The Watch - More Streaming Services Are on the Way—Watch Out for Your Wallet | The Watch

Episode Date: August 30, 2019

Bloomberg reporter Lucas Shaw joins the show to talk about how the forthcoming streaming wars are going to affect your wallet (3:18), how streaming services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ will release their shows (13:00), and what’s going on with network television (34:09). Host: Chris Ryan Guest: Lucas Shaw Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer podcast network. I'm Liz Kelly. With the NFL season a week away and the ringer's fantasy football coverage gearing up, we have released our first ever fantasy football hall of fame. We assembled a panel of voters including Bill Simmons, Cousin Sal, Robert Mays, Mallory Rubin, and more to induct the 25 best fantasy football players of all time. You can find the rankings by going directly to fantasy football.com. And for more fantasy football coverage, check out the Dantasy Football Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com. And on today's show, I was joined by Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw.

Lucas was here a couple weeks ago. And we started our conversation about sort of the state of the business of streaming. And I was so interested in it in what we talked about a couple weeks ago. I wanted to have Lucas come back because he's written a couple pieces recently of note. primarily about the price point that Apple is going to be looking at for their new service, which should roll out at some point in the fall or early or late fall, depending on, they haven't really announced a date yet for the morning show,

which is sort of the flagship show for the service. And they're going to have a couple of their shows that come out with it. Earlier this week, there was a trailer for Dickinson, which is a show about Emily Dickinson, starring Haley Steinfeld. And I wanted to have Lucasen to talk a little bit about Apple, that price point, And then obviously a rolling longer conversation about where we're at with streaming services. It seems like we're emerging into a time where we're going to have like essentially six big companies programming a lot of this content. And what that means, even with these umbrellas under which things like FX or USA or whatever are going to go under, what does that mean for us?

What does that mean for our wallets, especially if there's a recession next year? and what it means for the kind of shows that we watch. And Lucas had a lot of really interesting thoughts. We talked a lot about Netflix, a lot about Disney, a lot about Apple, and a lot about what do you do at the end of the month when you get a bill and how you decide about what you're going to spend your money on. So it was a fascinating conversation with Lucas,

a little bit of housekeeping. On Monday, obviously it's Labor Day, so not a lot going on. We will be running the audio for number one boys, me and Jason Concepcion's Succession After Show. Now, a note, Succession is actually on tomorrow, Friday. HBO Go is putting Succession up on HBO go before the long weekend or for the long weekend because that's what HBO does.

They did that with True Detective on Memorial Day, I think. So you can watch Number One Boys after you watch Succession. I think we're putting that up tomorrow. So that's available. But Monday's pod will be the audio from Number One Boys. It'll be our Succession Breakdown. It's a doozy. If you're not watching Succession, I don't.

If you're not watching Succession, I don't know why you're listening to The Watch. And then we'll be back Thursday. Hopefully Greenwald will be chatting about a lot of different stuff. So I will strive to make it clear what shows we're talking about in advance so that you guys can keep up with our viewing habits here at The Watch. Let's get into my conversation with Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg. I am so happy to be joined for the second time by Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw. Lucas, what's it?

I really like your newsletter, too, that you send out that people can read on Medium, but I suppose they could also subscribe to. What's that called? It's called Hollywood Torrent. Yeah, I came up with it in my previous job. I worked for a site called The Rap because I was upset that none of my friends were reading what I wrote.

I worked for a Hollywood trade publication. Who cares? Who gives a shit? What's published on the rap? So I just started sending out copy and paste the headline in the subject line in Gmail. Uh-huh. And then copy and paste the story into the body, and it started with like 35 close family friends.

And it just kind of grew from there. Yeah, then it had morphed into me trying to do a digest. I was very early on the newsletter train, but I also then never, I didn't fully commit myself to it. So now you have newsletters in the media and entertainment space like Brian Stelter one or the Hollywood Reporter has one. This guy Dylan Byers have one. They send it every day. And I just, like, it is not my job, so I can't do that. But I've tried to be good about sending it out once a week.

There's a long-running basketball one that I'm subscribed to called by the guy Tom Ziller, who works over at SB Nation. I think it's good morning basketball. and I don't understand how he does it because it's there when you wake up no matter what and it's got stuff from last night and I just can't imagine the discipline it takes. Yeah, that's commitment. I mean, I remember I was actually at a show.

I went to a concert in New York when I was there earlier this summer and Brian from CNN was there and we're like watching the show in a certain point he just left the show to sit in this suite we were in and type out the newsletter for a couple hours. So Lucas usually, you know, he typically writes on Bloomberg about the the business of streaming, well, among other things,

but I'm really fascinated by his work because it really clearly kind of outlines the direction things are going and has really good information, really good insights. And Lucas, you wrote a piece on the 20th, you co-bile lined a piece on the 20th about the price point that Apple was going to be starting with with their original programming. So I wanted to kind of get into that as a way to have like a broader streaming worse conversation because obviously Andy and I talked a little bit

about D-23 and the Mandalorian. and some Disney Plus stuff on Monday. And in this sort of dead period of August, I feel like we're spending it kind of wondering what's going to happen next. So it does seem like there's going to be a big six. Like we've kind of been talking about that with Netflix, Apple, Disney Hulu, the HBO Max,

Amazon, and then a Comcast universal product to come, correct? I would say number six is either going to be that Comcast product or whatever CBS and Viacom do, because CBS already has all access and showtime. Yeah. And if you think about All Access, they are now going to put all the Viacom, not all, but a lot of the Viacom programming, and that's all of a sudden you'll have all the Nickelodeon shows that your kids will want to watch probably in All Access. You might have some reality programming from MTV or VH1. The Paramount Movies will go into the Showtime. Would Yellowstone and stuff like the Paramount Network necessarily go there? I don't know. They have to decide whether it lives on All Access or Showtime, but I would assume a show like that would live in one of those two places. which you can buy as a bundle.

