Movies: the next media and music?

Very, very insightful piece from Stratechery about the future of the movie industry in the middle of the SAG/AFTRA strike. (I'm a one-movie-a-year person, at that, myself, pre-COVID; if it wasn't Tom Hanks, I almost certainly wasn't there.)

The two nut grafs are at end:

The broader issue is that the video industry finally seems to be facing what happened to the print and music industry before them: the Internet comes bearing gifts like infinite capacity and free distribution, but those gifts are a poisoned chalice for industries predicated on scarcity. When anyone could publish text, most text-based businesses went from massive profitability to terminal decline; when anyone could distribute music the music industry could only be saved by tech companies like Spotify helping them sell convenience in place of plastic discs.

For the video industry the first step to survival must be to retreat to what they are good at — producing content that isn’t available anywhere else — and getting away from what they are not, i.e. running undifferentiated streaming services with massive direct costs and even larger opportunity ones. Talent, meanwhile, has to realize that they and the studios are not divided by this new paradigm, but jointly threatened: the Internet is bad news for content producers with outsized costs, and long-term sustainability will be that much harder to achieve if the focus is on increasing them.

I'd have to agree with them, and with the background premise of Disney trying to out-Netflix the actual Netflix being stupid.

I would add to Ben Thompson that, given some parallels being from the media industry and some from music, this is a partial double-barrelled "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" the movie biz faces. He's right that studios' stupidity over streaming isn't the problem for actors and writers, but yet it is. Newspaper publishers and music execs engaged in similar stupidity, too. And, unlike the music biz, you can't take movies on the road for live performances.

The other bottom line is this:

Every person on earth has only 168 hours in a week, during which time they are presumably sleeping and working. Those few remaining hours can now be filled by YouTube, or gaming, or podcasts, or reading this article; every single minute spent doing something other than consuming Hollywood content is a minute lost forever.

Other than me still not liking the word "content," I agree. And, I read enough and summarized it for you.

I only wonder if the studios have a shot at making a gaming franchise out of more and more movies.