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The Streaming Service Cartoon Purge

The real question is who buys the actual studio lol. Dang thing's valuable - even Disney is known to rent out their biggest soundstage from time to time.

My money's on that, as much as IP, being what apple goes for. They're one of the biggest players not to have their own lot and soundstages in the LA area.
 
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Zap Rowsdower said:
The real question is who buys the actual studio lol. Dang thing's valuable - even Disney is known to rent out their biggest soundstage from time to time.

My money's on that, as much as IP, being what apple goes for. They're one of the biggest players not to have their own lot and soundstages in the LA area.
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The studio is valuable to production companies, but I doubt that the ownership of physical facilities will have much effect on people not directly involved with those companies. Even if Apple is driven by a desire to own its own studio space, most people will care more about what happens to Scooby-Doo.
 
GreatWyrmGold said:
The studio is valuable to production companies, but I doubt that the ownership of physical facilities will have much effect on people not directly involved with those companies. Even if Apple is driven by a desire to own its own studio space, most people will care more about what happens to Scooby-Doo.
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Excuse you, it'll have a huge impact because it's where the Animaniacs live
 
Konradleijon said:
Copyright used to be fourteen years and then twenty eight with a option to renewal for another twenty eight years.
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That's true but not what I'm talking about.

The technology for people to maintain a large local cache of media exists in a narrow band.

Basically it required cheap optical media.

Ironically, the studios haven't been too happy with the threadbare profit margins (or outright losses) of streaming compared to the DVD golden age.
 
Triggerhappy said:
That's true but not what I'm talking about.

The technology for people to maintain a large local cache of media exists in a narrow band.

Basically it required cheap optical media.

Ironically, the studios haven't been too happy with the threadbare profit margins (or outright losses) of streaming compared to the DVD golden age.
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Streaming has ruined media? Hasn't it.

All because we didn't want any ads.

So many people made their own streaming services and now no one can subscribe to them.
 
Konradleijon said:
Streaming has ruined media? Hasn't it.
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I think it's more subtle than that.

Y'know how Tesla is valuated at more than like, the next three auto-companies combined, despite building 2/5ths as many cars each year as Ford? A . . . fairly small (as huge companies go) car company whose main relevance comes from selling the red blooded American institution that is the F-150?

A good chunk of that is because Tesla is perceived not as a 'car company' but as a 'tech company'. And because technology is the only thing that can actually generate long term growth faster than the population grows and new resources are accessed, a tech company, unlike any other kind of company, can 'do anything' and therefore it's futures can shoot to the moon with the promise of 'disrupting the industry'.

Which is also why Elon Musk is constantly getting on twitter and telling us how Tesla will build fully autonomous AI robot maids that will replace all human labor . . . Because if he doesn't promise that, sooner or later, people are going to notice that Tesla is just a car company that makes a, eh fairly neat, Electric car that has some questionable marketing around its driver assist.

Netflix and other streaming services were perceived as 'tech companies'. But really all they are, are cable providers that use slightly more flexible digital decoders than the old cable boxes and offer a better on demand service.

But the problem is, due to their explosive growth, as they displaced the previous services and models, they were perceived as tech, and their investors expect tech growth numbers.

The only way to offer those numbers up to the VC gods is to perform fuck fuck games with the company valuation. Layoffs please the VC gods, because layoffs mean the company is 'running lean' and this signals that it is valuable, and desirable, and can be sold off for more than it was bought. As do increased revenue, even if the reason for that increased revenue was one time tax credit infusions or selling IP.
 
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It's good we can finally see streaming numbers because of the writers strike. Cheers for unions
Triggerhappy said:
I think it's more subtle than that.

Y'know how Tesla is valuated at more than like, the next three auto-companies combined, despite building 2/5ths as many cars each year as Ford? A . . . fairly small (as huge companies go) car company whose main relevance comes from selling the red blooded American institution that is the F-150?

A good chunk of that is because Tesla is perceived not as a 'car company' but as a 'tech company'. And because technology is the only thing that can actually generate long term growth faster than the population grows and new resources are accessed, a tech company, unlike any other kind of company, can 'do anything' and therefore it's futures can shoot to the moon with the promise of 'disrupting the industry'.
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Ventrue capitalism is a plague on the economy. It's not about profit it's about the promise of future profit.

It's faker then the shared delusion of money.
 
Konradleijon said:
It's good we can finally see streaming numbers because of the writers strike. Cheers for unions
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The trick is that numbers can still be deceiving. With enough data, collected uncritically, you can justify almost any decision by subtly altering the question.

Netflix, for instance, actually has its financial legs under it for right now, but my understanding is that they are still very dependent on licensed shows and movies for their staying power.

Yes, they have a fair number of their own compelling originals, but many of those are very high production cost limited series that appear, and then vanish from popular consciousness.

