I support the strikes and hope it comes to a good conclusion; but this feels a touch forced, honestly. I get that it is in vogue to blame silicon valley, but hollywood has a littered history of killing their goose, as it were.
For fun, consider that if netflix had stuck to the DVD model, they could still be profitable. You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone. Just as you don't need a special license to loan or sell a dvd to a friend. You bought it and you can do that.
Now, if studios had their way, they would kill this. Hard. Indeed, they can refuse to sell dvds to companies that they think will then sell to anyone that is renting out in this way. They have tried that with redbox, from my quick google.
That is all to say, no, SV is not the root of the problem here. Atrocious licensing deals and ridiculously baroque rules around streaming/broadcast are far harder to comprehend than anything out of SV. Largely from the influence of hollywood...
Let me put it in perspective for you: Hollywood the actors and writers are on strike because Hollywood, the money making machinery decided to replace them with a product from SV.
I don’t care for Hollywood and indeed it has gotten quite garbage anyway but I do support the actors and writers striking because they can. For the rest of us it remains to be seen how we’re going to handle it or whether we boil slowly..
In a way they may determine our fate as well. Imagine one scenario where the strike flops, AI is implemented as replacement and all goes well. In this scenario we’re more or less going to follow the same.
I let other scenarios play out however your imagination desires
I'm trying to see how this put anything "in perspective." :(
I could as easily say they are on strike because the economy is contracting, and they are the least shielded from the contraction. No need to add SV into the mix. Studios have always been on the lookout for ways to not pay them, such that the latest attempt being streaming seems a bit of a non story item.
Again, consider if we had never moved to streaming and instead they were trying to get their payouts from the movies that are checked out from redbox. They would be seeing as much of a dropout in residuals as they are seeing, as the dip is in syndication residuals.
Sorry, re-reading my comment I could see how my comment may sound offensive and if it does I appologize, that wasn’t the intention. And I do agree with your reasoning from your angle. But do consider other angles so we don’t disagree unnecessarily when we may in fact see the whole picture from different angles.
> I could as easily say they are on strike because the economy is contracting, and they are the least shielded from the contraction.
The writer’ and actors’ problem is not a contracting economy (if that is even true). Their biggest problem is people now have tons of cheap entertainment options other than movies/TV, such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and arguing on forums like Hacker News.
Comcast, Sony, Netflix, Apple, and Amazon seem to be the other big players, and Netflix seems to be the only pure media company that one can compare numbers to, but it stands to reason they are all finding it harder to make money.
Again, though, you have to find a better reason than TikTok and friends to explain a slump that seems to have started at the same time as the pandemic.
Were there choices made during the pandemic that are hurting them in other ways? Almost certainly. But I'm not seeing how that is true for the claimed competition being what is hurting them, as these things existed pre pandemic, but only started really factoring in after it?
That is why I said "ish." It certainly sounds plausible. I'm not clear the evidence is showing it, though.
I am just looking around at the differences in how I the people I know spend their time.
I have 8 to 13 year old nieces and nephews that have zero interest in watching movies or tv shows when they come over. You would literally be punishing them by taking their YouTube or video games or TikTok away and forcing them to watch a 100min movie with you.
I also have kids in that range. And by and large, I agree that they would be distraught to not have Netflix/YouTube/etc. However, I also know that blockbuster movies are still raking in the money, as I have family insisting on seeing Barbie this week. Super excited about it. Kids also wanted to see the Mario movie.
And if you have kids in that range, I am willing to bet that you are also in the demographic of people that generally have a natural slowdown in going to movies and things. Turns out, having kids in this age range is a full time job.
None of which is to say you are wrong. I'm just not sold on the evidence, yet. Turns out, there is still plenty of big budget entertainment out there.
The kids are just as tired as many of the adults of watching super hero x version y movies with a smattering of Tom Cruise action version z. I am hopeful that Oppenheimer will be interesting …
The feigned move toward AI generated content would likely make things worse, providing bizarre fake Tom Cruise scripts generated from old real Tom Cruise scripts.
The numbers aren't really supporting this claim, though? They continue to pull in record crowds. The past few years were hit hard, but we have a solid reason for that. Most everything else will be secondary. Not non-existent, but not the primary driver.
Even the concern over AI generated content seems odd to me. Video games have shown that complete photo realism is not needed to attract ever growing numbers of consumers. Such that I can absolutely see AI and procedurally generated content being used in clever ways by creators.
That is, I largely think it will be a new market that exists along side existing ones. But it is definitely coming.
I just watched the latest Mission Impossible and it’s quite possible that an AI would do a better job than what I witnessed. Movies like that are ripe for AI and will probably still make money, but I am saddened by AI likely increasing the trend of similar unoriginal content.
Resignation that my taste for original content is not shared by the average movie consumer is humbling.
Right, the last full year was already back to 60% of the pre covid. This year is already on track to be back to 90%ish, if not back at growth. Such that the dip is clearly more attributable to what happened in the year 2020. None of the supposed "competitors" listed originated that year. So, again, I'm not sure that is showing the evidence of competition to big budget entertainment.
But 2022 still had a lot of hangover effects from the pandemic, is my view. Especially with this year on track to possibly be back at 2010 levels.
I don't deny that they are facing some problems. But I'm not willing to buy that it is the existence of instagram/tictok/etc. I have little doubt those could be involved. I have doubts that they are, though.
