidenfeld has placed two series on Netflix; sold a variety of pitches and pilots he can't discuss publicly; and struck a starting time-look bargain with Hulu to take it show ideas before shopping them elsewhere. In a couple of hours, 1 of Weidenfeld's many creative partners was due to join him to refine the pitch for a new game show, on the theme of impostors, which Weidenfeld described to me with a mirthful look as "so stupid but then sellable."
Weidenfeld takes a wry, bird's-eye view of the tv industry — sketching out macrotrends, sorting them into taxonomies, prognosticating nearly where it'southward all headed — and for him, the Stankey-Plepler meeting captured something essential most the current state of the medium. "I know information technology's not pleasant to hear," he went on. "Specially if you lot're Plepler and you're a genius and you've made all these great decisions. Just Stankey's correct. It'south not enough hours."
Looming over the HBO meeting was the shadow cast by Netflix. Since its metamorphosis in 2007 from a mail-based DVD-rental library into a streaming platform, Netflix has go an entertainment hegemon, spending heavily on original shows and movies (a reported 700 of them as of last twelvemonth); minting new kinds of stars (the Tasmanian meta-comedian Hannah Gadsby, the Japanese dwelling house-organizing guru Marie Kondo); and growing its subscriber numbers to 149 meg worldwide. Its rise coincides with a trend of major consolidations, including AT&T'southward purchase of Time Warner and Disney'due south recent conquering of Play tricks's entertainment properties. Each conglomerate is readying a new streaming platform, as is the Comcast-endemic NBC Universal.
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Weidenfeld is intimately familiar with the tendency toward volume. He made his proper noun as the caput of evolution at Adult Swim, a job he got when he was 24, helping to bring several notable shows to that channel — among them the brilliant sketch-comedy serial "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" which played like David Lynch directing public-access Television receiver, and the monstrously successful cartoon "Rick and Morty." In 2012, Fox hired Weidenfeld abroad to build an animation studio, and afterward information technology was shuttered, he became president of programming at Viceland, a new cable offshoot of the millennial-targeting media empire Vice. Equipped with a limited budget, he practiced a philosophy of low-price, high-quantity development of the sort that streaming platforms now likewise practice, no affair how deep-pocketed they are. "To fill the hours in the day for sales, we had to make essentially 300 hours a year," Weidenfeld explained. "Then we could have made a huge testify. The Vice version of 'Mad Men,' our version of 'Game of Thrones,' whatever." He shook his head. "So what? We're spending $8-to-$ten meg an episode on it, and we've wasted our entire budget!"
Fifty-fifty at a much wealthier outfit, like HBO or Netflix, he said, "there's only and then many 'Games of Thrones' you tin can make, and so what you wind upward having is some premium-premium content, and then you need the low-price, high-margin stuff," Weidenfeld said. "If you're AT&T, you have to say, 'We're gonna make premium content, but we also have to find an on-brand way to make game shows.' " He added: "That's why when yous open up Netflix now, there's this glut. I'm not hating on it. That'south the business organization, and cool things volition come from it. But they accept to feed the beast."
As Stankey'due south remarks to Plepler laid bare, the dominant force driving TV in the Netflix age is the aforementioned i driving social networks, video-sharing platforms and online publishers: the relentless pursuit and monetization of our attention. For media companies like AT&T, the real value of HBO-style "prestige" programming is non that it produces works of fine art as profound as "The Sopranos" but that it offers a viable market place culling to all the gaming videos, makeup tutorials and alt-right primers that millions of people spend millions of minutes watching on their phones every twenty-four hour period. Randall 50. Stephenson, AT&T'due south chief executive, has expressed his desire for 20-minute edits of "Game of Thrones" — a length more optimal for mobile viewing. In a like vein, the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg is building a new streaming service named Quibi, for "quick bites," devoted to lavishly financed, big-name programming that will reportedly be delivered in phone-friendly 10-minute chunks. As the Netflix boss Reed Hastings put information technology in 2017, making a half-joke about bleary-eyed rampage-watching that was no less dystopian for its tongue-in-cheek commitment: "We actually compete with slumber. And nosotros're winning."
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1 big question is what all this means for united states of america, at home, fishing in the cushions for our remotes: If even a network as seemingly sacred every bit HBO can exist pressured by corporate bosses to crank out more shows in guild to meliorate compete with smartphones, what new era are we entering?
