- Hello, my beautiful doves. My name is Mina Le, and on this channel I
talk about fashion, media, and things happening in the culture. (soft birdsong) (cat mewing) - Entertainment and technology. - Go to netflix.com. - [Speaker] Are continuing
to transform each other as they have been doing
for over a hundred years. - [Narrator] Now streaming. - [Announcer] Coming to Netflix this May. - [Narrator] $22 a month.
(cash register ringing) $16 a month.
(cash register ringing) $18 a month.
(cash register ringing) - Guys, we did cable TV dirty,
I want you back, I'm sorry. - Our very own independent
streaming service, Watcher, for 5.99 a month. - (beep) $6, man, absolutely not! (light instrumental music) (TV static hissing) - This video is sponsored by ThredUp, an online
consignment and thrift store. ThredUp offers an extensive
range of styles and sizes and is overall a great way to switch up your closet more
sustainably than buying new. ThredUp currently offers
more than 55,000 brands and more than 4 million
unique items are available to shop every single day. Here's some of the items I got, so let me show you how I styled them. (upbeat music) I decided to style the
Maryam Nassir Zadeh Top and Burberry headscarf I got
together to make this sort of like pin up, slash 1960s
new wave inspired look. As an aside, I love putting bold greens, blues, and reds together. So yeah, this is like,
this is like candy to me, this outfit. I also got these shorts
which are D-Squared, which is a Canadian-Italian brand that I already liked
a lot, so I was stoked to see them listed on ThredUp. Also, if you've been
following me on Instagram, you know I've been really into baseball and sportswear in general lately and I had the perfect matching baseball top to go with these shorts. So yeah, had to style them together. Also, this outfit is super breathable. I will be wearing this
like every single day because it is hot and humid
in New York in the summer. Lastly, I put this Moschino cheap and chic green striped skirt and this leather belt by
Streets Ahead together for sort of like edgier take on
an otherwise pastel look. So yeah, let me know which
outfit you like the best. Build your dream closet for
less by shopping on ThredUp. Use my code Mina to get 35% off plus free
shipping on your first order. (static buzzing) Last month, one of the things
happening in the culture, specifically my culture as a YouTuber, Watcher
Entertainment got into controversy when they announced they
were quitting YouTube to launch a new streaming
platform where people would have to pay 5.99 a month to
access any future content. If you're unfamiliar, Watcher
is a production studio and media company founded
by ex-Buzzfeed employees, Ryan Bergara, Shane Madej and Steven Lim. All of them used to create content for Buzzfeed back in the day and eventually they all left the company because they wanted ownership
over their own videos, which is totally fair and the reason why a bunch of other Buzzfeed employees
also left the company. And also I think that like Ryan and Shane's series for Buzzfeed called Buzzfeed
Unsolved was like the most popular series on the Buzzfeed channel and they were not getting
like adequately paid for that achievement. (birds chirping) The birds are going crazy
today, hello spring! So since they left Buzzfeed,
they launched Watcher Entertainment which is hosted on YouTube and they were doing pretty well. But following this new announcement, they faced major backlash from their fans and a few days later the
team quickly scrambled to release a follow up with amendments. - This is our final goodbye to YouTube. - [Narrator] One week later. - We messed up. - They are still going to
be putting videos on YouTube but their streaming platform
will just be offering the same videos a month in advance. There were a lot of reasons
why fans were upset. Some people felt the
company was budgeting poorly because that was the main
reason that they cited for starting this new venture
that they needed more money. But a lot of people were like, we don't need high production, we actually like low production. Please don't charge us
for high production. - It's the right thing to do.
