| Theaters are always going to be around, and doing fine. With computers and technology, we're becoming more and more secluded from each other. And the movie theater is one of the last places where we can still gather and experience something together. I don't think the desire for that magic will ever go away. | | | | | | | | "Theaters are always going to be around, and doing fine. With computers and technology, we're becoming more and more secluded from each other. And the movie theater is one of the last places where we can still gather and experience something together. I don't think the desire for that magic will ever go away." | | | | OH, No! Not The Arc and The Dome
As I was writing this column news broke that the very fabric of my movie-going existence in LOS ANGELES is going to change forever. "ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theatres to Close." If I was going to a movie with a friend that was a super movie fan... I went to ARCLIGHT. I saw the best docs there. FROM WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?" to THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS. I saw STAR WARS prequel screenings there. I talked to KEVIN SMITH right after one. He's the kind of person you saw at Arclight. The night before my heart surgery, VAN TOFFLER took me to see THE GIFT to keep my mind off of the next day. This was my CHAMPIONSHIP VINYL with a more pleasant "Barry" at the counter. I loved the HOLLYWOOD theater. The design. The staff. And oh of course... CINERAMA DOME HOLLYWOOD. A landmark. A mecca of movie-going. A place studios fought over for premieres. Between those brands, CALIFORNIA - the home of film, just lost 300 screens. God knows how many seats. They couldn't survive COVID. Lots of email and texts tonight asking me if NETFLIX or AMAZON swoop in to buy. Sadly, I don't think so. Maybe if they could cherry-pick a few. And use them for brand and for award season eligibility. But 300? I don't think so. I love streaming. But I also love the theater. They are not mutually exclusive. This hurt. The little and the big "Toto" in me just lost his CINEMA PARADISO. I'm just digesting this and what it means. More later this week.
The HBO, The FX, and the Brand Adjacency of It All…
I'm old enough (and sharper than any 25-year-old) to remember when HBO aired from 6 am - 12 am. I saw TV color bars if I stayed up late enough. Back in those days, my HBO fare wasn't THE SOPRANOS, GAME OF THRONES, or those awesome HBO docs. There were no originals. Well, maybe those cool HBO promos. They licensed and curated. I remember EMMET OTTER'S JUG-BAND CHRISTMAS. WATERSHIP DOWN. Of course all the big movies. I probably saw most movies for the first time right there on HBO. From KING OF COMEDY to KIDCO. Oh, they'd done some live events. From polka to standup comedy. Then around 1983 HBO started to create a few things of their own. Some of the early ones - NOT NECESSARILY THE NEWS, 1ST & TEN, MAXIMUM SECURITY, and PHILIP MARLOWE, PRIVATE EYE. Then later... DREAM ON, ARLISS, OZ, THE SOPRANOS, MR. SHOW WITH BOB AND DAVID, SEX AND THE CITY, and on and on. HBO had become THE outlet for high-quality drama, comedy, music and so much more. Probably the greatest creative track record in television history. I hold the brand in ZEUS-like esteem. Their programming chief is an unassuming, great dude named CASEY BLOYS. He and his team continue to put out some of the best that "TV" has to offer. I can say the same about my friend JOHN LANDGRAF and the big bowl of curated awesomeness he and his team have created at FX. Don't get me started… THE SHIELD, NIP/TUCK, DAMAGES, SONS OF ANARCHY, JUSTIFIED, ARCHER, THE AMERICANS, THE BRIDGE, YOU'RE THE WORST, ATLANTA, FARGO, DAVE, BASKETS, IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA, MR INBETWEEN and…. I mean, it's friggin' ridiculous. These are not STEVE JOBS-like one-person-does-it all-executives. They built stellar teams that keep delivering. HINT: That's a key note for the end of this essay.
These are channels that ruled basic and paid cable through uber-smart entertainment and a cultivated brand that spoke to quality for a certain kind of viewer. But the environment those channels grew up in isn't KANSAS anymore. Television (once narrowly defined as home cable and broadcast) is in decline, like every other great media platform of the past. They evolve, they devolve. They transition, they get disrupted. Take your pick. It happens. Get over it. Television's decline has been slow, but faster as of late. Paid subs are down. The internet is largely the cause. But the good news is streaming video services are on fire. But to be on top isn't just to win an Emmy and beat your double-digital low-tens-of-millions of subscribers every quarter. The entire cable dial is gradually bring replaced by the mega-streaming service. Like NETFLIX.
No one ever watched a show because it was on COMCAST or SPECTRUM. They watched HBO, FX, SHOWTIME, AMC, COMEDY CENTRAL... What drew them? It was a channel brand and its flagship programming. In some cases, the brand first (MTV). Not the system. Back then a cable channel brand was a navigator. Each with its own standard of programming and what it meant to be part of that club. "I WANT MY MTV." "IT'S NOT TV. IT'S HBO." Programming and psychographics. To have an HBO or FX logo next to a show is/was as important in some cases as the talent or the narrative was to growing viewership. But again, they were channels. Netflix wanted to be the entire system. All the channels. All the genres. All the psychographics. The system as a channel.