I asked Weidenfeld if he could really see HBO experimenting with a game show someday before long. He was emphatic — "Yes, 100 percent. They take to" — then thought for a moment. "They might not call it HBO. It might all go nether this WarnerMedia O.T.T." — an abbreviation for over the superlative, which is industry-speak denoting a stand-alone streaming service — "where y'all tin can have HBO notwithstanding exist premium. Merely yes, if y'all're paying $10.99 a month for it, they have to accept volume."
All of our screens are now TVs, and there is more TV to watch on them than ever. More dramas, more than comedies, more than thrillers, more fantasy-hazard series, more dating shows, more than game shows, more than cooking shows, more travel shows, more talk shows, more raunchy comedies, more than experimental comedies, more family unit comedies, more comedy specials, more children's cartoons, more adult cartoons, more limited series, more documentary series, more prestige dramas, more than young-adult dramas, more prestige young-developed dramas — more, more, more.
In the golden age of what's at present called linear tv set — when viewing patterns were more predictable and, DVRs notwithstanding, more controllable — people had to sentinel what they wanted to watch when networks wanted them to spotter information technology. But the advent of digital platforms streaming video on demand (South.5.O.D.s, in trade lingo) has broken the 24-hr day into infinite possibilities. Questions once crucial have been fabricated irrelevant: "Does this bear witness deserve a prime-time spot?" "Would this make a good atomic number 82-in to that?" The success of a given streaming evidence isn't determined by how many people sentry it just by how many subscriptions it helps to generate or maintain. The programming goal of an South.Five.O.D., then, is an overall temper of plenitude, a constantly updating slate of would-exist "tentpole shows," buttressed with plenty theoretically watchable other stuff that viewers don't flee once "Stranger Things" is over. As i producer put information technology to me, the mission at a streaming service like Netflix is "to basically create channel surfing within Netflix" — to entice usa into a walled garden where the plantings are so copious we never think of leaving.
If you were to argue that this hyperabundance is, on residual, more of a good affair than bad, y'all could point to an underlying economic truth of streaming-era Television set: It puts less force per unit area on an idiosyncratic or otherwise "challenging" serial, because the viewership numbers needed to justify a show's existence are lower than ever. Precisely how depression is hard to say — streamers like Netflix self-written report their ratings in the very rare instances when they disclose them at all — just certainly much lower than was historically truthful in the circulate-TV era, when prime-fourth dimension existent manor was scarce. And lower likewise, maybe, than was historically true fifty-fifty at HBO, where a serial every bit critically enshrined equally "The Wire" teetered on the edge of oblivion throughout its five-flavor run, canceled, uncanceled and threatened with cancellation over again, co-ordinate to the show'southward creator, David Simon, in the face of a consistently meager audition.
In the streaming era, "you don't have to pull in a massive audition" to justify a show, says Ravi Nandan, who directs the television efforts of the boutique studio A24 — known for its dedication to moderately budgeted, auteur-driven material like the Oscar-winning motion-picture show "Moonlight." Nandan brought up an appealingly bizarre A24 series from 2017 called "Comrade Detective." A mock Cold War thriller, it was set in the 1980s, shot in Romania for peanuts with local talent and featured the voice acting — dubbed with intentional ungainliness — of Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. "For the states it was, 'This is a fun experiment,' " Nandan said. "Who knows what the effect's gonna be, but we're in a time when we tin have this chance, so why don't nosotros do information technology?" That hunch proved true when Amazon bought the testify.
The same principle holds at volume-driven Netflix, says Eric Newman, showrunner of the striking drug-trafficking series "Narcos." "I don't think they're looking to hit the brawl out of the stadium every time," he said, "and that takes a lot of the pressure off." The visitor, he noted, keeps viewership data even from him: "I've asked them: 'Practice people like this character? Should we kill them off in Episode 6?' And they say, 'Practice you call back we should kill them off?' "
That sense of artistic freedom has enabled a fundamental mutation in television'south Deoxyribonucleic acid. TV has long been a medium defined by familiarity — comforting narrative rhythms, stabilizing themes, repeatable formulas. In trusty 22-infinitesimal cycles, family tensions and romantic spats flared upwardly just to resolve themselves in time for the end credits; crimes were committed, solved and punished; news anchors and late-night hosts, besuited and paternal, shepherded us through the 24-hour interval's events from behind sturdy desks; their perma-tanned morning-show equivalents garlanded our breakfast hours with pleasant mundanities.
