Hollywood ... as in, the end of ....

But, at the same time, Netflix should reach 100 million paying subscribers by the end of the quarter and get close to grossing about $3B per quarter (last one was $2.6B). This full fiscal year, they're projected to gross $11B.
 
I was just in Rio, the first thing you see when you head to Copacabana Beach area is a full building sized billboard, no different than the ones on Sunset Blvd. that is advertising a Brazilian Netflix series that we don't get here. Thought that was interesting. The Brazilians who crewed for me all had Netflix.
 
DLD said:
It looks like the Netflix is having second thoughts about its big spending projects.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-rethinks-its-hollywood-ambitions-2017-04-17
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It's a funny business. There are the studios, and then there's everyone else. The studios have been around from pretty much the beginning, and since then, there have been endless numbers of pretenders to the throne - all boldly staking out their own claims as rival production machines, but stragely enough, nobody has succeded in displacing the studios for any length of time. Industry giants and insiders have tried it - from United Artists to SKG, and have failed. Outsiders Cannon Group, Carolco, endless others - never really outliving the founders. Remember the mini-majors? Bought out, some just gone and on it goes. The ones who do stay in, are ones who service a smaller or more specialized and focused part of the market (HBO, Lionsgate etc.). But nobody has usurped full service studios. At least so far. Now we have brash newcomers, Netflix, Amazon and interest from Silicon Valley. Will they be the ones to finally crack the code after more than a century? As Netflix is finding out, it's harder than it looks. And Netflix has just hired a Hollywood veteran. We'll see how that goes. Quite honestly, I wish them the best. Choices are good, growing the whole market is good, not just fighting for the same shrinking pie.
 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/spielberg-waxes-lyrical-joy-movie-theaters-070255792.html
... (cinema) purists upset by Spielberg's backing last year of Screening Room, a new at-home streaming movie service proposal that set some of the industry's most influential filmmakers at loggerheads over the future of cinema.

The proposed service, which has yet to sign any exhibitors or distributors, would include a $150 set-top box that streams new movies in homes the same day they are released in theaters.

Each movie would cost $50 and be available to watch for 48 hours with Screening Room, which counts Sean Parker -- the Napster cofounder and first president of Facebook -- as a major investor.

While Peter Jackson, Ron Howard and J.J. Abrams were in favor, those believing the proposal would hit theater revenues included filmmakers James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, as well as producer Jon Landau.
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(more or less the pertinent part of the article)
OldCorpse said:
It's a funny business. There are the studios, and then there's everyone else. The studios have been around from pretty much the beginning, and since then, there have been endless numbers of pretenders to the throne - all boldly staking out their own claims as rival production machines, but stragely enough, nobody has succeded in displacing the studios for any length of time. Industry giants and insiders have tried it - from United Artists to SKG, and have failed. Outsiders Cannon Group, Carolco, endless others - never really outliving the founders. Remember the mini-majors? Bought out, some just gone and on it goes. The ones who do stay in, are ones who service a smaller or more specialized and focused part of the market (HBO, Lionsgate etc.). But nobody has usurped full service studios. At least so far. Now we have brash newcomers, Netflix, Amazon and interest from Silicon Valley. Will they be the ones to finally crack the code after more than a century? As Netflix is finding out, it's harder than it looks. And Netflix has just hired a Hollywood veteran. We'll see how that goes. Quite honestly, I wish them the best. Choices are good, growing the whole market is good, not just fighting for the same shrinking pie.
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Cannon Films (Globus - Golan) actually had a great model for an independent - pre-sell the global rights and make that amount your film's budget. Anything that is grossed in the US is profit. That earned them tens of millions until they decided they were auteurs and wanted to make more prestigious films.

The outside investors (from the Gulf&Western at Paramount to pre-Panasonic Panasonic at Universal to Coca Cola's Columbia Pictures to Seagram at Universal) were all the same models with different executives in charge.

Netflix is a different bowl of wax entirely. And, whatever happens with it as a company, it's probably already defeated the old model.
 
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And, just like that, the WGA has authorized a strike. The contract expires May, 1 and they could walk out within a week.
 