They systematically looked at what was on cable and working (and in many cases what was missing) and went for it, genre by genre. From the big-ticket dramas to kids, comedy, food, music, documentaries, reality... These were all genres previously owned by individual channels in the age of cable. Then came the argument came Netflix was just throwing stuff up. But really, at their volume, no different than the entirety of TV and all its wide array of choices and quality (which in the eyes of the everyman is in the eye of the beholder). They don't balk at that. They lean into it. There is plenty for the elites, but this is not just for the elites. I used to complain that because Netflix was so wide and deep that the moniker NETFLIX ORIGINAL didn't mean as much as an HBO SERIES. HBO was consistent in its production and taste. I knew what I was getting. I watched it because it said HBO or FX. They were the DEF JAM of cable.
But now, the majority of my watching time is not on cable. I'm basically done with it outside of sports packages. The FIRETV. The APPLETV. The ROKU. These are the new boxes. Or sticks. On PRIME VIDEO I essentially have every video ever made available for free, or via rental or purchase. Or via free-streaming ad-supported services. Or subscription services like NETFLIX, HBOMAX, or HULU.
I'm drawn to shows now. The shows find me via friends, influencers, social media, targeting, algorithms and a host of other ways. Across multiple services. There is so much choice and I tend to stay in a few services. Way fewer than the channels that I watched on TV. I may love shows on smaller services but I see less of them than I want, or at least I get to them slower than I used to. Why? Because I'm spending time in those wide and deep services. The ones with scale. Not just in audience size, but in programming choice. inside their user experience. The better the product the more time I spend. Being available in 90 million homes is not the same as 90 million paying subscribers. Availability and access often mean less in some cases than the home screen on the services that have your time.
If you're literally serving everyone, your brand can't mean just one thing or one type of programming. There has been, certainly during the ZOOM hours of COVID quarantine, a lot of internal scuttlebutt in the TV industry as to whether having HBO on HBOMAX or FX on HULU somehow tarnishes the top-shelf brand. Maybe the record store clerk in HIGH FIDELITY side of me would have said yes five years ago. Not now. If anything those TV brands lend credibility and taste to the services they live on. And then there are the cable-nevers. Some of those brands, well, they never heard of them. These are noobs. They just want to watch stuff they like. And their tastes can be more eclectic than the TV body politic has given them credit for. Should The SOPRANOS be next to FRIENDS? Is that good for the brand? Will it confuse consumers? Should THE AMERICANS be next to FULL HOUSE? The MARVEL universe next to HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL?
Does this sound familiar? It does to my resident genius, MusicREDEF's MATTY KARAS: "The whole point resonates very strongly with the collapse of genres in music. Kids who grew up on Spotify and YouTube don't think about "rock" or "hip-hop" or "country" or "electronic." They just think that song sounds cool. Yes, they know genres. It's just that no one ever told them that those songs and those styles don't belong together. Playing a rock song and then a hip-hop song and then a country song makes perfect sense in a world where no gatekeeper ever told you you can't do that." Yes! So like Matty, my guess is as long as the "good stuff" (viewer defined) keeps coming, no one gives a f***. Concentration shouldn't be wasted on this stuff. It should be focused on how to get attention for the show. How do you find your audience through, owned, earned, and paid media? And social products and technologies.
Netflix proved that THE CROWN can be next to FIREFLY LANE. That is not a dig at either show. Everyone's Netflix is different. And yes, an original can mean a lot more things. But each household only has so many subscriptions it can support. Only so many AVODs they will try. And video entertainment is up against XBOX, PS5, SPOTIFY, TIKTOK, INSTAGRAM, YOUTUBE... an endless amount of choice.
Those blue-chip brands and shows will survive unscathed inside of these bigger services. Whether we like it or not, as TV companies retire cable brands from the dial, they will also retire digital counterparts. There will be fewer brands going forward. And I bet someday… Down the road, in the next 15 years, some of the blue-chip brands will either be retired permanently or will morph to be the scale programming service of the big behemoth media and communications company. It's starting already.
We live in an attention economy. And it's scarce and easily diverted. This doesn't mean that niche is going away. We've seen some nice growth and success with a niche focus. Who? STARZ and their female, Black, and Latinx targeted programming. A few of those will eventually be ripe for consolidation on their way to scale. Or form a consortium for a new service. And some will be a nice business, albeit smaller, and stay independent.
Ultimately, these brands are made up of creators. Of leaders, teams, and storytellers. No company worth their salt will leave behind the talent or programming executives. That's their oil. Separate brands or not, those are the people who make the magic. Those huge - then not so big media companies (vs techies) - are going big and they're going with fewer brands. As one former CEO would often say, "no trombone oil."
Brands are still navigators. They still have meaning. But viewing time is consolidated in a few services and that means the old princes will find cover under the new kings. They'll be adjacent to more, but their programming will still be as good and relevant as ever. So to those that worry about this. Stop worrying. Keep making the good stuff. Me. We. Your fans will appreciate it, even with one logo.