By contrast, the animating strength behind today'due south best streaming TV is a horizon-expanding sense of unpredictability, whether information technology's the slippery narratives of offbeat magical-realist series similar Netflix's "Russian Doll"; the impressionistic, shaggy-dog plots of "High Maintenance" (which began as a web series before moving to HBO); or the jarring encounters with broadly unfamiliar perspectives typical of "Larry Charles' Dangerous World of Comedy," a Netflix documentary series most the function of laughter in strife-torn international locales.
This ways that characters tin change as shows progress, instead of retracing the tightly fatigued circuits of personality typical of network protagonists. Episode lengths take become similarly elastic — lx minutes here, sixteen minutes there — as has pacing. "Forever," a dreamlike Amazon comedy starring Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen, took ii episodes to even introduce its central conceit (spoiler): The protagonists die and are forced to navigate both marital troubles and mysteries of the afterlife. In a network context, "Nosotros would have had to explain information technology in the very first act, if not the very first scene, if not the very first line of the show," Alan Yang, a former "Parks and Recreation" writer and a creator of "Forever," told me. "Nosotros were excited about making something where it'south constantly evolving and yous get 18-carat surprise because audiences accept been so conditioned on what to expect."
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According to a 2019 survey by Deloitte, 77 percent of Americans who watched streaming TV consumed an average of four hours per sitting. Online binge-watching can have an emboldening effect on outré artistic impulses. In add-on to "Forever," Yang was a creator of the Netflix series "Master of None," with Aziz Ansari, post-obit the romantic and gustatory searchings of Ansari'south lead character, Dev. "The power to have all the episodes available at once," Yang says of both shows, "made us feel like nosotros could have bigger chances" — that is, they could movement in unexpected ways from one episode to the next without disorienting people. Also, "Maniac," a Netflix serial starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, was able to play frenetically with genre, time and tone in a manner that would take risked incoherence were the series released over several months rather than all in one go. (Releasing a whole flavor en masse is, of course, some other way to proceed u.s. planted in front of our screens — and logged into i service — that much longer.)
Yet another upside to programmers' boundless appetites has been the opening of tv set'southward gates to historically excluded voices. This includes young showrunners of color, similar Donald Glover ("Atlanta"), Ramy Youssef ("Ramy") and Issa Rae ("Insecure"); and members of other marginalized groups, like Ryan O'Connell (a gay human being with cognitive palsy who created and stars in the Netflix series "Special") and Lindy West (the comedian and fat-acceptance activist whose writing inspired the Hulu serial "Shrill").
Established filmmakers, like David Fincher, Barry Jenkins and Errol Morris, are also making episodic Goggle box for streamers in e'er greater numbers. "It feels like I take the ability to tell a story outside any traditional format or construction," says Ava DuVernay, whose characteristic films include "Selma" and "A Wrinkle in Time." She has directed two Netflix titles: "13th," an Oscar-nominated documentary about the racist underpinnings of the carceral state, and "When They See United states of america," a four-episode drama almost the black teenagers falsely bedevilled of raping a white jogger in Central Park in 1989. In envisioning the latter as a streaming mini-serial, DuVernay told me, her thinking was, "We could brand this a two-hr movie and put it in theaters, or we could make it a iv-and-a-half hour movie" — divided into chapters and bachelor on your laptop.
The appeal of streaming TV to Hollywood auteurs is that it tin offer more expansive artistic possibilities than the feature world. The appeal of such shows for platforms is manifold. Multiseason smashes like "Game of Thrones" and "The Sopranos" are still possible only increasingly rare. They crave considerable budgets that, from a development perspective, might exist more judiciously spent on a flurry of marquee titles, which run for only a flavour or two but yet create a promise of quality amid the deluge and generate valuable buzz. Similar the proverbial water-cooler hits of the linear era, these shows heighten our sense that if nosotros don't subscribe to a given S.5.O.D., we're missing out on some vital part of the cultural conversation. The deviation today is that it'due south impossible ever to feel fully defenseless up on all the things your friends and the internet tell you "you've got to meet" — a feeling that is cracking for getting united states to shell out, month after month.