It's not that different from what Disney's doing with Disney Plus and Hulu, where you can buy them independently or you'll be able to buy them both together for 12 or 13 or whatever it is a month. Yeah, and a bunch of people on our watch Facebook group have been talking about, I guess there was like a D-23, like,

lock it in at this price price that was coming out of the convention? Yeah, I did not go. My colleague Chris Palmieri did, and they seem to have all these stands set up because the people who go to D-23 are like true Disney fans, the people who will be. by the annual pass to the parks.

I saw a lot of them were very irate by which panel talks they couldn't get into. Yeah. And so I think they have some lock-in where you can get it at a discount, but you have to commit for three years. I mean, look, Disney is going to try to position it so that they hit the biggest number out of the gate the fastest. And I have to assume that unless Apple comes up with some crazy, with some kind of bundling where a bunch of people get it for free on day one, that Disney will come out of the gate the

fastest, both because they have a bunch of diehard fans already. Yeah. And because it's just Disney and their machine and they know what they're doing. Yeah, right. They know how to operate a rollout. So let's talk a little bit about Apple, though, because one thing we didn't talk about on Monday was the, I would say almost casually dropped trailer for Dickinson, the forthcoming Emily Dickinson show that's going to be on Apple that starts Haley Steinfeld and looks

to be like the favorite meets Riverdale, I guess, would be a kind of. one way to sum it up? It was strange. I watched it sometime this week, and it had a lot of that they kind of put the cursive in the trailer, and it's a lot, and it's kind of Haley Steinfeld, who plays young Emily Dickinson, emodding, and that's very...

Millennial Emily Dickinson. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit in a totally different way of what kind of Apple's version of a euphoria, where they're like, most of their programming is going to be for an older audience like HBO, but they do want something for that young adult segment that's maybe a little bit edgy. And nothing says 2019, like Emily Dickinson.

No, I actually, I thought it was, it looked really well done if, like, one of those really high concept, like, you're going to really have, like, a small landing zone for something like that? Yeah, I don't know who's watching an Emily Dickinson show. Well, let's talk about a little bit, like, how they watch it. So in the piece that you co-byline, you were talking a little bit about, you know, the places in which you're going to be able to watch this stuff, which is on Apple TV, the device. Yep. It'll be built into some Samsung TVs. Yeah, the Apple, the TV app, or the original series will only be available in TV Plus, which is going to be a paid version of this app. Apple's made deals with some partners. It'll be in some Samsung TVs. I think it'll be on the Roku set-top boxes.

It'll be on a variety of that I don't remember if they made a deal with Amazon. I don't think they have a deal with Android for Android phones. Okay. But this is Apple acknowledging that because it's TV box is an event. third or fourth, it's only available in, I don't know, 15 million homes. And it's not cheap. For this video service to really work, it has to be in as many places as possible. And do you think there will be like a web-based, like a browser-based version of this? Like, can you log into Apple.com slash TV and watch shows?

We had a conversation about this in March when they had their big song and dance in Cooper Tino and Brock trotted out all the stars. At that time, I think they said no. But they have not said a lot. I mean, Apple is a notoriously secretive company. And even the story that we did last week, you know, we had to piece together on our own, and Apple is generally not interested in cooperating. So the big sort of takeaways that I got from that piece, aside from the fact that this is obviously,

if not a pivot, at least like a venture into the world of services by Apple, which is they're looking to basically provide to diversify what they do beyond hardware and phones. and that kind of thing, where they're looking to really push iCloud, this Apple TV product, credit card. Apple Music, the credit card, and Apple News. Right. And try to generate more revenue from that, right? Yeah, the macro Apple story is that it's one of the most successful and valuable companies in the world,

but that the growth of iPhone sales has slowed. And so if they want to move the company forward or make sure that they keep growing 30, 40, 50 percent a year, they need to invest someplace else. and so they've chosen this sort of amorphous category of services, most of which fall under this executive Eddie Q, who's one of CEO Tim Cook's top lieutenants. And so they're making bets on a bunch of different areas, and their hope is that if a couple of those pan out

and are the next iTunes to the next app store, their company is going to look great for many years to come. And you listed the five. Apple Music is already a pretty big success. Sure. You know, they have 60 plus million subscribers. It's not, doesn't seem like usage is as high as it is on something like Spotify, but it is already established as the number two streaming service in the world.

The news service, which has been out for several months, feels like a bit of a flop, but it may be too early to call it. And then the credit card and the video, and I think there's a gaming one. Arcade, yeah. Yeah, those are all coming. You know, ICloud, I don't know the latest numbers on those. But the video and the credit card are kind of the two sexy ones because there are going to be a lot of touch points.

