Bayou Renaissance Man laments not being able to watch television these days:
It used to be easy to watch a video or TV series without paying for cable or a streaming video subscription. All one had to do was wait until the DVD series came out, then buy a copy. However, in the past couple of years that’s become almost impossible. Streaming video services are commissioning their own series, then making it impossible to buy a copy or view them anywhere else.
Trouble is, I refuse to pay for most streaming video services due to ethical and moral considerations. Pay Disney after what that studio has done to trash so many sterling properties in the name of “woke”, not least Star Wars? I won’t give them a cent of my money. Netflix, after its child pornography fetish as exhibited in several made-for-TV movies and series? My gorge rises at the thought.
The same holds true for movies, as I have mentioned in my various movie reports. Newer movies will probably go directly to streaming platforms, so I won’t get them. I presume later releases of physical media that I’ll find in the wild (that is, secondhand) will be lower as consumers started making the switch to streaming at that time, so they won’t have physical copies to sell.
Oh, well. Don’t worry about me, gentle reader–I won’t run out of things to watch for the foreseeable future as I continue to acquire DVDs and videocassettes faster than I can watch them. I’m currently working through a 1993 television program that I’ve owned for probably a decade (or at least six years since I watched the first couple of episodes with my boys in 2019). And we’ve got several television series’ either in seasons or in complete runs which seemed like a thing to do back in the day (or they were cheap). My beautiful wife and I watched a fair amount of television together, hockey games but sometimes television shows we recorded onto DVRs, before we had boys.
In an unrelated story, John Nolte talks about how movies were monetized in the old days:
Here’s the other thing… And this is just me thinking out loud… What has streaming done to what’s known as the ancillary market?
It used to work like this… A studio released the movie in first-run theaters, then budget theaters, then pay-per-view, then home video (DVD), then pay TV (HBO, Showtime), then cable TV… So, even if a movie failed in theaters, there were a half-dozen or so markets to milk more money from. As far as I know, Snow White will exit theaters and then launch on pay-per-view but then jump over to the Disney+ streaming service. Once there, it will make no money from pay or cable TV — at least not for a long while when it will be worth much less to those outlets.
(Link to Nolte via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