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As rival megaliths confront off in the streaming wars, it's imperative for platforms that when we dig through their digital heaps we discover something slap-up, or at least great-ish, often enough that nosotros don't go digging elsewhere. This is where recommendation algorithms come in. Dissimilar an old-school broadcaster, a digital platform generates oceans of 2d-to-second information near viewing habits, sign-ups and subscription loss. Platforms utilise this data to group customers into different segments, organized around viewing preferences — and if all is working as it should to recommend shows that match those preferences.
Data affects deceptively elementary decisions, similar which still image will stand for a given title in a scrolling carte: If you streamed a bunch of romantic comedies on Netflix, the image algorithmically deployed to tempt yous into watching "Groundhog Twenty-four hour period" might be i of Andie MacDowell building a snowman with Bill Murray. If your history is heavy on absurdist comedies, you lot might see a portrait of Chris Elliott wearing a beanie instead. If the algorithm decides correctly, this benefits Netflix's relationship non only with customers but also with the creative community, helping to ensure that a show finds a substantial and enthusiastic audience. (1 producer, who asked non to be named considering he occasionally does business with Netflix, said he has heard creators limited wariness nearly selling projects in that location, for fear they will get lost amid the surfeit of offerings.)
But how much does data influence the cosmos of shows in the first identify? In March, I joined a meeting at Hulu's headquarters, in Santa Monica, Calif., as 12 executives discussed concrete ways to bring data science to impact content creation. Founded initially "to gainsay piracy," every bit Craig Erwich, the company's senior vice president of original programming, put it, Hulu began every bit a jointly endemic venture between Play a joke on and NBC, offering circulate Tv on demand. The platform, which is now nether Disney'south total operational control, has likewise entered into partnerships with premium-cable channels like HBO and Showtime, and invested in originals: In 2017, Hulu became the first streaming service to win an Emmy for best drama series, for its striking adaptation of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."
As we gathered around a conference tabular array, I looked out at an airy communal space. Around the office, several employees worked at standing desks, including a guy perched atop some hoverboard-esque balance ball that, he explained, when I asked him about it, helped with "cadre forcefulness." On a ready of blond-woods steps, life-size Simpsons statues sat together — referencing some other Fox holding that has slid into Disney's pocket. When I asked Erwich how Hulu might modify if assimilated into Disney+, he told me that given the latter's family-friendly epitome, it could make sense to set off serial like "The Handmaid'southward Tale" — whose story lines take included rape and female circumcision — under a different shingle. In this scenario, Hulu's originals would part, within Disney+, like a boutique tucked into a megamall.
In the conference room, Erwich introduced Jason Kim, head of analytics, who was "a half-calendar week into four weeks of work" on a new information-enquiry initiative. Speaking in a jargon-thick lexicon, he explained that this would involve "taking different content-investment scenarios" — What if we devoted this many dollars to these kinds of programming? — "pumping them through a model and then predicting the forecast subscriber growth as well as appointment growth" — how many more hours people spend on Hulu — "for each of those scenarios."
Kim, who wore a fitted greyness sweater and had spiky hair buzzed at the sides, clicked through graphs projected on an overhead screen. "We break down Hulu'southward addressable marketplace" — the pool of current and potential customers — "into these viii audience segments, which have distinct content-viewing behaviors and needs," he said. "The healthiest of these segments is what we telephone call 'broadcast generalists.' From a consumption standpoint, they overindex in" — watch above-boilerplate amounts of — "circulate dramas and comedies. They value next-twenty-four hours Tv" — last night's episode, streamed today — "which is a core office of Hulu's suggestion, and they're very healthy on our service. In 2018 they had the lowest churn" — cancellation — "of whatever of these segments, and they were one of the largest-engaging segments also."
Less good for you, Kim said, "were 'content miners.' They overindex in movie consumption. They really like to browse and treasure-hunt, and when they do scout Television set it's less next-solar day Boob tube or broadcast Television and more cablevision serial." I recognized myself among this group — uninterested in last night'southward "This Is Us," eager to bank check out the season finale of HBO's blackness comedy "Barry," happy to discover that "Dazed and Dislocated" is streaming and disappointed to see that Andrea Arnold's last film, which I missed during its brief theatrical run, isn't. The other audience segments included "comedy watchers," "for the family" and "drama watchers." Five of these, Kim said, "are mostly pretty healthy," as measured by how often they visit Hulu and for how long, whereas the remaining 3 were less then.
