In a very special episode, our hosts delve into the fascinating topic of how competition between streaming services is reshaping viewer preferences. They examine the effects of this fierce competition, such as the growing division between short- and long-form content, emerging monetization strategies, and the resulting impact on the quality and diversity of content available. The conversation sheds light on the transformative nature of this competition and offers insight into how it's shaping the future of streaming and viewer preferences. ~yawn~
In a very special episode, our hosts delve into the fascinating topic of how competition between streaming services is reshaping viewer preferences. They examine the effects of this fierce competition, such as the growing division between short- and long-form content, emerging monetization strategies, and the resulting impact on the quality and diversity of content available. The conversation sheds light on the transformative nature of this competition and offers insight into how it's shaping the future of streaming and viewer preferences. ~yawn~
Reach the pod at DontEncourage@gmail.com
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Welcome to. Don't Encourage us, the podcast where we talk about the big ideas behind fiction projects of all different kinds. Books, TV shows, movies, video games, nothing's off limits. And remember, stay away from those like and subscribe buttons. This is your host, rod Serling, and I'm here today with my co-host Jordan Peele.
How you doing, Jordan? Very well, thank you. What's on your list? What have you been watching, reading, absorbing? What kind of stuff has been pushing through for you? I mean, beyond the, the spy novel that I was working on or mm-hmm. Working on reading. Still, still chewing on the spy novel. Still was on that spy novel.
Moved on to another spy novel called Ballistic, I might've mentioned in the other podcast episode. Hmm. Which is the X C I A operative. It's by the same guy that wrote The Gray Man, which was a movie with Ling. Mm-hmm. So I've been really getting into that these days. I'm just really into light kind of action thriller type books.
Not anything too dark or too deep. Mm. Just. Just kind of moving away from that for a little bit, you know, like we had talked about for anyone who listened to the other podcast, the whole idea of watching that. So nobody, Hey Mo, um, Dahmer and all those other serial killer type of mm-hmm. Docudramas on Netflix.
So I've been moving away from that stuff and more into lighter stuff. And I, I watched Wednesday, that series I just finished. Mm-hmm. Which I liked. Mm-hmm. Cause I really like Tim Burton's stuff. And I don't think he's done anything in, in a while. Yeah. Didn't he do that, um, movie with Johnny Depp about? Was it Dark Shadows?
Was that him? Yeah, that was him, I think. And that was a, in Burton, long time ago that he did that one. Yeah. I don't think that was well received. No. I mean, I, I'm trying to think what the last really well received Tim Burton movie would've been. Nightmare before Christmas. Right? He did that. I believe he did.
Yeah. That was a really long time ago too. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I'm not really sure what he's done recently, but this is, well, Sweeney Todd Sweeney. Todd was his name. Oh, Sweeny Todd. Yeah. Yeah, that was another one. I like the look of his stuff a lot. Mm-hmm. Like I think his directing is really good, and I think whoever wrote these scripts was really clever.
It's like just witty one liner after witty one liner. Which is really good to, to see something that's really smartly written, you know? Mm-hmm. Like a rise sense of humor. Mm-hmm. So that, that was really good. Yeah. And I've been watching random YouTube videos, just kind of getting pulled into the rabbit hole of YouTube and seeing what they suggest for me next.
Yeah, I've never gotten really into YouTube. Like I will try it every so often or use it for some purpose, but it's never sucked me in probably because as soon as I start to settle, the commercials just become overwhelming. How does the algorithm grab you? I watch a lot of travel videos, so then, you know, I'll watch one travel video and then all of a sudden I'll see another creator who's making travel videos.
I'm like, oh, what's that all about? And it seems to really know the themes, the types of travel videos that I like. Like with the, you know, narrator, you know, some pretty quick cuts, some really good camera work, and it'll just keep kind of suggesting these videos and it really does hook you in. I mean, it's not as, it's not as accurate as something like TikTok would be cuz I'm not logged into my tv, so it's just going by, I don't know exactly which signals it's going by beyond the fact that I'm just watching a, a specific type of video.
So I don't know what other signals it would be drawing in besides that. But, um, Yeah, it's pretty interesting how it does it, but sometimes it really kind of screws up because I'll do a search for something and then all of a sudden it thinks I'm obsessed with whatever that thing is when I just wanted to watch one quick video over it about it, and then it'll use that and have a category of that particular topic come up every single time on my tv.
So everything related to it, no matter what it is. So I wanna watch a tv. All Mills. All the time. All the time. A hundred percent. Yeah. And then it just fills the screen. And you know how that press, you can't turn it off. You can't. And that's the actual rabbit hole. I wonder if that's the difference you watch YouTube on your television.
Yes, it's a huge difference. And that's probably why you haven't been really drawn into it. When it was just on my phone or on my computer. I didn't really pay too much attention to it when I got the app on my tv. That kind of became my go-to. Mm-hmm. Cause if I didn't wanna sit there and watch it say an hour long TV show or a two hour movie and I just wanna watch something really quick or informative, I would just watch something on on YouTube.
And I actually seem to watch it a lot more than I do anything else. And especially to learn. I was, I was just about to ask, you mentioned last time that there were some good websites. Was it Udemy? Udemy, Corra, and Corra. Do you watch that on your TV or do you go to your laptop for that? I go to my laptop for that kind of stuff, but I'm starting to see a lot more that there are a lot of these educational creators that have channels that are on YouTube and they're monetizing the channel through ad revenue.
