Dude, Where’s My Streaming Show?
Photo by Olaf Kosinsky, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE
In early August the New York Post released a scoop that Warner Bros. Discovery was cancelling Batgirl, a film which was in late post-production, and had already cost the company at least $70 million dollars. People were shocked because not releasing a basically completed film means that the company can’t even try to recover the costs incurred in making the film, on top of the fact that art was made that will never apparently see the light of day. Grumbles continued on social media since then, but it mostly went away as an issue.
On December 13 news broke of additional cuts to HBOMax. The service, which has been cutting shows since the beginning of July (Beforeigners was the canary in the coal mine, removed without a press release around July 2), continued to ax shows from the service, the biggest one of this last group being the dystopian sci-fi show Westworld, which was not renewed for a Season 5, and will apparently be licensed out to a strictly ad-supported streaming service.
This really got me thinking and continued discussions with Will Truman on Twitter about what is going on behind the scenes, especially when you couple the news of the coup-d’état at Disney with CEO Bob Chapek being fired on a Sunday!, being replaced by former CEO Bob Iger, just months after the Disney Board of Directors unanimously renewed Bob Chapek’s contract in late June of this year. While many Disney fans applauded the move, believing that Bob Iger would reverse the so-called anti-consumer changes made at the Disney parks since the beginning of the pandemic (less park hopping, no more annual passes at Disneyland, mandatory park reservations to enter, lower ride capacity, and higher ticket prices), I think you need to look at their financials.
Buried in their 4th quarter financial results (direct to consumer), the Disney streaming services lost over $4 billion dollars for the fiscal year, compared to only losing $1.6 billion the year before. News slowly leaked out that other executives were unhappy because apparently Bob Chapek was expensing certain Disney streaming shows under other divisions, such as the Disney Channel, so that the profits would show under Disney+ but be expensed under the Disney Channel. If this is true, then I can understand why the Board of Directors turned on Chapek so suddenly. (Note: the New York Post also reported that executives were unhappy because of a consulting agency hired to advise on cost-cutting measures – so it’s not just because of the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ streaming)
This news made me wonder what else is going on. Almost two years ago, this very site noticed Disney+ shrunk but I think those kind of streaming programming losses were expected. Companies, including Disney, and Warner Brothers, licensed their content years into the future; in 2020 Disney had to pull some of their own content to be exclusively streamed on a different service. Earlier this fall, HBOMax had to pull the original 8 Harry Potter movies to be streamed on Peacock instead of with the rest of the Wizarding World franchise on HBOMax. The HBOMax issue with Westworld has finally made something very clear however (without reading the license agreements themselves, mind you!): there are different residual fees for movies on ad-free streaming services versus those that allow ads.
Why else would HBOMax pull their original programming? Personally, I’m sure it’s a purely financial decision at this point. Cost of residuals/royalties divided by the number of eyeballs. Shows which get a ton of eyeballs will stay, cheap shows that don’t cost as much will stay. But shows that cost more per eyeballs will get axed. And in Westworld’s case, they must have lower residuals if they are on an ad-supported only service rather than a service which offers an ad-free plan out of the box (perhaps they will get residuals per viewing instead of a mandatory minimum?) This kind of analysis also explains (to me at least) why in the heck Disney+ lost 4 billion dollars last fiscal year. I don’t think all of their new original programming really cost that much. I think the residual costs are eating their lunch. Bob Iger is going to need to address that, and I really believe we are about to see the Disney Vault come out of retirement. Shows that don’t meet the threshold calculation above will either take a short (7 year?) or long (forever, like Song of the South) break from Disney streaming, or they’ll create a new service to replace the non-ad supported Disney+, or do like Warner Bros Discovery has done and pull their own programming (Westworld is a Warner Bros show!) to license to a different streaming company.
So what happens when your show is fully dropped from streaming? Services like JustWatch are great to try and figure out what happened (many movies are dropped from streaming but are available to rent on demand, usually for a low price). The best answer really is BUY PHYSICAL MEDIA. They can’t take that away from you. They can’t edit it. (Although I’m old enough to remember when they tried via the DVD competitor DIVx (not to be confused with DivX)
Westworld fortunately has a physical disk release, but the canary in the coal mine – Beforeigners (an excellent Norwegian sci-fi show about time travel that uses that plot device to address many social issues of today without actually talking about the specific social issues that could cause people to get offended – it reminds me a lot of how the original Star Trek series snuck social commentary in without being overt) does not have a home (outside of Germany and Australia) legally for people to watch it – no physical media, nothing. Some people on twitter have called for a new law that would strip copyright on works that were pulled from being able to view legally (i.e. no physical media and no longer offered on streaming) as being abandoned. I don’t fully agree with that although I can sympathize.
