DIS Shareholders and Stock Info ONLY

[clarker99]

Disney Capital Expenditure Trends


Parks CapEx breakdown

 

[Elijah Abrams]

They mentioned plans to by late this year. It will probably wind up being done once they own all of Hulu, and they’ll start to fully integrate the services. Bob mentioned that during the earnings call in May.

It seems to me Iger's plan is more or less to buy Hulu to shut it down/merge it with Disney+.

I would be quite shocked if they shut down Hulu or the name. The brand is strong and allows Disney to showcase more adult friendly content under a different banner.

Internationally, the app is already all-in-one. They showcase the more adult content and the non-Disney content under the 'Star' banner.
View attachment 797448

Iger be mad to close down a great service like Hulu! I don't think Comcast would want that when they and Disney discuss on the streamer's future.

 

[wabbott]

https://deadline.com/2023/09/tv-business-changes-writers-strike-impact-1235553886/#comments

TV Business Faces Further Contraction As Marketplace Reopens: “The Bubble Has Burst”
By Nellie Andreeva
Co-Editor-in-Chief, TV
September 27, 2023 1:03pm PDT

After 148 days of a WGA strike that ground production to a halt and put tens of thousands out of work, everyone in Hollywood has a reason to celebrate this week after the guild and the studios reached a tentative agreement Sunday night and the strike came to an end this morning. The WGA leadership, which approved the deal yesterday and sent it to the membership for a vote, has called “exceptional” the agreement, which includes AI guardrails, viewership-based residuals, writers room minimums, pay raises and other major gains.

Strikers, who spent months on the picket lines to protect the future of writing as a profession, have been sharing their joy on social media, telling each other excitedly, “Let’s go back to work.”

For those working in television, however it is not clear what kind of business and marketplace they will be going back to. It likely won’t be what they left five months ago.

Accelerated contraction, more competition, reeled-in budgets, fewer overall deals and possibly more cancellations are some of the things industry sources are preparing for. One thing they are not anticipating: a flood of spec scripts.

It’s another testament to how high the stakes were for writers this time, and how much they rose to the occasion.

One representative recalled writers’ attitude in 2007-2008 as “while I’m waiting for the strike to be over, I need to be prepared,” resulting in a slew of spec scripts written during the work stoppage that hit the networks right after.

Not this time.

“Everyone had good intentions to take time and write but not a lot of people did,” another rep said. “People were busy, they took picket lines seriously and were there every day.”

It wasn’t just the daily physical presence at the pickets. “They were invested in the strike and their emotional focus was there,” the first person said.

As a result, “there likely won’t be as many spec scripts as people anticipated at the start,” the second person added.

The observation was corroborated by writer David H. Steinberg. In an emotional message posted on X on Monday, he shares the anxiety created by the end of the strike and the routine of daily picketing — an experience he found “incredibly uplifting” because of the “wonderful solidarity” — as he readjusts to a daily routine of writing.

“I’ve talked to many writers and I think most of them did not write a ‘strike spec’,” he said in the post. “But we still feel like there’s going to be a ton of material flooding the market and a buying frenzy in the immediate aftermath of a strike.”

Indeed, there are a ton of projects ready to go out when networks and streamers reopen for business (though buyers do not expect the type of frenzy we have seen over the last decade). Many pitches had been held back from last winter and early spring amid a “terrible” market as buyers battened down the hatches in anticipation of a potential strike.

“No one is buying. This is the worst marketplace that I have ever experienced,” a veteran studio executive lamented to Deadline back in April.

The big question is, how receptive the marketplace will be post-strike.

“Across the board, what I have heard from buyers is they will be buying less and making less,” one seller said.

Back in April, there were already indications that the reasons for the dramatic industry slowdown were deeper and went far beyond strike preparation.

“A potential strike forces everyone to go on pause at the same time but they all needed to reframe and pivot as they have so much that is not working,” one insider told Deadline at the time.

Said a major buyer last week, “The strike just sped up the inevitable pullback; I suspect everybody will be doing less.”

In an appearance at the Code Conference today, Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content, said that the strike won’t change the type of shows they are planning to order but did call this an “existential” moment for the industry.

“There’s a lot changing and shifting. We’re coming out of a [Covid] bubble that we’re still dealing with the fallout from. It’s an uncertain time, it’s a scary time.”

Cancellations and Unrenewals

During the strike, there were a handful of renewals and a slew of cancellations as networks and streamers reevaluated their slates. That is continuing.

The first major programming news to come out after the WGA-AMPTP tentative agreement was reached was about four cancellations at Starz: of sophomore series Heels, Run the World and Blindspotting as well as the upcoming The Venery of Samantha Bird, whose production was paused in May due to the WGA strike with two episodes left to film.

There have been several cancellations of shows that had previously been greenlighted — like Showtime’s Gattaca and Seasoned and Apple/NBCU’s Metropolis — or renewed, like Prime Video’s The Peripheral and A League of their Own and Peacock’s Pitch Perfect: Bumper In Berlin — all headed into their second seasons.

We may not have seen the last of that either.

“There will definitely be more rescinded renewals,” one industry insider said last week.

That will likely extend to the broadcast networks as they examine their needs for the rest of the season in light of how deep into the fall the strike went.

“On the broadcast networks, if second or third seasons were ordered before the strike, it doesn’t mean will stay ordered after the strike.” (Deadline previously examined why shows early in their run are the most vulnerable for renewal reversals.)

Development Cuts & 2024 Pilot Season

Networks’ and streamers’ development slates also underwent close examination during the strike, and industry sources expect portions of them to be released, especially projects that were in early stages.

“There will be clearing the decks on a lot of stuff,” one source said. Buyers “have reevaluated how much they want to do and areas they want to go. That has changed.”

While the current broadcast season has been massively impacted by the strike, with just a couple of new and returning scripted series on the fall schedule, the 2024 pilot season can still be salvaged.

Normally, buying is almost complete by this time of year, but according to sources, networks are expected to be aggressive, buying new pitches along with some development rolled over from before the strike. Of course, even without the strike, broadcast pilot season over the past few years has diminished to a fraction of the volume we had a decade ago as networks’ parent companies have pulled back financially among declining linear ratings.

Series Budget & Deal Roster Trims

Show budgets by and large also are expected to be smaller even at places that have been generous, with an industry insider estimating that broadcast dramas would cost on average $4.5 million-$5 million per episode, and about half of that for comedy.

Even streamers, which have been shelling $20 million-plus an episode for series like Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Stranger Things, House of the Dragon and some Marvel/Star Wars shows, would be looking to keep budgets at about $5M-$10M an episode, the insider said.

The “streaming gold rush” that led to an overall deal boom a couple of years ago is officially over. While there were no term deal terminations during the WGA strike, a number of pacts expired during the work stoppage and won’t be renewed, I hear. Studios have the option to “suspend and extend,” adding the length of the strike-related suspension at the end of overall or first-look deals’ term. For a number of writers and producers, that won’t happen, with only high-profile talent tied to big shows getting extensions, observers expect.

The overall deal market is expected to get even tighter with streamers and studios not only looking how strong writer-producers’ existing show(s) are but also what stafe of their lifecycle the series are in to decide whether to sign another overall deal or just a pact for writer-producer’s services if a show might be nearing the end of its run, I hear.
Overall deals will be “only for people they absolutely have to be in business with,” an industry insider said.

Pendulum Swing Or Bubble Burst?

A pullback after a lengthy strike is not a surprise — “Honestly, I don’t think studios will be buying anything for a little while,” Steinberg wrote in his Twitter message Monday morning.

