SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Guardian asks: Is the golden age of television over?
Money is the root of TV's problems. In the US, where the TV economy is headquartered, TV and internet access costs two to three times what it does in the UK, and networks are in a tug-of-war with Americans, who are increasingly shredding steep cable bills in favor of Netflix and streaming services. This summer, many networks became locked in all-out legal battles with cash-strapped cable companies, with multibillion-dollar distribution deals at stake to fund those networks' huge programming budgets.
Executives are planning for a less luxurious future, in which TV shows may be briefer, lower-budget and filled with the kind of product-placement ads that audiences hate and advertisers pay for. Worse still, the company that started much of the trouble may soon confront flaws in its own business model.
Netflix reports earnings on Monday. Its problems, and those of companies like it, are more pressing than those of traditional television. At a conference in New York this month, chief executive Reed Hastings was blunt.
"Disney, who is very good in China, had their movie service shut down," he told an audience at the New Yorker Tech Fest. "Apple, who is very good in China, had their movie service closed down. It doesn't look good."
Hastings said his company was seeking to expand in other countries, India in particular. But there's a reason media businesses seeking vast scale tend to view China as the solution to all their problems: internet penetration in India is rising from 26% according to the World Bank. In China, it's rising from 50%.
[Continues...]
Netflix needs the money that increased scale would provide, in part, to pay top dollar for shows such as Arrested Development and Lost. In January, it told investors it owed $10.9bn in TV show licenses alone, with $4.7bn of that due this year. After that, almost the entire balance is due before the end of 2018.
Netflix will have to keep buying reruns at what will almost certainly be increasing rates if it wants to retain its users, and the companies selling those shows are now in a tight spot too – largely thanks to the ad-free Netflix model.
At US television networks, budget struggles mean making shows more as UK networks do, except with lots of ads and product placement: shorter lifespans, fewer sets and special effects, fewer episodes per series – and then little margin for error if shows look like they're failing early on.
Netflix cannot scale back. Its viewers pay for it outright and express their displeasure by canceling subscriptions, not by changing the channel. If anything, its executives are spending more: Baz Luhrmann's 1970s New York period piece, The Get Down, came with a record price tag for a service that had already driven up the cost of new scripts: $120m for 12 episodes, according to Variety.
In short, television content is expensive. With fewer people watching, the advertisers are getting fed up with paying the premiums the television networks ask for, and people aren't willing to pay the real price required for good television content. Unless something changes soon, expect cheaper television shows with shorter seasons and lots of product placements within the shows.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:23PM
Oh boy unleash the star trek nerdiness debates everyone put on asbestos.
First of all the 2040s in cannon were roughly around the WW3 end of civilization thingy, think Kahn and his buddies and first warp drive flight wasn't till 2063 so things were pretty Fed up.
A cheap shot example would be the death of baseball predicted I believe in DS9 where they have the trends correct but the dates all wrong.
I'm a very long-time Trekkie, but definitely not to the level of obsessiveness of some people. One thing you need to realize about Star Trek is that it isn't entirely consistent in its "universe" and has a lot of errors. Just look at TOS: for the whole first season, there was no "Federation"; they ran around calling themselves "United Earth Ship Enterprise". Then at some point, there was magically this "federation of planets". Kahn and his buddies were supposed to happen way back in the 1990s in the "Eugenics Wars", and were supposed to leave the planet shortly after that. None of those guys look like they're under 20, so supposedly they must have been born in the late 1970s! DS9 and VOY were already airing in the mid/late 90s, and ENT came out in the mid-2000s, well after this.
In short, you need to take historical references in ST with a giant bowl of salt. They made up some silliness about Colonel Green and the Eugenics Wars back in the TOS episodes (probably season 2, ~1967), when it was just a silly low-budget TV show that no one had any idea would become a cultural icon for the next half-century, because Gene wanted to warn people about things like eugenics or whatever. Then, a quarter-century later with spin-off shows like TNG, they're doing their best to try to not completely ignore the backstory, but there was only so much they could do, and the writers didn't comb through every single old episode and piece together a detailed timeline to make sure they wouldn't make a mistake.
As for modern TV, I can't help you there, except to recommend Game of Thrones. It's really the only thing I watch (and of course I have to wait until next April to see the last season, so right now I don't watch anything at all). I've really lost interest in TV; I have too many other interesting things to do with my time, and I can't often find people who want to watch stuff with me anyway (except GoT--it seems everyone loves that one).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @05:22AM
Here is the great thing about fiction. If there is an inconsistency they can make something up and wave it away.
Take for example the throw away line from doctor who with 12 regeneration. It turned into this mythos. How did they get around it? They made something up and the show goes on.