> Hollywood the actors and writers are on strike because Hollywood, the money making machinery decided to replace them with a product from SV.
this is slightly incorrect. the WGA was talking about a strike, then the AMPTP made it clear that they wanted to reserve the right to replace people with AI, and that escalated things quite a lot. but a strike was already on the horizon before that happened.
the analysis in the original LA Times article is all about streaming, and barely touches on "AI" (ML). this is correct, in my opinion, because the role of ML in this is kind of an attention-getting red herring.
in fact the article's way better than I expected when I clicked the link. I basically endorse its reasoning top to bottom.
a little context on that endorsement: I built a decent chunk of Hulu when it launched, and I've worked for an actor whose name you'd all recognize.
I have a vaguely insider-ish perspective on this, and I would really urge you to consider the fact that Hollywood's extremely visible, but also quite opaque.
this is the most important paragraph in the article:
It’s been noted, and correctly so, that entertainment industry labor disputes often erupt when there’s a change in technology — from theaters screening projected films to the cathode ray tube of the home television, say, or the rise of YouTube and other online content in the 2000s — and that happens for a reason. Historically, executives and management use a disorienting new technology to try to justify lowering wages of their workers, and they have done so since the days of the Industrial Revolution.
they definitely want to do that with AI, but they have been doing that here in reality with streaming.
The pending UPS strike is about improving the wages and benefits for non-union labor. Which in turn benefits the union labor because otherwise they're at risk of being replaced with cheap scabs someday.
In Australia collective bargaining workplaces unions negotiate the pay structure and benefits for all workers, members or not. This leads to some arguments that non union members benefit from the unions without paying the fees, and indeed, in my mostly white-collar government workplace only about 10% of workers are union members.
Unions mostly exist for unskilled workers (the most replacable) or specialised workers whose skills don't easily transfer elsewhere.
In the Netherlands employers pay part of the union contribution and members get some money from the union during the strike. Plenty of people are still not members
Yes, they could grab the reins by making their own content without the studios and putting it on YouTube or some other multimedia platform, similar to substack.com
This is a fight over (among many other things) who realizes the benefits of AI/streaming.
AI might mean that writers are freed from drudgery, their talents enhanced with powerful AI tools and now have a much more pleasant job that pays the same or perhaps more because they can produce more content or higher quality content. This is the Star Trek future.
AI could also mean that professional writers are barely needed. AI does the work, studio owners reap the benefit, and writers work day jobs and fight over the occasional poorly paid editing gig.
We as people will choose how AI changes the social contract. Anyone who relies on selling their labor to feed themselves and their families needs to be advocating for my first scenario, where productivity gains from AI are shared between workers, executives, and investors rather than monopolized by one or the other.
>Anyone who relies on selling their labor to feed themselves and their families needs to be advocating for my first scenario, where productivity gains from AI are shared between workers, executives, and investors rather than monopolized by one or the other.
I feel like the only way to effectively do this is to advocate for higher marginal income/wealth taxes that redistribute those productivity gains. Trying to fight for it on a business to business basis is easily a losing battle.
For example, one is going to wonder why they should pay more for groceries if technology can help them pay less.
They’re not, they want legal protections to stop companies from replacing them
For example paying someone for a day, scanning them, and using their image forever in AI content is both legal and allowed under SAG guidelines. Even if you think that what writers currently do can be done well by AI I’m pretty sure most reasonable people think that companies being able to do that is BS and you should get residuals or a really fat check if a company wants to pull that shit. It’s also about generally deteriorating conditions for actors and writers like shit pay and steaming companies not paying residuals. I actually think the AI part of the writers strike is mostly off the mark because ChatGPT is nowhere near good enough to replace a human writer and won’t be for years but general mistreatment of entertainment industry workers is totally a thing
My impression was that Netflix came along with up-front pay packages because taking a residual-heavy deal was not attractive back when streaming was unknown.
No mustache-twirling required, just a business model that made sense then and is no longer equitable.
The other point is that extras are getting full-body 3D scanned for a day’s pay, licensed in perpetuity. That is an existential threat to the profession; no actor could ever become a high-paid superstar if a bunch of producers own the rights to their likeness from back before they were famous. That’s the Marvel movies, not Netflix.
As you say, it seems Hollywood has a long storied history of abusing their labor pool at whatever opportunity they get. This is not something they learned from SV.
Extras have always gotten basically nothing, though? Quite often extras are "allowed to stand around" for filming of a scene that doesn't have a star in it for the chance of being on the big screen.
What? How does that work? Did Jet Li actually invent some techniques? Can you copyright martial art to begin with? Does Hollywood sue some kid if they do a flying drop kick on the playground?
If Hollywood wants to full body scan me so my likeness becomes famous forever, I'm all for it. Fly me down, give me a day pass to Disneyland, and I'm good.
That's easy for you to say because you have no skin in the game.
Imagine a service where a system can scan all your programming and engineering knowledge and expertise into an AI that then can be hired out to other companies infinitely and forever.
You might care then because this obviously reduces the profit you can now extract from your labor.
I give away for free all my programming output. But programming isn't the only thing I can do. I'd pivot to something else. Or I'd use that AI to enhance my programming productivity.
Just like word processors have eliminated the typing pool jobs, and have also greatly improved the productivity of writers.
(I know this because my dad wrote a book before word processors, and a great deal of the time was spent typing the draft double-spaced over and over and over again.)
