Are the streamers runnign out of st(r)eam?

[Jon Dent]

Hey, on the plus side this is by far the most level headed conversation on a serious topic I've seen in a while.

Maybe we should be solving all the world's problems instead...

[Bobby Henderson]

Yeah, the size and demographics of one generation versus another and those effects on macro-economics and politics is very big picture stuff compared to the topic of streaming entertainment.

The fortunes of companies like Netflix in the near term are being affected by more immediate problems, like the spike in consumer price inflation. Money is getting tight and consumers are looking for the least painful areas to make budget cuts. Consumers can't catch a break with what geo-political issues like the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and war in Ukraine are doing to the supply chain of manufactured goods and commodities like oil. Big businesses have a relentless drive to look for "efficiencies" (ways to eliminate jobs), even if they're dealing with labor shortages currently.

I think these past 3 years of supply chain crisis will spark a new boom of automation and AI-driven tech for both manufacturing and white color type work. It might bring a bunch of manufacturing production back into the US, but with robots doing the work.

Considering all the short-term and long-term economic problems, ones that appear very structural and thus very difficult to solve, I don't see how we can have a market that supports umpteen different streaming services. Netflix is looking at some tough times ahead, but so are all the other services. Some kind of market shake-up and consolidation is bound to happen. The immediate failure of CNN+ could be an outlier for various reasons, but consumer fatigue over the idea of paying for yet another subscription has to be a contributing factor.

[Harold Hallikainen]

We've certainly drifted away from the streaming subject! On population, we've generally talked about "the earth's carrying capacity." This seems to be the maximum population that can be supported with bare survival. I suspect there is a lower optimum population that results in the highest standard of living.

On Social Security, Medicare, and pensions, it SEEMS that what SHOULD happen is contributions made by people when they are young support them when they are older. Ideally, contributions to SS would go into the SS trust fund that gains interest (ideally more than inflation) and is then paid out when the person retires. Since people are now living longer than when SS was created, either more has to be contributed each year by workers or the retirement age needs to be increased so the number of years of payout remains the same. SS is slowly increasing the retirement age.

Summarizing, today's contributions should not be paying for today's retirees. But, that's where we are, and it makes shifts in population demographics problematic.

Harold

[Bobby Henderson]

Overpopulation is definitely a very bad thing. It leads to environmental disaster, particularly in poor/developing nations. Health risks spike and life expectancy drops. Overpopulation creates serious political problems too.

Even in the United States too much population in a given area leads to bad outcomes, like the millions of people moving into the desert Southwest, straining the Colorado River system well beyond its capacity to provide drinking water and water for agriculture.

Steep drop-offs in birth rates are not good either. Governments of most developed nations and many large businesses all have pension systems of some sort. Every one of these systems depends on a higher ratio of workers paying into the system versus retirees drawing from it. When Social Security was first put into law there were 42 full time workers for every 1 retired person. Today the ratio of full time workers to retirees is only 2.7 to 1. The ratio was forecast to hit 2:1 by 2050, but with birth rates dropping that 2:1 ratio will be hit some time much sooner. Life expectancy was much lower in 1940; someone drawing Social Security typically did so for less than 5 years. Today it's very common for people to draw Social Security for more than 10 years. It typically takes only 3 years for someone to draw out what they paid into Social Security.

I'm not calling for Social Security to be abolished. Still, it's a system that was designed on the guess that generational demographics would always be a pyramid shape, with far more younger people supporting the bottom of the pyramid and fewer elderly people at the top. Our generational demographics are shifting to an inverse of that. If we're going to have a draw-down in population it needs to happen in a more steady manner, not like that of a pendulum swing from one extreme to another.

There are more problems with generational demographic imbalance than just the threat of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many public/private pension systems going bust. The obscene cost of health care in the United States is greatly influenced by how we fund elder health care. These worsening funding burdens will affect a government's ability to fund other priorities, like infrastructure or national defense. Fewer young adults will lead to manpower shortages in all kinds of sectors, such as the military. The United States already depends heavily on H1B Visa immigrants to staff all kinds of medical, science and engineering jobs.