- It's not. I hope that helps. - Others thought they were
being hypocritical by trying to become like Buzzfeed
themselves in the sense that they were trying to scale up to be a bigger media company,
regardless of the reason, I personally believe that
this announcement also faced so much discontent because
of subscription fatigue. People are tired of having to pay for everything every single month. There's only a finite amount
of money the average person can shell out for these services. So you know, if you're launching something that people are interested in,
most of the time they'll have to unsubscribe from something else before they can subscribe
to this new thing. So obviously like whatever
you're offering on this new streaming platform has
to be able to compete with like Netflix, which
has over 18,000 titles. And also I feel like there's
just like a general like distaste towards like something
that was once given out for free and now like that
same product is being charged. I will get back to Watcher in a bit. I'm not a T channel so you know, I don't wanna make a whole
video, a breakdown about them, about the situation, but the way that the situation
has unfolded brought up a lot of thoughts and questions for me personally about
the current state of media and I wanted to explore those questions. So today I'm gonna be diving
into subscription fatigue. We'll be covering the rise
of Netflix, why movies and TV seem to suck today and the importance of owning content. (upbeat music) So first a history lesson. I wanna discuss the rise of
Netflix from DVD rental underdog to streamer champion because Netflix really paved
the way for the streaming model that we have currently. How did they get here? If you're old enough to remember, Netflix first started as a mail to order DVD rental business in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Mark Randolph. The big pull for Netflix was
that they didn't have late fees because at the time physical
video rental stores like Blockbuster operated a lot
like libraries in the sense that you had to pay a late fee if you return the movie too late. Hastings has actually said his
idea for Netflix was inspired by him having to pay a $40
late fee to Blockbuster for not returning Apollo 13 on time. - I remember it because I
was so embarrassed about it, I didn't want to tell my wife. - The interesting thing
about Blockbuster was that the company's profits
were actually largely driven by penalties it levied on customers. So basically the thing
that off customers the most was the main thing keeping
Blockbuster in business, which is always a
questionable business model. However, Netflix's model
wasn't feasible either because of one key reason, customers had to wait for the mail. This was like prior to Amazon
Prime level delivery speed. Neil Hunt, the company's
Chief Product Officer said our original model didn't work. We needed to overcome the shipping delay. It just wasn't a high enough value product to overcome the delivery waiting time. We spent a lot of money to market to and attract new customers and they wouldn't be repeat renters. We were spending a hundred dollars to $200 to bring in a customer and
they would make one $4 rental. There was no residual value. To overcome the delivery lag and improve the overall value, Hastings devised the model of a prepaid subscription service. This DVD on demand service
offered members four DVD rentals per month with no due dates or late fees for a $16 monthly charge. Prepaid return envelopes
were sent with each delivery. The program also featured an
automatic replenishment option. So members would select a list of films and each time they returned
one the next in the queue like on that list was
automatically shipped to them. Hunt explains that with
the move Netflix turned the disadvantage of delivery
time into having a movie at home all the time. The value to Netflix of having our movies in the
customer's homes at all times was our key insight. Very interesting. Still the company was struggling to compete with Blockbuster,
reports suggest that Hastings attempted to sell Netflix
to Blockbuster, not once but a few times in 2000. But then everything changed when Netflix offered online streaming. Netflix officially began
offering streaming movies and television shows in 2007. In 2010 it offered its first
streaming only subscription plan in select countries and by 2016 this plan was
available in 190 countries. House of Cards was another big
game changer for the company. So the TV series was Netflix's
first foray into original video content and it ended up
earning 56 Emmy nominations over the course of its
run from 2013 to 2019. - You know when you're watching
your favorite Netflix show and after five straight
episodes it's like you want to be in it. - Sir, I think you'll find
the information on the Senator to be invaluable. - A heartbeat away from the presidency and not a single vote cast in my name. Democracy is so overrated - As a result, Netflix was
probably even more convinced to pour tons of money into building
out their content library. A decision that some industry
experts touted as reckless because you know for a five year period after 2013 the company's
annual content spend shot up an average of 39% each
year while subscribers and revenue grew at 29%
and 35% respectively. Since the success of Netflix,
legacy medias like Disney, Warner Brothers, Discovery, Paramount and NBC Universal scrambled to compete and launched their own
streaming platforms as well. Content spending ballooned, ow, ballooned across the industry with each company spending
tens of billions of dollars to create new shows and films and to license old popular ones in a race to win over the most subscribers. For example, NBC offered a
