Entertainment

I'm not a specialist and I'm just guessing: licensing fees and streaming fees to the actors etc? Every view costs them a tiny bit of money. I guess over time it adds up. And from Disney's pov those shows don't bring in new subs or anything, so they only cost them money?

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

This thread isn’t touching on the biggest impact which is being able to write down or impair these assets that are taken off streaming or shows in production that are cancelled (for Warner’s an amount in excess of $3B) - the impaired asset value is then taken as a loss which reduces the company’s tax burden.

Most of these shows pay residuals to actors, writers, directors, and production companies based on formulas of how many subscribers the service has. Notably, none of the services are willing to publish detailed viewership statistics, even privately to creators, so the shows have to pay the same amount regardless of whether 1 person is watching or 1 million people are watching every day.

Rather than throw good money after bad, the services would rather take the show off entirely and not have to pay any residuals going forward. Then, with the show/movie making no money going forward, they get to write down the fair value of that intellectual property, which also saves the parent company on taxes.

Your best bet is to vote with your wallet. Can’t get Willow on Disney+? Then, Disney+ doesn’t get your money. I’ve been buying more physical media and downloading again like I’ve gone back in time 20 years.

So it's a tax thing.

The specifics of the tax and accounting issues at play here are beyond me, but it seems to be related to how big the value of the stuff you offer is versus how much of the cost you can write off as a loss.

The Guardian talks about it today and summarizes the whole process as "In May, Disney+ announced a content removal plan designed to cut US$1.5bn worth of content, meaning it substantially reduces the company’s value, giving it a lot less tax to pay."

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/aug/29/the-great-cancellation-why-megabucks-tv-shows-are-vanishing-without-a-trace

It's all fake, dumb monopoly money stuff and it sucks. Somebody track down an actual corporate accountant who can explain the process better than me, though. It's probably an interesting bit of detail to learn about.

Lindelof

This one seems a different case. You have Lost which was written as it was being filmed and then you have one of the best single season shows of all time a decade later with Watchmen (series). He never planned it past the first season and it didn't need to be, which I quite prefer to, say, dragging out a show for 4 more seasons.

As for why things get removed - contracts for the rights and the cost of them. I need to go to be so in short, companies can leverage the popularity of their shows. Whatever network for Gray's Anatomy for example is exempt from all "Ad-Free" Hulu plans, because ABC or whatever's network contract with Hulu specified they'd still shows ads. Fox contracted the streaming rights for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia which lapsed in 2017, so Fox Century owned by Disney which owns Hulu and FX then were able to keep IASIP on Hulu alone (except for outside the U.S. where it's on Disney+...)

The most recent absurdity is formerly HBO formerly HBO Max now just Max having removed over around 30+, mostly animated, shows many of which were originals and are now no longer available anywhere.

I suggest looking into the cost of an Intel Quicksync server and a couple hundred for some high capacity hard drives and setting yourself up a media server. I like to support the content actively coming out, but I can't trust and rely on those to always be there. They aren't accessible if the internet is down or if there's a password mishap, but my server is up as long as there's power running.

The only thing I can think of is licencing fees: if Disney don't actually own the rights to a particular show, then they're paying fees to be able to provide it on their platform. If the number of people watching that series after subscribing to the service isn't high enough (and I imagine Disney put a lot of effort into tracking what subscribers are watching in order to determine which series are motivating people to start or continue a subscription), then effectively that series is losing them money.

It is, however, one of those cost-cutting measures that will bite them in the ass within 6-12 months. Cutting back the catalogue too much and only leaving the super popular stuff available will lead to subscribers going "well I've watched everything I want to watch, why am I spending money on this?" sooner than if there's a wider catalogue with a much broader range. Most people aren't going to keep subscribing to a streaming service just to watch the same 6 things on a loop.

There is, ultimately, only one solution to streaming services taking away the stuff you want to watch...

🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️

unfortunately, in the age of streaming the measurement for success is not "how many people watch it" but "does it bring new subscribers and keep the current ones?".

if a show can be removed without fear of people cancelling their subscriptions, removing them saves them money.

It's so they don't have to pay royalties to the people who made the shows.

For streaming, much like every other distribution, rights aren't free. I don't know the exact details, but I suppose (and if I'm wrong, please correct me) companies have to pay a percentage of their income, or fixed price, every month, to keep the show on their catalogue.

There is also the idea shows with low viewership are "costly" because you're hosting something that isn't being used often. Storage isn't free, neither is serving bandwidth, especially for 1080p and greater qualities. If only 5 of 100 customers watch a certain show, it means that the show only "brought in" 5% of the revenue. It doesn't matter that this math "is wrong" or "doesn't make sense", that's the simplified version of corporate thought: if the cost is greater than the profit, ditch it.

Many companies have to pay a publisher rights for their show, which may or may not go onto paying other actors and companies and other stuff. This is much lower if you own the show. Hence why Netflix will have their own shows that don't disappear. Or Disney plus will keep Disney owned shows.

But some examples are:

• you are an avid watcher, you've seen these shows, so to retain you, companies will cycle out long standing shows for others (use the money for new stuff)
• Company is paying a lot for 1 show when they could diverse (or the other way) to get a more popular show to drive in traffic or cheaper shows that drive more traffic.
• company would rather drop the money going to the publisher and spend it for their own new show that they pay less ongoing cost for
• if a company has a hard year, they may just not pay publishers for as many shows so their books look better and they make some money to invest in innovation/shows
• some CEO's look at companies differently. They join a company, they cut costs saving 10mil by not paying publishers. They then pocket 5mil as a ceo saying they saved so much money. Then they move onto their next company. And the company pays for the show to come back again.

IP is a clusterfuck of rights and licenses. The owners have generally made sure to wring the last cent out of this stuff, making it fairly complicated. So things can randomly end up removed from re-releases or over the air, due to time-limited licenses. E.g. Scrubs had a huge part of its iconic soundtrack nuked from streaming versions.

It's not about saving money on the backend, it's about not bombarding people with terrible shows like Netflix does. They're trying to trim the fat so that all you see are quote unquote bangers. For instance, the Willow show was hot garbage.