SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Entertainment is at an inflection point, with streaming services on the rise and old business models falling. What does the future of the entertainment industry look like, and what does it mean for what we’ll see on the screen?
KCBS Radio has been reporting on the changing nature of the industry leading up to an upcoming Audacy Town Hall event. This reporting includes coverage of the Bay Area music industry.
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Reporter Mike DeWald went out to hunt down the reason why well-known music artists seem to have disappeared from San Francisco and the surrounding area.
In addition to DeWald’s dive into the music industry, reporter David Welch journeyed into the Bay Area’s theater scene. There, he found thespians dealing with new challenges in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Audacy station KNX in Los Angeles also gathered a panel of Hollywood insiders to discuss the future of the industry in a town hall this week, called “Streaming Wars: The End of Content’s Golden Age?”
Photo credit KNX News
Actor Ron Perlman said he’s “in a state of constant mourning” over the current situation in Hollywood, but he isn’t without hope.
“I’m incredibly optimistic, I just hate the people who are running the show right now,” actor Ron he said. “The art form of cinema, and television I guess is an offshoot of it, was invented by family-run businesses, studios. And the competition and the lust for profits were every bit as real as they are now, but their version of competing with each other was to make better stuff than the next guy did, and make sure it got to the audience as good as it possibly could.”
Perlman said that as the old studio system faltered and new corporations came in, “the desire to blow people’s minds about being part of a collective consciousness, which is what our culture is meant to do, turned into a desire to compete for stock prices.” During last year’s dual Hollywood strikes, that problem came to a head.
“The strike brought out in vast relief how in order for the captains of industry – the robber barons of our day – in order for them to control us, they have to diminish us, they have to devalue us, and what is behind that?” he said. “Everybody was talking about runaway greed, and greed and culture are just not bedfellows. They’re not only bad bedfellows, they’re not bedfellows at all.”
SAG-AFTRA Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the widespread support for last year’s strikes – not just from other Hollywood unions, but among the public at large – reflected a shared frustration with corporate control of entertainment and the encroachment of AI in various industries.
“There is a growing sense that people want to take back control from big corporations, that people want to have their concerns heard and responded to,” he said.
Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton highlighted the ways television has changed in recent years, both for consumers and entertainment workers. As technology put more control in the hands of viewers, the way TV was produced rapidly changed, with the focus shifting from long-running broadcast hits like Law & Order to shorter-run series with fewer episodes.
Streamers were greenlighting hundreds of new series every year…until they weren’t.
“Although it was a bonanza of work, that was a bubble that was unsustainable, and when it eventually burst, it really burst,” she said. “You have a time when what’s possible in content is awe-inspiring. It’s just a matter of getting to how people distribute, how they make money – that is the big challenge.”
Karina Manashil, president/executive producer for Kid Cudi’s production studio Mad Solar, pointed to Netflix’s subscriber drop as the moment where the bubble burst.
“Every other streamer, whether they were starting to see their stock prices drop or not, started to react with, ‘Oops, let’s go broad and safe. Let’s go all four-quadrant, easy, inexpensive, let’s not take those risks, because if it’s happening to Netflix, it can happen to us too,’” Manashil said.
Patrick Gomez, editor-in-chief at Entertainment Weekly, said other industries had gone through similar periods of change – notably, the music industry after the advent of Napster, Limewire, and paid streaming apps. He said that if the music industry could figure out how to create a sustainable business model with streaming platforms, film and TV could do it too.
The question is how to keep things sustainable for creators and performers, too.
“What’s really cool about [TikTok] is there’s a democratization of access to audience, because all of a sudden you don’t have to go to LA to do an audition. You don’t have to be in New York to perform at a showcase,” Gomez said. “But at the same time, there’s less bags of money to go around. There’s more chance to become a quote-unquote star, but the paychecks are getting smaller and smaller.”
Crabtree-Ireland pointed out that while “peak TV” may have been a good time for consumers, it was detrimental for performers.
“If you were an artist and you thought, oh wow, I finally landed a series, and then that series was gone after one year and it’s not on any platform any more, you’re not making any residuals, you barely made any money because the series was only 8 episodes to being with, that’s problematic,” he said.
And even for viewers – is binge-watching really the best way to experience TV? Gomez recalled attending the premiere of the Friends reunion, where many of the young people in attendance hadn’t seen the series during its original run.
While he appreciated that the show had found a new audience, he was stunned to find that attendees who had binged the show on streaming – without the collective experience of discussing it week-to-week – couldn’t answer trivia questions about the sitcom’s most iconic lines.
“Because to them it was just one more episode they watched out of 10 they watched that day, the plotlines they could remember, but all these touchstones from that show – it was fascinating to see that,” he said.
With this ability to curate your own viewing experience, came the trend of jumping from service to service. And while it might seem like a new-age phenomenon, Gomez said you don’t have to look too hard to find its parallel in earlier means of content consumption.
“If you just go back to HBO and Showtime, they’d see those same influxes. When Game of Thrones was on, they’d see an uptick in subscribers, and then it would dip back down and they clearly were able to make that sustainable,” he said.
The difference, Gomez said, is that “HBO would take four or five big bets in a year and then have other programming that were smaller bets, and as long as they had all year round, that was enough to keep people around, enough to make them profitable. On streaming, they’re trying to do that 60x or sometimes 600x – that’s when it gets unsustainable.”
So is there a sweet spot for content rolling out that benefits creators and viewers alike?
Crabtree-Ireland believes streaming services are still trying to figure that out, saying, based on recent industry analytics, “It seems to me that what is happening right now is they are testing out what is the level of original content versus acquired content and library content that they need to have in order to keep their ideal level of subscribers, and so I think we haven’t seen the result yet.”
Manashil said you can see competition for collective viewing opportunities heat up, especially in the world of sports saying, “You’ve got Amazon picking up Thursday Night Football, and now they’re going to get a playoff game next year. You’ve got Paramount getting the Champions League or Peacock getting the Premier League, or even Nickelodeon doing a simulcast of the Super Bowl… you’re seeing SpongeBob and Taylor Swift getting kids and their parents to watch football together…So I do think it’s almost like competition to what we’re trying to do on our side with traditional content. You’re getting it major on the sports side.”
But what Littleton found interesting was how this model sounds eerily reminiscent of the days of cable dominance, saying, “Everything old could be new again in terms of even streamers bundling themselves because who wouldn’t want one bill versus 10 that come in now.” She called the sports play a ‘hedge’ by the streaming service.
Perlman believes the big problem here is an overreliance on data, saying the conversation is always, “We gotta figure out what they want, what the suckers want. Let’s go to our algorithms that’ll tell us.”
He said, “You don’t make culture by reverse engineering, by thinking that you know what the audience wants. That’s why none of these companies will be around in five years.”
What is the next battle in the content wars?
Crabtree-Ireland said more negotiations are underway, fighting the same battles over AI and fair pay for other sections of the union, and so he says, “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
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