This was the promise of the streaming age: You can have everything, you can have it everywhere, and you can have it all, at once. Subscribe to our platform and you’ll have access to our huge library of “content” forever, on demand, whenever you want it. You want more? Look, it’s right there in the plus sign at the end of the platform’s name. (Why did everyone do that?)

This utopian fantasy was in serious contrast to the old way of watching TV, where you’d sit yourself down to watch your show at the time it aired or you wouldn’t see it at all unless you were lucky enough to catch it in reruns. Once your show was canceled, you couldn’t watch it anymore. We got VHS recorders, and then TiVos, sure, and eventually you could buy a show on tapes or DVDs after it had aired. But these all require intention and planning, an action on the part of the potential audience member. Streaming? That would be easy.

Turns out the utopian fantasy was a fantasy for a reason. In recent months, big studios have started pulling content off their platforms, sometimes at baffling speed. Paramount, for instance, recently announced that it hadn’t just reversed course and canceled Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies instead of its previously announced renewal, but was yanking the show — which had its finale June 1 of this year — off the Paramount+ platform altogether, along with a bunch of other shows. Disney+ lost Y: The Last Man and Willow, among many others, and Warner Bros. Discovery gave Westworld, Genera+ion, and The Time Traveler’s Wife the boot ahead of the relaunched Max platform.

Why, you might very reasonably ask, would anybody do this? If a show is just sitting on a hard drive somewhere, not hurting anybody, what’s the harm of leaving it there? Maybe it’s not the most-watched show on the service, but who cares?

Companies care, as it turns out, especially about their balance sheets and their shareholders. Getting the exact reasons that big entertainment studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery do anything at all is a bit like trying to ascertain the secrets of the universe: You know they’re out there, but absolutely nobody is going to give them to you straight. It’s a business run on smoke, mirrors, secrecy, misdirection, and some kind of lopsided magic.

Regardless, we can detect a few reasons that giant corporations would want to take, say, FBoy Island off their digital platform. They’re not ideological reasons, unless you count the simple fact that Hollywood’s only ideology (circa 2023, anyhow) is profit margins. The content of the content, so to speak, is not of interest to the executives. This is all about belt-tightening. The studios have their reasons

The first way that removing a show from a platform saves money is tied up with some of the reasons that the WGA is striking and SAG-AFTRA is considering it: residuals. Production companies pay members of various guilds (like the WGA) a fixed percentage every year if their show is available on a streaming platform. Calculation of the precise rate is byzantine and renegotiated every three years by the guilds, and can range from a pittance to a livable income, depending on the deal that was cut for that show. But it’s a cost that the company incurs, and if they remove the show entirely, the cost is eliminated.

Often, however, shows removed from a platform don’t go away entirely. In the case of Westworld, for instance, Warner Bros. Discovery removed the show from its platform (now called Max) but licensed it to free, ad-supported channels operated by Roku and Tubi. That means you can actually watch Westworld now, entirely for free, as long as you’re willing to sit through some ads — and it means Warner Bros. Discovery starts making some money on Westworld again.

What you can’t necessarily do is watch it at literally any time you want to. These free channels, called FAST (for Free, Ad-Supported Television), operate on a linear model, which is basically the same way cable TV works. You flip through channels and watch whatever is “on TV” right now. What makes FAST different from traditional cable or network TV is that it’s distributed over the internet, so you can watch on your laptop or device or smart TV, instead of over cables or airwaves.

But wait, you might ask: Doesn’t Warner Bros. Discovery now have to pay residuals to everyone involved with Westworld? Yes, it does — but the residual rates for FAST are currently lower than the SVOD rates on streaming platforms, which in turn are far lower than on broadcast television like network or cable. Additionally, Warner Bros. Discovery is getting payment from Roku and Tubi — that’s what it means to “license” your show. So there’s income and less outflow, and that’s a net positive on the balance sheet.