And lastly, if you work in a make-work profession that is more efficiently done by automation, your career is doomed one way or another. For Hollywood, if the union makes it so that making movies is cheaper outside the US, the obvious is going to happen.
Labor and Right of Publicity with your Identity are two very different beasts.
You really don't seem to grasp what it all entails to have your likeness taken and used in _any_ fashion some business desires, or that it can be sold to another company who could use it in ways you didn't expect with the prior company.
Yikes, you can't post like this here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do, and I don't want to ban you. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Sorry dang... instead of calling Walter a bootlicker, would it have been more acceptable to post something like the following?
"Walter has a noted tendency to come racing into any thread involving labor disputes, stumbling over himself to defend the bosses and pointing out that the lazy layabout workers should be happy they're getting anything at all, and this instance is no different."
Basically, is it the tone, or the content of the message? I'll adjust as needed.
As you say the studios are good at killing the goose: tv, cable, VHS: each a huge money spinner and each caught tooth and nail by the studios.
> You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone.
Actually the studios strong-armed Netflix into not distributing new disks but maintain a “release window”.
Redbox wouldn’t do this and anyway couldn’t get Netflix’s sweet deal, so ended up asking people to buy disks themselves and send them to Redbox. First sale doctrine makes this legal in the US (as you implied) and the studios could do nothing.
Now Netflix and the studios are in a Mexican standoff and the studios make less.
Netflix used their magical tech money to compete with studios in a wildly unprofitable way. Netflix churns out hundreds of thousands of hours of content each year at heavy, heavy losses, because they can afford to burn money to force the studios to the table. If we imagine a world in which streaming platforms were only ever licensees and not producers, it’s easy to imagine the status quo could have continued indefinitely. Netflix are a studio, Netflix is responsible for many of their own show creators having zero royalties — look at the squid game financials!
Netflix are not an innocent tech company doing the best for consumers in the face of big bad Hollywood. For all of Hollywood’s flaws, it was a simple business: make something, make money off it, repeat. Netflix brought the Silicon Valley funny money into the picture and threw everything out of whack.
First Netflix as a company is profitable so it’s hard to say they’re losing money on producing content or not.
Netflix owning the content it’s producing means they can use it to help retain customers indefinitely. It’s a very difficult value proposition to accurately calculate because in say 2025 they could stop streaming and still have a revenue stream from licensing their content to other platforms.
I think you have this somewhat backwards, though? Netflix keeps getting taken to the table to renegotiate terms that they would not have to do if they were sending DVDs. If the big studios say no, Netflix has to stop streaming their shows. Pretty much period.
Studios did originally take them up on some early license agreements that were very time limited to see the market. And they kept terms that were basically identical as some of the terms they use for syndication, which Netflix agreed to as they don't want to share too much data, for fear of things.
Not shockingly, at the table between studios and Netflix, the actors and writers are not represented. Getting that corrected does make sense to me. I'm not entirely clear that having residuals tied to actual streams will actually benefit as many as the current discussion hopes.
> Netflix churns out hundreds of thousands of hours of content each year at heavy, heavy losses, because they can afford to burn money to force the studios to the table
Then that's just the cost of acquiring content, not a total loss. I'm not comfortable labeling it a loss because it supports user retention _and_ acts as force to draw in other content providers.
It sounds like Netflix discovered a superior business model to the film studios and outcompeted them with a vertically integrated product that started from distribution and then moved to production, while the legacy studios did the inverse.
I largely agree with you but imo this is a bad example
> their own show creators having zero royalties — look at the squid game financials
The economics of Kdramas (which is what Squid Games is) are different from that of American productions [0]. Netflix for example doesn't give residuals but is able to pay the entire production team way more than what Korean studios like Lotte, Myung, etc are able to with residuals.
A similar story happened with the rise of KDramas btw. In the early 2000s, JDramas became expensive when production houses like Sony started upping their pricing, which lead networks across Asia to start selecting cheaper dramas, which back then was Korean.
A similar shift is starting to happen again with the rising popularity of Chinese and Thai dramas (at least in ASEAN) which I feel is largely due to how their rights are now significantly cheaper than KDramas.
Imo, a similar shift also happened in OTT content in the US. Look at the "popular" (ie. Social media buzz) shows recently. It's either back catalogue shows like Community (#sixseasonsandamovie) or much cheaper produced European or Canadian shows like Kim's Convenience, Schitt's Creek, Downton Abbey, Peaky Blinder, Outlander, etc.
> If we imagine a world in which streaming platforms were only ever licensees and not producers, it’s easy to imagine the status quo could have continued indefinitely.
That'd have been great, but they studios decided they wouldn't license their content to them. Instead they went off to make their own streaming services, with their content exclusive to it. They effectively forced Netflix to start making content, or face an empty catalog.
There is a reason some governments previously blocked studios from owning theaters. It leads to goofy behavior.
For more in that "goofy behavior" line, it is mind boggling that the Netflix exclusives of Daredevil and other Marvel shows are no longer viewable on Netflix.
A lot of their productions are very niche. I mean, Bojack Horseman... absolutely good show, beloved by its fans and more than worth a binge, but was it actually mainstream much outside of the Mental Health Twittersphere?
The worst thing for Netflix is, for none of their original shows they managed to pull off "outside" draw: merchandise/swag outside of hoodies and coffee mugs, books, spin-offs and most importantly fan fiction.