hundred million dollars a year to stream the Office exclusively
on their service Peacock for five years beating Netflix's offer of $90 million a year. CEO Ken Solomon of the tennis channel who once ran Universal
Studios television recalls what his budgets for top cable TV shows like Law and Order were still
below $2 million an episode. He said, I thought budgets were
out of control back then, but in the streaming era, budgets have inflated,
Amazon shells out a record $465 million on just its
first season of a Lord of the Rings prequel series. Disney developed more than
a dozen superhero shows for its Disney plus platform
with each episode costing around $25 million. But despite all this content spending, only three US video subscription
services have managed to turn a profit in the 17
years since Netflix launched the streaming revolution, Netflix, Hulu and most recently Warner
Brothers Discovery. One of the big issues these
streaming companies were facing and are still facing
is that it's just hard to maintain subscriber
growth and keep subscribers. In the last four years, the
weighted average churn rate for US streamers has
almost tripled to 5.5%. (keyboard typing) According to a new
report from the streaming analytics from Antenna. So what that means is that like in 2023, although streamers gained 164.7
million gross subscriptions, they also recorded 140
million cancellations, which you know isn't too shabby, they're still gaining
more than they're losing except the fact that gross subscriptions are slowing down overall. Subscription growth fell to 10.1% in 2023 down from 21.6% in 2022. It's a little worrisome
for the future for sure. Mark Debevoise, CEO and Board Director of Brightcove said all of these
companies spent more money than they likely should have. Now media companies are trying to make streaming more profitable through more traditional means
like introducing advertising, licensing content to other platforms, cracking down on password
sharing, bundling with pay TV, and of course everyone's
favorite technique, increasing subscription prices. So in the US today, Netflix's
standard plan, two streams, no ads is currently $15
and 49 cents a month and the premium tier,
which is four streams cost 19.99 a month. Last summer, Netflix got rid
of the basic tier without ads, which had cost 9.99 a month
to drive customers to choose between the 6.99 a month with ads or a higher priced tiers. Last fall, Disney Plus's ad free price increased from 10.99 a month to 13.99 a month with Hulu's
ad-free plan jumping from 14.99 to 17.99 a month. Virtually every service has
raised their prices last year, HBO, Peacock, Paramount
Plus, Discovery Plus and Amazon Prime. With increased prices, and ads, many people have started
comparing these streaming services to cable TV and even going so far as to
say that cable TV was better, one of the arguments I've
seen against streaming is that with these massive content libraries, streaming actually takes up
like way more brainpower than the traditional method of just like flipping through channels. It's analysis paralysis. You just have like too much choice and figuring out what movie or show to watch can, at
least in my experience, take as long as you're watching
like an entire show. Also as Vince Mancini
writes on his substack we're approaching a point
when trying to maintain a nest of streaming subscriptions
is going to become more expensive, not to mention
a huge pain in the ass than just paying one company
who shall we say bundles them. The irony of course is that streaming is actually becoming more and more like cable TV every day. Historian Kathryn Cramer
Brownell explains, like their cable predecessors, streaming
companies have lured people in with promises of a better and
cheaper viewing experience. Now that they have a
robust subscriber base, they're in the process of raising rates while also
introducing more commercials and bundling programming
to make customers pay more and more. In a more like positive
spin on taking streaming and making it more like
cable, The Criterion Channel, which is arguably the
premier streaming program, they launched a cool new
feature recently called Criterion 24/7, which basically
mimics a cable TV channel. So some mysterious person in
the company chooses the movie roster and if you click
on the channel you can enter mid movie. The only problem that I
have with it right now, and granted it's still like
new is literally introduced in April, is that you can't
actually see what's playing, like the title of what's playing. Like you have to go online
to see like what movie is being played, which I
don't know, I feel like that's an easy fix, get on it, Criterion. However, the difference between cable TV and streaming is that at least
when cable companies tried to raise prices in the late 1980s, politicians called these
business practices unfair to their constituents. But now it seems like
it's an inevitable thing that no one can stop. Brownell says this is a sign of just how inured Americans
have become to the whims of corporations trying to
squeeze their customers. Yikes. (instrumental music) Maybe it would be easier
to accept the price gouging if the content was
actually getting better, but many people feel like
it's actually getting worse. Alex Cranz wrote for the Verge, Netflix's programming
strategy currently seems to revolve around putting
established successes from other companies out there and
hoping no one notices that Netflix isn't doing a lot of really good originals of its own. - This is Paris. (crickets chirping) - A potential issue with not offering enough
quality original content is that people could have
less loyalty towards Netflix in comparison to like other companies. As Cranz explains if there's a choice between spending on Netflix's
