>> as long as it exists in a digital file, it's pretty cheap to serve it to the customer.
I think this is where a lot of these discussions trip up? Because it's relatively cheap, but it's not zero cost. I wouldn't guarantee streaming a show is even cheaper, on the individual margin, than the marginal cost of renting out a VHS at Blockbuster; at Blockbuster you're paying out overhead for the floor and employees and stock but the actual cost of an individual rental is only physical wear-and-tear, which is negligible. And you can charge more, because the customer actually feels like they're getting something.
For streaming, for every single stream you're paying the bandwidth costs, you're paying the overhead of infrastructure for the servers that hold it and process it, you're (at least in theory!) paying small amounts to the creatives and producers and owners for every stream + a large amount for the license if it's not original (which will probably go up the more people watch the show), and you've still got really considerable employee overhead to keep all of that actually running (which is more complex and requires higher-paid skills than working at a Blockbuster.) And you're generally charging a set fee for an unlimited number of watches, since people wouldn't put up with a per-hour charge. Netflix actually still has its DVD mailing service - and it's still got a much, much higher catalog of shows and movies than the streaming service *ever* did.
Tumblr, which serves mostly still images and some video and audio, is running at a considerable loss, and always has. Youtube and Tiktok feel like video for free, but they don't release their profits, only their revenues, and they're both supported by much larger corporations that can eat a lot of loss for the advantages of owning the services. (They also sell HUGE amounts of customer data and a TON more ads than subscription services can get away with.) The last time Youtube released profit numbers, it was just barely breaking even, and I would not be surprised if that has gone back down as ad prices continue to plummet, competition increases, and other issues grow. Spotify only serves audio and always operated at a loss. Twitch makes most of its money by skimming off half of direct donations to streamers, is subsidized by Amazon, and had to increase its skim last year just to get a little bit closer to breaking even. AO3 spends about 200000 a year on just hosting costs, serving only text and working with bare-bones hardware and hosting and volunteer labor; an hour of streaming video is ~10,000x an hour of fic-reading just in bandwidth. Consumers as a whole often have the impression that serving internet content is basically free! because for the whole existence of the internet, it has been heavily subsidized by corporations taking on risk (and on the scale most consumers do their own hosting, it's factored into their internet costs.)
The subscription streaming services in theory operate on a subscription model but that doesn't make up the whole difference. And people who subscribe to streaming often expect to stream a *lot* for the cost of their subscription; having stuff streaming in the background all the time isn't unusual, and it costs money for the services.
Which isn't to say they're entirely justified in what they do; you can absolutely run a streaming service that makes a profit and isn't rapacious (Vimeo is actually doing fine on its medium-scale subscription/SaaS model) but the big streaming services are stuck needing to satisfy boards and stockholders by at least appearing to be wildly successful at all times, not just chugging along (making reasonable profits) like Vimeo. But they aren't pulling back catalogs just to be mean and evil; they're doing it because keeping them up costs them considerable amounts of money.
The ideal situation for a streaming service would be that every subscriber binges perhaps one new aaa original show a month and that's enough to keep them subscribed and draw new people in; beyond that every hour of show they watch is a loss of profit for the service, and every back catalog show they keep up is their current subscribers costing them more money while not pulling in any new subscribers that would let them show "growth" to justify their losses.
I mean, yes, I personally think there are many, many massive problems with the current streaming models all the way through, and it would absolutely be possible to run a subscription streaming service that only had older shows that could be licensed cheap and had them all and kept -- but it's not the world we live in, and it has never, ever been the model that TV show producers and studios worked with.
I have sympathy for the people who expected their stuff to be up forever, and of course it's been to the benefit of the streaming services - up till now - to give them the impression it was true. But if you think keeping old streaming content up is a negligible cost, or if you think old content disappearing completely is somehow a new phenomenon, or if you think there was ever any even implied promise from the studios to keep it available forever, you absolutely have not been paying attention.
I mean, I've seen stuff from professional animators being like "the show I worked on isn't streaming anymore so I don't have any way to demonstrate my past stuff when I apply for jobs!" and like. Your portfolio should not be a bunch of links to streaming sites. It should never have been.
