Uber is worse... door dash is pathetic... Air BnB is causing the HIKE in appartment prices DESTROY ALL these sick startups AL LWAY WORSE THAN STREAMING !
Doesn't rocket money sound too good to be true? It is funny when you've pinned this comment on a video telling us not to fall for the big tech rug pulls.
TV was already dead. What you are talking about as the “golden age”, the damage had already started. Everyone wanted to skip ads on their TiVo, ruining the advertising income stream. The TiVo ruined the age of “free” tv.
an under-discussed aspect of shorter seasons is the fact that we're losing all the avenues for people just getting their start in the industry; with a 24-episode season, that's 48 slots for writers and directors, which means there's a lot more room for working crew members to get a regular gig. like a lot of Hollywood's bad decisions, this one will eventually come back to bite them; undeniably, the Russo brothers have made an enormous amount of money for Hollywood, but they wouldn't have ever gotten the chance to do that if they didn't first get to direct a lot of episodes of long seasons of Arrested Development and Community.
An under discussed aspect of shorter seasons and offshoring, is people in their 50s having their careers completely deleted while they were saving for retirement. Younger tech CEOs, hate walking into any studio or office and seeing people with grey hair working there. If you didn't climb the management ladder, you're a loser. The Actor's/Writer's strike gave companies an excuse to simply never hire those people again, so age discrimination is just plausible deniability.
Quality over quantity, every time. Less is more. Nobody needs to watch a bloated show just to give people in the TV industry more to do. Somehow the British TV industry has been able to get by just fine with 6-episode seasons where quality is the number one priority and there's plenty of talent developing there. The end goal shouldn't be to create endless episodes of mid content, but to make content that's worth having.
I see where you're coming from, but the argument isn't for 22 episodes of shitty TV. Nobody sets out to make a bad thing! The ideal is always for it to be good. Whether it's 22 episodes or 6. I would also say that a long season is not for people to have "more to do." This is industry folks' livelihood, and they rely on it! It's job security in a tricky industry that has cut thousands of jobs in the last couple of years. And even when the industry is going strong everyone is basically a journeyman. Hopping from gig to gig with no safety net. A twenty-two episode order was the norm until very recently. That's effected people. A lot of shows also thrived under that model! Creating long story arcs with big payoffs and making your favorite sitcom characters feel more real because you got to spend so much time with them! Sometimes a show is good and sometimes it's bad. It has little to do with how long it's seasons are. I've seen six to eight episode seasons drag horribly! There's no right answer. It's also worth mentioning the U.K. is a different beast. Their T.V. is funded through T.V. licenses. Basically funded through taxes! They make short series with small budgets. It's sorta frowned upon to make a big budget show their. Seen as wasteful. Just food for thought!
Most creators get far more money per view when you pay for no-ad TH-cam than from the ad-supported model. Them adding built-in ads is in response to the ad-supported model paying too little. Not you.
I also pay YT to not see ads. I don’t mind in-video ads, really, because I can easily skip past them with a few screen taps, unlike any ads YT puts in themselves. Plus, in-video ads are usually more targeted and the creators can sometimes do some funny stuff with them.
Actually I think YT is "cracking down" on sponsor segments in videos. Once in a blue moon I already get a "jump ahead" button, maybe its a premium thing but this could really hurt creators who depend on these, especially the ones that arent in the adsense program.
I've always been a huge TV fan with lots of favorite shows. And now every time I turn the TV on I think about how I have access to more shows than ever before, and there have never been fewer things I actually wanted to watch.
Lots of good shows. Problem is they all get cancelled so i never watch a show before it´s confirmed there will be a season 3. Or that i know that last season can stand on it´s own if season 3 gets cancelled.
That's part of the problem I think. I usually agree with Adam on his takes, and in part I do here via advertising, but I think he misses the mark on most of it. Let's look at some statistics. In 2010 there were 210 scripted shows produced. In 2022, there were 600. That's a 3X increase on the number of shows produced. That extra choice alone makes it much harder to find time to simply watch shows to see which ones are good or not. Add to that streaming means all of these different shows are fractured in different services. The Bear and Shogun are on Hulu, Stranger Things, Wednesday, and Bridgerton are on Netflix, The Boys, Wheel of Time, Fall Out are on Prime, Silo, Severance, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking are on Apple+, and House of the Dragon, True Detective, and White Lotus are HBO/Max (we won't talk about Disney+, though Andor is excellent). These are all pretty good to excellent shows, easily rivalling stuff like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Lost, etc. (though nothing rivals peak Game of Thrones yet). So not only are the number of shows a lot larger, but the places where each person gets them are more diverse, with very few people able to tune in to the same show/service because collectively they all cost a ton. This makes it more difficult to build word of mouth campaigns for all but the wealthiest people, whereas with cable if you had a good show, new watchers could just watch it or reruns without needing to sign up for something new. But I think most of Adam's complaints are nostalgia based rather than legitimate here. Yes, there were great shows back when cable was dominate, but there were also real duds too. Sure, Comedy Central birthed South Park, Chapelle Show, The Daily Show, and Reno 911, but they also made shows like Drawn Together, Mind of Mencia, Crossballs, and Big Lake, shows that people actively don't remember or have very negative associations with. I do think one thing that has mostly gone away and is not talked about here is the sitcom. I don't know why the sitcom model doesn't really work with streaming, though my guess is it doesn't draw new customers so they get cancelled quickly. But we haven't really had any big breakthrough sitcoms like the Office, Parks and Rec, How I met your Mother, Arrested Development, etc. since about 2016 or so. Which is a real shame, as sitcoms are easy to watch and generally cost less to make, so they seem like a perfect fit for streaming. Idk maybe they will come back some day. Ok, rant over lol.
I work for an ISP/cable company, and you would be amazed how many people call to remove "Max" from their bills only to call back upset that they no longer have HBO
as much as i agree with the sentiment, there was a major bit that you blew past/got wrong: Hulu wasn't created by Disney, it was the collaborative effort of the major networks and a shared answer to Netflix until Disney bought Fox(and Fox's share of Hulu) which THEN led to all the other networks panicking and rushing their own streaming services onto the market.
I remember that Hulu used to be free and you could watch broadcast shows for free the following day. It was how broke college me kept up to date with my favorite tv shows.
It was also built with the express purpose of trying to introduce commercials into streaming and see what they could get away with and what the consumer would tolerate. It was always the thin end of the wedge.
I was an original Hulu Beta Tester. Very limited selection but it was great. Until they removed video game console access and then removed the free version. Pissed me the hell off. I didn't watch nearly every episode of Cleopatra 2025 because I enjoyed it! I watched it because it was one of only shows they had on. Those bastards couldn't even give us Beta Testers a legacy Hulu accounts for our sacrifice?
I forget the exact timeline, but Hulu was owned, at least in part, by NBC Universal & Comcast in the days before Peacock. I believe you're right that it was a joint venture of multiple providers, and then Comcast divested from it in favor of their own online streaming platform (I forget the name, but it was probably something like XfinityTV or w/e). This was also around the time you started to see all of the cable companies withdrawing their licenses to Netflix to onshore their most valuable shows for their specific platforms. Then, eventually, we get to Fox being bought by Disney, and Disney (which already had Disney+) now owns two streaming services that are in competition with each other. They kind of manage to coexist by catering to different audiences (Disney originals vs non-Disney brands) but even that split is starting to fall, which leaves Hulu in limbo as to whether it stays around or not. The funny thing is that the story remains the same. The whole point of people jumping off over-the-air broadcast television to cable was because it was a premium service that promised premium shows without ads. Then, as more shows came to cable they had to increase the price and include advertisements. When the value proposition became unsustainable (who needs 500+ channels of TV?) was when we saw the introduction of Netflix. A service where you pay a nominal fee to watch your favorite shows ad-free. However, now that we crest that bell curve of unsustainable business, we once again look for a solution. In the end, we really just want to watch a handful of movies and/or shows, and everything else is just fluff or noise. Unfortunately, a complete collection of that media is more than the cost of the associated streaming service. In some cases, that media wouldn't exist without the service. Case in point, Crunchyroll essentially made anime maintstream. They don't pay anyone in the industry nearly well enough, but they provided the financial incentive for more foreign media to be translated, as well as the platform to disseminate it effectively. Prior to that, it was largely a community that thrived on piracy and fan subtitles that were often poorly done or incorrect.
Catering to binge watching serves no purpose. There's no technical reason Netflix can't release an episode a week. Many TH-cam creators post new episodes on a weekly schedule. Weekly releases help build fan followings and brings people back the next week. It's especially a problem for kids shows. Kids binge each new show and move on, never sticking with one show long enough to buy the toys or games based on it. Binge watching is setting shows up to fail, and inviting people to leave the service (they have no reason to stay subscribed to see the next episode).
Well most Netflix shows are fully serialized witch are enjoyed better binged. but that also leads to a situation where fans can be disappointed when there show gets canceled after a season or two. Most serialized shows run on a system where its more like a movie so you are not satisfied until you get to the end of the story. so cancelling the show after a season means you will not get the end of the story leaving you unsatisfied. Netflix makes very few shows that are fully episodic or that are a hybrid between episodic and serialized. In short Netflix makes shows that work with the binge model and the binge model and the weekly release model are not compatible.
We've known this since the robber barons, the goal of capitalism isn't competition, it's the monopoly. People forget that competitions have winners, and with capitalism, its winner take all.
I’m a TV producer who’s been out of work for months and this was extremely cathartic to watch. Most of my friends are out of work too, but it’s hard not to take it personally.
Not to be rude, just a nieve Midwestern question: What stops you from getting some talented industry friends together and making something of your own instead of creating content for the machine? My daughter is a digital animator and is far happier doing commissions/ freelance work while making less money. Some of the best media is made by great people put in a tough situation.
NBC was smart and realized that people don't stay up until 11:30 pm every night to watch The Tonight Show, Late Night, and then on Saturdays, SNL. So they put it all onto TH-cam. Which is good, because it expands the audience into the younger generation who likely can't get live TV in their household or don't know how to, (not us, but I know of some folks who just have a Roku for every TV), or just are unaware of a live TV broadcast medium other than cable and satellite, and for us legacy viewers, makes it so we can wake up the following morning and watch the monologue, sketches and interviews. Although I do still stay up and try to watch SNL on Saturdays and I'll usually make it halfway through Late Night before falling asleep. By the way, great video. Earned yourself a subscriber.
I was an Ayn Rand reading libertarian who fully believed in the wisdom of a free market in high school in the late 90s. I grew out of that when the internet bubble burst. I don't understand how anyone can be one today with the countless examples of market manipulation keeping a market "Free" has resulted in.
No such thing as a free market, not in the past, not in the future. All markets require regulation. It's just a pipe dream and/or cheap propaganda. It cannot exist IRL
Same here. It seemed clear by the early 2000's that the neoliberal consensus was not producing the promised results. Intended results, maybe, but promised results, nope.
Any Rand's "great men" funded Movie Pass. The poster child for brain dead stupid business models that axiomatically can not work but CAN get lots of members, each of which lost money for the company.
I leaned libertarian before I went to college and generally believed in the idea of the free market as its commonly expressed in those circles. Seemed like a plausible model and philosophy until I started learning from the source-- Smith, Ricardo, et al. Later, I went to engineering school and that's where I learned that scientific assumptions are for simplifying problems so that they can actually be solved (somewhat) and serve as the basis of some design. Economics isn't really any different, EXCEPT that people take the assumptions as TRUE the moment they see some advantage-- instead of your plane crashing, you just have an economy lurching from one government intervention to the next, or just suffering endless boom and bust cycles because no one is even aware of the second and third and fourth order effects that are occurring because they are deliberately NOT looking for them.
the biggest problem is companies are hiring executives that have no idea what they are doing. the C level is so detached from their customers and inside their own echo chamber its destroying peoples free and decompress time. and there is nothing we can do
Yes, there is, but it is too much work and will make people uncomfortable so we’re not going to do it. Read this in an angry tone directed at the people who don’t want to do more than lift their own butts off the couch.
Those same execs are hiring writers who also don’t know what they’re doing, and that has allowed legacy fans to grow angry (and sometimes toxic) but there hasn’t been this much bad writing in TV since the late 70s or 80s. Now streamers want “lean back TV” or “Second screen TV” or “Dad TV” or God help us all “Mid TV”! Just the explosion of exposition dumps in pilot episodes is galling. You know how you find out a character is a brilliant lawyer/doctor/cop? Another character tells you they are in the first ten minutes! This used to be something a writer would get canned for doing, now it’s like a rampant std running through practically every streaming platform.
Arguably the biggest issue that the execs have is figuring out how much money a show is really bringing in. With OTA programming, they could look at the ratings and the advertiser dollars and work out how much the show was bringing in and look at what they were spending on advertising and production costs. With streaming, it's pretty hard to say how much a show is really contributing to gaining and retaining subscriptions. You don't have any idea what the other streaming services are doing in terms of numbers the way that they would in the olden days with Nielson ratings, it's all a massive guess. So they go for metrics that are easily quantified even if they are completely inadequate. Part of why they look at binging that first day is because if a show isn't in that top 10 the likelihood of an audience even knowing it's there is pretty low. At least that's Netflix. I've recently subscribed to Max and I find far more programming that I might actually want to watch just on day one than I would on any given day on Netflix.
@@rickcleveland310 if you think the past was some oasis of good writing you're only fooling yourself. Every decade since now and way back into the past has it's lions share of garbage. Writing really hasn't changed all that much, but I'd argue it's even better now because there's more avenues to do so.
I've been in this industry for 33 years. I've worked in Post Production for about 26 of those years and this is the worst it's ever been. In the last 2 yrs and 2 months, I've only worked 19 weeks and my last paycheck was mid-December. 😭
I'm 53 & saw the TV 📺 entertainment business 📉 .... TV from mid 1990s to around 2012 will never return. If you made $ or worked then you had a decent career.
And to add insult to injury, content creators have forgotten the art of the fade to commercial break. So the ads now appear abruptly out of nowhere and make the watching experience even more miserable. EDIT: I realize this is harder to control on youtube where it is automated. But it can be controlled on streaming services. But then again, they often don't bother to place ads in the right spots even for shows that were originally created for traditional over the air TV. 🤦🏻♀️
ngl kinda like when content creators mix they ads into what their talking about or their particular "flavor" of content, like Internet Historian with Nordman or Some More News incorporating the ads into their unhingedness and so on and so forth.... but idk, maybe i'm a brainwashed contentmaxing consumingcuck
I like what Robert Evans does on his podcast “Behind the Bastards”. He’ll be explaining some horrible thing that happened in history, and then cut to ads by pausing and then insisting that the sponsored products are not responsible for an atrocity. Like, “Y’know who won’t taint baby formula with lead? The products and services that support this podcast”
For content that was produced to air on conventional TV, there were engineering standards: the picture had to go to a solid shade of "ad black" and stay that way long enough to let the linear broadcast recognize it and patch some commercials in. Closed captioning had to be done to certain standards. Ads and content had to have audio signals of similar loudnesses. For content produced to air exclusively on digital streaming, under "new media" contracts, none of that was required, so few bothered to do it. And now that the streaming services are regressing to a more conventional TV experience, the experience is frequently janky and trash.
500% this. There's a great video by Jimmy Robins that compares Dropout's model when compared to how The Try Guys or Watcher handled it and it's insane how well Dropout just works. It worked so well, that College Humor is basically rebranding itself, pretty seamlessly
they DID rebrand as Dropout. They don't use "collegehumor" anymore. As a fan growing up watching their POV videos before any of the current cast were there, watching it morph into my all time favorite DnD shows and comedy shows is crazy. so happy to have watched them throughout the years. @@IAmMightyMike
Hey Adam, I discovered ''Adam ruins everything'' a little too late, a few years ago after its cancellation, but it really makes me happy to see thatt you kept the concept and spirit and turned an amazing documentary show into these videos, you are doing amazing work and i'm all in for it
The context missing here is that cable itself was the original streaming. Cable was marketed as the first paid tv model. The benefit was no ads. But once cable disrupted network tv, it kept charging but added the ads. The issue is that every "innovation" is a rehash of what amounts to monopolization with its attendant issues
This is exactly why I'm so alarmed to see all the streaming services adding an ad-tier. We've seen how this game goes before, mark my words they'll eventually either A) remove all the ad-free plans, or B) have only one "ultra premium" ad free plan that will be extra expensive.
