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Yves here. It’s intriguing how quickly habits have changed. Consumers were once content to supplement TV or cable TV offering with movie rentals, and some would buy DVDs. I have a not-too-shabby collection of mainly foreign and niche-y films, the sort I would not rely on Netflix to carry. But it seems entertainment on demand is seductive, even if more limited than one would expect.
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), Fortune’s Fool: Australia’s Choices (2022)
Growing up in Calcutta in the 1960s, information and entertainment options were grim. There was All-India Radio with its rigid orthodoxy of official news and uplifting programs. There were local and a few foreign films that survived the censor’s cuts eliminating violence, revelations of the naked human form or the procreative act. The Soviet embassy (run by the KGB) provided occasional ‘correct’ entertainments matched by the US Information Service’s CIA supported wholesome counter offerings.
Emigrating to the West, I discovered a wider range of options. Initially, it was AM stations and black-and-white television with four, repeat four, channels. Progressively, it grew to many FM stations and colour television. In the 1990s, cable television with it tens and then hundreds of channels catering to every deviant interest appeared. Today, there is even greater choice – digital audio and video streaming supplemented by the cable television bundle of channels as well as lingering free-to-air broadcasters.
There is a shift in medium away from traditional platforms. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, less than 40 percent of US households who have a television now subscribe to a cable or satellite service currently, down from more than 70 per cent in 2016. Traditional television now makes up less than half of US viewership.
The cornucopia has created new challenges. First, there is the cost. As providers struggle to make money, the era of cheap streaming is nearing its end. A basket of top US streaming services now costs around $87 per month, up from $73 last year. With Amazon forecast to lose $12 billion in streaming content this year, further rises would not surprise.
Traditional cable television services have raised prices. As they lose customers, they seek to generate additional revenue from the remaining customer base. The average cable television package costs $83 a month.
If your thing is specialised content, multiple subscriptions may be required. Football requires subscriptions to several platforms at a cost of around $150 per month just to watch favoured leagues and tournaments. One surveyfound that just to follow all the games in the English Premier League – a task that would take fifteen dedicated hours each week- requires access to Sky Sports, TNT Sports and Amazon’s Prime Video, at a cost of around $90 per month. Unsurprisingly, more than 40 percent of people who use illegal means to watch live sport cited the cost as their primary motivation.
One study found that the average American is willing to pay around $42 monthly for streaming services. In reality, the expenditure is greater. Australian households spend upwards of around $70 a month and rising. Once, utility costs such as internet access or mobile plans are included, the expenditure is greater. Prices in developing country whilst lower still make up a sizeable claim on middle class incomes.
Managing cost presents problems. With payments deducted monthly from your account or credit card, service providers exploit subscriber inertia. Efforts to unsubscribe are Kafkaesque. There is no contact numbers, emails are not responded to, forms which do not exist must be completed, only original signed copies will do, you can only cancel on 29th February or the Chinese Year of the Dog which comes around one every dozen years.
Second, services are additive, that is, you must generally subscribe to a new platform as what you already have inevitably falls short of what you need. The smart television’s IQ proves inadequate. Your television set-top box cannot handle the service you want requiring entirely new hardware. Your residence soon resembles an electronic graveyard of different devices and is littered with devices, cables, wires, repeaters etc, which constitute a fire and health hazard. Various aerials and satellite dishes rust on the roof.
Third, you also don’t know when what is on. Once, you would receive a monthly magazine listing forthcoming programs. It required a full working day a month to meticulously scan the information to carefully identify items of interest. Capricious last minute program changes negated this careful planning. Today, you take pot luck, rely on what’s trending, the curator, or hope the search function finds what you seek.
Fourth, multiplicity has not improved entertainment or information. Where content is concerned, quantity not quality is the operative word. Never an early adopter of new technologies, my first cable subscription elicited an astute insight from a neighbour: “Keep it for 6-12 months and you will have watched most of what interests you as there are a lot of repeats.” Other than new films and sporting events, his advice was prescient.
While delivery services expanded, content has lagged for various reasons. New quality content is expensive. Talent and ideas are scarce. The desire for guaranteed successful outcomes shows up in the franchise concept (a passable idea stretched ever thinner), remakes, dire soap operas and reality shows.
Your scribe confesses to a love of old arthouse films – the ‘everything was better once’ syndrome. While there is much that merits repeat watching, access is limited by IP issues. Rights can be held by different holders for different jurisdictions and may be time limited. Holders, increasingly keen to monetise their libraries through their own streaming services, are reluctant to license content to others. This leads to aforementioned proliferation of services, costs and the challenges of finding where to watch what you want to watch.
Fifth, the diversity of services and also programs, now increasingly homed in on ever narrower markets of interest to specific advertisers, also creates a lack of shared experiences. If we all watch something different, then the lack of common ground creates a lack of connection with those in our immediate circles. With nothing to share, it is little surprise that when with peers the favoured option is to stare at your smart phone.
In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, educator Neil Postman identified that contemporary society, in the affluent advanced nations he was addressing, resembled the world of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where citizens were oppressed by their addiction to entertainment not by state violence as George Orwell had predicted. Postman saw media such as television and by implication cable and streaming services as a form of self-administered medication – a present-day ‘soma’, Huxley’s fictitious pleasure drug by means of which the citizens exchanged rights for entertainment.
Expanding on the work of media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued that specific media is only compatible with a particular level of ideas. The medium altered both information and entertainment irrevocably. Packaged visual media formats, in particular, devalued detailed, rational argument and deeper, thought provoking content. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters would revisit the same ideas in his 1992 album Amused to Death.
A typical evening today consists of identifying what to watch and a search for where it might be on and if it is a service that you have access to. By the time those issues are resolved, tiredness and boredom have set in. You shuffle off to bed without watching anything.
Despite the promise of ‘everything everywhere anytime’, entertainment let alone information is now a struggle. A coda to Postman’s book might be entitled Desperately Trying To Amuse Myself To Death. Havelock Ellis was right: “What we call ‘Progress’ is the exchange of one nuisance for another.”