Saturday 21 May 2022

Binge


I'm not sure why I'm here. (This is no time for philosophy.) Yes, I am. It's so I can say I told you so. I have this urge because, unusually, the Italian Publishing Industry has not asked me for my futurological input this year.

1. Streaming services releasing things weekly instead of in binge-lumps: partly - simple - you can release fewer things, ergo cheaper.

But also lots of highly-educated people need jobs which aren't there in traditional industries. The US healthcare industry is terrifically inefficient at producing at healthcare, but one reason it persists is that its weird insurance, servicing and billing wastage creates tons of white collar jobs that would be a disaster for the US economy to lose. (See also universities.) It's a version of the subsidies paid to the uneconomic bits of farming and fishing. It's less romantic and it creates different distortions, but it's distortions everywhere and it's not like people don't need jobs. I do not have a solution.

I have not drifted off the point: releasing shows weekly has created a decent-sized and growing derivative industry in commentary recaps, podcasts and so on. It's like watch-the-bouncing-ball politics or sports podcasting. Or, differently, fantasy sports.

Also, this derivative industry is attracted to discussing certain types of show and story and not others. So a sitcom, whose traditional raison d'être is to reset the table, is not so interesting as a who-will-die story. This definitely fed into online discussion of the amazing, amazing Succession which is sort of built on the sitcom premise of resetting the table on a season-long basis.

So, various incentives head towards weekly rather than spurgely.

2. All the different subscriptions! The answer will be when services are bundled together under a single bill and you get them through your main provider, be that Sky, Virgin or whoever, and it will be like cable again but with more choice in terms of bits but more cost because more white-collar middlemen will need to be paid.

3. I enjoy the continued slippage of the vowel sound associated with the letter 'I' across different English language accents ('eye' slipping to 'ah').