what the hell happened to TV all your favorite shows are getting cancelled the few that do stick around make like six episodes every 2 years and all the most popular shows are reruns from 20 years ago I guess people are nostalgic for the good old days when you worked in an office and TV didn't [ __ ] suck somehow even though the average user is now paying more for streaming than we ever were for cable the companies are all losing money and the people who actually make the shows are barely scraping by you know I thought the streaming Revolution was supposed to fix TV and Usher in a golden age of cheap high quality watch when you want entertainment so what the hell happened well the answer is that the entire streaming Revolution was built on a lie that is on the verge of destroying one of the most successful Industries in the world and you know this one is personal to me because I happen to work in this industry but none of us are safe because the big Tech Playbook that that gutted Hollywood is gearing up to annihilate your industry next now before we get into it I just want to thank everybody who supports this show on patreon head to patreon. com adamc Conover you can get every monologue and podcast I put out ad free but more importantly you can join our online community full of smart curious people who love complaining about how screwed up the world is just as much as you do head to patreon. com Adam conon and join us we would love to have you and of course if you like standup comedy come see me on the road head to Adam Conor .
net for all my tickets and tour dates here are some of those dates right now wow come see me adamc con. net remember 2013 we were all eating fro yo and doing the Harlem Shake at the thrift shop with mmore and everything on TV was amazing critics were calling it a new golden age of television and Peak TV TV was such a cultural force that entire websites were devoted to recapping the previous night's episodes and the shows themselves were genuinely incredible you had cuttingedge dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad crowd-pleasing comedies like parks and wreck and new girl edgy satire like vep and Eastbound and Down and massive hits like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead and sure there were some annoying things about the old days of TV there was that big cable bill you had to watch all those Geo caveman ads and you had to wait a whole week to see what wigs they'd wear on the next episode of The Americans a whole week for wigs companies were making bank the writers actors and crew were making a and the shows were so good that people were literally saying that TV was better than movies but you know what today nobody is saying that [ __ ] when you open Netflix or peacock or Max you see a bunch of shows you've never heard of that nobody is talking about I mean which one of these is a real show and which one was mocked up by my producer Tony you don't even [ __ ] know and once you finally find a show you like it gets two six episode Seasons if you're lucky and then it's cancelled I mean what is this England was the Boston Tea Party for nothing and even though it now costs more to have the top streaming services than it did to have cable the streamers are somehow losing money huh maybe it's because the executives keep buying so many ugly ass puffer vests I mean how else could peacock lose almost a billion dollars in one quarter and how in 2022 could Titan of industry and Canadian tuxedo Ruiner David zaslov lose Warner Brothers Discovery over 2 billion in one quarter I mean we knew the guy was good at murdering your favorite character but somehow he's also murdering his own profits so how did this happen how is Hollywood losing money by the zaz full while you pay more well the answer goes back to the big tech company that promised to revolutionize Hollywood Netflix Let's Travel back to the 2010s the Golden Age of television Netflix was fresh off the bloody evisceration of their loome enemy Blockbuster Americans cheered their Victory their stock price was through the roof and Netflix was looking for its next dinner so they decided to storm the gates of Hollywood with a brand new business model streaming Netflix made the public a simple promise for eight bucks a month you could watch almost any show ever made whenever you wanted with no ads this was an almost impossibly good deal and the public went feral for it so many people can cable and signed up for Netflix instead the media gave the phenomenon a name cord cutting but this almost incredible deal was always too good to be true how was it possible to replace all of television with a service that costs just a few cups of coffee a month and has no ads I mean advertising used to fund almost the entire television industry you weren't actually paying the bills the zoom zoom kid was zoom zoom zoom zoom the [ __ ] was that ass so how could Netflix afford to offer such an amazing deal with no ads at all simple they were subsidized by Wall Street who showered them with tumb loads of cash because they told investors that they disrupt the entire industry and form a monopoly and just so you know that I'm not exaggerating when I say that a Netflix executive literally said that their entire objective was to replace all of television Netflix grew so quickly and was so blunt about their quest for world domination that the rest of the entertainment industry [ __ ] their [ __ ] pants I mean the network heads saw what Spotify did to the music industry and they did not want to become the next meal so when confronted by this new threat they did what good capitalists have done since the dawn of time they ripped their competitor off every Entertainment Company rushed to launch a Netflix clone Paramount created CBS all access I mean Paramount Plus Warner Brothers launched HBO Max I mean Max I mean pretty soon they're just going to be calling it m and Disney created both Disney plus and Hulu which they're now trying to smash together like two dickas Ken dolls each of these companies threw away the profitable business model that has assain them for decades in order to replace it with Netflix's but this was a deadly mistake because Netflix was never designed