giant grab bag of stuff and Apple TV's pretty pristine library of well-made science fiction shows, a science fiction nerd
might go with Apple TV. I also think that just like with the way that shows have been jumping
from platform to platform, so for example like Sex
and the City was on HBO and now it's on Netflix,
like there's not a lot of permanence, which I'll
also talk about a bit with these TV show selections. So if a company is not really
hosting any original content, that's good, then yeah
there's just like less reason for people to stick around because you know you could
have ownership over the Office right now but then like in
five years it might be on some other channel and people might
be like, oh I'd be willing to wait until it gets onto the
channel that I like the most. I do think there are some good movies and shows that have come
out on Netflix though, like I don't wanna slander
the company too much, but I do agree that the
streaming environment overall has led to less creative and arguably worse
quality movies in TV than we've had before. Alex Slotnick explains what
that is like really well, where a DVD sale was once
contingent on you liking a movie, a Netflix monthly payment has
nothing to do with the quality of any given piece of media as long as you're engaged enough in
aggregate to stick around. That's not to say Netflix
doesn't produce some outstanding and bonafide art, but it does mean that
we're encouraged to engage with a bottomless pit of content rather than form a lasting bond with any single work. Yeah, I mean Netflix will
continue making money as long as they have like good enough movies, meaning they have little
incentive right now to make great movies in-house. Speaking of DVD sales though,
on his Hot Ones episode, Matt Damon talked about how DVD
sales were like a big factor in allowing for creative
freedom in the 90s. - The movies that we used
to make, you could afford to not make all of your money
when it played in the theater because you knew you had the
DVD coming behind the release and six months later you'd get all, you know, a whole nother chunk. It would be like reopening
the movie almost. And when that went away, that
changed the type of movies that we could make. - Throughout the later 20th century, the way that movies could make money was through the box office and then even if the movie bombed, later DVD sales could still turn
the film into a success. For example, Fight Club was
a box office bomb grossing $37 million in America
on a $63 million budget. Not because the movie was bad but because it was marketed badly. Edward Norton who plays the
main character in the film has talked about it saying I
think there was a reluctance on the part of some of the
people who were actually marketing it to embrace
the idea that it was funny. And honestly I think
they felt indicted by it. I think if you felt more like the guy who plays my boss in the
film, then you tended to not like the film. But also it just was a
tough one to distill. And yeah, there's this
interview of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton that's really funny during their press tour and it's just like the way
that they promote the movie, you can tell they're
having difficulty with it and to their credit it is
kind of confusing to explain what it's about without giving
like the whole plot away. - It's tough to put a label on it 'cause I have never seen
anything quite like it. - Yeah, it's just, it's
an unusual, it's very, very thick with ideas almost. - [Interviewer] It's a
philosophy class or something. - Philosophy, theology.
- It's a movie that you watch and then you find yourself
talking, you know? - So I do feel for them in that sense. The director David Fincher wanted to take a creative approach
to the film's marketing. He directed a couple of
fake PSA videos where Norton and Pitt as their characters
advise movie goers to turn off their cell phones,
adding weird lines like. - No one has the right to touch you in your bathing suit area. - Fincher's idea was to take
an in your face assaultive approach to the marketing, which is actually way
more in line with the tone of the movie overall and I
think would've worked better. But Fox preferred to play
it safe by selling the film as a big studio film with movie stars and marketed Fight Club
at wrestling events making it seem like a
straight action movie. But then the movie poster
they chose was really artsy so people were just confused
what this movie was supposed to be about and had less incentive to go see it in person. - There's a weird pathology
in in marketing departments and they honestly believe,
to the core of my being, I believe that this is true. They believe that it's
their job to save it. They really do, that's their contribution. - The movie was predicted to
bomb close to opening weekend, so Fincher decided to take a
vacation to Bali that weekend for a little piece of mind. He's so me coded. He later reflected on
the poor performance. People at the restaurant Morton's would pat you
on the shoulders like you lost a loved one. The vibe at CAA, his agency
at the time was very much, it's good you've experienced this and that you can understand
we can sway you from making these kinds of life altering
possibly career destroying decisions for yourself. I just got up and excused myself and later on I had a conversation and said, how dare you, I'm
really okay with this movie. But despite the bombing, the film went on to sell 6 million DVDs, which is probably why it's
become one of the most popular and highly ranked movies today. And I'm sure its success
has actually given David Fincher way more sway in fighting
against any producers who don't fully trust his vision. Nowadays it seems like most