But as writers have to compete for fewer staffing hobs available amid show cancellations, fewer script buys and fewer term deals, the question is how long the pullback will last.

While some think that the pendulum would swing and TV volume would bounce back, a number of top industry people believe the strike-influenced 2023 dip would not be an anomaly like the Covid-related drop in 2020.

Some of the losses are permanent: Over the past year, a broadcast network, the CW, went from 12 homegrown scripted series employing WGA writers to three — all of them producing shorter seasons.

Reporting a new all-time high of 599 scripted series in 2022, FX’s John Landgraf in January suggested that 2022 marked the peak of Peak TV, predicting a decline in 2023 months before the strike.

“We are not going back to 599 scripted shows, ever,” a top TV executive said recently.

Added a veteran rep, “The bubble seems to have burst.”

 

[wabbott]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2023/09/27/future-of-television-peak-prestige-tv/
TV is dead! Long live TV?
Television’s boom may be over, but its experimental energy persists. Here’s a look at TV’s next wave.

Perspective by Lili Loofbourow - TV critic
September 27, 2023 at 2:01 p.m. EDT

This is a uniquely confusing moment in the history of the small screen.

The Hollywood strikes haven’t just been negotiating what the next contract (or the fall TV season) is going to look like. They’re part of an existential fight over what television’s next iteration will be.

The battle is being fought against the backdrop of two seismic shifts: the much-discussed decline of prestige television and the beginning of the end of television’s disruption by streaming services. The former has arguably been underway for years, while the latter exploded into full view in recent months, as streamers panicked over profitability and the deluge of new content dried up. Together, they are poised to radically alter the television landscape.

That landscape has already, of course, been altered. If prestige shows such as “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” expanded our understanding of what the medium was capable of, streamers spent the last decade supercharging the industry’s experimental streak. The antihero dramas were followed by a wave of great, quirky shows that were freed from the constraints of appealing to mainstream audiences. This proliferation of boutique TV wasn’t limited to streaming — HBO and FX were major innovators, too — but was driven by disrupters greenlighting weird, exciting ad-free content in a race to acquire new subscribers. It was a TV gold rush, and one broadcast television struggled to keep up with.

That was Peak TV — a term first coined by FX’s John Landgraf in 2015 to describe a problem: too many TV shows. That was back when 400 or so scripted shows aired in a year. Last year, which is likely to be the literal peak of television production, there were 599.

Now television’s boom cycle has gone bust and Peak TV is winding down, like prestige TV did before it. There are hints of what might come after. The contraction now in progress suggests (given the kinds of projects being canceled) that streamers are embracing more conservative, less experimental programming even as they look for the next “Game of Thrones.” There will probably be more revivals. More reboots. And, if some executives have their way, a heavier reliance on formulas and algorithms, perhaps assisted by new technologies like AI.

But the wild, weedy overgrowth of the Peak TV era is yielding fruit, too. Ambitious stuff, some so weird and convention-averse that it fails, some so ethically fraught that watching it work disturbs as much as it thrills. Antiheroes are over. So are dramedies. So, perhaps, are boundary-pushing comedy specials, which may have crested with Bo Burnham’s “Inside” and Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel.” But there’s still experimental energy, and it’s popping up through the cracks even as broadcast television languishes and streamers, panicked by losses, scramble to salvage pieces of the TV model they broke.

I think of this latest wave, emerging in the post-apocalyptic aftermath of the Great Television Disruption, as Post-TV.

Whereas Peak TV was epitomized by the dramedy — a poignant compromise of a genre, so nuanced it sometimes lapsed into tepid indeterminacy — Post-TV takes big, definitive swings. If Peak TV centered marginalized perspectives to explore how they coexist with and despite racism and misogyny, Post TV goes further, sometimes all but forgetting that a dominant culture exists. If Peak TV had winky, self-referential reality shows, Post-TV supercharges the frame and turns the camera on the creators.

With luck, television’s next era will retain something of the innovation made possible by this one. Without it, and if the worst tendencies animating the fight between the unions and the studios prevail, television might face a future shaped more by AI and ChatGPT than by the writers, actors, and creators who made TV seem capable of something like high art.

The great streaming explosion — and implosion

Peak TV quickly got co-opted, as so many useful terms are, to describe something slightly different: a stunning proliferation of great, idiosyncratic shows that got to exist because there was so much output. Thanks to the creative leeway many streamers offered, a lot of very beautiful series got made, among them “Catastrophe,” “Transparent,” “Fleabag,” “The Leftovers,” “Reservation Dogs,” and “Atlanta.” For viewers, this was pretty amazing: No ads, cheap subscriptions, endless offerings on demand, many of them good to great. An enormous range of aesthetic sensibilities were suddenly being catered to. There was a sense of creative and consumer plenty — the same sense that’s not-so-gradually slipping away.

Streaming services have spent the past decade trying to persuade consumers to abandon cable and broadcast television — to become cord-cutters — on the understanding that they’d revolutionized the model and were committed, in the long term, to offering better, more ambitious fare for a lower cost. Now it looks as though they might instead embrace a counterintuitive but predictable retrogression. Their victory over broadcast television now near-complete, many seem poised to turn streaming into a less pleasant user experience that replicates some of the more annoying aspects of cable and broadcast TV — complete with ads, fewer choices, rising prices, and increasingly bland offerings pitched to a theoretical mainstream audience.

In 2022, it was reported that streaming, which had for years been nipping at the heels of broadcast television and cable, finally drew a higher viewership share than both, in the same month, for the first time. Yet Netflix lost more subscribers than it signed on last year, also a first, which precipitated an industry-wide panic compounded by streaming losses at Paramount, Disney, and NBCUniversal (amounting to more than $8.3 billion). These losses weren’t exactly new; Disney’s streaming service had lost $630 million just the year before. What changed was the Wall Street consensus on how tolerable those losses were and why they were happening.

The pivot was abrupt. Orders for new shows plummeted. Cancellations of existing series soared. Deals with established creators fell through. There were layoffs. The market for new shows dried up and a scarcity mind-set materialized overnight in an industry that has, for more than a decade, been buying like crazy and handing out deals right and left.

Jeremy Strong in the series finale of HBO's “Succession.” The show is widely cited as “prestige television’s” last gasp. (HBO)

‘Succession’ and the end of prestige TV

Under the circumstances, it seems only right that “Succession,” the drama about ultrarich siblings squabbling for control of their dad’s media empire, ended just before the strike began. The show is widely cited as “prestige television’s” last gasp.

There was a belatedness to “Succession” that made its reception strangely nostalgic. It felt like a product from a slightly earlier time, and you could almost hear people missing — in advance — the feeling of talking about a show like this. The nostalgia wasn’t just for good television with snappy dialogue; it was for the kind of deeply engaged TV chatter that used to be everywhere. Each episode of “Succession” was received as an event at a moment when it was becoming clear that occasions of this sort would be rare going forward.

The way we used to talk about TV, in person and online, was a Golden Age unto itself. It was moving to see folks processing art and pleasure and plot, jointly and sociably developing something like a collective critical apparatus. And to see television changing in response — talking back to its fans and critics, sometimes directly. Fans will always exist, but most of the forums for that kind of dedicated, obsessive TV talk (including Twitter and the AV Club) have decayed, almost past recognition, if they’re even still around. An entire invisible apparatus that enabled the ascent of television to something like art (or at least film) is collapsing.

