(This is a very long rant about streaming stuff that you should skip if the subject isn’t interesting to you)
Prior to reading the article above, I’d just received my email receipt this morning for my monthly autorenewal for Netflix, a moment that always raises very mixed feelings in me. The immediate feeling is a sort of rueful bitterness—“Why do I pay this every month for something I don’t use that much and that has very little I am actually interested in seeing? Netflix sucks.” But within seconds, I also experience the opposite feeling—“If 1980s or 90s Biff could see this library of thousands of movies and episodes available 24/7 to me for about 50 cents a day, he’d think I was living in the promised land. Netflix is kind of amazing.”
All of this is to say that Netflix (and all the streamers) neither sucks nor is amazing.
Conceptually, steamers should be amazing. In practice, they are not. This is the way of things in 2020s earth culture. Greed turns great ideas into mirror-versions of themselves, restricting their potential and dissatisfying users, while lining the pockets of whoever owns the idea/tech. That’s just how things work. It seems highly unlikely to ever change and very likely to get worse. In 2040, we will almost certainly look back on what we have now with great fondness. Ad-free content’s days are numbered.
Things are made worse by the concept of “exclusivity” as applied to consumable anything. To see what we want to see, we must subscribe to multiple services, as they all have “exclusive” content, some of which rotates at random to other services, some of which simply goes away and might(?) return at some point in the future, some of which is canceled on a whim. This is really irritating. What we all want to is to be able to easily find and watch whatever we want to see. The current model is devoted to providing the opposite of this. It might be on Streamer A, it might cost extra, and you might not be able to finish it because it rotates off at the end of the month.
Before this descends into an all-out rant against streamers, I must also admit that 1980 and 1990s me did not have kids or a wife or all of the stuff that is associated with that—my time then was my own, and the idea of scanning through an enormous database of media to watch would have been endlessly alluring. Today, I can’t do that. And that’s mostly on me, not the streamers.
But I say “mostly” because what may be my greatest frustration with streamers is the user interfaces. It should be (a lot) easier and straightforward and less time-consuming to be able to find something I want to watch. Why is there no simple list of what’s New, with the date it showed up on the streamer? Why aren’t there more niche categories? Amazon drills down to serious niche on their retail site, so it’s clearly possible to do so with a catalogue of items. Why can’t we see what other people have watched? I want a window that tells me, “OhBollox has watched and liked 80% of the shows you have—here’s what else he’s watched lately that you haven’t.”
Instead we have only what the streamer “thinks” I will like, which is usually just a bunch of their own shows they are marketing to me. Instead of niche categories, we get “Comedy”, “RomComs”, and “Movies Under 90 Minutes” (because people have short attention spans?). And instead of a user friendly navigation, we get a bunch of rows showing us what the streamer wants us to watch, what is “most popular” that day (is it really? Or is it stuff you’re trying to make popular?), almost none of which is remotely interesting to me. Amazon is the worst culprit, featuring less and less of available content for subscribers and more of their “pay extra to get this” content. There used to be a way to filter this, but that appears to be gone, presumably because too many people were filtering out all the stuff they didn’t want to pay extra for and amazon enjoys money.
Password crackdowns and ad tiers are not making us like streamers more. The idea of “engagement numbers” doesn’t translate to good TV. This is nonsense that reeks of desperation from an industry built on rolling the dice on content it doesn’t care about and that seems unable to understand its own success or decline. It can’t understand that its endless quest to get “more subscribers” reached a natural plateau some time ago—that cannot continue to be the metric by which success is measured (and possibly never should have been). Until we find an alien civilization on another planet that thirsts for earth media, there are no new audiences to reach at this point.
According to the article above, Suits was the most-streamed show last year. I doubt anyone in the industry anticipated this or understands why that was. I certainly don’t. But how many Suits-like shows will we see hit streamers next year as a reaction to that? (A spin-off is already in the works) Is that what people want, or was Suits (which I’ve never watched) simply an easy show for people to engage with? And how many people were RE-watching the show?
According to the internet several other shows in the top 10 last year were also shows that haven’t had new seasons in (many) years, with a deep reserve of old episodes—and large existing fan bases (which Suits did not have) who rewatch a lot—including Friends, Gilmore Girls, Supernatural, and the utterly dreadful Grey’s Anatomy. Wait—Grey’s Anatomy is still making episodes! How is that possible?
Anyway, the point is that there aren’t a lot of “new” shows in the Top 10. This is not good news for us, as streamers will undoubtedly view that as a signal that all they need to do is buy libraries of old shows and feature those (a la Tubi).
Another not-great sign is that Suits had about 57 billion streams in 2023, while the top streamed original show, Ted Lasso, had about 17 billion. That’s an enormous difference that even the people who run streaming services cannot possibly miss. If we want more quality and more new stuff to watch, anyone looking at these kinds of numbers isn’t going to be remotely inclined to provide it.
The main takeaway in the article above is that people are less and less satisfied with their streaming services, which is certainly how I generally feel. Some of that may be that the streamers themselves don’t really know what they’re doing, that it’s all just throwing darts at moving targets, and we’re getting content decided at random (it usually feels that way). Some of it may also be that we, as the viewing public, are unhappy with the way the streaming model is being iterated to progressively give us less and less of what we actually want out of it. And some of it is almost certainly that Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air.
