Study Hall Digest 2/24/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Dispatch From the Streaming Wars

As a flurry of new streaming services launch, commentators are wondering aloud which will emerge on top, which will go under, which will steal viewers from which. But the arc of the content universe is long and viewers…..they really fucking love content.

A quick rundown: Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus both launched in the fall, while HBO Max and NBCUniversal’s Peacock will launch in the coming year. On top of industry giants Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, the field is getting crowded with potential ways to waste our precious time on earth by watching streaming video. Each service is racing to put out as much content as possible and to own as much IP as possible. The result is, obviously, a lot of content — a lot of it mediocre. In the battle for our attention, can all these services thrive?

Venture capitalist and opinion writer Matthew Ball, former head of strategy for Amazon Studios, argued that reports of a war have been greatly exaggerated. The thing is, these services have a lot of viewers’ time to compete for. Americans watch an average of 150 hours of TV per month, Ball said, which comes out to about five hours per day. Netflix currently only occupies an estimated 10% of that time. About 75% of video time is still happening on traditional television, but those hours are decreasing as viewers migrate to online streaming. “There is a huge opportunity for more and more services to say, ‘As you shift, make us your destination,’” said Ball. “There is so much video time that needs to find a new home.”

As these new services emerge and find their footing, they will likely carve out a niche and distinguish themselves from their competitors, Ball predicted. The important thing is, different content will be available on different services, and audiences love content. Viewers will likely continue to flip between the services, just like they flipped through channels back when cable was king. (The real problem will be the price of subscribing to all these services, though I predict a bundling service in the future, plus a lot of viewers on their parents’/friends’/ex’s accounts.)

“We will see a lot more of these companies survive and thrive in the streaming war, and that’s a reflection of the fact none of them own all the content and people have insatiable desires for content,” said Ball.

(It’s true. Speaking personally, I binge-watched all of Hulu’s High Fidelity remake with Zoe Kravtiz even though it was just ok, and I’m probably going to watch Love Is Blind on Netflix to see what everyone on Twitter is losing their shit over. You’d think I wasn’t aware that I’m going to die one day.)

Whatever the outcome of the streaming wars, this is just the beginning. “To put this in perspective, cable started rolling out in 1972 and yet there’s still about 15% of TV homes that use broadcast,” said Ball. “Until a few years ago, people still had antennas in their home. The vast majority of video is still on the traditional system. It takes a pretty long time for [the shift to digital] to happen.”

Bernie Breaks the Media

It’s fitting that after a weekend spent in Las Vegas, the Democratic establishment is nursing a catastrophic, existential hangover thanks to a Bernie Sanders caucus landslide. Reporters let out groaning sighs at caucus sites Sanders was winning. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (noted “history guy”) decided that it was a good idea to compare the Jewish senator’s landslide victory to the Nazis invading France. And Skeletor’s brother James Carville theorized that a Bernie win was playing into Vladimir Putin’s strategy for disrupting the election.

The Democratic establishment and the news media have gone full meltdown at the moment when every argument they’ve made for nominating a candidate who is “electable” in the general election is coming true. Sanders won big in Nevada among every age group except the 65+ bracket and swept the Latino, independent, college grad, and non-college degree voting base. He’s also the first candidate in any party to win the popular vote in the first three voting states.

Ever since voting began 3014 years ago in Iowa, even the most minuscule shift has reshaped the media narrative (see: the short-lived Klobmentum), which shows just how flimsy the entire process of speculation is. In one particularly unhinged Politico piece about the post-Nevada meltdown, Matt Bennett from the center-left group Third Way made the case that a Sanders nomination would essentially usher in the end of the world. “In 30-plus years of politics, I’ve never seen this level of doom,” he writes. At least we can take solace in the fact that by the end of the next nine days — which will include two nights of CNN town halls, one more debate, the South Carolina primary, and Super Tuesday — we’ll either have a clear picture of what comes next or watch everyone on MSNBC’s heads explode, Scanners-style. — Chris Erik Thomas

Longread of the Week: The New York Times Magazine published a piece on employees at Google who staged a revolt over the company’s treatment of its employees and over ethical concerns with the company’s products, and either left their jobs or were fired when the company cracked down on agitators. A labor historian weighed in on why they believe Google employees may have set in motion a lasting labor movement: “For one thing, they said, today’s tech workers, unlike earlier generations, have built coalitions beyond the walls of their own company, making it more difficult for employers to isolate them. They have forged alliances across class and job categories, and they situate themselves within a larger political and cultural reaction to the extreme inequality that the tech industry has come to epitomize.”

Everything Else

— In streaming news: WarnerMedia reached a deal that will bring HBO Max and Cinemax content to YouTube TV. It’s the first distribution deal for HBO Max, and is a smart move if they’re looking for an edge over competitors. 70 percent of the time people spent on their phones in 2019 watching entertainment apps was spent on YouTube.

— A year after launching, media company Truly*Adventurous is apparently fulfilling its goal of feeding the insatiable IP machine. The company, which seeks to put out a true story with the potential for development every three weeks, has secured 15 film or TV deals. Impressive, but I’m stuck on the detail in this Deadline piece that the operation is apparently run out of a sailboat in Marina del Ray?!?!?!

— There are a lot of competing visions for the salvation of local news, and here’s a new one out of Marfa, TX, where the office of The Big Bend Sentinel is attached to a cafe and cocktail bar that also serves as a wedding venue. The majority of the paper’s revenue still comes from ad sales, but private events and drinks have helped! It’s a model that’s already been seen in digital media — Refinery29 has been expanding its events business — but the application to local news is a novel one.

— Writer Madeleine Schwartz has launched The Ballot, a website tracking global elections in 2020 that includes dispatches from correspondents around the world.

— When a representative for New Yorker journalist Ken Auletta posted a call for someone to wait in line for the Harvey Weinstein trial to a Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism alumni Facebook group, media Twitter lost it. But in an industry filled with indignities, what’s waiting in line for a few bucks? That’s how the journalist who took the assignment, Eddy Martinez, came to see it, as he wrote in a dispatch for the Columbia Journalism Review. The piece ends on one of the more brutal kickers I’ve read in some time!

— Some good news! Condé Nast will eliminate its use of NDAs in connection with harassment and discrimination. The company made the announcement months after the New Yorker union pushed for the elimination of NDAs in these cases.

— And bad news: Men’s Journal laid off its entire staff this past week. According to Charles Bethea, the magazine will continue as a skeleton operation, but it’s safe to say the magazine as it existed is gone.

— The New York Times did a deep dive on E. Jean Carroll’s termination from Elle. The legendary advice columnist claims her firing was due to Trump’s denial and “ridicule” after she alleged in a book excerpt that he had raped her, but Elle says that is not the case, and insiders at the magazine argued that narrative from Carroll is self-serving: They claim that the contract was terminated due to the high price of the column and the fact that Carroll gave the news-making book excerpt to New York Magazine. Anyway here’s a wild tidbit buried in the Times piece: Carroll was paid $120,000 per year to write one column per month.