I’m not sure if you are familiar with the situation, but my understanding is that HBO Max just pulled a bunch of shows, including some of their originals. Oh, they still have the contracted rights to stream them, but they pulled them off their service.
Why?
Residuals seems to be the answer. They don’t want to pay the residuals to the people who made the shows and so the cost-effective way to not have to do that is to simply bury them.
I would have thought that contracts require not only that you have the rights to stream something…but that you have to make it streamable or lose those rights. Kind of like the “make this movie by this date or the rights revert” stipulation you hear in the movie industry.
Here is a brief article on Sesame Street, which HBO Max quietly wiped out 200+ episodes of.
If there was an actual demand for this content of old dated Sesame Street shows they would keep them available. As it is the 456 (!) episodes they have available, including a sampling of what seem to favorites of “the classics” seem to enough for most preschoolers.
PBS had no obligation to rerun every episode from the ‘70s that few wanted to see either.
While viewers want to watch the first seasons of Big Bang Theory or Seinfeld they will get played and the actors will get residuals. Once the demand is gone they won’t get played and the actors won’t. There is no obligation of any network or streamer to keep those episodes on air or streamable. Nor is it to be expected with old children’s programming.
Of course a company is going to make a decision that they think will be more profitable.
HBOMax is relatively new. They would have included some volume of shows simply to convince new customers to sign up. The streaming market is going through some upheaval right now as customers re-evaluate the channels they want to keep and the streamers re-evaluate the return on investment for their original products. No surprise to see bottom line decisions now.
Do you have a cite for this? It’s not in the article you linked. I don’t really understand how this makes sense as an explanation. I mean, they could pull all their content and save even more on residuals. Is there something peculiar about the way the residual contracts on these shows are structured, like it’s based on streaming availability rather than per view?
Maybe you are right and residuals are not based on per view but by virtue of being accessible?
Why anyone would think that a streamer is under any ethical let alone legal obligation to make all of what they own available at all times is beyond me. They are pulling the Harry Potter movies too …
Currently, residuals are calculated based on the amount that a performer was originally paid and how many subscribers the streaming platform has. The percentage rate is applied for the first year, then continues to decline until year 13. From there, the smallest percentage rate is applied in perpetuity.
The article doesn’t specify what happens when the series/movie is no longer available to the consumer, but it’s pretty clear that a ‘per view’ model is not used to calculate residuals.
The Sesame Street episodes they’re removing are from the first forty years of the show’s run. I really doubt that the residuals amount to much. Also, do the actors in a children’s show like that even get residuals?
New WB CEO Zaslav is playing slash-and-burn with the back catalog because he thinks unscripted TV is the future of entertainment. He’s also replaced the executive team with mostly white male yes-men.
If that’s what he thinks (and I really hope it’s not), he’s absolutely wrong. I have little to no interest in the unscripted stuff on Discovery (and it’s not all that unscripted) but am interested in good, scripted drama and comedy shows and movies. Really, I don’t think that Discovery and Warner Bros are a good match.
Removing content from a streaming service, to me, is the equivalent of canceling a show from broadcast television (in a sense). When people are no longer watching the programming, it is no longer profitable to provide it. Shows stay on streaming services for the same reason they continue to create new shows; because people are interested in them.
To me, if it costs you to keep something in your library and nobody is watching it, it would be ridiculous to not remove it.
And the source is simple speculation. OTOH if no one watches them, and I suspect no one does, anything is too much to pay. Plus the presumption is that the combined streamer will have more subscribers than either alone so the small amount increases some …
Yeah, everything I read of the new direction seems like bad choices to me too. They have every right to make what they think are profitable choices. And they may be very wrong.
The reason for a streaming service like HBO Max to have a show like Sesame Street is because children will incessantly watch their favorite shows and movies, so that encourages parents to stick with those subscriptions. Given that Sesame Street is presently in the 52nd season, are there any kids who care about the first forty years of the show? I doubt it. They’re probably watching the recent stuff.
