Binge viewing is not about to take over the world
After Kevin Spacey attracted headlines last week with his MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh, Raymond Snoddy looks in more detail at what he said – and wonders how much of a threat the likes of Netflix really pose to cable operators.
There is one thing guaranteed to keep cable operators everywhere awake at night. Even some of the smartest of them, including the chief executive of Liberty Global, Mike Fries, readily admit that they don’t know what the ultimate impact of over-the-top (OTT) players such as Netflix will be.
With their relatively cheap online offering and their very expensive investments in original content such as the $100 million House of Cards, will Netflix be a hugely disruptive force in the media world? That is clearly how they see themselves.
Everything will change, millions of cable subscribers will cut their costly cords in favour of the Netflix option, and you can just forget television series with their episodes artificially drip-fed once a week.
There is another equally cataclysmic option. Neflix could fall off its high wire as it faces increasing direct competition from the big content creators coming up with their own online channel offerings. It is also in a deadly race to continue to sign up more and more subscribers across the world to service what Enders Analysis believes is $7 billion worth of content deals it is already committed to.
Never mind the high profile series such as House of Cards and Arrested Development, many in the industry shake their heads and say they simply don’t understand the economics of the Netflix business model. And what about ratings? Netflix never actually tells you how many of their subscribers are watching.
The much more likely reality is that the OTT operators have found a useful and sustainable – though not overwhelming – position in the media food chain and they will continue to provide a channel, an extra choice not too dissimilar to those that have gone before.
Reasonable price, lots of stuff to watch and the chutzpah to dump all 13 episodes of House of Cards on the internet at once to allow viewers to graze or binge depending on appetite.
But surely Netflix’s head of content Ted Sarandos had to be crazy to commit $100 million to two whole series in advance, without a pilot?
Yet it wasn’t that much of a risk, as Sarandos explained in his Futureview address at last year’s Edinburgh International Television Festival.
He had “taste-based algorithms” at his disposal which tracked what Netflix subscribers have liked in the past and they clearly liked actor Kevin Spacey and producer David Fincher and the original BBC production. It then only took a hunch.
The worst case was that a somewhat mediocre show would result and lead to a possible loss, Sarandos explained.
We now know that House of Cards was met by critical acclaim and has already made entertainment history by receiving nine Emmy nominations, despite never having been on TV.
We still don’t know of course how many people have actually watched it out of the Netflix universe of nearly 38 million streamed subscribers worldwide – probably more than 1.5 million of them in the UK.
Whether it made a loss or not scarcely matters because of the enormous publicity that must have helped to drive subscriber growth.
All the noise must also have helped get Kevin Spacey booked for one of the most venerated speaking gigs in the business – thereby becoming the first actor to deliver the MacTaggart memorial lecture in Edinburgh.
Spacey certainly got his headlines and had a good story to tell. Let audiences binge and combat piracy by not just giving audiences what they want but when they want it and at a reasonable price.
Then there was the Edinburgh crowd-pleasing stuff about the tyranny of ratings and the conservatism of commissioners.
Get a creative in and you inevitably get a diatribe against the dead hand of the commissioners and you would hardly expect, in all the circumstances, Spacey to have a bad word to say for the business model of his recent paymasters.
As for binging, there will always be some people who can’t wait to see something or who get a box set of a favourite series at Christmas and realise they will never catch up unless they set aside a weekend.
At the margins it’s a minor problem for broadcasters – some people taking themselves away from the schedules for the odd 12 hours or so and aren’t there to watch broadcast television.
There is nothing even new about the phenomenon. Opera buffs like to boast of setting a week, and a great deal of money, aside to watch all of Wagner’s Ring Cycle back-to back.
To imply that this is somehow the future of television and that traditional channels are about to implode is just Luvvie talk.
But Spacey is in very good company when it comes to MacTaggart lecturers. The lecture is an hour long in front of 800 to 1,000 television professionals and it’s your opportunity to influence, to change things.
The need to say something becomes overwhelming and there are very few who have managed to resist the temptation to go too far, to overstate your case and raise the spectre of the traditional television world in flames.
Usually no harm is done. A week after Edinburgh the final echoes have begun to fade.
Attention should be paid to Spacey when he argues for greater creative freedom and that a larger part of the audience want “complex, smart stories” than is ever acknowledged by programme commissioners.
Why is some of the best output of the BBC to be found on BBC Four and why is that channel having its budget slashed?
And why is some of the best drama on that channel actually in Danish, courtesy of the Danish public broadcaster DR?
But at least cable operators and traditional broadcasters can sleep relatively easily in their beds; Netflix and binge viewing is not about to take over the world any time soon – as long as they do not ignore its potential for disruption.