At this point there isn’t anything new or novel about Netflix, Hulu or Disney+. In fact there are many other streaming services; to list would take too much space in this column.
What is new is while this new format for distribution of entertainment has matured, new and exciting types of entertainment content is being created. Streaming services offer something regular cable could never – unlimited time.
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What I mean by this is before a TV channel could only air one program at a time. In other words, only 24 hours of content in a day. The number of TV channels proliferated, many of which became very niche, but still there was a limit. Your cable company would bundle different types of channels together and you basically had to make a choice about what content you wanted chosen for you.
Streaming on the other hand doesn’t have that challenge. The customer has thousands of choices of what to watch no matter what time it is. This has enabled two things to happen: bigger budget programming and smaller budget programming.
While it might sound odd I would say the advantage is both bigger and smaller, it has had a profound impact on the types of content streaming services provide. And these types of content would never appear on traditional cable services.
Let me give you some examples. The smaller side, I think, is easier to explain.
When you have a huge platform with all kinds of customers, you can afford to create extremely niche content or what I am more excited about, experiment a bit. Netflix recently released a mini series called “How to Become a Tyrant.”
For example, ‘How to be a Dictator for Dummies’
Describing the genre is a bit hard. On the surface it is a documentary series that follows several of the world’s most notorious tyrants from Adolf Hitler to Idi Amin. However, the way it is presented is in a how-to format. That is, the series explains how to take over a population and control a country and fight off rivals – in a very much tongue in cheek kind of way.
Think of it as “How to be a Dictator for Dummies” type of approach. As an added layer of irony, it is narrated by Peter Dinklage (of Game of Thrones fame). However, a witty and ironic telling of some of humanity’s darkest hours? That format probably only makes sense to a small subset of Millennial history buffs, which I don’t think there are too many.
It was a rather inexpensive production, very creative in factual storytelling and was quite the experiment. Maybe Netflix will do more documentaries of that style; maybe they won’t. The point is, you would never see anything that niche (or creative, or risk taking, or inventive) on a cable.
On the other side, big-budget productions pay off
The opposite side of things sees big-budget productions for streaming. Most cable channels produce their own TV shows (which are comparatively inexpensive) and then secure the rights to movies to re-air after they have had their run in the movie theaters. Not streaming services.
Amazon recently paid $200 million for the movie “The Tomorrow War.” This movie has plenty of expensive special effects and well-known actors such as Chris Pratt, J.K. Simmons, and the greatly underrated (in my opinion) Sam Richardson.
To put that in perspective, that price puts it in the range of some of the recent Star Wars movies that appeared in actual theaters.
Personally, I thought the movie struggled to find its identity (somewhere between horror, sci-fi and action) and had plenty of plot holes. But that isn’t the point. The point is no cable channel would ever pay $200 million to produce a movie just for itself.
We are seeing quite a number of changes in how entertainment is distributed. But we also are seeing quite a number of changes in what and how entertainment is being created.
The streaming platform allows for more creativity, more risk taking, more experimenting, and just plain-old bigger productions.