> Netflix churns out hundreds of thousands of hours of content each year
Uhh, how much content do you think Netflix is making?
There exists 8760 hours in a year.
To produce "hundreds of thousands of hours of content each year" would require producing almost 23 hours of content for every hour in the day. Every single day.
From its creation Netflix has only produced around 1500 original shows. Give a few hours per movie and maybe 10-50 hours per show depending on episodes and seasons.
No where close to hundreds of thousands of hours of content even since their inception.
Not sure who "Hollywood" is in your statement, but "Hollywood" is mostly the studio scumbags who are trying to make actors and writers obsolete; so yes they're trying to harness Silicon Valley technology to do it... but it's still asshole CEOs across the board.
What few articles point out is that these companies have been riding the gravy train for years on the backs of writers and actors, whose union agreed to an absurd and abusive contract LAST time. That's when the same C-suite trash finagled them out of their royalties by whining that streaming was "new media," when everyone the least bit savvy knew that it was NOT "new media" but in fact the new NORMAL.
So now we have people who don't even get benefits, and scrape by on multiple jobs, finally demanding fair pay a decade later... and the studio/network trash are trying to render them homeless. If you think these guys aren't assholes to the core, look at this: Universal Studios vandalized taxpayer-owned trees to DENY PICKETERS SHADE: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/19/business/sag-aftra-strike-uni...
The article claims the trend of going big on streaming started at Netflix and the more traditional players followed along. It seems a reasonable claim.
> For fun, consider that if netflix had stuck to the DVD model, they could still be profitable.
Netflix is earning multiple billions of dollars in profit per year already, far more than they used to with DVDs.
Also, I expect most people to prefer digital only streaming to any device they have at any time over having to deal with physical disks and single locations.
Yeah, I shouldn't have said "still be profitable." For that, I meant they could be in a stronger position to ignore studios.
And it is a bit mind boggling to think of 4.4 billion in profit. Wow.
Still, my point mostly stands? If the studios decide not to let Netflix stream their movies, then they don't stream their movies. This was far more hollow of a threat in the early days of streaming, but nowadays it is very conceivable that they can leverage their back catalog for someone. Such that Netflix is quickly getting to where what got everyone to sign up is at major risk of going away.
And this is far from hypothetical. It is mind boggling to me that Daredevil is no longer available on Netflix. Something they literally helped produce.
Amusingly, I suspect this is me falling for the "engineer" trap. Producer is clearly a technical term in that field that all to many of us think means something more nebulous. Doesn't help with "executive producer" being a thing that I know a ton of folks mean "funded."
So, whatever their technical role's name, my understanding is that they put up a lot of money for the shows to be made. And now can't show them. Is that not the case?
> That is all to say, no, SV is not the root of the problem here.
In 2015, %80 of people watched network tv regularly and 50% had streaming accounts. That has flipped in the last 8 years. Total television revenue has declined 35% in that timeframe.
What’s happening to television now is what happened to newspapers 10 years ago: low-cost distribution alternatives disrupted the major networks and created new business models to control distribution and make employees take the financial hit. The fact is that Netflix was first to adopt streaming and did so with vast venture capital backing. This analysis does a pretty good job of looking at the financials of television in the streaming era.
Right, the way that residuals played out for syndicated shows is ultimately a large part of the decline for the guild members.
I am still a little curious on a few things in this. For one, I'm not clear on how long residuals can last in a sustainable way. Pretty much no matter how I try and simulate this payment model, it falls on needing more income from future participants. Not quite a ponzi scheme, as you are not asking future members to put money into the pot. You do need them to keep the machine running, though.
Granted, in that framing, the studios are effectively private equity groups that have managed to skim off a ton of value from the creative works? (Saying this as someone that isn't too keen on what a lot of private equity has done.)
> I'm not clear on how long residuals can last in a sustainable way
They were possible before, since there was much less content available at any given time. The media industry is in a bit of a death spiral it feels like, with a race to the bottom in many ways.
When broadcast tv was a bigger thing, syndicated shows were licensed to stations, who typically sold ad slots, allowing them to pay the licensing fees.
The problem is in many ways streaming platforms just really aren’t that cheap to run in the US when compared to old methods of distribution and the margin is almost entirely going to the platform, not the people making the content.
I'd rephrase your first as they were easy to keep up when everything was growing. That is, again, I don't see how residuals can be a lasting form of payment for people like this. Note that this is decidedly not saying that I don't think they should be getting them now. Mine is a longer term question.
Also, cards on the table, I'm ultimately a fan of basic income, which can effectively be seen as residuals for everyone. No need to pretend that it is tied to specific work where folks are basically in a lottery to see if they can get their name on the big ticket item that everyone wants.
> You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone. Just as you don't need a special license to loan or sell a dvd to a friend. You bought it and you can do that.
Allow me to introduce you to British Columbia, Canada:
"By law, any person or business that distributes or publicly exhibits motion pictures or Restricted or Adult DVDs (adult motion pictures or “adult videos”) in BC requires a licence. To “distribute” means to rent, lease, sell or supply (or to offer to provide any of these services)."
There's also a whole industry for supplying dvd for rental purposes which charges serial multiples of the retail price per copy and you are legally required to purchase those version and are not permitted to rent out retail dvds.
I learned this when I was going to try to have a used dvd club in a small town and fell afoul of these issues, as it was a for profit venture.
