Something Different
I recently applied for a job with a media agency, and as part of the application I had to write a short essay/article/thought piece on something vaguely media-related. I didn’t get the job, but I thought it would be a shame if the piece went to waste.
It’s about the increasing and, in my opinion, irritating tendency for big media companies to start launching their own streaming services and suchlike, splitting up content and devaluing existing subscriptions. Obviously this is a little different to my usual output, but I hope you enjoy it.
A Place for Everything, and Everything in… a Dozen Places: The Netflix Problem
Disney’s Bob Iger said in 2017 that “the media landscape is increasingly defined by direct relationships between content creators and consumers”. That was his reasoning behind the launch of Disney’s upcoming streaming platform. He’s not wrong; more than ever, across multiple strands of online media, consumers are taking the direct route to getting their content, whether it’s TV, games, or other online videos; and the most successful platforms are those that can amalgamate the greatest proportion of any one kind of media in one place. Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix – the days of hundreds of TV channels with their own unique programming aren’t quite gone, but the new kids on the block are definitely dominating the market. Why would any consumer want to sift through dozens of different broadcasters when they can just pay a single subscription and get everything in one place?
But it’s not so simple anymore, because the more profitable these streaming platforms get, the more other companies try to break into the market – and, slowly but surely, the more the hundreds of channels of conventional TV begin to be reflected online.
[image error]RIP Iron Fist/The Defenders.
A few years ago, Netflix dominated the online streaming market. Hulu, despite starting its VOD service around the same time as Netflix, was hamstrung by being US- and Japan-only, and so Netflix held the worldwide market almost unopposed. It’s still the biggest service – but it’s no longer the only competitor. With the rise of Amazon’s Prime Video service, YouTube’s Originals program, and the upcoming Disney streaming service, Netflix is no longer the only place to go for streaming – and, as a result, Netflix is losing shows. The Expanse jumped ship to Amazon for its third season, with the first two being removed from Netflix, and Disney intends to remove Marvel and Star Wars content from the Netflix library once its service launches – a move also partly to blame for the cancellation of Netflix’s Marvel Defenders shows, given that Netflix doesn’t want to “funnel money into the intellectual property of its soon-to-be rival.” Star Wars fans were ecstatic when a seventh season of The Clone Wars was announced – but when it turned out to be confined to Disney rather than being available on Netflix like the rest of the show, many fans lamented the explosion of new streaming platforms – and others decided to simply resort to piracy.
Services like Netflix have always sold themselves on the strength of their massive libraries of content – but the more streaming platforms are created, the further that content is being divided. No consumer wants to pay five subscription fees for the same range of content that was once available on a single service, and, as with everything on the Internet, the harder things are to access legally, the more they’ll be accessed illegally.
[image error]The new – and unpopular – kid on the PC gaming block.
Recently, similar events have upset the world of PC gaming. Valve’s Steam is, without question, the dominant marketplace for PC games, overshadowing EA’s Origin and Ubisoft’s UPlay, among other competitors, almost completely. Apart from the flagship titles of big game studios like EA, essentially every other game could be found on Steam. In late 2018, however, Epic Games launched their own storefront and launcher, the Epic Games Store – and with a more publisher-friendly revenue split and the titanic Fortnite to draw in players they seemed to be muscling in on Steam’s territory. Just as Amazon has siphoned away some of Netflix’s content, so Epic managed to snag big games like The Division 2. But, just as with Netflix, gamers want their games to all be available in one place – and when the developers of Metro: Exodus pulled their game from Steam without warning and moved it to Epic, players were furious. It doesn’t help that the Epic store lacks a lot of Steam’s basic functionality; it doesn’t support reviews, community discussion, or even offline play. At the moment, both Steam and the Epic store are free to use – but if either one decides that they want to charge a subscription fee like their streaming counterparts, piracy rates will almost certainly go through the roof. Game developers might get a better deal – but if their audience aren’t buying their games at all, then what does it matter?
Fifteen years ago in the Internet’s Wild West, games and videos were scattered across hundreds of different sites. Content was free, or at least cheap, but it was all over the place. YouTube’s arrival in 2005 heralded the first of the great centralisations; Netflix and Steam did the same with streaming and gaming respectively – and monetisation swiftly took over almost all online content. We’ll never quite get those old days back, but content is beginning to scatter once more – only this time every site has its eye on your wallet.
