Tag: streaming platform

Introducing MountCock+

Introducing MountCock+

Dennis

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, roll up and be the first to subscribe to the greatest streaming service of all time: the brand-new MountCock+!

Made-up logo of fictional streaming service "MountCock+".
If only it was real…

If you haven’t heard, Paramount Global – the company behind Paramount+, the Star Trek franchise, and others – is in a pretty bad place financially. That isn’t “breaking news;” it’s been the case for quite some time. As Paramount has continued to lose money, its executives have put a lot of faith in streaming to swoop in as some kind of saviour – but they’ve learned, belatedly, that streaming is a difficult market to crack at the best of times. And these are not the best of times!

Here’s what I think happened a few years ago. An elderly executive or investor – who knows nothing about the internet, data, streaming, or any of the complex technologies required to make it work – saw the success of Netflix, looked at CBS/Paramount’s own back catalogue and library of content and said to some poor, overworked employee “make me my own Netflix.” In the mid-2010s, Netflix was the hottest up-and-coming property in the entertainment world, and Paramount wanted a piece of that action. But rather than work with Netflix, Paramount wanted to be a competitor – despite having none of the outside investment, financial support, development knowledge, or technological know-how.

Logo of Paramount Global.
Logo of Paramount Global.

I really wish that I’d been faster at getting to work on this story, because “MountCock+” would’ve been a great April Fools’ gag if I’d made it a week ago! Oh well, lesson learned.

The title of this piece – which, in case it really needs saying, is facetious and won’t really be the name of a potential newly-merged streaming service – comes from news that new Paramount investor and potential new owner, SkyDance Media, is considering rolling Paramount+ and the Peacock streaming service together into one single entity. This would give subscribers to either platform access to a lot more films and TV shows, and the hope is that rolling two unprofitable streamers together will help the restructured Paramount/Paradance/Dancemount (or whatever the new company might be called) edge its way closer to profitable territory.

Logo of Skydance Media.
Paramount Global and Skydance Media may be in talks about a merger or sale.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: small, specialised streaming platforms that only offer relatively few shows and films within a single niche have always been a bad idea. It was a bad idea when DC Comics tried it, it was a bad idea when CNN tried it, and the fact that DC Universe and CNN+ no longer exist as independent platforms is all the proof you’ll ever need. Netflix succeeded in the 2010s because it was a comparatively cheap and convenient way to access a huge library of content. Yes, there were whole genres on Netflix that you’d never even touch because they were of no interest to you. But there was so much other stuff that was appealing that it made a Netflix subscription worthwhile.

That was what convinced me to cut the cord – or rather, the wire to my satellite dish! In the late 2000s I got Sky – a satellite TV provider here in the UK. Getting Sky in the first place had been one of my ambitions for a long time; ever since it launched in the ’90s, the idea of hundreds of channels had been massively appealing! But by the late 2010s, the media landscape was changing. When Star Trek: Discovery was only going to be available on Netflix, I signed up so I could watch it. And I found streaming to be so convenient and at such a good price point that I very quickly dropped Sky altogether.

Stock photo of a satellite TV dish.
You can still see a satellite dish on many houses here in the UK.

The reasons for Netflix’s success were its convenience, low price point, and huge library of content. Take away one of those factors and it wouldn’t have become the phenomenon that it did – and as the so-called “streaming wars” rage in the 2020s, it’s a combination of those same factors in reverse that account for the failure or underperformance of other, newer streaming platforms. Less content for a higher price turns people away – even big fans of some franchises. I’m a Trekkie, but in 2024 I’ve only paid for a single month of Paramount+ so far; the streaming platform just doesn’t feel worth it most of the time.

Roll Paramount+ content in with another streaming service, though, and suddenly it becomes a more enticing proposition. As long as the price stays low as the library of content grows, there would be much more of an incentive to sign up for MountCock+ than there is for either Paramount+ or Peacock individually. Continuing as competitors will, in all likelihood, lead to the failure of both platforms, but if they join forces they might stand a chance. Even though Skydance doesn’t own Peacock and thus profits will have to be split, it still feels like a good idea.

Stock photo of streaming apps on a TV screen.
There are currently too many streaming services. Some will never be profitable for their parent companies.