On the personal level, dropping birth rates and child-less adults can lead to very lonely and grim outcomes. The Japanese coined the term Kodokushi, which translates to "lonely death." So many people there were raised as the only child in their immediate families. With parents gone they might have no living relatives. The island nation now has a phenomenon of elderly people dying alone in their apartments and not being discovered for long periods of time. One man's skeletal remains were discovered over a year after his death, only because his bank account finally hit empty after enough billing auto-drafts.

[Leo Enticknap]

At the risk of getting political, I've often thought that a more effective implementation of term limits than is currently done would be a system whereby someone may run for elected office as many times as (s)he likes, but at least two terms must separate each run. So, using President Biden as an example, he would have to leave office at the end of his current term, but would be eligible to run again in the 2032 election (though he's probably not a very good example, because if he were to do so, he would have exceeded his statistical life expectancy by a significant margin). That would force politicians to think about the long term effects of what they do in office, because voters would be living with them, and able to evaluate them if and when that politician came back for another go

As for reproductive rate decline, your points remind me of a guy I interviewed in 2004. I was working for a small regional film and TV archive in northern England at the time. One day, a lady walked in through the door with a large reel of 16mm: she had no idea what the movie was. It had belonged to her husband, recently passed away, and she was dealing with his possessions in the aftermath of that.

The film turned out to be a documentary, made between 1959 and 1963, about the closure of a coal mine, and specifically the local unemployment problem that caused. Furthermore, it was a lost film (as in, no elements were known to survive in any major public or corporate archive), and, for reasons I won't bore you with, a very important and valuable local history document. I didn't recognize any of the names on the credits (there were only four or five), and scouring the Internet only yielded any information at all about one of them.

It turns out that the director of this pic was a sociology professor who had made the movie as a purely amateur project after becoming interested in the minor political controversy created by the mine closure. After he was done with it, he had nothing to do with films ever again. After seeing to it that the film was properly preserved (in any case, as properly as possible, given that the only surviving element was a release print), I drove across the country to interview him, wanting to gather as much information about the circumstances of its production as possible.

When I got there, he didn't want to talk much about the film at all. What he really did want to talk about was the topic that he had devoted almost his entire life to studying, which was population control: and specifically, his beliefs that overpopulation was the greatest threat facing humanity, and one that was being weaponized by certain nations to overwhelm others. I listened patiently to a 2-3 hour lecture on this thesis, the short version of which is that the Chinese one child policy was the best thing any government has ever done, and that if the west doesn't do it too, we're all doomed.

He died a couple of years after I met him, and so never knew that although the academic establishment had come to regard him as, how should I put it - "non-mainstream" ? - much of the world appears to have taken his beliefs very seriously, as evidenced, as you point out, by ongoing population declines in every major region of the world except Africa.

[Bobby Henderson]

Just look at birth rates all over the world and you can see there is a massive problem brewing here in many places. Many couples I knew have opted out of children, because it doesn't just scare them to put a child into the world in the current state, it also scares them what it will cost to support those children until they're "self-providing adults"...

I've been pretty alarmed by falling birth rates for some time. It's partly out of my own selfish concern about my own retirement picture around 20 years from now. If current trends in total fertility rates continue the United States will suffer terrible consequences due to severe demographic imbalance. Programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be casualties. The math does not add up for any of those to survive, not in a country with way too many retired age people and not enough working age people sustaining the system with their taxes.

A nation needs a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per female to keep population sustained at a steady level. The US fell below that level on a sustained basis for the first time in the mid 2000's during the Great Recession. US TFR now stands at 1.7 and will likely fall more. European countries and Russia have all had TFR numbers below the replacement level for longer. The problem is even worse in Asian countries. China's one child only policy back-fired pretty badly. They raised the limit to 2 kids per family and then abolished the limits completely. Still most young adults in China are avoiding parenthood; the costs are just too high in relation to wage scales. Birth rates in India have leveled off near replacement level. Africa is the only continent where birth rates are still high. Numerically the majority of the world's youth will be in Africa soon. There may be huge ramifications on that economically and militarily.

