This seems like a smart money grab. Keep the hot titles on streaming to keep your subscriber base, and those who really want to watch the fringe shows will probably pay for them, earning HBO more money.
Just recently paid for Angry Boys. It’s totally obvious why they would want to remove it from their platform in this culture, and even more so when they are still selling it elsewhere.
I wonder if other titles removed are similarly as politically incorrect, or if it’s another reason like not drawing in a huge audience.
The most likely theory is that HBO (under the former ownership) signed deals on streaming residuals for these shows that make them more expensive to keep available than they’re worth.
They expected Westworld, for example, to do Game of Thrones-class numbers and continue to draw subscribers for years as a catalog title. It didn’t sustain that level of interest. And the new ownership doesn’t seem to believe in the value of catalog titles in the first place: I wouldn’t be surprised if The Wire and The Sopranos eventually get moved or sold elsewhere.
I’d disagree that S2 is where the show went wrong. It holds up quite well on rewatch, with probably 3-4 of the best overall episodes.
Ironically, I think Nolan & Joy made the same kind of mistake Dr. Ford criticizes in the premiere: They forgot why people wanted to watch Westworld. Fundamentally, the show was about the park, with all its mystery and detail. They seemed to think it was actually about the ideas around AI, consciousness & free will they wanted to explore. Those were modestly compelling, and enough to ride the momentum of the first couple seasons to some passable storytelling assisted by some great performances. But not the same show at all & the plummeting audience reflected that.
Ye I agree with the later. People wanted a Western with cowboys. It also had this "Greec theater thing word" were the audience, the guests, knew the story but the actors, the hosts, didn't.
Concerning the former I guess that is a matter of taste. I watched it with my wife and she was extremely dissatisfied with the change of genre and pace. Lets pretend you know her. You understand why she disliked it right? She loved S1.
Yeah, I can imagine a version of that show that’s basically S1 but stretched out much longer. I can also imagine it being quite enjoyable, there was a lot of story space back and front to explore that they didn’t get to before things went to hell in the park. Some of the best parts of S1 were in this mode: “Ooh, Pariah… that’s new and different!”
On the other hand, I think it would have required robbing S1 of the coherent, two track, beginning-middle-end story that made it as compelling as any single season of any show.
> the ideas around AI, consciousness & free will they wanted to explore
I haven't seen S2, but with that description, and as an avid fan of the various incarnations of Ghost in the Shell, I want to see S2 to see how they explore those concepts.
Don't don't just don't. I was just talking to my son about this. They started with a very superior storytelling and by the end it was only mythology, maybe some story but zero "telling". S2 is still comprehensible but it appears they just believed the wrong side of their appreciation and went hyper on that.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
Thank you for taking the time and maintaining the passion to write a reply this detailed. Much of this goes over my head, but that just means I've got me some learning to do.
I'll be keeping this bookmarked to refer back to.
I should also say, a few years ago I read "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" and it totally changed my thinking on how the brain works, as in it has clearly evolved in an entirely "evolved" manner, ie. unstructured, pieces fitting together as they randomly develop. The one sentence description I've come up with is: the brain, our logic engine, doesn't actually work in a way that we would consider logical.
What this means for me, combined with my abstract understanding of your commentary, is that consciousness won't be achieved when you're trying to build it, consciousness will be achieved by trying to build the pieces that can grow and work together over time to become consciousness (I can't quite find the right words to demonstrate what I mean - we can't build "it" but we can build something that can evolve into "it").
Couldn't agree more. It's the most rapid descent from prestige television to soap opera in television history. Just took some people longer than others to realise it.
In the short term, you are probably right. In the long term, people will move to the most convenient option. That means the experience has to be better than bit torrent.
Is there? How much music was lost when oink (and what.cd) was shut down? We will never know but I suspect quite a bit. It can get awfully hard to get hold of obscure records even if they did exist on physical media.
> For decades before the invention of the VCR, any TV show that aired on any given Tuesday night might never be available again,While I was doing research for The Encyclopedia of New York, I spoke with a curator at the Paley Center in New York about how to find out what aired on NBC in its earliest years as a TV broadcasting company and learned there was no way to watch any of it. There were no tapes. The only record is a filing cabinet, which is part of the Paley collection, full of the carefully typed index cards where secretaries kept track of everything that aired on the network. and certainly never in a way that viewers could control.