to be a sustainable model for a television network it was designed to kill the television industry it was a trojan horse containing within it three fatal flaws that when duplicated by the Legacy networks caused their businesses to collapse first up we have Netflix's most famous invention binge watching you know at first binging was a cool novelty instead of waiting a week to watch your favorite show you could Gorge yourself on the whole thing right away when House of Cards dropped an executive I used to work with the college humor bragged to the whole office that he watched the entire season the very night it dropped and at the time I thought wow this guy gets paid a lot of money to have more free time than me but today binging has become an obligation in fact it's now how the streamers measure success they expect Their audience to binge the entire show as soon as it drops and if we don't they cancel it but who has time for binging now I mean the average American is lucky to have half an hour free after working two jobs to pay rent and putting the kids down if we're binging on anything it's seral for [ __ ] dinner I mean we're supposed to watch 5 hours of TV a night and if we don't Wednesday gets it that's ridiculous I mean binging is literally a use disorder binge eating binge shopping binge drinking none of those are good things in fact binging is bad for the shows themselves that's because binging kills the most important form of marketing in television word of mouth with a weekly release schedule every time a new episode comes out people talk about the show you know almost no one watched Breaking Bad on the day the first episode dropped they watched it after hearing 10 friends for 10 weeks say I need someone to talk about Walter's tidy whes with or I'll go breaking mad but with binging that momentum never has time to build a show drops and then a week later no one is talking about it you know earlier this year Netflix released a new $160 million show from the creators of Game of Thrones but I bet you haven't thought about that one in a while I mean this was a good show but it was in the conversation for 3 days and then everyone went right back to watching Suits the obsession with binging is also why the streamers make Seasons that are so short now when I made the g-word for Netflix we were told that our Target was to make it short enough that people could binge the entire Series in just one night because that's what looked best for Netflix's success metrics and you know what that's all well and good for a limited series like ours but there are are so many types of shows that just don't work with a binge model because they're better consumed a little bit each night for months on end you know the reason people like sitcoms is because you get to spend long enough with the characters that they start to feel like your literal friends and that is why some of the most popular shows on streaming aren't Netflix originals they're reruns of old cable and network shows that made dozens of episodes every season for hundreds of episodes and yet despite their overwhelming popularity none of the streamers are making shows like these anymore in fact entire genres of TV that people love have just disappeared you can't binge game shows and you can't binge late night shows so the streamers don't make them at all anymore but that doesn't mean people don't want to watch them the game shows that my friends at Drpout make are wildly popular and late night comedy actually has more viewers than it ever did they're just watching it on YouTube I mean you are literally watching me do what I used to do on TV right next to where you watch John Stewart and Steven Co bear and that means that the companies could have come up with a business model for streaming that supported daily or weekly content but no they all followed Netflix gorged themselves on binging and threw up entire genres of Television into the YouTube toilet hey speaking of streaming subscriptions how closely do you track your bank statements and credit card history are you combing through every single charge on a regular basis or do you just just assume everything is fine until you notice something weird honestly I don't have time to watch my accounts that closely but now that I'm using rocket money it does 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com Conover the second fatal flaw at the heart of the streaming Revolution was the death of the media brand so back in the old days before Netflix the big media companies divided themselves into multiple sub Brands otherwise known as channels Each of which was for a different audience as a teenager I watched Comedy Central because I loved comedy and bleeped swears while my sister watched Animal Planet because she was an animal lover who is obsessed with mircat gossip and my grandpa watched TV Land because he was fing old these were famous popular valuable brands that people loved I mean I literally identified with Comedy Central it felt like a channel that was made for me and that was good for the company because advertisers were willing to pay more to reach a specific audience of dumbass edgy 16-year-olds but Netflix didn't want to Target a specific audience their goal remember was to be a monopoly so they needed to be everything to everyone so what did the Legacy Media companies do to compete with that they threw all those beloved brands in the [ __ ] trash Comedy Central was once the most important brand in American Comedy they didn't just create some of the most successful TV comedies of all time they also produce standup specials comedy albums and Live Events they were an essential part of the infrastructure of the entire comedy industry there is no reason that Paramount comedy centrals parent company couldn't have come up with a business model that brought this beloved brand into the digital age but no in the process of competing with Netflix Paramount fired comedy Central's leadership and forbid it from making new scripted shows and now it's nothing more than a sub pain on Paramount plus this happened a across the media ecosystem MTV one of the most famous TV brands of all time now airs nothing but reruns and doesn't even exist on streaming