Instead of going onto Udemy and creating, you know, an official subscription based course where they're charging, let's say 10, 20, a hundred dollars for it. Mm-hmm. Which is an interesting shift. And I wonder what, what's gonna happen with that in the future? Are almost all of these creators that were on these platforms, specifically around learning, just gonna switch over to YouTube cuz they have such a gigantic reach on there and the algorithm is a lot more sophisticated so they can reach more people.
And really to teach a course, you just need a video platform. So if you use the biggest, most searchable video platform it seems like you can sell, then you can use that platform to sell more in-depth paid courses, let's say, or just use it to get the ad revenue from whatever you're doing. Like that audacity course I mentioned in the last podcast.
Um, That's a hundred percent free on YouTube, but it seems to be as complete as anything that you would find on one of these paid subscription platforms. So that'll be interesting to see what happens. Hmm. You also mentioned, um, clever writing. Uh, what did you say? Rye humor. Mm-hmm. Uh, I've been watching, uh, avenue Five.
Have you seen this? Have you heard of this? I've never heard of that. No. Okay. So Avenue five is an H B O sitcom. Um, it's, uh, stars Hugh Laurie and Josh Gad. It's got a couple other people in it that you might recognize. Um, Zach Woods from the office, he was like the, uh, when, when the companies merged. He, I think he was the nephew of the, the owner of the copy company and he like, anyway, he was late later seasons office employees, so they, they got some good names.
And I was a little surprised to see Hugh Laurie back in comedy. You know, he originally did comedy, then he did house. Yeah. And now he's back doing comedy. And, uh, it's a, it's an odd series. I don't think I can recommend it, but it has that kind of rye humor that you like. But the problem with it in part is that, I think the script is probably hilarious.
Like if you read through the script, it's like really funny comments and jokes and like very, like very dry delivery of humor and things like that. And, um, like this podcast. Oh yeah. I mean joke after joke, after joke. Just so many levels. Clearly written by a genius who's unappreciated in his times. Yeah.
So the opposite of this podcast I think is fair. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, uh, anyway, it has the script, probably has all that. I think it's amazing. But the way the show is filmed, The, the character's lines like step on each other a lot. Like the next person talking will step on the punchline for the previous joke, or, um, they'll be like a lot of ambient sound effects, you know, like, uh, alarms or background noise or, you know, it's, it.
Explosions, things like that. It's set in space and I think it really kills the jokes. I think probably the director and the, maybe the writers, maybe the producers, maybe even the actors, but it seems like they're afraid to do that sitcom thing where you hold on a character long enough for them deliver to finish delivering the joke, and then you give it like a quarter beat.
You know, so that the audience member has a second to absorb the cleverness of the punchline before you go right back into the next sound or line of dialogue. And they do that kind of rapid fire where it all kind of blends together and it's really difficult to kind of pick out the stuff that's funny.
Like you have to stop and kind of think like, oh, okay, I get why that was clever. For some of it, you have to back up a line or two, but they're already onto somebody else mugging or saying some crazy thing. And since not every line is funny, it really dilutes the humor a lot and it, it just doesn't work as a series.
The premise I should mention, by the way, is it's a cruise ship set in the future. It's a cruise ship in space. It's supposed to do like a lap out and back, I think around something and back to Earth, which should take a, I think a few months or a month or something. Um, and they get knocked off course, so they're trying to figure out like they're in our solar system, but they're off course and they're trying to figure out how to get back and how to survive.
But I think probably the, the most off-put aspect of the series is that it's got a very elitist attitude. And I think the, the really core premise is so, you know how dumb cruise ship patrons are, right? Like people who take cruises, you know how stupid and dumb they are? Well, we're just gonna do that. But in space, so you have like several characters who are flawed, but they're supposed to be kind of smarter.
You know, and they're constantly judging the, like, moronic. I mean, honestly, if they were human beings, their, their IQs would be in the sixties. Right. You know, like the, the passengers, right? They're, they're just comp, like so foolish that they've. Periodically end up killing themselves because they're so dumb, you know?
And they do things and it kills them, like going out the airlock because they think the whole thing's a simulation and you know, somebody dies and then somebody else thinks it's part of the simulation. So they go and then somebody else thinks that. And like, so the premise, a big part of the premise of the show is just how dumb cruise ship crowds are.
Uh, and I, I don't know, I think that kind of stuff is fine to a certain extent, but it wears thin pretty quickly. So it's pretty OneNote. Yeah, it's a little bit of that like coastal, uh, attitude about middle America. Yeah, yeah. You know, or that what it used to be more, I think, which was educated versus the less educated, you know, like people who have college degrees versus people who don't like kind of laughing at them for not having that knowledge.
And the, I think the irony here, or the unintentional irony is that often people who are. You know, less elitist are the ones who have better survival skills. Mm-hmm. And I think that that point gets lost on a lot of people and they reject it openly and it, anyway, so it's, to me, it's an interesting show purely as a, like a cultural artifact.
