Bela Bajaria, Netflix chief content officer : I look forward to cancelling all of your favorite shows after one season. Please look forward to Stranger Things Seasons Five through Nine. Its always exciting to see Millie Bobbie Brown frown at a monster until it explodes.
seems about right.
In all seriousness though, TV is in a weird place. I haven’t had cable or even an antenna for fifteen years at least. Now I’m cancelling my streaming services as they balloon in price and deflate in quality.
A large part of me wants to see it all burn, but TV ads manage to feed many friends of mine so that tempers my cynicism.
Most of what I see across the entertainment landscape is a sort of “maximize shareholder value” approach, which yields mediocre works as it uses surplus cash for stock buybacks and other investor-side bonuses in lieu of better budgets for creative work.
Has anyone delivered spots to Netflix or Disney+ yet? They’ve decided to roll out ad-supported tiers, because apparently time is a flat circle.
I imagine they get their spots trafficed from ER like everyone else.
I know what you mean @andy_dill. I sold our 75" plasma when we moved across the country two years ago, and haven’t really had a reason to buy a new one. My wife, daughter, and I enjoy our evenings reading, playing board games, or doing one of the many chores needed when moving into a new house. We do have a Netflix account that I’m always on the cusp of canceling, and a Disney Plus sub that my wife got a killer 3-year deal on. Since we only watch them occasionally from our laptops, off of the redneck home theater I cobbled together in our basement from some spare parts I had, I feel television doesn’t have the same addictive grip it once had on me.
TV is def in a weird place. it’s really insane how fractured and costly the market is now. it’s just going to push people back to pirating again. (HBO is making pretty great entertainment still. worth it IMHO). As others have noted, the freemium versions of them all will keep us in business for awhile yet. Plus legacy media dies a slow slow death.
You’re not wrong. I’ve been privy to some fairly high level TV executive discussions, and I’m not sure some of them understand what makes a good television series successful.