this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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A better comparison is with studio-owned movie theaters, which eventually led to the United States' Paramount Antitrust Consent Decree (which was the law of the land for movies until the DOJ killed this ruling in 2020.)
I don't feel that studios should get to have their own streaming services much like how I don't feel movie studios should be allowed to run their own theaters.
For all of its faults, cable had a ton of competition between studios on the same distribution system, often with multiple channels with the same focus by entirely different studios. With current streaming services, ther are more accounts to keep track of, completely different (and often lackluster) UX between each streaming service which can make navigating a pain, and instead of competing with new content it can be just as- if not more- viable to buy up as much pop culture video content as possible and centralize it behind one studio-owned streaming services' paywall. (Looking at you, Disney.)
If streaming services weren't allowed to have their own studios, we'd probably have a better streaming landscape than we currently do.
I'm glad to finally see someone else mentioning this aspect. Streaming services creating their own content is Vertical Integration and it's a big reason for a lot of the problems with streaming. It's essentially a conflict of interest where the platform wants to create as much content as fast as possible, which puts them at odds with the realities of creating quality content: it takes time, and is heavily dependent on the artists involved; there's no simple formula to make something good consistently. Netflix originally had some good shows at first with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black but then both shows fell off and Netflix switched tracks to putting out a much as they could and cancelling anything that didn't catch on (which is most things).
I think this also contributes to lowering payouts to the actors involved because of the lack of licensing agreements. I have seen a few news articles about how bad the pay is for residuals on streaming sites, and it's not hard to imagine ways that a streaming platform could massage the numbers to make any specific show seem less profitable since all content is behind the same paywall. However, when a show is licensed, like the big popular shows such as Friends or Seinfeld, there is a public announcement for how much money is paid for the rights to stream that show, and this makes it much more straightforward to calculate how much money goes to everyone involved.
I agree, streaming was a lot better when the main players didn't produce their own content. And it could get to be a bigger problem as the streaming players consolidate more which we're already seeing with the HBO+Discovery merger for instance.
Not to mention how much media is consolidated under Disney currently.
This feels like a false history. Hulu had original content all the way back in 2008, with Dr horrible