I didn't read the article that way. I think that SV is simply the current catalyst of tech being used to try and justify decreases in quality and/or number for labor. Hollywood seems to either be huffing the same AI fumes or at least want people to believe they have for this iteration.
Why don’t we reduce this down a bit? Hollywood studios are businesses. Businesses exist to create value for owners. Hollywood talent is expensive. AI tends to be much less expensive. Hollywood studio execs believe they might be able to replace expensive talent with cheap AI, thus creating more value for owners.
The interplay between SV in the form of Netflix and Hollywood in the last 15 years of streaming wars is interesting but the author loses the plot a bit in trying to connect to Uber, WeWork, etc. By the time those companies were making waves the Hollywood trends were already in motion.
Netflix made waves for sure with original content, but if you look at in another light, it was just an extension of what HBO and other cable networks had already started doing.
And Hollywood initially was much more concerned with Youtube and piracy than Netflix, see the introduction of Hulu as a free ad-supported broadcast-network-based "TV from last night" alternative to piracy.
Hulu borrowed the back catalog model from Netflix as streaming grew, and then eventually started doing its own originals too, which was then also copied by everyone else, including Youtube, ironically enough.
And this was a boon for writers and actors and studious, but at the same time the contracts weren't particularly well thought out (see how some stuff has now been pulled from streaming altogether because the views weren't seen as enough to support paying whatever was needed to make it available at all per contract) or actor/writer friendly in terms of residuals.
So it's a tough time on the backend now since hardly anyone who tried to throw money at content and hope profit followed succeeded (hi Quibi), and the market was oversaturated, PLUS the deals got increasingly talent-unfriendly since the syndication residuals and similar dried up. And now there's the specter of AI too!
But all that was set in motion from 2007-2013, before "magical thinking" about Uber, Theranos, WeWork, etc was mainstream; and even without AI things would be at a head.
> at the same time the contracts weren't particularly well thought out
I think they were plenty thought out: Netflix set more or less fixed residuals, which is quite different from “more popularity = more money” for other distribution models.
People were mostly fine with it because most shows were not super popular. But if everything is on it suddenly there is no “high end”. And streamers pulling shows means your “low end” revenue disappears. No mountain to cover valleys, and valleys are getting deeper.
Fair, that makes sense too, but that part of "now stuff will be black holed" is what I think wasn't particularly anticipated from either side. Especially from the streamer's side: now you've spent money on shows that aren't even gaining you "niche back catalog size" benefits.
It’s the streamers making the black holing decision I think? Like the studios aren’t saying “remove this”, but the streamers deciding to not pay residuals. My guess is the higher profile removals are for shows that had special residual deals but most of it is probably just trying to save cash
That seems to be a distinction without a difference?
Sure, you can say the studios are not demanding that shows be removed. But, they are demanding that shows get paid for on each stream. And the streamers have done the math to see that it is cheaper to stop streaming them.
This kind of thing didn't happen at your old rental spots, as they specifically did not have to pay back to studios on each rental out. Just as your library doesn't have to pay on each lend. Moving the streaming into that world is very different.
Broadcast is /almost/ comparable. But there they don't give viewers a choice of what to see. It is them paying a much smaller subset of shows for the right to broadcast them. It is a payment model that doesn't scale up to on demand streaming capabilities.
To be fair, I suspect that the deal was actually on the right to be able to stream. Not per active stream, as that you could probably still find a way to make work. But if I have to pay for the right just to offer a show, and the number of people watching it are low, I can fully understand just not bothering.
Of course, it gets further complicated when you consider it a broadcast, as that also requires some considerations on the music rights that have to constantly be redone, as well. Truly a very baroque system that is exceedingly complicated.
The economy goes from boom to bust, bust to boom, new technologies and ideas come, the novelty wears off and reality sets in (but the gems stick around!), so on and so forth. One thing that was unique this cycle was the extended period of near-zero interest rates in the rich world - this made the boom very big.
I’m not sure it’s “Silicon Valley” thinking other than as a euphemism for subsidizing losses in hopes of future profits. But now interest rates are up, money is expensive, and justifying investment when 5% return is guaranteed means you need to promise significantly over 5% return. Junk bonds are one thing but highly speculative investments like VC are less attractive.
It’s sad that Hollywood creatives are struggling but they were part of a bubble, just like tech and biotech. Will be a tough 2 to 7 years.
Fiat currency is the result of trying to finance WW1. The propaganda reason was to even out the boom-bust cycle, of course that promise was never fulfilled.
It's the management of the fiat currency that's part of the problem, not the fiat currency itself.
Fundamentally it's human laziness and corruptablility, both actively and passively.
But it's also basic human nature in reaction to stock market bubbles and the fomo of getting rich quick.
There aren't enough rules and regulation around stock market trading, or at least they're not enforced well enough, to maintain some kind of rationality.
... and it still may not actually be possible.
But there's little effort to reign it in because the powers that be tend to massively profit from the status quo.
Crypto is the opposite of the gold standard. Instead of backing currency with a physical object with inherent value, it's backed by absolutely nothing and grows at a pace governed by people whose primary goal is to benefit off a pyramid scheme.
Fiat currency gets a bad rap because it can be mismanaged, but a metal backed currency isn't compatible with rapid growth and we've yet to find a better alternative.