Speaking of balance sheets, there’s one more reason this might happen. For companies like Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, every show on their platform is an asset. If an asset’s value declines more rapidly than anticipated, you can “write down” its value, meaning it’s now worth less; that ultimately creates a loss on your balance sheet, which translates to a tax deduction. If you remove a show from your platform, it’s now “impaired” in terms of earning power, and thus literally worth less. It’s all pretty complicated, but companies seem very eager to incur write-downs, perhaps in part to show their shareholders that they are serious about getting their financial houses in order. (That’s key for companies like these, which are feeling a squeeze after years of relentless, profligate spending on content to populate their platforms — especially during the pandemic.) Disney, for instance, announced that it will incur a whopping $1.5-$1.8 billion impairment charge from removing content from its platforms, which translates into a very sizable write-down and a lower tax burden.

I’ve explained each of these factors in an oversimplified way, but you can see a pattern here. Executives believe it’s time to pump the brakes. We’re exiting an era in which entertainment companies threw money at projects without seeming to quite realize that a $10 subscription fee wasn’t going to pay for all of this and that, further, consumers have a limited appetite (and wallet) for streaming subscriptions. Shareholders want answers; companies respond.

Unfortunately, that means some of us are losing easy access to the shows we love or, at least, meant to get around to watching someday. The good news is they’ll probably still be accessible, at least via FAST. That’s not convenient, kind of annoying, and, I suspect, might make more than a few streaming subscribers decide this whole thing isn’t worth it. But the entertainment business has entered its most chaotic era, and this is just one more symptom of it.

At least you don’t have to learn to set your VCR

Source

  • Franklin's Beard
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    1 year ago

    AVAST, ME HEARTIES!!! Life on the high seas has solved this problem for me. Yo-ho, yo-ho!

    (Although as someone who works in the entertainment industry, I’m stuffed to the gills with ennui)

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    Although I have a few streaming services, I’ve always continued to buy physical media. It’s great, I can watch what I want to watch, and when to watch it. This just further confirms my decision to do so.

    • Scrubbles
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      61 year ago

      I’ve literally been laughed at by friends for shelling out money for box sets. “Why did you buy the TNG bluray set, it’s on Netflix?” Then it was removed from Netflix. Then it went to CBS, rebranded to Paramount.

      I don’t want to pay $10 a month to watch a comfort show, I want it whenever I want, always. Netflix used to mean that but streaming has changed.

      For some shows I don’t care to see a second time? Sure, they can sit there, but I have a big stack of physical media that I love, that I’ll always have.

  • @Zebov
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    41 year ago

    I’m so glad we got rid of cable and all the useless stuff no one ever watched and switched it out for…something more expensive, has far fewer shows, and has connection issues.

    The aristocrats!

  • @simple
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    31 year ago

    I can understand selling a show to another streaming platform but honestly erasing an entire show is outrageous. In some cases like Infinity Train, they tried to completely erase it from the internet. They cancelled it, removed it completely (you can’t legally watch it), and even went back and deleted any trace of it. Trailers, clips on YouTube, even the pilot episode got yanked off the Cartoon Network youtube channels.

    It’s a giant warning sign in the industry that warner bros (and by extension HBO Max) can’t be trusted. Why would publishers go to a platform that can happily erase your show without warning? It’s a shortsighted move that’s only going to hurt more over time.

  • Elixartist
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    31 year ago

    So if these shows aren’t released to physical media are they just lost forever? (Aside from through piracy)

  • badbrainstormOP
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    1 year ago

    Pi, Kodi, addons personally. Just a little nudge. Pfft, Roku…

  • Bizzle
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    21 year ago

    Stremio Torrentio RealDebrid

    Went back to piracy after the Netflix shenanigans and lemme tell ya what life is GOOD

  • golli
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    11 year ago

    Seems to me that the write downs for tax savings without any strings attached is something that needs to be changed.

    If companies write down an media asset like that in return for lowering their tax burden, there should be some requirements attached to it. Maybe the rights fall to some kind of public entity that make it available for free.

    Although that might not be fair to some of the people involved that would receive residuals normally. So maybe not completely free but available to anyone to license for a specific rate (either fixed or based on the tax deduction assigned to it).