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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WELCOME TO THE ERA OF GARBAGE FILM AND TELEVISION STREAMING  
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David Moscrop
June 6, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Private equity and monopoly capitalists will destroy anything to
make a buck, and they’ve turned their sights on TV and film. If you
hated cable’s high prices, endless ads, and copycat programming,
you’re going to loathe the future of streaming. _

The story of the decline of streaming is a tale of deregulation and
big finance’s monopoly capital model, which comes in hard and, when
it leaves, trails devastation. , (Riccardo Milani / Hans Lucas via AFP
via Getty Images)

 

If there’s an iron law for twenty-first-century capitalism, it’s
that private equity and big corporate capital will enshitify
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it can get its grubby hands on. Most recently, the finance class was
in the news for destroying the Red Lobster chain
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depriving us regular folks of a decent meal out. The same forces are
also setting out to ruin the entertainment industry and those who work
in it.

Writing in _Harper’s Magazine_, Daniel Bessner, a contributing
editor at _Jacobin_, penned “The Life and Death of Hollywood
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a must-read feature on Hollywood. He deconstructs the streaming
industry, tracing the history of film and television through their
early years, into the deregulation 1980s and ’90s, through to
industry consolidation and derisking. He highlights how the promise of
creativity, freedom, and decent work in the industry have been
slaughtered at the altar of intellectual property milking, worker
exploitation, and the race to profit.

As Bessner writes, the original strategic streaming play was to pump
up subscriber numbers, dominate market share, and cash out at scale.
But the strategy failed, particularly as credit became more expensive,
and now the industry is flailing, bilking its writers and actors and
foisting ads on subscribers in a grotesque return to something a lot
like cable TV.

Land of IP-Milking Garbage

In his piece, Bessner recounts screenwriter Alena Smith’s experience
in Hollywood during the streaming era, and it’s not a pretty
picture. It’s what you’d expect from Apple, though: demanding too
much, offering too little, and wringing a worker dry without regard
for them as a human being.

Smith explained to Bessner how the rush of money into streaming
ultimately left writers feeling swindled.

“It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a
multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” she said. “But we
mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that
was because they cared about art.”

If you stream television or film, you’re familiar with the
contemporary frustrations of the model. You were promised no ads and
endless choice. Instead, you got ads and, well, endless choice — but
it was a Faustian bargain.

Now, you’re subscribed to half a dozen increasingly expensive
services, increasingly supported by ads, and increasingly filled with
intellectual property (IP)–milking garbage and countless other
options that are indistinguishable from one another and from what you
got on cable a decade or two ago.

Cable TV Strikes Back

John Koblin, in the _New York Times_
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writes

Ads are getting increasingly hard to avoid on streaming services. One
by one, Netflix, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+ and Max have added 30-
and 60-second commercials in exchange for a slightly lower
subscription price. Amazon has turned ads on by default. And the live
sports on those services include built-in commercial breaks no matter
what price you pay.

The reason is predictable — the companies want to make a profit and
they’re struggling to do so. They can only hack away labor costs so
much, which they’ve long tried to do, even as writers and actors
went on strike last year. And the market, already stretched thin, can
only afford so many price increases. Ads are one way to boost the
balance sheet.

Another cash source, as Koblin points out, is cheap, low-risk
standards — a shut-up-and-play-the-hits approach. That means
streaming companies are, as he writes, “ordering lower-cost, old
network standbys like medical dramas, legal shows and sitcoms.”

Put this all together and it becomes really hard to distinguish
streaming from cable, even if the ad burden is lower with the former.
You still have ads, the cost of subscriptions adding up to the
equivalent of a cable TV package, and familiar programs chock-full of
stock settings, plots, and tropes.

The familiarity is no accident. The old TV and film players are as
much a part of the new streaming entertainment industry as the new
move-fast-and-break-things tech bros are. And they’re all selling
the same thing. Same as it ever was.

As Bessner points out:

By the early Aughts, six enormous conglomerates — Disney, General
Electric, News Corporation, Sony, Time Warner, and Viacom —
controlled every major movie studio and broadcast network, and a
substantial portion of the profitable cable businesses. The
conglomerates were raking in more than 85 percent of all film revenue
and producing more than 80 percent of American prime-time television.

In parallel, he notes that in the years that followed, three major
asset-management companies came to dominate the most valuable publicly
traded companies in the United States. You may see where this is
going: the story of the decline of streaming, of its enshitification
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deregulation and big finance’s monopoly capital model, which comes
in hard and, when it leaves, trails devastation.

A Vulture’s Eye View of Hollywood

In 2022, private equity investment
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entertainment witnessed a sharp decline compared to the previous
years. In 2021, the vultures poured a staggering $12.45 billion into
the industry, but by the following year, that number plummeted to
$10.6 billion. In 2023, investment hit a six-year low at a mere $2.77
billion.

The industry attributes this downturn to various factors: a lack of ad
opportunities, the purported burden of regulatory scrutiny, and the
challenging landscape of streaming services, which struggle to make a
profit within the confines of the new model that they themselves have
created. The soaring costs of credit and inflation aren’t helping,
either.

This trend reflects a broader period of austerity for the industry in
which workers — writers, actors, and those who make the
entertainment industry work from the bottom up — are struggling to
get by.

Private equity and big corporate giveth capital and they taketh away.
They have essentially become arbiters of fortune in the entertainment
industry. Now, as the tide turns, we are left with the worst of all
worlds. The industry is collapsing, workers are bearing the brunt of
the fallout, consumers are inundated with ads and saddled with
ever-higher bills, and the once vibrant landscape of creativity is
being suffocated by a low-risk, IP-exploiting monoculture. This grim
scene is made worse by the looming specter of artificial intelligence
promising more of the same — at best.

Hopefully everyone really, really enjoys _Grey’s
Anatomy _and _Blind Date_. Because for the foreseeable future,
they’ll be what we’re left with in one form or another.

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CONTRIBUTORS

David Moscrop is a writer and political commentator. He hosts the
podcast Open to Debate and is the author of Too Dumb For Democracy?
Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones.

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