Dispatches from the streaming wars

We reflect on a personal milestone and examine the new streaming landscape

It was a quiet and uneventful birthday, which is what I wanted.

The world is plenty eventful today. I didn’t really want or need anything special to happen on Tuesday. If anything, I wanted the opposite. I wanted to simply eat some delicious terrible food, watch some great movies, and be with the people I love.

We made a double-feature out of the day, and I did indeed eat terribly. I’m very happy with the keto lifestyle overall. It’s made a huge difference in my daily life and my general well-being, and losing something like 80 pounds in less than a year has probably given me a second wind that I desperately needed. These days, when I take a day to eat fried chicken and french fries and donuts, it’s an indulgence, and I definitely pay for it the next day, but the good news is, this is what 50 looks like:

A year ago, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d feel this good, and it’s not just on the outside. You guys have helped enormously as well. I am grateful, as always, for any audience at all. We live in a very noisy culture, and the idea that you choose to pay to read the work I produce is something I do not take for granted. All of you who subscribe are important to the ongoing existence of this newsletter, and I respect the choice you had to make to subscribe. It’s not a passive thing, this kind of support. It’s easy to just read someone on a website if it’s free every day, and it’s a very different relationship when I ask someone to pay for access to the work. So thank you.

I did not write the stuff I meant to write this month, and that’s because it is sometimes harder to dig in than I expected. Writing this kind of personal reflection as I counted down to this particular birthday felt much more like I was flaying myself, cutting too deeply. These milestones we struggle with are arbitrary, sure, self-imposed more than anything, but that doesn’t make them less difficult or significant. I told myself I was fine with 50, but as I started writing about the countdown, it became clear to me that it’s more complicated than that. I am not great at letting go of things, whether they are regrets or injuries, and as much as I want to focus on the positive, it’s hard when you’re looking back to not see mistakes that you’ve made. I wish I could go back in time and talk to myself in high school and really impress upon me how important it is to not let anger drive you or define you. There are these toxic moments from my past that I look back at now, and they each feel like profound crossroads where I made the wrong choice and I have paid for it ever since, and when those things are things you did, not things that were done to you, it’s hard to feel like life is anything but fair. It’s fair that I burned down my creative career because I never figured out how to moderate my response to any perceived offense. It’s fair that people chose not to work with me because they didn’t feel like they could trust me not to take our fights public and use my bully pulpit online to get my way. It’s fair because I’ve spent so much of my adult life doing what so many people do, pretending that my flaws aren’t really flaws and moaning about how other people are the cause of all of my problems.

Part of gaining perspective as you get older is learning to own your shit. I am who I am, and any changes that are going to happen at this point will be the result of hard work, not just vague hopes and dreams. I am capable of change, but like most people, I often allow the status quo because it’s easier. The moments in my life that have been marked by genuine change have often led to growth and real progress, but they have also been turbulent and even terrifying. I think I need to be reminded of that sometimes, and taking control of my health was a very powerful way to underline it for me.

This newsletter has been a net positive change in my life. I’m going to shake up some of the format a bit, but the basic shape of the newsletter has been really exciting overall. I’m enjoying the feeling of not being a slave to the hype cycle. There is something much more organic about the film diet I’ve been on this year, and I can feel it rewiring me in a positive way. I love the new. I crave the new. I am almost always down for taking a chance on a new movie. But there’s also a part of me that gets worn out from the relentless nature of the marketing machine, and the way you buffer against that is with the rest of your media diet.

I’ve been so aggressive about building my Plex server and finding a way to make my own personal media easier to search and access because I’m feeling much more driven by whim these days, and I don’t want to rely on someone else to have what I want when I want it. More than ever, it is clear that these islands of media we build for ourselves are all about giving us a way to shape our interior landscapes since we have absolutely no control over the larger world around us. Building that landscape for comfort isn’t wrong or lazy or anything of the sort, any more than building it to challenge yourself or to overload yourself with anxiety on purpose is. Some people run into the Apocalypse, some run from it, and neither way of consuming media is inherently better. I have settled back into a mix of the two in terms of the kinds of things I’m willing to watch, and I presume that’s just the way I prefer it.

