Well folks, this is one of the last “Streaming Saturday” articles for 2022, and it’s my opportunity to talk about the future. The next year should be interesting when it comes to streaming. It seems like the “gold rush era,” when streaming apps were cheap and full of top-quality content, is over. The companies behind those apps aren’t just living on hopes and dreams anymore. The alarm has sounded, and they have to start showing real profits or they won’t make it.
That uncomfortable message has made things a lot worse for the consumer this past year, no question about it. Consumers really benefited from low prices and lots of high-quality shows in the ’10s and early ’20s. The bean counters, led by David Zaslav of Discovery, have decreed that a change must be made. And so it has been. This leads me to my big hope for next year, and it’s not necessarily what you think it is.
I hope that content from the 20th century doesn’t disappear.
That’s right, I said it. Right now, it’s getting harder and harder to find movies and TV shows from the 20th century. If it doesn’t have appeal to today’s viewers, it’s getting awfully hard to find. Excellent films like The Sting, On the Waterfront, The Lion in Winter, and Bonnie and Clyde are hard if not impossible to find on streaming apps now. A lot of really good shows like Moonlighting never made it to streaming at all. I’m a little worried that today’s viewers won’t have the opportunity to be exposed to significant content like this.
And to be very honest, I don’t understand why. I’m sure some of it has to do with royalty payments to the actors and filmmakers, but it’s got to be fairly cheap to keep a copy of an old film on your servers. Why wouldn’t you just do it? Is it because today’s executives think old movies make their service look old?
There are a few apps out there like TCM and Britbox that keep older content alive. But it seems that most of that stuff is disappearing from mainstream apps. Sometimes you can still rent these films if you’re into paying for them. But with so much new content, will today’s viewers choose to pay? I don’t think so.
Is it copyright law again?
Occasionally I rail about how copyright law in this country is just ridiculous and needs to be reformed. In a lot of cases, copyrighted material like movies and TV shows stays protected for 90 years from the original date of issue. That’s so long that the original people involved are long since gone. It’s just an intellectual property grab for whatever company owns the copyright.
It means that films like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, A Hard Day’s Night, and The Deer Hunter will be copyrighted long after I’m dead and gone. That’s a shame because these films are a real critical part of understanding who we are as a culture. They should be free to everyone. I personally believe that most forms of copyright should expire after 30 years. Thirty years is enough time to make your money back, without a doubt. And that would mean meaningful films like Platoon and Do the Right Thing would be free for everyone to see. Libraries could stream them free of charge.
There will be a solution, but I don’t know what it will be.
It seemed for a couple of years that staples of mid-20th century TV would never be seen again. Whether you saw them live on their first showing or daily on UHF TV after school, you might have fondness for The Monkees, My Three Sons, or Gilligan’s Island. Those shows, along with a trove of old game shows, have made their way to subchannels and advertiser-supported streamers like Pluto TV. That’s a good solution for content that was advertiser-supported to begin with.
But, watching a classic film with commercials every 10 minutes isn’t a good experience. Trust me, I’ve tried it. There will have to be a better way for people who want to watch films from the late 20th and early 21st centuries to get their fix. Maybe Netflix will have a “classic” app you can pay $7 a month for. Maybe there will be a next-generation TCM-like app dedicated to preserving culturally significant films from that era. Yes, it makes me feel old to think that the movies I loved as a young person are now “classics” but there you are.
Someone will see the opportunity. I hope it happens in 2023. It’s getting harder and harder to find the films I actually want to watch. I’ll pay a fair price to see them, since I do understand there are costs involved. I just hope it’s even possible.
