Over the weekend, James P. Stewart and Benjamin Mullin of the NY Times had an expansive look at the future of streaming TV (gift link). There isn't much new, especially if you've spent any time at all paying attention to what is going on in industry. But it's a nice overview of the challenges and it certainly is a fine way for civilians to get a better handle on the overall issues.
The piece opens and closes with comments from Barry Diller's 156-foot yacht, as he ponders the challenges for the industry with John Malone and Brian Roberts. So, an 83-year-old, an 82-year-old and the son of the founder of Comcast? With all due respect to the trio, these are executives who have made a lot a lot of money in the television industry and have helped make the linear TV business model a cash cow.
But reading these comments, as well as ones I've seen elsewhere, just illustrates that these executives don't have a clear vision on how to improve their streaming businesses. They are flailing around in a way that manages to not help their bottom line while standing in the way of the innovation required to build a successful business:
But Mr. Diller, like many of the other executives interviewed for this article, sees a path forward for streaming companies once they stop trying to be Netflix. (That’s the strategy already adopted by Mr. Roberts of Comcast.)
The focus, according to Mr. Diller, needs to be on what “has been true since the beginning of time.”
The business, he said, “is based on hit programming, making a program, a movie, a something that people want to see.”
To be fair, there are some enlightening comments. Including this paragraph from Netflix's Ted Sarandos, which is a pretty straight-forward explanation of why the company sticks with primarily releasing their shows in a binge fashion:
“When you finish ‘Baby Reindeer,’ there’s something else just as good,” he said. “I worry that this notion of these other services, that they have nothing to watch problem, and that once you do a show and then you drag it out over 10 weeks or doing one episode at a time, you still end up in the same place, which is there’s nothing to watch after it.”
Given the number of top industry executives quoted in the story, I wish the NY Times had opted to do a series of stand-alone interviews, rather than spending hours speaking with executives only to include a quote or two in a larger state of the industry piece. Take, for instance, this brief comment from Jason Kilar:
Jason Kilar, the founding Hulu chief executive and former chief executive of WarnerMedia, has called for an even more radical approach than bundling: a new company that would license movies and TV shows from the major studios and pay back close to 70 percent of the revenue to those studios.
“I’ll call it the ‘Spotify for Hollywood’ path, where a large number of suppliers and studios contribute to a singular experience that delights fans,” Mr. Kilar said. “The studios would be the ones that would be taking the majority of the economic returns from such a structure.”
I have SO many questions about this idea. And while I'm not convinced that it could happen at this late point, it is perhaps the lone "thinking out of the box" moment in the interview.
This isn't a bad piece. But like most NY Times long profile pieces, it feels more like a history recap than an effort to learn something new.
