I wonder if this only gets worse as streaming platforms crack down on password sharing. I currently have access to almost all major platforms through a patchwork of friend/family wheeling and dealing ("ok, I'll pay for Netflix and share my login, you pay for HBO and share yours..."). If I had to limit myself to services I'm actually willing to pay for personally, about half of those disappear. Or I need to start more aggressively rotating every 3-6 months, ugh.
IMO a huge part of Apple's problem is that they want to be the platform where you buy/rent media, so it's weirdly difficult to sift out what's free vs paid. Their free options are limited in comparison to almost all the other platforms, so it's often a very frustrating experience to find their content- much as I've enjoyed many of their shows (Loot, so charming! Bad Sisters, so well done! Physical, occasionally grueling but finding its footing!).
I keep wondering if this is the future of all types of media. The Internet was supposed to mean having everything imaginable at one’s fingertips, but now (unless you have the budget not to be choosy) it just means taking a stab at guessing which firehose will have the water most worth drinking. Awful for creators and awful for their potential audiences.
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.
The answer seems to be in that curation, at least for now. Look at what The Criterion Channel or, to a lesser extent, Shudder does with their themed collections that rotate monthly. Then compare that to Netflix's sad attempts at grouping films and TV into algorithmically-nothing categories like "Period pieces with a strong female lead" or whatever. And the fact that nothing is ever spotlighted in any meaningful way, or with any care given to cast & crew (a director or actor spotlight for example) and it's impossible to find anything. I don't know what they want from us, honestly. (Besides our money.)
I'm getting around this by keeping a watchlist on Letterboxd and filtering by service to see availability. I've discovered this week that five movies I want to see (Barbarian, Soul, French Dispatch, The Empty Man and Prey) are on Disney+, so I'll do a month of that and mop them up.
This of course only works if I'm actually reading about movies and know what to add so if they're not getting mentioned or reviewed anywhere the whole thing falls apart.
I think about this too often because of two things: Steven Soderbergh's K Street and Netflix's Chelsea. K Street can't be found streaming anywhere due to very gray "licensing" issues, which a jaded person could read as "certain lobbying groups/politicians realized they look bad and threatened to sue but this is unconfirmed and no one will go on record especially now to admit this so all parties agreed to never re-air the show since it was also so tied to the news of its release dates besides who wants to rewatch things from 20 years ago" but it's still property of HBO. Chelsea was a weekly talk show on Netflix and, as far as folks have found, the only program Netflix actively removed episodes citing "data" but it's terrifying that no one, aside from Netflix, could tell you what was on the removed episodes. That said, Joe Dante & Roger Corman's Splatter has been on Netflix streaming for 13 years when it was a gimmick release of "choose the next episode." Shudder or some other site has "the full series" as of this year or last year. So who knows, silos can get sold off too.
Me wrote piece for content maw of AV Club about DuMont Television Network — they were early competitor to NBC and CBS who went bankrupt (opening up slot for ABC as third network). They gave start to Jackie Gleason (including early Honeymooners sketches) and Ernie Kovacs. They had first Asian-American lead of TV series, in Anna May Wong playing art dealer-turned sleuth. They had first African-American women to host TV show, Broadway singer and pianist Hazel Scott, who had guests like Charles Mingus and Max Roach on show.
When network went bankrupt, they threw all their tapes into the Hudson River. All of that pioneering television is lost forever. And me feel like we coming back around to that attitude — that even though we now have technology to archive everything ever made and make it easily available to everyone, movie and TV show just treated like more content to toss into maw and forget about forever. (So much of early film history is lost for similar reason — no one thought anyone would remember or care about movie after its theatrical run was over, unless it was massive hit like Wizard of Oz or Gone With Wind, which would get revival screenings.)
Thank you for pointing me to a movie I've never heard before -- Boys State! Perfect for a post-election-night viewing.
My knee-jerk reaction to reading this is one of indignation. In a better society, no doubt we should be able to watch whatever we want. Right now, if you google Boys State, there is indeed only one way to see it -- by subscribing to Apple TV.
I suppose one way to remedy this is to force all streamers to have an option for nonsubscribers to have access to their films. Say, $19.99 to watch this movie if you don't have Apple TV but don't wish to subscribe. But that would mean the less fortunate would be able to afford it even less.
So how would people who can't afford to subscribe watch? The public library, of course. Where you can borrow a lot of great content for free. Except I don't think there's a borrower program for streamers -- or is there?
With a little googling, I found this service: Kanopy. Using my library card, I just got on it. Sadly, it has neither Boys State nor Alles Ist Gut, which leads me to believe that Netflix and Apple TV does not participate, or if they do, participate thinly. Stranger Things - nope. House of Cards - nope. CODA - yes! Well, no. Three movies called Coda, none that match the Oscar-winning movie.