I see. Yeah. You mentioned the editing style, how it's so rapid fire. Yeah. I mean it's, I dunno if it's editing or dialogue, but Yeah. In terms of the, the editing, one thing I've noticed a lot, at least on YouTube is this very rapid fire editing and where, because it's all video based, right? Audio, you can edit, kind of move things together and it doesn't look awkward.
I've noticed it a lot in vlogs and now I'm seeing it more and more and more across channels. Mm-hmm. Where they're using some type of editing software where they're editing like a Word document. Like the software that we enjoy using. Mm-hmm. But in the video format, it's very odd because someone will be saying something and it's clearly two clips that have been brought together.
They're not even standing in the same place in a room. And they'll edit it, you know, they'll edit the content. But the person's literally like jump cutting into another area of the room and then jump cutting back to say the rest of whatever they're gonna say. And I found it so weird and so jarring. But after a while, you just start getting used to it.
And I'm wondering if in terms of editing, if there's this new wave of editors that are kind of seeing this in. And seeing that it's more accepted or they're, you know, some really well-known creators that are using this editing style with millions of followers, and they're like, okay, I think that makes a lot of sense.
You know, I can just edit in this way and the audience is just gonna accept it. So, I don't know if you've noticed that or not, but it's a very strange thing to see if you're not used to it. You're like, what are they doing? This is so weird. The person is clearly saying two different things at two different times.
But there's no transition like there would be in a moving, right? You don't edit to your cut to B-roll and then back to the character. You're literally cutting them in two different physical locations in a room, or not even in the same room. They might be outside in the next part of the sentence. It's very strange.
It wouldn't be surprise me if that was the wave of the future, I feel like. Um, That's probably happened a lot in the past when new types of comedy or. Styles of shooting TV shows come out. Mm-hmm. Like for example, uh, docudramas. Yeah. You know, or docu comedies, or I don't know how you docu documentaries.
Yeah, like the Office, right, like that doc comedies maybe. Yes. Right. Because you know, initially or before that, It was, um, like what, a two, three cameras that were fairly static. Yeah. And you just kind of cut different angles and maybe do closeups or not. Um, and then they had like a handheld kind of moving, and I'm sure that was very jarring for people initially.
Mm-hmm. Um, like Blair Witch, when that came out, I imagine a lot of people saw that and were like, man, that's, it's really shaky. It seems really amateurish, but it's easier, it's cheaper, and it actually does create a little bit of a sense of immersion. Mm-hmm. And then they did what Cloverfield, which gave me a headache because it was so much of that, and they intentionally wouldn't show you the things you want to see.
Like they kept it tight on the people and it's like there's a giant monster, like, what are you doing? Like show the giant monster. Um, but there's always something in the way and, and so on. So maybe this is the, the next wave. It's cheaper, it's easier. Uh, it probably allows you to just shoot a bunch of stuff and then cut it together really, you know, quickly.
And even though the seams are showing, maybe the TikTok generation doesn't care. Yeah. Doesn't seem like it's affecting view counts for a lot of these creators, at least, you know? Yeah. To your point, you know, maybe it's. They're just getting tons and tons and tons of footage pulling it down into editing software.
That's much easier to use if you're editing everything like a, like a script, a word document for the editor. It's like, do these two sentences make sense? Yeah. Half of this one makes sense, but the other half of the other sentence make sense. Okay. We'll just click those two together. Mm-hmm. So now we have a full thought.
Mm-hmm. Where it's just, it's just interesting to me to think. How things have evolved in terms of your basic rules of editing are just being so violated and thrown out the window. Mm-hmm. You know, and then you're getting that acceptance. You know, maybe it's the TikTok Vine, you know, Instagram reels. This style of, of editing has just caught on because of those, those platforms.
Now it's normalized. It. So of course you can do that. Of course you can, you know, just cut someone in such a strange way that now it's normal, you know, you don't have to have a really cohesive thought or set of thoughts. You can just kind of clip together a bunch of different thoughts and rapid fire editing where, which doesn't seem to make bunch sense and it works.
So, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe that is the best way. Well, anything that lets you generate content faster, Is potentially gonna be accepted. Mm-hmm. He goes, you know, I think content is really the issue, right? Yeah. If you have a YouTube channel and you've gotta crank out, you know, one to what, five, six videos a week, maybe, uh, depending on the nature of your content, something like you said may allow you to cut your editing time in half and maybe even you can use stuff that you've recorded in other.
Episodes, if you wanna call 'em that. Yeah. And it allows you maybe to increase your content or the content you put out there by 10% or 30%, or even more potentially. Um, and that's probably enough to be worth it. Yeah. Even if it's te, you know, technically lower quality content, if you put it out a lot and people respond more to that, they'll get used to it and it won't feel subjectively like lower quality.
Mm-hmm. So maybe that's what it is. Maybe it's just quickness. Yep. Yep. Speed to market. Right. Just now, whoever creates the most amount of content and can test it faces is the one who wins. Right? Right. They'll just start creating that kind of content. Yeah. There's a big name creator, forget Polish. Yeah.
There's a big tongue creator, and I forget his name, but he was talking about how he started out making car content. People, it seemed to really resonate with the audience. And then he did a 180 turn and just switched into doing like kids type videos. Like, oh, I'm, I'm filling up my apartment with sand and I'm gonna put a trampoline in there.