Part of what will determine the outcome of the Great Streaming Wars will be how much each service gives people room to roam. I know plenty of people who thought of Disney+ as a day-one obvious purchase, but I know just as many people who an’t imagine a scenario where they would pay that subscription rate because they think of Disney as a very narrow bandwidth of entertainment. While every studio in town has spent the last five years positively sick with envy over the IP catalog that Disney has put together for itself, brand management isn’t as easy or as automatic as people assume. Star Wars has yielded rewards, certainly, but it’s also a monstrous pain in the ass. I can’t imagine having to be responsible for the hopes and dream of Star Wars “fans” at this point, and perhaps the only thing that makes owning Star Wars tolerable at this point for Disney is that they don’t also own DC, the only major IP with a more vocally obnoxious fan base. Marvel continues to do very well for itself, but there’s also a perception in the industry that Marvel is self-managing and that Disney doesn’t call any of those shots. I think they’ve fumbled the Muppets at every turn. I have zero vested interest in Disney Feature Animation at this point now that my kids have hit a certain age, and sadly, that’s true of Pixar, too. So far, they’ve shown absolutely no game plan for what they plan to do with All That Was Fox. Avatar is happening regardless of what anyone thinks, Disney included at this point. I’ll be honest… Disney+ has gotten very little play in my house aside from The Mandalorian so far, and I’m guessing there are plenty of adult households that feel the same way. Those long-promised Marvel shows seem to keep getting further away, and there’s no real drive to even turn on the app unless I know specifically there’s something I can only get there.

I don’t even think their movie catalog is particularly impressive. They own so much more than they make available, and I don’t really get that from a consumer point of view. I get why the company holds stuff back so they can sell it in other places, but it chafes because this kind of streaming service is a very different promise than a cable channel. On cable, I get it… you have a certain number of hours in a programming day. You can’t have everything available all of the time. But on a streaming service? That’s the appeal. That’s the dream. Supposedly, I turn on Disney+ and I can watch anything Disney owns. Boom. Just like that. Cable channels have to negotiate deals because they don’t own their movies, or at least not all of them. But with a streaming service, it feels like the appeal is that I’m paying a company and they’re opening their vaults. While I know that The Criterion Channel isn’t streaming every single piece of content they have the rights to currently, they’re offering you a dense experience, richly curated, and there is a deliberate nature to what they make available. Shudder speaks to a niche, but it speaks very loudly and clearly to that niche. These are services I’m happy to pay for because they are laser-focused on what they’re doing, and they’re doing it well. Disney+ feels like an obligation because they have a few things I’d like to see, but it also feels like a hobbled version of the thing they told consumers they were building.

With the HBO Max launch this week, the company had a chance to distinguish itself from the services we already have, and my impression after spending a few days with it is that they show some promise but they whiffed this rollout in a pretty significant way. Say what you will about Disney+, but the split second that service was available, it was available on every device there is, and they made it very simple to download and use. Many people are confused about whether they already have HBO Max because they have HBO and where they’re supposed to find it and how to use it, and the name is part of that confusion. I can’t use the service on either the Roku or the Kindle, two of the devices I use most often, which will absolutely impact how much I use it.

Giving HBO prominence over Warner in the name of the app is a definite choice, and I’m not sure what that choice represents. I find myself a little puzzled by the entire idea of brand loyalty at this point since it’s clear that brands (A) do not care about the individual consumer in any way and (B) shouldn’t because brands are simply things and they have no feelings at all. People who get really into the idea of one giant conglomerate to the point that they let that become a defining part of their personality confuse me. It’s such a one-way transaction. If anything, I’d like a little goddamn loyalty from brands, not for them. Then again, thinking that way is what leads to people writing petitions demanding things from these companies, and we have long since passed the event horizon of whatever line there was between healthy fandom and toxic entitlement on that front.