Yeah okay... but we are in a post-VCR world. Are any of these [modern, but removed from streaming] shows not preserved and available through online filesharing? I think they probably all are.
When I asked "Are any of these shows not preserved and available through online filesharing?", I am asking if any of the shows the article is about aren't available online. The article is about modern shows from 2022 being removed from online streaming.
I'm not sure if you're mis-reading the quote, or don't have the implied context for the quote, which is that television broadcast did not originally pass through any persistence layer. It went from the camera to the television, never to be seen again.
The article isn't talking about pre-VCR shows, which indeed were ephemeral. The article is hand-wringing about modern shows getting dropped from streaming services in 2022. These shows are almost certainly preserved online through file sharing.
The article ignores filesharing and tries to suggest that the ''disappearance'' of modern shows is somehow worse than the disappearance of pre-VCR shows: "TV Has Always Disappeared. This [disappearance of shows in 2022] Feels Different"
The real reason it's different is because these modern shows haven't actually disappeared, unlike those pre-VCR shows.
I'd expect that there's a fair amount of local-release content that might not have surviving recordings. Individual episodes of things like local newscasts, public affairs shows, those weird weekend "lifestyle" shows where all the guests are local advertisers basically paying for a 10-minute ad spot. There might be a representative episode floating around, but does anyone necessarily have the December 16, 2007 episode of the Channel 83 Action News at Noon? If they do, is it publically accessible, or sitting in some dusty records room at Channel 83, on decaying tape?
You have to be pretty determined and somewhat tech-savvy to find them. For most people, if it doesn't show up in the HBO/Netflix/Amazon/iTunes list, it doesn't exist. There are a lot of shows that were on Netflix years ago that I'd like to see again, but they are gone. However I'm not motivated enough to go figure out how to download them from some pirate site.
Apparently some of these series are going to be re-licensed to ad-supported networks. [1]
I don't think this undermines the premise of this article, that the current crop of streaming execs are moving TV backward to a more ephemeral medium. It's gonna be essential for independent archivists to preserve assets that are being discarded.
The ephemerality seems like a side effect of the underlying “problem”: Media consumers want what’s new and hot, that’s where the audience and money are.
Prestige TV imported the creative standards and financing levels of Hollywood films into dramatic television. Now, just like the movies, it’s become hit-driven.
Yeah, that doesn't make me feel any better. Generally I have zero interest in watching quality shows with interruptions by ads, but on streaming networks they're especially bad. It's not like they bother putting them in at scene changes, they just jam them in anywhere.
Just one anecdote: The Roku Channel (on their free website) is streaming Seasons 1-8 of Great British Bake Off with ads. But with an adblocker, magically there are no ads.
I really don't understand why people are surprised. If you don't have access to the file itself, you don't own it. "Buying" a movie on a platform or paying for a subscription service are both just paying for a revokable license to access a movie. You do not own it and access can be revoked at any time according to whatever platform's ToS.
If you want to own an actual copy of a TV show or movie, buy the physical disc. Optionally you can rip it and store/stream it digitally. Nobody can take that away from you no matter what anyone decides. It's yours forever. If you can't download the file, you don't own it.
Also, most of us are comparatively rich, adult, first worlders. If you like something and want to support it, pay for it! If you literally can't get some obscure media, or if the company is no longer selling it, that's different. But piracy of things you like and want more of is not only unethical, it's shortsighted and immature.
Buying a legit copy doesn't make it legal to download a pirated/illegal copy, any more than buying a band's CD makes it legal to sneak into their concert without a ticket.
I don't think that analogy holds. If I buy the CD and rip it myself end up with MP3s. If I buy the CD and download a torrent of it, I end up with MP3s. If I buy a ticket and bring my tape recorder into their concert, I can listen to my recording of that concert forever.
It sounds like they're saying that if you pay, then it's just as moral to acquire your copy from a torrent as from a product. Would you disagree? The creators get the same (small) cut, the buyer gets the same product, so what's wrong with it?
Something being illegal doesn’t say anything about its morality. Many things that we now think are normal were illegal not too long ago, and in many cases things are made illegal to protect the established powers.