“Succession’s” audience was relatively small. But facing extinction, too, are the Big Shows, such as “Game of Thrones.” Puny though these audiences were compared with the sitcoms of the past, they felt like juggernauts. The sense of occasion they provided had value even if the shows sometimes didn’t. We live in a time when any given person’s reality is significantly shaped by the inputs their personalized algorithms serve up, and although the Big Shows certainly couldn’t get Americans to agree on what’s real, there was some comfort in knowing that a big slice of the country could companionably occupy a shared unreality, at least for the space of an episode.

Studios have spent fortunes on would-be Big Shows, but no comparable phenomenon has surfaced. We do, admittedly, still have “House of the Dragon,” the “Game of Thrones” prequel, which did great numbers. But there’s something just a little … unhealthy about that, isn’t there? Not just derivative, but symptomatic of an enormous archive of properties built to feed off established fan bases. I’d cheekily call this “Zombie TV” if there weren’t six spinoffs of “The Walking Dead” in the works. (Along with three “Dexter” spinoffs, four “Yellowstone” offshoots, and four variants on “Billions.”)

Some genuinely great stuff has come out of this trend. “Better Call Saul” was as good as “Breaking Bad” and “Andor” was superior to almost everything in the Star Wars universe. If “Velma” crashed and burned as a wearisomely self-referential spinoff of “Scooby-Doo,” “Wednesday” more than made up for it by becoming one of Netflix’s most-watched shows this year.

Yet the sheer abundance of recyclings and revivals seems to signal a downturn. “The Conners” is heading into its sixth season on ABC, “And Just Like That …” just got renewed for a third, “Night Court” and “That 90s Show” for a second, while “Weeds” and “Nurse Jackie” prepare to come back. The TV landscape feels like it’s haunted by TV ghosts. Timothy Olyphant resurrected Raylan Givens this year in “Justified: City Primeval,” and this fall will mark the return of “Frasier,” 30 years after that spinoff — among the most successful in television history — first premiered. If that’s not nostalgic enough, it’ll be set back in Boston, and the first two episodes will be directed by James Burrows, who co-created “Cheers.”

Kathy Bates might be fantastic in the new “Matlock.” I’m hopeful her undeniable greatness will be transformative. But let’s face it: A lot of this year’s original scripted television has been pleasant and predictable, a return to tried-and-true formulas. “Poker Face” is no “Russian Doll.” It isn’t groundbreaking or transcendent. It isn’t even particularly ambitious, but it’s exactly what you’d want from Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne. “Hijack,” likewise, is an admirably predictable thriller that lets you relax into Idris Elba’s charisma. “The Night Agent” is a better show, but workmanlike: a straightforward political thriller from beginning to end. “The Diplomat” is fun in an algorithmically informed sort of way, more “The West Wing” than “The Americans,” with just a hint of the kind of romance I associate with period dramas.

These are all entertaining shows. They are also (sometimes pleasingly) formulaic.

The Post-TV era

Ambitious TV isn’t dead. If anything, its experiments are getting even more bold, pointed, self-referential. A subset of shows is emerging that runs on the kind of creative profligacy that defined these past few years in television but can also only exist in its wake.

A decade spent running hundreds of stories through a public addicted to discussing things online does things to consumers and creators. Audiences became incredibly sophisticated; “Westworld” fan forums, for example, correctly guessed the ending of the fabulous puzzle box of a first season, causing writers to disastrously redraft the show. A spiraling feedback loop between savvy viewers and producers doesn’t just stop, so a strange bifurcation is underway: even as streamers scurry back to tested formulas, there’s still a discernible avant-garde dedicated to going a little further than Peak TV ever did.

The Peak TV era burned through the burden of representation (usually a first-wave challenge), got past the attendant clichés and found something interesting and chewy on the other side. Much of it remained corrective in spirit, however; if a show’s protagonists belonged to a marginalized group, for example, there was a tendency to foreground the ways the oppressive dominant culture drove the conflict.

This new wave sources its conflicts differently; sometimes from entirely within a community, or a genre. I’m thinking of masterpieces like “Beef,” Lee Sung Jin’s stunning, hilarious, brutally specific exploration of a particular kind of Southern Californian, intra-Asian American rage that doesn’t find Whiteness (for example) interesting enough to define itself against. Or “Mrs. Davis,” a Pynchonesque adventure about the Holy Grail and motherhood, that has revolutionized my understanding of what television can do. (Damon Lindelof, one of the co-creators of Mrs. Davis, stands out as a formidable figure in television, one who has not just survived but shaped all the eras discussed here.)

Few such shows will be perfect, though those two come close. “Swarm,” Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s horror comedy for Prime Video, stars Dominique Fishback as a mild-mannered, hungry and totally ruthless devotee who literally slays on behalf of the singer she idolizes. As a broadside against fan culture, the series falls a little flat, but Fishback’s Dre is unforgettable: spectacularly awkward, believable, specific.

“Yellowjackets,” the show about a high school girls’ soccer team stranded after a plane crash, is notable for how carefully it excludes “the patriarchy” from its frame. In fact, the frame — which notoriously causes the protagonists to start eating their teammates — was chosen not just because it would facilitate the cannibal plot but because it would allow a story about conflict between very flawed women to exist without those distorting effects. “We didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world,” one of the showrunners, Ashley Lyle, told the New York Times Magazine.

A second, perhaps related epiphenomenon of Peak TV has been a crop of experimental, reality-distorting shows making interesting use of the conventions of reality TV. Simultaneously hampered and supercharged by self-knowledge, some of these shows have been extraordinary. They have wrecked expectations.

One example is “Jury Duty,” the finely calibrated, improvised breakout hit on Freevee that pranked a man by making him think he was a juror in an actual trial when everyone concerned, including the judge, was an actor. It became a massive hit on Tik Tok, where the target’s unflagging decency, despite all that was thrown at him, made him famous and beloved. The series also earned James Marsden an Emmy nomination for playing a vacuous version of himself.

“Jury Duty” forms part of an ethically fraught but addictive emerging genre — “semi-reality TV,” maybe? — that suggests audiences might be ready for reality TV to get, oh, prestigious. Interested in questions of authorship. Absorbed in the thorny problem of its own production. The genre includes Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” on HBO, which began as a reality show in which Fielder offered people needlessly accurate replicas of real-life situations so they could rehearse difficult situations in advance, and became something much stranger. It also includes Jason Woliner’s “Paul T. Goldman,” a Peacock meta-documentary based on a deluded man’s self-published memoir about the end of his marriage that exposes his hubris and gullibility, even as he directs humiliating reenactments of his life. These shows usually end up breaking the fourth wall to include their actual creators, often in unflattering ways. They flirt with control and indict and enhance the television definition of “reality."

Streaming after the flood

The story of emergent microgenres is important. But the bigger story, the one that could fundamentally transform the industry, is the sort of existential war in progress over whether programming in the future will remain a human concern, with actors and writers, or become mostly (or indeed purely) algorithmic.

That’s an extreme formulation. But long before they started panicking over profits, studios were doing body scans of extras so as to have their digital likenesses and using available technology to “resurrect” deceased actors. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are happening in a climate where content producers desperate to cut costs are quite likely to explore how much they can rely on new technologies like AI and ChatGPT instead of (for example) writers.