In the US the price inflation on health care, day care, education, housing and other trappings of parenthood add up to one hell of a birth control pill. Since the early 1970's all of the net population gains in the US have come via immigration and higher birth rates of immigrants. American born women of all races have had fertility rates hovering at replacement rate levels for over 40 years. And now it's dropping. Plus we're putting more limits on immigration and the immigrants who are arriving are having fewer kids too. The US has all the conditions in place to see birth rates crash down much farther. Overturning Roe v Wade won't make any difference, other than maybe create a business boom in long term contraception methods.

Costs of houses are out of whack in many places in the Western world and it's all just due to speculation. Why put your savings in the bank if you get a negative return on that? Consider the housing business, which, despite the massive crash of 2008, only has gone up ever since...

The housing market in the US is now in an even worse price bubble than it was in the mid 2000's. My area of the country was fairly shielded from the last price bubble. Not this time. Here in Lawton some houses are getting bought up for cash and just sitting empty. People from, um, somewhere are buying up the properties just to hold like baseball trading cards. The prices don't match up with wage scales on what people living in the area can actually afford. Army Soldiers newly stationed at Fort Sill are arriving to find very little housing off Post affordable to rent or buy. The only new houses getting built are big homes for people with deep pockets.

A lot of these 4000 square foot McMansions selling for a fortune today may be very difficult to sell 20 years from now when lots of child-less adults might be more interested in living small. The cost of the utility bills alone on those big houses are insane.

I don't know how politicians around the globe expect future generations to pay for their houses. I guess owning property will not be a thing for the future "middle classes". Renting at exorbitant fees until you die will become the new norm.

So called "law makers" can't think any farther in the future than their next re-election date. Those old farts don't give a rat's ass about what could happen 20 or more years from now. This falling birth rates topic and what it could mean for generational demographic imbalance in the future is not on the radar scopes of any politicians at all.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yeah, YOLO... maybe that's the new way of life I should be adopting.

I always thought the idea of living on this big, round rock floating through space, is to leave it behind a little bit better than when you got it. I've never been the religious type, but I can't suppress the feeling that we've lost "our religion" somewhere along the ride...

[Jon Dent]

I don't know how politicians around the globe expect future generations to pay for their houses. I guess owning property will not be a thing for the future "middle classes". Renting at exorbitant fees until you die will become the new norm.

It should be pretty obvious by now that it's not trendy to think of the future, at all. YOLO!!! It's all about getting as much as you can RIGHT NOW and f**k the future.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Whenever my girlfriend comes over to my house she likes to turn on HGTV. There's all these house renovation and sell shows. House-flipping pornography. The cost of the renovations and asking prices of the homes afterward on these TV shows are just insane. But these TV shows make it seem like everyone should have no problem spending $200,000 on renovations and affording $700,000 for a mortgage. What kind of loser doesn't have money in the bank for that? The median home price in the US is now over $400,000 for the first time. Therapists are wondering why the teen suicide rate is up 60% since the year 2000. Have they considered the cost of entering adulthood as one of the factors?

Just look at birth rates all over the world and you can see there is a massive problem brewing here in many places. Many couples I knew have opted out of children, because it doesn't just scare them to put a child into the world in the current state, it also scares them what it will cost to support those children until they're "self-providing adults"...

Costs of houses are out of whack in many places in the Western world and it's all just due to speculation. Why put your savings in the bank if you get a negative return on that? Consider the housing business, which, despite the massive crash of 2008, only has gone up ever since...

I don't know how politicians around the globe expect future generations to pay for their houses. I guess owning property will not be a thing for the future "middle classes". Renting at exorbitant fees until you die will become the new norm.

[Bobby Henderson]

One hundred dollars per month for Dish plus another $130/6-mo and another $100+ a month...a total of $200-$250/mo. ... would DEVASTATE my budget!