It should have a 4th problem: the lack of physical media. Sure, it may not be the whole source of income, but the sale of DVDs and Blue-rays helped studio make bank. Also, we wouldn’t have to worry about a show we like disappearing forever.
Physical media was the reason studios took risks on movies that weren’t lowest common denominator slop. There was that chance a movie that didn’t do good at the box office had a chance at physical media sales through word of mouth
The problem with physical media is I think a lot of collectors just assumed that everyone else has infinite space to collect stuff and they all have a collector mentality. They don't. A lot of people just want to watch stuff on demand without having to set things to record. For a while, the only way to easily do that was physical media. Then TH-cam, Netflix, and Hulu came along and said, "Hey as long as you have a device connected to the internet, you don't even need a TV to watch shows and movies. That's why physical media had become a niche market.
Physical has been making a big comeback since Covid. Tons of old shows & cartoons getting dvd collection released. I see them in Walmarts every other day
My issue with the transition to streaming/online delivery, ig from my gamer perspective, is when you do not get to actually own at least a copy of the media. I don't mind everything being online, so long as I have the ability to download locally and be able to partaker without internet (which fails a lot where I live). Also, why are prices the same if they're not spending money on printing physical media, delivering it, handiling it, etc...... it prob all went to profits for the higher ups.... and then those with allegorical eyepatches and digital wooden legs laugh n_ñ
@@photoelectron The prices are much lower online. Especially if you just buy subscriptions instead of buying movies which are included on different platforms anyway. For the price of 3 seasons of a TV show, I can subscribe to something for a whole year and watch many TV shows fully.
Whenever a show comes out that I don't want to see get cancelled, but don't have time to binge it(which is most of the time), I use my tablet and just play the show from episode and let it run in the background while I do other stuff
This reminded me of a discussion I had with my husband the other day about missing bottle episodes where it was about character development instead of these short season, fast paced things. Let the material breathe! Let us know the characters!
I had this conversation with my mother the other day as well, I'm backing up my DVDs and was doing SG-1 and how I can't think of a recent Sci-Fi show that hits like it. It feels like nothing actually builds it's characters, world and plot anymore.
@@randomtinypotatocried I enjoy Strange New Worlds but it’s so short that I just end up watching DS9 or TNG for the 100th time lol. I spend more time watching old Trek, SG1/Atlantis, Parks&Rec, or Midsomer Murders, than I do watching anything new.
That Comedy Central story is truly heartbreaking. I remember 20 years ago when it was peak. South Park was still fresh, Chapelle, Reno 911!, Jon Stewart was really starting to hit his stride and then we got The Colbert Report. Good times.
I only really ever watched Comedy Central for the Colbert Report and Jon Stewart. I gradually started watching those less and less, and then eventually stopped entirely, going back only for the end of Jon Stewart's run on the network. My parents watched those shows, but stopped after they left, and that was the end of that. Comedy Central went into decline not because of some evil suits, but because people stopped watching it. Young people just don't watch as much TV. They have lots of other better things to do.
The constant price increases has caused me to spend more time on either TH-cam, or reading books and buying cds and dvds. Things are getting way too expensive.
@@HarringJess Most people don't understand the concept of inflation. If they've been making 600 dollars since 1989, they think their wage has stayed the same. They don't understand that the value of 600 dollars is getting lower and lower every year. In order to equal your salary from 1989, you need to be making 1500 dollars today.
This is the exact same thing we’ve seen since at least the 80s, I think? I’m thinking about Walmart coming into small towns with the promise of jobs and cheap goods. They lose money on the new store sometimes for years undercutting the Main Street stores, then once they’ve turned the once vibrant shopping district into a blight town, they jack up prices. People are left with one major employer who pays so little they have to do food drives so the employees can eat, and no competition for prices on goods so they end up paying more for the same things than they did a few years earlier. Plus the town typically ends up with higher unemployment as the dozen or so old shops have been replaced by just one And we fall for it every time since we all chase our own short term self interest over what’s best for society at large
Yep, the complaints about the big firms destroying their brands and such is sort of missing the point, we're in the middle of a total war situation designed not to produce great content, but to capture market share. Also advertising is a bit of a red herring inasmuch as it was already relatively fucked as a revenue source regardless of what Netflix happened to be doing - thank Google, Facebook and co for that one.
Agreed, back in the 80s I can remember many domestic products to choose from across all categories. Then the imports started to trickle in, and people bought them because they were slightly cheaper. The domestic manufacturers shut down, costing people more in the long run than the small amount they saved on imports.
part of this is terrible, but part of this is also just how progress works in our world. think of how many jobs were lost to automation during industrialization or to mechanized farming when it was invented.
@@theX24968Z that's not really an accurate comparison, though. Historically eliminated jobs and created new jobs elsewhere. The consolidation of capital and people chasing only their own short term self interest has been the cause here of people ultimately getting screwed over.
While all the shit they did to beloved properties was, is, and always will be terrible, I won't forgive them for erasing Final Space. Say what you will about that show (assuming those reading this have seen it), but it did not deserve to be cancelled pre-merger, and subsequently written off by Discovery. I'm just glad Olan (the show's creator) got a license to finish it via a graphic novel.
I'd like to see Adam run for president one of these days he's the kind of guy I already agree with on things and he's a very personable guy and a likeable guy and even though I'm a Canadian I think he would do great things for America simply because it's pretty clear he's a smart dude with a good head on his shoulders and it's clear he has the right morals that I would want from somebody running a country but of course I think it might do good for him to run for some smaller offices first just so we don't have another unqualified guy like Trump running the country because that was embarrassing as a Canadian I felt second hand embarrassment for you guys
@@ZakkandtheJ He’s not as smart as you think he is. His show Adam Ruins Everything made a ton of errors on almost every episode. It was unwatchable. Plus, opposition will just play the clip of him on Joe Rogan making a fool of himself.
Problems with modern media consumption are not limited to. 1. Rushed streaming shows that in spite of some of them being good there is a noticeable lack of quality from shows of the past due to inconsistent animation and writing, lack of focus or direction, characters that hardly change at all, bad formatting of the episodes and retconning from previous shows to try something different but lack the experience or talent to make it work in the story due to negligence or laziness. Examples include: Helluva Boss, She ra reboot, Stephen Universe, The Legend of Korra 2. Shows that go on for far too long than necessary or shows that try to represent the previous work but fail to do it effectively. Examples include Teen titans go, Fairly Odd parents and Spongebob. 3. Putting original shows that are good in quality last while putting popular but poor quality shows first which is the bad corporate decisions at Cartoon Network for putting Teen titans Go first while leaving Adventure Time and Regular Show to name a few last. 4. Canceling a good show and replacing it with something worse. What Disney did to the Owl House. 5. Film critique becomeing lazier by focusing on politics way too much. Back then critiquing a movie was about the writing, cinematography and characters. Now the focus is too much on politics and identity. While all art is political having it be 90 percent or a majority of your critique makes your film critique lazy since it makes you a media analysis equivalent of Fox News or CNN not a professional film critic.
But the point was that the way channels worked, a significant part of that risk was mitigated because you were selling it to the exact audience it was intended for, whereas you can't do that for these streaming sites because they don't have intended audiences, and intended audiences have no way to actually find their content.
Yep, there has been some great network TV the last 10 years, but there's also been a lot more garbage. The bigger issue, IMHO, is that they're competing against 70-ish years of TV and all the hits. There's also the issue that they have largely stopped producing TV shows that are standalone episodes. One of the reasons that people watch Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch these days is that you can watch just one episode without having to remember the previous episode. (The other major reason is that the were heavily syndicated years later)
@@Wolfwood2057the advantage that streaming services have though is that they don't have to rely on Nielson Ratings anymore to tell them who is watching what. They have access to way more people's viewing habits. 5 personal accounts on each shared Netflix means 5 data sets that can tell them what each individual viewer in the household wants and doesn't want. It tells them what time of day they watch, how often, if they binge, what genre. And then they can extend the watch time by tweaking algorithms to recommend "much watch" content to viewers. You can also take it with you, so that's even more ad revenue and more data about you
I mean, can you blame them? IF you're going to throw millions into a project you want a return. Are you going to argue you'd be different if given the opportunity? You would personally sink 40 million of your own money on a chance, watch that flop, then do it again?
The concept of the gentrification of media has been something I have been thinking about as a topic for a while and this video really puts into perspective the issues surrounding the topic.
Doesn't gentrification typically mean pushing out low income residents and decreasing access to resources? Yet with streaming media the opposite is happening. As a low income person living below the line of poverty I have more access as far as media than ever before and at a lower cost. Plus nobody here seems to know about Hoopla or other free streaming services through libraries.
I'm in fandom, and we talk about how the binge & small episode count model has spun the fandom cycle so fast that fandoms can't get a foothold anymore.
@@darksaint0124 They're saying when shows don't last very long it's harder to establish a lasting community of fans. What about that do you find hard to understand?
I'm finding that anime doesn't have this issue because they didn't do any of that. And likely never will because Japan has a wholly different philosophy on work, for one. Dip your toes in maybe I dunno. 🤷♀️
One thing I'd like to add: Killing off physical media to force us into streaming. Cutting off a source of revenue seems ridiculous to me. Same for what all these companies have done to their film divisions : they make films but keep them on their services rather than release to theatres. Another source of potential revenue (and advertising) that the big streaming companies are missing out on.
IMHO, the biggest issue with the theater releases is how quickly they go from theater to streaming service. Sometimes it's even the same day. It used to be that you'd watch it in the theater if you wanted to, and then there was a prolonged wait for it to be available on home media. Then there'd be a wait until it was being shown on TV. At every step along the way, the studio could make money to help pay for the production costs and turn a profit. And it helped a lot with movies that didn't do so well in the theater as it gave the word of mouth time to build and for a cult following to emerge. That's rather unlikely these days.
TH-cam *is* my TV. I don’t really watch streaming services anymore, because they’re more or less the replacement for cable. They aren’t ad free by default like they were before the 2020’s, which just makes them not worth the price anymore.
If only Alphabet wasn't taking so much revenue out of TH-cam.... Imagine how good this service could be, if they could use that money to pay producers.
I was just thinking the other day that I've become so disillusioned by streaming services that I only really go to TH-cam any more. Surely there have been some great shows in the past 5 years with active fandoms??? Nope. Edit: Okay the Vivzieverse is popular. And that's not even on TV!
Yeah. I switch between streaming services (other then TH-cam) to binge watch content and cancel in a month or two, but lately I just can't really get into much of anything on most of the streaming services. TH-cam literally has people who just post videos recapping TV shows and movies, which I find more entertaining a lot of time. Occasionally one of them will sound so interesting I'll put it on my list of shows to find which streaming service I can watch it on.
I think streaming is "great" for people like me who have some very niche special interests ( like, say, you watch French tv or like boutique label movie houses) that might not be met with cable. That's imo what it was for despite what the ceos of said companies might tell you. It's just that rather than be an option on the buffet table, it's now become the whole buffet. When you become the whole buffet, then things become expensive, and people get tired of you. Nothing looks good enough to get back in line for. But the free buffet where you can find niche content made by people like you? One that that can feel a bit more personalized? Sign me up.
Netflix not only killed TV but it also indirectly killed the physical media market. Many of the shows from the early 2000s until 2015 were must see TV and popularized the boxed set of DVDs with entire seasons or a whole TV series. That was a big source of residuals for the writers, directors, and actors involved with those shows. I always had the sense that what Netflix was offering was too good to be true and was more like a bait and switch. Its a classic move of predatory capitalism whereby, a new competitor will look to corner a market with predatory low pricing to drive out everyone else and then use its position as a monopoly to make all the money it wants a la Amazon.
They really didn't. People forget just how much garbage was on TV during the '90s and '00s. There have been great TV shows on network TV since then, but much of it was already on networks like HBO where you had what was hardly any different from streaming. You could watch what you wanted when you wanted via DVR and it was behind a paywall. If anything, Netflix just accelerated what was already happening.
In 2015 I loved going to Best Buy to get Steelbook exclusives and then in the clearance section, getting 2-3 BluRays for my collection. I loved the feeling of OWNING a copy that I could watch any time I wanted and was willing to take care of the discs. Now, I refuse to enter stores because of the depressive state they’re in. It also makes me sad that today’s kid does not know the excitement of getting the physical movie to HOLD. You felt special when you finally had the Endgame Steelbook exclusive. You feel RELIEF when that movie from 1987 that nobody cared about is now out on limited Blu-ray.
Drug dealer capitalism: "First hit's always free (or, at least, really, really cheap)." Matt Damon made an interesting point on Hot Ones about how every single movie has to go for broke these days. Back in the 90s, early 2000s, the home video market meant you could release an...OK...movie into cinemas, and not have it do too well, but it'd more than recoup its costs on home video. That's gone. Now, every movie has to make back its budget on the opening weekend, sell merchandise, and, of course, set up a Universe and act as advertising for then next movie (or five), so that people will see the sequel out of obligation to make sense of the first one if nothing else. And to do that, the execs feel the only way is to go huge or go home, with half-billion dollar budgets and another quarter bill on advertising - all for a single film. And all that money means the studios get very, very, very risk-averse. The marketing budget alone for the next MCU movie could probably produce another Big Lebowski or Office Space.
Yeah Netflix did to Hollywood, what Walmart did to box retail stores. I work in the grocery business and we can't even order stock for the price Walmart can sell it for. Call me old fashion but I miss owning my media, reading a physical book that I bought at the bookstore, and spending a Saturday at the shopping mall. Maybe even watching a movie at the theatre that wasn't a sequel or reboot.
Executive greed is destroying their own industry. The good old days of TV only was good for everyone. Executives, actors, and writers ect had a very lucrative pay system.
Small edit you guys might want to make: at 14:30, Adam says "FX", and a poster for 'Breaking Bad' appears. 'Breaking Bad' aired on AMC, not FX. Other than that, amazing--and unfortunately depressing--video! Also, I saw Adam at the Animation Guild rally a few weeks ago in Burbank. Very inspiring. Thanks for everything you do, dude. 🙏
Agreed. They Alienpilled WAY TOO HARD! Seriously, Ancient Aliens used to be a fun thought experiment, then they rushed to say "hey ,what if aliens did this", then thought their theories were true then whine to say "ALIENS BUILT THE PYRAMIDS" or some other dumb shit
"Word of Mouth" THANK YOU! I've been saying this for years now, that the binge and forget model kills all "watercooler conversation" that keeps a show alive and brings in more viewers, because nobody can talk about the show if everybody's only at a different point in the season - there's no shared reference point, so any comment by anybody is 'spoilers' to another.
granted, the weekly schedule DID survive at least in some genres on the *other* services, particularly in sci-fi/fantasy. Star Trek (incl Picard), most of the MCU shows (until they dumped Echo just to get rid of it). There are some other examples, but yeah, the MCU and the Star Trek got a lot of word-of-mouth...but at the same time, they already had an established fan base, which a new show (or a reboot/prequel decades away from its original cough cough Dark Crystal cough) isn't going to have.