I mean, we all spent approximately 5 years anticipating the live action Avatar, and then about two weeks talking about it . . . and now it's kinda gone from the online discourse.

Nobody is paying for a Netflix subscription to watch Red Notice. And the appeal of Netflix's own backlog of originals is a lot less compelling when you blank out everything that ends on a cliff hanger cancellation.
 
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Konradleijon said:
Ventrue capitalism is a plague on the economy. It's not about profit it's about the promise of future profit.

It's faker then the shared delusion of money.
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Venture capitalism isn't separate from capitalism, any more than the pancreas or appendix are separate from the digestive system.

Consider the stock market. Investors buy stock for one of two reasons; they either expect the stock to pay dividends, or they expect to sell the stock for a greater price to someone else, who also expects one of those two things.
(In theory, stock price is determined entirely by the expected future value of dividends, even for corporations which have never paid dividends since they went public. Sometimes, economists just say shit.)

Anyways, it's all about the promise of future profit. Venture capitalism is just that, at an earlier point in the corporation's life cycle. It's understood as higher risk than (say) buying AT&T stock, but also with a higher potential reward. If you buy into the next Apple when it starts up, your initial investment of a few dozen million dollars could grow to nine digits in just a few years! And you don't have to hit the jackpot to make a profit. If 15% of your investments are worth ten times as much as when you invested, who cares about the 85% which are worth pennies a share at best?

To the capitalism stan, this is how capitalism rewards innovation. To the venture capitalism critic, this is a market where the quality of your product matters less than the quality of its marketing. To the capitalism-in-general critic, all markets are like that to one degree or another; quality matters only insofar as it convinces a rube to buy your product.

Venture capitalism is capitalism at its most unfettered. Nothing more, nothing less.
 
GreatWyrmGold said:
Sometimes, economists just say shit.
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Economist - "It's supposed to be determined by the company's value."

"And how do you determine that?"

Economist - Begins to sweat.

Edit : I dunno, with streaming, I think it's pretty obvious now that the 'golden age' was a product of a non equilibrium state of affairs where audiences were gaining access to a huge backlog of quality media that it was possible to license cheaply because it had already made back its money.

As we move deeper and deeper into the streaming era, and older shows and movies fall increasingly out of relevance, this becomes less and less true and the streaming services have to figure out how to produce stuff people will pay to watch on a much smaller overall budget.

Edit Edit : There's also the bizarre insistence, even with relatively secure services like Netflix to focus on only one of two extremes, reality trash, or ultra prestige, with almost the entirety of the 'mid range' episodic television supplied by licensed network/legacy tv shows.

It's very strange. Or maybe not so strange now that I think about it.

Growing up, my family were the proud owners of a 32 inch JVC television which we housed in a dedicated solid oak cabinet. This was the TV that I hosted Halo LAN Parties on (friends would bring projects that we'd set up in darkened rooms), with a crystal clear 4:3 aspect ratio STANDARD DEFINITION picture and the finest built in 2.0 STEREO SOUND!

It's laughable these days when you can get a TV that blows its performance out of the water almost for free (maybe literally for free, provided you don't mind letting Amazon monitor literally everything that happens in your home) but it did enforce a sort of armistice among TV studios.

You could only spend so much money. You could only make tv look so good.

Imagine spending Rings of Power money on visuals for a show that people are going to watch on televisions like the ones most people had in the late 90s. The only people who could hope to watch the show even remotely as it was intended would be those who shelled out for full home theater set ups, probably with a projector based television or one of those fancy Japanese TVs designed for HD laserdisk.

Modern displays have brought the theater experience into the home . . . But now you have to spend theater money to make the content, while users still want to pay tv prices, because that's what they were promised.
 
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Triggerhappy said:
Economist - "It's supposed to be determined by the company's value."

"And how do you determine that?"

Economist - Begins to sweat.

Edit : I dunno, with streaming, I think it's pretty obvious now that the 'golden age' was a product of a non equilibrium state of affairs where audiences were gaining access to a huge backlog of quality media that it was possible to license cheaply because it had already made back its money.

As we move deeper and deeper into the streaming era, and older shows and movies fall increasingly out of relevance, this becomes less and less true and the streaming services have to figure out how to produce stuff people will pay to watch on a much smaller overall budget.
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The economists most often platformed are the minority. Most economists say that copyright is too long and that the rich should be taxed at ninety percent of their wealth instead of teen percent.

But the rich assholes platform their pet economics to suck them off.

So many streaming shows that come and go.

The whole season at once approach means no one series can have a continuatious built up of fans as easily.

So shows have a small time with much more content to binge.
 
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Konradleijon said:
The economists most often platformed are the minority. Most economists say that copyright is too long and that the rich should be taxed at ninety percent of their wealth instead of teen percent.