At $131 for a 6 month term, the Sirius|XM subscription comes out to $21.83 per month. I still balked at that, forcing them to drop the cost or watch me leave. $15 per month here, another $8 there plus $20 for that service and on and on still accumulates pretty fast. My own personal costs for TV services, phone and internet are pretty modest compared to most people. I know other Dish customers paying upwards of $200 per month just for that; the premium TV packages and sports packages will inflate the bill pretty fast.

The notion of adding more streaming services like Apple TV+, Hulu, Paramount, etc are about as valuable to me as tits on a bull. As it stands, I'll probably drop either Netflix or Amazon Prime along with Dish Network. That's even with me still being able to afford the subscriptions. I'm just not spending enough time making proper use of the services. I'm doing more with my $38 per month membership to the Lawton Family YMCA.

Adding all these costs together, cutting out cable/Dish, iPhone, car, etc., would be like getting another paycheck every month!
How the HELL do people even survive?!

The much bigger question I have on that front is how do people who haven't already owned their home a decade or more be able to afford housing? The collective cost what I spend per month on pay TV, smart phone service, etc is a fraction of what too many people are having to spend on a house payment or rent.

I live in a modest 2 bedroom house that's big enough for me; I'm single and don't have any kids. My mortgage is around $450 per month, which is dirt cheap compared to mortgages most of my friends are paying. Lawton has some of the lowest living costs in the nation. This town isn't drawing a huge number of new arrivals like the DFW metroplex 200 miles away, but we have enough of an influx that it's still making the housing market just plain absurd. Even smaller houses like mine are in short supply and getting hard to afford. Anyone stuck in service industry jobs or anything else where they're making less than $30K-$35K per year is going to be screwed. And that's here in Lawton.

Whenever my girlfriend comes over to my house she likes to turn on HGTV. There's all these house renovation and sell shows. House-flipping pornography. The cost of the renovations and asking prices of the homes afterward on these TV shows are just insane. But these TV shows make it seem like everyone should have no problem spending $200,000 on renovations and affording $700,000 for a mortgage. What kind of loser doesn't have money in the bank for that? The median home price in the US is now over $400,000 for the first time. Therapists are wondering why the teen suicide rate is up 60% since the year 2000. Have they considered the cost of entering adulthood as one of the factors?

[Harold Hallikainen]

Besides the Netflix loss of 200k subscribers, CNN+ decided to quit after about 3 weeks of operation. Netflix lost 700k subscribers by suspending operation in Russia, so otherwise they would have had a subscriber gain. But they were expecting a gain of 2.5M subscribers in the quarter, so a gain of 500k (excluding the Russia loss) is far short of expectations. They now face a lot of competition, so it is certainly difficult to gain subscribers, much less maintain the subscriber count.

I do expect that some day we will see ads for movies or TV shows and just enter a URL to see it (or go to a theater!) and not require a subscription to anything. The subscription model is really limiting the audience for a program since there are now so many different subscriptions. Movies do not show in just one theater chain. Groceries do not appear in just one grocery store chain. Video content should also be widely available. There is, of course, room for a theatrical window for a premium experience at a higher price. But once that window expires, content should just be available on the Internet with a pay per view price.

Having a URL for a particular piece of content would also remove the gatekeeper restrictions like that imposed by Roku where streamers have to pay Roku to appear on the device. There should not be gatekeepers on the Internet (other than the content owner charging for the content if they wish).

Harold

[Randy Stankey]

Um ..that's where my eye paused and I thought, Wow...mothballing his girlfriend...yah, no doubt; that will indeed save him lots of $$. Sorry, Randy; it's my mind's fault.

Funny!

[Ed Gordon]

The Streaming decline started almost a year ago:

Streaming is decreasing, as shown by US research.