All I can say is…be prepared. Your favorite show on streaming may disappear. Any time. And bring back Beforeigners!
What’s the argument against yanking copyright for unavailable works? And if not that, then what kind of policy action should we take to prevent this?Report
One of the arguments is that the copyright holder is merely waiting for someone to meet the price they are demanding. Perhaps even waiting passively — they’re not actively marketing it, but if someone comes along with an offer they’ll entertain it. You have a point about actual abandonware, or material where tracking down the holders costs more than the material is possibly worth.Report
Well, perhaps the owner wants it to not be available for some reason. Disney is currently doing that with Song of the South right now; however – it’s not the best example as if you look hard enough, they’ve released it before on VHS and LaserDisc (at least overseas), so it has been *released* at least once for consumers to be able to watch it via a physical copy. With this new advent of streaming though, while it goes against my libertarian leanings, I’m more on the side of “at least one physical release” of a streaming show if it’s no longer available.Report
The basic argument is that the copyrighted property is, well, the copyright owner’s property, and if the owner of a copyrighted work doesn’t wish to sell it, that’s his, or her, right, just like with most other types of property. If the owner of a vintage Edsel who keeps the car garaged didn’t want to sell it to you, what is the argument for making him, or her, sell it to you just because he or she isn’t using it, you want it, and no other Edsels are available?
If you want a “policy action,” you could redefine our basic notions of property, either generally — sell me the Edsel, dammit! — or just for books, movies, music, etc., preferably for some more principled reason than, “I want to see a racist movie the copyright holder doesn’t want to distribute, dammit, and I don’t want to wait until it goes into the public domain!”Report
Copy “Rights” are interesting because unlike a other forms of property, they were invented not as a recognition of some naturally occurring right, but as a legal fiction for the purpose of incenting creative creation.Report
I sort of agree with this, though it might be more accurate to say that copyright was explicitly and consciously created to promote creation of literary works rather than to embody some naturally occurring right, while certain other types of property, which functionally created analogous incentives to productive activity, were said to recognize what was claimed to be a naturally occurring right. They may even have believed it back when.Report
“What’s the argument against yanking copyright for unavailable works?”
The same argument that authors had when e-books started to be a thing; nobody knows what distribution methods might exist in the future, so destroying copyright might lead to the loss of potential markets. (Many authors found a lot of success re-releasing their back catalog for e-readers; reversion clauses in their contracts allowed them to get the rights back after a work had gone out-of-print.)
I’m very skeptical of “well X isn’t available therefore it should be free” statements because if it’s not available then how did you manage to get a copy?Report
This is also a problem with books. I really, really, really want to read Duane Decker’s books about the Blue Sox (a fictional major league baseball team), some of which I read as a kid, but they’ve been out of print for decades and used copies either cost hundreds of dollars or are unavailable.Report
At least for old books, there are existing huge collections that are already cataloged: public and university library stacks. Some years back I wanted to reread an historical novel I had read as a kid. There was a copy in a nearby university’s stacks. The book showed up at my public library about three weeks after I made the inter-library loan request.
California’s got a ton of sizeable public libraries and universities. The LA public library catalog says they have five of the Decker baseball books, all available. WorldCat shows at least 13 titles at libraries somewhere in the US.
Reminds me that one of these days I need to get back to my project of setting up a book-scanning arrangement.Report
One of my buddies told me about the Casca series back around 2003 and I got excited and couldn’t find a copy of #1 (of 53!) anywhere. You could find onesy-twosys in the thirties or fourties for a little under cover price in the occasional used book store, but if you wanted to start from the beginning? You were boned.
I have sympathy for pirates.
It’s wrong to pirate media you can’t otherwise get, of course. The law is important!
But I have sympathy for pirates.Report
So, from sometime in 2014 the entire series has been available in e-book form. Someone has gone to the trouble to buy up rights and make arrangements with all of the series’ authors over the years. Still sympathetic?Report
I am.
But I am pleased to know that you can get 49 of the 53 books for about six bucks each.Report