You'll have a lot of people talking about them. With credit card, it's like finance and Apple going into a whole new area. and with video, all of a sudden Apple is competing with Netflix and Disney and making shows with movie stars. I've been kind of curious to read about, I was trying to figure out whether or not Apple music is a good analog for what they're doing with TV. Because you've got the actual functional, this is how I listen to my music, old school iTunes part of it. And this is how I buy music and this is how I put together playlists or whatever. And then there's the other element, which was sort of beats, beats radio, some of the, the editorial components, the music discovery element of it,

and some of the original content that was coming out of that. Obviously, the TV Plus idea is a much bigger operation and it involves a much more well-known people to some extent. Jennifer Aniston is a bigger name than Zane Lowe or whatever. But is that kind of the model that they're following? Or this idea that, because it does seem like also in your piece, you talk a little bit about how unlike these other services, the Apple service isn't going to come with a built-in library of content.

Right. Yeah, I mean, that to me is, is one of the big question marks around this and why the pricing is such a question. If they're going to charge $10 a month for that service, they're charging $10 a month as if you only had the HBO originals and there was nothing else to watch on HBO. Now, I get it. It's different.

There's not a live feed that they have to fill. But if you think about the services you pay for, they don't just release original shows every week or every month. They have a bunch of stuff you can go and watch from the past. And Apple is not doing that. Their whole play, it seems like, is using big, stars. So they're like only making deals with celebrities that you know by one name, Reese, Jen, Oprah. They want those. Mamoa. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty, it's not there. There's not like a ton of

Moas. Yeah, Aquaman. That works. They want that one, they want those people that can sell the service on their own. I expect long term that either Apple will realize that it needs to fill out the library in some way or they'll bundle. And if you pay for music, you get the video service for free. If you buy the credit card, you get the video service for free. If you get the video service, you get something else at a discount. Maybe it's all built into if you buy a new iPhone, you get a year of this and a year of that for free. I mean, the model is, for something like this is Amazon Prime, where people pay for Prime for the shipping and they get all sorts of other stuff for free, and it allows Amazon to, you know, tout how many customers they have and also push the original

series. I have to imagine Apple is going to do something like that. So the number that's being thrown around is $9.99 with some caveat. right? Yeah. So that's at least reported that they're thinking $9.99 a month. Yeah, we heard that they were

thinking about it. It's not final. And how the bundling is going to work out is not clear. But that's the ballpark. It's the same price as music and news. So it seems like they like that price.

Right. And then beyond that, you also reported a little bit about the idea that they might do something where, hey, the first three episodes are free or there's like a kind of teaser, teaser offer,

and then they would actually ask for subscription. I don't, they could do that. The part of the release that I heard from multiple people was that they would release a few episodes and then go weekly. So it's sort of a hybrid of the traditional TV model, which is once a week, and the Netflix model, which is everything at once. And so that way, they give you enough at first that you can kind of sink your teeth into it and figure out if you like it, but then stretch out the show, both so that it gets people coming back and because they just they need to they don't have enough programming. So let's talk a little bit about the binge mode model.

The binge mode model, the binging model, the binge TV model, because we're coming out of this interesting month where at least in terms of like, say the small sample size of like the office that I work in, it's a really good example of successions on every Sunday and on every Monday people come in and talk about it, which is, I guess, like, exactly what HBO wants to be having happened. Is that everybody in offices all over America are like, damn, you see Succession last night?

And to a lesser extent that's happening with righteous gemstones, and there's conversation about these shows that happens incrementally over the course of its run. And then there's Mind Hunter, which 10 of us watched immediately all weekend and completely inhaled. And some people are watching piecemeal, but the conversation is a lot less defined because nobody knows where each other is in the season, or if they've yet to catch up on season one even, or whatever, or they're planning on doing it during Thanksgiving.

So I guess I'm curious as these new services start to roll out, what are you hearing about their thinking about how they're going to release their shows? Well, they're all taking different approaches. You know, Netflix has been pretty stubborn about the all at once, with a few exceptions, some of kids programming. HBO has stuck with the weekly. It sounds like Disney Plus, at least with Mandalorian, is going weekly. And I'd assume that they'll do that with a bunch of their shows.

Apple is kind of in the middle. Hulu has experimented with lots of different models. Yeah, I think like they put up like four episodes of four weddings and a funeral and then another batch. But I think for something like I, if I read it correctly, like looking for Alaska will just go up as is. But I think Handmaid's Tale was weekly. Yeah. So everybody's experimenting. I don't know what the right answer is. As a consumer myself, I prefer weekly.

I like, you know, I watch TV on Sunday nights usually. I like having succession just waiting there. for me. I can watch an hour. I can then have a week to not worry about it and then watch it again that following Sunday. And not worry about somebody coming in on Wednesday. Be like, did you see episode seven yet, dude? Yeah. Right. But I don't know because look, like there's this analyst Rich Greenfield who just loves all things Netflix. And he thinks that they've never done anything wrong. And I've seen him tweeting a lot about how it's so clear that people prefer the binge approach because of Netflix's success. And I feel like that's sort of a false logic because I don't think

that Netflix has succeeded because of the binge release. I think Netflix succeeded because they got rid of ads. I think Netflix succeeded because it's on demand and people like being able to go in there. And I do think people like binging, but you don't have to release everything new binging. Like, Succession I'm watching every week on HBO, and I like it that way.

Euphoria, I sort of skipped. I had other things going on, but every single woman I'm friends with loves that show. And so at a certain point, I'm probably going to binge it start to finish in a weekend, and that's fine. But it doesn't mean that they had to release it all at once. I think the more shows we have, the harder it gets to release them all at once.

