I am not the biggest fan of the direction that the entertainment industry is going… especially with all of the new streaming services producing their own content. I personally liked Netflix better before they started producing so much of their own content. When they were more in the business of sharing movies and tv shows from all over the industry that have for the most part proven they are worth watching… know what I mean? It is hard to match that structure making your own content, because it implies that almost everything you are going to make is going to be a hit… which the more it has become 50/50 or less anymore in a lot of ways, we lose interests in taking the gamble. Which most of the things they even promote are their own stuff… you have to search harder now for movies that have proven their worth. I can see a future now with all of these streaming services when they all have their one hit wonders and one month we pay for this service, then switch to a different service the next month to watch theirs… etc… unless you can afford the ever-increasing house payment of entertainment it is becoming.
We also lose a shared cultural experience when everything is so spread out… I don’t want to go back to just 13 channels on television, but it was nice in a way that the country could enjoy an experience all together. Everybody could talk about it; everybody watched it or probably knew enough to carry on a conversation about it. People want that… part of why it is so depressing everything is getting so spread out and expensive and hard to keep up with. We want those shared cultural experiences and to be a part of them.
I actually think we should all just agree to a price we are going to pay to one service, say Netflix, and say this is what you get to work with. Then let the industry figure out how to best manage it… go back a bit to the way it used to be. Then there would also be a shared cultural experience streaming service, we could all easily share and talk about the same movies and things like that, with variety of course… I am not opposed to the streaming and still be able to sign up for some dvd’s in the mail or whatever… which we could probably eventually even do the dvd’s in the mail digitally… maybe… like have the digital content but have a limit with how many of the “special” movies you can watch in a month or something like that… might be better for the environment as well.
Sometimes I wonder if we could ever work something out for new releases in theatres for people to be able to watch from home as well?… so many people just want to be a part of the conversation ya know? Might have social anxiety or something, fear of movie theatres, too expensive to go… The entertainment industry hasn’t quite come to terms with acknowledging how powerful of a force that is (Fear of missing out) and how it contributes to pirating…
I am against pirating, but I understand it at times… We should be able to develop better ways that make people not want to pirate… People (especially low-income people) look at the industry and the way things are run and don’t find it morally wrong to pirate… I guess I am saying that it would seem apparent that the entertainment industry hasn’t developed a system that makes pirating clearly morally wrong, yet prosecutes people that way… there is a lot of grey area… It should be a goal, to develop a system that does that…
Might need to start trying out some experiments and theories… try some trial and error using new methods of supplying entertainment… Especially in the modern era when we can track data so fast, it shouldn’t be too costly to play around with new methods and be able to adjust pretty fast as you go along. I think there are better ways to do it for both the consumer and the industry…
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