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Five Things because it's been awhile
- I've been reblogging fandom/geek/tumblr holidays to my tumblr this year (I have them queued until the end of the year) and this is the middle of the biggest week in holidays all year! The 7th was Purim, and then Mar 10 is MAR10 day for gamers; yesterday was the Eleventh of March for those who will always remember the Eleventh of March; March 12, today, is GNU Terry Pratchett day for SF/Fantasy fandom; 3-14 is of course Pi Day; and then it's the Ides of March, followed by Leprechaun Day on the 17th. And this year Ramadan then starts the 22nd. So happy holidays everyone who celebrates any of those! (If you celebrate none of those, happy March, I guess.)
- I FINALLY read Nona the Ninth. My brain was doing the thing where I had to put off reading it because I'd staked to much on it and then I kept putting it off, but it was way beyond due to the library, so I finally did (by staying up till 2 AM) so now I am having all the feelings the rest of the fandom had six months ago. The flashbacks filled in *exactly* the story I wanted them to, which is always a weird feeling as you read something you're overinvested in, what do you *mean* this isn't disappointing me?? It was supposed to disappoint me!
Anyway I wanted to post my Blood Of Eden name here just so I don't lose it again:
Greetings And Defiance Fairest And Fallen ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον It's Not Made Of Fire Forget What You've Been Told In The Past
(what would your Blood of Eden name be, if you know what that is?) - I made a sort of low-key resolution to post fic to AO3 once a month this year whether I'd actually written any or not, so there may be a bunch of old unresolved fic showing up backdated there this year. I'm also going to try to actually keep up with comments on them, we'll see how *that* goes. This is February's (shhh. it's still February.)
Lacunae (2234 words) by melannen
Fandom: Highlander: The Series, The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Methos (Highlander)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Community: intoabar, Post-Book 1: All Systems Red, image recognition software
Summary: Pin-lee first noticed him because he wasn't there. - Still both playing and watching too much Minecraft! Got weirdly stuck in sand yesterday and thought I was going to die of suffocation, which would have been my first death in months, because I couldn't move and couldn't break blocks, but then I didn't die and didn't die and didn't die, didn't lose health even though I had the "taking damage" sound and animation, so I thought I might have lost the whole world, and then I got desperate and just walked out through the solid blocks. Dunno what was going on there but hey I didn't die! I might be almost ready to finally light a portal and go to the Nether soon. There's an island-based extra-large ruined portal really beautifully situated under a natural arch that's part of a giant dripstone cave system that's centrally located on the water route between my two main bases, hopefully the nether on the other side is just as cool!
- I keep recently seeing people - fans and actual journalists - being extremely upset about shows coming down from streaming services that own them, which means they will be GONE FOREVER! And treating this like some horrible injustice and some new thing that is going to totally upset how the creative industry works.
And. I mean, I get why people are upset, they won't be able to easily access favorite shows anymore! But your beloved shows won't be gone forever? As long as a single person has a pirated copy and either a torrent client or a CD burner and a mailbox, they won't be gone forever. It's especially weird from the POV that I'm still doing the in-period Star Trek watchalong, where it's 1968 and Star Trek has just been officially renewed for a third season after a massive fan campaign, which was extremely important not just for new canon, but because having less than three seasons would have meant it wouldn't go into syndication - which would mean, really truly, it would be gone forever and nobody would ever be able to see it again, only listen to fan-made audio recordings and look at photos and scripts. Gideon Marcus, who runs the watchalong, attempts to also give us the 1968 shows that ran before and after Star Trek - and only about 50% of them still exist in any form at all, even in locked film and video archives. (And, tbh, this is generally not a great loss to culture the way Trek would have been.)
So, on the one hand, if you really want it have it forever, save your own physical copy (on media you own!) And on the other hand, "make this available to everyone who wants to watch it, forever" has never been a goal of any media producer, even a little bit, and anyone who thought that, even in the age of streaming, hasn't been paying attention. Also: sometimes things are ephemeral, and all you have of them is your memories of the experience, and that's ok. I've been trying to write fic for the watchalong without cheating and using sources I wouldn't have had in 1968 (even the ones around in 1998) and it's such a different experience, and freeing in a lot of ways!