This isn’t just about Sesame Street. And there are a number of different issues at play here. For starters, streaming media has been prioritized to the point that many movies and shows doesn’t even get a physical release any more. The showrunner of Dickinson had to beg for a physical copy of her show. She has the only one out-in-the-wild.
So for many shows, if they get removed from a streaming site, how do you even watch it? Especially if it never got a DVD release?
There has always been a balance between “creatives” and “the suits”. And that balance has been upended in an unprecedented way here. And now the ball has started rolling, it’s only a matter of time before others start following suit. They all knew how the industry worked. But HBO Max decided to re-write the rulebook.
This has put the entire industry on edge. It puts at risk everything from residuals to healthcare insurance, it has showrunners and creatives questioning even continuing to work in the industry, and nobody knows where it will end. The suits used to at least pretend they cared about “making movies.” But now its all a numbers game.
And the other factor at play here is a political one. As Cervaise has pointed out they are replacing the executive team with “white male yes-men.” The first high profile target was a movie directed by two Moroccan Muslim men, featuring a latina actress and was to have the feature film debut of a transgender actress. Sesame Street is a show that has Black American culture as its foundation. And the most powerful investor in the Warner Brothers Discovery inc thinks that CNN should be more centrist.
HBO Max is now being run by capitalist, right-leaning libertarians and the network will realign to reflect that. They are corporate vultures and will strip the channel to the bones before flipping it to someone else in a couple of years.
I am no media expert but I very much doubt there was ever a non-fictional balance between the “creative types” and “the suits”. The suit always had the power and the creative types won when the it suited the suits. Usually believing that the creative gamble would result in profit but sometimes out of ego.
Many studios and streamers are offering products that showcase diversity more than ever. Y the hey have not been doing that out of pro-social beliefs; they’ve been doing it because they have realized thar’s profit thar. The new WB led team may be going against that realization. And the result may be that they are left behind as the industry shakes out.
Hmmm…the creator of Infinity Train begs to differ about his show at least:
However, if they WERE able to find someone familiar with the matter and it WAS about frequency, Discovery has failed to show statistics or provide what metrics they’re using. By all publicly available metrics, Infinity Train was in the 91st percentile in children’s media, at it’s height* was 17x more popular than the average TV show, as of yesterday evening was #1, #2, #3, and #5 on itunes for kids and family, and in the top 20 on iTunes overall. From his blog post on the topic.
Basically they’re being incredibly unprofessional in how they went about this (no prior notice to creators about the pull and the sudden hit to their income) and aren’t providing much transparency on their actions. Which is their right - legally they can do what they want here. But it certainly doesn’t fill me with great optimism that they are heading in the right direction creatively. And I dislike unprofessional organizations reflexively.
…of course there was balance. That’s how the stuff that is creator-lead and often critically acclaimed gets made.
But it goes beyond merely “showcasing diversity.”
Which is why I always champion what Marvel is doing under Feige. Diversity isn’t about just checking the boxes. Just look at She-Hulk: its a show with a female protagonist, with two women directors, Jessica Gao as showrunner with a majority women in the writers room. Ms Marvel was a show about a young Muslim superhero that had a writers room and directing crew that reflected the diversity that we saw on-screen. They are doing the work. They’ve committed to a diverse slate of movies and television shows that are created by a diverse slate of writers and directors. It’s something that none of the other big studios have committed too. It isn’t perfect representation. And LGBTQ representation needs a heck of a lot of more work. But they are getting there. The strategic direction here is clear. It’s part of their framework. They made a commitment to diversity and are simply walking-the-walk. That isn’t the case everywhere else.
Diversity is “trendy.” But most studios and streamers aren’t really committed to doing the work. That means not only “showcasing diversity”, but giving budgets and opportunities to people of all backgrounds to be able to tell their stories.
The clear message coming from the head of HBO Max is that “not only are we not going to be giving you the opportunity, but we also have the power to take anything that you have already created and make sure that nobody ever lays eyes on it.” It is the ultimate dick move.
Nah. There is always going to be a market for movies and television shows made by straight-white-men.