Like, Netflix does that because it's going for volume, and it thinks that people like to binge, and clearly some people do. But Netflix has also started to see that a lot of it shows, like, people don't finish them because they'll watch those first four or five episodes, and then they're not reminded that it's coming back. So they're not going to go back and watch episode seven or eight, whereas because you release something weekly, I think it's harder for people to fall off if they're committed to it.

Does the binge give them some sort of goose time spent on service number? Like, does that number of this person watched nine hours of Netflix on Sunday really, like, get them going? Yeah, well, it's a big part of how they evaluate shows. So I did a piece earlier a couple weeks ago about the whole, there's been a debate in Hollywood all summer, like about how quickly Netflix canceled shows. Right. And this is coming off of, like, Tuka and Birdie. There was Tuka and Birdie and the O-A, and they canceled at least a dozen shows this year,

and probably a lot more than that. And it fed this perception that no show on Netflix lasts more than two or three seasons. Like I had a friend come up to me at a barbecue who works on a show and was convinced that that show was not going to make it past season three. Now, the data says that Netflix actually cancel shows at the same rate as most other TV networks. But they do assess those shows in a slightly different way. Like their metrics, you talked about time spent, is. something that they really do look at. They're seeing what is the completion rate for a show? Do they just watch the first four? Do they watch all eight? How long are they spending watching? It probably does

give an advantage to a show that has more episodes. But what we've, by and large, seen Netflix do is they're cutting the number of episodes in a season, and they're cutting the number of seasons in a show because people aren't finishing. Yeah, that's really fascinating. Because I mean, I'm just watching, I watched over my wife's shoulder last weekend, the last Orange is the New Blacks. season, which even she as a big fan was like, I skipped a whole season of this show, which is usually not what in these last 10 years that we've been taught, like, you're supposed to be this avid consumer of a show. And then once you've kind of given into it, your fandom is, or at least your attention is

completely concentrated on it. And it's not like the way it was in the 80s where, you know, you would watch like five episodes of Valley Law and made me miss five episodes. And then you'd kind of come back as it was on on Thursday night. or whatever. And it does seem like they're trying to balance that with like the actual physical capability people have of watching

50 episodes of a TV show, right? Do you know a bunch of people besides your wife who watched the final season of Orange? Anecdotally, like a few. I mean, like I think I'm increasingly having a hard time. I find this conversation to be really interesting because

obviously in the last three or four years there's been a lot of conversations across the board about what behavior in coastal cities versus what actual people out in America just do with their daily lives but anecdotally around the office yeah like a couple of people were like

oh Orange was really moving this this season or whatever but I didn't know that it was in its seventh season like I had no idea it had been going on that long partially because I don't think it I think of it in those terms what about you did you did you I watched the first two maybe three seasons of that show and stopped and I don't really know other people who watched it. Like when Netflix is coming off, it had a bad second quarter.

And everybody thought this third quarter is going to be huge. They had stranger things. They had money heist. They had Orange. And I was sitting there going like, I get why Orange is in that list because it was early. It's a legacy show for them almost. But I don't know many people who are still watching it. But to your point, anecdotal evidence means less and less.

There's so many shows. It's so fractured. You know, everybody I know is watch, or not everyone. everybody, but a lot of people are watching Succession, and I'm sure that nobody in the middle of the country or very few people are watching that show. Yeah, the numbers for that show are not astronomically high. I mean, like, it's not anywhere. I don't even know that it's as well watched as like True Detective, right? Probably not. It just is very well watched by people in the media because it's about us and we're all narcissists and because it's, and in LA and New York,

because we love watching shows about rich people. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I'm curious, I'm curious how that changes for binging, for people who don't have offices that talk about whether or not they've seen Mindhunter's season two in its entirety yet. Like, if you're just a guy or a woman working at a job somewhere and you're just like, I work in insurance or I work in software or something like that, but I do love TV. And maybe you don't feel like you're under any kind of pressure to keep up with an internal conversation about, like, a season of a show. I mean, I think that, like, I'm probably in, like, a very specialized percentile of anxiety about falling

behind on stuff. Right. Well, there are probably most people, I mean, across the country, are more excited that were a few days away from football coming back and from any show coming up in the next few weeks. No, I think you're probably right. That being said, though, it was

interesting because Bill had Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the show this week, and it's a great interview if people haven't checked it out. But while I was listening to it, I was thinking about whether or not succession could have the run that VEP has had. which is essentially like a decade-long run of like relevance for that entire run.

And how exactly what you're saying, something like Orange or a bunch of the Netflix shows have a hard time maintaining that kind of buzz around them going into season four or five where people are like, oh, they're that showing back? Do you think that has something to do with their inability to actually say, hey, this two and a half month time period and the calendar, that belongs to this show? Yeah. That's the kind of, that's this season. Whereas essentially it's, it's a weekend.

