Here’s the state of the industry: 15 years ago networks would program 35 weeks a year, filling the remaining time with reruns from domestic off-network syndication deals. Now they're programing 50 weeks a year, with virtually zero reruns. Which brings us to how much SVOD has changed the game: having Hawaii Five-O doesn’t quite work on TNT when you can also find it on CBS and Netflix. Sell too much downstream, and a ton of FX shows start popping up in just about every OTT provider; sooner or later all that stuff is everywhere at the same time. It's hard to build a subscription base just like that. Sure, Amazon might claim limited exclusivity to something like Fargo, but is that really enough to make anyone sign up? This is the difference; this is what HBO realized when they set the template for all the content creators who would follow; HBO knew that original content was the way to go.
There’s no doubt there’s tremendous need for fresh product. On the surface, higher demand undoubtedly seems like everything a creator’s wet dream. After all, there was a time when everyone was so concerned that all the work would go to reality TV; today the increased number of outlets translates into a surfeit of writing jobs. But it goes without saying that the opposite is now also true: There’s not enough available talent – and paying viewers.
“There’s price elasticity,” says Amazon Studios alum Morgan Wandell. “There’s an inherent limitation to the number of services people will subscribe to… in addition to their cable.” Which is mildly disturbing, since the subscription revenue model supporting high level programming – like Netflix and Amazon’s – is crazy expensive. The SVOD model revolves around bingeing. Cable is all about stickiness; HBO wants you to watch 12 episodes of Girls over a 12 week period, rather than binging in two days – it needs to win audience engagement so they’re invested enough to roll towards the next episode. Netflix wants you to be inundated in stuff that you’d never finish – it constantly needs more original content so you’ll stay. And as great as any service is, there’s still no clear, paradigm-shifting, competitive edge that warrants customer loyalty to any particular provider: Most people watch their favorite shows on HBO for 3 months, drop it, and pick it up again. Because there are so many options out there (many free), it boils down to a bare-knuckle fistfight for viewer attention. And viewer attention is more fragmented than ever before. With all these new outlets to funneling out content from, a lot of content gets buried in the haze: Vimeo on demand catalogues 20,000 films from 6000 creators. Machinima buckets 30, 000 channels into its Quasi-Orwellian ad-share rev farm state. And look at Twitch: a click past the top 25 games on the homepage nets you 18,000 videos streaming Minecraft alone – all with harrowingly similar thumbnails on screen. How do you make a TV guide of that?
Granted, there’ll always be 13 year-olds clamoring for (MOAR!) content on Twitch, but discoverability is becoming a serious problem even for superusers in this clutter. When was the last time you discovered content? Do you even go to the homepage of Youtube.com anymore? I don’t. Which brings me to the issue of the amorphous mass.
Well, the amorphous mass is a little like Wave 40 when the press of zombie bodies start to feel claustrophobic, and you can neither see where you’re going nor where you are shooting. That about sums up the state of today’s television business: Half-surviving a flood, half-groping around a dark, foggy mess. With such a rapid, torrential demand for content in new and emerging platforms, it’s all new frontier. And like zombie mode, there’s no clear direction where this is all heading, or how to quantify how far we’ve come. Measurability, then, is the damned enemy.