Nah, weekly discussions are overrated. Every single week the top comments are the same, repeating lines from the show like "Winter is coming" or "A Lannister always pays his debts". Other times it's low effort one-liners like "Dragon look good". All the thoughtful comments are at the bottom because nobody reads paragraphs anymore. Also I don't watch shows weekly even if it's a weekly release. I wait a few weeks and watch it 3 at a time. Sometimes I wait until the last episode then binge it.
exactly 👏👏 coworker wants to be social with me and suggests a tv show she's watching, by the time i start shes done...cant really talk about it. then shes onto the next show. sad really. used to be goid talking about the last episode, now it's meh...everyone does their own thing. I think the slowed down stranger things though 🤔
probably why most of content on streaming ia from the 80s. there is competition from asia, kids start watching content made there because those aren't reruns from the 80s. so streaming will have to figure things out.
i had no idea the CEO of Kellogs literally suggested cash strapped consumers should eat cereal for dinner....what the fuck kind of oligarchy hellscape are we living in?
I think the notion that if it wasnt for Netflix, TV would just have kept going like it always had is a naive fairytale. Old fashion tv channels were never going to survive the internet era, the only question was what form the online streaming platforms that replaced them were going to take.
There are better and worse ways of handling it. The real problem with Netflix is that when they started streaming, there were hardly any other options and they didn't own any of the stuff they were streaming. I think that in the long run Disney, Max and Paramount have a better chance of finding a model that does generate profits. But, mostly because they have a significant back catalog of material that people want to see, so they don't have to go all in on new stuff. With the amount of stuff on Disney+ and Max that I personally would like to see, it just takes a relatively steady drip of well written and well executed shows to justify the money. Netflix though is likely to be one major studio pull out away from going under for the foreseeable future as they own hardly any of what they stream. IIRC, both Max and Disney+ have recently posted profitable quarters, so they may well be within striking distance of sustainability.
Yeah that’s the thing. The market wanted TV on demand (see the rise of DVRs before Netflix took off), and web video was already popular, which means someone was gonna make a streaming service as soon as the technology was capable of it. And that means venture capital was gonna invest heavily in whichever one looked like it was gonna hit it big first. The real question is, if Netflix was propped up by VC funding and wasn’t profitable on their own yet, why did all the business geniuses in charge of every other entertainment company follow suit? Lol
But that wasn't the only two possible outcomes. I think what Conover argues is the networks should have embraced new content delivery models instead of fighting progress and then frantically copying Netflix.
@@williamyoung9401 hell no to the government. They will make it worse and they have no standing. There role is to ensure that no one company is a monopoly and there clearly is no monopoly. We are in this mess because so many media companies had there business disrupted by Netflix that they tried to be Netflix and caused harm to themselves and there audiences.. the winner in all of this may be Sony for not chasing the streaming wars that will lose there competition billions. Lol
Going to be honest i much preferred the old style of TV except for one thing: you had to watch it on their time or buy a DVR. I moved to China and the way it works here is perfect! You can watch it live or you can watch an episode from this current season whenever you want. You still get commercials from the network but whatever. Most of my coworkers think I'm weird for not buying a subscription to tencent streaming or other services but it's much cheaper to just watch it on my cable box and i get to watch it whenever I want. I just have to buy a season of a show three weeks after it's finished. I'm fine with that
I thought it also works like that in the US nowadays.... That's pretty much how it works in Canada if you don't wanna subscribe to a streaming service...
Some providers will let you watch a show on demand but not every episode of the current season and sometimes you only get like 2 days to do so for each episode. It's pretty wack. The best ISP in my area, time Warner, didn't allow you to do it at all. They didn't even come with a DVR. However where my brother lives AT&T was the best and they gave him a DVR that could record 100 hours of shows plus the two days of on demand of random shows and random episodes. Meanwhile here in China all box tops just let you go back in time and run the broadcast from then. So like say i missed an episode on 7/14 at 2PM. I just roll back to that time slot on the network and run it, if it meets the criteria.
Adam, your content has put a smile on my family’s face for years. I’m going to address the elephant in the room. These cable companies that also supplies internet…they knew about the streaming bubble and that’s why the internet prices has sky rocketed. Back in the day, they never talked about bandwidth or anything…in the early days of Netflix, you used to stream to your hearts content without having any throttling issues…now it’s insane. However the domino effect continues.
the final straw for me was Our Flag Means Death getting cancelled unceremoniously this year. i don't trust a single streaming service not to pull the rug out from under me anymore. i'm done. i'm literally watching Cheers rn bc at least that show got an ending. it's so bleak that shows don't get a chance to find their audience anymore. for a second there, it looked like diverse TV was finally getting its chance. fuck me i guess!!
I personally prefer watching 1 really good season of a show vs going back to old ones. As sad as it was to see no more seasons of for example You, Me and the Apocalypse, I'd choose something like that than something I've seen way too many times like Friends, something I never much liked anyways though was just that thing everyone watched because they didn't have many other choices anyway ... I'd personally rather scratch my eyeballs out, totally exaggerating, though seriously.
@@victoriah.20the thing is, i much prefer when it’s a choice :/ i’d much rather showrunners got to end shows on their own terms, rather than streamers thinking they can manufacture art on a conveyor belt. there should be space for shows like Friends AND I Am Not Okay With This. we could have both, streamers would still rake in money, and the duds wouldn’t be as painful. it’s just stubborn greed that they refuse to take any risks that used to be normal
@@alexm7334 I just see to many people mentioning Friends, The Office, Seinfeld etc as if we all just absolutely loved those shows and not because those were sometimes our only choices. I don't miss putting up with watching something because I wanted to watch TV and there weren't many other options. Flipping through 100 channels at times and "nothing good is on", while paying way too much from my perspective. Nowadays that's definitely not a problem for some of us. I can always search and find something, there's more access to even indie movies I never had access to before. I'm all for not putting out shows like it's manufactured on a conveyor belt and just spit out for profit. I just don't want to see us go backwards in any way. Keep moving forward, make what is better if it's not entirely working
The binge requirement also doesn't account for other hobbies. Video Games have had this problem for a few years now, with so many companies putting out 'Live Services' without realizing that gamers only have a set amount of free time.
Mainstream Corporate Media is basically shooting themselves in their own foot, and that could be a good thing. If we, the people, emerge from this in solidarity with each other for our shared humanity and push against the downfall of capitalism and for a pro-social new society based on health, well-being and steady-state economics, we can turn the tides in our favour. For people in entertainment that produce stuff we actually like, we can support them. With mutual aid networks. We could create a 'bridge community trust' between the monopolies and then going back to the traditional way of TV, movies and music, with slightly different aspects. If we want to go back to having cable with specific channels that cater to audiences, we can cancel streaming networks, especially Netflix and, when possible, just use Patreon to support specific channels or shows we like. Let's be honest, not many out there that are actually worth our time (the little time we have). For new films, same sort of thing. We can support it by actually going to see it or maybe arrange an additional screening in town for a lower cost to get more people in to see it and then support it by buying the hard copy version and put it into a sharing library. For music, we can not pay for Spotify and try to go back to buying songs or albums directly, either digitally from the artists themselves, where possible, and then at the remaining record stores in town. Once again, older music we can share and put in music lending libraries and then go see those bands live if they are in our area.
Yup, just look at the launch of Concord. I'm not paying 40 bucks for another generic sci-fi looking, made-by-commitee, live service, arena/hero shooter when the market's already flooded with free to pay ones that have a unique gameplay element.
The binge requirement he had is simply wrong though. Netflix is literally the ONLY streamer that drops all the episodes at once. Everyone else releases 1 (or 2) a week, and maybe an extra episode or two at the premiere. And even Netflix is slowly moving away from the binge model by not dropping all the episodes at once in more and more shows.
@@shadowninja6689 Yes and no. Netflix is taking the lessons from other streaming platforms and changing their release schedule, but they still make decisions on viewing data in the binge mindset. If not enough people FINISH a show in a given time, it will get canceled very fast. There’s no time for word of mouth to spread or new viewers to catch on. Heck, people don’t invest in starting a serialized show if it’s not complete. It’s a negative feedback loop. This is why foreign shows like K dramas do better. They usually tell a story and just ends. It remains to be seen if people still care about Squid Game 2 when it comes out.
This premise ignores one pretty big elephant in the room: TH-cam. Even if Netflix hadn't existed TH-cam was going to come along and destroy the legacy entertainment industry. It has all the advantages of legacy media with virtually no overhead.
As a Brit, I’ve never minded shorter series that run for 8-10 episodes and a couple of series at most. If they’re well written, you get to know the characters without the need for filler episodes. The problem with the 22+ episode format that runs for years is that they’re constantly chasing ratings, they get dragged out beyond whatever story they set out to tell in the first place, and up being cancelled or struggling to end properly. Shows like Breaking Bad were so good because they were written with an ending in mind, a plan to get from A to B without trying to see how long they could drag it out for.
I'm also British and prefer lower episode counts. Finding out about a show that you might like, only to find that it's currently on Season 5 with 24x 40min episodes per season is such a time sink to catch up with that I usually don't bother. 6-10 episodes per season is perfect imo. Quality not quantity.
Yes, as an Australian who grew up with both formats, I agree. I have no problem with the longer format so long as, as you said, have an end-game in mind. How I Met Your Mother is a perfect example of a show that _did_ have an ending in mind but completely screwed it by dragging it out for too long.
@@batsteve1942 The British model won't work in the US. The US industry is massive compared to the UK industry. Also the UK system relies a lot on TV licenses, which is increasingly being avoided by Brits and the UK industry faces the same problems with streaming as the US and right now 50 percent of British workers in TV and film are out of work right now. The UK system is a nice system, don't get me wrong. But if short seasons worked for streaming, we wouldn't have a problem right now. You mention Breaking Bad. One of the most popular series right now is not Breaking Bad but Suits. Suits was not written with an end game in mind. In fact the show had to be retooled when Megan Markel became British royalty. They had to figure out story wise why her and the main character, her boyfriend, would be leaving. Suits is a classic broadcast 20+ episode 5+ season series that was paid for by advertisers, and generated a lot of stable jobs. And it's the type of show that streaming viewers are flocking to right now in record breaking numbers because they can't deal with tons of content being dumped on them that might not have a second season. Breaking Bad is sort of a throwback borrowing from broadcast TV. It's doubtful if that show was greenlit today, that it would get as many episodes or seasons.
I don't mind ads, and I enjoy a lot of them. It's a way to see what's out there, what's going on, or if nothing else, a chance to take a break. Breaks are good. Binging is bad. We know this. Ads make it easier to live it. Personally, what becomes annoying is seeing the same ad, over and over again. That begins to feel condescending. Like, I can remember. Stop telling me. Seeing the same ads over and over didn't happen _as much_ with broadcast and cable as it does with streaming, in my experience.
This is because the advertiser bought too many impressions, was sold too many impressions or the service has limited subscribers and had to crank up the frequency in order to look like it is a viable advertising channel.
Although I understand the point when it comes to the TV industry as a whole, streaming was absolutely a major improvement over the old TV model in a lot of countries, mine included. With the exception of shows that were big enough to get DVD box sets, a lot of the shows mentioned from the days before streaming were locked behind prohibitively expensive channel packages here - often exclusive to one provider. Even after we got a satellite dish, all we really got was endless re-runs and decades-old movies ruined by incessant ads. The real competition that Netflix beat was piracy, not TV - TV was already useless.
@@JamesTDG It never went away. Honestly, the only Piracy I've noticed where it can actually be difficult to find stuff is music. Spotify really did stop people from uploading albums to piracy sites. Unless you are a huge band or artist, good luck finding an album on a piracy website these days.
I'm a low income person living below the line of poverty in the US and paying significantly less for the streaming services I actually watch compared to my father who chooses cable still instead. I'm surprised at the "costing more" part of the video unless that wasn't meant about just the literal cost 💵.
I've had so many films that I enjoyed in the cinema, never taken to DVD, lost, because streaming services keep a hold of it, never release it anywhere else, and then drop it because no one is interested. They are actively contributing to lost history.
Either Adam has recovered memories of what Cable TV used to be or Americans had a really good deal in the 90s. Here in Canada it was a $60/mo buy-in to get any channels via cable and then $15 - $30 monthly per bundle of channels. Each bundle of course was one desirable channel and a half-dozen syndication farms. The only comparable upside was that each commercial break was 4 to 5 short ads jammed together which, compared to cable today, was quaint.
Adam is from a lower upper class family, he's from privilege. He had premium cable and internet when he was a teen while during the same time I was an adult that could only afford cable and internet with the help of roommates.
i wanted to say something similar... here in the Bay Area, my basic cable was running close to $200/mo now $50 of that was for internet, but the rest was for BASIC cable. no premium channels (HBO for example) and not many of even the good ones (like AMC) so $150/mo for Local News and Sports and a bunch of syndicated garbage and i was still paying for netflix/hulu/disney on the side cuz thats where anything good was? ya... no. cable is trash now, has been, and was VERY far from 'free' although, i did pay all that to ALSO have it be ad supported! what a deal!
Cable in the US is/was an Oligopoly, divvied up in to territories that don't directly compete with each other and try to keep the same basic options/prices. It depended heavily on where you lived and who you got stuck with. I can't speak to prices in the 90s, but when I had it installed and started paying for it in 2003, it was like 35$ for a decent Internet Service (200 down / 5 up IIRC) or 40$ for the same internet and basic cable (like just the big networks, CNN Headline News and Court TV - later TruTV, and maybe Travel?). Eventually they kept hiking the price though, and sometime around 2011, we cut the TV option. I think it was like 60$ at that point. The price hikes kept coming though. So, with Fiber establishing itself in like 2019 in the area, this year we finally switched to Fiber. Our Internet went from 100$ to 30. And we are now on a 500/500 plan. When the introductory offer is over next year, either we pay 60, or we drop to 250 and pay 30$. And as bad as our cable company was, Cox is actually one of the best in the country in terms of defending users and keeping prices low. I recognize that every other cable provider sells user data, throttles the service and gouges the shit out of it's customers. So plenty of people on Comcast or AT&T et al. I imagine are saddled with 200$ monthly bills no doubt
Streaming didn't destroy tv. Lack of trailers and marketing and cancelations did. Streaming is just evolution. It's about adapting with the times. A lot of these big shows came out after Netflix already existed. I only watched occasional episodes on cable. But with Netflix ive seen the entirety of many shows. Dexter, Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Boy Meets World. That 70s show. Friends. How i met your mother with it's god awful ending. My Name is Earl which left off on cliffhanger. Last Man on Earth which got canceled and Santa Clarita Diet which also did. Maybe Orville which i need to restart. I'm not paying 60 to 80 bucks on a dvd set. That's for sure. Streaming is amazing. It's just the business side of things needs to evolve. Gaming is doing terrible too. It's just a modern issue with too many options taking up all our attention. Tiktok consumes most of many people's free time. They can waste hours on scrolling Facebook and watching shorts
Not possible since you have to pay union mandated residuals to all of the people that made those shows for them to even be available. As much as organized labor helps workers, you have to remember that it ONLY is meant to help workers, not customers or the audience.
That's not how I remember it, it was mostly about being able to choose the channels you wanted, without being forced to pay for a bunch of other channels. The issue with it was that it was complicated. Some channels would subsidize the other channels, other channels would be paid to be there and some were there mostly for diversity reasons. The issue I had was that the cost of cable went from $5 a month in 1985 to roughly $90 now and the amount of actual shows that I care to watch is even worse than it was back then. I only have cable because it's the only option I have for wired internet and not getting the TV and phone part of the package is somehow more expensive than getting it all together.
@@Jumbleman5 That's just because the corporations try to at least force it to be worse, to make the consumer hate unions over actions that if they just thought things through instead, the unions would not have to be made. A well-paid and understressed employee will deliver better results, and I would rather pay extra and wait to see a creative make something beautiful.
Im still salty at how Netflix's binge model murdered all the hype for Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. shit used to be SUPER successful when it aired weekly and then when part 6 dropped, nobody talked about it...
As someone who spent their tweens watching Adam ruins everything, seeing Adam genuinely firey and passionately PISSED about the destruction of the industry and art form he loves is just special. I’m mad with you Adam. I always was
I had a bit of an epiphany about streaming a few weeks ago. All of these executives aren't putting it all into the streaming model because it makes more money. They're doing it because its money they dont have to share.
