People who make addictive social media apps and bureaucratic enterprise software love to glorify their work by lumping it in with vaccines, clean drinking water, and global food distribution in order to claim some of the halo of those obviously beneficial technologies (though claiming “fire and rock tools” is taking that to a hilarious new extreme). I hate to break it to you but you don’t work on any of those things. You work on selling people ads and making it easier for their boss to fire them. That tech is neutral at best relative to these problems you’re claiming and often destructive — ask people in Myanmar about how social media has affected war and violence, for example. Digital technology hasn’t had a demonstrably positive impact on worker productivity let alone mortality, hunger, or war. Start being honest with yourself that working in tech is a lot more like selling carbonated sugar water or making reality TV shows than it is like saving the world.
Can’t wait for the AI-generated “botshit” (to borrow Cory Doctorow’s term) to start killing of social media sites. You can see from the decline of Twitter (and Facebook amongst anyone under the age of 40) how weak some of their hold on their users already is. Hopefully AI’s big “contribution” to tech of empowering spammers will be the thing that pushes them the rest of the way into their much deserved grave.
Another obvious cause I don’t see anyone mentioning: tech simply created a lot less value in the last decade than in any previous decade. Pretty much every one of the big hyped up technologies that was going to be the future of everything turned out to be a bust: IoT, drones, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and on and on. Even the ones that got some traction like ride sharing really were just castles of smoke floated on giant clouds of dumb middle eastern and Asian venture capital money looking for a greater fool. Most of the changes in web development tech have made software slower and more bureaucratic to make in order to support large FAANG-style software orgs.
There was absolutely nothing remotely on the scale of the smartphone, social media, the web, the personal computer, etc from previous decades in terms of actually creating real value for users.
The genius of the web was its focus on documents: GET, POST, UPDATE, DELETE. Authoring and sharing text and images and video is essential to human knowledge and the web’s big contribution to the world was creating a fairly simple, universally understandable format for people to read and publish documents. The idea of the separation of information from presentation (and putting presentation in the control of the user-agent) was genius and lead to some of the biggest forms of innovation built on top of the web like RSS and podcasting. The gradual evolution of the web away from a hyperlinked network of documents towards being a thin frame into which we deliver complex software applications mostly destroyed so much of this value. It’s convenient for engineers but often deeply hostile to users and has lead to a systematic disregard for what was unique and special about the web. How easy do you find it to discover interesting or useful information created by actual people nowadays vs, say, 2007? Web engineers have largely destroyed one of the great human information technologies in order to make it easier to ship software. Good job everyone.
The write off is based on the cost of creating the show. I think the article is wrong/sloppily phrased in its line about the value of the company. If they remove a show then it will never generate any future revenue so they can write the cost of producing it off as a loss.
The real scandal here is how little viewership streaming shows get and how little revenue they generate off of that viewership. Particularly for how expensive these shows are.
I wrote a couple of comments elsewhere in the thread about some specifics and consequences. But the takeaway is that the last decade+ of super expensive “prestige” shows on streaming has been a huge bubble that isn’t supported by the underlying revenue generated by the shows. In 2022 Netflix spent $16 billion on producing shows [https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/netflix-content-spendi...] to generate shockingly few viewing hours (which is why they will never agree to WGA demands to release viewership numbers in order to pay writers residuals; their stock would go to 0 if those numbers ever became public). The future of streaming is ad-supported cheaply produced reality TV, ie exactly what niche cable looked like in 2008.
"In 2022 Netflix spent $16 billion on producing shows [https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/netflix-content-spendi...] to generate shockingly few viewing hours (which is why they will never agree to WGA demands to release viewership numbers in order to pay writers residuals"
So, Netflix declines to release viewing numbers but you somehow know they're insufficient to their bottom line to support their spend?
> (which is why they will never agree to WGA demands to release viewership numbers in order to pay writers residuals; their stock would go to 0 if those numbers ever became public)
I wonder what percentage of streaming hours on Netflix is toddler and preschool shows like CoComelon?
I really have wondered who convinced them the strikes were a good idea. It's clear the streaming content bubble has popped. It was a revenue windfall for everyone involved save investors (Disney's stock has lost nearly a decade of gains.)
The AI stuff is a wildcard on top of everything. The worst case scenario for the WGA and SGA is that the more successful they are with their getting their demands, the less likely there will be anything resembling North America's film/tv industry left within 5 years.
> The write off is based on the cost of creating the show. I think the article is wrong/sloppily phrased in its line about the value of the company. If they remove a show then it will never generate any future revenue so they can write the cost of producing it off as a loss.
Yeah, I was going off the article's statement that it was about reducing value of assets. Makes more sense if write-offs are included as well.
> why they will never agree to WGA demands to release viewership numbers in order to pay writers residuals; their stock would go to 0 if those numbers ever became public
Well, they're not going to have any WGA shows either any time soon, and maybe the WGA will start advocating for an investor lawsuit on this basis?