We could, at least in theory, go from Peak TV, a moment known for the free rein it gave creatives, to one in which algorithms effectively supplant them.
For now, at least, the creators are fighting back, and not just on the picket lines. And if Post-TV describes shows still pursuing bold experiments in a climate that doesn’t particularly encourage them, some older properties might make the cut, too. “Black Mirror,” for instance, a Netflix show that peaked back when streamers were on the rise, returned this year with an aggressive revision of its usual brand. Several episodes replaced its trademark nightmarish technofuturism with pure, supernatural horror.
But the tech dystopias weren’t entirely absent: In the first episode of its most recent season, “Black Mirror” made the villain a Netflix stand-in armed with a powerful, identity-stealing algorithm. That episode, “Joan Is Awful,” is a fun bit of human pluck.
But it feels a little like an entry in the annals of “semi-reality TV” that Netflix allowed it.

 

[Elijah Abrams]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2023/09/27/future-of-television-peak-prestige-tv/
TV is dead! Long live TV?
Television’s boom may be over, but its experimental energy persists. Here’s a look at TV’s next wave.

Perspective by Lili Loofbourow - TV critic
September 27, 2023 at 2:01 p.m. EDT

This is a uniquely confusing moment in the history of the small screen.

The Hollywood strikes haven’t just been negotiating what the next contract (or the fall TV season) is going to look like. They’re part of an existential fight over what television’s next iteration will be.

The battle is being fought against the backdrop of two seismic shifts: the much-discussed decline of prestige television and the beginning of the end of television’s disruption by streaming services. The former has arguably been underway for years, while the latter exploded into full view in recent months, as streamers panicked over profitability and the deluge of new content dried up. Together, they are poised to radically alter the television landscape.

That landscape has already, of course, been altered. If prestige shows such as “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” expanded our understanding of what the medium was capable of, streamers spent the last decade supercharging the industry’s experimental streak. The antihero dramas were followed by a wave of great, quirky shows that were freed from the constraints of appealing to mainstream audiences. This proliferation of boutique TV wasn’t limited to streaming — HBO and FX were major innovators, too — but was driven by disrupters greenlighting weird, exciting ad-free content in a race to acquire new subscribers. It was a TV gold rush, and one broadcast television struggled to keep up with.

That was Peak TV — a term first coined by FX’s John Landgraf in 2015 to describe a problem: too many TV shows. That was back when 400 or so scripted shows aired in a year. Last year, which is likely to be the literal peak of television production, there were 599.

Now television’s boom cycle has gone bust and Peak TV is winding down, like prestige TV did before it. There are hints of what might come after. The contraction now in progress suggests (given the kinds of projects being canceled) that streamers are embracing more conservative, less experimental programming even as they look for the next “Game of Thrones.” There will probably be more revivals. More reboots. And, if some executives have their way, a heavier reliance on formulas and algorithms, perhaps assisted by new technologies like AI.

But the wild, weedy overgrowth of the Peak TV era is yielding fruit, too. Ambitious stuff, some so weird and convention-averse that it fails, some so ethically fraught that watching it work disturbs as much as it thrills. Antiheroes are over. So are dramedies. So, perhaps, are boundary-pushing comedy specials, which may have crested with Bo Burnham’s “Inside” and Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel.” But there’s still experimental energy, and it’s popping up through the cracks even as broadcast television languishes and streamers, panicked by losses, scramble to salvage pieces of the TV model they broke.

I think of this latest wave, emerging in the post-apocalyptic aftermath of the Great Television Disruption, as Post-TV.

Whereas Peak TV was epitomized by the dramedy — a poignant compromise of a genre, so nuanced it sometimes lapsed into tepid indeterminacy — Post-TV takes big, definitive swings. If Peak TV centered marginalized perspectives to explore how they coexist with and despite racism and misogyny, Post TV goes further, sometimes all but forgetting that a dominant culture exists. If Peak TV had winky, self-referential reality shows, Post-TV supercharges the frame and turns the camera on the creators.

With luck, television’s next era will retain something of the innovation made possible by this one. Without it, and if the worst tendencies animating the fight between the unions and the studios prevail, television might face a future shaped more by AI and ChatGPT than by the writers, actors, and creators who made TV seem capable of something like high art.

The great streaming explosion — and implosion

Peak TV quickly got co-opted, as so many useful terms are, to describe something slightly different: a stunning proliferation of great, idiosyncratic shows that got to exist because there was so much output. Thanks to the creative leeway many streamers offered, a lot of very beautiful series got made, among them “Catastrophe,” “Transparent,” “Fleabag,” “The Leftovers,” “Reservation Dogs,” and “Atlanta.” For viewers, this was pretty amazing: No ads, cheap subscriptions, endless offerings on demand, many of them good to great. An enormous range of aesthetic sensibilities were suddenly being catered to. There was a sense of creative and consumer plenty — the same sense that’s not-so-gradually slipping away.

Streaming services have spent the past decade trying to persuade consumers to abandon cable and broadcast television — to become cord-cutters — on the understanding that they’d revolutionized the model and were committed, in the long term, to offering better, more ambitious fare for a lower cost. Now it looks as though they might instead embrace a counterintuitive but predictable retrogression. Their victory over broadcast television now near-complete, many seem poised to turn streaming into a less pleasant user experience that replicates some of the more annoying aspects of cable and broadcast TV — complete with ads, fewer choices, rising prices, and increasingly bland offerings pitched to a theoretical mainstream audience.

In 2022, it was reported that streaming, which had for years been nipping at the heels of broadcast television and cable, finally drew a higher viewership share than both, in the same month, for the first time. Yet Netflix lost more subscribers than it signed on last year, also a first, which precipitated an industry-wide panic compounded by streaming losses at Paramount, Disney, and NBCUniversal (amounting to more than $8.3 billion). These losses weren’t exactly new; Disney’s streaming service had lost $630 million just the year before. What changed was the Wall Street consensus on how tolerable those losses were and why they were happening.

The pivot was abrupt. Orders for new shows plummeted. Cancellations of existing series soared. Deals with established creators fell through. There were layoffs. The market for new shows dried up and a scarcity mind-set materialized overnight in an industry that has, for more than a decade, been buying like crazy and handing out deals right and left.

Jeremy Strong in the series finale of HBO's “Succession.” The show is widely cited as “prestige television’s” last gasp. (HBO)

‘Succession’ and the end of prestige TV

Under the circumstances, it seems only right that “Succession,” the drama about ultrarich siblings squabbling for control of their dad’s media empire, ended just before the strike began. The show is widely cited as “prestige television’s” last gasp.

There was a belatedness to “Succession” that made its reception strangely nostalgic. It felt like a product from a slightly earlier time, and you could almost hear people missing — in advance — the feeling of talking about a show like this. The nostalgia wasn’t just for good television with snappy dialogue; it was for the kind of deeply engaged TV chatter that used to be everywhere. Each episode of “Succession” was received as an event at a moment when it was becoming clear that occasions of this sort would be rare going forward.

The way we used to talk about TV, in person and online, was a Golden Age unto itself. It was moving to see folks processing art and pleasure and plot, jointly and sociably developing something like a collective critical apparatus. And to see television changing in response — talking back to its fans and critics, sometimes directly. Fans will always exist, but most of the forums for that kind of dedicated, obsessive TV talk (including Twitter and the AV Club) have decayed, almost past recognition, if they’re even still around. An entire invisible apparatus that enabled the ascent of television to something like art (or at least film) is collapsing.

“Succession’s” audience was relatively small. But facing extinction, too, are the Big Shows, such as “Game of Thrones.” Puny though these audiences were compared with the sitcoms of the past, they felt like juggernauts. The sense of occasion they provided had value even if the shows sometimes didn’t. We live in a time when any given person’s reality is significantly shaped by the inputs their personalized algorithms serve up, and although the Big Shows certainly couldn’t get Americans to agree on what’s real, there was some comfort in knowing that a big slice of the country could companionably occupy a shared unreality, at least for the space of an episode.

