Would you all explain to me how removing content we expect to have access to is a “cost savings” measure?
The following is from the Willow Wikipedia page, which led me to the linked URL:
The series was removed from Disney+ on May 26, 2023, amidst a Disney+ and Hulu content removal purge as part of a broader cost cutting initiative under Disney CEO Bob Iger.
I’ve been abroad for a month and earned some time off afterwards. One of my kids reminded me that we never finished Willow, so I said “let’s do it now!” The show wasn’t perfect for many reasons, but I wanted to finish it for nostalgia’s sake and my child legit found it interesting. Lo and behold, the series isn’t on Disney+ any more!
A quick search later, I see the above referenced quote linking to the article associated with this post… which only made things worse. The Mysterious Benedict Society was something my whole family could watch and enjoy without arguments! Turner and Hooch was dorky, but something my youngest loved and it was a super safe and easy pick for us bond over.
This post isn’t about whether the shows are good. And it isn’t about how nearly every show I like ends up cancelled. The point is that I paid for access, they were then quietly removed (for various platforms), and I have zero understanding as to how this saves these companies money.
Would someone explain?
P. S. Yes, I know this is old news. However, this is just how I am. I’m not up to date with anything in the entertainment world. I intentionally wait a few seasons for things because I loath when shows are cancelled after a season. (I’m looking at you, Firefly.) I’m the same way with books, often waiting to read a trilogy after its published because I don’t like the wait in between books. (Thanks, Rothfuss).
I just don’t take cancellation wells, especially when I was on top of everything including summer podcasts and such. (Now anything with the names Abrams, Lindelof, or Cuse makes my skin crawl.)
I know. I’m weird and stuff.
For streaming, much like every other distribution, rights aren’t free. I don’t know the exact details, but I suppose (and if I’m wrong, please correct me) companies have to pay a percentage of their income, or fixed price, every month, to keep the show on their catalogue.
There is also the idea shows with low viewership are “costly” because you’re hosting something that isn’t being used often. Storage isn’t free, neither is serving bandwidth, especially for 1080p and greater qualities. If only 5 of 100 customers watch a certain show, it means that the show only “brought in” 5% of the revenue. It doesn’t matter that this math “is wrong” or “doesn’t make sense”, that’s the simplified version of corporate thought: if the cost is greater than the profit, ditch it.
Afiak, storage is actually the cheap part whereas bandwidth is the where the cost resides. If a show isn’t watched much, I’m still not certain why it would cost much. And when a company owns the rights, I’m even more confused as to how licensing can be costly. There obviously has to be way more involved with licensing that I am not aware of. And royalties are only paid when content is consumed, right?
Depends, sometimes royalty costs are per view and others are a set amount per period of time. If it is the latter then the more views the more it is worth, and lower view numbers are worse because the cost is split between the views. Doubly worse if that show was supposed to attract new viewers, and none of them watch that content.
Storage isn’t cheap, but storage and transmission are not free. I would have dismissed this as a significant cost, too, except that a frind of mine is part of IT at major US university (~35k undergrads) and a couple of years ago they were actually negotiating with Netflix to potentially colocoate a server on campus to reduce the total external data rates. Standing up a server and maintaining it may be small cost compared to the revenue of Netflix, but there are easily 100 campuses as large is this one in the US, and doubtless many other high density areas. Caching even a couple hundred TB of additional content spread over n data centers will eventually start adding up.
My guess is still that it’s a fixed-fee cost for licensing (say, $2M/yr plus $0.0005 per streamed minute) that is pushing long-tail series off the platform. If profitability is at $0.001 per minute and the hypothetical above streams less than a billion minutes a year, the net cost pops over $0.001 and it gets dropped (or whatever the math is).