April 5, 2016
Hello blog readers, it's Neil. This week's blog assignment is to say whether streaming media is good or bad. While I do think that it is good, I also think that a lot of those who praise it overestimate what it can do and what it will do to television and film. The combination of Netflix-type streaming services, On Demand, and Redboxes at nearly every commercial retail outlet has all but put video stores out of business. People watch TV on their own time now rather than on broadcasters' time, and the typical three-act format is being played with so as to accommodate a show streaming on something like Apple TV, iTunes, HBO Now, the Showtime app, Crunchyroll (an anime-exclusive streaming service), the app versions of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox; Yahoo Screen, Vimeo, and all of the rest of the video streaming services. And yet, this has led people to believe that in a few years' time, they will replace cable and satellite television. Dan Harmon, the creator of NBC's cult classic sitcom Community and co-creator of my sixth favorite TV show as of right now, Adult Swim's animated quasi-philosophical science-fiction-with-very-occasional-fantasy-and-supernatural-elements action-adventure soft-horror black comedy-drama Rick and Morty, has discussed this aspect of modern television in an interview from a few years ago with Hitflix. He mentioned his observation that ratings have become the least important thing about television, at least when it comes to cable. Harmon explained that (paraphrasing) the large corporations that measure ratings do so because they need something to cling onto, and that eventually, capitalism will do what it does and pull out the bottom from what's working, and all of the money you thought you could gather suddenly falls away, and then we'll find a new way to measure viewers. Harmon went on to say that with 8,000 shows on the air, we have to stop treating them like they are all competing with one another, and acknowledge that most people watch what they want on their own time. Harmon says that due to his way of thinking (which he has previously stated is somewhere on the Asperger's-autism spectrum), he could only be a success in television in a crumbling business model, and that if it were still working the way it did in the 1980s, he would have been fired and forgotten long ago. While I do usually admire Dan Harmon, his absolute faith in left-leaning principles, fiscal or social, and rather abrasive way of expressing them, can make him hard to like at times. Others have acknowledged that despite Harmon's cleverness, he does try to justify his own questionable real-life behaviors through public hand-wringing about human morality and its complicated ins and outs, essentially using longhand talk to say what amounts to the rather immature statement of "well, you do it too!" I try not to fault him too much for this because of how this is most likely a result of Asperger's syndrome, and I doubt I'll be much better if I end up becoming semi-famous and gain a public media presence, but it's still something to think about.
Anyway, this is about public perception of streaming services. A book I read last summer by journalist Michael Wolff was called "Television is the New Television", which tries to refute the claims that streaming and internet media will overtake all of the rest of media in a few years' time. He explained that despite the rise of original content on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, they are dependent on buying the rights to existing films and television series in order to stay afloat. HBO and Showtime still need old-fashioned subscribers as well as users of their streaming services. Rather than compete, old and new media helps one another out, so one cannot exist without the other. Dish has already began to offer Netflix as an add-on subscription in a similar fashion to HBO, Showtime, and Starz, and so it is expected that other cable and satellite companies follow suit within the next few years and provide Hulu and Amazon as well (though Amazon will be a little harder because the streaming service is tied directly to the online superstore, and you need to be an Amazon member in order to get anything on Prime Instant Video). Of course, Comcast is trying to make Xfinity into the X1 Entertainment Operating System; essentially a Netflix-type service minus original programming, so maybe not in every company. In conclusion, streaming media is pretty good, but not the end-all-be-all of media. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.
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