22 Jun 2021

For the first time ever, the number of video streaming services used per citizen is falling. From 7.23% in November to 7.06% in April.
These are the results of a survey on US citizens. The study is conducted by Omdia and has been presented in London at the Connected TV Summit 2021. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Omdia‘s Senior Researcher Maria Rua Aguete states:

“After the 2020 explosion of VOD growth, we’re seeing a cooling of the market, partially driven by viewing habits normalizing and industry consolidation, but also from a wealth of new SVOD and studio services.”

Indeed, Pay TV figures are stable and SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime) usage is growing. However, many users are abandoning AVOD (Advertising Video on Demand, meaning free services such as YouTube and broadcasters’ web portals) in favour of paid alternatives.
We are therefore witnessing a cooling down of the market, which is partly based on the normalisation of viewing habits and a consolidation of the industry.
In Maria Rua Aguete’s words, always stated by The Hollywood Reporter:

“In the past, many have placed a limit on the number of services a consumer will be able to handle. With US growth stumbling, many will wonder if seven is the ceiling for video streaming services (paid and free).”

Wall Street analysts speculate in the meantime that streaming giants such as Netflix and Disney+ will have no problem in an increasingly competitive space, but it will be the smaller players that will perhaps face upheaval.

Outside the US, the number of online services per household seems to be increasing. The UK has now reached 5.78 services per user.

Source:https://www.miamarket.it/en/streamin...y-us-research/

Other factors:

• Viewers are no longer trapped at home in the dark of winter by the Pandemic.
• Production of new content will take time to reach the market.
• Inflation is stimulating a re-examination of what part of the budget will go to entertainment.
• Demand for TV always falls during summer.
• There are too many subscription streaming services. The market can not support them all.
• Content providers have failed to see that the theatrical run adds value to their product, while streaming subtracts from the value of the product because as soon as the content leaves the highly secured theatrical environment, it breaks out into the wild and becomes available at no cost.

[Steve Guttag]

I don't know Frank. I differentiate a mini-series from a short season TV show. I have no problem with s mini-series that breaks up a single story into several, bite-sized parts. I also like my true TV seasons of 20-30 episodes. Most Trek fan found that TOS was too short with just 3-seasons (and they would be long, by today's standards). No, they didn't like the Season 3 episodes but season 3 was begrudgingly provided. My favorite TV shows all had more than a couple of seasons...shows like The West Wing (7-seasons and none of them clunkers) or ER (15-seasons with some of them clunkers but one got a good 5-7 seasons of pretty good stuff). BSG did okay though not running many years, got over 70 episodes. The Sopranos went over 80 episodes.

I, personally, will not invest in a streaming service to get a short-season series. There will need to be other, compelling product as well.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've ever since decided not to invest my time into series anymore. I occasionally may watch an episode of a series, but that's it. A REAL GOOD miniseries may sway my mind, but I'm done with a never-ending string of cliffhangers.

Apparently, I had my Disney+ subscription tied to my Google account, which apparently had some credits left. When those credits went out, my Disney+ subscription apparently lapsed with it and I didn't even notice it for a few months. Google kept mailing me on an old spam-account I almost never use. So, we went by without a dysfunctional Disney+ subscription for months, without even noticing it. I guess, that's a good indication of how much it was being used.

The only subscription currently active is Netflix, I've since cancelled most of the others. I personally could even live without Netflix, but the wife is a pretty heavy user. Lots of folks around me had subscriptions to all kinds of services, including Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Amazon Prime, some sports related services and a bunch of local options. I just yesterday had a short discussion about exactly that subject with a bunch of friends and it looks like they're also cutting back on subscriptions, ever since most pandemic restrictions have been lifted (at least for now).

The same seems to be true for us also: Ever since the pandemic restrictions have been loosened, I'm back visiting theaters again. We've watched quite a few movies in our own screening room in the meanwhile, but I still dearly missed the experience of watching a movie in a theater together with other people, even though the current release schedules are pretty lackluster...

Let's wait and see when those "streamers" start walking things back once they start realizing that a movie made much more bucks for them when they released it first in cinemas all over the world, before dumping it "for free" on some streaming platform.