But then again, Mad Men doesn't come up, either, so obviously, premium content is not for the poor. Except Mad Men DOES come up if I search my library's website -- on DVD format.
So this is indeed the silo effect. The silo defect. What can we do about this? This is very, very wrong. Often with stuff like this, we used to say things like "Write your congressman!" but saying that now is more like a joke...
I find it depressing because it also means that movies can't be conversation any more. There was ORDER to the old world, damnit. We had 2-3 movies released a week and we could talk about those, and then in 6 months or whatever they'd get released to video or DVD, maybe show up on HBO, and everything made sense. Now I have a digital sticky-note on my computer about what movies are where. And for people who aren't as into movies as I am, I doubt they even can keep up
Always glad to see love for Boys State. That T/F screening had to be missing a very narrow sliver of crowd, but it played all the way to the back of the auditorium. The next day was abuzz about the film, the day after all anyone could talk about was how SxSW had been shut down. Extremely unfortunate timing. And maybe the movie came a little too late anyway - it has a lot in common with the competition doc trend in the early 2000s, though it's a much better movie than most of those - but it's still a movie I recommend a lot because it's hard to imagine anyone not being entertained and provoked by it.
Sidenote - this was the first post I tried listening to with a virtual audio reader via Substack's app. The first sentence was pronounced "What happens when movies become conTENT?" at which point I pressed stop and contemplated a world where sentient movies happily settled down.
This is definitely a real problem, leading to a lack of shared cultural conversation around film (& TV) titles that only segments can access or even know about. But the flipside is also true: people perceive that every film is available somewhere, as long as you find the right streamer. Alas the vast majority of historical titles, and many acclaimed recent titles (especially internationally) are simply unavailable on any platform and cannot be found on disc anymore (if ever). It's particularly challenging for film & media educators like me, looking to point students toward back catalogs and obscurities - if they can't play it on Netflix, they won't watch it.
Nov 12, 2022·edited Nov 12, 2022Liked by Scott Tobias
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!
I wonder if this only gets worse as streaming platforms crack down on password sharing. I currently have access to almost all major platforms through a patchwork of friend/family wheeling and dealing ("ok, I'll pay for Netflix and share my login, you pay for HBO and share yours..."). If I had to limit myself to services I'm actually willing to pay for personally, about half of those disappear. Or I need to start more aggressively rotating every 3-6 months, ugh.
IMO a huge part of Apple's problem is that they want to be the platform where you buy/rent media, so it's weirdly difficult to sift out what's free vs paid. Their free options are limited in comparison to almost all the other platforms, so it's often a very frustrating experience to find their content- much as I've enjoyed many of their shows (Loot, so charming! Bad Sisters, so well done! Physical, occasionally grueling but finding its footing!).
I keep wondering if this is the future of all types of media. The Internet was supposed to mean having everything imaginable at one’s fingertips, but now (unless you have the budget not to be choosy) it just means taking a stab at guessing which firehose will have the water most worth drinking. Awful for creators and awful for their potential audiences.
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.
The answer seems to be in that curation, at least for now. Look at what The Criterion Channel or, to a lesser extent, Shudder does with their themed collections that rotate monthly. Then compare that to Netflix's sad attempts at grouping films and TV into algorithmically-nothing categories like "Period pieces with a strong female lead" or whatever. And the fact that nothing is ever spotlighted in any meaningful way, or with any care given to cast & crew (a director or actor spotlight for example) and it's impossible to find anything. I don't know what they want from us, honestly. (Besides our money.)
I'm getting around this by keeping a watchlist on Letterboxd and filtering by service to see availability. I've discovered this week that five movies I want to see (Barbarian, Soul, French Dispatch, The Empty Man and Prey) are on Disney+, so I'll do a month of that and mop them up.
This of course only works if I'm actually reading about movies and know what to add so if they're not getting mentioned or reviewed anywhere the whole thing falls apart.
I think about this too often because of two things: Steven Soderbergh's K Street and Netflix's Chelsea. K Street can't be found streaming anywhere due to very gray "licensing" issues, which a jaded person could read as "certain lobbying groups/politicians realized they look bad and threatened to sue but this is unconfirmed and no one will go on record especially now to admit this so all parties agreed to never re-air the show since it was also so tied to the news of its release dates besides who wants to rewatch things from 20 years ago" but it's still property of HBO. Chelsea was a weekly talk show on Netflix and, as far as folks have found, the only program Netflix actively removed episodes citing "data" but it's terrifying that no one, aside from Netflix, could tell you what was on the removed episodes. That said, Joe Dante & Roger Corman's Splatter has been on Netflix streaming for 13 years when it was a gimmick release of "choose the next episode." Shudder or some other site has "the full series" as of this year or last year. So who knows, silos can get sold off too.