Adapt or perish...... thought the same about the old timers who keep trompeting one lights superiority over another.

When you get caught up in your own dogma, you have lost the game, and the game doesn't care.

Also look at how former champions are suddenly making a lot of "this is how you make it!" video courses... that's not "sharing", that's defeat.

You have to adapt constantly and eat some camels, otherwise the next generation will take over even faster. That's just how the game is.
 
ESPN is rumored to be cutting 100 on/off air talents. Its subscribers base is down by approximately 2 million over the last couple of years due to cord-cutting. The combined ESPN/2/3/News fees are around $7/mo, so that's a pretty hefty chunk off the top for them. Some sports league (NFL) ratings have also been down from the previous years.
 
DLD said:
ESPN is rumored to be cutting 100 on/off air talents. Its subscribers base is down by approximately 2 million over the last couple of years due to cord-cutting. The combined ESPN/2/3/News fees are around $7/mo, so that's a pretty hefty chunk off the top for them. Some sports league (NFL) ratings have also been down from the previous years.
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Not a rumor...
 
puredrifting said:
I was just in Rio, the first thing you see when you head to Copacabana Beach area is a full building sized billboard, no different than the ones on Sunset Blvd. that is advertising a Brazilian Netflix series that we don't get here. Thought that was interesting. The Brazilians who crewed for me all had Netflix.
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Interesting to hear, thanks. I understand that the Netflix catalog in Brazil (and in other foreign countries) is significantly better than the US ones. Also, I don't believe that subscription TV (cable, satellite) made anywhere near the same levels of market penetration in Brazil as it has in the US (it started much later, and a larger portion of the population is poorer).

Do you recall what the series was? Netflix has released at least one of its Brazilian series in the US: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4922804/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
 
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The BRIC is a considerable market (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and some would add South Africa). All these countries that were third-world or second-world countries back when I was in school are quickly becoming first-world countries, with the disposable income to match.

If you make apps, movies, TV shows, cameras, handbags --- anything, really --- you now have a market 10 times bigger than you did in the 80s. Why is Hollywood still complaining about money being tight? Isn't the BRIC the whole reason we have such a plethora of mediocre, comic-book, please-the-most-people movies these days?

saopauloVEJA.jpg

São Paulo, Brazil
 
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BRIC, outside of C, is kind of tanking these days. Nonetheless, the point stands. Netflix is bidding to become the first global rather than Hollywood based studio. They'd still have to figure out though how to spread the costs better over their 100 million subscribers. In other words, if they do a show with the Brazilian talent - Xuxa galore! - how do they bring it into North America? Do they dub, subtitle, keep it native, etc.? Back in the 1970's, Pan European productions were fairly common. An English, a French, a West German and an Italian talent was featured prominently and entirely voiced over for the final audio mix. Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime may have to do likewise soon.
 
combatentropy said:
The BRIC is a considerable market (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and some would add South Africa). All these countries that were third-world or second-world countries back when I was in school are quickly becoming first-world countries, with the disposable income to match.

If you make apps, movies, TV shows, cameras, handbags --- anything, really --- you now have a market 10 times bigger than you did in the 80s. Why is Hollywood still complaining about money being tight? Isn't the BRIC the whole reason we have such a plethora of mediocre, comic-book, please-the-most-people movies these days?

View attachment 123078

São Paulo, Brazil
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I just spent two weeks in Brazil on a shoot. According to the guys in our crews, Brazil is a freaking mess. Not that they don't consume and produce entertainment, of course they do. But their entire government is so corrupt, there is so much social injustice, victimization, police shooting people all over the place (I witnessed three cops shoot a guy on a motorcyle less than 20' away from me, the headlines for the last week I was there was all about the cops shooting a 9 year old girl on a school playground!) that the average Brazilian is much more concerned just about survival than about Hollywood or where Brazil's place is in the overall scheme. It's a shame, Brazil is a beautiful country with incredible natural resources and there is plenty of money in the country but it is largely in the pockets of a few ultra rich while the average Brazilian barely scrapes by. There did not seem to be much of a middle class that I saw when I was there. Of course, I was only there for two weeks, in three cities, and I only heard second hand from my crews, but overall, it seemed grim.