Almost every time Star Trek’s parent company has been shaken up, there have been changes for the franchise. And not all of these changes have been positive. We have to keep in mind that it’s possible that a Skydance/hedge fund-owned corporation would have less of an interest in Star Trek, especially if the franchise seems to be underperforming, not bringing in or retaining subscribers, or even running too hot. While I don’t expect to see imminent cancellations, it’s something to be aware of as it’s happened before. It’s also possible that new corporate leadership might be keener on feature films with cinematic releases than on making more made-for-streaming series.

On the other hand, Paramount has been slow and even reluctant to listen to Trekkies sometimes. There’s been a significant fan campaign to create a sequel/successor show to Star Trek: Picard – but after more than a year, it hasn’t garnered a response from those at the top of the corporation. So perhaps new faces in the boardroom would be better at reading the room and understanding where the fan community is and what kind of projects we’d like to see. This is an area where Paramount has needed to improve for a long time, so again there’s the potential to see some positive changes.

Still frame from Star Trek: Picard Season 3.
Trekkies have been clamouring for another Picard-era series.

Business and finance is not my strong suit nor my area of expertise – and I don’t blame you if the details are boring or difficult to grasp. I’m pretty sure I’m oversimplifying it because I don’t fully understand it either; when you’re looking at corporations that routinely deal in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars… it can be hard to really comprehend the kinds of decisions that they take. But as fans, and as consumers of media in a competitive marketplace, we need to know a little about what’s happening behind-the-scenes. The future of Paramount Global will have an impact on future Star Trek productions, on the corporation’s other streaming projects, and even on its cinematic output and television channels.

For my two cents, I can see why amalgamating Paramount+ and Peacock – or Paramount+ with some other streaming platform, if the Peacock deal falls through – would make sense. After several years of streaming becoming an increasingly balkanised and fractured marketplace, bringing different platforms together just makes sense. There’s a general unwillingness on the part of audiences to pay for more than two or three different streaming services, and smaller, second-tier platforms will struggle in such a challenging environment. I’m a Trekkie – albeit one who’s been feeling a bit burned out of late – but even I have never paid for a full year’s worth of Paramount+; it’s a service I pick up for a month or two at a time to watch a couple of shows. On a related note: have you checked out my review of Halo Season 2 yet?

Promo poster for Halo Season 2.
It’s the Master Chief!

So could the hypothetical MountCock+ turn things around? I think it has to have a better chance of turning a profit than either Paramount+ or Peacock do individually – though it will perhaps need a better name than I’ve given it! But in theory, a bigger streaming platform with more original and legacy content, backed up by a corporate merger that brings more film franchises and television shows under its umbrella is a good thing. We don’t want any one corporation to have a monopoly in this marketplace, of course, but creating platforms that are more consumer-friendly and don’t see small bundles of content paywalled off at every turn is a good thing and a positive development.

“Watch this space” is probably the soundest advice right now! Paramount has been in talks for a while about possible mergers, sales, or splitting off different parts of its business, so nothing is set in stone and this latest Skydance/Peacock proposal is unofficial at best. It could happen – or Paramount could end up going in a very different direction. Still, corporate changes are afoot – and I feel increasingly confident of major news breaking before the year is over.

All properties discussed above remain the copyright of their respective broadcaster, distributor, studio, etc. This article is not financial or investment advice. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

How Sega and the Dreamcast offer a valuable lesson for streaming platforms

How Sega and the Dreamcast offer a valuable lesson for streaming platforms

Dennis

In 2001 I was bitterly disappointed by the failure of the Dreamcast – a console I’d only owned for about a year and had hoped would carry me through to the next generation of home consoles. For a variety of reasons that essentially boil down to mismanagement, worse-than-expected sales, and some pretty tough competition, Sega found itself on the verge of bankruptcy. The company responded not only by ending development on the Dreamcast, but by closing its hardware division altogether.

At the time, Sega seemed to be at the pinnacle of the games industry. For much of the 1990s, the company had been a dominant force in home video game consoles alongside Nintendo, and as the new millennium approached there were few outward signs of that changing. It was a massive shock to see Sega collapse in such spectacular fashion in 2001, not only to me but to millions of players and games industry watchers around the world.