Me wrote piece for content maw of AV Club about DuMont Television Network — they were early competitor to NBC and CBS who went bankrupt (opening up slot for ABC as third network). They gave start to Jackie Gleason (including early Honeymooners sketches) and Ernie Kovacs. They had first Asian-American lead of TV series, in Anna May Wong playing art dealer-turned sleuth. They had first African-American women to host TV show, Broadway singer and pianist Hazel Scott, who had guests like Charles Mingus and Max Roach on show.
When network went bankrupt, they threw all their tapes into the Hudson River. All of that pioneering television is lost forever. And me feel like we coming back around to that attitude — that even though we now have technology to archive everything ever made and make it easily available to everyone, movie and TV show just treated like more content to toss into maw and forget about forever. (So much of early film history is lost for similar reason — no one thought anyone would remember or care about movie after its theatrical run was over, unless it was massive hit like Wizard of Oz or Gone With Wind, which would get revival screenings.)
Thank you for pointing me to a movie I've never heard before -- Boys State! Perfect for a post-election-night viewing.
My knee-jerk reaction to reading this is one of indignation. In a better society, no doubt we should be able to watch whatever we want. Right now, if you google Boys State, there is indeed only one way to see it -- by subscribing to Apple TV.
I suppose one way to remedy this is to force all streamers to have an option for nonsubscribers to have access to their films. Say, $19.99 to watch this movie if you don't have Apple TV but don't wish to subscribe. But that would mean the less fortunate would be able to afford it even less.
So how would people who can't afford to subscribe watch? The public library, of course. Where you can borrow a lot of great content for free. Except I don't think there's a borrower program for streamers -- or is there?
With a little googling, I found this service: Kanopy. Using my library card, I just got on it. Sadly, it has neither Boys State nor Alles Ist Gut, which leads me to believe that Netflix and Apple TV does not participate, or if they do, participate thinly. Stranger Things - nope. House of Cards - nope. CODA - yes! Well, no. Three movies called Coda, none that match the Oscar-winning movie.
But then again, Mad Men doesn't come up, either, so obviously, premium content is not for the poor. Except Mad Men DOES come up if I search my library's website -- on DVD format.
So this is indeed the silo effect. The silo defect. What can we do about this? This is very, very wrong. Often with stuff like this, we used to say things like "Write your congressman!" but saying that now is more like a joke...
I find it depressing because it also means that movies can't be conversation any more. There was ORDER to the old world, damnit. We had 2-3 movies released a week and we could talk about those, and then in 6 months or whatever they'd get released to video or DVD, maybe show up on HBO, and everything made sense. Now I have a digital sticky-note on my computer about what movies are where. And for people who aren't as into movies as I am, I doubt they even can keep up
This is it exactly. Every streaming service I have is just a huge huge watchlist and very few things watched. It’s dispiriting
This is such an incisive and economical piece. What a weird place we’ve all found ourselves in.
"It’s easy to pick on Apple TV+, because it’s relatively small"
I mean, the only reason you're picking on Apple TV+ is because they have good content, as opposed to the other multitude of small services.
I want to hear you pick on Paramount+, Scott!
Scott, do you think there's any room for anti-trust action here? Barring owners of the media from being the streaming distributor?
Always glad to see love for Boys State. That T/F screening had to be missing a very narrow sliver of crowd, but it played all the way to the back of the auditorium. The next day was abuzz about the film, the day after all anyone could talk about was how SxSW had been shut down. Extremely unfortunate timing. And maybe the movie came a little too late anyway - it has a lot in common with the competition doc trend in the early 2000s, though it's a much better movie than most of those - but it's still a movie I recommend a lot because it's hard to imagine anyone not being entertained and provoked by it.
Sidenote - this was the first post I tried listening to with a virtual audio reader via Substack's app. The first sentence was pronounced "What happens when movies become conTENT?" at which point I pressed stop and contemplated a world where sentient movies happily settled down.
This is definitely a real problem, leading to a lack of shared cultural conversation around film (& TV) titles that only segments can access or even know about. But the flipside is also true: people perceive that every film is available somewhere, as long as you find the right streamer. Alas the vast majority of historical titles, and many acclaimed recent titles (especially internationally) are simply unavailable on any platform and cannot be found on disc anymore (if ever). It's particularly challenging for film & media educators like me, looking to point students toward back catalogs and obscurities - if they can't play it on Netflix, they won't watch it.
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!