We're gonna see what happens. Like that kind of fun video. And he was just talking about how with YouTube you can just make that switch. And just it accepts it or doesn't. It gets accepted, or it gets rejected and the algorithm is just kind of feeding people this new content. They're either gonna love it, watch it, you know you're gonna have a longish watch, watch time for a video.
It'll start promoting it to other people. You'll get more likes and subscribers. And then your channel went from a car site or a car channel all of a sudden to a kids channel. And he says people don't even remember that it was a car channel that he first started. It's literally a completely different genre.
But he just went with what kind of clicked. And to your point, maybe it's just having as much content as he possibly can have. That's kind of the key. Well, there was another point you made in there about noticing what the algorithm responds to. Mm-hmm. Because the, you know, these companies love to make it about the user, oh, the users did this, and so on and so forth.
But there, in reality, it's only as accurate as the programmer. It's like research and social science, right? Mm-hmm. They often rely on self-report. Mm-hmm. Uh, not did the person wake up feeling refreshed, but did they report that they woke up feeling refreshed? Right. Not. Did they like this person more than that person?
But did they report that? And they treat that as the same thing. There's no, no difference statistically or in terms of how they interpret results between the two. And so I think, um, because you're dealing with people a lot of the times, programmers or algorithmic designers, I don't know what you call that, like.
Engineers or something. Software engineers. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Um, or a mathematician, who knows? I think they like to kind of make the same mistake or to hide behind the same illusion and say, well, we're monitoring this and this and so we're just gonna label it this bigger thing. You know, they're not relying on self-report specifically, but they're also not getting.
Accurate information about what people really think or feel? Yeah, they're just using a few indicators, um, that I, I guess, are generally behavioral in order to make, you know, giant assumptions and drive track accordingly. And then I guess the end results are their proof, right? Which is mm-hmm. Not really rational.
So, um, but they don't care. It's all utilitarian, it's all pragmatic. Like they just, as long as they're getting the, the metrics they want, in the end, they don't really care why that's happening. Mm-hmm. And if they create some fiction to explain that and there's an algorithm that drives it in the right direction and it gets where they want to be, then they call it a win.
But I don't, again, think that they're explaining causation. So you were saying though, that some of the creators can use the algorithm. To inform them about what to create. Mm-hmm. So if the, you know, if the system is responding positively to something, then they just do more of that, which is dangerously recursive as far as culture goes.
But if you wanna make money, then you can go from, it explains how you could go from, you know, talking about car engines to filling your living room with sand. Mm-hmm. Simply because the algorithm for its all its flaws said, well, we'll promote your video more if you do that. Exactly. And it creates a, a cycle, right?
Mm-hmm. You just create, keep creating that content over and over. The algorithm keeps pushing it. You get more viewers in that particular genre. All of a sudden you're a, you know, kids content creator when in fact you just wanted to be a car content creator. But that doesn't pay as well. So now you moved into that.
Um, and then America is an Idiocracy. Exactly. That's a good point. It's a, yeah, and it's a hill. We're all sliding down for a buck quickly, quicksand. Mm-hmm. Or sliding into quicksand. Uh, you know, the biggest creator being Mr. Beast. He talks about how he studied that algorithm day and night in order to figure out what it wanted him to create, essentially.
And there was one interview that he was doing, and he mentioned how long he's actually spending on just the thumbnail. Like making sure that that thumbnail is like the biggest click bait you can possibly have. Mm mm-hmm. Because that's the thing that's really driving everything. If the thumbnail looks mediocre along with the title, then that's gonna be a big problem in terms of viewership.
Right. And the other thing that he did really brilliantly is be able to start with the end of a video or the middle of a video in the beginning. So it's all about how long you can keep a viewer watching. And just hook them in in that first like 10 or 20 seconds. And that kind of determines like the success of the entire video.
So out of all the creators, he has something like a 75% watch time on his videos, which is incredible for YouTube, like it's above and beyond any other creator imaginable. That then to your point, is this just something that's being created by YouTube? Are they now like, okay, this guy's so popular, we're just gonna keep feeding him to more and more people.
Testing this content more and more, and then giving him all that feedback where he can then create the perfect video in effect, or what Netflix is doing right? They're kind of molding and shaping the way you're watching content by what they're displaying as it learns more and more about you. It's uh, yeah.
I've noticed a few years ago, Netflix and some of the other ones, they started hiding content that I preferred, but they just moved it like out of my view. Like for example, you have that, like my stuff section in Hulu, I forget what it's called in Netflix, but the things you've saved. Mm-hmm. And it used to be for years when I logged in, it was at the top, like whatever the stuff was.
My list is what they call, call it on Netflix. Right. It was always right at the top. And then I couldn't find it like suddenly, it was not like three rows down, but like six or seven or eight rows down. And I had to just keep going down past all their, to me meaningless lists of things that they think I should watch in order to find the stuff that I had saved.
And in Hulu, it's a separate tab. There's a whole front page, at least presently of stuff they want you to watch. And then you have to at the bottom hit like my stuff. And then it's kind of an ugly grouping of things in no particular order that you saved. And I, I really got the impression that they're trying to move me away from choosing for myself.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that's again, like a perfect example of what you're talking about. It's like, uh, maybe they don't realize it, but they're functioning from the idea of this system would work best if we could just tell you what to watch, and you would just watch that. And then that would change your taste over time and then it wouldn't go down quite so hard, like you wouldn't choke down our recommendations because you would be used to watching a lot of teen shows on Netflix about, you know, teenagers struggling with how important high school is or whatever, or whatever the, you know, other, the one other element other than their high school kids is to that particular story.