Binge watching probably ruined lives or made you miss some appointments. You take old school TV that puts out a show once a week and the shows are designed to have you running home to miss anything. All that put together it's like putting a kid in a candy store. After you eat all the candy you have to wait a year for the next shipment
“Television” series now act like long segmented movies, unlike traditional television that had contained episodes. So you want to binge shows now because you’re teased by the story too much and it’s frustrating to wait. Back in the day an episode of Community had a beginning middle and end and was satisfying.
This is exactly what I found even when watching shows I otherwise like, such as Westworld or the new Fallout series. Now that the whole thing drops instantly and it's also designed to end on a cliffhanger each time, it's really hard to resist watching the next episode immediately after. Cliffhangers have existed for a while but now they do the show more harm than good. It's like the shows are made to keep us in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction so we keep watching 🤔...
TV channels also used to have a wide variety of programs. But thanks to binge watching, TNT is now the Law and Order channel pretty much. Crime dramas and sports are all they show and not much else.
@@quatricise Cliffhangers in the past were used sparingly, often in rare two-part episodes or in a season finale. Now it seems like many (most?) of the streaming dramas end almost every episode on one.
Episodic is always better than serialized. And deep down, people know it. It's one of the reasons shows like Stargate Universe flopped so hard after the other two not being that way. Plenty of shows ran for years and had continuity between episodes without literally running into each other.
The television shows are not fully developed, and you have to wait 2 years and only 2 days have passed, and we still don't know what the show is about.
Truly, ill buy a subcribtion once in a while for a moth to watch a good show, but youtube just has everything and its geniune, because its made by normal people
It also seems generally cheaper to buy into specific channels with different shows, like the Try Guys. I know if I can spend $5 a month, I'll get content I'm for sure gonna like that i can stream anywhere. TH-cam lets us decide the content we want easier.
Broadcast tv was dying for years before Netflix streaming became the norm. Most of those "popular 20+ year old shows" were off the air before 2006 or so. Reality tv took over.
To be fair, tv destroyed tv first. I spent a few years without one (before streaming was a common thing) because the inconvenient scheduling and obscene number of commercials made it too miserable an experience to be worth my while. Now I can watch what I want, when I want, and pause, rewind, etc.. I do want more episodes and completed series, though.
Yes, also at this point TV has been around as a common thing for well over half a century and it's going to be harder and harder to compete with the best the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s, ''20s put out and the problem just gets worse over time, we all only get 168 total hours a week to spend on everything we do. Right now, even if we watch 8 hours of TV a day, that's only 1 hour per decade on average, and with how good the TV was in some of those decades due to forward thinking execs that paid for quality, it's going to get progressively harder to compete anyways. Especially, with so much available via both streaming and home media.
Netflix heyday was good, it was all there, but now it's a pain to watch what I want when theyre all spread out on different subscription, and they pull out license for shows on my watchlist, and the annoying region locks. I am willing to pay, but why would I pay for headache. Pirates can provide a much easier service.
You are saying things I have been ranting about for years. The death of monoculture and water cooler conversations about entertainment. Why is nobody else talking about this???
I have grown to dislike binge-watching because of the associated mental health risks and the limited time to process things after watching an episode and starting another. Most original shows on Netflix and other streaming services are over-serialised and have cinematic budgets which give the impression that they are simply movies that have been stretched out.
It's still not a trend. It's still happening, and it's mostly the elderly and disabled who are dying (as well as poor people, homeless people, and majority BIPOC communities) and most well-off Euroamericans will carry on without a mask in sight.
I miss the red envelope Netflix days. The library of movies was actually larger than it is now because you can only watch what's currently licensed. Netflix probably had warehouses full of 90% of the most purchased DVDs.
This is why I HATE that all episodes at once crap. Once you binge on that tripe, the hype of the show goes away in a few weeks with spoilers on social media.
I don't mind it bc i don't binge, i watch like 2 or 3 eps at a time, and it really annoys me when shows go back to the weekly ep schedule..... it feels like having a calculator, but insisting on doing numerical analysis by hand :gar:
Yeah, and also it just makes the show worse. Watching 1 episode every week, makes you appreciate the show, makes you make theories, think about what will happens, and so on Binge watching is bad
@@no_name4796 i mean, u dont "have" to binge watch... sometimes when i binge, i look up stuff online between eps, or if im watching with we friends, we theorize bit we're also like "whats gona happen next aaaa lesgoll mext episode" ... ig it depends how u consume, and all eps at once allows u to decide how to consume, instead of forcing 1 week per episode.... I've had series i dont watch until all epis come out, then i can watch at my pace
@@no_name4796Gravity Falls wouldn't be one of the best shows of all time if it was dropped all at once. The time between episodes created hype, myatery, and PUZZLE SOLVING from the fans! I'm glad I got to experience it the way it was meant to be experienced.
Crunchyroll started out as a pirating site and became a monster that is making more mainstream anime now harder to financially support without them being involved
I feel like a lot of the actors, writers, TV content creators need to do what a lot of the major TH-cam content creators did with Nebula and just build and launch their own platform where they can make their own material per their own rules that favor them and not tech companies. Nebula isn't industry disrupting but it's a stable, viable business that's helped a lot of TH-cam content creators have a more permanent home for their content that maybe wouldn't appeal to the "everyone" audience. Maybe a lot of the TV content makers can follow a similar route.
One thing you mentioned but a lot of people aren't talking about in detail is that because you can watch brand new content and stuff that was made 100 years ago the content gap is constantly widening.
Any minute now a certain someone who's famous for making grand promises involving technology and delivering a tiny fraction of his claims will decide to buy a streaming service, claim he started it and promise to disrupt the disrupters, then fire all of the people who make the shows. And some people will call him a genius.
and then once he has accumulated enough power he will run for president. or maybe buying the president is enough. Don't get me wrong i like Elon in a lot of ways but..power corrupts and consumes. He made his money being part of a group they called the paypal mafia. I'm not sure you get a name like that for being nice.
I think it really depends on the show, some things I find more enjoyable to binge watch while others I find I need time between episodes to fully digest what happened. Yeah a show like game of thrones had everyone talking every week about each episode but I have had similar experiences when a new show drops on netflix...Not at work mind you as I don't talk about my personal life almost at all with my coworkers and they also talk about almost nothing with me. Most I got was "you need to watch Fallout, its amazing." I started watching it but even then I wasn't caught up on the the show so we couldn't talk about the new episodes. My wife and I only watch 1 episode of any given show a night and we normally try for 30 min shows so she can go to the gym after dinner and I can clean up after dinner. a 1 hr show needs to be insanely good for us to sit down and watch it regularly. Note: I will binge shows on my own if I know its something my wife wont like but even then I can't binge a show in a single day like I used to.
Okay but Hulu’s history is sooo much cooler than you made it out to be. It was originally a free collaboration between several of the OTA channels. I remember telling everyone about it back in the day
i only find this funny bc in 2014, when i was in business college, for a diploma of marketing my assessments were STILL running on "specialty DVD stores are STILL the big boys! write a marketing plan for music maxxx dvd store.". while my teacher was like "these people know NOTHING! in next couple of years, there's going to be a huge move to streaming. like, when was the LAST time ANY of you in this class even bothered to walk into civic video/blockbuster?" *no one raises their hand* exactly my point. my teacher was right. and now it's destroying TV and creativity.
I quite like the indie business model that some content creators like Louis CK have used, where you just put up your own site, charge a fixed price for DRM-free files, and trust that more people will buy it than pirate it. In another time it wouldn't work, but right now people are so desperately grateful for a hassle-free, honest transaction with no strings attached that they actually are buying it, or even pirating it and then buying it if they like it, to vote with their wallet. Louis CK did extremely well with selling his shows directly from his own site, and that has the potential to be a disruptive force if enough content creators do it.
not to nitpick, but Hulu wasnt' really created by Disney, but Disney DID purchase a majority stake in it around the time Disney+ launched via the purchase of 21st Century Fox. I worked for Hulu at this time at a call center that contracted for Hulu's support line, and when Disney+ launched they split our floor between Hulu and Disney+ support. We got laid off after COVID when it hit us hard; 70% of our floor caught it and because the company struggled to retain people after that, they ended up losing the contract.
Also don't forget the insane prices cable and satellite companies changed on top of the advertisements. I had to pay for the niche stuff I didn't want to watch too and it sucked.
The high prices for cable/satelite I blame on the owners of said cable channels, the local broadcasters passing on broadcast fees to the consumers, and the cable/satellite tv providers themselves
Yeah... This is a HIGHLY biased video. You can buy Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and Max all for MUCH less than cable got to if you pick the *with ads* versions. He's conveniently comparing apples to oranges. He's also comparing the "peak TV" version of content with today's TV in ways convenient to his argument. Yes, TV was better when companies were subsidizing. You can't have it both ways. He's also taking about shows like "The Office". Yes, we had great shows back then but... we also had absolute crap. Not every show in the 90s was Friends and Seinfeld. You can't take a decades worth of time and pretend that a handful of shows represent it. At the end of tbe day he's a Union spokesman and this is a propaganda piece for the TV unions (writers, actors, etc.). I ABSOLUTELY agree that those people are getting screwed and that needs to be fixed, but he lost major credibility with this video. :(
You had me until "union spokesman", I'm not sure if you're trying to insinuate that being a bad thing? Is he biased in this because it could effect his career and those of his friends? Probably! It would have been more nuanced otherwise I'd think. Considering more angles etc. Though unions definitely aren't bad things.
@@victoriah.20I have absolutely no issues with Unions. I like Unions. My point was only that the piece is less of a fair and balanced look and more of him doing his job to set the narrative. Basically -- let's not forget context.
There's no way the average user is paying more for streaming than cable. Average people have 2-3 services for $10-15 each. Even on the high end, that's $45 a month which is less than what basic cable costs.
Exactly. I'm rarely signed up to the same services at once, though I have very specific viewing habits compared to some. It might be more expensive like as someone said if you were paying for every streaming service and for all of the ad free versions of them. It might be more expensive than cable. Though I have not personally experienced that, it has been significantly cheaper
Take control of you spending at rocketmoney.com/conover
I will consider it...FOR ADAM!!!
Uber is worse... door dash is pathetic...
Air BnB is causing the HIKE in appartment prices
DESTROY ALL these sick startups AL LWAY WORSE THAN STREAMING !
Doesn't rocket money sound too good to be true? It is funny when you've pinned this comment on a video telling us not to fall for the big tech rug pulls.
TV was already dead. What you are talking about as the “golden age”, the damage had already started. Everyone wanted to skip ads on their TiVo, ruining the advertising income stream. The TiVo ruined the age of “free” tv.
@@AsuraVeri^ same… 🤔❓
an under-discussed aspect of shorter seasons is the fact that we're losing all the avenues for people just getting their start in the industry; with a 24-episode season, that's 48 slots for writers and directors, which means there's a lot more room for working crew members to get a regular gig. like a lot of Hollywood's bad decisions, this one will eventually come back to bite them; undeniably, the Russo brothers have made an enormous amount of money for Hollywood, but they wouldn't have ever gotten the chance to do that if they didn't first get to direct a lot of episodes of long seasons of Arrested Development and Community.
Yes! Mentorship and apprenticeship is often so undervalued! People need that hands-on experience to get their foot in the door!
This is something I think about all the time as someone who recently graduated film school! It seems like it's impossible to get your foot in the door
An under discussed aspect of shorter seasons and offshoring, is people in their 50s having their careers completely deleted while they were saving for retirement. Younger tech CEOs, hate walking into any studio or office and seeing people with grey hair working there. If you didn't climb the management ladder, you're a loser. The Actor's/Writer's strike gave companies an excuse to simply never hire those people again, so age discrimination is just plausible deniability.
Quality over quantity, every time. Less is more. Nobody needs to watch a bloated show just to give people in the TV industry more to do.
Somehow the British TV industry has been able to get by just fine with 6-episode seasons where quality is the number one priority and there's plenty of talent developing there. The end goal shouldn't be to create endless episodes of mid content, but to make content that's worth having.
I see where you're coming from, but the argument isn't for 22 episodes of shitty TV. Nobody sets out to make a bad thing! The ideal is always for it to be good. Whether it's 22 episodes or 6.
I would also say that a long season is not for people to have "more to do." This is industry folks' livelihood, and they rely on it! It's job security in a tricky industry that has cut thousands of jobs in the last couple of years. And even when the industry is going strong everyone is basically a journeyman. Hopping from gig to gig with no safety net. A twenty-two episode order was the norm until very recently. That's effected people. A lot of shows also thrived under that model! Creating long story arcs with big payoffs and making your favorite sitcom characters feel more real because you got to spend so much time with them!
Sometimes a show is good and sometimes it's bad. It has little to do with how long it's seasons are. I've seen six to eight episode seasons drag horribly! There's no right answer. It's also worth mentioning the U.K. is a different beast. Their T.V. is funded through T.V. licenses. Basically funded through taxes! They make short series with small budgets. It's sorta frowned upon to make a big budget show their. Seen as wasteful. Just food for thought!
I am paying, TH-cam, to not see ads, and now creators are forced to put ads directly into their videos. I'm with you.
Most creators get far more money per view when you pay for no-ad TH-cam than from the ad-supported model. Them adding built-in ads is in response to the ad-supported model paying too little. Not you.
I also pay YT to not see ads. I don’t mind in-video ads, really, because I can easily skip past them with a few screen taps, unlike any ads YT puts in themselves. Plus, in-video ads are usually more targeted and the creators can sometimes do some funny stuff with them.
Actually I think YT is "cracking down" on sponsor segments in videos. Once in a blue moon I already get a "jump ahead" button, maybe its a premium thing but this could really hurt creators who depend on these, especially the ones that arent in the adsense program.
There's a way around avoiding ads on TH-cam without paying for it, but if I annouce it, TH-cam might disband me lol
@@andrewschultz77 Especially since anything intelligent that isn't influencer fluff is demonetized.
I've always been a huge TV fan with lots of favorite shows. And now every time I turn the TV on I think about how I have access to more shows than ever before, and there have never been fewer things I actually wanted to watch.
Lots of good shows. Problem is they all get cancelled so i never watch a show before it´s confirmed there will be a season 3. Or that i know that last season can stand on it´s own if season 3 gets cancelled.
That's part of the problem I think. I usually agree with Adam on his takes, and in part I do here via advertising, but I think he misses the mark on most of it.
Let's look at some statistics. In 2010 there were 210 scripted shows produced. In 2022, there were 600. That's a 3X increase on the number of shows produced. That extra choice alone makes it much harder to find time to simply watch shows to see which ones are good or not. Add to that streaming means all of these different shows are fractured in different services. The Bear and Shogun are on Hulu, Stranger Things, Wednesday, and Bridgerton are on Netflix, The Boys, Wheel of Time, Fall Out are on Prime, Silo, Severance, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking are on Apple+, and House of the Dragon, True Detective, and White Lotus are HBO/Max (we won't talk about Disney+, though Andor is excellent). These are all pretty good to excellent shows, easily rivalling stuff like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Lost, etc. (though nothing rivals peak Game of Thrones yet).
So not only are the number of shows a lot larger, but the places where each person gets them are more diverse, with very few people able to tune in to the same show/service because collectively they all cost a ton. This makes it more difficult to build word of mouth campaigns for all but the wealthiest people, whereas with cable if you had a good show, new watchers could just watch it or reruns without needing to sign up for something new.
But I think most of Adam's complaints are nostalgia based rather than legitimate here. Yes, there were great shows back when cable was dominate, but there were also real duds too. Sure, Comedy Central birthed South Park, Chapelle Show, The Daily Show, and Reno 911, but they also made shows like Drawn Together, Mind of Mencia, Crossballs, and Big Lake, shows that people actively don't remember or have very negative associations with.
