In Occasional Defense of Piracy: Streaming services getting it wrong.

When piracy of entertainment properties is the only way to improve its own domestic market.  But in no way does this apply to international licenses.  That is a very different set of metrics.

Yar har har!  Hardee harrr har har har harrrr!

Those who fail to learn from the past are... baby boomers.   Only from the boomer mind that thinks it's just too cool to keep up with new developments would a notion of a TV studio acting like a record label make sense. In 1995 having a Blackberry made sense too.  Since these people have insulated themselves in positions of power which no one would dare offer up an incongruous or critical counterpoint, their clunky outdated ideas will drop on top of the existing market only to smash into it like a rusted 1970 Mercury Zephyr into an electric car show. Theirs is the idea of owning a show from top to bottom and forcing an environment where an interested consumer would have to join a paid service just to watch the one good show that's on it.  The days of consumers buying an "album" to get one or two hit songs from it are gone, and it seems as if TV executives don't think that is going to mean anything to them as they try the exact same failed strategy with streaming services.

Nobody... just no one wants this.  Seriously.

If anyone who sees this has seen other stuff written here previously, it would be apparent that I usually take a very negative view of piracy, as it de-values any property and makes it less likely that more of that property will be made.  But in this context, "be made" does not only mean produced, but also be made available to potential consumers/audiences/whateveryouwannacallit.  By not doing so, a vacuum is created which will collapse in on itself, and never is that seen as a profitable venture. Even though these properties lack tangibility in the literal sense, the rules of logistics are going to apply just as they would to any commodity.  Ignore those rules at your own peril, guys.

There is a reason that Nike.com was never the #1 seller of Nike shoes online.  It's because no one goes to a store that sells only one brand of one item.  No one wants to register or any nonsense at a different website for every different product they want to buy.  Amazon made it possible to look "across the shopping isle" to other brands, other items, and alternative products while never abandoning a shopping cart.  Similar thinking in the strategies of TV streaming, forcing potential customers to sign up for an entire service just to get the one thing they want, will similarly kill these studio attempts.  We had Hulu, Netflix, or even (shudder) cable providers, which offered all the programming with little barriers of going in between them as a consumer, push a few buttons, and bam you're watching the other thing you want to watch.  Throw properties behind a paywall of a completely exclusive service with its own user registration and billing cycle?  Yeah, the RVR (reverse value ratio) there is far too big to make it worth it to the point of continuing.

RVR is this but with way more math and specified variables based on regression analysis.  I'd mansplain it to you but your brain would melt.

So why is this even happening if it's so crazy universe ass-plodingly obvious doing so is a terrible idea?  Because baby boomers.  I am serious, baby boomers are desperate to keep other baby boomers running the show rather than allow opportunities to become available to other generations, will literally do anything to stop younger people from ascending to any type of positions where they would have executive authority.  Baby boomers will invent new positions which sound great but don't do anything and put younger people in them, they will abandon entire projects/divisions to get rid of them there youngins, or they will just keep hiring their own generation even if they are way past their expiration date.  The generation that says "there's no such thing as a free lunch" but wants to pay you in "experiences" is gonna keep on truckin' and just say "what the fuck are you gonna do about it?"

The boomer-block.  Why you haven't gotten promoted in over a decade.

They may end up changing the strategy, but boomers won't "learn" anything, they never do.  The reason is actually because the boomer mentality is so conceited that despite having ample opportunity to learn new things when they were new (the internet, corp. strategy, environmental responsibility, logging on to wifi, how to rotate a fucking .pdf), they feel they shouldn't have to learn such things.  They are just too cool for that stuff.  The generation that has such ignorance that finds not until it feels, is not going to avoid a problem in advance.  So like many things boomer, this is another one where the solution is going to have to wait until they run out of other reasons to blame it on until they finally end up having to look into a mirror. 

The show Picard itself isn't actually very good.  This is going to cause a lot of buyer's remorse and trigger a kind of resentment that people on the receiving end of a bait and switch inevitably feel.  It promised so much and delivered a pile of nonsense antithetical to the entire identity of the entertainment entity that is the character Picard and the brand of Star Trek.  This should be no surprise as it's coming from Alex Kurtzman.  They guy who ran the SpiderMan franchise into the ground, who screwed up Universal Monsters so bad it couldn't even get off the ground at all, the mind behind the box-office juggernaut that was The Mummy with Tom Cruise.  Alex "I want a franchise NOW and I don't care what it is" Kurtzman was a bad choice for this.  Also, they've given creative input to Patric Stewart... and he's an awesome guy but he's not a Star Trek Writer.  He's an MCU actor and has been in a rich-person bubble for a long time.  He has so much money he hasn't had to wash his own dishes since before I was even alive, and he's on half-his-age hot trophy wife #3, so, what are we really get from that?  Nothing relatable.

You didn't need me to tell you Star Trek: Picard was gonna suck, it was pretty obvious.

Same has been true with the Harley Quinn series available only through DC Universe.  You see it?  It's not as good as you were thinking it was gonna be was it...?   Sure you're still excited because because of the novelty "ooo animation where they say fuck and tits!  ha! Take THAT people who say cartoons are just for kids... like SPAWN, remember AEON-SPAWN & STIMPY?"  but that will ware off soon enough.  Now imagine you paid for that up front and there's nothing you can do about it.  The warning signs were there.  The delays, and the character design change to full on suicide-squad Harley and away from the original Paul Dini version (which should always be a red flag that someone involved doesn't know what they're doing).  But I am biased in favor of the original version of Harley Quinn and not the Suicide Squad anorexic with a face tattoo played by someone who speaks in a condescending Mary Poppins accent IRL.

Girl you know it's true.