But the rich assholes platform their pet economics to suck them off.
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And those are the guys who write the economics textbooks. Or at least the ones my teachers used. And that has plenty of influence among—

Oops, we're getting off-topic, aren't we?
 
GreatWyrmGold said:
And those are the guys who write the economics textbooks. Or at least the ones my teachers used. And that has plenty of influence among—

Oops, we're getting off-topic, aren't we?
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Yes it's like that episode of South Park where Randy gets the town to start worshiping the "economy" like a god and get mad at Kyle for "blaspheming" against the economy. Also a subplot where the US government cuts the head off chickens to determine what they do.

Yes but it is somewhat related to line goes up attitude common in business.

My proposed copyright reforms is that investors get twenty years of exclusive rights to make money on something they helped to fund. After the twenty years it goes into a state of compulsive licensing where anyone can use the text but if it is used for a profit making endeavor then you have to pay royalties to then actual creators and not the soulless corporations who had their chance to make money off a product for two whole decades.

How does a hundred and twenty years of copyright benefit anyone?

Once something is in the Public Domain it has lost basically all cultural relevance with few exceptions like the Great Gatsby. That's if it's still available and not destroyed like old films or books with a limited print run who are often destroyed by the time they enter the public domain.

With this model anyone could show twenty year plus media in an educational context for free. Which would be a real big help for film and history classes.

While still supporting the laborers that made Friends possible.

The corporation has had twenty years to make money on a product.
 
Wateryblue said:
Yes but for how long before the copyright bots eviscerate it from YouTube like so many other things whos copyright and license expired but the bots never get the memo and decided to create "Lost Media"
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It seems to be officially uploaded by the rights holder.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TQFlVcPyUA&list=PLrrh84y760v-hDEulas0Tp_wiQy0FcjLl
Who is now owned by Crunchyroll, so who knows how long that'll last, but it's not going to be the copyright bots that take it down.
 
Wateryblue said:

View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oq2lLW9qnI

SONY is just Warner Bros with a different outfit :anger:
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It isn't exactly uncommon for most media to not get kept long-term, honestly, and anime adaptions are just another shade of this trend. Media preservation has never been a priority for most folk, whether companies or individuals, and I never really expected anything on a streaming service to remain watchable a decade or two later.

That's what DVD and Blu-Ray disks are for. Or whatever storage medium you're using for X.
 
Mizu said:
It isn't exactly uncommon for most media to not get kept long-term, honestly, and anime adaptions are just another shade of this trend. Media preservation has never been a priority for most folk, whether companies or individuals, and I never really expected anything on a streaming service to remain watchable a decade or two later.

That's what DVD and Blu-Ray disks are for. Or whatever storage medium you're using for X.
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I don't know. Individuals might be arguable, at least when it comes to saving a few things for your private collection. I definitely agree vis a vis companies, though.
 
FelOnyx said:
It seems to be officially uploaded by the rights holder.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TQFlVcPyUA&list=PLrrh84y760v-hDEulas0Tp_wiQy0FcjLl
Who is now owned by Crunchyroll, so who knows how long that'll last, but it's not going to be the copyright bots that take it down.
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"Video unavailable
This video is not available"

So there's already at least some sort of region lock going on.

Edit: hilariously, this playlist displays one available video, which is Episode 13, and says that "38 unavailable videos are hidden".
 
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Mizu said:
It isn't exactly uncommon for most media to not get kept long-term, honestly, and anime adaptions are just another shade of this trend. Media preservation has never been a priority for most folk, whether companies or individuals, and I never really expected anything on a streaming service to remain watchable a decade or two later.

That's what DVD and Blu-Ray disks are for. Or whatever storage medium you're using for X.
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there is so much that can be written with how the fear of piracy and the drive to protect precious I.P. Law is disastrous for media preservation.

anti copy software on DVDs means even if you have a copy you can't share it with other people.

I despise modern IP law in all its forms. the idea that Copyright law primary benefits the creators of works is stupid bullshit that is disproven by looking at how copyright for movies works

fuck work for hire contracts they should be banned like in most countries.

the idea of either corporate ownership vs individualistic "great men" creators who single handedly make masterpieces TM is baked into modern copyright law reminds me of the American government treatment of indigenous societies.

what land which was once communally owned was divided into individual chunks to be owned by nuclear family units.

I think copyright law is simalier to dare to compare government forced assimilation to copyright law but it's of the same idea.

creative art made primarily by one person is very rare with it mostly being books.

look at the IMBD page for How Green Was My Valley for a random example. look at the cast page and see how many people worked to make it possible. no one person can make a movie possible. (exceptions apply) copyright still being in the hands of some corporate entity that helped fund it but as of now no one who helped fund the movie is still alive or working with the company
 
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