I do think one thing that has mostly gone away and is not talked about here is the sitcom. I don't know why the sitcom model doesn't really work with streaming, though my guess is it doesn't draw new customers so they get cancelled quickly. But we haven't really had any big breakthrough sitcoms like the Office, Parks and Rec, How I met your Mother, Arrested Development, etc. since about 2016 or so. Which is a real shame, as sitcoms are easy to watch and generally cost less to make, so they seem like a perfect fit for streaming. Idk maybe they will come back some day.
Ok, rant over lol.
@@urduibyou're literally helping the shows get cancelled.
I work for an ISP/cable company, and you would be amazed how many people call to remove "Max" from their bills only to call back upset that they no longer have HBO
Prob the worst marketing stunt WB ever pulled
"Why am I paying for Cinemax?"
It's almost as bad a rebrand as renaming Twitter "X".
🤦♀️
Hilarious, but in a tragic way
as much as i agree with the sentiment, there was a major bit that you blew past/got wrong: Hulu wasn't created by Disney, it was the collaborative effort of the major networks and a shared answer to Netflix until Disney bought Fox(and Fox's share of Hulu) which THEN led to all the other networks panicking and rushing their own streaming services onto the market.
I remember that Hulu used to be free and you could watch broadcast shows for free the following day. It was how broke college me kept up to date with my favorite tv shows.
It was also built with the express purpose of trying to introduce commercials into streaming and see what they could get away with and what the consumer would tolerate. It was always the thin end of the wedge.
I was an original Hulu Beta Tester. Very limited selection but it was great. Until they removed video game console access and then removed the free version. Pissed me the hell off. I didn't watch nearly every episode of Cleopatra 2025 because I enjoyed it! I watched it because it was one of only shows they had on. Those bastards couldn't even give us Beta Testers a legacy Hulu accounts for our sacrifice?
I forget the exact timeline, but Hulu was owned, at least in part, by NBC Universal & Comcast in the days before Peacock. I believe you're right that it was a joint venture of multiple providers, and then Comcast divested from it in favor of their own online streaming platform (I forget the name, but it was probably something like XfinityTV or w/e). This was also around the time you started to see all of the cable companies withdrawing their licenses to Netflix to onshore their most valuable shows for their specific platforms.
Then, eventually, we get to Fox being bought by Disney, and Disney (which already had Disney+) now owns two streaming services that are in competition with each other. They kind of manage to coexist by catering to different audiences (Disney originals vs non-Disney brands) but even that split is starting to fall, which leaves Hulu in limbo as to whether it stays around or not.
The funny thing is that the story remains the same. The whole point of people jumping off over-the-air broadcast television to cable was because it was a premium service that promised premium shows without ads. Then, as more shows came to cable they had to increase the price and include advertisements. When the value proposition became unsustainable (who needs 500+ channels of TV?) was when we saw the introduction of Netflix. A service where you pay a nominal fee to watch your favorite shows ad-free. However, now that we crest that bell curve of unsustainable business, we once again look for a solution.
In the end, we really just want to watch a handful of movies and/or shows, and everything else is just fluff or noise. Unfortunately, a complete collection of that media is more than the cost of the associated streaming service. In some cases, that media wouldn't exist without the service. Case in point, Crunchyroll essentially made anime maintstream. They don't pay anyone in the industry nearly well enough, but they provided the financial incentive for more foreign media to be translated, as well as the platform to disseminate it effectively. Prior to that, it was largely a community that thrived on piracy and fan subtitles that were often poorly done or incorrect.
@@foxallanyou shut your mouth about Cleopatra 2025.
Catering to binge watching serves no purpose. There's no technical reason Netflix can't release an episode a week. Many TH-cam creators post new episodes on a weekly schedule. Weekly releases help build fan followings and brings people back the next week.
It's especially a problem for kids shows. Kids binge each new show and move on, never sticking with one show long enough to buy the toys or games based on it.
Binge watching is setting shows up to fail, and inviting people to leave the service (they have no reason to stay subscribed to see the next episode).
Well most Netflix shows are fully serialized witch are enjoyed better binged. but that also leads to a situation where fans can be disappointed when there show gets canceled after a season or two. Most serialized shows run on a system where its more like a movie so you are not satisfied until you get to the end of the story. so cancelling the show after a season means you will not get the end of the story leaving you unsatisfied. Netflix makes very few shows that are fully episodic or that are a hybrid between episodic and serialized. In short Netflix makes shows that work with the binge model and the binge model and the weekly release model are not compatible.
We've known this since the robber barons, the goal of capitalism isn't competition, it's the monopoly. People forget that competitions have winners, and with capitalism, its winner take all.
Exactly
That was perfectly worded
I rather watch this for free, fuck your Patreon.
read imperialism by lenin if you want to really understand this comment
All republican think the same thing about capitalism but your exactly right. Capitalism end is a Monopoly model.
I’m a TV producer who’s been out of work for months and this was extremely cathartic to watch. Most of my friends are out of work too, but it’s hard not to take it personally.
Not to be rude, just a nieve Midwestern question: What stops you from getting some talented industry friends together and making something of your own instead of creating content for the machine? My daughter is a digital animator and is far happier doing commissions/ freelance work while making less money. Some of the best media is made by great people put in a tough situation.
Greetings from Mexico... I am precisely in the same situation.
@@heg203 American animator in the UK. We all stand together worldwide against studio greed and tech companies destroying our industry 💪
You have done that yourself Anakin!
Womp womp
NBC was smart and realized that people don't stay up until 11:30 pm every night to watch The Tonight Show, Late Night, and then on Saturdays, SNL. So they put it all onto TH-cam. Which is good, because it expands the audience into the younger generation who likely can't get live TV in their household or don't know how to, (not us, but I know of some folks who just have a Roku for every TV), or just are unaware of a live TV broadcast medium other than cable and satellite, and for us legacy viewers, makes it so we can wake up the following morning and watch the monologue, sketches and interviews. Although I do still stay up and try to watch SNL on Saturdays and I'll usually make it halfway through Late Night before falling asleep.
By the way, great video. Earned yourself a subscriber.
Younger generation Seth Meyers fan here. Honestly what really got me into his show was seeing one in person, but same idea lol
I was an Ayn Rand reading libertarian who fully believed in the wisdom of a free market in high school in the late 90s. I grew out of that when the internet bubble burst. I don't understand how anyone can be one today with the countless examples of market manipulation keeping a market "Free" has resulted in.
No such thing as a free market, not in the past, not in the future. All markets require regulation. It's just a pipe dream and/or cheap propaganda. It cannot exist IRL
Same here. It seemed clear by the early 2000's that the neoliberal consensus was not producing the promised results. Intended results, maybe, but promised results, nope.
Libertarians are just Anarchists with a money boner
Any Rand's "great men" funded Movie Pass. The poster child for brain dead stupid business models that axiomatically can not work but CAN get lots of members, each of which lost money for the company.
I leaned libertarian before I went to college and generally believed in the idea of the free market as its commonly expressed in those circles. Seemed like a plausible model and philosophy until I started learning from the source-- Smith, Ricardo, et al. Later, I went to engineering school and that's where I learned that scientific assumptions are for simplifying problems so that they can actually be solved (somewhat) and serve as the basis of some design. Economics isn't really any different, EXCEPT that people take the assumptions as TRUE the moment they see some advantage-- instead of your plane crashing, you just have an economy lurching from one government intervention to the next, or just suffering endless boom and bust cycles because no one is even aware of the second and third and fourth order effects that are occurring because they are deliberately NOT looking for them.
the biggest problem is companies are hiring executives that have no idea what they are doing. the C level is so detached from their customers and inside their own echo chamber its destroying peoples free and decompress time. and there is nothing we can do
Yes, there is, but it is too much work and will make people uncomfortable so we’re not going to do it. Read this in an angry tone directed at the people who don’t want to do more than lift their own butts off the couch.
Those same execs are hiring writers who also don’t know what they’re doing, and that has allowed legacy fans to grow angry (and sometimes toxic) but there hasn’t been this much bad writing in TV since the late 70s or 80s. Now streamers want “lean back TV” or “Second screen TV” or “Dad TV” or God help us all “Mid TV”! Just the explosion of exposition dumps in pilot episodes is galling. You know how you find out a character is a brilliant lawyer/doctor/cop? Another character tells you they are in the first ten minutes! This used to be something a writer would get canned for doing, now it’s like a rampant std running through practically every streaming platform.
Arguably the biggest issue that the execs have is figuring out how much money a show is really bringing in. With OTA programming, they could look at the ratings and the advertiser dollars and work out how much the show was bringing in and look at what they were spending on advertising and production costs. With streaming, it's pretty hard to say how much a show is really contributing to gaining and retaining subscriptions. You don't have any idea what the other streaming services are doing in terms of numbers the way that they would in the olden days with Nielson ratings, it's all a massive guess. So they go for metrics that are easily quantified even if they are completely inadequate.
Part of why they look at binging that first day is because if a show isn't in that top 10 the likelihood of an audience even knowing it's there is pretty low.
At least that's Netflix. I've recently subscribed to Max and I find far more programming that I might actually want to watch just on day one than I would on any given day on Netflix.
@@rickcleveland310 Are you the Rick Cleveland I think you are?
@@rickcleveland310 if you think the past was some oasis of good writing you're only fooling yourself. Every decade since now and way back into the past has it's lions share of garbage. Writing really hasn't changed all that much, but I'd argue it's even better now because there's more avenues to do so.
I've been in this industry for 33 years. I've worked in Post Production for about 26 of those years and this is the worst it's ever been. In the last 2 yrs and 2 months, I've only worked 19 weeks and my last paycheck was mid-December. 😭
I'm 53 & saw the TV 📺 entertainment business 📉 .... TV from mid 1990s to around 2012 will never return. If you made $ or worked then you had a decent career.
And to add insult to injury, content creators have forgotten the art of the fade to commercial break. So the ads now appear abruptly out of nowhere and make the watching experience even more miserable.
EDIT: I realize this is harder to control on youtube where it is automated. But it can be controlled on streaming services. But then again, they often don't bother to place ads in the right spots even for shows that were originally created for traditional over the air TV. 🤦🏻♀️
It is because they all use adblockers, like the cool kids.
ngl kinda like when content creators mix they ads into what their talking about or their particular "flavor" of content, like Internet Historian with Nordman or Some More News incorporating the ads into their unhingedness and so on and so forth.... but idk, maybe i'm a brainwashed contentmaxing consumingcuck
I like what Robert Evans does on his podcast “Behind the Bastards”. He’ll be explaining some horrible thing that happened in history, and then cut to ads by pausing and then insisting that the sponsored products are not responsible for an atrocity. Like, “Y’know who won’t taint baby formula with lead? The products and services that support this podcast”
Comment etiquette is the king of ads
For content that was produced to air on conventional TV, there were engineering standards: the picture had to go to a solid shade of "ad black" and stay that way long enough to let the linear broadcast recognize it and patch some commercials in. Closed captioning had to be done to certain standards. Ads and content had to have audio signals of similar loudnesses.
For content produced to air exclusively on digital streaming, under "new media" contracts, none of that was required, so few bothered to do it. And now that the streaming services are regressing to a more conventional TV experience, the experience is frequently janky and trash.
Dropout is probably my favorite streaming service. They are doing it right.
500% this. There's a great video by Jimmy Robins that compares Dropout's model when compared to how The Try Guys or Watcher handled it and it's insane how well Dropout just works. It worked so well, that College Humor is basically rebranding itself, pretty seamlessly
Give it 5-10 years 😂
@@snooopledinkeroo it's already been 6 and they're still going strong!
they DID rebrand as Dropout. They don't use "collegehumor" anymore. As a fan growing up watching their POV videos before any of the current cast were there, watching it morph into my all time favorite DnD shows and comedy shows is crazy. so happy to have watched them throughout the years. @@IAmMightyMike
Bought a year subscription this year, loving it. My only complaint is that I want more, but I'd rather they stay financially stable.
Hey Adam, I discovered ''Adam ruins everything'' a little too late, a few years ago after its cancellation, but it really makes me happy to see thatt you kept the concept and spirit and turned an amazing documentary show into these videos, you are doing amazing work and i'm all in for it
The context missing here is that cable itself was the original streaming. Cable was marketed as the first paid tv model. The benefit was no ads. But once cable disrupted network tv, it kept charging but added the ads.
The issue is that every "innovation" is a rehash of what amounts to monopolization with its attendant issues
Exactly. Adam might be too young to remember it, but Cable was marketted as no ads.
This is exactly why I'm so alarmed to see all the streaming services adding an ad-tier. We've seen how this game goes before, mark my words they'll eventually either A) remove all the ad-free plans, or B) have only one "ultra premium" ad free plan that will be extra expensive.
The phenomena has a term, it's called enshittification
This single comment has more value than the entire video. Thank you!
@@clv603 yeah, Corey Doctorow really hit the nail on the head with his analysis
It should have a 4th problem: the lack of physical media. Sure, it may not be the whole source of income, but the sale of DVDs and Blue-rays helped studio make bank. Also, we wouldn’t have to worry about a show we like disappearing forever.
Physical media was the reason studios took risks on movies that weren’t lowest common denominator slop. There was that chance a movie that didn’t do good at the box office had a chance at physical media sales through word of mouth
The problem with physical media is I think a lot of collectors just assumed that everyone else has infinite space to collect stuff and they all have a collector mentality. They don't. A lot of people just want to watch stuff on demand without having to set things to record. For a while, the only way to easily do that was physical media. Then TH-cam, Netflix, and Hulu came along and said, "Hey as long as you have a device connected to the internet, you don't even need a TV to watch shows and movies. That's why physical media had become a niche market.
Physical has been making a big comeback since Covid.
Tons of old shows & cartoons getting dvd collection released. I see them in Walmarts every other day
My issue with the transition to streaming/online delivery, ig from my gamer perspective, is when you do not get to actually own at least a copy of the media. I don't mind everything being online, so long as I have the ability to download locally and be able to partaker without internet (which fails a lot where I live). Also, why are prices the same if they're not spending money on printing physical media, delivering it, handiling it, etc...... it prob all went to profits for the higher ups.... and then those with allegorical eyepatches and digital wooden legs laugh n_ñ
@@photoelectron The prices are much lower online. Especially if you just buy subscriptions instead of buying movies which are included on different platforms anyway. For the price of 3 seasons of a TV show, I can subscribe to something for a whole year and watch many TV shows fully.
Whenever a show comes out that I don't want to see get cancelled, but don't have time to binge it(which is most of the time), I use my tablet and just play the show from episode and let it run in the background while I do other stuff
This reminded me of a discussion I had with my husband the other day about missing bottle episodes where it was about character development instead of these short season, fast paced things. Let the material breathe! Let us know the characters!
I had this conversation with my mother the other day as well, I'm backing up my DVDs and was doing SG-1 and how I can't think of a recent Sci-Fi show that hits like it. It feels like nothing actually builds it's characters, world and plot anymore.
I miss that for Star Trek
@@randomtinypotatocried I enjoy Strange New Worlds but it’s so short that I just end up watching DS9 or TNG for the 100th time lol. I spend more time watching old Trek, SG1/Atlantis, Parks&Rec, or Midsomer Murders, than I do watching anything new.
The last good bottle episode I can remember was the fly episode in Breaking Bad and that was well over a decade ago.
@@EmmaTeckenbrock One of the most beloved episodes in SG-1 fandom (Window Of Opportunity) wouldn't be made in today's landscape.
That Comedy Central story is truly heartbreaking. I remember 20 years ago when it was peak. South Park was still fresh, Chapelle, Reno 911!, Jon Stewart was really starting to hit his stride and then we got The Colbert Report. Good times.
What Comedy Central did to Dave Chappelle, I not really caring what happen to it.
I only really ever watched Comedy Central for the Colbert Report and Jon Stewart. I gradually started watching those less and less, and then eventually stopped entirely, going back only for the end of Jon Stewart's run on the network.
My parents watched those shows, but stopped after they left, and that was the end of that.
Comedy Central went into decline not because of some evil suits, but because people stopped watching it.