Like, oh, their mom's a sex ed. Teacher or whatever, or you know, this person's thinking just committed suicide or whatever the other aspect of the premise is. But they're like, if you would just watch that and get used to that kind of show, then you'll, you'll be happier and we'll be happier. And it's win-win and we know what to make and it's easier for us.
But if you're out there just sorting through the whole catalog and grabbing things that you like, I think it breaks the algorithm. It gets confusing. And I imagine part of the reason is the same reason a lot of research and social science struggles, which is you can come up with with really statistically significant results.
If you're relying on short-term gathering of data, and it's a limited group who are selected because of very clear criteria, and you can kick people out the minute they no longer meet that criteria, right? So if you play that same variable out over a longer period, then you no longer get statistically significant results.
Like a good example, I think the classic example of this is the Pepsi versus Coke taste test. Remember that from, I think it was from the eighties, right? Right. So yeah, Pepsi won every taste test by a mile. Uh, and then the, they realized that, uh, but of course their sales weren't better and, you know, it just, it didn't make sense.
Right. The taste test very clear. People picked Pepsi like most every single time, but they realized after years of trying to understand the discrepancy between that and sales is that Pepsi is sweeter. So if you just give somebody a little bit, then it tastes better. But getting through an entire can or a two liter or a 12 pack and then continuing to buy more, it's sickening.
It's so sweet that the majority of people don't like that. Level of sweetness for that long. Right. In that, in those quantities. Uh, but, you know, typical social science research, right? Oh, well, you know, we, we found 10,000 people or a thousand, you know, people or however many they initially did with the taste test, with probably at a shopping mall, right?
And, you know, person after person, 80% or whatever it was, chose Pepsi when they had a little cup of it. You know, a little cup of Pepsi, a little cup of Coke, you know, sip, sip. You can run that all day long with, uh, you know, a couple coolers full of cans or bottles or whatever, and you get, you get that really clear result and then they interpret it wrong.
Right. And I think that that's a lot of what happens. I think a lot of these, um, streaming services are really struggling with that. They're, they don't account for taste changing over time. Like for example, uh, murder shows. Right. Oh, people are watching a lot of, you know, uh, true crime, whether it's a documentary or a, a drama, right?
And so we'll just, okay, well, we have to plan a year, two, three years ahead in order to produce content. So it's huge. So let's just make a lot of that and put it in the pipeline. Um, but then people get tired of it. They see a lot of it. They get, you know, it, it gets, uh, old or they get sick of it a little bit, and then suddenly now Netflix has five serial killer shows coming out and they put it all over the front page and people are tempted to stray from that.
Uh, and if there are other, if there's other content that's competing on an equal ground, right, it's right next to it, they're gonna go that way and watch reruns of something else if they have to because they're tired of serial killer stuff. But I think the algorithms don't know how to factor in the amount of times somebody wants a particular thing.
Mm-hmm. Right. Because it's, it's, there's so many variables for that. It's probably impossible. Yeah, I, there's a lot to unpack there with these algorithms, right? Mm-hmm. There's so much going on where the viewer is being manipulated constantly, and the way the manipulation is happening could be happening on so many different levels.
So let's say, for instance, you were talking about the front page. Let's say Netflix realizes that the idea of a big star in a movie isn't necessarily such a huge draw anymore. Because they have so many millions of subscribers and they've been able to test this over time. Mm-hmm. So they think to themselves, maybe we can just, you know, slash the cost of production for these shows that we're creating and still get the same number of subscribers staying on the platform and also attracting new subscribers through the content part.
And not the movie star part, which would cost us a lot more money to do. And that's kind of interesting to me in the sense that what is a movie star now? Is a movie star the same as they were even 10 years ago? Or is it more content based like a certain genre? Is the star of the show or the, like you were saying, like the, um, these documentaries, these docudramas, you know, real life.
You don't really know those people necessarily or have heard of those people in these, you know, small crime cases in the Midwest or something, or or wherever it might be. But at the same time, it's drawing eyeballs. So you got 30 million people watching one of those versus 10 million for the latest rock movie.
Then are they gonna put more emphasis on these types of, on this type of content, creating more of these docu-series, driving more eyeballs to those and kind of pushing people's taste in the way they want it to go? Or is, does a person rebel, like you said, and at what point do they rebel and they wanna watch that?
The latest Rock Adventure Action Adventure movie, you know? Well, you know, people like familiar until they don't. Mm-hmm. And I think that's at the crux of a lot of this. So you put Ryan Reynolds in, uh, like a science fiction movie, and a lot of people who don't watch science fiction movies will watch that movie because Ryan Reynolds is a star and he's familiar.
Right? And they think that they like him. They have a sense of how, I mean, he's, his acting is. It's pretty remarkably consistent, uh, from movie to movie. Like he, he plays versions of the same character generally. Yeah. I mean, in terms of what I've seen. So if you like that you might watch something that you would normally not watch.