The originals squad scrutinized Kim's graphs, and Erwich piped upwardly to identify the limits of the research so far: "This tells yous, Maybe you lot need more" of a certain kind of drama. "What it doesn't tell yous is whether you should buy 'CSI' or brand a new 1."
Kim nodded. "There's a lot more to do," he said.
Val Shimabukuro, Hulu's content-scheduling managing director, presented next. "When I schedule a show," she explained, "I inquire, Is this gonna exist a subscription-acquisition driver, or is this gonna be a evidence to engage and retain our current subscribers?" These two categories translated, broadly speaking, to "tentpole series" and "smaller, niche shows," with Shimabukuro trying as much as possible to steer audiences attracted by the one-time toward the latter. Hulu has more than 25 million subscribers, and Shimabukuro noted the importance of spontaneous P.R. opportunities in attracting new ones. When Hulu learned that Netflix was preparing to release a documentary about the Fyre Festival controversy — in which a supposed grifter sold exorbitantly priced tickets to a functionally nonexistent Commonwealth of the bahamas music festival — they saw a chance to kneecap it. Hulu had its own Fyre documentary set up to go, which information technology rush-released in what Shimabukuro referred to as "a surprise stunt."
Toward the end of this presentation, Belisa Balaban, responsible for documentaries at Hulu, mentioned that she and Shimabukuro had discussed timing the debut of a movie acquired at Sundance, about a prominent sexual predator, to coincide with "The Handmaid'southward Tale," all the amend to feed off what she called "the 'Handmaid's' halo" of viewership. Erwich furrowed his brow at this line of reasoning. "That'southward a stretch," he said.
Old-fashioned guessing, it turned out, all the same played a office in such matters. Shimabukuro pressed the case: "I recollect it could be an audition that'south interested in strong female, #MeToo movement. ..."
Erwich squinted. "All right," he replied, not still fully sold. "O.K."
After the meeting, Beatrice Springborn, Hulu'southward vice president of content development, told me she enjoyed attending such information-heavy presentations: That style, "yous're non saying, 'Why is this piece of development good' in a bubble." All the aforementioned, she added, "You take to bring a human touch to it." Springborn studied journalism in higher, later getting a job in development at Pixar. At Hulu, she has instituted recurring "quiet-fourth dimension" meetings for the originals team: "Just u.s.a. sitting there, zoning out, proverb: 'What practice you wish was on Tv set? I just saw this Eric Rohmer moving picture I loved — is there a version of that that's a TV show?' " Without such introspection, Springborn said, "it's a content farm."
Paradigm
Success in the streaming game isn't zero-sum, but information technology might exist close. Co-ordinate to a Feb written report by the research business firm Ampere Analysis, afterward years of growth, the S.V.O.D. marketplace is "showing signs of reaching saturation," with the number of subscriptions per household staying house at almost three from late 2017 through late 2018. You lot can become an anecdotal sense of the ceiling for this market past asking yourself, How many unlike companies am I willing to pay $6 to $15 a month for Goggle box earlier I max out?
At Netflix, the strategy from the beginning has been to endeavor to please as many people as information technology can. Every bit Cindy Holland, Netflix's vice president of original content, put it to me, "We want to entertain the earth." Treating that equally a concrete objective rather than a scrap of grandiose sloganeering, she explained, required forethought and infrastructure. "When we first set up out thinking most original serial, I asked, What do other networks practice?" she went on. "Well, most have a command-and-control-style organization organisation, commonly personality-driven, with decisions coming from 1 person at the top. Depending on what kind of network it is, say they accept a 10-to-30-evidence slate of scripted originals. We knew our long-term appetites would be bigger, so very chop-chop I thought, from an organizational standpoint, How practise I accomplish the goals not of one network only of vi networks? So my squad is essentially the equivalent of 6 or so networks, on the scripted side. Each has their own focus in terms of content they're searching for, and I've delegated authority so the power to greenlight extends down."