Young people just don't watch as much TV. They have lots of other better things to do.
@@wellofworlds well he's not exactly a good guy himself turns out
The fact we got as much Bojack as we did is a miracle
I'm so glad we got it before streaming hit this point. It's one of my favorite shows. Wish I could get the physical media of it 😭
The constant price increases has caused me to spend more time on either TH-cam, or reading books and buying cds and dvds. Things are getting way too expensive.
It's not that its getting expensive, it's that our income isn't being indexed with the cost of living.
I should've known about that happening and then again you may not see this since with times now and restrictions it really is nuts.
@@HarringJess Most people don't understand the concept of inflation. If they've been making 600 dollars since 1989, they think their wage has stayed the same. They don't understand that the value of 600 dollars is getting lower and lower every year. In order to equal your salary from 1989, you need to be making 1500 dollars today.
Came from Captain Midnight’s video. Both great breakdowns of different consequences of the same problems
This is the exact same thing we’ve seen since at least the 80s, I think?
I’m thinking about Walmart coming into small towns with the promise of jobs and cheap goods. They lose money on the new store sometimes for years undercutting the Main Street stores, then once they’ve turned the once vibrant shopping district into a blight town, they jack up prices. People are left with one major employer who pays so little they have to do food drives so the employees can eat, and no competition for prices on goods so they end up paying more for the same things than they did a few years earlier. Plus the town typically ends up with higher unemployment as the dozen or so old shops have been replaced by just one
And we fall for it every time since we all chase our own short term self interest over what’s best for society at large
Yep, the complaints about the big firms destroying their brands and such is sort of missing the point, we're in the middle of a total war situation designed not to produce great content, but to capture market share. Also advertising is a bit of a red herring inasmuch as it was already relatively fucked as a revenue source regardless of what Netflix happened to be doing - thank Google, Facebook and co for that one.
Agreed, back in the 80s I can remember many domestic products to choose from across all categories. Then the imports started to trickle in, and people bought them because they were slightly cheaper. The domestic manufacturers shut down, costing people more in the long run than the small amount they saved on imports.
part of this is terrible, but part of this is also just how progress works in our world. think of how many jobs were lost to automation during industrialization or to mechanized farming when it was invented.
@@jonleibow3604 now you know why countries made these things called "tarrifs"
@@theX24968Z that's not really an accurate comparison, though. Historically eliminated jobs and created new jobs elsewhere.
The consolidation of capital and people chasing only their own short term self interest has been the cause here of people ultimately getting screwed over.
Whoever went to the trouble of replacing FRIENDS with BUDDIES in the same font for a two-second joke, thank you😂
I've been aware of the problem for a while, but you did a great job of putting this into context. Netflix has destroyed television.
What WarnerDiscovery did to Cartoon Network was vile. I was raised on that channel during its heyday in the 2000s, and now it's pretty much dead.
The site was EVERYTHING to me too. I spent so many hours playing their flash library!
@@JamesTDG Get Flashpoint archive. They have all of those old flash games.
While all the shit they did to beloved properties was, is, and always will be terrible, I won't forgive them for erasing Final Space. Say what you will about that show (assuming those reading this have seen it), but it did not deserve to be cancelled pre-merger, and subsequently written off by Discovery. I'm just glad Olan (the show's creator) got a license to finish it via a graphic novel.
It is crazy how much of the modern zeitgeist’s entertainment getting worse can be tied to one really bad CEO
Preach it brotha!
2 Adam videos in a week? Damn the world really must be crumbling
I'd like to see Adam run for president one of these days he's the kind of guy I already agree with on things and he's a very personable guy and a likeable guy and even though I'm a Canadian I think he would do great things for America simply because it's pretty clear he's a smart dude with a good head on his shoulders and it's clear he has the right morals that I would want from somebody running a country but of course I think it might do good for him to run for some smaller offices first just so we don't have another unqualified guy like Trump running the country because that was embarrassing as a Canadian I felt second hand embarrassment for you guys
@@ZakkandtheJwhat makes you think he’d want the job?
@@ZakkandtheJ dude... you need to get over electoralism
@@ZakkandtheJ He’s not as smart as you think he is. His show Adam Ruins Everything made a ton of errors on almost every episode. It was unwatchable.
Plus, opposition will just play the clip of him on Joe Rogan making a fool of himself.
Problems with modern media consumption are not limited to.
1. Rushed streaming shows that in spite of some of them being good there is a noticeable lack of quality from shows of the past due to inconsistent animation and writing, lack of focus or direction, characters that hardly change at all, bad formatting of the episodes and retconning from previous shows to try something different but lack the experience or talent to make it work in the story due to negligence or laziness. Examples include: Helluva Boss, She ra reboot, Stephen Universe, The Legend of Korra
2. Shows that go on for far too long than necessary or shows that try to represent the previous work but fail to do it effectively. Examples include Teen titans go, Fairly Odd parents and Spongebob.
3. Putting original shows that are good in quality last while putting popular but poor quality shows first which is the bad corporate decisions at Cartoon Network for putting Teen titans Go first while leaving Adventure Time and Regular Show to name a few last.
4. Canceling a good show and replacing it with something worse. What Disney did to the Owl House.
5. Film critique becomeing lazier by focusing on politics way too much. Back then critiquing a movie was about the writing, cinematography and characters. Now the focus is too much on politics and identity. While all art is political having it be 90 percent or a majority of your critique makes your film critique lazy since it makes you a media analysis equivalent of Fox News or CNN not a professional film critic.
Corporate TV doesn't take risks. They would rather buy their mistress a 2nd house then risk ANY of their money.
But the point was that the way channels worked, a significant part of that risk was mitigated because you were selling it to the exact audience it was intended for, whereas you can't do that for these streaming sites because they don't have intended audiences, and intended audiences have no way to actually find their content.
Yep, there has been some great network TV the last 10 years, but there's also been a lot more garbage. The bigger issue, IMHO, is that they're competing against 70-ish years of TV and all the hits. There's also the issue that they have largely stopped producing TV shows that are standalone episodes. One of the reasons that people watch Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch these days is that you can watch just one episode without having to remember the previous episode. (The other major reason is that the were heavily syndicated years later)
@@Wolfwood2057the advantage that streaming services have though is that they don't have to rely on Nielson Ratings anymore to tell them who is watching what. They have access to way more people's viewing habits. 5 personal accounts on each shared Netflix means 5 data sets that can tell them what each individual viewer in the household wants and doesn't want. It tells them what time of day they watch, how often, if they binge, what genre. And then they can extend the watch time by tweaking algorithms to recommend "much watch" content to viewers. You can also take it with you, so that's even more ad revenue and more data about you
I mean, can you blame them? IF you're going to throw millions into a project you want a return. Are you going to argue you'd be different if given the opportunity? You would personally sink 40 million of your own money on a chance, watch that flop, then do it again?
@crushycrawfishy1765 it's not their personal money lol. If I had that much, I would to be a patron of the arts. That would be awesome
FTC Antitrust needs to make private equity subsidized pricing to undercut competitors ILLEGAL.
Yes this!
They will jump on that after they fix Citizens United :)
The concept of the gentrification of media has been something I have been thinking about as a topic for a while and this video really puts into perspective the issues surrounding the topic.
Doesn't gentrification typically mean pushing out low income residents and decreasing access to resources? Yet with streaming media the opposite is happening. As a low income person living below the line of poverty I have more access as far as media than ever before and at a lower cost. Plus nobody here seems to know about Hoopla or other free streaming services through libraries.
I'm in fandom, and we talk about how the binge & small episode count model has spun the fandom cycle so fast that fandoms can't get a foothold anymore.
Legit some shows I like, even released week to week, seem to end so fast I can barely find people to discuss them with
Why do you guys get online and say some of the dumbest things? This doesn't even make sense on its face.
@@darksaint0124 They're saying when shows don't last very long it's harder to establish a lasting community of fans. What about that do you find hard to understand?
@@darksaint0124basically dropping 8 episodes at once destroys fans’ ability to form community online
I'm finding that anime doesn't have this issue because they didn't do any of that. And likely never will because Japan has a wholly different philosophy on work, for one. Dip your toes in maybe I dunno. 🤷♀️
One thing I'd like to add:
Killing off physical media to force us into streaming. Cutting off a source of revenue seems ridiculous to me.
Same for what all these companies have done to their film divisions : they make films but keep them on their services rather than release to theatres. Another source of potential revenue (and advertising) that the big streaming companies are missing out on.
IMHO, the biggest issue with the theater releases is how quickly they go from theater to streaming service. Sometimes it's even the same day. It used to be that you'd watch it in the theater if you wanted to, and then there was a prolonged wait for it to be available on home media. Then there'd be a wait until it was being shown on TV. At every step along the way, the studio could make money to help pay for the production costs and turn a profit. And it helped a lot with movies that didn't do so well in the theater as it gave the word of mouth time to build and for a cult following to emerge. That's rather unlikely these days.
0:03 Infinity Train's loss still hurts so much. For my money, the greatest Western animation show we've had since Bojack Horseman
Tbh it was getting a little samey after season 2
@@tangyorange6509 S3 and S4 couldn't be any more differently thematically or tonally. C'mon
@@franciscoduran4618 Season 3 was SO DAMN GOOD
@@NoteBard One of the best seasons of any CN show ever. Maybe the greatest overall?
TH-cam *is* my TV. I don’t really watch streaming services anymore, because they’re more or less the replacement for cable. They aren’t ad free by default like they were before the 2020’s, which just makes them not worth the price anymore.
If only Alphabet wasn't taking so much revenue out of TH-cam....
Imagine how good this service could be, if they could use that money to pay producers.
I was just thinking the other day that I've become so disillusioned by streaming services that I only really go to TH-cam any more. Surely there have been some great shows in the past 5 years with active fandoms??? Nope.
Edit: Okay the Vivzieverse is popular. And that's not even on TV!
Yeah. I switch between streaming services (other then TH-cam) to binge watch content and cancel in a month or two, but lately I just can't really get into much of anything on most of the streaming services. TH-cam literally has people who just post videos recapping TV shows and movies, which I find more entertaining a lot of time. Occasionally one of them will sound so interesting I'll put it on my list of shows to find which streaming service I can watch it on.
@@SeppelSquirrelthe only one I can think of is Squid Game. All the shows I watch even on streaming services are a decade old at least.
I think streaming is "great" for people like me who have some very niche special interests ( like, say, you watch French tv or like boutique label movie houses) that might not be met with cable. That's imo what it was for despite what the ceos of said companies might tell you.
It's just that rather than be an option on the buffet table, it's now become the whole buffet. When you become the whole buffet, then things become expensive, and people get tired of you. Nothing looks good enough to get back in line for.
But the free buffet where you can find niche content made by people like you? One that that can feel a bit more personalized? Sign me up.
Netflix not only killed TV but it also indirectly killed the physical media market. Many of the shows from the early 2000s until 2015 were must see TV and popularized the boxed set of DVDs with entire seasons or a whole TV series. That was a big source of residuals for the writers, directors, and actors involved with those shows.
I always had the sense that what Netflix was offering was too good to be true and was more like a bait and switch. Its a classic move of predatory capitalism whereby, a new competitor will look to corner a market with predatory low pricing to drive out everyone else and then use its position as a monopoly to make all the money it wants a la Amazon.
They really didn't. People forget just how much garbage was on TV during the '90s and '00s. There have been great TV shows on network TV since then, but much of it was already on networks like HBO where you had what was hardly any different from streaming. You could watch what you wanted when you wanted via DVR and it was behind a paywall. If anything, Netflix just accelerated what was already happening.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadewho forgot?
In 2015 I loved going to Best Buy to get Steelbook exclusives and then in the clearance section, getting 2-3 BluRays for my collection. I loved the feeling of OWNING a copy that I could watch any time I wanted and was willing to take care of the discs. Now, I refuse to enter stores because of the depressive state they’re in. It also makes me sad that today’s kid does not know the excitement of getting the physical movie to HOLD. You felt special when you finally had the Endgame Steelbook exclusive. You feel RELIEF when that movie from 1987 that nobody cared about is now out on limited Blu-ray.
Drug dealer capitalism: "First hit's always free (or, at least, really, really cheap)."
Matt Damon made an interesting point on Hot Ones about how every single movie has to go for broke these days. Back in the 90s, early 2000s, the home video market meant you could release an...OK...movie into cinemas, and not have it do too well, but it'd more than recoup its costs on home video.
That's gone. Now, every movie has to make back its budget on the opening weekend, sell merchandise, and, of course, set up a Universe and act as advertising for then next movie (or five), so that people will see the sequel out of obligation to make sense of the first one if nothing else. And to do that, the execs feel the only way is to go huge or go home, with half-billion dollar budgets and another quarter bill on advertising - all for a single film. And all that money means the studios get very, very, very risk-averse.
The marketing budget alone for the next MCU movie could probably produce another Big Lebowski or Office Space.
Yeah Netflix did to Hollywood, what Walmart did to box retail stores. I work in the grocery business and we can't even order stock for the price Walmart can sell it for. Call me old fashion but I miss owning my media, reading a physical book that I bought at the bookstore, and spending a Saturday at the shopping mall. Maybe even watching a movie at the theatre that wasn't a sequel or reboot.
Executive greed is destroying their own industry. The good old days of TV only was good for everyone. Executives, actors, and writers ect had a very lucrative pay system.
Small edit you guys might want to make: at 14:30, Adam says "FX", and a poster for 'Breaking Bad' appears. 'Breaking Bad' aired on AMC, not FX. Other than that, amazing--and unfortunately depressing--video! Also, I saw Adam at the Animation Guild rally a few weeks ago in Burbank. Very inspiring. Thanks for everything you do, dude. 🙏
I miss the old History Channel and discovery channel. Now it’s just garbage.
Agreed. They Alienpilled WAY TOO HARD! Seriously, Ancient Aliens used to be a fun thought experiment, then they rushed to say "hey ,what if aliens did this", then thought their theories were true then whine to say "ALIENS BUILT THE PYRAMIDS" or some other dumb shit
I used to love modern marvels and Mythbusters 😢
TV and films 🎥 once were about culture, refinement, class 🧐 .....
I thought lemme watch this while doing homework in the background, but Adam is too good, I cant stop looking away
"Word of Mouth" THANK YOU! I've been saying this for years now, that the binge and forget model kills all "watercooler conversation" that keeps a show alive and brings in more viewers, because nobody can talk about the show if everybody's only at a different point in the season - there's no shared reference point, so any comment by anybody is 'spoilers' to another.
granted, the weekly schedule DID survive at least in some genres on the *other* services, particularly in sci-fi/fantasy. Star Trek (incl Picard), most of the MCU shows (until they dumped Echo just to get rid of it). There are some other examples, but yeah, the MCU and the Star Trek got a lot of word-of-mouth...but at the same time, they already had an established fan base, which a new show (or a reboot/prequel decades away from its original cough cough Dark Crystal cough) isn't going to have.
Nah, weekly discussions are overrated. Every single week the top comments are the same, repeating lines from the show like "Winter is coming" or "A Lannister always pays his debts". Other times it's low effort one-liners like "Dragon look good". All the thoughtful comments are at the bottom because nobody reads paragraphs anymore. Also I don't watch shows weekly even if it's a weekly release. I wait a few weeks and watch it 3 at a time. Sometimes I wait until the last episode then binge it.
exactly 👏👏 coworker wants to be social with me and suggests a tv show she's watching, by the time i start shes done...cant really talk about it. then shes onto the next show. sad really. used to be goid talking about the last episode, now it's meh...everyone does their own thing.
I think the slowed down stranger things though 🤔
I have sent this video to all friends/family/work-related groups. I really hope it blows up into millions of views.
It's crazy how much I miss TV from the 80's. Even the commercials were entertaining.
id watch ads brainlessly and some ads made me wonder, what the fuck is this? then a car would appear, haaaaaaa car ads. loved them.
