It is official. I have reached the end of the internet. At least the end of the streaming part of it.
It hasn’t been a great summer for streaming, at least not in my opinion. Why? The answer is pretty clear, it seems to me. For a couple of years we had stuff moving to streaming instead of going into movie theaters. It’s great that movie theaters are back. Certainly, it’s the greater good. But, it’s meant a serious dip in streaming content. It’s temporary, but it’s no fun.
The perfect storm
When streaming started to become common, I hoped that this “seasonality myth” would go away. I believe that people like to watch TV all year. Not only that, more and more folks are living in southern climes where the winter is nice and comfortable and the summer’s when you stay indoors. I had hoped this would lead to some big changes. Hopefully, I thought, the big names in TV would realize all this and start putting out high quality content year-round instead of feeding us nothing in the summer. I was wrong… and it seems like the titans of streaming love to rub my nose in it. There just isn’t as much good content in the summer. Sure there’s some but is there enough? No.
Add to that the return of movie theaters. I’ve already said that’s a good thing. But it’s been a big disruption to the streaming pipeline. Because movies are heading to theaters first, we’re waiting 4-5 months more to see them in streaming. That’s meant a fairly long pause when there just isn’t as much content coming to streaming. And let’s be honest, that’s where we are at the moment. This part will fix itself when timeframes align themselves again, and it won’t be a problem. But for now, it is.
The third part of the streaming hat trick is intentional. Folks like Discovery’s Zaslav have decided to slow the timeframe that’s had movies going to streaming. It’s been getting pretty common for a film to hit streaming between 2 and 3 months after its initial theatrical release. In the case of HBO, we were pretty used to seeing new stuff 45 days after they hit theaters. Those days are over, and in some cases it’s now taking 6 months or more. That’s going to create a flat spot on the calendar that probably won’t resolve until next year.
Which is how we find ourselves here
I don’t know about you, but I’m finding myself more drawn to antenna TV than ever. I’ll go to the Pluto app as well, in reality there’s a lot of the same content. With all these “high quality” choices, in the end I retreat to watching reruns when there’s nothing that really captivates me on streaming. They may not be as emotionally challenging, but is that really so terrible?
I think we’re all hoping that the fall TV season, whether it be for streaming or traditional pay-TV, is a darn sight better than the summer. Could it be much worse?