Echoing what I heard at Hulu, Holland told me that when it came to data, Netflix uses information technology mainly for "sizing investments." She said, "Nosotros take projection models to assist us understand what the minimum audience threshold for a given project might be." For example, Netflix knew from DVD-rental histories and other consumer habits that Kevin Spacey vehicles and David Fincher films performed well on the service, which bolstered their decision to spend hundreds of millions of dollars making "House of Cards." More recently, "Stranger Things" came to life non long afterward Netflix gleaned from its data that there was an unmet audience desire for what Holland chosen "college-upkeep immature-adult programming."
When Netflix began streaming its ain series, information technology adhered to recognizable prestige-cable contours: "House of Cards" and "Orangish Is the New Black" could take fit on HBO or Showtime. As the company'south offerings have multiplied, that has changed. "Nailed It!" a striking blistering-competition show, looks and feels like a Bravo title; y'all could imagine "BoJack Horseman" on Comedy Central; "Amazing Interiors" might be an HGTV show. As for Netflix's brand-new game show, "Awake" — in which sleep-deprived contestants are fabricated to compete in "challenges both eccentric and everyday for a chance at a $one million prize" — it's hard to say where such a concept would fit in. Japanese reality Television set? Hell?
It bears noting that Netflix, the well-nigh consequential contemporary force in Hollywood, was built-in 335 miles n, in Silicon Valley — a identify driven by venture capitalists who, seeking gargantuan investment returns, prize scale in a higher place all else. Netflix tends to play downwards the threat posed by its streaming rivals. Yang says that when he first started working with Netflix, the feeling was: "We don't encounter ourselves becoming the next HBO; nosotros see ourselves becoming the entirety of cable." In a tardily-2018 earnings letter of the alphabet, the company situated itself on an fifty-fifty grander plane of contest, reporting that "we compete with (and lose to) 'Fortnite' " — a multiplayer online video game — "more than than HBO," and mentioned that, when YouTube experienced a global outage in Oct, Netflix'due south own new-subscription and engagement numbers rose. (YouTube has experimented with original series, only its principal draw remains ad-supported user-posted videos.)
Information technology's fair to wonder how far any Television set-maker can spread itself before its output suffers. For all the talk of epochal alter effectually streaming television, the emphasis on sheer volume at Netflix and other platforms has already created a dispiriting new phenomenon reminiscent of old ones — like entering a Blockbuster in 1994 and navigating alley after aisle of VHS tapes, half of which seem to be "Jurassic Park," and straining to find ane you actually want to rent; or flicking through 150 cablevision channels in 2004 and wondering if anything decent is on now that "Sex and the City" is over.
When I brought up the tension betwixt quality and quantity to Holland, she rejected the premise. "That's a paradigm set by our competitors," she argued, "who have much smaller budgets and less ability to provide a large volume of content to their viewers." But budgets are just 1 part of the equation. Someone who works in series development framed this matter for me using the benchmark example of "The Sopranos": When HBO broadcast that serial, beginning in 1999, it boasted a roster of non just top-tier actors, writers and directors but also of cinematographers, casting directors, location scouts and so on. This was possible because its creator, David Chase, enjoyed his selection of talent in an industry that had done a pretty practiced task till that signal of squandering it on far less ambitious shows (if not outright junk). Twenty years later, it's harder to picture that kind of concentration of talent in a single projection, because the proliferation of shows has splintered and scattered those writers, actors and scouts — leading the medium from its early on-aughts "golden age" to what some critics have called the era of "proficient-enough" Television set.
The move into streaming can put premium-cable programmers in an particularly awkward position: The attributes of their networks that people about cherish — craftsmanship, discernment, consistency — seem straight at odds with the growing mandate to pump out hours. And John Stankey's comments last June did not inspire confidence that HBO, the aureate-age standard-bearer, was going to atomic number 82 the good-enough era anywhere better. After the town hall, college-ups there and at AT&T strove to soften that impression. Casey Bloys, HBO's president of programming, recently bodacious me, "We're non looking to increase volume by lowering our standards." And Randall L. Stephenson likened Plepler'southward network to Tiffany & Company. Only another troubling indication of AT&T's priorities arrived last fall, when it spiked the beloved arthouse-cinema streaming service FilmStruck, describing it as "niche." Then last Feb, Plepler announced his departure from HBO amid reports he was unhappy with his decreased autonomy. (Plepler gently declined my request for an interview, citing his desire "to allow the current squad to have the stage to themselves.")