@@John_Locke_108
Informercials? Like The Miracle Wax( or something)?
I look at older ads on TH-cam and skip new ads while watching 😊
@@BestBecky78 Yup. I pay for TH-cam Red to avoid ads.
probably why most of content on streaming ia from the 80s. there is competition from asia, kids start watching content made there because those aren't reruns from the 80s. so streaming will have to figure things out.
i had no idea the CEO of Kellogs literally suggested cash strapped consumers should eat cereal for dinner....what the fuck kind of oligarchy hellscape are we living in?
Who can afford name brand cereal at this point
@@randomtinypotatocried
Ah the disconnect between the Rich and the Poor.
They really do think that 5 dollar small box of cereal is 'cheep.'
the logical outcome of a dug-in two party system that serves the same master
(Donald "Childish Gambino" Glover voice) This is America
The Managerial Revolution and its consequences have been disastrous for the human race.
Your channel’s writing is amazing, keep up the great work and thanks to you and your team...!!
I think the notion that if it wasnt for Netflix, TV would just have kept going like it always had is a naive fairytale. Old fashion tv channels were never going to survive the internet era, the only question was what form the online streaming platforms that replaced them were going to take.
It would of ended up like Tubi TV tbh much earlier
There are better and worse ways of handling it. The real problem with Netflix is that when they started streaming, there were hardly any other options and they didn't own any of the stuff they were streaming. I think that in the long run Disney, Max and Paramount have a better chance of finding a model that does generate profits. But, mostly because they have a significant back catalog of material that people want to see, so they don't have to go all in on new stuff. With the amount of stuff on Disney+ and Max that I personally would like to see, it just takes a relatively steady drip of well written and well executed shows to justify the money. Netflix though is likely to be one major studio pull out away from going under for the foreseeable future as they own hardly any of what they stream.
IIRC, both Max and Disney+ have recently posted profitable quarters, so they may well be within striking distance of sustainability.
Yeah that’s the thing. The market wanted TV on demand (see the rise of DVRs before Netflix took off), and web video was already popular, which means someone was gonna make a streaming service as soon as the technology was capable of it. And that means venture capital was gonna invest heavily in whichever one looked like it was gonna hit it big first.
The real question is, if Netflix was propped up by VC funding and wasn’t profitable on their own yet, why did all the business geniuses in charge of every other entertainment company follow suit? Lol
@@Dave102693Tubi is what Hulu 1.0 was. It started there
But that wasn't the only two possible outcomes. I think what Conover argues is the networks should have embraced new content delivery models instead of fighting progress and then frantically copying Netflix.
No one explained todays media landscape better than you did here. Standing ovation and instant sub from me.
How does this get fixed? Congress? We can't rely on the Public; we're all broke. 🤑
@@williamyoung9401 hell no to the government. They will make it worse and they have no standing. There role is to ensure that no one company is a monopoly and there clearly is no monopoly.
We are in this mess because so many media companies had there business disrupted by Netflix that they tried to be Netflix and caused harm to themselves and there audiences.. the winner in all of this may be Sony for not chasing the streaming wars that will lose there competition billions. Lol
Going to be honest i much preferred the old style of TV except for one thing: you had to watch it on their time or buy a DVR.
I moved to China and the way it works here is perfect! You can watch it live or you can watch an episode from this current season whenever you want. You still get commercials from the network but whatever.
Most of my coworkers think I'm weird for not buying a subscription to tencent streaming or other services but it's much cheaper to just watch it on my cable box and i get to watch it whenever I want.
I just have to buy a season of a show three weeks after it's finished. I'm fine with that
I thought it also works like that in the US nowadays.... That's pretty much how it works in Canada if you don't wanna subscribe to a streaming service...
Some providers will let you watch a show on demand but not every episode of the current season and sometimes you only get like 2 days to do so for each episode.
It's pretty wack. The best ISP in my area, time Warner, didn't allow you to do it at all. They didn't even come with a DVR.
However where my brother lives AT&T was the best and they gave him a DVR that could record 100 hours of shows plus the two days of on demand of random shows and random episodes.
Meanwhile here in China all box tops just let you go back in time and run the broadcast from then. So like say i missed an episode on 7/14 at 2PM. I just roll back to that time slot on the network and run it, if it meets the criteria.
That late stage capitalism sure is late stage capitalisming
Any business who says they want to disrupt/takeover/revolutionise a whole industry - means become a monopoly, put up walls and jack up prices.
Adam, your content has put a smile on my family’s face for years. I’m going to address the elephant in the room. These cable companies that also supplies internet…they knew about the streaming bubble and that’s why the internet prices has sky rocketed. Back in the day, they never talked about bandwidth or anything…in the early days of Netflix, you used to stream to your hearts content without having any throttling issues…now it’s insane. However the domino effect continues.
the final straw for me was Our Flag Means Death getting cancelled unceremoniously this year. i don't trust a single streaming service not to pull the rug out from under me anymore. i'm done. i'm literally watching Cheers rn bc at least that show got an ending. it's so bleak that shows don't get a chance to find their audience anymore. for a second there, it looked like diverse TV was finally getting its chance. fuck me i guess!!
Even more news had an episode about this last year after WB canceled most of its shows geared towards Hispanic audiences.
I personally prefer watching 1 really good season of a show vs going back to old ones. As sad as it was to see no more seasons of for example You, Me and the Apocalypse, I'd choose something like that than something I've seen way too many times like Friends, something I never much liked anyways though was just that thing everyone watched because they didn't have many other choices anyway ... I'd personally rather scratch my eyeballs out, totally exaggerating, though seriously.
@@victoriah.20the thing is, i much prefer when it’s a choice :/ i’d much rather showrunners got to end shows on their own terms, rather than streamers thinking they can manufacture art on a conveyor belt. there should be space for shows like Friends AND I Am Not Okay With This. we could have both, streamers would still rake in money, and the duds wouldn’t be as painful. it’s just stubborn greed that they refuse to take any risks that used to be normal
@@alexm7334 I just see to many people mentioning Friends, The Office, Seinfeld etc as if we all just absolutely loved those shows and not because those were sometimes our only choices. I don't miss putting up with watching something because I wanted to watch TV and there weren't many other options. Flipping through 100 channels at times and "nothing good is on", while paying way too much from my perspective. Nowadays that's definitely not a problem for some of us. I can always search and find something, there's more access to even indie movies I never had access to before. I'm all for not putting out shows like it's manufactured on a conveyor belt and just spit out for profit. I just don't want to see us go backwards in any way. Keep moving forward, make what is better if it's not entirely working
And when you finish Cheers, you still get a continuation with Frasier if you so choose
The binge requirement also doesn't account for other hobbies. Video Games have had this problem for a few years now, with so many companies putting out 'Live Services' without realizing that gamers only have a set amount of free time.
Mainstream Corporate Media is basically shooting themselves in their own foot, and that could be a good thing.
If we, the people, emerge from this in solidarity with each other for our shared humanity and push against the downfall of capitalism and for a pro-social new society based on health, well-being and steady-state economics, we can turn the tides in our favour.
For people in entertainment that produce stuff we actually like, we can support them. With mutual aid networks. We could create a 'bridge community trust' between the monopolies and then going back to the traditional way of TV, movies and music, with slightly different aspects.
If we want to go back to having cable with specific channels that cater to audiences, we can cancel streaming networks, especially Netflix and, when possible, just use Patreon to support specific channels or shows we like. Let's be honest, not many out there that are actually worth our time (the little time we have).
For new films, same sort of thing. We can support it by actually going to see it or maybe arrange an additional screening in town for a lower cost to get more people in to see it and then support it by buying the hard copy version and put it into a sharing library.
For music, we can not pay for Spotify and try to go back to buying songs or albums directly, either digitally from the artists themselves, where possible, and then at the remaining record stores in town. Once again, older music we can share and put in music lending libraries and then go see those bands live if they are in our area.
Yup, just look at the launch of Concord. I'm not paying 40 bucks for another generic sci-fi looking, made-by-commitee, live service, arena/hero shooter when the market's already flooded with free to pay ones that have a unique gameplay element.
The binge requirement he had is simply wrong though. Netflix is literally the ONLY streamer that drops all the episodes at once. Everyone else releases 1 (or 2) a week, and maybe an extra episode or two at the premiere. And even Netflix is slowly moving away from the binge model by not dropping all the episodes at once in more and more shows.
@@shadowninja6689 Yes and no. Netflix is taking the lessons from other streaming platforms and changing their release schedule, but they still make decisions on viewing data in the binge mindset. If not enough people FINISH a show in a given time, it will get canceled very fast. There’s no time for word of mouth to spread or new viewers to catch on. Heck, people don’t invest in starting a serialized show if it’s not complete. It’s a negative feedback loop.
This is why foreign shows like K dramas do better. They usually tell a story and just ends. It remains to be seen if people still care about Squid Game 2 when it comes out.
That's why no new "live service" games are surviving. Everyone has their one or two games already. Not enough hours in the day to play more.
This premise ignores one pretty big elephant in the room: TH-cam. Even if Netflix hadn't existed TH-cam was going to come along and destroy the legacy entertainment industry. It has all the advantages of legacy media with virtually no overhead.
Throughout the years only two things remain true: 1) Adam gets angrier; 2) His forehead grows
In a few years he's going to change his name to Adam Combover !
If the forehead stops growing I'll stop watching.
Isn't he first in the line of succession to the Lewis Black empire?
As a Brit, I’ve never minded shorter series that run for 8-10 episodes and a couple of series at most. If they’re well written, you get to know the characters without the need for filler episodes. The problem with the 22+ episode format that runs for years is that they’re constantly chasing ratings, they get dragged out beyond whatever story they set out to tell in the first place, and up being cancelled or struggling to end properly.
Shows like Breaking Bad were so good because they were written with an ending in mind, a plan to get from A to B without trying to see how long they could drag it out for.
I'm also British and prefer lower episode counts. Finding out about a show that you might like, only to find that it's currently on Season 5 with 24x 40min episodes per season is such a time sink to catch up with that I usually don't bother. 6-10 episodes per season is perfect imo. Quality not quantity.
I'm an American who wholeheartedly agree with you.
@@Shaun742as a Canadian though I really could of used more Mr. Bean episodes!
Yes, as an Australian who grew up with both formats, I agree. I have no problem with the longer format so long as, as you said, have an end-game in mind. How I Met Your Mother is a perfect example of a show that _did_ have an ending in mind but completely screwed it by dragging it out for too long.
@@batsteve1942 The British model won't work in the US. The US industry is massive compared to the UK industry. Also the UK system relies a lot on TV licenses, which is increasingly being avoided by Brits and the UK industry faces the same problems with streaming as the US and right now 50 percent of British workers in TV and film are out of work right now.
The UK system is a nice system, don't get me wrong. But if short seasons worked for streaming, we wouldn't have a problem right now. You mention Breaking Bad. One of the most popular series right now is not Breaking Bad but Suits. Suits was not written with an end game in mind. In fact the show had to be retooled when Megan Markel became British royalty. They had to figure out story wise why her and the main character, her boyfriend, would be leaving.
Suits is a classic broadcast 20+ episode 5+ season series that was paid for by advertisers, and generated a lot of stable jobs. And it's the type of show that streaming viewers are flocking to right now in record breaking numbers because they can't deal with tons of content being dumped on them that might not have a second season. Breaking Bad is sort of a throwback borrowing from broadcast TV. It's doubtful if that show was greenlit today, that it would get as many episodes or seasons.
I don't mind ads, and I enjoy a lot of them. It's a way to see what's out there, what's going on, or if nothing else, a chance to take a break. Breaks are good. Binging is bad. We know this. Ads make it easier to live it.
Personally, what becomes annoying is seeing the same ad, over and over again. That begins to feel condescending. Like, I can remember. Stop telling me. Seeing the same ads over and over didn't happen _as much_ with broadcast and cable as it does with streaming, in my experience.
100%. I've seen ad breaks where they show a Trivago ad, a different ad, then the SAME Trivago ad. It's insane.
This is because the advertiser bought too many impressions, was sold too many impressions or the service has limited subscribers and had to crank up the frequency in order to look like it is a viable advertising channel.
Rarely do ads cater to what I like so I hate them
Although I understand the point when it comes to the TV industry as a whole, streaming was absolutely a major improvement over the old TV model in a lot of countries, mine included.
With the exception of shows that were big enough to get DVD box sets, a lot of the shows mentioned from the days before streaming were locked behind prohibitively expensive channel packages here - often exclusive to one provider. Even after we got a satellite dish, all we really got was endless re-runs and decades-old movies ruined by incessant ads.
The real competition that Netflix beat was piracy, not TV - TV was already useless.
And then Piracy resurfaced, HARD
@@JamesTDG It never went away. Honestly, the only Piracy I've noticed where it can actually be difficult to find stuff is music. Spotify really did stop people from uploading albums to piracy sites. Unless you are a huge band or artist, good luck finding an album on a piracy website these days.
I'm a low income person living below the line of poverty in the US and paying significantly less for the streaming services I actually watch compared to my father who chooses cable still instead. I'm surprised at the "costing more" part of the video unless that wasn't meant about just the literal cost 💵.
I've had so many films that I enjoyed in the cinema, never taken to DVD, lost, because streaming services keep a hold of it, never release it anywhere else, and then drop it because no one is interested. They are actively contributing to lost history.
That and DVD has stuff like commentary and bonus features
"one less old film you watch is one more film we can sell you!" -studio execs
@@liammcnicholas918 It use to, then blu-ray took over. Now if you want special features, you usually have to buy blu-ray.
Thank you SO MUCH for mentioning crew and how we’re struggling! My family and friends have no idea how hard a time i am having!
Either Adam has recovered memories of what Cable TV used to be or Americans had a really good deal in the 90s.
Here in Canada it was a $60/mo buy-in to get any channels via cable and then $15 - $30 monthly per bundle of channels. Each bundle of course was one desirable channel and a half-dozen syndication farms. The only comparable upside was that each commercial break was 4 to 5 short ads jammed together which, compared to cable today, was quaint.
Adam is from a lower upper class family, he's from privilege. He had premium cable and internet when he was a teen while during the same time I was an adult that could only afford cable and internet with the help of roommates.
i wanted to say something similar... here in the Bay Area, my basic cable was running close to $200/mo now $50 of that was for internet, but the rest was for BASIC cable. no premium channels (HBO for example) and not many of even the good ones (like AMC) so $150/mo for Local News and Sports and a bunch of syndicated garbage and i was still paying for netflix/hulu/disney on the side cuz thats where anything good was? ya... no. cable is trash now, has been, and was VERY far from 'free' although, i did pay all that to ALSO have it be ad supported! what a deal!
Cable in the US is/was an Oligopoly, divvied up in to territories that don't directly compete with each other and try to keep the same basic options/prices.
It depended heavily on where you lived and who you got stuck with.
I can't speak to prices in the 90s, but when I had it installed and started paying for it in 2003, it was like 35$ for a decent Internet Service (200 down / 5 up IIRC) or 40$ for the same internet and basic cable (like just the big networks, CNN Headline News and Court TV - later TruTV, and maybe Travel?).
Eventually they kept hiking the price though, and sometime around 2011, we cut the TV option. I think it was like 60$ at that point.
The price hikes kept coming though.
So, with Fiber establishing itself in like 2019 in the area, this year we finally switched to Fiber. Our Internet went from 100$ to 30. And we are now on a 500/500 plan. When the introductory offer is over next year, either we pay 60, or we drop to 250 and pay 30$.
And as bad as our cable company was, Cox is actually one of the best in the country in terms of defending users and keeping prices low. I recognize that every other cable provider sells user data, throttles the service and gouges the shit out of it's customers. So plenty of people on Comcast or AT&T et al. I imagine are saddled with 200$ monthly bills no doubt
Not to mention they actually had VARIETY in those ads! You weren't being shoveled the same ad multiple times in the same break!