movies aren't even released at the box office and are
just made direct to streaming, which is also a problem because streaming habits are
a lot different than theater going habits in movie
theaters, you're not allowed to use your phone for instance, but when you watch TV at home, you can obviously do whatever you want and most of the people that I
talk to say they watch movies and shows on their TV
while browsing their phone though they know it's a bad
habit and I've done it too. Like I'm watching reality TV, I'm not paying attention fully, but this viewing pattern
is starting to affect how shows are being made. Writer, producer, director,
Justine Bateman told the Hollywood Reporter last year, I've heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that this isn't second screen enough, meaning the viewer's primary
screen is their phone and the laptop and they don't
want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get
distracted they might look up, be confused and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before, they want a visual music. When showrunners are getting
notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No, I mean it's really crazy
like the concept of that because it shows that a lot of streamers like don't actually
care if people are paying attention to what they're showing, what they're offering on the platform, they care more about the fact that like the stream is just
running all the way through. So I don't know if this
has affected movies yet, but I think Quentin Tarantino
sums up the profit first mindset that streamers have pretty well, and I'm not picking on anybody, but apparently for Netflix, Ryan Reynolds has made
$50 million on this movie and $50 million on that movie and $50 million on the
next movie for them. Well good for him that
he's making so much money, but these movies don't
exist in the zeitgeist. It's almost like they don't even exist. Basically what he is saying
is that movies that are made for the purposes of these streamers tend to just not be memorable. (upbeat music) Another issue people
have with streaming is that we don't actually
own anything even though we're paying for something. This also means that streaming
services have the ability to add and remove movies or shows that we like whenever they want. And without consulting anyone or without consulting us. - Why didn't you ask me? - The most annoying thing is
that if they remove a movie, we sometimes don't have the
option to watch it anywhere else because they like bought
the exclusive rights to it. So you have to wait
until they list it again or until another streaming
company buys the rights to it and list it. And some movies that are
not seen as bankable enough to warrant licensing fees have
literally no digital presence and maybe won't ever, I
came across this struggle because a couple years ago I was trying to watch the movie
Life-Size with Tyra Banks and Lindsay Lohan again because I was covering it for a video. I forget what I was doing
with that movie exactly, but I will remember that I
couldn't find it anywhere. Like there was nowhere that
I could rent it digitally. There was nowhere I could stream it. It was like this movie didn't even exist. And then I did end up
finding like a stream that someone had uploaded onto
Daily Motion like in parts with like Dutch subtitles
and I used that to watch it. I don't even know if this is up anymore because I think it's piracy so it might have been taken down. But yeah, it's just annoying. There are so many movies out there that probably I will never find out exist because they have no
digital footprint online. And one of the things that I love the most about
like video rental was that I would just go through and like pick up a movie that, you know, I wouldn't have discovered unless I was going through
a whole catalog of movies that existed and sometimes I would find something really special. Like for example, Kimba the White Lion. 'cause I was a child, I picked that one up and I really liked that
movie until I lost it. And then my parents had
to pay a pretty gnarly fee because you know, we lost the
movie, which was not great. But other than that I, you know, I really appreciated
the fact that I was able to watch that movie. I wouldn't have discovered it otherwise. Anyway, this kind of like
model is also dangerous in a censorship way too. For example, Disney Plus
sometimes shows movies that first start with a message. This film has been modified
from its original version, it has been edited for content and we won't know what was
edited from the original cut unless we also have a copy of an old DVD. But if we did have a copy of an old DVD, we wouldn't be streaming it. - Don't fool with the babysitter. - Don't fuck with the Babysitter. - As Richard Brody wrote
for the New Yorker, that's not the case when one
holds in one's lap, a book that one owns, pops a disc into a player or lays a needle on a record along with a specific
aesthetic of movies one views, there's an economic aesthetic at work too in each type of transaction. Having a movie in hand
that's paid for once or paying forever and owning nothing but memories and promises. Even if you buy something
digitally though, it doesn't even mean
it's yours forever still. For example, if you buy an ebook, it'll most likely be registered to a specific e-reader
company email address. If you lose that email address or if you want to change to
another company's e-reader, you lose all the eBooks
that you've bought so far. In 2023, Google decommissioned its
game streaming service Stadia. So current users were told
that they would receive refunds for the licenses of their
purchases within the studio ecosystem, but the point is something that they purchased is no longer
