Will streaming save Hollywood?

These are tumultuous times for the entertainment industry. Not wanting to be outdone by tradpub's contraction from the Big Five to the Big Four, Hollywood is heralding its demise with the announcement of two huge mergers in the last 2 weeks.

First, AT&T merged WarnerMedia (i.e., HBO Max) with Discovery and spun it off, effectively washing its hands of show business. Then Amazon (Prime Video), the fourth-largest company in the world, bought MGM.

With 200 million Prime subscribers, a (blasphemous) Lord of the Rings series on the way, and a newly acquired library and IP list that includes Stargate, Rocky, Robocop, and James Bond, Amazon is poised to become a major player in the streaming wars. It's hard not to see them rocketing to top-dog status. None of their competitors have the ability to lure viewers with free 2-day shipping of everything you can buy under the Sun.

Expect more consolidations and acquisitions over the next year or so. It wouldn't surprise me if one or both of the little fish on this chart get gobbled up. ViacomCBS's mismanagement of Star Trek is the ultimate cautionary tale, and the company's contraction is already underway after it sold Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House. Meanwhile, WarnerMedia's decisionmaking in the last 10 years has been less reliable than a coin toss.

The AP article about MGM's sale to Amazon contains this nugget:

Sucharita Kodali, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said streaming companies need shows people can’t watch elsewhere in order to stand out and be competitive.

“There is an arms race to get what you can while the window is open,” she said.

The highest-profile casualty of this arms race was the theater business, which as you know received a mortal wound last year. The studios chose not to resuscitate it and started pushing new movies on their streaming platforms, backed by a phalanx of legacy content. Think how much more justified that monthly subscription fee becomes if studios stop selling DVDs and Blu-Rays. Would you put it past them?

Tell me if this sounds familiar: "Back in my day, Best Buy had rack after rack of every movie and album. Now there's nothing but Star Wars, Marvel, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift." I have to go to Half Price Books or Amazon if I want anything that came out before 2015 and/or that didn't gross $800 million.

This is one reason among many you should be assembling a physical media library. Because the corporations are looking forward to the day they will shut off your at-will access to entertainment and start charging you for it. It's the only way they can survive.

Don't subsidize this anti-consumerist agenda. Reject the mainstream and patronize indie creators instead. Get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. You have a choice.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.