I'm not saying crypto is like a gold standard, I'm saying it behaves more as a commodity (like gold) than a currency. There's a couple of properties that make gold really useful as a form of money (rare but available, easily divisible, easy to transport) some of which are shared by crypto. The main difference is that gold also has some intrinsic value, but I reckon most of its value comes from its use a store of value. If not convincingly gold looking jewellery should have a similar price, and I don't think that's the case.
Not sure if a metal backed currency is harder to mismanage. Lowering the metal content in coins or simply lowering the corresponding amount of metal have both happened. I'm pretty sure the US simply reneged on their promise to exchange promissory notes for gold at some point.
Frankly I think that no matter the currency bankers are going to abstract it into something that they can work with eventually.
>>Currency is the lifeblood of the system known as a state,
Correct, which is the primary reason I oppose it. I consider the state to be part of the problem with human society
>>what exactly would you consider an alternative?
I dont proscribe a single "alternative" nor do I believe an single alternative should be mandated by a state, nor do I believe it is the proper role of a state to control the medium of exchange
So you're just blaming a Complex and ingrained societal concept without offering a better model(s)? It's fun to do it with small tech projects but world commerce probably needs a bit more thought considered before attacking it.
Yes, the currency was always entirely trustworthy... No one lied or played games...
I wonder how many of modern day businesses would be ready to deal with real physical gold, silver or whatever. As any digital or paper based one can't really be trusted in long run.
It is caused by tech and by tech quite exclusively by Netflix, for sure. But nothing recent or magical thinking is to blame here. In the past people were dumbly forced to pay hundreds of dollars for a cable package they never truly utilized fully. They bought CDs for 10-15 bucks a piece. They bought DVDs in Walmart for movies they never would have paid any money for otherwise except maybe because it’s now in the discount bin.
One could argue that the per capita entertainment expenditure in the US might have been in the hundred+ dollar range in the nineties.
But now due to Netflix and Spotify that’s not true. Even with all the subscription services it’s a small fraction once you divide family sharing. Thus we are making more movies and shows and music with less money for the total pie. Something’s gotta break. Realistically half the studios or folk making these things just have to stop making them. The industry cannot survive on the smaller pie with so many people eating chunks of it (I mean studios and tech companies not workers). It’ll be interesting to see how this actually ends up working out.
there is only so much studios can do to grow their slice of the pie. They can't make much cheaper content reality TV is about as low cost as they can go and not be beaten completely by YouTube. They could make less total content but higher quality that was HBO's modus operandi. But AT&T didn't know how to run a media company and sold them to discovery which is run by a producer of the lowest quality reality TV. so now that's looked at by other producers as a bad strategy even though it more a case of bungled management. from their perspective the only way forward is to cut production cost but the unions probably strong enough to outlast them with new and current productions on hold
This seemed like a pretty tortured explanation of what's going on here, as though the punching bag was selected before the mechanism was figured out. Then I realized the guy they were citing was Adam Conover, who drafts explanations like that for a living. Mystery solved.
Haha I was watching some of him on YouTube yesterday and he has some quite interesting views and choices of topics but I was thinking the whole time, "something about his style is really grating"
I continue to wonder how much studios are ACTUALLY hurt by this strike. The studios have reserves of money, they still get money from streaming existing content. And short term they can still release content that are in post-prod enough to release.
On the other hand, the public supports of the strike amounts to ... wanting new TV shows and movies. It's annoying for many I'm sure, but its not exactly something that keeps you alive.
> the public supports of the strike amounts to ... wanting new TV shows and movies
Nobody in my social circle has taken any notice of it, because movies and TV has become so bad that none of us watch them anymore. Dune was the last Hollywood movie I watched, Oppenheimer and the next Dune are the only movies I’m looking forward to watching. There’s nothing on TV that I watch. I’m somewhat looking forward to the 3 Body Problem adaptation, but I’m expecting it will be bad.
As far as I’m concerned they can stay on strike forever. Let somebody who can do a better job replace them.
The same executives who want to steal the wages of the writers and actors are responsible for the quality and range of productions. It is only a handful of directors who get full creative license.
I agree that good sci-fi is rare but don’t think that my personal dissatisfaction should result in many thousands of already exploited people who put in incredibly hard work, their heart and souls in what they do, to go jobless - because you and I don’t like how their bosses, the same bosses who are trying to squash them, do their jobs.
Finally, we might have similar tastes. A few things you might like: Outer Range; The Underground Railroad.
I believe that the entertainment workers strike in Hollywood deserves my support.
I do sympathise for the poor working arrangements, but I just can’t bring myself to support a return to the status quo that would continue producing more of the same content that Hollywood has been producing.
I certainly don’t blame only the writers. The producers and executives also play a major role in the decline of the quality. But I’ve seen bits and pieces of TV recently, and I do think the writing itself is typically just bad, regardless of other creative constraints.
There’s many ways that a system can fail, and I’m simply not upset to see this system progressing along its path to failure.
They’re stuffed with content, but much of the content is of poor quality. The good stuff everyone has seen, and you can attract new viewers with a new show that is good.
They have 30-40 years worth of content. I agree, majority is bad. But there is still plenty of stuff to watch. Plus, rewatching some old great show often is more rewarding than consuming all this new drek.
That old content is not on Netflix, or if it is is quickly disappears for "rights" reasons. Even more so now with every company coming out with its special streaming service.
I have a feeling that they are optimizing for view length (binge watchers) instead of commercial value of views.