And to be quite candid, Netflix has been doing some pretty weird stuff in terms of promo, like not doing it. I think the difficulty Netflix has getting people to watch seasons four, five, six of a show reflects one just industry problem. Yeah. Not specific to Netflix, which is there's just so much. And so people, most shows have a hard time sustaining. And we're always going to be more excited about the shiny new thing than we are, like, season four of something. Right. And then there's the issue specific to Netflix, which is what you talk about, which is that people, they finish it in a weekend or a week, and then they don't think about it for a while. And so maybe they aren't quite as excited about it. Like, I think about this with Dear White People, which is a show that I really like. Me too. I watched, I remember watching both the first and second season in like a weekend because they're half an hour episodes. They're really easy to digest. The third season came out this summer. And I got excited. And I started, I think I watched one episode.

but then I didn't keep it up, and I don't know if I'm going to go back and watch it. I probably will at some point. And Netflix does not... Netflix is still figuring out the promotion game. For the longest time, the way to promote for Netflix was just in the app. They figured they would build a big enough audience,

and then they could use the algorithm to direct people to the shows that the people liked. And they generally knew what you like. They knew what your wife like. They know what I like. They know what all of your coworkers like. That is harder, harder as there are more shows.

If Netflix is the only place people are going when they get home and turn on their TV, which is true for a certain segment of the population, they don't have to worry about them. But for everybody else who is being pulled in six different directions, Netflix does have to market more, which is why their marketing spend, I think, has consistently gone up over the past several years. It has, but it almost feels as though it was impossible to get through this early summer without knowing that euphoria and succession were coming. Because if you watched Game of Thrones every week, every Sunday,

there was two minutes of, hey, just by the way, there's the show Euphoria coming, Drake executive producers, Zendaya's in it, you got to watch it. You got to watch it. You got to watch it. And by the time it came on, I was like, I give up. I'm in. You know what I mean? But with Mine Hunter, I saw a billboard on Hollywood and Highland, I think. Right, which people in most parts of the world are not seeing. And a teaser that went up on YouTube.

And that was it. And then my favorite show on television came back over a weekend. And I loved it, and we obviously have done a ton of stuff on it. Mine Hunter is your favorite show on TV? I think so. I think that in succession are my two favorites, yeah. I mean, in the last couple of years. I acknowledge that it's not...

No, I have not seen it, and I've heard very, very divergent takes on it. Some people think it's boring in Drek, and some people think it's amazing, and I don't know where I'm going to land. I get... It really depends on your capacity for Fincher, you know, because I think that his sort of, his look and his tone Like, it's like, if you thought Zodiac was David Fincher's best movie, yes. You'll love mine. Okay.

Yeah. But let's get back to talking a little bit more about some of these services. I'm curious about the relationship. I'm curious about whether or not this is going to be the way it is for like eight years. Do you think that any of these six, whatever, and with some variance there, they are looking at it like we're, this is the new era of six networks. and pretty much most of the content, with a few exceptions, there's going to be... I mean, even...

Who don't even knows? Like, FX could just be a function of the Disney Plus Hulu landscape in a couple of years. In many ways, I think, yeah, FX will be a sub... You know, Disney Plus has the sub-brands. It has Lucasfilm. It has Marvel. It has Disney. It has National Geographic.

I think the further we go on, the more FX is basically a Hulu sub-brand. Sure. And then I'm even having a hard time wrapping my head around when I see announcements of stuff that's going to be on HBO Mac. How is that different? I'm like, oh, wait a second. Wait, there's a Gossip Girl. HBO's rebooting Gossip Girl?

And it's like, no, it's, they have the IP. Warner's is making it. It's just going to be under this umbrella. I really want to know how the companies decide what goes where. Because if you're Disney and you have FX and ABC and Nat Geo and these cable networks that you still are programming a lot of, but you also have Disney Plus and Hulu, how do you do you do? direct the best show to ABC? Do you direct it to Disney Plus? You can say the show will sort of land wherever is the logical home, but FX and Hulu can make shows that are really similar. And ABC and

Freeform are going to make shows that are really similar to what's on Disney Plus. And the decision making for some of that is separated because Disney Plus had its own team of executives and then the TV networks have their own team of executives. And it's the same as true at AT&T and WarnerMedia where you have a programming team at HBO. And then you have a programming team at HBO. Now, sources swear that they're all communicating well and great. But I'm sure. John Landgraf might not be thrilled when like some show is a big hit for Hulu that could have helped FX. He'll be, you know, he'll be generous in public and say all the right things because he's very adept. But I'm very curious about what happens there.

Well, I mean, and we're not very far removed from the time period when a lot of these premium networks were establishing their own aesthetic. You know, in the way that were Cinemax had like a sort of bare-knuckle genre feel to it, or showtime was a kind of, hey, it's like prestigious version of CBS shows or something. Or HBO obviously did what HBO did. There's like there was a layer of gloss and kind of excellence that we associated with a lot of their shows. And now that it's all kind of, they're all kind of going into this one harbor and we're, and we're kind of picking and choosing what we want. I mean, I don't have like a ton of personal experience for this kind of stuff, but I do remember working, when I worked at MTV, kind of like in the, you know, the first,

I guess it was like 2007, I worked on what became urge, which was their streaming, an early streaming music service that they worked on there that they eventually sold to Rhapsody. But I just remember from my experience at MTV, which I enjoyed, was still like, there's VH1, there's Nickelodeon, there was all these sub-brands of VH1 and MTV, and there would be projects that would come through the building. and there would be a lot of like territoriality about like, well, who kind of gets to own this Foo Fighters album?

Who gets to own this Rihanna album or whatever? And like, what is, what are the asks being made? And in a way, like those corporations, that's the story of working in a conglomerate like that. Right. Well, there's also, I mean, there's the volume problem they now face. You're talking about defining the brand

and what each network stood for. Can you sustain that as you double and triple the amount of shows that you make? if FX is now responsible for making 50% more programming and same with HBO, even removed from the streaming service question, can they make as, can they sustain equality and tone across all those shows with not that many more resources in terms of people?