(And I guess the tl;dr version of all the above is: a lot of people compare streaming services to owning dvds/videos and treat it like that, but a streaming service is a broadcaster and always has been a broadcaster, it's just a broadcaster with an infinite number of channels. But its cost calculations are, fundamentally, a broadcaster's; old shows are in syndication, not on the shelf.)
no subject
I think this is where a lot of these discussions trip up? Because it's relatively cheap, but it's not zero cost. I wouldn't guarantee streaming a show is even cheaper, on the individual margin, than the marginal cost of renting out a VHS at Blockbuster; at Blockbuster you're paying out overhead for the floor and employees and stock but the actual cost of an individual rental is only physical wear-and-tear, which is negligible. And you can charge more, because the customer actually feels like they're getting something.
For streaming, for every single stream you're paying the bandwidth costs, you're paying the overhead of infrastructure for the servers that hold it and process it, you're (at least in theory!) paying small amounts to the creatives and producers and owners for every stream + a large amount for the license if it's not original (which will probably go up the more people watch the show), and you've still got really considerable employee overhead to keep all of that actually running (which is more complex and requires higher-paid skills than working at a Blockbuster.) And you're generally charging a set fee for an unlimited number of watches, since people wouldn't put up with a per-hour charge. Netflix actually still has its DVD mailing service - and it's still got a much, much higher catalog of shows and movies than the streaming service *ever* did.
Tumblr, which serves mostly still images and some video and audio, is running at a considerable loss, and always has. Youtube and Tiktok feel like video for free, but they don't release their profits, only their revenues, and they're both supported by much larger corporations that can eat a lot of loss for the advantages of owning the services. (They also sell HUGE amounts of customer data and a TON more ads than subscription services can get away with.) The last time Youtube released profit numbers, it was just barely breaking even, and I would not be surprised if that has gone back down as ad prices continue to plummet, competition increases, and other issues grow. Spotify only serves audio and always operated at a loss. Twitch makes most of its money by skimming off half of direct donations to streamers, is subsidized by Amazon, and had to increase its skim last year just to get a little bit closer to breaking even. AO3 spends about 200000 a year on just hosting costs, serving only text and working with bare-bones hardware and hosting and volunteer labor; an hour of streaming video is ~10,000x an hour of fic-reading just in bandwidth. Consumers as a whole often have the impression that serving internet content is basically free! because for the whole existence of the internet, it has been heavily subsidized by corporations taking on risk (and on the scale most consumers do their own hosting, it's factored into their internet costs.)
The subscription streaming services in theory operate on a subscription model but that doesn't make up the whole difference. And people who subscribe to streaming often expect to stream a *lot* for the cost of their subscription; having stuff streaming in the background all the time isn't unusual, and it costs money for the services.
Which isn't to say they're entirely justified in what they do; you can absolutely run a streaming service that makes a profit and isn't rapacious (Vimeo is actually doing fine on its medium-scale subscription/SaaS model) but the big streaming services are stuck needing to satisfy boards and stockholders by at least appearing to be wildly successful at all times, not just chugging along (making reasonable profits) like Vimeo. But they aren't pulling back catalogs just to be mean and evil; they're doing it because keeping them up costs them considerable amounts of money.
The ideal situation for a streaming service would be that every subscriber binges perhaps one new aaa original show a month and that's enough to keep them subscribed and draw new people in; beyond that every hour of show they watch is a loss of profit for the service, and every back catalog show they keep up is their current subscribers costing them more money while not pulling in any new subscribers that would let them show "growth" to justify their losses.
I mean, yes, I personally think there are many, many massive problems with the current streaming models all the way through, and it would absolutely be possible to run a subscription streaming service that only had older shows that could be licensed cheap and had them all and kept -- but it's not the world we live in, and it has never, ever been the model that TV show producers and studios worked with.
I have sympathy for the people who expected their stuff to be up forever, and of course it's been to the benefit of the streaming services - up till now - to give them the impression it was true. But if you think keeping old streaming content up is a negligible cost, or if you think old content disappearing completely is somehow a new phenomenon, or if you think there was ever any even implied promise from the studios to keep it available forever, you absolutely have not been paying attention.
I mean, I've seen stuff from professional animators being like "the show I worked on isn't streaming anymore so I don't have any way to demonstrate my past stuff when I apply for jobs!" and like. Your portfolio should not be a bunch of links to streaming sites. It should never have been.
(And I guess the tl;dr version of all the above is: a lot of people compare streaming services to owning dvds/videos and treat it like that, but a streaming service is a broadcaster and always has been a broadcaster, it's just a broadcaster with an infinite number of channels. But its cost calculations are, fundamentally, a broadcaster's; old shows are in syndication, not on the shelf.)