This isn't actually settled in US law, as far as I can tell: if you actually do own a legal copy and you download another copy, it's unclear that you've actually done anything illegal.
IIRC this is the argument that Apple uses to de-duplicate copies of users' music libraries, sometimes to deleterious effect[1].
Technically, the “illegal” part is copying, distributing and deriving from; per Title 17 of Federal law (in the US, of course).
That being said, just like possessing a pound of marijuana can be considered an amount with intent to distribute, the same can be said for having a NAS server with 20TB of copyrighted media. In addition, there are state criminal/civil laws to take into account as well.
>>>just like possessing a pound of marijuana can be considered an amount with intent to distribute, the same can be said for having a NAS server with 20TB of copyrighted media.
Not even close to being the same thing under the law, not even in the realm of the same thing. Show me one case, even one where a person was sued or even implied that the amount of digital content stored on a storage server was considered "intent to distribute" for the purposed of copyright violation
>>In addition, there are state criminal/civil laws to take into account as well.
Name them, copyright is 100% US federal law. So what other laws are in play here
Do you have the authorization if the legal copyright holder? If so, great! But if you are downloading torrents from Pirate Bay, I'm going to assume you don't have such authorization.
Downloading, or possessing copyrighted work that you have not paid for is not actually illegal. It is not drugs, and it is not theft
One of the reasons indivual consumers were targeted for torrents was the fact they were UPLOADING while at the same time downloading
Copyright law is about DISTRIBUTION of a protected work, if I have a copy of a movie, and never distribute it even if the person I obtained it from was not authorized to give me a copy of that money I did no violate copyright law, the person that gave it to me did.
I have yet to see anyone cite the section of copyright law, or any other law that covers the act of DOWNLOADING, only the act of UPLOADING, Sharing, or other wise distributing the work is what violate copyright
It is certainly not as clear-cut as you are making it out. It's not theft to "possess" Call of Duty if you never paid for it?
Or, say I purchased a record of Rolling Stones "Sticky Fingers" back in 1977 or whenever. It is a copyrighted work that I paid for, as you stated. Now, can I go into Sam Goody in 1983 and just walk out with a cassette of the same album? In 1994 can I snag a CD off the shelf at Tower Records? Today, can I demand Amazon or Google or Apple provide me with a MP3 copy?
Let's say I bought every single Rolling Stones album, in every format, etc. I own every song they have ever released. Tomorrow they come out with a new box set -- every song in the collection is one that I already own... so now I can possess the box set for free without buying it?
No, you don't possess the box set for free. You already have all the songs in the box set that you paid for, and therefore you already paid for the contents of the box set. You own the box set contents in entirety, just not that specific box set you would walk out with from the store.
If you're confusing the medium with the actual work, consider the following. You own an original painting. Is it illegal to take a picture of that painting and not redistribute it? A picture is not an exact replica of the painting, but someone might say it is a close enough copy. What if you copied the painting by hand on a new canvas to be indistinguishable by human eye from the original. How about if you move the painting from one painting frame to another. Is the painting from considered part of the art? Are any of these illegal if you don't redistribute it? Stealing is illegal. If you take a box set, you're stealing the DVDs not just the contents of the DVDs. If you remux a movie, you didn't pay for that exact version that you now possess. Is that illegal if you don't redistribute it? If you buy a fork, 3D scan it and then 3D print it and eat dinner with it, is it illegal?
It all comes down to laws of one's country. But your analogy doesn't work because you're talking about physically stealing media and we're talking about digital piracy. Some countries it's actually not illegal to download, only upload. It gets even more complicated in the US when it comes to federal and state laws, copyright law, fair use, personal property, etc. I agree that it is not as clear cut legal as he's making it, but it's not as clear cut illegal as I feel you are making it.
Doesn't seem to be much dispute that stealing a physical copy is in fact illegal, it's theft. I agree, you agree. Please show me where an exception has been made in any law that says, theft doesn't apply when the goods in question are digital. Digital goods are goods, they have value, they are sold, and they can be stolen/pirated/"borrowed"/whatever words make you feel better.
Do I think the actual likelihood of an individual being prosecuted or sued for downloading torrents is more than 0.000001%? I do not. But getting away with it is not the same as being in the clear.
