Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Thursday, January 4th, 2024

How much does branding matter in the streaming video business?

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Thursday, January 4th, 2023. 

DOES BRANDING MATTER IN THE STREAMING VIDEO BUSINESS?
Branding businesses is a complex calculation and how much branding matters to your business depends in part on what you're selling. If you're selling lightbulbs, branding is not so important. If you're selling hamburgers, what potential customers think about your brand matters a lot.

And after covering the streaming video business since its inception, I get the sense that when it comes to branding a platform, a lot more attention is paid to fonts and taglines than some of the nuts-and-bolts branding decisions that are a high priority in other industries. Top executives don't seem to have a real sense of how branding works, other than a bit of "wow, our studio sure has a long history, huh?"

But one of the reasons why branding is important is because it can help provide value to the streamer. I have written a great deal in recent years about the idea of a streaming service's "perceived value." Simply put, perceived value is a customer's opinion of a product's value to him or her. It may have little or nothing to do with the product's market price, and depends on the product's ability to satisfy his or her needs or requirements. In other words, a streaming service is worth what most customers consider to be a fair price for what they're receiving when they subscribe.

There are a lot of factors that influence that perceived value and one of them is the streamer's library. The size, the content mix, the freshness. It's a mushy metric, but it really gets down to the ability of a streamer to answer the subscriber's question about whether the platform has enough of the right shows and movies to make it worth the cost to the subscriber.

One place content availability and branding cross is when it comes to content a service is expected to have. Peacock spent a relatively insane amount of money for the U.S. rights to The Office. Because their calculation was that the show was one of those core programs subscribers would expect to see on the service. Whether or not they intended to watch episodes any time soon.

Which is why I was interested to see that Paramount Global has licensed its roster of Star Trek movies to Max. And they have now disappeared from Paramount+. Which is an interesting decision, given that I suspect if you asked the average streaming customer to list five titles they associate with Paramount+, Star Trek would be near the top.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with licensing out the Star Trek movies. Paramount has been doing it for years and those Star Trek titles have appeared at one point or another on just about every competing SVOD. Licensing the films on a non-exclusive basis would make sense. But while removing them from Paramount+ likely made Paramount a bit more money, it feels like a unforced branding error. Whether subscribers intend on watching them or not, having the Star Trek films unavailable to Paramount+ subscribers certainly doesn't help the service's already challenging issues with perceived value.

SPEAKING OF PARAMOUNT
Deadline has a column from veteran film executive Bill Mechanic, who had success runs at Paramount, Disney and Fox. The column is pretty much what you would expect to read, arguing that the studios have lost their way by chasing the streaming business and the success of Netflix.

He also takes some shots at former Warner Media head Jason Kilar, although in typical Hollywood fashion, he doesn't mention Kilar by name:

When WB disappeared into the smothering embrace of AT&T, they put someone in charge who was too clever for his own good, in much the same way that MLB owners hired a bunch of book-smart but street-dumb Ivy League analytics experts who used statistics to run their teams into the ground. The AT&T/WB exec chased the White Whale of streaming and myopically put a dagger in the film world while dragging down WB’s own finances to the point it was wiped away by an opportunistic Discovery — the same one now trying to absorb Paramount clearly for reasons that have nothing to do with movies. The studio is simply collateral damage.

Mechanic complains about Kilar's decision to release movies on a day-and-date schedule, seeming to forget that the decision was driven by a pandemic that had shut down theaters. 

At the end of the piece, Mechanic longingly notes that Skydance is interested in acquiring the studio and executive David Ellison "grew up loving films." Which might be helpful if Skydance was able to get access to just the studio. But that would involve chopping Paramount up for parts, which is the very thing Mechanic argues against in the rest of his piece. He seems to forget that Paramount Global is more than a movie studio, some buildings and a catalog of IP. It's linear TV channels, several streaming services and all sorts of ancillary businesses. And the only way to break out that studio (and likely the studio lot and the library) is to chop up and sell off the company like it was a stolen sports car.

READER FEEDBACK
I received some interesting comments about my piece yesterday on short TV seasons. Someone named Wise Sage shared these thoughts:

The problem with your argument defending smaller TV seasons is that it presumes that the best version of TV involves the serialized story arc. You joke about the pointlessness of episodes which slow down or veer away from the all-important reveals and cliff-hangers of some big unfolding uber-narrative. However this was not even something TV did for the first fifty years of its existence -- except maybe on soap operas. Individual episodes stood alone for the most part. The network could (and often did) air them out of shooting order. The viewer could miss a few shows and not feel lost and not need a two minutes spread-sheet of re-cap at the top to jump back in.