The Sega Dreamcast failed in 2001.

Thinking about what happened from a business perspective, a demise like this was inevitable in the early 2000s. Both Sony and Microsoft were arriving in the home console market with powerful machines offering features like the ability to play DVDs – something that the Dreamcast couldn’t do – but at a fundamental level the market was simply overcrowded. There just wasn’t room for four competing home consoles. At least one was destined for the chopping block – and unfortunately for Sega, it was their machine that wouldn’t survive.

But the rapid demise of the Dreamcast wasn’t the end of Sega – not by a long shot. The company switched its focus from making hardware to simply making games, and over the next few years re-established itself with a new identity as a developer and publisher. In the twenty years since the Dreamcast failed, Sega has published a number of successful titles, snapped up several successful development studios – such as Creative Assembly, Relic Entertainment, and Amplitude Studios – and has even teamed up with old rival Nintendo on a number of occasions!

The end of the Dreamcast was not the end of Sega.

I can’t properly express how profoundly odd it was to first see Super Mario and Sega’s mascot Sonic the Hedgehog together in the same game! The old rivalry from the ’90s would’ve made something like that impossible – yet it became possible because Sega recognised its limitations and changed its way of doing business. The board abandoned a longstanding business model because it was leading the company to ruin, and even though it does feel strange to see fan-favourite Sega characters crop up on the Nintendo Switch or even in PlayStation games, Sega’s willingness to change quite literally saved the company.

From a creative point of view, Sega’s move away from hardware opened up the company to many new possibilities. The company has been able to broaden its horizons, publishing different games on different systems, no longer bound to a single piece of hardware. Strategy games have been published for PC, party games on the Nintendo Wii and Switch, and a whole range of other titles on Xbox, PlayStation, handheld consoles, and even mobile. The company has been involved in the creation of a far broader range of titles than it ever had been before.

Sega’s mascot Sonic now regularly appears alongside old foe Super Mario.

So how does all of this relate to streaming?

We’re very much in the grip of the “streaming wars” right now. Big platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ are battling for subscribers’ cash, but there’s a whole second tier of streaming platforms fighting amongst themselves for a chance to break into the upper echelons of the market. The likes of HBO Max, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Peacock, BritBox, and even YouTube Premium are all engaged in this scrap.

But the streaming market in 2021 is very much like the video game console market was in 2001: overcrowded. Not all of these second-tier platforms will survive – indeed, it’s possible that none of them will. Many of the companies who own and manage these lower-level streaming platforms are unwilling to share too many details about them, but we can make some reasonable estimates based on what data is available, and it isn’t good news. Some of these streaming platforms have simply never been profitable, and their owners are being propped up by other sources of income, pumping money into a loss-making streaming platform in the hopes that it’ll become profitable at some nebulous future date.

There are a lot of streaming platforms in 2021.

To continue the analogy, the likes of Paramount+ are modern-day Dreamcasts in a market where Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ are already the Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation. Breaking into the top tier of the streaming market realistically means one of the big three needs to be dethroned, and while that isn’t impossible, it doesn’t seem likely in the short-to-medium term at least.

Why did streaming appeal to viewers in the first place? That question is fundamental to understanding why launching a new platform is so incredibly difficult, and it’s one that too many corporate executives seem not to have considered. They make the incredibly basic mistake of assuming that streaming is a question of convenience; that folks wanted to watch shows on their own schedule rather than at a set time on a set channel. That isn’t what attracted most people to streaming.

Too many corporate leaders fundamentally misunderstand streaming.

Convenience has been available to viewers since the late 1970s. Betamax and VHS allowed folks to record television programmes and watch them later more than forty years ago, as well as to purchase films and even whole seasons of television shows to watch “on demand.” DVD box sets kicked this into a higher gear in the early-mid 2000s. Speaking for myself, I owned a number of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS in the 1990s, and later bought the entire series on DVD. I had more than enough DVDs by the mid-2000s that I’d never need to sign up for any streaming platform ever – I could watch a DVD every day of the year and never run out of different things to watch!