I think he's got a musical out sort of with, um, Will Ferrell mm-hmm. Right now that's streaming and you know, he's got a lot of stuff in the pipeline and people will watch it because they'll, they'll cross genres or even streaming services or, um, you know, streaming verse, uh, in person or verse, uh, movie theaters, verse, whatever, because they like Ryan Reynolds.
So there's probably always going to be a place for familiar faces in this balance. Right. I would think, you know now how much they get paid and what it's worth, you know, based on calculations. I don't know. You know, that's hard to say because people do get tired of them. I think Tom Cruise has done a pretty good job of not overexposing himself, but at times I think he's done that.
Yeah. Where he's become kind of overexposed. People have gotten tired of it and they want like a different star. But I think when he does that or when that's happened, he's pivoted and, and. Played a very different kind of role or done a very different kind of film. And then when people are un tired of him, he does a series of action flicks again.
Mm-hmm. You know, stuff like that. So I, I think that's, I think that's always gonna be the case, or at least, you know, for the time being. Nothing I'm seeing I think will stop that. But I it But it will rebalance the equations, right? It'll revalue the pieces, probably. Yeah. And I think it affects risk for them.
What are they gonna take a gamble on? What's gonna be a sure thing? Because the data's telling them it will be a sure thing and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mm-hmm. If you create something that you think is gonna be a sure thing, and then you just keep showing people this movie or TV show over and over and over again while they're scrolling through their Netflix queue, eventually certain percentage of those people are gonna click on it and then it's a c I told you so moment.
Mm-hmm. So it's kind of, it's rigged in the sense they can create in unlike in any other time in history they can create that, that need or that want in the viewer. Mm-hmm. Which is so different than going to a movie theater to watch a movie, cuz you know, you have the basic channels, right? In the past, radioed tv, magazines, newspapers, before the advent of the internet, you have the movie star.
The big director, you know, the poster, and that was the thing that was gonna sell, but you couldn't really force the individual into watching something. And the way that you can do it now, just by consistently hitting them with that message on a platform they're going to all the time anyway for another reason.
So it's very, it's a very captive audience that you have and one that's very sticky to each one of those platforms. So it's interesting, but there's still that, you know, wild card there, which is what you were saying. People get sick of seeing the same thing over and over again, and in whatever point it might be, they could say to themselves, yeah, you know what?
I hate that Netflix always does this. It's showing me something that they want me to watch, but I'm not watching it. But they keep showing it to me. I'm gonna stop, you know? Using Netflix, I'm gonna go to something else. That gives me a lot more freedom. And maybe that'll be another streaming network that pops up, one that's not so algorithm based and gives you more randomized movies for you to watch, or TV shows or content in general.
It's like you're the, you're the boss of what you watch. Mm-hmm. Who knows? I'm, I'm surprised that, uh, Netflix and some of the other ones, hbo O. They went the opposite direction. I thought they would go in order to solve these problems. I thought they would go, they went big budget. I thought they would go low budget.
Mm-hmm. I thought they would just focus on like inexpensive, almost YouTube style. Like, you know, sometimes like, uh, sketch comedy series will pop up on YouTube and it's just some, some people and they have, uh, a couple cameras and they, you know, they just shoot it outside or whatever. Like they have maybe a set or something, but.
They just put it together or somebody has like an animated series and they just happen to be an animator or have a studio and they just kind of put it together and it's short little videos and stuff like that. And we also talked a little bit about short films that later become, uh, Like a, a full length movie.
Right? Right. So in my mind, why didn't Netflix, or why don't they dedicate a lot of that money that they're spending on celebrities and big budgets and you know, you take one or two of those projects, you cancel them, and instead you spend that money on hundreds of smaller YouTube style shows. That are relatively low budget and you brand it as Netflix local or Netflix U or Netflix.
You know, something that makes it clearly like, Hey, this is gonna be lower quality. It's sort of like amateurish, but it's a, it's a nice steady feed of different shows. You can follow one, you can just stream it as, as if it's a single channel itself. And it's got some sketch comedy, it's got some animation.
It's all very low budget stuff. We wrote 'em a check for $10,000 and they made us six episodes kind of a thing. Mm-hmm. Um, and just let talent. You know, like people who are young and don't really know what they're doing, give them maybe some technical assistance, you know, a little bit of help with direction or with equipment or things like that.
And then just clean up their work and just make it look a little nicer than it does on YouTube. Um, but for very inexpensive. Mm-hmm. You can do that. You can also use it as like a farm team. If some of those short horrors films are good, then you turn 'em into full length features. If you know, with a. Uh, you know, more like a more professional support staff or whoever directed it or came up with a concept, you know, or different actors or whatever.
Or if some of these animated things are good and they're 10 minutes long or 15 minutes long, why not invest in them and see if you can come up with some, you know, 20 minute episodes or do a whole season or, you know, hire some writers to help them, um, kind of flesh out the characters or whatever. Like, but they, they've gone, or they at least they previously went the other way and they were like, we're gonna spend a ton of money.
On one season of a show that isn't gonna hit, or, uh, you know, what is it? Red note? What's that? Is it Red notice the one red notice? Yeah. Ryan Reynolds and like The Rock and like Gal Gao. Gal Gao. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's like 12 other recognizable faces that pop up for scenes and I mean, just ridiculously expensive.