Studios have spent fortunes on would-be Big Shows, but no comparable phenomenon has surfaced. We do, admittedly, still have “House of the Dragon,” the “Game of Thrones” prequel, which did great numbers. But there’s something just a little … unhealthy about that, isn’t there? Not just derivative, but symptomatic of an enormous archive of properties built to feed off established fan bases. I’d cheekily call this “Zombie TV” if there weren’t six spinoffs of “The Walking Dead” in the works. (Along with three “Dexter” spinoffs, four “Yellowstone” offshoots, and four variants on “Billions.”)

Some genuinely great stuff has come out of this trend. “Better Call Saul” was as good as “Breaking Bad” and “Andor” was superior to almost everything in the Star Wars universe. If “Velma” crashed and burned as a wearisomely self-referential spinoff of “Scooby-Doo,” “Wednesday” more than made up for it by becoming one of Netflix’s most-watched shows this year.

Yet the sheer abundance of recyclings and revivals seems to signal a downturn. “The Conners” is heading into its sixth season on ABC, “And Just Like That …” just got renewed for a third, “Night Court” and “That 90s Show” for a second, while “Weeds” and “Nurse Jackie” prepare to come back. The TV landscape feels like it’s haunted by TV ghosts. Timothy Olyphant resurrected Raylan Givens this year in “Justified: City Primeval,” and this fall will mark the return of “Frasier,” 30 years after that spinoff — among the most successful in television history — first premiered. If that’s not nostalgic enough, it’ll be set back in Boston, and the first two episodes will be directed by James Burrows, who co-created “Cheers.”

Kathy Bates might be fantastic in the new “Matlock.” I’m hopeful her undeniable greatness will be transformative. But let’s face it: A lot of this year’s original scripted television has been pleasant and predictable, a return to tried-and-true formulas. “Poker Face” is no “Russian Doll.” It isn’t groundbreaking or transcendent. It isn’t even particularly ambitious, but it’s exactly what you’d want from Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne. “Hijack,” likewise, is an admirably predictable thriller that lets you relax into Idris Elba’s charisma. “The Night Agent” is a better show, but workmanlike: a straightforward political thriller from beginning to end. “The Diplomat” is fun in an algorithmically informed sort of way, more “The West Wing” than “The Americans,” with just a hint of the kind of romance I associate with period dramas.

These are all entertaining shows. They are also (sometimes pleasingly) formulaic.

The Post-TV era

Ambitious TV isn’t dead. If anything, its experiments are getting even more bold, pointed, self-referential. A subset of shows is emerging that runs on the kind of creative profligacy that defined these past few years in television but can also only exist in its wake.

A decade spent running hundreds of stories through a public addicted to discussing things online does things to consumers and creators. Audiences became incredibly sophisticated; “Westworld” fan forums, for example, correctly guessed the ending of the fabulous puzzle box of a first season, causing writers to disastrously redraft the show. A spiraling feedback loop between savvy viewers and producers doesn’t just stop, so a strange bifurcation is underway: even as streamers scurry back to tested formulas, there’s still a discernible avant-garde dedicated to going a little further than Peak TV ever did.

The Peak TV era burned through the burden of representation (usually a first-wave challenge), got past the attendant clichés and found something interesting and chewy on the other side. Much of it remained corrective in spirit, however; if a show’s protagonists belonged to a marginalized group, for example, there was a tendency to foreground the ways the oppressive dominant culture drove the conflict.

This new wave sources its conflicts differently; sometimes from entirely within a community, or a genre. I’m thinking of masterpieces like “Beef,” Lee Sung Jin’s stunning, hilarious, brutally specific exploration of a particular kind of Southern Californian, intra-Asian American rage that doesn’t find Whiteness (for example) interesting enough to define itself against. Or “Mrs. Davis,” a Pynchonesque adventure about the Holy Grail and motherhood, that has revolutionized my understanding of what television can do. (Damon Lindelof, one of the co-creators of Mrs. Davis, stands out as a formidable figure in television, one who has not just survived but shaped all the eras discussed here.)

Few such shows will be perfect, though those two come close. “Swarm,” Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s horror comedy for Prime Video, stars Dominique Fishback as a mild-mannered, hungry and totally ruthless devotee who literally slays on behalf of the singer she idolizes. As a broadside against fan culture, the series falls a little flat, but Fishback’s Dre is unforgettable: spectacularly awkward, believable, specific.

“Yellowjackets,” the show about a high school girls’ soccer team stranded after a plane crash, is notable for how carefully it excludes “the patriarchy” from its frame. In fact, the frame — which notoriously causes the protagonists to start eating their teammates — was chosen not just because it would facilitate the cannibal plot but because it would allow a story about conflict between very flawed women to exist without those distorting effects. “We didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world,” one of the showrunners, Ashley Lyle, told the New York Times Magazine.

A second, perhaps related epiphenomenon of Peak TV has been a crop of experimental, reality-distorting shows making interesting use of the conventions of reality TV. Simultaneously hampered and supercharged by self-knowledge, some of these shows have been extraordinary. They have wrecked expectations.

One example is “Jury Duty,” the finely calibrated, improvised breakout hit on Freevee that pranked a man by making him think he was a juror in an actual trial when everyone concerned, including the judge, was an actor. It became a massive hit on Tik Tok, where the target’s unflagging decency, despite all that was thrown at him, made him famous and beloved. The series also earned James Marsden an Emmy nomination for playing a vacuous version of himself.

“Jury Duty” forms part of an ethically fraught but addictive emerging genre — “semi-reality TV,” maybe? — that suggests audiences might be ready for reality TV to get, oh, prestigious. Interested in questions of authorship. Absorbed in the thorny problem of its own production. The genre includes Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” on HBO, which began as a reality show in which Fielder offered people needlessly accurate replicas of real-life situations so they could rehearse difficult situations in advance, and became something much stranger. It also includes Jason Woliner’s “Paul T. Goldman,” a Peacock meta-documentary based on a deluded man’s self-published memoir about the end of his marriage that exposes his hubris and gullibility, even as he directs humiliating reenactments of his life. These shows usually end up breaking the fourth wall to include their actual creators, often in unflattering ways. They flirt with control and indict and enhance the television definition of “reality."

Streaming after the flood

The story of emergent microgenres is important. But the bigger story, the one that could fundamentally transform the industry, is the sort of existential war in progress over whether programming in the future will remain a human concern, with actors and writers, or become mostly (or indeed purely) algorithmic.

That’s an extreme formulation. But long before they started panicking over profits, studios were doing body scans of extras so as to have their digital likenesses and using available technology to “resurrect” deceased actors. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are happening in a climate where content producers desperate to cut costs are quite likely to explore how much they can rely on new technologies like AI and ChatGPT instead of (for example) writers.

We could, at least in theory, go from Peak TV, a moment known for the free rein it gave creatives, to one in which algorithms effectively supplant them.
For now, at least, the creators are fighting back, and not just on the picket lines. And if Post-TV describes shows still pursuing bold experiments in a climate that doesn’t particularly encourage them, some older properties might make the cut, too. “Black Mirror,” for instance, a Netflix show that peaked back when streamers were on the rise, returned this year with an aggressive revision of its usual brand. Several episodes replaced its trademark nightmarish technofuturism with pure, supernatural horror.
But the tech dystopias weren’t entirely absent: In the first episode of its most recent season, “Black Mirror” made the villain a Netflix stand-in armed with a powerful, identity-stealing algorithm. That episode, “Joan Is Awful,” is a fun bit of human pluck.
But it feels a little like an entry in the annals of “semi-reality TV” that Netflix allowed it.