If I watch only 3 Netflix movies or 1 serie in a month, I should be getting 10 times more budget per movie / serie than a person viewing 30 Netflix movies / 10 series. Sadly this doesn't happen.
I disagree. Tons of good stuff flew under the radar over the years... I have a huge backlog to work through just flipping through ranked stuff on Reelgood.
> wonder how much studios are ACTUALLY hurt by this strike
Netflix is fine. The others are hurting, but not bleeding, except maybe Discovery. Keep in mind the top-paid actors take in about as much as the top-paid studio heads.
The amount of money plowed into creating new content that nobody watch is the hollywood equivalent of the Bridge to Nowhere project, except on the private investors' back.
The volume of content that has been made in the past few decades is enough to keep the entire world occupied for probably the next couple decades.
Human attention is a finite resource and it directly correates to and puts a ceiling on how much the money studios and creators can earn.
We've long past the ceiling and the gravy train has been coming to a stop.
"The boom times are over. Executives know it. Wall Street knows it. And the story that we're in a revolutionary moment of technological transformation will run out of gas soon."
"Wildly profitable tech companies are citing an as-yet notional recession to make deep workforce cuts. They may have another agenda."
There's a two speed economy. If you're in the low speed part earning less than the median then you're already in recession. If you're in the high speed part you will be in recession when you stop being able to extract money from the low speed economy.
As seductive as that story is, the data doesn't bear it out. Hourly workers have made huge gains in the last three years at the expense of salaried workers, and flyover states are turning the tables on coastal states.
Look at: real hourly wages and unemployment figures.
I have some fairly big gripes with the way inflation adjustion is calculated. Mainly: I don't think it properly covers the difference between discretionary vs non discretionary spending across different income levels.
Ultimately, if you're poor, the only weightings that _actually_ affect you are (in order) food, housing, transportation, and energy. Everything else including healthcare ultimately doesn't become part of the equation, because you can't afford it.
It doesn't matter if cars are cheaper if you can't afford to buy one anyway, it doesn't matter if drugs are cheaper if you can't afford your prescription anyway, and it doesn't matter if restaurants are cheaper if you can't afford to eat out anyway.
Pretending like the price of consumer electronics (which can be a big one off spend, but amortised over the several years they last are fairly small) or plane trips matters at all to the spending power of poor people is laughable.
I’d argue housing should be first in that list, since it represents almost 50-70% of a poor persons gross income. Food is critical of course, but beans and rice with occasional road kill are cheap and can sustain someone nutritionally.
Are we doubting in a tech oriented community that software had a big boom during the pandemic and that we're returning to industry norms post pandemic? You'd think the near daily large tech layoffs would clue one into the situation.
Time for SV to go on strike too. Far too many companies have promised far too much to investors.
Now that it's harder to get the same meteoric growth, they are resorting to squeezing workers, RTO mandates and general hand flailing at the expense of employees.
> We’ve heard a lot about the ways that studios want to reserve the right to use AI — to create endlessly usable digital replicas of actors, to generate scripts that writers will be paid lower rates to fix up.
Does anyone know of ongoing attempts to achieve these kinds of products now? Seems like vaporware right now
It for sure is something that people are trying to do. The weird Twitch AI Seinfeld jumps to mind. You can find a few different versions by just searching "script writing AI" or "Movie making AI" but I have no desire to sift through that trash pile. I think we're pretty far away from making something that is appealing outside of the novelty or "so bad it's good."
On the other hand, I'm not sure if you couldn't just use AI to write/generate a lot of children's programming. It's already highly formulaic, parents only halfass pay attention to it, and kids are exactly highly decerning critics. Sure some kids might be very misguided and confused by the AI media babysitter, but is that really any different than what we already have?
That's the kind of thinking that these unions fell for LAST time, when they agreed to contracts that treated streaming as some kind of "new, unproven" media... which it obviously wasn't even then.
So the studios have been screwing these people for years, and now they're whining that they're being asked to pay up from here on out. This is like the banks bitching that Obama put a stop to a bunch of their shit after they screwed us for decades. And we're going to hear all that and more if Congress finally acts to rein in another scumbag industry: airlines.
The product could exist in the future, and the studios could give themselves permission to use their library to train AI models in the contracts. Even if they don't do it this year or the next, actors want assurances that their facial structure won't be ripped off.
Separately, writers don't want to read the trash that contemporary LLMs spew, and readers/listeners/watchers don't want it either, even if a human edited it.
Most the writing on TV today is just awful. I support living wages and fare compensation but the quality of programming and writing seems to be at an all time low. Dune was probably the last solid movie I have seen in years … and that’s because it mostly stayed true to a novel written decades ago.
Reportedly the 3-stooges were ripped off by the studios who also hid or obstructed or misrepresented how much their stuff made.
But closer today ... I had a two year debate (80s/90s) on Japan conquering some 30% of the US market. The other guy argued state support and price dumping by the Japanese. I argued laziness on the part of American management who did not take quality and process control seriously. I also critiqued US auto labor unions for loosing their minds ie both of them ... since that time and since the decimation of unions since the 60s/70s today's corporate managers are virtually guaranteeing labor will return to strong unions ... stupid pay packages, bad fiscal control, and attempting to squeeze labor hard. ceos will create and legitimize them.
That's right, LA Times! No one in the whole history of the world ever succumbed to Irrational Exuberance before. It was Big Tech that brought that plague down on us.