There isn't an exception that I know of. What I'm saying is if you download a torrent for a movie that you own you can still get a copyright notice. That doesn't really make sense to me.
>>It's not theft to "possess" Call of Duty if you never paid for it?
From a US law it is not even theft to distribute it, it is infringement of copyright which is not theft.
>Now, can I go into Sam Goody in 1983 and just walk out with a cassette of the same album?
That is shoplifting of a physical product, very very different than replication of digital product
if you were from the future with a Star Trek replicator an when in to Sam Goody, Scanned the Cassette and made a perfect replica of it it would not be theft
Similar if I am a talent artist and I make a perfect replica of a famous Painting to hang on my own wall it would not be a crime, it would only be a crime if I attempted to sell the painting as if it was the original work
See that is the key point, duplication of copyright is not a crime, selling it is, distributing it to others is.
> you were from the future with a Star Trek replicator an when in to Sam Goody, Scanned the Cassette and made a perfect replica of it it would not be theft
This is certainly false, no need to speculate. There is presently an entire underground industry of fake Louis Vuitton handbags, and other luxury brands. The goods may be amazing replicas but the legality is clear... an unauthorized source simply cannot produce LV handbags at will, and knowingly purchasing one is not legal either.
Do I think there is any actual risk that an individual person would be prosecuted for buying one of these bags? As I said elsewhere, no. It still doesn't make it legal.
Again the problem here is not the duplicate bag, it is the act of SELLING or DISTRIBUTING the bag
I can take material and make an exact replica of a Louis Vuitton handbag for my own personal use, however if I tried to SELL it as a Louis Vuitton handbag it would be fraud and trademark violation.
So in the case of the Sam Goody, Scanned the Cassette I can take a star Trek replica for my own personal use, perfectly legal. I just could not SELL IT, or DISTRIBUTE IT
>> and knowingly purchasing one is not legal either.
I would love to see the statute on that, not saying your wrong but it would have to be a local law and I bet would not apply to the context of a digital download.
That links to trafficking statutes. And it states, "it is not a crime under this act for an individual knowingly to purchase goods bearing counterfeit marks, if the purchase is for the individual's personal use." I emphasize under this act, since this act relates to trafficking. That doesn't say that it is not illegal under any other act or law. Customs and Border Patrol seems quite clear: "It is illegal to purchase counterfeit goods." Period. No ifs/ands/buts.
CBP provides no code statute under which they have made this declaration so it seems to be more of a scare tactic than at legal opinion. Further given the context to CBP they are also most likely talking about knowingly importing counterfeit products into the US after buying while traveling
That is way way off course from the topic of digital nor does it make it illegal to buy just illegal to import
You have yet to provide the needed statute citation to back your claims that it is either illegal to buy a counterfeit nor how that would apply to the original thesis that it is note illegal to download a copyrighted work only illegal to distribute or upload it
>If you don't have access to the file itself, you don't own it.
This isn't the full story either though. You can be in possession of a file that has a DRM encryption applied. If the service revokes you keys, that encrypted file in your possession is worthless. So, do you really own that file?
This is why the only real way to keep copies of media for future viewing is to have them in a completely DRM-free format that can be viewed using any open-source player software. Don't settle for anything less.
Or the converse! Think of the way GOG sells DRM-free installers -- GOG sells you a license, sure, just like everyone else, but they give you a DRM-free installer, which is bit-perfect to the version of that installer shared on the Pirate Bay's eternal decentralized tracker.
Can I pirate that installer? When I'm caught, which file is the pirated version, and which is the legitimate one I got from GOG's servers? If I wave around my emailed receipt, is that (moral) license enough?
And oddly enough, Amazon has DRM-free MP3s. (who knows how long they will host them). And the UI is hard to use / doesn't work in-bulk to get the MP3s you downloaded.
They can make old players stop playing old blu-ray discs? Has that ever happened? I thought they just did key changes that would stop old players from playing new blu-ray discs.
The last paragraph wasn't necessary to me; while I'm glad we have "if you can't pay I understand" -- but I also think that "if you can pay you always should" isn't nuanced enough?
I imagine few of us want "cable all over again," but that's what it looks like we're headed toward? Offhand, I'd e.g. like to pay for individual shows. Let me pay $5 for Severance and I literally need nothing else from Apple TV.
