Three years ago, when the WGA Strike ended, I sounded a note of cautious optimism based on the amount that studios had given away in order to preserve their gamble on the ad-supported streaming model for Internet content. They all claimed that the Internet was in such infancy when it came to its relationship with TV, and that it would be years before it caught on with people, so they really kind of NEEDED to withhold lots of money from us for this specific revenue stream. Not that they had anything SPECIFIC in mind for it – Gosh, No!
“What about Hulu?” we would ask, since the were busy crowing to Wall Street about their new ad-supported joint streaming venture with which they were poised to reap huge dollars.
“Hu…lu?” they would respond. “What’s that? Silly writers with your random syllables“. Hulu went live to the public less than a month after the strike ended.
My projection was that they had gambled wrong, and that you couldn’t just shove the network TV viewing experience into an InterTube and start cashing checks. I thought direct rental or purchase might step up, but it turns out that I was off-the-mark as well.
The model wasn’t iTunes. The model was XM.
Netflix has just about finished disemboweling Hulu, which will not survive in its present form. Hell, even the cable delivery systems are currently freaking the eff out about Netflix, which will now be streaming first-run syndication for Mad Men, and is gearing up to produce its first original series. It is becoming a one-off “channel” that exists completely outside of the cable box – one with thousands of hours of entertainment that you can watch on your own time, and which costs less than HBO.
Cable thought it had worked itself into a nice cozy corner where it could charge us $100+ a month for 500 channels – 480 of which we would never watch. Over and over it resisted calls for more consumer choice. Now people are looking at the $8/month Netflix streaming plan and saying “hey, I get a LOT of entertainment for this!” And then they turn in their cable box.
A low-subscription fee, ad-free model is triumphing, and it’s looking now like the only obstacle is studios getting grumpy and withholding their content from it while they try and whang together their own content pipe that people might actually like. It’s an exciting thing to watch, since, as my viewing of Alien vs. Ninja underlined for me – any jerkoff in the woods with a digital camera can get their crappy-ass movie on Netflix, and never even involve the studios.
That is their nightmare – filmmakers who don’t need them.