up your alley? Interesting changes?
Good catch. Yes, streaming needs to die. The sooner the better. Streaming is convenient, but it turns everything it touches into slop and destroys the ecosystem that supported higher quality movies and shows.
Netflix was originally just a distributor. There was a lot of good stuff on Netflix because it licensed content from traditional studios that were still oriented towards theatrical distribution -- which requires making something good enough to draw real paying customers to invest an evening, buy a ticket, and plant butts in seats -- and then the secondary market of DVD releases and eventual licensing for broadcast.
That older model worked.
Netflix became big in streaming due to first mover advantage. Then Big Tech looked over, realized that it owned the distribution platforms, and a bunch of pixelbrained MBAs started dreaming of synergies, that having been fetishized in business school.
Big Tech moved into tv and movie production, buying up the legacy studios to get control of their huge catalogues of older films and shows ... and put them behind a paywall. The movie studios that wanted to stay independent decided that they needed to set up their own streaming platforms. The subscription sellers took over, with the idea that anything that could be reduced to pixels was generic content, and all content is fungible. The streaming problem that particularly concerns me right now is that the streamers have so segmented the audience that even the occasional good shows and movies are not accessible to most of the potential viewing audience. In fact, many people don't ever hear of them unless they happen to be showing on the streamer of your choice, because it's very hard to advertise across so many highly siloed platforms. Streaming is killing the ecosystem that supported investing in quality, in an industry where every film is a big gamble to begin with.
The race to the bottom commenced. At the same time, the bigger the company, the more attractive it is as a target for the activists, and soon the big studios and streamers (already mostly liberal left anyhow) were living in terror of getting on someone's blacklist. That's when the woke stuff ran completely amuck.
The sooner audiences get fed up and quit, the better. Man up. Don't rely on the Netflix algorithm to spoon feed you; pay enough attention to spot good movies when they come out, man up, and buy a ticket as you used to do not so very long ago.
Netflix has been in the forefront of wanting to kill theatrical distribution because it views theaters as competition. And once the competition is eliminated, quality can continue to erode and prices can be hiked because people have nowhere else to go, except to read a book, clean out the garage, or paint the back bedroom.
Netflix set this cycle off, and everyone else decided that they needed to compete with Netflix. Scale uber alles. Streaming was overbuilt. Most of the streamers lose money. They are all hoping to be among the last survivors when the industry consolidates to the point that a cartel can raise prices at will.
I've always suspected that Netflix, still by far the streaming leader, might turn out to be a house of cards. It is still largely a distributor, although it began to edge into production as other streaming platforms proliferated and Netflix found it harder and more expensive to license the good stuff from others.
BUT Netflix is notorious for quantity over quality slop (not having ever had a quality studio at its core) -- although even on Netflix, a good "Netflix original" does sometimes appear, largely (I think) because Netflix picks up an indepedent production early enough to stake a claim. Netflix has a huge passive income stream from subscriptions and selling harvested data to advertisers, and it can use that to back quality productions from time to time. But Netflix maintains its position mainly by being perceived as the platform with the most content. It's big because it is big. If it loses that advantage, it will have to compete on quality, and it could crash fast.
The streaming fiasco is starting to unwind. It's really not much more than a decade old. The question is what will be left when the customers walk away. When it comes to movies, I've gotten partial to the films with a writer-director team of one and made on a shoestring budget. They're almost immune from the woke commissars. But they need to be able to find an audience, which means that they need the festivals and theatrical distribution. Yes, you can shoot your own movie on an iPhone and put it on YouTube, but your chances of finding an audience and breaking out are almost nil.