This guy making useless observations here. Streaming IS television.

 

[wabbott]

This guy making useless observations here. Streaming IS television.

Must be a former attorney. Uses three words when one will do.

 

[wabbott]

https://www.thewrap.com/screen-engine-furloughs-nrg-marketcast-layoffs/
Layoffs, Furloughs Hit Hollywood Data and Research Firms | Exclusive

National Research Group, MarketCast and Screen Engine cut jobs amid hardship caused by strikes and slowing streaming market

Scott Mendelson
October 2, 2023 @ 6:15 AM PDT

Three of the leading Hollywood data and analysis companies have downsized due to the industry strikes, TheWrap has learned. National Research Group and MarketCast instituted layoffs while Screen Engine has undergone furloughs.

A representative for MarketCast told TheWrap they had laid off 12 people in recent weeks. NRG laid off about 30 people of 303 employees, according to two individuals with knowledge of the company. Screen Engine furloughed about a dozen employees, the company told TheWrap.

All three companies specialize in data-driven analysis and research that benefits media and entertainment companies, conducting test screenings, pre-release research and marketing analysis. With the reduction in streaming shows and with feature film production shut down, executives said that there was less work and that they needed to cut costs.

Screen Engine CEO Robert Levin told TheWrap that temporary employee reductions were the result of the summer’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

“We executed some furloughs in relation to the impact on revenues regarding the strike,” Levin stated. “Where we sit, it’s going to be a while until we see production back to pre-strike levels.”

An executive with knowledge of the company said Screen Engine was taking a proactive approach, planning for an anticipated lag in production.

Levin declined to comment on the number of employees impacted. However, he expressed hope that once the industry was back on its feet, the impacted employees would be brought back to work.

A representative for MarketCast told TheWrap that their layoffs mostly impacted operations or back-office staff, resulting in 12 employees being let go amid a company of around 600 people.

“As part of our planned digital transformation and investments in new technology, MarketCast made reductions to our operations staffing along with a small number of researchers, some of whom were impacted by the strikes in Hollywood,” the spokesman said. “While we never take reductions to staffing lightly, these measures were necessary to continue to evolve the business and meet the needs of our clients.”

Two individuals told TheWrap that NRG made significant cutbacks. NRG didn’t respond to TheWrap’s multiple requests for comments.

“NRG scaled up really fast because of streaming work and then the streamers contracted quite a bit,” a high-level studio executive with knowledge told TheWrap. “MarketCast is only really profitable in the film space.”

The WGA strike came to an end on Tuesday, with hopes running high that the SAG-AFTRA strike will soon conclude.

TheWrap previously reported on an overall decline in the number of streaming feature films on the major platforms. Every company with skin in the game has been under pressure to reign in spending and cut costs.

The firms that specialize in market research in and around the entertainment industry could face a status quo where there are fewer mainstream theatrical films and fewer big-deal streaming films and shows that require the kind of analysis provided by these companies.

 

[RivShore]

Couple random thoughts for these slow news days -

I usually watch Squawk Box on CNBC most mornings and late last week, Becky Quick was complaining about not being able to use her DVC points almost a year in advance and saying Iger needs to start paying attention to his most loyal customers. Becky, are you on here? LOL

Given it looks like they are holding on to ESPN, good to see that they are finally trying to create some synergies with the D+ Toy Story NFL game, I could only handle watching a few minutes of it but nice to see some experimentation going on again.

 

[HokieRaven5]

Couple random thoughts for these slow news days -

I usually watch Squawk Box on CNBC most mornings and late last week, Becky Quick was complaining about not being able to use her DVC points almost a year in advance and saying Iger needs to start paying attention to his most loyal customers. Becky, are you on here? LOL

Given it looks like they are holding on to ESPN, good to see that they are finally trying to create some synergies with the D+ Toy Story NFL game, I could only handle watching a few minutes of it but nice to see some experimentation going on again.

They did something in March too with an NHL game between the Capitals and Rangers that was themed to Big City Greens that aired on The Disney Channel, Disney XD, ESPN+ and D+.

 

[RivShore]

They did something in March too with an NHL game between the Capitals and Rangers that was themed to Big City Greens that aired on The Disney Channel, Disney XD, ESPN+ and D+.

Hmm, I never noticed the promos for that one.

 

[HokieRaven5]

The Walt Disney Company Executives To Discuss Fiscal Full Year And Fourth Quarter 2023 Financial Results Via Webcast

The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) will discuss fiscal full year and fourth quarter 2023 financial results via a live audio webcast beginning at 4:30 p.m. ET / 1:30 p.m. PT on Wednesday, November 8, 2023.

Results will be released after the close of regular trading on November 8, 2023.

 

[wabbott]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/business/media/elemental-pixar-box-office.html

‘Elemental’ Morphs From Flop to Hit, Raising Questions Along the Way
The Pixar film struggled at the box office initially. It has now made $500 million, but not before prompting the studio to re-examine its release strategy.

By Brooks Barnes - Reporting from Los Angeles
Oct. 3, 2023 - Updated 11:21 a.m. EDT

The headlines were murderous.

Pixar, once unable to do no wrong in the eyes of film critics and ticket buyers, had misfired so immensely at the box office that its future as a cultural force was in doubt. Pixar’s creative spark had apparently blown out — poof.
“Elemental,” the movie in question, has since made those insta-obituaries look rather foolish.

An opposites-attract love story and parable about following your dreams, “Elemental” arrived to $29.6 million in domestic ticket sales in June — the worst opening in Pixar history, by a mile. Little by little, however, the $200 million film became a hit, collecting nearly $500 million worldwide. For the year to date, “Elemental” ranks No. 9 on the list of top-grossing films, ahead of Marvel’s latest “Ant-Man” sequel.

Moreover, “Elemental” has provided the Walt Disney Company, which owns Pixar, with one of the biggest streaming hits in its history. The movie arrived on Disney+ on Sept. 13 and had garnered 60 million views through Sunday, far surpassing results for Disney films like “The Little Mermaid” and “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3” for the same periods of availability, according to the company.

“I had no idea what ‘Elemental’ was about, but we decided to watch it as a family because I kept hearing good things,” said Rahela Nayebzadah, who lives in suburban Vancouver, Canada, and has two sons, ages 7 and 4. “The kids have been watching it nonstop ever since.”

Disney also expects to sell about 800,000 “Elemental” DVDs worldwide. About 1.7 million people will buy a digital copy through iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and other online stores.

Predictably, Pixar executives are doing cartwheels. But the “Elemental” turnaround does not vanquish questions about the studio as much as raise new ones.


In a postpandemic, streaming-oriented movie marketplace, is the box office ceiling for original animated films simply lower? Pixar originals used to reliably take in more than $500 million worldwide — sometimes a lot more, including “Coco,” which collected $1 billion in 2017, after adjusting for inflation, and “Inside Out,” which sold an inflation-adjusted $1.1 billion in 2015.

And if that is the case — if Disney+ has eaten into Pixar’s theatrical audience — will Pixar need to spend substantially less? “Elemental” cost roughly $200 million to make, not including marketing. To compare, NBCUniversal’s competing Illumination Animation spent half as much to make its most-recent original movie, “Sing,” in 2016.