Still, I feel like Warner Bros is a much broader banner than HBO, and while HBO has always leaned heavily on certain studio catalogs, I’ve never though of them as exclusively a Warner Bros outlet. It feels like this streaming service name has somehow reduced both brands in some way while also confusing the question. Who is the parent company? What exactly falls under this banner? Midway down their landing page, they have some hubs…

… but when you explore those hubs, that does not encompass all of their titles, and that confuses me. Your best bet is simply to go to “series” or “movies” and do the full A-Z list. Their layout is noisy and confusing right now, and it seems almost counter-intuitive to me. I don’t understand how they have things grouped, and in many cases, things are under more than one hub. Still, that Turner Classic Libraries movie is pretty rich at first glance, and I think they’re definitely a better movie library at launch than either Netflix or Amazon Prime, which probably has more movies than I realize, but which is so poorly designed for the consumer that I find it infuriating. That’s a big part of this that none of these services really seem to have cracked yet, finding a way to make all of this media something less than a nightmare to organize, navigate, and browse. It’s great to say you have 10,000 hours of content at launch, but if it takes me too long to find something on your service, that doesn’t matter. The thing that makes that movie library on HBO Max so interesting is that it doesn’t just feel like someone dumped a bunch of catalog deals into one place. There is a dense list of movies here from every era stretching back to silent films, and that is increasingly rare and absolutely of value.

I’m not surprised to see Deadline’s story today that Cobra Kai will move to either Netflix or Hulu for its upcoming third season. YouTube Premium isn’t going to happen. I’m not going to start using YouTube as a major provider of series. It annoyed me to have to watch the first two seasons there, and it clearly annoyed them to even be in the scripted television business. It’s good that they’re letting the show go live somewhere else because it’s a genuinely good show and it deserves a broader audience. Netflix could do well with it, but that depends on Netflix. They have the power to promote within their ecosystem, and they have so much content that they create that there are things that feel like they got somewhat lost in that shuffle. When they make a noise, they make a big noise, though, and that definitely still gives them the edge in this entire corner of the entertainment world. Everyone else is still chasing Netflix’s vision of what streaming looks like, and they will be for a while. No one’s figured out a way to do it that is better or that radically redefines the Netflix model; they’re all just running variations on it.

I think most of these services are in their infancy. HBO Max has time to figure itself out, and it has the resources to stay up and running while it does so. Disney+ isn’t going anywhere. Apple+ is desperate to make noise and not doing a great job of it, and while I loved Beastie Boys Story, that is a singular thing, and you can’t build an audience off occasional interesting pick-ups from outside sources. You have to have a voice of some kind. That’s Hulu’s biggest problem… what the hell is Hulu? It’s such a grab bag of things, and again… I like some of those things. But there’s no identity, and because so much of their programming comes from other places, it doesn’t feel like they’re consistent about who they are. They’ve had a lot longer to figure it out, too, but the problem is that they’ve always been a meeting ground for a few different companies like Fox and Universal and Disney, and so they all use it as a dumping ground for certain things. If Disney+ was smart, they’d turn Hulu into the sister brand where they could put all the things they own but that don’t fit on Disney+, like that incredible film library they bought from Fox. I think it’s shitty of Hulu to make you pay money for a version of the service that still features ads, expecting you to pay more for the ad-free experience. Make it free or make it paid but doing it like that just rubs me the wrong way, and again… it impacts how much I use the service. I find it frustrating to sit through the same ad three times in any show, and I won’t spend as much time in an ecosystem where that’s being forced on me repeatedly.

So tell me… which of these services actually matters to you and why? What do you have now? What will you explore? And in the end, isn’t Quibi all any of us really need?

I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Image courtesy of getting older
Image courtesy of HBO Max