TBS TNT my old Network True TV all famous brands that used to make unique shows that people loved had their entire staffs laid off and now make nothing and even HBO one of the most valuable brands in media the Cathedral of Television synonymous with quality Warner Discovery took it goddamn name out of the streaming service I mean I understand HBO Max it's HBO but there's more but what the [ __ ] is Max maximum what it's like if Koch zero changed its name to zero what's in the bottle [ __ ] nothing but the media brands of a decade ago weren't just good for business they were good for television as an art form because they attracted a specific audience they caused the companies to make unique shows that catered to the tastes of that audience that's how we got edgy dramas on FX Cutting Edge comedy on Comedy Central and weird ass Stoner animation on Adult Swim but when you try to be everything to everyone you just end up making flavorless Pap I mean Netflix describes the perfect streaming show as a gourmet cheeseburger and yeah sure everyone's fine eating a gourmet cheeseburger you know why because they all taste the same but if you want to cook a dish that's daring something new and different you have to take a risk risk that not everyone will like it and cater instead to a more specific taste so if you've been wondering why the streamers have started making generic common denominator programming choices I think this is why they stopped trying to make you happy and they started trying to make everyone happy and that is simply not a recipe for greatness it's the recipe they use at the Guy Fieri burger joint on a Caribbean cruise no shade to guy by the way I love triple D give me that donkey sauce and that leads us to the third and biggest problem with the streaming business model see Netflix's goal was to take over the world but they did so by copying the most exclusive least scalable business model in television HBO see back when Netflix started HBO was the most prestigious and admired Network on television so Netflix set out to copy them CEO Ted Sandos even said the goal is for us to become HBO faster than HBO can become us but at that time HBO was just one small part of the television ecosystem it was a premium status symbol paid for by rich people who didn't want to pollute their viewing with todrey ads HBO was so fancy it was literally advertised as a perk at hotels ooh how dah a place where I can cheat on my wife sexually and by watching The Sopranos without her but in reality most people couldn't afford HBO he hell half of us watching Game of Thrones were just borrowing the password from our rich friends parents the real cash cows of the TV industry were free ad supported broadcast channels like CBS NBC and ABC and paid ad supported cable like Nickelodeon and Comedy Central the advertising on those channels subsidized the cost of the media lowering the price to a level where more people could watch it is simply not possible to get as many people to tune in for 15 bucks a month as you can for free because the truth is as much as we all hate ads and I do hate them we hate paying for [ __ ] more I mean you could watch an adree version of this video if you just subscribed to my patreon but you didn't do that because you'd much rather watch me do an ad and get the content for free and that's fine if you want as many viewers as possible you have to offer an ad supported option it was simply never going to be the case that the future of TV was everyone subscribing to multiple adree hbos for 15 bucks a pop there are simply not enough rich people on the planet to make that sustainable so by throwing away the advertising business model that had supported them for decades the Legacy companies did massive damage to their own businesses they are now losing money hand over fist while Netflix the company that tricked them into running off the cliff is close to its goal of replacing all of TV and so what is Netflix doing why they're adding ads and jacking up the price which of course they were always going to do that too good to be true deal was always just a promo funded by Wall Street and designed to help Netflix kill the competition and take over the industry and all the other CEOs were so gutless and so brainless that they fell for it they threw out the advertising the sub Brands and the weekly release schedule that made them [ __ ] rich but you know what Bob Iger and zaz they're going to be fine they're still making bank it's the rest of us who pay the the price Hollywood has started making less shows and since August 2022 the entertainment industry has seen more than a quarter of jobs laid off things got so bad last year that writers and actors had to go on a six-month strike for basic worker protections and even though we won enormous gains in that strike including protections against AI today writers actors and the crews that make your favorite shows are struggling to find work why because these idiots killed a profitable industry chasing a big Tech Mirage and did we get the revolution they promised no TV is worse we pay more and average workers can barely make a living the rich got richer and everyone else got [ __ ] and the worst part is this bait and switch business model is coming for every industry in America Uber and Lyft did it to the cab industry Amazon did it to the retail industry Airbnb did it to the entire housing market they use Wall Street money to undercut the competition then once they're in charge they Jack the prices up on you all while paying the workers peanuts they promise a revolution but what we end up with is something that's worse than what we had before for everyone except the rich people at the top and it'll keep happening as long as we the public keep falling for it we need to start recognizing this pattern when it starts not when it's already too late so the next time the tech disruptor snake oil salesman shows up and starts tap dancing on your porch promising you something too good to be true just slam the door in his [ __ ] face and go back to watching TV thank you so much for watching if you're a TV executive please hire me I swear it was all in good fun if you want to support videos like these head to patreon.