I, it just doesn't seem to draw people to commit to the Siri, I mean, to the, uh, streaming channel. I don't know. Listen, they're the ones with the numbers. It must make sense to do it that way, but my read of it has always been these streaming services are competing with each other and YouTube's gonna benefit.
YouTube is in a really unique position. I mean, just someone to speak about Netflix and the strategy that that I think they're taking, which is to buy a lot of foreign properties for a lot cheaper. Yeah, yeah. They're new one, that's their new strategy. Yeah. Doing that and then investing a ton of money into reality series, like, you know, the Cake Boss or the Love Island and all these other Love is Blind.
Right. All of these to get more people watching, but since they're so secretive with their numbers, it's kind of anything you're saying is just like, yeah. You're just kind of grabbing it. Straws. You don't, we've already been through this. We've already been through this, right? Like these, the networks tried this before.
M T V did this. Famously, they figure out some sort of reality idea, some sort of, they did low budget game shows for a while. They did clip shows, like, and now it's for videos, comedians, right. Well, people love it for a little bit and then they get, it's kind of like a glut. And they get tired of it, and your audience is gone.
And not only that, it's so easy to produce them that your competition just starts making the same thing. You know, I, I, I think it's more about finding your future talented creators, finding people who have done stuff before, but they've been out of the limelight. You know, creating, um, an environment where you can match talent and, uh, make it easy for them to do, to produce, to create.
You know, and then you just have that up there and they're loyalty for a while. You maybe you kind of own them, or at least this idea for a little while and they produce it. And when it's no longer good, you just stop putting it up there. You don't put it up there at lower quality, you just stop putting it up there.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you just say, yeah, that's it. This show just ended up having four episodes and then that was the end of it. I think YouTube has the, the upper hand. Any way you really look at it, if you're gonna see, you know, where is YouTube gonna go? I mean, right now they have the juggernaut and creators.
Mm-hmm. Because they pay them so much money. Now they came out with that, what is it, YouTube reels or something where they're also trying to compete with TikTok. And a lot of big creators are thinking that they're gonna destroy TikTok because of their rev share that they have, but they also have, number three is since they're owned by Google.
Google can show this content all over their search engine and their network and drive even more eyeballs to YouTube, which is a huge advantage over any other platform imaginable. Huge over Netflix or Disney Plus, or Hulu or H B O Max. They don't control a search engine. So now if you look on Google, you see a lot of those top search results or what YouTube videos.
Which is then creating this need for not only creators, but just business owners, businesses in general to get on that platform so that their content and their webs websites are shown within Google search. It's brilliant. I mean, it's a, and to see what they'll do, you know, maybe YouTube is gonna turn into a gigantic studio as well, the same as Netflix has done.
To augment that massive growth. But as long as they're paying creators who are more amateurish and they have a huge audience, regardless, there's really no incentive for them to really change that business model besides getting more amateur creators or more business owners and creators to get on that platform and incentivize 'em to create as much content as possible.
And how are they gonna do that? By paying them more than anybody else. And it's just this, a constant cycle. Them earning ad dollars, distributing those ad dollars, splitting them with the creators, getting more creators, getting more eyeballs, and it just keeps going on and on and on. So that'll be really interesting to see cuz Netflix can't do it.
Disney Yeah. Maybe that's, won't be able to do it either. You don't have, that's what they decided is they couldn't compete with YouTube. So they went the other way. Went big budget. Mm-hmm. In, in competing with, Disney Plus or hbo O, whatever they're in. It's almost like they're in a different land in terms of, of competition and they have their own problems.
While YouTube is just on it, on its own doing, its doing its own thing. Taking advantage of what Google has to offer in terms of search, which is just in general, how many more eyeballs is a YouTube gonna get than a Netflix can ever get? Cause they're working off a subscriber model. Well, I think that's the, that's the difference, right?
I think probably from a business person's perspective, they are in different arenas. Mm-hmm. But I think from a reality perspective, you know, from a user perspective, they're directly competing. Mm-hmm. And I think probably Netflix and, you know, apple and Disney, I don't think they understand that or they disagree or, you know, they're crunching the numbers differently.
But I think when it comes down to it, People who sit and watch stuff, you know, who consume a lot of video via their phone or their laptop or whatever, you know, Roku, whatever streaming service. I think there is now a direct competition between YouTube and Netflix or YouTube and HBO O plus, or YouTube and Apple, and maybe you're right, and they've reali or maybe.
Maybe the pro or the answer is they figured out they can't compete with YouTube. I mean, at this point, there's just no point in trying. Or maybe they don't realize that they're in competition with them. I don't know. Yeah, time will tell. I wonder, you know, if YouTube will create that studio. But then they have to change user behavior to start thinking, not in terms of eight minute long videos or, I think they've tried that.
They've tried that a couple times and maybe that's why like executives, if they do think that they're two different arenas, cuz they're like, well, YouTube tried to create their own channels and do their own kind of Netflix thing and it just kept failing and there's no point in Netflix trying to create their own, like amateur short clips, you know, stream.
Or feed because that'll fail too, uh, because we're in different arenas. But I think the reality is they're directly competing for those eyeballs. Uh, you know, either way, no matter how you slice it. Yeah. If Netflix gets boring and there isn't really good stuff in your feed that appeals to you, then you know, you're the average viewer today.