there regardless of whether or not they got a refund for it. As director Guillermo del
Toro tweeted last year, physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved, level of responsibility. If you own a great 4K HD,
Blu-Ray, DVD, et cetera, et cetera of a film or films you
love, you are the custodian of those films for generations to come. This doesn't only affect movies
by the way, doing this job, I've come across a lot of dead articles because the server that
hosted them no longer exists. It's shut down. Archive.org is actually a lifesaver. I owe it my life. But there's tons of blog pages on Tumblr and Live Journal that are
just no longer discoverable. And sometimes if I do find an
old live journal page, the way that the old internet worked
was that many people had to upload photos onto hosts
like Flickr and Photo Bucket because there was just no way to post a photo directly
onto the blogging platform. But then, you know, I've noticed that Photo Bucket must
have purged their storages or something in the last couple years because a lot of the photos
on these old blog pages are now blank and no one thought to
archive these small pages. So everything's just effectively gone. It's like there's a dark period
from like 2000 to like 2013 where it's just really hard to find stuff that was posted in that time. I was also a member of all these forums and those forums don't exist anymore and I just feel like forums
were also a really important part of seeing how people communicated
online in the early internet. And yeah, they just, they don't exist. So we lost that historical data and I'm actually realizing I
really need to get a hard drive because I don't have
copies of any of my videos. I delete them once I post
them because storage reasons. But if YouTube just shuts down one day, all the work I've done
in the past three years would just like disappear. So yeah, I need to get
on that immediately. Bringing it back to movies, the lack of physical archiving on the
consumer part is one thing, but not even the studios
are saving all their data and this is because of how
cumbersome current technology is. So almost every film these
days is digital data. Even if the filmmaker starts
off shooting on classic 35 millimeter film, they almost
always end up turning it into a digital form to add effects and just like make it look right. And this digital version
is called a Digital Intermediate or DSM. And the cool thing about DSM
is that it can actually be used to make a brand new 35 millimeter print and it'll actually look better than trying to keep an old film print
safe for years and years. However, keeping digital
data safe is harder and more expensive than
keeping old film reels. Right now this digital data is
getting stored on LTO tapes, which are meant to last 15 to 30 years. But most of the time companies
only trust these tapes for about five years. And this is because the machines that read the LTO tapes
keep evolving, every couple of years they come out with a new version of these tape readers and
the new ones can't always understand the older tapes. It's like trying to watch
a DVD with a VHS player. It just, it doesn't work. And so every five years or so, each film in the archive
needs to be migrated over to a more like technologically
advanced version, which requires time and money. It requires new tapes,
new drives, staff to copy and verify the film data. For example, film archivist
Dino Everett stated a recent project to restore the 1948
classic, the Red Shoes. He says it was archived on
LTO-3, when LTO-5 came out, the quote was 20,000 to
$40,000 just to migrate it. Films like the Red Shoes that continue to make money are probably safe, but for films that are bombs or for films that are produced
by independent studios with way less money than the big ones, there's a good chance we'll
lose some of the films. It reminds me of this Tumblr post. I do think there's something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. I wanna read stuff that
ancient people thought sucked enormous balls and this is a joke, but I like actually live in fear that we are going to be like
one day the ancient people and people are gonna wanna
read like the shitty boy band fan fiction that exists on Whack Pad and it's not going to exist anymore because no one wanted to archive it. (keyboard typing) And this isn't entirely speculation by the way, Warner began
classifying its 8,000 feature films and 5,000 TV shows into two categories. Those it will manage, aka preserve and those it deems perishable,
managed assets could include not just the finished film or
show but marketing materials and some deleted scenes too. Whereas perishable material may
include dailies for features or unused footage. It'll be stored for
some time in the archive but may not be migrated ever. And you know, to decide what's perishable and what's not, the studio
considers things like how successful the film has
been, how popular it stars are, and whether the film could
have enduring or cult appeal. The hope for archivists
is that we'll come up with better technology to replace the LTO method
hopefully sooner than later. But journalist Marty Perlmutter talked to a top technician at Technicolor who said there's going
to be a large dead period from the late 90s through 2020 where most
media will be lost. (upbeat music) So I wanted to talk a lot about Hollywood and streaming services
because you know, I love film and also 'cause you know, Watcher is releasing a streaming platform. So I was thinking about
these bigger platforms, but what's interesting
and unique about Watcher is that they're different in the sense that they're also a team
of content creators. And so right now they kind of exist in the new media
space though I have a feeling they're trying to lean
