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Notes -
The Hollywood actors guild is on a strike. They are joining the Hollywood writers' strike, which has been ongoing for a few months. I did not know this, but apparently Fran Drescher (the loudly nasal woman from "The Nanny") is the president of the union.
Is this strike a big deal? Well, for one, it's the biggest strike for over 60 years. But what caught my eye was her rationalisation. You can read a summary of the demands.
A key demand has been surrounding generative AI. Actors do not want companies to create their own AI replicas of actors, nor to use generated voices and faces.
One possibility could be the actors raising the AI bogeyman as a cover to demand better pay. And to be sure, they are asking for a fairer split from the streaming model. Yet the AI demands are not directly linked to compensation per se, but rather asks about blanket bans. This does suggest that AI fears are genuine and real. Given very rapid progress in the generative field in recent years, perhaps they are right to be so.
Whenever I've read about jobs displacement from AI, invariably experts have opined that "the creative stuff will go last". Clearly the people who know their trade best are disagreeing with the experts. I'm not sure if this means that actors are paranoid or if we should disregard the expert consensus. Either way, I suspect we may see more and more of these kinds of Luddite strikes in the future, but perhaps not from those who people expected it from.
All you need to do is watch Rogue One to see their fears with the CGI Tarkin and Leia.
It's already happened. But I guess AI might make it cheaper and easier
Might as well shut the door now.
Anyways, I think AI and having to put out streaming numbers (to pay more equitable residuals) have been reported as the big sticking points.
The AI thing is obvious but the streaming numbers may be more interesting, in the short run, for us.
Many of these services may just be horribly unprofitable (this whole thing has been a gold rush of trying to blitzscale while everyone else is also doing it) and we'd finally know for sure. Maybe we'll have the transparency of the box office again.
It might mark the end of the streaming wars and possible consolidation if they have to pay profits they don't have.
The economics of streaming services have always seemed really weird to me. The incentives for the services are for consumers to subscribe for as many months as possible and watch as few shows as possible (zero, optimally). That doesn't seem like a formula likely to lead to high-quality shows, and yet Netflix, Amazon, and Apple have all produced a fair amount of high-production-value (i.e. at least expensive, if not to your taste) shows. I can't see how that can be sustainable for companies where they don't get any direct payments in exchange for making good shows. This feels like the stage in taking over a market segment where the companies produce high-quality products cheaply to gain market share / starve out competitors before slowly getting worse.
It doesn't seem to be possible to fund TV shows via a more direct "customers pay for the show" model for whatever reason (probably too much up-front cost, so it would look like a really expensive Kickstarter campaign trading on the reputation of the show runners with a release 1-2 years after payment?), so I don't have a better idea, unfortunately.
I think the idea is that Netflix builds up both a catalog of quality complete workand has enough of a reputation that you stay subscribed for the new, exciting stuff they bring you. Basically, they themselves summed it up as "becoming HBO before HBO can become us". HBO has been around for a while, and they sustain themselves on subscriptions and their reputation for making good shows.
If you are Netflix or any new upstart without a strong brand it is absolutely not in your interests - in the most crowded entertainment landscape in human history - to put out shit when everyone else is trying their hardest for people's eyeballs.
The problem is that Netflix's value proposition (or for a streaming service in general) drops the more competition there is. Netflix succeeded by being a one-stop shop when everyone was content to just license out their content. The more Netflix succeeded by cornering the market, the more competition started to wake up, the more companies trying to drown out their rivals in content (aka peak TV) before becoming enough of a monopoly to be secure or at least enough of a major player to be comfortable and the less everyone makes.
Especially since streaming offers strictly worse profits than the box office it's helping to kill and the DVD industry it definitely already strangled. People are paying prestige TV/film levels of cash and likely not getting that return (HBO does one GOT but then has shows like The Wire and Treme that get subsidized by it). Even worse: streaming makes piracy even worse since the minute it's on stream it's also on the Bay (COVID was a great time for just rolling out of bed, torrenting a "just released" movie and having it on your screen by the time your breakfast is ready.)
There doesn't seem to be one. Honestly, I don't think this is even specific to streaming: I think that the internet broke cinema and media and we've been basically managing the hangover since then.
When people can get it all for free it messes with the equation. Streaming was an attempt to exploit this unfortunate fact but it only seemed to be working so well because of a very artificial period of Netflix dominance (and the strike shows that some people think it wasn't working well for them anyways)
No such system will simply ever be as profitable as getting a direct payment for one watch, but unless some magical uncopyable format comes out that's over.
I think the socialists are right about this one: a lack of scarcity is kind of a failure mode for capitalism and here, unlike with patents, copyright and such, we don't have a good patch.
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