Sure. Because, like, they all like to hate on Netflix for the amount of crap that it releases. Like, for every narcos or for every mind hunter, there's six shows that nobody's heard of. Right. Are FX and HBO going to trend in that direction? Right. And you can, I mean, anybody who's a writer can also think about it.

Like, if you're going to do better work, if you only have to write four or five stories in a month, than if you have some quota and you have to do three stories a day, it's just natural. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Luminary, a new podcast subscription service with some of the best content around. I am excited about Luminary because it is the only place you can listen to the newest show on the Ringer Network. Breakstuff, the story of Woodstock 1999. This is definitely a podcast you can't miss. In 1999, a music festival took place in upstate New York that became a social experiment.

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more consolidation in in the future or do you feel like we're kind of like at an even point? I mean I know it's really hard to project but in terms of like both in terms of of buying up library but in terms of like hey by the end of the day like it's going to be really hard for some of these smaller, like for lack of a better term, mom and pop streaming services or small channels that don't have a home to continue? Yeah. In terms of really big consolidation, we're mostly done with, the one exception is there's a bunch of companies floating, like the CBS Viacom company and Discovery, which owns a bunch

of cable networks and AMC networks and a few kind of MGM. There are all these companies that are really small now. relative to the giants that you listed. And most people assume that they will have to merge or get bought or sell in some way. Or just become like production companies or something, yeah. You could certainly see at a certain Netflix or Apple deciding that they need to buy a library at some point to fill it out. I'm not saying it's going to happen. But Disney has a deep library.

HBO Max is going to have a deep library. Comcast has a pretty deep library because they've been making movies for 100 years or they own studios that have been making programs forever. One of the tech companies that doesn't have as deep a library could ultimately go that way. But most people do see, at least, to answer a question you sort of teased earlier, Netflix, the AT&T people, I think Disney, they do see there's going to be like five or six networks. And they just want to be at the table. And they just want to be one of those that people pay for. They want to be part of the $100 that everybody spends in a given month. Apple and Amazon have totally different motivations.

And so it's hard to group them in the same category. Because it's one product of many that they have. Yeah, Amazon views TV as a way to bring in more customers who then shop more on its website. Apple is going to view the video service. Sure, it's a nice way to make extra money, but it also is maybe another reason for somebody to have an Apple device, or it's part of a broader services bundle. They would like to be one of those five or six networks, but it's not, like, Tim Cook is not going to sleep tonight going, oh, my God, I really hope that Apple TV Plus is one of the four TV. Morning show really hits.

Yeah, right. Like, he cares. Sure. He's going to watch the trailer. He's going to show up at the big event. But he's way more concerned about the trade war with China right now than he is about the Dickinson trailer. Sure. Maybe we all should be.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about this may be a question from like the 1800s for all I know. But is there such a thing as a network response to all of this? A network TV response. Now, we should state up front. NBC, CBS. Not really, I guess Fox sort of. But all of these networks are essentially associated with one of these big streaming services anyway in one way or another. I was like very curious, this is sort of an aside, but after I saw once upon a time in Hollywood and watching like watching like bounty law type shows, I was like maybe I'm going to get really back into like watching normal TV, you know.

And so I was like, oh, maybe I'll like watch CBS. I'll watch like FBI and stuff. So I was like looking through the fall schedule and it's like, what if there's something really? good coming up on network TV and I just haven't heard about it. And I was going through like a slide show on TV line of all the fall shows and I came across a council of dads. When Scott, a loving father of four, has his entire life's plan thrown into upheaval by a cancer diagnosis. He calls on a few of his closest allies to step in as backup dads for every stage of his growing family's life. And I was like, so the answer is no. The answer is no on that one. Who are the backup

dads? They look like a bunch. I think there was like a guy. who always plays a secret service guy on, like, West Wing. So it was pretty anonymous, but I was just, like, wondering, like, is there a secret, like, lost waiting for me on ABC this fall that I don't know about? And it does not seem to be the case. Is there even a plan in these networks, as, like, in terms of terrestrial network television, or are they just kind of like, hey, you know, your uncle watches FBI and NCIS. Like, that's where we're fine, and we also have live sports.

They would say there's a plan, but, look, you mentioned live sports. That's the real driver for most of those networks, especially like the new Fox. They're going to have football and wrestling and baseball. They have so many sports. They don't need that much entertainment programming. The rest, I assume, look, they know that they're speaking to an older audience. You know, the demo for CBS, I think, is probably 20 years older than the demo for All Access, which is the related streaming products.

So they are sort of speaking to different people. But that's what all these programming executives are going to have to decide, because Dana Walden at Disney, she is overseas ABC and Freeform. But her studio is also going to be making shows for Hulu and Disney Plus. And it's really, I guess, in some ways up to her where she wants to direct some of those really good shows. She knows that probably the best Star Wars Marvel programming will just go to Disney Plus. Sure. But she also ran Fox's studio when it made Modern Family.

She could put that on... That show did go on ABC. It was a source of some tension because it was a Fox show, but it was on ABC. Yeah, right. They shoot it on the Fox lot. Yeah.

