From the Theater to Your Couch

theaters,” Stuart Kelban says, a UT professor at Moody College and part of the Department of Radio-Television-Film and an avid movie watcher. People are continuing to develop less of a need to go to the movie theaters and are beginning to realize that they have everything they need right at home. Still, movie theaters will never completely go away. They will always stay around, but will likely be less popular. Because many people did not go to movie theaters for a time, they became less attached to them. This hurt movie theaters, and they were forced to change some things. “I went [to the movie theater] and they said do you want to see [Shang Chi] in 4X? I don’t even know what that is,” Kelban says, “I said sure, let’s go see it. Well they had turned the theater into this kind of interactive experience where wind blows on you and water gets blown on you. The seats, it’s a rollercoaster. And I think they did that to try to lure people back into the theaters. That’s an experience you can’t have at home. Well, my wife and I walked out after a minute. That’s just not how I want to see a movie.” This is not the only reason people are deciding to stay home. Movie theaters are very expensive, and now so more than ever. The prices have risen significantly in an attempt to recover funds lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although this makes sense, even just for families of four this can be really expensive. “That’s four tickets, plus some popcorn, some drinks. That’s a hundred bucks easy. 100 bucks is a year of Netflix or some other service,” Kelban says. There is so much precaution for filming anything nowadays and even if massive amounts of caution is taken, there is still room for error. These problems are a big pain that filmmakers are facing and managing nowadays. Movie theaters are losing popularity, and people are staying home a lot more often. We have seen the film industry change and adapt to the tyrant that is COVID-19 Despite the many bad effects producers are facing, it might have been good for the consumer. The film industry is now very different from the one of the past, and will continue to change even more as time goes on. All we can do is watch and see what happens.

“~500 HD video streams” by ChrisDag

The Meteoric Rise of Streaming Services

By: Pedro Renner Ely Couto

As you wait through the introduction sequence of the latest episode of The Mandalorian, you know that even though you might be sitting alone on your couch, the whole world is watching with you. Maybe right away as you hop online after the episode, or maybe the next day when you talk to your colleagues, you see everyone discussing the new episode and are happy to join in on the conversation. Perhaps before you had even been eager to catch the show as it came out, specifically so you could talk to people about it. While watching the most newly aired episode on cable certainly evoked this zeitgeist, streaming services have expanded it to more people than ever before. When Netflix first started out, it was a DVD rental business where customers would pay a subscription and receive the ability to have Dvds from a massive library mailed to their door, where they could watch the movie before returning it. Eventually, they progressed to sending the movies over the internet straight to people’s TVs. This is video streaming, and it carries many important benefits. Unlike cable or satellite companies, streaming services use the internet, which means that multiple signals can be sent at once, therefore multiple users can stream different things to their devices, rather than being forced to all watch the same thing at the same time. Many other inventions attempted a similar feat, but none had the sheer convenience of streaming services, which didn’t even require a cable box. In the era before streaming services, there were cable television and DVD stores, And while DVD has faded out almost completely, cable is still around somewhat. While cable could provide you with movies and tv shows just fine, some customers were unhappy with the state of things. These consumers, deemed ‘cord cutters’, decided to unsubscribe from their cable companies, known as ‘cutting the cord’. “The reason you got a lot of people cutting the cord from their televisions was often about the fact that they were getting hundreds of cable channels they didn’t necessarily want, all bundled together, and they wanted to have a more customized experience,” says Suzanne Scott, a professor at Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas. These consumers found a great option in streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. Not only did they allow for more customizability in terms of what exactly they would be paying for, but they also allowed for more ways to watch things other than lounging on your couch, waiting for a particular show to air. “So one of the things that I think streaming really, at least early on, promised people was this kind of customizability,” Scott says, “Not just in terms of paying a set amount of

“Streaming services allow money to get access to certain types of consumers to watch a diverse content, but even when you see the ways in which Netflix started array of content at their own to develop their original programming, dropping time and anywhere they go,” a whole season at a time meant that it was - Cibele Salomao an entirely different way of consuming something,”. Television shows and movies on streaming services could be viewed anywhere, anytime, as long as you had an internet-capable device and an internet connection. Cibele Salomao, a consultant for ViacomCBS, a media production company, states, “Streaming services allow consumers to watch a diverse array of content at their own time and anywhere they go,” and later adds “Unlike VHS, DVD and blu ray disks, consumers can take the streaming apps everywhere with their phones or ipads,”.

However, providing an easy way to access media could only get streaming services so far. To attract a wider audience, they would have to try something different, namely, producing their own content. Alisa Perren, who teaches a Media Industries course at Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas, Austin, explains what let them expand. “[Streaming services] were and are willing to pay a lot of money to get the rights to licensed content and grow their audience very expansively,” Perren says, “And they’re willing to spend money to acquire movies and to pay for stars in an industry that is struggling anyway, financially, in terms of making movies that are outside of the sort of big budget blockbuster mode of movie.” By producing their own content, streaming services gained access to a whole new audience. “So, initially it was more for people who wanted to cut the cord, or wanted access to particular libraries of things. Once a lot of streaming platforms got into the original content game, both for tv and for film.” says Scott, describing the transition from sole content distribution to film, “That shifted things and then suddenly it became that you didn’t need to have Netflix, so that you just had access to a library, you needed to have Netflix because everyone’s talking about Stranger Things and how great it is.” Along with this, Perren explains that in order to make a movie, massive risks must be taken. The cost of production is extremely high and profits are not guaranteed. “So basically, the way the film industry has evolved over the last 30 ish years is that they, to really sort of make money that is robust enough to be worth it in terms of their business model, they have to spend $100 to $200 million, and then an extra $100 million oftentimes, on marketing,” She continues, explaining that “It’s a huge investment, and the film industry has increasingly prioritized the sort of big budget effects, spectacle oriented movies.” Since movies, and

sometimes tv shows, are so risky to produce, movie studios have to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and since every movie has to make a profit individually, movie studios are left appealing to the same audience every time in order to “You’re make a profit. not paying for a As streaming services entered the media production ticket. It’s a very different game, a massive advantage model. It’s not about making arose from their business model. They get their money from money off an individual subscriptions, not movie tickets or viewership, which changes movie,” - Alisa Perren two important things: One is that attracting the same audience over and over again becomes pointless, since those people would already be paying for the subscription anyway, and the other advantage is that they have a lot more security in terms of income since their profits don’t completely depend on whether one movie or show succeeds or fails. “You’re not paying for a ticket. It’s a very different model. It’s not about making money off an individual movie,” Perren says, “it’s about having enough varied content to give a reason for every individual person to want to subscribe to the service,”. This means that

“It’s about having enough varied content to give a reason for every individual person to want to subscribe to the service,” - Alisa Perren