Streaming: Movies, Media, and Instant Access

3. Content Wars

71 3 Content Wars Streaming accelerates everything. It creates a voracious appetite for new content. How do you think those 100+ YouTube channels get through the day, providing new programming for their millions of viewers? A look at the promo video on the YOMYOMF (You Offend Me, You Offend My Family) channel demonstrates that it runs like a factory; it’s designed to spew out masses of content—good, bad, or indifferent—simply to keep the channel up and running. In many ways, it’s like a movie studio in the boom years of the 1940s: some great films were made, but the simple law of supply and demand mandated that many more “program” pictures were produced. Before the collapse of vertical integration in the late 1940s, when many of the major movie studios owned their own chains of theaters, it was essential that a string of cheap films existed to fill theater seats. The same rule applies today. Content is key to any new enterprise, and although classic films and television programming provide entertainment for many viewers, the vast majority of streaming consumers want new content. We’ve already seen what happens on the web— mountains of new video, text, and music are added every minute of every hour of every day. This new content comes from a wide Streaming 72 variety of sources, but the pressure is particularly acute on established names in popular cinema, pop fiction, and pop music. Books are no exception to this “speed up” in production; indeed, it has made virtual slaves of fiction writers, who used to rely on a more relaxed schedule of production that had been in place for nearly a century. As Julie Bosman notes: For years, it was a schedule as predictable as a calendar: novelists who specialized in mysteries, thrillers and romance would write one book a year, output that was considered not only sufficient, but also productive. But the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year. . . . The push for more material comes as publishers and booksellers are desperately looking for ways to hold onto readers being lured by other forms of entertainment, much of it available nonstop and almost instantaneously. Television shows are rushed online only hours after they are originally broadcast , and some movies are offered on demand at home before they have left theaters. In this environment, publishers say, producing one book a year, and nothing else, is just not enough. According to Bosman, one author of popular thrillers, Lisa Scottoline , has had to increase her production schedule to Warholian levels, cranking out “2,000 words a day, seven days a week,” working nine or ten hours a day. More critically acclaimed writers , such as Jonathan Franzen, “can publish a new novel approximately every decade and still count on plenty of high-profile reviews to promote it,” but for mass fiction, like all other forms Content Wars 73 of popular culture, if you’re not continually in the public eye, you run the risk of being forgotten. At the same time, because the demand for content is so acute, battles over new work erupt on the streaming landscape, as various portals compete for the right to provide the latest film, book, or pop song. I’ve already discussed the various content providers for movies; for music, iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Spotify , and CD Baby are some of the primary content providers. And the lines between “provider” and “publisher” are becoming more blurred with each passing day. Amazon, for example, has begun signing up authors of popular novels directly, bypassing publishers entirely. As Richard Curtis, a veteran literary agent, told David Streitfeld, “Everyone’s afraid of Amazon. If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out. It’s an old strategy: divide and conquer.” And so far, it seems to be working. As far as readers are concerned, publishers are not a visible part of the book business; they buy books for their Kindles through Amazon...