Of course, it was 1996 when Alan Greenspan coined the phrase, before Google & Amazon were big, so we have to cover up that fact.
It's worth noting most of this article is spelled out by Adam Conover, the ex-CollegeHumor star of Adam Ruins Everything. Generally speaking, the man does his research.
> These companies blew up a successful business model that the public enjoyed, that was immensely profitable, and they replaced it with a mishmash that we have now
They were only "immensely profitable" because they were in an oligopoly with 4.5 players. Netflix disrupted that, and then it was a race to the bottom. Saying the "public enjoyed" network TV is a bit of a stretch, too. For the most part, it was just adequate.
> Saying the "public enjoyed" network TV is a bit of a stretch, too. For the most part, it was just adequate.
Not adequate either. Throwing a hundred ads during one show, at the same time charging you for it and that's somehow a good experience? Netflix is a million times better and that's why they're still raking in money.
>Saying the "public enjoyed" network TV is a bit of a stretch, too.
They may not have profited as much as they would have from cable, but the number of viewers seems to speak for itself. I know they aren't the HN audience but surely we can see wider than that.
The virtual people are coming, the generated scripts are coming, the generated worlds are coming, the glue code is coming. It can probably match the standard sausage. I doubt people will watch a lot of it but who knows. The market for hand made sausage will decline.
I think the more compelling tale is that Hollywood execs are infected with Wall Street thinking. Maximum profit extraction, the kind of product is irrelevant, as are the customers.
I'm talking about how billionaires like Bob Iger are essentially trying to squeeze "labor" to extract more profits, which is what Wall Street did to the newspapers, to radio, to television, the music industry...
We're getting ever crappier products in nearly every consumer category, because short term profits for shareholders are prioritized over the long term viability of the firm. Wall Street likes to shred firms for "value" and move on.
I want healthy capitalism, not scorched earth financialism.
> I don't know what on earth you're talking about.
I'm talking about your statement: "Maximum profit extraction, the kind of product is irrelevant, as are the customers"
The Soviet movies were not about profit at all. Why didn't they make better movies than Hollywood?
> We're getting ever crappier products in nearly every consumer category, because short term profits for shareholders are prioritized over the long term viability of the firm.
Which corporation has done this, and have you been shorting their stock? After all, if you know which companies are doing this, you can make a mint shorting their stock.
Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and any company that sells appliances made in China these days.
I don't short stocks, requires way too much attention.
> The Soviet movies were not about profit at all. Why didn't they make better movies than Hollywood?
Because they were propaganda, which is a lot of what Hollywood has been producing. Since it's failing, the execs are moving to squeeze out writers and actors rather than make better product.
You read an awful lot into me being against ruthlessness in business. I'm not in favor of communism; it's been dangerous and a colossal failure everywhere it's been implemented.
I am saying that today's Hollywood execs don't understand story, don't understand viewers, and don't care to build that kind of understanding. They only think in terms of knobs they can turn to get more money pouring in: "X marketing dollars yields Y revenue... Hmm... why didn't that work. Looks like we need to lower wages."
Quite a sweeping generalization. Besides, many Hollywood movies are good in spite of being rather excessive propaganda.
> today's Hollywood execs don't understand story, don't understand viewers, and don't care to build that kind of understanding
If someone is running a profitable business in X, I'd pause before concluding they are ignorant fools. It's a competitive business, the fools get squeezed out.
It's the job of a CEO to generate maximum revenue while minimizing costs. It's also the mission of every worker to maximize compensation. It's how markets work. It is not inherently evil. Don't you want to get paid the most you can get? Don't you want to pay as little as you can when buying things?
BTW, even the Beatles had a bunch of duds on their albums.
That didn't used to be the only job of the CEO, though. CEO pay used to be roughly 4 times the pay of the average worker, not 30 to 40 times the pay. It also used to be the CEO's job to ensure the health of his company in the form of the health of his workforce including their ability to stay in the middle class.
Publicly traded companies end up being driven by perverse short-term incentives.
> CEO pay used to be roughly 4 times the pay of the average worker, not 30 to 40 times the pay.
When you have $100 billion subject to his decisions, do you really want to cheap out and not get the best you can find? Take a look at Nadella's reign at Microsoft. The value of the company increase ONE THOUSAND PERCENT under his leadership. As a long term MSFT shareholder, I have no problem with his compensation.
Besides, his compensation is coming out of MY pocket, not the employees. The shareholders pay his salary.
> Publicly traded companies end up being driven by perverse short-term incentives.
They don't grow if they are driven by short-term incentives, they collapse. Do you really think that companies grow into the S&P500 by sabotaging their prospects?
> including their ability to stay in the middle class
Worker pay was and is determined by the Law of Supply & Demand, not some expectation of the CEO.
For fun, consider that if netflix had stuck to the DVD model, they could still be profitable. You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone. Just as you don't need a special license to loan or sell a dvd to a friend. You bought it and you can do that.
Now, if studios had their way, they would kill this. Hard. Indeed, they can refuse to sell dvds to companies that they think will then sell to anyone that is renting out in this way. They have tried that with redbox, from my quick google.
That is all to say, no, SV is not the root of the problem here. Atrocious licensing deals and ridiculously baroque rules around streaming/broadcast are far harder to comprehend than anything out of SV. Largely from the influence of hollywood...