Bloys, who at present reports to Plepler'southward replacement, Robert Greenblatt, conceded, however, that the always-increasing drive for volume creates distinct pressures. "My challenge is to make sure we don't lose the handmade feel," he said. "That'due south partly a matter of hiring more staff for our programming teams. It's besides well-nigh making certain we're not taking on things nosotros wouldn't otherwise have done." Bloys estimates in that location will be virtually fifty percent more hours on HBO in 2019 than there were terminal year — a result of development decisions that predate the AT&T merger only that an infusion of AT&T greenbacks fabricated possible. Still, he emphasized, "there'southward nil on our air in 'nineteen or even looking forward to 'twenty that we wouldn't have programmed five or 10 years ago."
Epitome
Using Nick Weidenfeld's example, I asked Bloys whether viewers could look to run into an HBO game bear witness soon. He replied in two parts: "At that place'due south no newfound mandate to go into new areas all in the name of volume, but at the same time, we've never been totally airtight off to anything. Nosotros're non actively looking for game shows, simply I tin tell you, a few years ago we were thinking nigh a game show, saying, Could we do our version of that?"
Not all networks have responded to the demand for volume in the aforementioned style — a signal underscored when I spoke with Gary Levine, president of entertainment at Get-go. Similar HBO, Showtime established itself in the '80s and '90s every bit a premium cable aqueduct and has since entered the nonlinear world: You can watch its shows through a stand up-alone streaming app or add it to your Hulu or Prime subscriptions. Showtime's recent flagship titles include the brash late-night show "Desus & Mero," the soapy Wall Street hit "Billions" and well-pedigreed limited series like "Twin Peaks: The Return," a continuation of the surrealist '90s mystery from David Lynch and Mark Frost.
Unlike HBO, Showtime was not recently purchased by a telecom company with a stated interest in bulking up. "I don't have a John Stankey telling me I have to produce more," Levine said expert-humoredly. First is part of the CBS corporation, which appear last year that First's subscriber numbers exceeded 25 million for the first time. That figure is half of HBO'south domestic subscribers, but the bulletin to the press from Offset is that bigger isn't necessarily better, as long as the network makes money and remains adaptable. On the subject field of industry consolidation, Levine said: "We've never been arrogant virtually hoarding our programming. We're happy to become information technology to people through Comcast or Charter or AT&T or Amazon or whoever. We don't listen being the improver."
Speaking in relaxed tones, Levine sounded convincingly like a homo positioned to 1 side of the fray — happy to be in a position to share.
Before I left the bar at Mama Shelter, Nick Weidenfeld put Tv's current upheavals into historical context for me. Much was new nearly streamers, he said, just in one regard they were retracing a path trod decades ago by cable Goggle box: "Everyone starts off licensing other people's catalogs or libraries, 'cause the margins are the best," he said. At a sure point, "you've built a brand on other people'south content, and you say, we don't own this, we tin can't merchandise information technology, we can't license it, we don't have any revenue streams confronting it, merely we do have X number of viewers coming to our network — why aren't nosotros making our own stuff?"
He took the example of Cartoon Network, which started as a venue for Ted Turner to sell ads against material from the Hanna-Barbera library, among others, and which he gradually augmented with originals whose copyrights he endemic, like "The Powerpuff Girls" and "Johnny Bravo" — "shows with billions of dollars in merchandising, and now that'south your money," Weidenfeld said. "And that's the unabridged manufacture."
The parallels to Netflix were obvious: Start out licensing, then create programming you ain outright. Only Netflix'south exorbitant push button into originals — the company says that as of adjacent twelvemonth, it will devote a vast majority of its multibillion-dollar programming budget to such content — speaks to a contemporary dynamic. Those platforms that control the largest content libraries are regarded as having the all-time shots at streaming-war success. This ways that many rights-owning studios once happy to earn extra money licensing shows to Netflix are letting such agreements expire every bit they build S.5.O.D.s of their own: Why let others thrive off your titles when y'all can use them to lure customers your fashion, instead? This is long-game thinking, with studios betting that what they cede in licensing revenue will be justified down the line by the market border they create for their streamers. In turn, the portion of Netflix's library consisting of stuff endemic by others is increasingly imperiled.