Pixar will know more in March, when it releases “Elio,” an original comedic adventure about an 11-year-old boy who gets inadvertently beamed into space and mistaken as Earth’s galactic ambassador. (Pixar’s sibling studio, Walt Disney Animation, will also provide clues later this year, when its “Wish,” an original musical, arrives in theaters.)

“I hope we can continue to be able to have budgets that allow our artists to do the best work of their lives,” Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, said in a Zoom interview. Hollywood as a whole needs to adjust its business models for the streaming era, he noted.

Pixar and Disney have spent a lot of time trying to understand the chilly initial response to “Elemental,” Mr. Docter said. For a start, he said, Disney had undercut Pixar as a big-screen force by using its films to build the Disney+ streaming service. Starting in late 2020, Disney debuted three Pixar films in a row online, bypassing theaters altogether. Those films were “Soul,” “Turning Red” and “Luca.”

“There has been an overall shift in viewing habits as a result of the pandemic, but it’s also specific to Disney+,” Mr. Docter said. “We’ve told people, ‘Hey, all of this is going to be available to you on Disney+!’”

Although not saying so directly, Mr. Docter also indicated that Pixar had perhaps drifted too far from its storytelling roots.

In recent years, Pixar has allowed filmmakers like Peter Sohn, who made “Elemental,” to explore stories that are more personal. (Mr. Sohn’s immigrant parents inspired his film.) Yet many of Pixar’s biggest original successes, including “Toy Story” in 1995 and “Monsters, Inc.” in 2001, have grown from more universal concepts — “ideas that we all carried around as kids,” as Mr. Docter put it.

What if my toys come to life when I leave the room? What if there are monsters in my closet?

“I always felt that ‘Elemental’ would speak to a lot of people, and I’m so happy it has,” said Mr. Doctor, whose credits as a director include “Inside Out,” “Up” and “Monsters, Inc.” “But we have also taken another look at the projects we’re working on now. What are the kinds of films we want to be making? I really think I want to double down on what allowed us to speak to audiences to begin with.”

 

[fatmanatee]

“There has been an overall shift in viewing habits as a result of the pandemic, but it’s also specific to Disney+,” Mr. Docter said. “We’ve told people, ‘Hey, all of this is going to be available to you on Disney+!’”

Well... yeah.

 

[RivShore]

“There has been an overall shift in viewing habits as a result of the pandemic, but it’s also specific to Disney+,” Mr. Docter said. “We’ve told people, ‘Hey, all of this is going to be available to you on Disney+!’”

Although not saying so directly, Mr. Docter also indicated that Pixar had perhaps drifted too far from its storytelling roots.

Pixar's new superhero - Captain Obvious!

 

[RivShore]

“But we have also taken another look at the projects we’re working on now. What are the kinds of films we want to be making? I really think I want to double down on what allowed us to speak to audiences to begin with.”

There does seem to be an effort to get back to basics across the company, that can only help.

 

[wabbott]

There does seem to be an effort to get back to basics across the company, that can only help.

Probably about as close to a mea culpa as we'll hear from management.

 

[wabbott]

https://variety.com/vip/why-disney-...d=48&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

Why Disney Should Preserve the Hulu Brand at All Costs
Tyler Aquilina
October 3, 2023 6:00am PDT

Official talks over the future of Hulu have only just begun, but the streaming service’s fate has effectively been sealed for months. As Disney and Comcast negotiate the terms of the Mouse House’s full acquisition of Hulu (in which the cable giant still owns a one-third stake), the only real question marks are how much it will cost Disney and what the studio will do with Hulu once the sale is finalized.

Even that last question already has a partial answer: In May, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced a “one-app experience” integrating Hulu content into Disney+ would launch in the U.S. by year’s end.

Disney isn’t sunsetting Hulu just yet — Iger clarified that the service will continue to exist as a “standalone option” — but it’s hard not to see the single-app development as the first step toward Disney+ subsuming Hulu. After all, the latter SVOD has never operated outside the U.S., and Disney+’s family-friendly content is presented side by side with more adult-oriented fare in other markets. Once Disney fully owns Hulu, why should the U.S. be any different?

But Disney may want to think twice before doing away with Hulu as a brand, even if it eventually kills off the standalone app. The Hulu label offers strategic assets Disney sorely needs at this juncture of the streaming wars — and, potentially, a major advantage over the Mouse House’s competitors.

Let’s start with the obvious: Hulu generates nearly twice the average revenue per user of Disney+ (excluding the Disney+ Hotstar product serving India), thanks to its robust advertising business. As a result, Hulu’s balance sheet looks much neater than that of Disney+: The former service was actually profitable for fiscal year 2021 and broke even in 2022, per a MoffettNathanson analysis.

With Disney+ now offering an ad-supported tier, the plan is likely to grow the service into the Mouse House’s top ad-revenue generator. But this won’t happen overnight, and not for nothing, keeping the Hulu label alive would allow for marketing partnerships that won’t fly on family-friendly Disney+.

Secondly, Iger may not like it but Disney is in desperate need of Hulu’s “general entertainment” content machine. Setting aside Marvel and “Star Wars” shows, nearly every hit series on a Disney-owned SVOD has come from Hulu, most notably “Only Murders in the Building,” FX’s “The Bear” and the soon-to-conclude “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Meanwhile, nearly all of Disney+’s attempts at more generalized fare have fallen flat. And though the recent success of “Ahsoka” shows there’s still content to be mined from the “Star Wars” galaxy, even Iger recognizes that both of Disney’s flagship franchises have become oversaturated, and he confirmed earlier this year that the company will “pull back” on its output.

As this pullback plays out, along with the broader contraction in SVOD content, Hulu could arguably become more valuable as a subscriber retention tool. Disney will need lower-cost, “general entertainment” titles to help hold onto users in between high-profile franchise plays, especially if such blockbuster series will be fewer and farther between.

Hulu’s usefulness in this arena is already evident. The SVOD consistently tops Disney+ in Nielsen’s monthly reports on streaming service usage, nearly doubling the latter’s share of streaming viewing time each month.

This is attributable both to Hulu’s hit originals and to its library content, another valuable tool for retaining subscribers. While the service’s non-Disney-owned titles will likely dwindle once the Mouse House fully acquires it, its supply of popular shows from 20th Television (“How I Met Your Mother,” “Futurama,” “Modern Family”) will no doubt keep usage afloat.

One might argue that Disney could simply shift these titles to Disney+ and viewers would likely follow, with no skin off the company’s proverbial nose. But there is one additional factor at play here: consumers’ perception of the value they’re getting for their money.

As I argued in VIP+’s “Streaming Service Bundles” special report earlier this year, Hulu is a major component in the value proposition of the Disney Bundle, the company’s most efficient streaming product. The package of Disney+, Hulu and (optionally) ESPN+ consistently records the lowest monthly churn rate among the major SVODs tracked by analytics firm Antenna, with less than half the turnover of Hulu alone.

Take away Hulu from this equation, and the bundle’s value proposition makes much less sense. It would therefore behoove Disney to keep the brand alive as a component of the bundle, even if it fully integrates the service into Disney+. (It would be easy enough to surcharge users to access Hulu content on the Disney+ app; this dynamic already exists for Hulu and ESPN+.)