You might end up on Netflix watching 30 minutes of videos that are two minutes to 20 minutes long. So let me ask you this, do you think. YouTube's problem could be a branding issue. So if it wouldn't have been, let's say YouTube studios or whatever they were trying to create and they called it something else entirely and had it be its own platform, do you think it could be successful for the reasons that I mentioned, let's say, because they can take advantage of Google.
No, I think at that point, you're late to the game. You're creating some other, like, it's not called YouTube, presumably you're saying they create like cricket TV or mm-hmm. You know, something like that. And it, and it has shows and movies that are full length and higher budget is what you're saying. Yeah.
But maybe they don't have, but in order to make it work, I guess. Would, they'd need to have these really high-end properties, right. These Marvel. I mean, but even then you're, yeah, but you're entering the game that like the race even further behind like peacock, you know what I mean? Like you're, it's so, so late and you're dealing with like, you're taking Apple.
On directly and Disney on directly with all their existing IP and deep pockets, you know, all the stuff that they're willing to spend and do, and it becomes a spin war at that point. Mm-hmm. I, I think the, the better strategy, if you, okay, so I've been thinking of it from the Netflix standpoint or the Disney standpoint, but if you're a YouTube, then probably you need to bridge that better.
You know, you need to slowly introduce longer content with. Divisions or some like, uh, just your algorithms. So it's feeding people based on their preference mm-hmm. And that their login screen looks different. Right. And so yes, some of your users are moving away from your core model, and that might be scary, but they're being fed into your new model because they prefer, prefer like longer content.
And you can figure out. Do they sometimes like the shorter stuff, sometimes like the longer stuff. If so, you can work the shorter stuff into their home screen as well, or at certain times of day, maybe it's more predictable that they prefer one to the other or times a week. After work, maybe they're preferring, uh, you know, longer form content, but during the day they typically go for shorter stuff or educational stuff.
So I think you could slowly, without making an announcement out of it, just have like those shows, like what was it was on there? Um, karate Kid, right? The Karate Kid Reboot's a great example. Great show, done big things for Netflix, YouTube canceled it. Because I don't think they knew how to, and they, I think they've been trying, but they don't know how to like kind of gently move certain viewers into more of that kind of content.
Yeah. And they don't know how to monetize it without breaking their existing model. Yeah, that's a good point. Maybe it's something that it's not even worth doing. Because they're doing so well with what they have now. Yeah. That going into this long form content model, and like you said, they're going in so late, there's so much competition already.
It might just be a headache that they just don't wanna take on. Maybe it's more along the lines of what I'm saying and like getting more creators on there. Getting more business owners thinking, well, we need video, and that video needs to be on YouTube. So everybody wins. Google gets more ads. YouTube generates more revenue for for Google, and it becomes just a, a huge, yeah, but you, I think they're sitting around and they're trying to answer this question too, and their answer is, we need a better algorithm.
We need a better algorithm. The algorithm, if we could just improve the algorithm, we can solve all of our problems, is what I think they think. I would imagine it all like, you know, chalkboard or the whiteboard and then you've got like algorithm in the middle circled and then there's little lines out, you know, they're like, you know, more business content, more famous creators, like mm-hmm.
Shorter videos. Oh, absolutely. Longer videos, you know, with like little circles and stuff, but, I think they're counting on their algorithm being their money maker. I think again, Netflix or subscription companies have an advantage because they already have a subscription model, so if they add shorter form content, then they're not asking people to pay for something they used to get for free.
Mm-hmm. They're not asking them to pay more money or do like a pay-per-view. If you wanna watch Karate Kid, which is what I think it was, right? Like I think you had to pay extra. In order to get a subscription in order to watch this stuff or whatever, if I recall. So it's a YouTube bread maybe they call it.
I think that's right. Yeah. And I just don't, I think if you have a user base that's used to relatively free content, Then they don't really want to like pay up pay, but if you have a user base that's used to paying a subscription and you can just cancel a couple expensive projects and create a wealth of inexpensive material that, you know, the, the, uh, results, like the viewing numbers will tell you what's good and what's not good.
Mm-hmm. And you can edit that, and you can change that, and you can tell them and they can do what they want with that and so on and so forth. I think that works. Better. Yeah. But I'm assuming they've considered this and rejected it. Maybe somebody listening right now knows why. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's an interesting conversation.
Mm-hmm. Cause there's just so much going on in that world of streaming. Yeah. We'll see a lot of changes. A lot of changes coming. All right. So, uh, I have some other stuff we can talk about, but I'll save that for the future. Yeah, I think this was a good episode though. Okay. And talking about the streaming services is always interesting since that world is always changing and there's so much going on from a user perspective and, and from the company perspective.
Yeah, absolutely. All right, as always, we're interested in your thoughts. So feel free to reach out. Uh, Do we have any, we don't have any way to reach out yet though, right? Should we set something up? We'll, we'll set something up, don't worry. I know you've been trying to email us, but info don't encourage us.
Podcast. It doesn't work. Just, just save all those drafts, those drafts of emails and complaints and those postcards, and you can mail 'em all as soon as we have that set up. Well, thanks, and I'll see you next time.