São Paulo was definitely the NYC of South America, it is so massive, it's mind blowing.
 
There's no single thing that triggered this, unless you file it all under MONEY. "Cord cutting" is obviously reducing revenue, BUT they(and ALL the nets) have been playing an unsustainable game with the sports leagues and college conferences of paying ever increasing amounts for the broadcast rights. They pay 10 figures for the NFL which includes the rights for MNF and a wildcard playoff game. And that is just ONE SPORT(one game a week for the regular season and one playoff game). And that does not count the actual production costs to cover and air the game.

Most of us that have been doing this longer than for the last decade know, to say the least, that TV is really expensive to do, but... To help put it in perspective:
If I spent $2.5M a month until I was 100 years old, I still wouldn't spend all of the money they spend annually for just their NFL rights.
 
Scanning a few sites that are no friends of ESPN - some will also point at their daytime chat shows not generating enough revenues due to unappealing personalities/ideological bent/loss of top talent, etc.

Their subscriber count went down from 99M in 2013 to 92M today, which is bad, bad news for them because they're so fee driven.

The broadcasting angle is a bit more difficult to ascertain. ESPN outbid its competitors to get those rights, which increased its financial outlays. On the other hand, their competitors would have been much stronger, had ESPN not outbid them.

The sports/news business is different from the purely creative/narrative in that the actual cost of production is relatively small compared to the overall investment. A talk-show costs very little to produce. It's the talent you pay for.

PS. As a side note - Spotify pays 85% of its gross receipts to the licensing agencies for the music rights. With entertainment going online into the unlimited channel universe, other audio/video streamers will probably use a similar model, where the direct fee system rather than an advertising supported concept- not that there can't be a mix of the two, as employed by Spotify - will become dominant. Then some fans might pay for the actual sporting events and not for the filler of the First Take and Pardon the Interruption. And that does not bode well for ESPN in the long term.

PPS. The below idea is unlikely to happen but, just in case - let's say, the NFL decides to go into business for itself. For $20/mo, it'd need 15 million US subscribers to roughly break even with its current TV deals, deals that might decrease in the future due to the falling TV ratings and the cable subscriber base.
 
It's funny you mention future deals, because I, and many others, think we've seen the last round of "insane" contracts. Viewership and ratings are down across the board, along with revenue. Unless you're the federal government, you can't continue spending way more than you take in, but for so long. We all laughed when NBC bid on NASCAR for the current contract. Everyone knew they paid way too much, especially when ESPN and Turner were not even bidding. They have already made cut-backs for this season and were trying to figure out cuts before the start of the season their first year.
 
Don't you US citizens put this all down to the genius of capitalism?

There's so much more things to spend coin on so there's less demand for some rather dated and anachronistic institutions, broadcast TV being one of the biggest anachronisms on earth.

I'm enjoying watching the pain these anticompetitive virtual monopolies are going through, much more to come in the future. I wish I was still in the game as there's plenty of moolah to be made for the independent producer with a great idea and a unique selling point. Everything you need to find your audience is available.
 
According to WaPo, ESPN hit its max subscriber number of 100.1M back in 2011 and is now around 89M (other sources have different numbers). If correct, at $7/subscriber, it's a $925M decline in revenues from that single source. Add in the advertising losses and the overall haircut should be over a billion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...g-the-networks-issues/?utm_term=.0df61c6bdd1f

The author implies that sums ESPN paid for the broadcast rights (the NFL, MLB, etc) were excessive. I say that, if ESPN lets some of those lapse, others will pick them up instead.

PS. About a decade ago, ESPN picked up some EPL matches from what was then (poorly distributed) Fox Soccer Channel. ESPN currently has some second tier UEFA CL matches that were sold to it by its current holder FS1. It could then seek similar partnerships from Fox Sports, NBC SN and/or local sports regionals to offset its investment.
 
There was also an article about a year or two ago that said if their subscriber loss continued at the same rate, that they would not be able to cover/fulfill their rights contracts.
 
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