- Joined
- Jun 10, 2003
- Messages
- 26,382
- Real Name
- Josh Steinberg
I don't think it's greed so much as trying to survive in a changing media landscape.
The old method of getting financing for a TV show is virtually extinct. In the past, a studio would sell a show to a network for a set fee; this fee would cover a significant portion of the production expenses. The studio would put up the remaining money, and hope that the show would be successful enough to last long enough to enter syndication, at which point the studio would be able to start recouping the rest of their investment by selling syndication rights. Networks were willing to pay a higher fee for shows, because the advertising that aired during popular shows had tremendous value.
That paradigm has changed.
To begin with, networks are unable to finance shows in the way they used to. This is because broadcast advertising is not as lucrative as it once was. The reason for this is that far fewer people watch a show live during broadcast than in years past. And on top of that, commercial time just isn't as valuable in an environment where the viewer doesn't have to watch the commercials to see the show. Broadcast TV has more competition than ever, fewer viewers than ever, and even fewer ways to monetize those viewers.
The old model is broken.
Studios and content creators are at a crossroads, and trying to find a way to make production viable in an era where there are more distribution channels than ever before, but fewer sources of reliable funding. I don't think it's a bad thing that studios are essentially experimenting with a direct to consumer approach. Shows on TV were never free in the first place; the costs were just hidden from the consumer. We paid for shows indirectly in the past by watching commercial advertising and purchasing those products. Now, by and large, we're not watching that advertising and we're not buying products simply because a commercial aired during a show we like. It's not unreasonable that those companies are not willing to spend the same amount on advertising when it no longer gets them the same number of viewers or sales as it used to.
So we can either pay for the content that we enjoy, or we can decline to pay for it, and in doing so, send the message that this content isn't relevant or appealing to us.
I don't think that's true at all.
I think the media landscape has changed tremendously in the short time that Fox renewed the Orville, and today. When The Orville was renewed for a third season, it was the Fox network renewing a show produced by the Fox studio, which were one and the same company. Even though the Disney merger had already been announced, until it was completed, federal law prohibited Fox from making any organizational changes or making any business changes based on what the new owners would want. By law, they were required to act as if they weren't being bought. And in that environment, renewing the Orville to air on the Fox Network made sense.
But once the merger went through, Disney had ownership of the Fox studio, while the Fox Network remained with the Murdoch family. The Fox Network has indicated that it plans to move away from scripted programming in favor of live events and reality shows. Shows like The Orville no longer fit into their business model. Additionally, The Orville is an expensive and time consuming show to produce. Now, there is perhaps a reasonable argument to be made that a show like this could be made in a different fashion that cost less and was faster to produce, but that's not The Orville as we know it. While The Orville aired its first two seasons on the Fox network, the show has behaved since the beginning like a streaming or premium cable show, with short seasons and extended breaks between those seasons. It's not really a fit for where Fox is right now.
The Orville has already suffered declining ratings on Fox because this method of production and release is not conducive to ratings success on broadcast. And whether we like it or not, sci-fi programs like The Orville are always on the chopping block for network broadcast. Broadcast networks always want more viewers than what sci-fi programs typically attract, and advertisers typically want different demographics than what sci-fi brings in. So I suppose that could be considered greed, but it's not greed on behalf of the studio producing the show. It's just the reality of the broadcast landscape. That Fox let the show go so easily should be an indication of how unimportant it was to them.
I think the choice Disney faced, as the studio now producing the Orville, was to continue with the initial plan to air the show on Fox, where it wouldn't be a priority for the network, and where the realities of broadcast today would all but guarantee that it would sink. Or, they could have done what they did, which was to move it to a platform where it had a greater chance of success. By being on Hulu, the metrics by which success is measured changes, and numbers that would have been considered "not good enough" on broadcast will be good enough on streaming.
So the problem isn't so much that it went from broadcast to streaming, but that it went to a different streaming service than the one you'd prefer?
This demonstrates the point I was making in the first place - the biggest hurdle that content producers face today isn't in getting people interested in that content, but getting people to pay for it.