Now it's... That's all the same company. The next modern family could certainly be on ABC. Now, are people craving the next modern family? I don't know. But the ratings for some of these shows

are still pretty strong. I mean, CBS is making the same kind of comedies that it has for... forever. I think they probably are a little more loyal to those shows because it's so hard

to bring... break out and bring in a new one. I'm sure the ceiling is pretty high too, right? Like, I mean, it's just like if you make bowl or FBI or whatever, it's, it, there is just like a baseline of somebody who's just like, oh, it's Wednesday night. FBI is on, you know, and it is kind of the same behavior that they're talking about. And once upon a time in Hollywood, somebody goes home and they're like, you know, bounty law is on.

Yeah. That's great. So, okay, we're not necessarily looking at like any kind of revolution coming. I'm sure that there will still be, that that is still going to be the home for a lot of, of situational comedy, whether it's like single cam or multi-cam. Right. It seems like the good place is a good example of something that like feels right on NBC, even though I think it gained a lot of traction because it went on Netflix too, right?

Does that make sense? Yeah, and there's certain types of programs that the streaming services haven't figured out. It's not just sports, which most people still keep on broadcast TV, but the kind of the topical humor, the late night shows, that's been a really, that's been really hard for Netflix and Hulu and others to crack. And I don't know that that's going to change anytime soon. It just doesn't seem to work as well in an on-demand environment. Sure. And morning shows and national news shows, which are just like still like the way a lot of people interact with that kind of stuff. Anything that's live or right off the news still feels right on a

linear network. And it'll stay there for a while. Now, it's possible. I think one question people have is, okay, let's say there are all these signs that are headed towards a recession, right? So let's say sometime in the next 12 months, we have one. What do people cut first? That was what I was going to ask. Do they cut Netflix or do they cut whatever streaming service or do they cut their pay TV package? There are some people who are going to be able to ride it out and keep it all. But I don't know the answer to that question.

Well, especially if we're getting into it like here's another $75 to $100 worth of stuff that you might be interested in buying per month. So add that to the fact that times might get a little tight coming up. Well, the prevailing wisdom among media executives is that the amount that people spend is pretty fixed. It's just how it's allocated. So right now you've seen a decline. The decline in pay TV subscriptions has correlated with a rise in subscription on video on demand. And so you basically just moved money from one pot to the other, but the overall money being spent is pretty much the same. Do they have, do you have like a number in your head? $100 a month.

$100 a month. It is more or less, I guess, what people spend on TV. I'd like to talk to you about. Spectrum television. I would bite your hand off for a $100 a month Spectrum cable bill. Mine, I only pay like 45 from Spectrum. Do you just get Internet? No, they have this Spectrum TV package where you just pick, you get the basic broadcast

networks, and then you pick like 10 or 11 channels. And so I just pick both the places that have TV I like, like, FX, AMC, and then sports. so TNT, TBS, ESPN, Fox Sports One. And I cover pretty much all of my bases with that. I add on HBO and Showtime, and it's a reasonable deal. That's about $45? Not with, I mean, not with HBO and Showtime, but the basic product is like...

And then do you do your cable through Spectrum as well? I mean, sorry, do your Internet providing? So it's an Internet TV, too, so I don't really have a cable box. I have an Internet box, and then the service gets pumped through it. The only downside of it is that because it is dependent on the Internet, if my internet is crappy sometimes, then the quality, like we were watching the Oscars earlier this year, and it froze a couple times.

Right. I guess you're like a second behind on sports, so Twitter will be like, oh my God. There are moments in big sporting events where, because I'm texting with friends, I will have to mute my phone or set it somewhere else at a big moment so that they don't ruin for me what has happened. I mean, I cannot tell you how many times

watching the Eels through DirecTV's app and getting like a... 100 text message is like, Al Shah Jeffrey. And I'm like, what? It's like, that doesn't happen yet. Okay, I got kind of sidetracked there. But so there's $100 a month.

More, that's what, like John Stanky, the head of Warner Media, that's what he says is the spend in a given month for the average consumer. And so if there's a recession, could that go down to 75? Could it go down to 50? Or maybe the number will stay more or less the same.

Maybe it's above it. now because we've had 10 years of unchecked economic growth and it settles back down, or you'll just, and you'll see people making more rational decisions like, okay, we have to cut something. Will that be the moment where cable really falls off a cliff? I mean, it's been shrinking, but could you start seeing it shrink 5% a quarter instead of two or three percent a quarter, which would be really bad news for a lot of companies? Right.

And does that affect the bottom line of some of these streaming services if that happens? Yeah. I mean, look, if there's a flight from ESPN, which I still think, like, ultimately, ESPN has too much live sports to actually, like, crater in any significant way. But if there was ever going to be a moment where people are just like, I just can't pay for this anymore, I'll just watch it online. Like, that would be, would that affect Disney? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're investing in streaming because they think it's the future, but they don't expect a profit from streaming for many years.

So if ESPN starts losing 5% of its sub-base every quarter, that's a huge problem for Disney. I want to ask, this is a pretty nebulous question, but I wanted to sort of end on this. But interrupt me if you have any other stuff you wanted to hit today. I was kind of curious about if you as somebody who largely looks at this from the lens of the business, but have you heard anything?