Happy Birthday To…
ALLISON WILLIAMS, MEGAN BERRY, MAURLEY MILLER FEINBERG, and CORD HIMELSTEIN. Belated to DAVID MARCUS, ALEXIA BONATSOS, JOEY ANUFF, ALEXANDRA PATSAVAS ROSENFELD, DAVID JENSEN, SEAN BRECKER, ETHAN KAPLAN, KEITH MEISTER, LISA GREGORIAN, DAVID J PAUL, BRETT WEISMAN HEYMAN, DAN ROSENSWEIG, SHAHED KHAN, TSEGA DINKA, BRENT WEINSTEIN, AARON COHEN, LARRY MAX, MAX LEACH, and MARIAN BELGRAY.
| | | | Jason Hirschhorn, curator |
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| | MUST LISTEN: Deplatforming Fox News | | by Bob Garfield, Jason Hirschhorn, Angelo Carusone... | | A growing chorus of journalists and activists want to see Fox taken off the air. Maybe even me, Jason Hirschhorn. | |  | | The Valley of Dunning-Kruger |
| | Playing Different Games | | by Everett Randle | | Or why Tiger is eating your lunch (& your deals) | |  | | Stratechery |
| | Non-Fungible Taylor Swift | | by Ben Thompson | | When it comes to a world of abundance the power that matters is demand, and demand is driven by fans of Taylor Swift, not lawyers for Big Machine or Scooter Braun or anyone else. | |  | | NPR |
| | The Rhymes And Reasons Behind Re-Recording Your Own Classics | | by Annie Zaleski | | Taylor Swift is far from the first to revisit her old catalog for reasons of business as much as art - but even if it's often a managerial decision, the process can't help but be heartfelt. | |  | | New York Magazine |
| | You're Not Crazy. Money Is. | | by Max Read | | Welcome to the non-fungible, memeified, cryptodenominated, degenerate future of finance. | |  | | io9 |
| | A Brief History of DC Comics' Black Supermen | | by Charles Pulliam-Moore | | In the wake of reports that Warner Bros. is considering a Black actor to lead a new Superman movie, and Regé-Jean Page's experience with discrimination in the casting process of Krypton, we take a look back at DC Comics' history with Black sons of Krypton. | |  | | Dror Poleg |
| | The Ponzi Career | | by Dror Poleg | | The future of work is a pyramid scheme, where every person sells his favorite person to the next person. | |  | | Journalism.co.uk |
| | A decade on from the Arab Spring: ten ways use of social media has changed in the Middle East | | by Damian Radcliffe | | In 2011, Facebook and Twitter were key players for political uprisings in the region. Ten years later, TikTok videos celebrating Ramadan are proving a hit | |  | | Medium |
| | What Cancel Culture Did to Hollywood | | by David Sackman | | "Cancel Culture" is not new to Hollywood. During the Cold War, Hollywood tried to "cancel" its best and brightest talent. The results were both absurd and horrifying. This history should be studied as a lesson for today. | |  | | Gamasutra |
| | Analysis: Apple vs. Epic - the key monopoly takeaways | | by Simon Carless | | We read all 700 pages of the 'Apple vs. Epic' lawsuit, so you didn't have to - here's some of the key takeaways for Epic's pitch against App Store monopoly. | | |  | | Paul Graham |
| | How to Think for Yourself | | by Paul Graham | | There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. | |  | | The New Yorker |
| | The Limits of Political Debate | | by Benjamin Wallace-Wells | | In February, 2011, an Israeli computer scientist named Noam Slonim proposed building a machine that would be better than people at something that seems inextricably human: arguing about politics. Slonim, who had done his doctoral work on machine learning, works at an I.B.M. | |  | | The Daily Beast |
| | The Shady Crypto Startup Selling 'Shares' in Celebs | | by Tarpley Hitt | | BitClout lets people speculate on prominent social-media figures, buying tokens that theoretically rise and fall in value with the person's popularity. Yes, it's insane. | |  | | Foreign Policy |
| | The Most Vital 100 Days Since FDR | | by Michael Hirsh | | Just like Roosevelt, Biden must show that government still works. | |  | | GQ |
| | Hip-Hop Loves Cash App, and That Might Be Why Jack Dorsey Bought Tidal | | by Grant Rindner | | The alternative to Venmo has become ubiquitous in rap lyrics. How did that happen? | |  | | Foreign Affairs |
| | How to Contain Putin's Russia | | by Michael McFaul | | A strategy for countering a rising revisionist power. | |  | | Forbes |
| | Saving Local Media Isn't About Demonizing Big Tech | | by David Doty | | High operatic performances about media are making a spectacle out of Capitol Hill these days. They're known as "hearings" but they're really more like hammy vocalizations and their affected tone, sensational eyerolls and melodramatic vocalisms are meant to signal that the pols know full well that Big Tech is to blame for everything that ails the country right now. | | | |  | | | Music of the day | | "Trapped" | | Jimmy Cliff (Live on Letterman) |  | | YouTube |
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| | | | | Music | Media | Sports | Fashion | Tech | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in
everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" | | |  | | | Jason Hirschhorn | | CEO & Chief Curator | | |  |
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