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And even later the networks never really acknowledged taping off the air - if there wasn't an official VHS/DVD release that they were currently selling, they didn't think of it as being available, so it didn't factor into their business plans, and they never did VHS releases of the majority of TV. (I've been seeing a few thinkpieces lately that talk about this with the music industry actually from a slightly different angle - until streaming services, the only way studios had a way to track what music was being listened to was via radio play and sales of recordings, and now they're suddenly being like, wait, people constantly listen to old music that isn't on the radio and hasn't had a recent CD release? When did listening habits change? And of course people have always done that, but the studios didn't have a way to track when you listened to your old LPs, so they literally did not realize it was a huge part of the market until now, and they actually think it's a generational shift in what kind of music people like. No video streaming service has ever actually offered the kind of back catalog access that the music sites do as a matter of course, even early on, so they have not had that realization yet.)
I guess for me I had this disillusion early on? In the early days of streaming Netflix there was a huge amount of press about how now you could get any show you wanted whenever you wanted on demand! And then I went and looked for the shows I wanted to watch that I had never been able to legally get other ways, and none of them were there. No Golden Girls, no Hogan's Heroes, no Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, no old episodes of Jeopardy from the 80s. Most of them would probably have been super cheap to get the rights to at the time, too. (Many of them were on Youtube.) Even early on they'd made the really obvious calculation that putting up an extensive back catalog was a losing proposition. We've just now reached the point that streaming originals count as back catalog for the first time.
Yeah, it absolutely does suck that stuff is coming down that doesn't have any official DVD release yet, but, y'know, I was also around for the early days of anime fandom in the US, where nothing had an official DVD release, and if you're tied in enough to the fandom to melt down in Discord about it, you probably do already know someone who knows someone.
I guess this connects back to the strong feelings I get about a fight I've also had repeatedly lately about people saying that fanwriters shouldn't have the right to take down their fanfic, ever, because putting it on AO3 was an agreement to keep it available to the entire fandom forever and it's ethically unsupportable to take it down. Sometimes. Things aren't available anymore. And that's ok.
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Let's take movies pre-VHS/Beta. You could see a film in the theaters, and once it was out of theaters, it was probably gone forever. It probably existed somewhere, in some studio vault! But the technology to make it available for home use simply didn't exist. People didn't have room in their homes or the money to set up a film projection studio, and even if you did, film cannisters were big and bulky and film itself was a fire hazard. There was just no way that you could practically have it in your own home, and projecting it for public use cost money--you needed the physical space and the equipment and the projectionist, and also you had to pay the studio. So only popular movies that lots of people would want to see again would get re-released in theaters. It was ephemeral, but that was a limitation of the actual physical medium. None of this is because of decisions on the studio's part, there's nobody to blame, it was an inherent issue of the medium. TV, same thing. There simply wasn't any way to practically have your own copy that you could re-watch at will.
Even books and music were ephemeral. Most albums and most books got a single printing, and that was it. Either you bought it when it was new, or you never had a copy at all unless you were lucky enough to stumble upon a copy in a second-hand store. Manufacture costs were decently high, so they had to have a decent guarantee that if they reprinted something it would sell well despite not being new. If something was out of print and you couldn't get a copy of it, again, it was a limitation of the physical medium. It was not a case where the media could be available with trivial ease. You might be very disappointed if you missed something or your copy got ruined or whatever and you couldn't find another, but there's nobody to blame.
And then came VHS and DVDs, and not only could you have your own copy to watch whenever you wanted, old forgotten stuff was being reprinted and brought out that you hadn't been able to get ahold of before! The technical barriers disappeared.
With the rise of digital media, the few remaining technical barriers disappeared. Any media the company has the rights to can be made available to the customer. It's simple and easy. Books, music, TV, videos--as long as it exists in a digital file, it's pretty cheap to serve it to the customer. And anything that exists in a physical form (anything that hasn't been permanently lost in the meantime) can be converted to digital with a little bit of work. The only reason something isn't available to the customer is if the media owner has chosen not to make it available.
And while in experiential terms, both now and the 60s have lots of ephemeral media, the difference is that in the 60s that wasn't a choice anyone made, that was simply the reality of the level the technology was at. It was a natural ephemerality. Now the ephemerality is entirely artificial, and purely the result of decisions a tiny group of humans have made that affects everyone else. Of course people are going to respond differently!
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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.)