more into traditional, I don't blame them for this decision because you know, as
much as I love my job, social media platforms are scary as hell. Like you never have any sort
of job security, not only because of algorithms, but also because a platform could
literally just go away. We're seeing this right now with TikTok. The US government has legally
passed a ban against TikTok unless its parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese company sells TikTok to an American company
within the next nine months. This is of course the dumbest and most insane thing
to tell a company to do. And there's like lots
of xenophobia in it too. And you know, it looks like as of now, ByteDance is not going to do
that and I can't blame them. But you know, who knows? Maybe they figure like they could make like a ton of money
and billionaires love money more than anyone else. If TikTok does get banned
in the US that means that for any talkers who haven't
cultivated a platform elsewhere, they're virtually screwed. I don't know exactly how many
people fall into that category because I feel like most content
creators exist on multiple platforms now, and that's because there's been an idea
recently in the last few years that content creators have to exist on every single platform. In the before times it
was way more fragmented. You called yourself a YouTuber or a Viner, but nowadays a lot of people
tend to align themselves with the general content creator label because it's the catchall
for all social media. And also like all social
media platforms are trying to converge and become one another. So you can just end up cross posting. And you know, most people
on these platforms, they're not posting
because they're addicted to posting content everywhere. But because of the precarity
of platforms themselves, content creators do not have a union. And I remember when the writer
strike was happening last year, there were conversations
in my YouTuber group chats about how dangerous it is that we actually don't have a union and are fully at the
mercy of these platforms. If you know, YouTube decides that they actually wanna take
like 90% of my ad revenue, like you know I'd, what can I do? What would I be able to do? Like nothing. Sometimes the platform doesn't
go away like with Vine, but they'll make changes and they won't communicate
those changes to creators. For example, in 2018, Pinterest advised creators
on the best SEO practices with the instruction that the
first five pins that you save during the day will have
the biggest priority. However, one week later the
company changed their mind and they remove that line
from the best practices page. Companies also change algorithms
like seemingly all the time and they keep their algorithms a secret. So all of us are basically
playing a game every day, but the game is our financial livelihoods, which is so, so fun. I have no idea, like I
have no idea why some of my TikTok videos do better than others or why some of my Instagram
carousels do better than others. And I have some of my friends
who say they're shadow banned and you know, no one knows why. So given all this headache, I
can see why Watcher would want to try to create their own platform. I mean, a lot of content
creators have a Patreon or paid substack to give
them more financial security and for a long time consumers were happy to support their favorite artists
and creatives in this way. In a 2021 Vox article, editorial director Everdeen
Mason explained why she pays creators. I'm 32 with no kids, no student loans, and no plans to buy a house again. I'm very much someone
who will pay an artist for a thing that they've made. Patreon was founded by Jack Conte, a former YouTube musician, and Sam Yam, Sam Yam is
such a great name, sorry, a co-founder of the mobile
ad platform Ad World in 2013, when they launched the platform, Conte posted a video he'd made for an original song called Petals. He said the video cost him $10,000 to make and three months, you
know, time is money too. And it got nearly 2 million views, but he made only $963
through YouTube's ad network. He wrote in a blog post,
this devaluing of art and creators is happening
at a global scale. It actually makes my
heart sink when I think of the magnitude of the
web's systemic abuse of creative people. While there are a handful
of Patreons that make tens of thousands of dollars
every month, the majority of people on the platform
are not making enough to be solely supported by it. I haven't been able to
find recent info on this, but Brent Knepper wrote about
the feasibility of Patreon as an income stream in 2017. He reported that in October,
2017, only 2% of the creators who publicly share their earnings
made the equivalent of $7 and 25 cents an hour or $1,160 a month, the federal minimum wage. I honestly think we've surpassed the goals and age of Patreon. I don't really know anyone
who would launch a page for the first time right now. Mostly because it's really
hard to compete with Patreons that have been around for years. And once again, there's
only a finite amount of money people have to give to creators. And as I said earlier, people are developing
subscription fatigue, not helped by streaming services,
increasing their prices and cracking down on password sharing. 57% of respondents to the Motley Fool Ascent's
2024 subscription survey believe they're spending too much for
their subscription services. - But now we're getting to the point where cable costs less
than streaming services and streaming services are starting to give you more ads than ever. - So the difficult thing
that creators have to juggle is that if they launch a
subscription program, they have to really consider the
wants of their audiences because those people are
