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Noel Murray's avatar

We're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of Orange Is The New Black and House Of Cards arriving on Netflix and changing the whole streaming business model from "virtual video store" to "premium cable channel." I think about that moment a lot (and will likely try to find someone who'll let me write about it at length next year), because there was a moment there when the handful of popular streamers -- basically Netflix's then-sparsely populated "Watch Instantly" service, Amazon's similar thing, and Hulu -- had a lot of the same movies and TV series, which meant that the differentiating factors between them were things like price, design and ease of use. Again: Like stores! There are some food brands you can only get at Kroger or at Wal-Mart, but if you want Oreos? They're everywhere. You buy them from the store that's closest, cleanest and cheapest. That's how it was to some degree in 2013 with big entertainment properties. Netflix had an exclusive partnership with Starz and only Hulu could show you last night's network shows (with ads), but if you wanted to watch old episodes of Star Trek or I Love Lucy? Paramount licensed them to everybody. I still wonder how different the media landscape today if that model for streaming had become the norm: Everyone has everything, with just a few exceptions. It's one of the many missed opportunities of a digital age that should be more utopian but instead has become one sloppy shakedown after another.

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Tom L.'s avatar

If the platonic ideal of a filmmaker is to see their work on the big screen in front of a large appreciative audience and hell is not having it released at all -- than having it become another cog of "content" on a "platform" seems neither here nor there, but unfortunately may be the most likely outcome. It feels like the streaming platforms are most interested in Engagement -- and that may come from promoting series and not discrete films. But who knows..they're not sharing the data with me!

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