To get back on topic, what attracted people to streaming was the low cost. A cable or satellite subscription is easily four or five times the price of Netflix, so cutting the cord and going digital was a new way for many people to save money in the early 2010s. As more broadcasters and film studios began licensing their content to Netflix, the value of the deal got better and better, and the value of cable or satellite seemed ever worse in comparison.

Streaming isn’t about convenience – that’s been available for decades.
(Pictured: a 1975 Sony Betamax cabinet)

But in 2021, in order to watch even just a handful of the most popular television shows, people are once again being forced to spend cable or satellite-scale money. Just sticking to sci-fi and fantasy, three of the biggest shows in recent years have been The Mandalorian, The Expanse, and The Witcher. To watch all three shows, folks would need to sign up for three different streaming platforms – which would cost a total of £25.97 per month in the UK; approximately $36 in the United States.

The overabundance of streaming platforms is actually eroding the streaming platform model, making it unaffordable for far too many people. We have a great recent example of this: the mess last week which embroiled Star Trek: Discovery. When ViacomCBS cancelled their contract with Netflix, Discovery’s fourth season was to be unavailable outside of North America. Star Trek fans revolted, promising to boycott Paramount+ if and when the streaming platform arrived in their region. The damage done by the Discovery Season 4 debacle pushed many viewers back into the waiting arms of the only real competitor and the biggest danger to all streaming platforms: piracy.

Calls to boycott Paramount+ abounded in the wake of the Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 mess.

The streaming market does not exist in a vacuum, with platforms jostling for position solely against one another. It exists in a much bigger digital environment, one which includes piracy. It’s incredibly easy to either stream or download any television episode or any film, even with incredibly limited technological know-how, and that has always represented a major threat to the viability of streaming platforms. Though there are ethical concerns, such as the need for artists and creators to get paid for their creations, that isn’t the issue. You can shout at me until you’re blue in the face that people shouldn’t pirate a film or television show – and in the vast majority of cases I’ll agree wholeheartedly. The issue isn’t that people should or shouldn’t engage in piracy – the issue is that people are engaged in piracy, and there really isn’t a practical or viable method of stopping them – at least, no such method has been invented thus far.

As more and more streaming platforms try to make a go of it in an already-overcrowded market, more and more viewers are drifting back to piracy. 2020 was a bit of an outlier in some respects due to lockdowns, but it was also the biggest year on record for film and television piracy. 2021 may well eclipse 2020’s stats and prove to have been bigger still.

The overcrowded streaming market makes piracy look ever more appealing to many viewers.

Part of the driving force is that people are simply unwilling to sign up to a streaming platform to watch one or two shows. One of the original appeals of a service like Netflix was that there was a huge range of content all in one place – whether you wanted a documentary, an Oscar-winning film, or an obscure television show from the 1980s, Netflix had you covered. Now, more and more companies are pulling their content and trying to build their own platforms around that content – and many viewers either can’t or won’t pay for it.

Some companies are trying to push streaming platforms that aren’t commercially viable and will never be commercially viable. Those companies need to take a look at Sega and the Dreamcast, and instead of trying to chase the Netflix model ten years too late and with far too little original content, follow the Sega model instead. Drop the hardware and focus on the software – or in this case, drop the platform and focus on making shows.

Some streaming platforms will not survive – and their corporate owners would be well-advised to realise that sooner rather than later.

The Star Trek franchise offers an interesting example of how this can work. Star Trek: Discovery was originally available on Netflix outside of the United States. But Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Lower Decks went to Amazon Prime Video instead – showing how this model of creating a television show and selling it either to the highest bidder or to whichever platform seems like the best fit for the genre can and does work.

Moves like this feel inevitable for several of these second-tier streaming platforms. There’s a hard ceiling on the amount of money folks are willing to spend, so unless streaming platforms can find a way to cut costs and become more competitively priced, the only possible outcome by the end of the “streaming wars” will be the permanent closure of several of these platforms. Companies running these platforms should consider other options, because blindly chasing the streaming model will lead to financial ruin. Sega had the foresight in 2001 to jump out of an overcrowded market and abandon a failing business model. In the two decades since the company has refocused its efforts and found renewed success. This represents a great model for streaming platforms to follow.

All films, television series, and video games mentioned above are the copyright of their respective owner, studio, developer, broadcaster, publisher, distributor, etc. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.