Aloha Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

💥 3 Entertainment Tech Trends That Will Be Key in 2024

💻️ I Miss My (Netflix) Friends

🍿 Kernels: 3 links worth making popcorn for

3 Entertainment Tech Trends That Will Be Key in 2024

Folks, to my shock and horror it is almost 2024 (I could swear it was just 2022!), and I’ve been doing some thinking about the burgeoning tech trends in entertainment from this year that promise to have bigger impacts next year.

The Continuing Pivot to Ad Revenue

I’ve written about this ad nauseam (get it? AD nauseam???) within the context of FAST, TikTok, and bundling, but the subscription model for streaming has hit its very hard ceiling and consumers are simply not going to continue paying out over $100/month for a few streaming services.

Expect to see an ongoing shift towards ad-supported content, both in consumer behavior and in offerings from the big streamers. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see one of the major streaming platforms collapse and possibly merge with another one. Who do you think it will be?

AI

Yes I know: DUH. However, keep in mind that being a tech product “AI” is a complicated idea - for as many useful applications of AI that exist to make your life easier there are an equal number of grifts whose sole purpose is separating you from your money. It’s easy to get swept up in hype cycles even when there’s no obvious use case (NFTs anybody?).

While AI provisions in the SAG and WGA agreements made the most news, I suspect we’ll see its exponentially-growing effects more prominently in less-regulated parts of the business like visual effects and localization. Why pay an artist for a title sequence or a translator for English subtitles on a foreign language film when AI can do both? Sure, the quality of each will be significantly worse, and probably stolen from other people’s work, but if it means retaining a penny, the studios will go for it.

Out With the Old (IP), In With the New (IP)

There’s no doubt about it: Disney’s 100th year has also been one of its worst. The reasons why are complicated, but as always I return to Ed Zitron’s tremendous piece “The Rot Economy” as a good explainer for the mindset behind its woes. Disney has bet hard on IP, purchasing Marvel in 2009 and Lucasfilm in 2012 and subsequently has treated both like an audience ATM, relentlessly withdrawing cash from its feverish fans.

Unfortunately the ATM was actually a slot machine, and the Mouse made a few pulls too many. Obviously I don’t think we’re seeing the end of comic book or Star Wars movies anytime soon, but I do think the firehose of related content will be turned way down. What’s next? As I’ve written before: video games. Keep an eye out for ever-increasing numbers of video game properties on the big and small screens, likely led by the studio with the tightest connection to them: Sony.

What are your top trend ideas for 2024? Send them to me at [email protected]!

I Miss My (Netflix) Friends

I’m a weird nostalgist about the red envelope days of Netflix, so I found these two articles covering the behind the scenes of Netflix’s doomed “Friends” feature from years ago to be fascinating.

What exactly was Netflix Friends? As the Mind the Product article describes, “Netflix launched Friends in 2004, the year that Facebook grew from one million to six million members. Because of Facebook’s meteoric rise, the persistent question from Silicon Valley venture capitalists became ‘What’s your social strategy?’.”

Friends was a Letterboxd-style feature specifically for Netflix, a place where Netflixers could share what they were watching and what they thought of it. I’m a nosey guy, I loved this! What better way to judge the movie opinions and viewing habits of your friends and family? Sadly only 8% of Netflix’s user base agreed, and Friends was summarily deprecated after 4 years.

Why am I sad about this aside from being a big busybody? To me it was the last time we saw a glimmer of human curation from the content platforms, a chance to be recommended a film or TV show by an actual person with quirky tastes instead of something algorithmically determined for me. Maybe I don’t want to watch what a computer thinks I want to watch, I want to see this awful-looking romantic comedy my Aunt Joan has watched 6 times for some reason!

Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)

Here’s a round-up of cool links about Hollywood and technology:

Roku’s plans for winning the smart TV war. (link)

How a contemporary art collective smuggled subversive messaging onto Melrose Place. (link)

Uh-oh, now there’s an AI-generated newscast! (link)