directly giving them income. And you know, if you're
not appealing to them, they are not going to pay you. And the disconnect that
Watchers seem to have with their audience is that
it seems like Watcher wanted to keep making higher and
higher production videos. Meanwhile, many audience members
prefer a more lo-fi setup. For example, many Watcher fans
have lamented in the comments and on Twitter and on Reddit about how they preferred Buzzfeed
Unsolved over Ghost Files, which is like the Watcher
version of Buzzfeed Unsolved. Among the reasons our complaints that Ghost Files is too overproduced and professional, whereas
Buzzfeed Unsolved was more like off the cuff and genuine. I think there's also a charm
about watching two amateurs play detective, which is like an archetype we see time and time
again on actual TV shows. - I gotta dig a little deeper. There's no Pepe, you gotta be kididng, I got boxes full of Pepe! - Ryan and Shane also have a
lot of Parasocial followers, which can backfire because when you put a lot
of work into production, it distances you from your fans because you start to
resemble more of a like a legit television show rather than a homemade production. And some fans may not like that distance. Heavily produced videos do work for some people on YouTube like Mr. Beast who has 300 people working
on his production team. But it's difficult to transition
into it when your fans initially followed you
for more lo-fi content. Ironically though, Buzzfeed
is actually way bigger of a production company
than Watcher currently is. So it's funny that people felt that the Unsolved Series was cozier. In the end, I think that
they made a mistake, but I definitely feel for them as someone who has a similar job,
there's always a desire to improve your editing, your scripting, your production if you will. And especially as you get bigger and have more revenue streams, it seems like they were
doing it all with Patreon, merch sponsors, live shows,
so it can feel like a waste to not invest some of that income and put it back into your video content. Also, before I started
recording this video, I came across this newsletter
essay from Ryan Broderick who is talking about this and he says something really interesting. He says that Watcher isn't totally to blame in their like attempt to leverage into bigger productions because YouTube continues to push for more TV level production
from its biggest channels, but does not financially
scale in a way that makes that possible without losing your mind. And it's so true. I do feel like especially
in like the video essay type of sphere, there is a pressure to be pushing out longer and
longer and longer videos. Like I have seen videos on
this website that are running for six hours long and for
me I'm like, that's insane because I personally, I could never sit through like a six hour video essay. But clearly a lot of people can because these videos do really well. And also the longer the videos, like the more ads can
get put in the videos and so you get paid more by ad sense if you have
longer form content. There's also this like idea that like longer form does
better with the algorithm. I don't know if that's true or not. And so yeah, there is this
like pressure to do more, even though you know a lot of the times, like the audience
doesn't actually want you to do that much more. Also it was just hard because
these guys are real people. I read a few comments about how fans liked Buzzfeed Unsolved more because Ryan was more scared
about entering these haunted houses, which was a fun dynamic in contrast with Shane who
didn't believe in ghosts. - Who in their right mind would be stoked to be in there by themselves? You know how much of a psychopath you have to be to enjoy that? - Oh my ghouls, won't you talk on my show? - But obviously if you've
been entering haunted houses for years and you haven't
been possessed yet, fingers crossed, knock on wood, I imagine you become a bit desensitized. If Ghost Files was a fictional TV show with fictional characters, the Ryan character would
probably always be written as like someone a little bit more paranoid and easily stressed
than the Shane character because it's more entertaining that way, but it's not reflective of how work can change people over time. (upbeat music) Anyway, this is the end of the video. Thank you all so much for listening. Let me know what your thoughts
are on subscription fatigue and what you think about like movies and TV shows that are
being made today versus how they were made in like, you know, the DVD era, like the 90s. I'd love to know, I do feel
like there are some really good movies that have come out. Like I don't wanna be
like so doomsday about it. Like honestly, I loved Challengers. That was the most recent movie I saw. I loved (crickets chirping). (Mina Le laughing) There's so many good movies and I'm like, I loved one movie. I loved Challengers, I loved... My God, there's gotta be something else. I loved The Holdovers. That was like a little bit ago, you know, I really like Saltburn, even though that was like a polarizing one. There are clearly like
good movies coming out. So I don't know, like
sometimes I feel like maybe it's because there's more bad movies that have come out than good
movies that have come out because of just like the fact that we've been pushing way more movies and shows out now than ever before. I don't know if it's true that movies have gotten worse in general. I don't know, as I said, let me know, but I hope you have a
lovely rest of your day and I'll see you next time. Bye. Thank you, ThredUp once
again for sponsoring, build your dream closet for
Less by shopping on ThredUp and use my code Mina to get 35% off plus free
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