Have you thought much about? And what do you think about the idea of actual innovation, within the art of television as we kind of entered this era because I think one thing I hear when I talk to people a little bit is there was this moment of like great experimentation that happened

maybe starting with Sopranos where we felt like a lot of the stuff that we weren't finding in movies anymore was showing up on television and even more so if you wanted to get dramatic about it you could be like it's a return to like 70 cinema of real stories or showing up a TV.

All the best writers started working in TV. Now we're getting all the best actors are coming and you can watch sharp objects and you can watch, you know, all these things where it made it feel like, yeah, maybe at the movie theater it's just Hobbs and Shaw or nothing, but man, on TV, you just are, you can't, can't like turn anywhere without seeing something interesting. And I think that a lot of this is just like amusing ourselves to death, but like it does feel a little bit like there, it's gotten a little rote. Like there is, there has not been a breathtaking with the exception of Fleabag. There has not, or Atlanta, there hasn't

not been a show that challenges the conventions of what TV can do in a minute. And I was wondering whether or not that is something that matters at all to these companies. I think it matters in the context for business reasons. So I don't know, I don't know that we've seen some great innovation in some of the really basic formulas like TV show, yes, maybe an episode will be 47 minutes and then an hour and five minutes, but that's not some huge change. Um, What you've seen more of as the volume of shows have made is kind of some improvements in representation. So you brought up Atlanta and Fleabag. There are more really good shows being made by women, being made by people of color than there were before.

Because there are just more opportunities. And because these streaming services know that there's only like, only a certain percentage of the population is white. Only a certain percent of the population is male. You have to try to reach everybody else. It's like one of the big priorities I know with HBO Max is they feel like HBO skews male. So you brought up Gossip Girl. One of the reasons they're doing that, if you look at a lot of their programming, they think that a lot of the original programming should be focused on women

because that is the opportunity for HBO to keep growing. Right, yeah. So is that a revolution in the stories being told? Or like much as kind of the Breaking Bad Mad Men Sopranos, you had this moment where the kind of this like male, anti-hero was the formula. But that was at its time pretty innovative. I don't know that we've seen something quite like that

where there's like the new genre. And with Netflix, you're seeing it now start to make a lot of the types of shows that you used to see on broadcast. Sure. Like the number of times I've talked to people in a reality, PV business, who say that Netflix needs like a big shiny floor show, something like The Voice. Okay.

Like I'm sort of done hearing about that. But that's like the kind of thing that they want now. They need a big traditional broadcast hit. Okay. But I... Like a hospital show or like necessarily like a reality. A reality. Yeah.

That is a big priority for them. Find something like the voice or like Survivor, like who wants to be a millionaire. But creatively, I think it's... Would you have to binge that? They'd have to figure that out. Because that would... There's no way to watch... I've never binge a reality show like that.

No, but there's... I mean, I've even, when I got into Survivor a couple years ago, my wife and I like went back a couple of seasons to watch like quote unquote classic episodes seasons and we could not bring ourselves to do it. Everything about it is it's just like sports. You look forward to the day that it's on. You talk with your friends about what might happen. You watch it and then you talk about what happens afterwards. It means going back to what we were talking about with binging. With the week-to-week releases, it's way more like sports than it is like, oh, I'll watch Olive Orange this weekend. You wouldn't want to watch a season of Survivor over the weekend. Or The Bachelor. Yeah, right. Yeah.

I mean, that would take the whole fun out of it. Also, industries would crater around it. We couldn't do it. But yeah, I guess that's what I'm kind of getting at. I know that there's all this stuff with Quibi and the idea that you can make this short form video, high-end short-form video. I don't necessarily even mean like runtime as much as I do. I kind of wonder what happens if you and I are sitting here in a year and we're like, yeah, those three Apple shows were okay. There was that one episode of the morning show that was pretty good. It looked great. It had Reese Spoon and Jennifer Anderson. So it was like definitely high end, but it was okay.

Right. But it's going to be a lot like every other show. You're probably aren't going to see Apple completely reinvent the way the stories are told. Because if you look at all the new entries, they're just hiring people from the old places. Netflix now employs hundreds, if not thousands, of old studio executives at its Hollywood offices. Apple's studio is led by the two guys who ran Sony's TV studio who've been doing this forever. if you had to pick any place where there's a lot of experimentation, the two I would say are interactive, which is still very, very small, but Netflix now has a slate of about a dozen

interactive shows. Coming off of Bandersnatch. Right. They're making a bunch. They're in the grand scheme of Netflix, still small. But that is a truly different storytelling format. And the other to keep an eye on is international because one of the great things about Netflix to me has been the way it has brought voices from other countries into the country.

consciousness of American consumers, whether it's dark, Casa de Papel, you know, Brazilian shows, so on and so forth. And that's only going to keep going for Netflix because their future is all international. And at a certain point, that's going to happen, have to happen with Disney and HBO. And so you're just going to see an influx of different perspectives and different languages that you weren't paying attention to before. That's a really good way of looking at it. Was there anything else you wanted to hit today? I think that covers it mostly because if we talk about quibby, my brain will explode. Well, I'll only give you seven minutes to talk about it if you wanted to.

Lucas, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time, but it's always so fascinating to talk about all this stuff. You can read Lucas on Bloomberg, obviously, and you can also subscribe to his newsletter, Hollywood Torrent. They can find that just Google Lucas Shaw Medium Hollywood Tour. Yeah, there's a link in my Twitter bio. There's a sign-up page somewhere on a Bloomberg website.

Okay. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll see you again soon. Thanks, Chris.