There'due south a detail force per unit area on WarnerMedia to make its service alluring: In figuring out how much to charge for monthly subscriptions, which will include access to HBO, WarnerMedia must remain sensitive to the rates currently charged for that channel by its cable-carrier partners, whom Warner relies on for significant acquirement. That sensitivity has already created an effective price floor of $15 on HBO'southward O.T.T. service, HBO Now, which is roughly what nigh cable providers demand from customers wanting to add the channel to a monthly package. This makes information technology trickier, in plough, for Warner to charge less than $15 monthly for their entire streaming service — which is more than than competitors currently accuse (though rates across the sector are expected to keep rise).
It's unsurprising, and so, that one emblematic streaming-war skirmish centers on a WarnerMedia belongings, "Friends." That epochal '90s sitcom remains then valuable to Netflix that the company, which one time reportedly licensed the serial for $30 million, agreed at the end of 2018 to pay Warner a sum approaching $100 million for i more than year of nonexclusive rights. But a few weeks ago information technology was announced that Netflix's library will presently take another hit: Despite a reported $ninety million bid to keep the rights to "The Office," that series will head over to NBC Universal's new streaming service in 2021. [Update: Later on this article went to press, AT&T announced that the name for its streaming service will exist HBO Max; that it will include programming from HBO, Warner Bros., CNN, TBS and Turner Classic Movies, amidst others; and that "Friends" volition leave Netflix and get exclusive to this platform.]
In the ongoing scramble for hours, international shows have emerged every bit another pregnant frontier. Importing such shows was one time largely the province of PBS, but now Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime number are full of series licensed from or made in partnership with studios from Britain ("Fleabag"), Spain ("Money Heist") and Scandinavia ("The Bridge"). Executives encounter them equally affordable — which ways that they are becoming more expensive.
When it comes to building a viable streaming service, the cost of entry has get prohibitively high and is ascension. For its Apple Television set+ service, Apple is spending a reported $2 billion to create original shows and movies, featuring prominent partners like Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and A24. Amazon, which is cagey about numbers only has an estimated 101 million Prime Video customers, is investing heavily in both licensed material and splashy programming of its own, recently paying, according to news accounts, some $250 million for the rights to make a new series based on "The Lord of the Rings." Weidenfeld told me that, a few years ago, he investigated starting a streaming platform devoted to animation: "I was looking at financing, and they told me, straight upwards, 'You need Ten amount of hours per month to make Y amount of subscriptions.' It'south a math equation." When I asked Nandan whether A24 had considered starting its ain streaming platform, he laughed before answering: "Starting a subscription service today without billions and billions of dollars is virtually impossible."
Information technology was on this theme that Nick Weidenfeld'south mood, otherwise so brilliant almost the state of television, started to darken. Right now, he said, information technology was a very fun moment to develop and sell Television shows, because a variety of well-funded competitors were adopting messy, fecund, throw-mud-at-the-wall programming tactics. But he feared that this moment was about to grind to a halt. The exorbitant costs involved in amassing hours of programming, he explained, combined with parent-company consolidation, were already ushering in a period that he called "the Great Reclamation of Content — everyone's gonna pull back what they ain." The coming landscape, as he envisioned it, sounded grim. "Once it consolidates and settles, like annihilation else, sure production methodologies and creative methodologies will be put in identify, and they'll become sacrosanct, and that's all in that location's gonna be for a while."
The nightmare version of this would be a Tv set replication of the Hollywood blockbuster model. It's possible that Disney — whose holdings include ESPN, Pixar, the "Star Wars" franchise and a vast chunk of the Marvel universe — will program its streaming service much the same fashion information technology programs its theatrical slate, organized around a loud parade of Jedi titles and interconnected superhero movies. In the movie business, the supremacy of blockbusters has come at the expense of a in one case-robust agenda of smaller-bore, midbudget titles. It would be paradoxical, though hardly inconceivable, if TV — a much-heralded refuge for exactly that kind of storytelling — fell victim to a similar fate.
"3 behemothic telecoms are gonna make and ain all the content, and they're not gonna desire anyone else to make it," Weidenfeld went on. "There'south not gonna be a lot of innovation. 'Russian Doll's won't get made for a while." Weidenfeld grinned. "In a few years," he predicted, "it's gonna suck."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/magazine/streaming-race-netflix-hbo-hulu-amazon.html
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