Shows were designed to be little standalone one act plays with human-sized stakes and complications -- never big manic rollicking plots with the fate of our entire universe and several other quantum universes on the line. The idea of watching a TV show was to bond each week with characters and immerse yourself in their interesting world. If the show survived a few seasons you would naturally get to know these folks better, see new facets and watch them develop a bit as people, but rampaging ever-forward toward some "important" plot culmination was not the priority -- and I think the shows were better for it.

The current TV landscape is a frenetic glut of disposable sameness -- "This slick new show didn't grab you? Not to worry. We'll throw another one at you next week, and then ten more the week after that. Anything to keep you engaged." New confusing limited-episode programs constantly thrust at us, many of which undoubtedly started out as unsold screenplays, which got diced into breathless eight-episode sassy slam-a-roos. And if you actually make it to the final chapter of these plot-driven little novels for TV how many actually serve up an ending worth all the bother? I'll answer this one: Not many.

And Catterbu had this feedback:

I agree that the piece desiring longer seasons was poorly reasoned. I think I would advocate for "right-sizing" based on the nature of the show and streamer. X-Files is a good example of one show where shorter seasons probably would have benefited the show overall. Of course there are the great standalone episodes, but arguably part of why the mythology became so non-sensical was because 20+ episodes needed to be churned out each year (also, there were a lot of BAD episodes that were standalone). My argument is that more shows need to consider something like what Slow Horses does. Especially more episodic shows (sitcoms, but also shows like Poker Face) benefit from getting to put out more episodes as that allows writers and viewers to better understand and build relationships with characters.

Slow Horses releases its seasons every 6-9 months. My argument is that streamers should look at making some cheaper shows designed to run 6-10 episodes every 6-9 months. The Netflix belief that longer seasons tend to have lower completion rates does not really come into play with that much time in between, but viewers still get greater regularity, which can minimize cost in promotion since viewers are less likely to have forgotten about the show over a shorter time period.

I will note that Slow Horses has been able to release seasons every 5-9 months because they have been shooting two seasons back-to-back. So seasons one and two were shot at the same time, although Apple TV+ didn't mention this to anyone publicly when the show premiered.

This is the same approach streamers (particularly Netflix) take with animated shows. They order a full season of episodes and then split them up into smaller "chapters," all the while announcing they've picked up the show for another group of episodes. Even though the episodes have already been completed.

WHAT'S NEW TONIGHT AND TOMORROW

THURSDAY, JANUARY 4TH:
*Barnwood Builders Season Premiere (Magnolia)
*Boy Swallows Universe Series Premiere (Netflix)
*Casey Anthony's Parents Speak: The Lie Detector Test(A&E)
*Daughters Of The Cult(Hulu)
*Delicious In Dungeon Series Premiere (Netflix)
*Dying For Fame(LMN)
*General Hospital: 60 Years Of Stars And Storytelling(ABC)
*Hudson & Rex(UP tv)
*One Night Stay(BET+)
*Reyka (Britbox)
*Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale Series Premiere (Sundance Now)
*Society Of The Snow(Netflix)
*Swamp Mysteries With Troy Landry Series Premiere (History)
*Swamp People Season Premiere (History)
*The Bachelor: The Golden Wedding(ABC)
*The Brothers Sun Series Premiere (Netflix)
*The First 48Season Premiere (A&E)
*The Power Of Film(TCM)

FRIDAY, JANUARY 5TH, 2024:
*Ancient Aliens Season Premiere (History)
*Foe(Prime Video)
*Good Grief(Netflix)
*James May: Our Man In India(Prime Video)
*LOL: Last One Laughing Quebec(Prime Video)
*Man On The Run(Netflix)
*RuPaul’s Drag Race Season Premiere (MTV)
*Sasaki And Peeps Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
*The Demon Prince Of Momochi House(Crunchyroll)
*The Prison Confessions Of Gypsy Rose Blanchard(Lifetime)
*The Unwanted Undead Adventurer Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
*The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
*Where The Devil Roams(Tubi)

SEE YOU FRIDAY!