Lastly, Hulu is a unique beast in the streaming menagerie, thanks to its origins as a joint venture by the major studios. It’s the only SVOD to offer a virtual MVPD, Hulu + Live TV, and the only SVOD that also functions as a streaming aggregator. Currently, users can still add à la carte, full-price subscriptions to Showtime, Cinemax, Starz and HBO/Max through their Hulu accounts and view live or on-demand content from these networks on the Hulu app.

It's unclear whether this practice will be able to continue once Disney becomes Hulu’s sole owner, as the company’s rivals may well not want it hawking their services (and taking a cut of subscription fees).

But with streamers now trying to boost revenues by any means necessary, the additional reach offered by Hulu may simply be too advantageous to pass up. If this holds true, Disney would be the sole traditional media company able to compete in the streaming aggregation game, the realm of Big Tech, telcos and cable providers.

That’s a big if, to be sure. But either way, it should be clear that Hulu offers numerous strategic advantages Disney will not want to forego. It’s a valuable brand, and one that will likely be worth what Disney ultimately has to pay for it.

 

[RivShore]

Not sure I've seen this posted - the year of the union continues...

https://seekingalpha.com/news/40178...disney-pictures-vote-in-favor-of-unionization

Visual effects workers at Walt Disney Pictures vote in favor of unionization​

Oct. 03, 2023 2:17 PM EThttps://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DIS...on_asset:meta|first_level_url:news|symbol:DIS

In-house visual effects (VFX) workers at Walt Disney Pictures (NYSE:DIS) have unanimously voted in favor of unionizing in an election held by the National Labor Relations Board, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) said on Tuesday.

The announcement comes just weeks after VFX workers at Disney's (DIS) Marvel Studios also voted in favor of unionization, which IATSE said had been a first since the advent of visual effects nearly 50 years ago.

"Today's unanimous victory shows that VFX workers everywhere have a clear path to winning a meaningful say about their working conditions and quality of life. We'll be continuing our work to win a great contract, but we need to bring every studio and vendor in line to bring those union standards to all VFX workers," Mark Patch, VFX organizer for IATSE, said in a statement.

Hollywood writers last week ended a nearly 150-day strike after the Writers Guild of America inked a new contract with major studios. The actors strike is now in day 81, with the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists to continue negotiations on Wednesday.

The unionizing DIS VFX workers are asking for "fair compensation for all hours worked, adequate health care, retirement benefits, and more generally, the same rights and protections afforded to their unionized coworkers who are already represented by IATSE," the union said in Tuesday's statement.

The latest action by Disney (DIS) VFX workers is another brick in the wall in 2023's "summer of strikes." The year has seen an unusual amount of labor union activity, from unionizations to the most significant of them - an ongoing strike by the United Auto Workers against the "Detroit Three" carmakers.

Las Vegas hospitality workers have also voted to strike against hotels and casinos, while casinos in the Detroit, Mich.-area could also be facing a potential labor walkout. Meanwhile, thousands of healthcare workers are also planning a strike against employer Kaiser Permanente.

According to its website, IATSE is a labor union that represents over 168K technicians, artisans and craftspersons in the entertainment industry, including live events, motion picture and television production, broadcast, and trade shows in the U.S. and Canada.

 

[wabbott]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/com...e-prices-after-actors-strike-ends/ar-AA1hD5QP​

Netflix Plans to Raise Prices After Actors Strike Ends​

Story by Jessica Toonkel, Sarah Krouse
10/3/2023

Netflix plans to raise the price of its ad-free service a few months after the continuing Hollywood actors strike ends, the latest in a series of recent price increases by the country’s largest streaming platforms.

The streaming service is discussing raising prices in several markets globally, but will likely begin with the U.S. and Canada, according to people familiar with the matter. It couldn’t be learned how much Netflix will raise prices by or when exactly the new prices will take effect. Netflix declined to comment.

Over the past year or so, the cost of major ad-free streaming services has gone up by about 25%, as entertainment companies look to bring their streaming platforms to profitability and lead price-conscious customers to switch to their cheaper and more-lucrative ad-supported plans.

On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery said the monthly price of the ad-free version of its Discovery+ streaming service was rising to $8.99 from $6.99, while the cost of its ad-supported platform remains unchanged at $4.99 a month.

Streamers are also starting to look at how they can create new pricing tiers around exclusive programming, such as live sports, without running the risk of driving people away from their core offerings.

Disney is discussing launching a new live-sports tier of Disney+ in markets outside of the U.S., according to people familiar with the situation. Last month, Warner Bros. Discovery said it would soon add live sports to its Max streaming service that will eventually cost interested subscribers an additional $9.99 a month.

Apple is selling Major League Soccer’s MLS Season Pass for $12.99 a month to people who subscribe to its $6.99-a-month Apple TV+ streaming platform, and $14.99 a month to those who don’t. The recent move of soccer superstar Lionel Messi to Inter Miami helped drive a surge in U.S. subscriptions to Apple TV+, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Netflix, which stands out from its peers by running a profitable streaming business, has been the lone major streaming company not to raise prices over the past year—focusing instead on boosting revenue by cracking down on password sharing. Its latest price increase came in January of 2022.

The company plans to wait until the dual Hollywood writer and actor strikes end before increasing prices. The Writers Guild of America announced a tentative agreement with studios last week and the Screen Actors Guild, which went on strike in July, restarted negotiations with Hollywood studios this week.

Writers won major concessions in the deal, including new bonus payouts and higher royalties. The streamers will have to find a way to pay increased talent costs—from the writers’ settlement, along with an earlier deal with directors and whatever is finalized with actors.

In July, Netflix stopped offering its basic $9.99-a-month ad-free tier in the U.S., which had the effect of significantly expanding the price gap between its $15.49 standard ad-free plan and its $6.99 ad-supported tier, which it launched in November of 2022.

Next week, the prices of the ad-free versions of Disney’s streaming platforms—Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+—are officially going up, an increase the company announced during the summer. It marks the second time since last fall that Disney raised prices, following a string of similar announcements by the owners of Peacock, Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+.

The recent wave of price increases comes after entertainment companies lost billions of dollars as they spent big on content while charging bargain-basement prices for their services in pursuit of fast growth.

Boosting the cost of ad-free streaming platforms is also making their ad-supported alternatives more appealing: When Disney’s latest price increases go into effect on Oct. 12, the advertising-supported versions of Disney+ and Hulu will be $6 and $10 cheaper, respectively, than their ad-free counterparts.

“We’re obviously trying with our pricing strategy to migrate more subs to the advertiser-supported tier,” Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said in August during a call with investors to discuss the company’s quarterly results.

Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said the ad-supported versions of their streaming platforms generate more money per user than their ad-free counterparts, as the advertising revenue more than offsets the lower subscription cost.

Amazon also is adding a new pricing tier for its Prime Video service. Starting next year, the company will include ads in its Prime Video offering and charge U.S. subscribers $2.99 more for an ad-free tier.

Over the past year, Netflix has taken other measures to get more money from people watching its service. It began asking households to pay a new monthly fee to share an account with people who don’t live with them, and booted freeloaders in the hopes that they would pay for a new account. Netflix executives said the move was, in effect, a price increase.

 

[Elijah Abrams]

The Walt Disney Company Executives To Discuss Fiscal Full Year And Fourth Quarter 2023 Financial Results Via Webcast

The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) will discuss fiscal full year and fourth quarter 2023 financial results via a live audio webcast beginning at 4:30 p.m. ET / 1:30 p.m. PT on Wednesday, November 8, 2023.

Results will be released after the close of regular trading on November 8, 2023.

Prediction: The results won't be good, and they will admit they are in a pickle.