@@Samael1113 We were trapped with 2 choices, CenturyLink and Comcast. Both SUCK ASS
TLDR: Companies grow until they control the market, then cut quality and jack up prices.
Streaming didn't destroy tv. Lack of trailers and marketing and cancelations did. Streaming is just evolution. It's about adapting with the times. A lot of these big shows came out after Netflix already existed. I only watched occasional episodes on cable. But with Netflix ive seen the entirety of many shows. Dexter, Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Boy Meets World. That 70s show. Friends. How i met your mother with it's god awful ending. My Name is Earl which left off on cliffhanger. Last Man on Earth which got canceled and Santa Clarita Diet which also did. Maybe Orville which i need to restart. I'm not paying 60 to 80 bucks on a dvd set. That's for sure. Streaming is amazing. It's just the business side of things needs to evolve. Gaming is doing terrible too. It's just a modern issue with too many options taking up all our attention. Tiktok consumes most of many people's free time. They can waste hours on scrolling Facebook and watching shorts
*starts upbeat pop melody*
Video killed the Radio star
Video killed the Radio star
Streaming killed Television.
@@zacharythomas8617
*starts upbeat pop music*
Streaming killed the Television star
Streaming killed the-
Nope, it doesn't sound right
@@karolwithaz Streaming killed the TV star
Internet killed the video star
"And digital killed them both!" - Caine
(Source: _Caine vs Alastor_ , Freshy Kanal)
All we wanted was a la carte TV service - basically TH-cam but with TV shows. THAT'S IT, just give us that and we'll be fine lol.
That's now how the C suite gets a third yacht.
Not possible since you have to pay union mandated residuals to all of the people that made those shows for them to even be available. As much as organized labor helps workers, you have to remember that it ONLY is meant to help workers, not customers or the audience.
The streaming mess kinda proves out that Ala carte cable was never the money saver people thought it was.
That's not how I remember it, it was mostly about being able to choose the channels you wanted, without being forced to pay for a bunch of other channels. The issue with it was that it was complicated. Some channels would subsidize the other channels, other channels would be paid to be there and some were there mostly for diversity reasons.
The issue I had was that the cost of cable went from $5 a month in 1985 to roughly $90 now and the amount of actual shows that I care to watch is even worse than it was back then. I only have cable because it's the only option I have for wired internet and not getting the TV and phone part of the package is somehow more expensive than getting it all together.
@@Jumbleman5 That's just because the corporations try to at least force it to be worse, to make the consumer hate unions over actions that if they just thought things through instead, the unions would not have to be made. A well-paid and understressed employee will deliver better results, and I would rather pay extra and wait to see a creative make something beautiful.
What a great summary of how we got to where we area, amazing Adam! Please consider doing a follow up video about how we can get out of this mess!!!
Im still salty at how Netflix's binge model murdered all the hype for Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. shit used to be SUPER successful when it aired weekly and then when part 6 dropped, nobody talked about it...
Oh I get blue in the face telling everyone I know that binge watching is. The. Worst. Idea. Anyone. Ever. Had.
It fucking sucks.
Yep
I was watching jojo part 5 weekly
And that's fun
Imagine causing a company BILLIONS of dollars and still keep your job. Madness.😂
**wall street
thanks adam your presentation felt like it was made for tv 🧡
As someone who spent their tweens watching Adam ruins everything, seeing Adam genuinely firey and passionately PISSED about the destruction of the industry and art form he loves is just special. I’m mad with you Adam. I always was
I had a bit of an epiphany about streaming a few weeks ago.
All of these executives aren't putting it all into the streaming model because it makes more money.
They're doing it because its money they dont have to share.
Binge watching probably ruined lives or made you miss some appointments. You take old school TV that puts out a show once a week and the shows are designed to have you running home to miss anything. All that put together it's like putting a kid in a candy store. After you eat all the candy you have to wait a year for the next shipment
“Television” series now act like long segmented movies, unlike traditional television that had contained episodes. So you want to binge shows now because you’re teased by the story too much and it’s frustrating to wait. Back in the day an episode of Community had a beginning middle and end and was satisfying.
This is exactly what I found even when watching shows I otherwise like, such as Westworld or the new Fallout series. Now that the whole thing drops instantly and it's also designed to end on a cliffhanger each time, it's really hard to resist watching the next episode immediately after. Cliffhangers have existed for a while but now they do the show more harm than good.
It's like the shows are made to keep us in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction so we keep watching 🤔...
TV channels also used to have a wide variety of programs. But thanks to binge watching, TNT is now the Law and Order channel pretty much. Crime dramas and sports are all they show and not much else.
@@quatricise Cliffhangers in the past were used sparingly, often in rare two-part episodes or in a season finale. Now it seems like many (most?) of the streaming dramas end almost every episode on one.
Episodic is always better than serialized.
And deep down, people know it. It's one of the reasons shows like Stargate Universe flopped so hard after the other two not being that way.
Plenty of shows ran for years and had continuity between episodes without literally running into each other.
The television shows are not fully developed, and you have to wait 2 years and only 2 days have passed, and we still don't know what the show is about.
To me this right here is TV. TH-cam is the new TV.
Truly, ill buy a subcribtion once in a while for a moth to watch a good show, but youtube just has everything and its geniune, because its made by normal people
no it is not, there is nothing collective about it and it is censored, demonetize you will be, if you disobey your corporate overlords.
It also seems generally cheaper to buy into specific channels with different shows, like the Try Guys. I know if I can spend $5 a month, I'll get content I'm for sure gonna like that i can stream anywhere. TH-cam lets us decide the content we want easier.
Unfortunately, it pays very poorly for anyone trying to post content, unless you're lucky enough to find a good sponsor.
TH-cam premium is the only streaming service I'll pay for@@MrKubahades
Broadcast tv was dying for years before Netflix streaming became the norm.
Most of those "popular 20+ year old shows" were off the air before 2006 or so.
Reality tv took over.
To be fair, tv destroyed tv first. I spent a few years without one (before streaming was a common thing) because the inconvenient scheduling and obscene number of commercials made it too miserable an experience to be worth my while. Now I can watch what I want, when I want, and pause, rewind, etc.. I do want more episodes and completed series, though.
Yes, also at this point TV has been around as a common thing for well over half a century and it's going to be harder and harder to compete with the best the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s, ''20s put out and the problem just gets worse over time, we all only get 168 total hours a week to spend on everything we do. Right now, even if we watch 8 hours of TV a day, that's only 1 hour per decade on average, and with how good the TV was in some of those decades due to forward thinking execs that paid for quality, it's going to get progressively harder to compete anyways. Especially, with so much available via both streaming and home media.
Netflix heyday was good, it was all there, but now it's a pain to watch what I want when theyre all spread out on different subscription, and they pull out license for shows on my watchlist, and the annoying region locks.
I am willing to pay, but why would I pay for headache. Pirates can provide a much easier service.
You are saying things I have been ranting about for years. The death of monoculture and water cooler conversations about entertainment. Why is nobody else talking about this???
probably because we see people online complaining about that kind of culture all the time.
Diversity is our… strength…
@@alm8399 until it impedes on itself from tribalism.
This could spell the end of the horse-drawn zeppelin!
I have grown to dislike binge-watching because of the associated mental health risks and the limited time to process things after watching an episode and starting another. Most original shows on Netflix and other streaming services are over-serialised and have cinematic budgets which give the impression that they are simply movies that have been stretched out.
FYI, disney didn't create hulu, came in several years after it had started.
Then again wtf did happen to Hulu for it to sellout
I think they mistook binge watching during the pandemic as the norm.
The pandemic wasn't a 'trend'.
It's still not a trend. It's still happening, and it's mostly the elderly and disabled who are dying (as well as poor people, homeless people, and majority BIPOC communities) and most well-off Euroamericans will carry on without a mask in sight.
I miss the red envelope Netflix days. The library of movies was actually larger than it is now because you can only watch what's currently licensed. Netflix probably had warehouses full of 90% of the most purchased DVDs.
This is why I HATE that all episodes at once crap. Once you binge on that tripe, the hype of the show goes away in a few weeks with spoilers on social media.
I don't mind it bc i don't binge, i watch like 2 or 3 eps at a time, and it really annoys me when shows go back to the weekly ep schedule..... it feels like having a calculator, but insisting on doing numerical analysis by hand :gar:
by calculator I mean a computer with Matlab jsjsjs xd
Yeah, and also it just makes the show worse. Watching 1 episode every week, makes you appreciate the show, makes you make theories, think about what will happens, and so on
Binge watching is bad
@@no_name4796 i mean, u dont "have" to binge watch... sometimes when i binge, i look up stuff online between eps, or if im watching with we friends, we theorize bit we're also like "whats gona happen next aaaa lesgoll mext episode" ... ig it depends how u consume, and all eps at once allows u to decide how to consume, instead of forcing 1 week per episode.... I've had series i dont watch until all epis come out, then i can watch at my pace
@@no_name4796Gravity Falls wouldn't be one of the best shows of all time if it was dropped all at once. The time between episodes created hype, myatery, and PUZZLE SOLVING from the fans! I'm glad I got to experience it the way it was meant to be experienced.
6:45 Anime weebs were binge watching on certain site before it was hip and mainstream.
And now it became a monolpoly of the US anime industry and treating and underpaying its employees badly
@@mehlover There’s the downside while fucking over their own customers and still to this day haven’t fixed their smart TV app
Crunchyroll started out as a pirating site and became a monster that is making more mainstream anime now harder to financially support without them being involved
Fuck crunchyroll though for now locking basically their whole catalogue behind a paywall(and fuck Sony for changing the model)
People left cable for Netflix because they could not afford the $55 cable bill in 2010
I feel like a lot of the actors, writers, TV content creators need to do what a lot of the major TH-cam content creators did with Nebula and just build and launch their own platform where they can make their own material per their own rules that favor them and not tech companies. Nebula isn't industry disrupting but it's a stable, viable business that's helped a lot of TH-cam content creators have a more permanent home for their content that maybe wouldn't appeal to the "everyone" audience. Maybe a lot of the TV content makers can follow a similar route.
If it becomes super successful and big media companies get wind, the creators will quickly fold
That's the saddest thing, Netflix killed Blockbuster but then stopped offering the service that replaced the need for a physical video rental store 😕
People were also probably sad when cassette tapes replaced 8 tracks and so on. I feel like I've time traveled with some of these comments.
No one kills anything. If Blockbuster appealed to more people or adapted, they would still be here.
@@I_Am_The_Social_Reject They tried, Blockbuster online was really cool, you could have any movie you could think of mailed to your house
One thing you mentioned but a lot of people aren't talking about in detail is that because you can watch brand new content and stuff that was made 100 years ago the content gap is constantly widening.
Any minute now a certain someone who's famous for making grand promises involving technology and delivering a tiny fraction of his claims will decide to buy a streaming service, claim he started it and promise to disrupt the disrupters, then fire all of the people who make the shows.
And some people will call him a genius.
SHHHHH... Don't jinx it.
and then once he has accumulated enough power he will run for president. or maybe buying the president is enough. Don't get me wrong i like Elon in a lot of ways but..power corrupts and consumes. He made his money being part of a group they called the paypal mafia. I'm not sure you get a name like that for being nice.
but he tweets what I want to hear
how could he not be on my side?🤔😮😬
🧐🧐🧐that's why
100% agree about binge-watching and how it was way better when it was a weekly affair
I think it really depends on the show, some things I find more enjoyable to binge watch while others I find I need time between episodes to fully digest what happened. Yeah a show like game of thrones had everyone talking every week about each episode but I have had similar experiences when a new show drops on netflix...Not at work mind you as I don't talk about my personal life almost at all with my coworkers and they also talk about almost nothing with me. Most I got was "you need to watch Fallout, its amazing." I started watching it but even then I wasn't caught up on the the show so we couldn't talk about the new episodes. My wife and I only watch 1 episode of any given show a night and we normally try for 30 min shows so she can go to the gym after dinner and I can clean up after dinner. a 1 hr show needs to be insanely good for us to sit down and watch it regularly. Note: I will binge shows on my own if I know its something my wife wont like but even then I can't binge a show in a single day like I used to.
I don’t have time to binge. If they’re gonna cancel shows like that, I’ll just never start watching new shows.
I like a nightly show. One episode a night. Its the perfect balance between binging and weekly releases
Okay but Hulu’s history is sooo much cooler than you made it out to be. It was originally a free collaboration between several of the OTA channels. I remember telling everyone about it back in the day
i only find this funny bc in 2014, when i was in business college, for a diploma of marketing my assessments were STILL running on "specialty DVD stores are STILL the big boys! write a marketing plan for music maxxx dvd store.". while my teacher was like "these people know NOTHING! in next couple of years, there's going to be a huge move to streaming. like, when was the LAST time ANY of you in this class even bothered to walk into civic video/blockbuster?" *no one raises their hand* exactly my point.
my teacher was right. and now it's destroying TV and creativity.
I quite like the indie business model that some content creators like Louis CK have used, where you just put up your own site, charge a fixed price for DRM-free files, and trust that more people will buy it than pirate it. In another time it wouldn't work, but right now people are so desperately grateful for a hassle-free, honest transaction with no strings attached that they actually are buying it, or even pirating it and then buying it if they like it, to vote with their wallet. Louis CK did extremely well with selling his shows directly from his own site, and that has the potential to be a disruptive force if enough content creators do it.
not to nitpick, but Hulu wasnt' really created by Disney, but Disney DID purchase a majority stake in it around the time Disney+ launched via the purchase of 21st Century Fox.
I worked for Hulu at this time at a call center that contracted for Hulu's support line, and when Disney+ launched they split our floor between Hulu and Disney+ support. We got laid off after COVID when it hit us hard; 70% of our floor caught it and because the company struggled to retain people after that, they ended up losing the contract.
Also don't forget the insane prices cable and satellite companies changed on top of the advertisements. I had to pay for the niche stuff I didn't want to watch too and it sucked.
The high prices for cable/satelite I blame on the owners of said cable channels, the local broadcasters passing on broadcast fees to the consumers, and the cable/satellite tv providers themselves
Yeah... This is a HIGHLY biased video. You can buy Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and Max all for MUCH less than cable got to if you pick the *with ads* versions. He's conveniently comparing apples to oranges. He's also comparing the "peak TV" version of content with today's TV in ways convenient to his argument. Yes, TV was better when companies were subsidizing. You can't have it both ways.
He's also taking about shows like "The Office". Yes, we had great shows back then but... we also had absolute crap. Not every show in the 90s was Friends and Seinfeld. You can't take a decades worth of time and pretend that a handful of shows represent it.
At the end of tbe day he's a Union spokesman and this is a propaganda piece for the TV unions (writers, actors, etc.). I ABSOLUTELY agree that those people are getting screwed and that needs to be fixed, but he lost major credibility with this video. :(
You had me until "union spokesman", I'm not sure if you're trying to insinuate that being a bad thing? Is he biased in this because it could effect his career and those of his friends? Probably! It would have been more nuanced otherwise I'd think. Considering more angles etc. Though unions definitely aren't bad things.
@@victoriah.20I have absolutely no issues with Unions. I like Unions. My point was only that the piece is less of a fair and balanced look and more of him doing his job to set the narrative. Basically -- let's not forget context.
I don’t hate ads. I love commercials. I don’t watch them all, but they are generally great and mini shows and creative.
Commercials pay the bills and generates work for us simple folk.
There's no way the average user is paying more for streaming than cable. Average people have 2-3 services for $10-15 each. Even on the high end, that's $45 a month which is less than what basic cable costs.
And you can subscribe to services sequentially, rather than all of them all the time.
Exactly. I'm rarely signed up to the same services at once, though I have very specific viewing habits compared to some. It might be more expensive like as someone said if you were paying for every streaming service and for all of the ad free versions of them. It might be more expensive than cable. Though I have not personally experienced that, it has been significantly cheaper
I love how Adam called out his own selling out and why we should not be so dismissive of selling out to the advertisement overlords.