Why is it the bean counters need to perfectly pair the cost of show A with views of show A? And then cheaper B to B? There’s a synergy in having the whole platform.
Your advice would be telling Apple to ditch the $10 headphone dongle because it has a low ROI, and they should be using the factory to crank out more iphones…
That's not the exercise. The exercise is "make it if and only if it will generate more revenue than it costs[1]". That doesn't have to be because people watch it. A prestige show (Succession, say) can bring people to a platform where they end up watching something less demanding (Friends, say). Even if nobody watches the prestige show, therefore, it can still be worth it. That makes it hard to know what is profitable.
Is there any sort of time limit for writing off the production costs?
I guess it makes some sense when you scrap a project completely and take a loss in exchange for a write-off, but some of these shows have been available for years.
I think the article phrased it sloppily. I think what’s happening is that the studios write off the cost of the production as a loss and they can only do that if they don’t have them available to stream where they could in theory generate revenue in the future. The phrase about “the company’s value” is just sloppy/mistaken here.
The reason it makes sense for the studios to remove these shows for the minimal benefit represented by a lowered tax burden is that the shows generate shockingly little viewership let alone revenue. The mechanism for the relationship between those things is pretty fuzzy in a subscription-based world in the first place, Did a single viewer signup for Netflix or decide not to cancel their subscription because of The Irishman, for example? That movie cost Netflix something upwards of $160 million. It made $8 million in its theatrical release. Is there any world where the remaining cost was made up for by new or retained streaming customers? I highly doubt it.
This is why the whole streaming industry is moving to ad-supported and low cost reality content. And why the services are fighting the WGA demands to release streaming viewership numbers as part of paying writers residuals. It’s not the cost of the residuals. It’s the numbers. If streaming viewership numbers were public Netflix stock would go to 0 the next day.
They explain that the benefit to the companies is the tax write off. The part they don’t explain is how little money shows like these generate that they’re worth less than the potential write off. The big semi-open secret in streaming right now is that viewership is a lot lower than people think and much less correlated with show “quality” (where by “quality” here I mean production cost). This is why the whole industry is introducing ad-supported tiers. Look for that to be paired with shows that are radically cheaper to make and payout less to talent in residuals, ie. reality TV. The last decade of streaming has been a big bubble. The economics are fundamentally unchanged from 2008 basic cable so as these services try to actually become profitable expect the content to look a lot more like Toddlers And Tiaras than Westworld and expect to watch a lot more ads.
The thing is people learn and if streaming sucks they will just stop watching all together eventually. the algorithms probably don't predict that kind of behavior.
The streaming boom was what, the last decade? Whenever Netflix started spending on House of Cards? Billions spent on prestige TV shows to acquire market share and they all have seemingly no cultural relevance at all. None will be remembered or cherished 10+ years from now I think. Pretty insane.
even the ones that did have cultural relevance (like game of thrones or house of cards) have been pretty well "culturally liquidated" at this point. ain't nobody going back for a rewatch of game of thrones, or at least not past about season 5.
it's funny, a couple years before the show was finished (during the first time when they stalled out for a year) my sister gave me a box set of the blu-rays, at first I was a little bummed because I'd inevitably end up with a couple mismatched DVDs/not in the box set, but it turns out that stallout was also the point where the show started imploding.
I like to joke that after she gave me the set they never finished the show, haha what are the odds!? /s
My guess is that it's only going to get worse as each streaming service builds up their exclusive library.
As prices and interest rates go up, people will become more concerned about getting value for their money. Having 5 different streaming services will be an increasingly difficult sell.
> "viewership is a lot lower than people think and much less correlated with show quality"
That doesn't surprise me. Many are probably just turning on the TV due old habits, and keep it on in the background while staring at their phones.
I switched from software development consulting to being a game designer at a large studio. I still use my programming skills part of the time to prototype and build content but there’s a lot more variety day-to-day especially as I’ve gotten to be more senior: writing design documents, working with producers on the game’s business strategy, working with artists and ux designers, managing and mentoring, etc. The biggest difference is that I care about what we’re making in itself. Trying to make a game fun for people is a much more rewarding creative challenge than “get people to click on ads” or “make the website scale”. When I was a software consultant I thought I could find motivation in the pure craft of code. But as soon as I got into games I realized that can’t hold a candle to making a product where you feel creatively invested in the end result.
Game companies that do “boxed product” releases (eg. giant games that come out on a date announced up to years in advanced that make their money from up front purchases) certainly can be. My company makes Games as a Service games which makes things much less stressful. We ship the game every two weeks so if a feature isn’t ready it just ships two weeks later. The result can be (with the right team culture a much healthier working environment. I’ve had better work-life balance and more time to allocate to skills growth (both my own and to support that of my reports) here than I ever did in traditional tech.
Bitcoin is not especially anonymous. Researchers have demonstrated techniques for de-anonymizing users through transactions: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/596.pdf