You can already do that with Vudu/iTunes/Amazon (maybe not the $5 part but sales fire off frequently enough for tv shows if you keep your eye out on Slickdeals / CheapCharts etc)
I bought a ton of MP3 records off their platform over the years, and recently it all went to hell. I'll take responsibility for not downloading it all right away, but I still think their recent behavior was sketchy.
My mistake was listening to the music that I owned using Amazon's music player. I'd download it locally to whatever device I was using, but my collection was large enough that I rarely kept it all on my mobile devices. When they changed their subscription model for amazon music I no longer was able to stream my music that I had bought. I couldn't even download it on mobile. Zero explanation of what happened.
Instead I had to login on my desktop, and download tracks one by one. It was painfully slow and totally unintuitive.
Keep in mind this all happened without explanation as it relates to music you owned, but still resided on their servers. It was pretty clear that they wanted you to sign up for the new streaming service and we're making it hard to get to your music otherwise.
When Amazon moved Canadian kindle customers to its new Canadian site - it wiped out all owned copies of magazines and newspapers. I'd purchased a fair number but had read few; all gone forever no apology, no refund.
That's unlikely to be a economically viable price point.
DVDs used to cost about $20 / season, right? And digital purchase of shows (rather than subscriptions) when it used to be more of a thing was typically $2 / episode. Are you still game at those prices?
Well, a subscription service is literally a subscription access, of course.
If you buy an iTunes movie and keep the downloaded file (there is a single file), it works so long as you retain an iTunes account (it is DRM protected, that DRM is account-specific, NOT media-specific)
It’s hard to take things away from people and charge the same amount of money and not have a consumer friendly reason for doing it. Even casual access to programming content.
> If you want to own an actual copy of a TV show or movie, buy the physical disc.
For the vast majority of new TV shows, that option simply doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been that way for a couple of years now. You can only hope to find a torrent in good enough quality.
> For example, looking at Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the best TV show of 2020, only a good 10% have a US Blu-ray release
That's a top 129 list. "The 129 most popular TV shows in 2020" is not a category of much interest. How many of the top 130 American TV shows in 2007 have a blu-ray release?
I disagree. The amount of people who pirate shows is tiny compared to regular viewers of a show. Stopping piracy doesn't really lead to a significant more legitimate purchases; most people just don't pirate in general. And people in general don't buy Blu-Rays because streaming is more convenient and cheaper.
I don’t know anyone under the age of 30 with a dedicated machine to play the discs. Maybe some of the game consoles can do this. But seeing shelves of movies and shows on a rack feels super outdated to me. A lot of these things feel like stuff that people watched once or never and they were just gifts.
Digital piracy golden age was in the 2000s and they released everything on DVD. But I think it was streaming that basically killed the idea that people would pay hundreds of euro for a box set.
I distinctly remember buying a single season of Westwood for 40 euro!
First and second seasons are masterpieces which absolutely deserves multiple re-watches. There are many layers to both seasons where early details are only noticeable on rewatch, preferably after watching some youtube videos explaining it all.
3rd season was just a confusing mess, fourth was so bad that by the time i reached then end I completely did not care about it.
> I really don't understand why people are surprised.
Because this is the first time anything quite like this has happened. Yes I know shows disappear from streaming platforms all the time.
Anyone who says they aren’t surprised is, imho, full of shit. This is surprising because the economics of it seemingly don’t make sense. Which means the contracts must be structured in a way that people didn’t expect. TBH eve after the announcement it still doesn’t make sense to me! The only way it can sense is if you know the contract details. And I’m pretty sure you don’t, which means I think you’re full of shit. I’m not trying to be rude, just honest! However if you do know what the Westworld contract looked like please let us all know!
I think part of the reason this is a big deal is that it breaks HBO’s brand. They have always been seen as a prestige channel that had a catalog of original programming you’d never see anywhere else. Westworld appeared to be part of this original programming portfolio and something that would live on as part of what it meant to be subscribed to HBO, like the Sopranos. Having the series disappear is like finding out that Disney is jettisoning Toy Story.
Yes but Westworld started out with a brilliant first season and went downhill from there until the 4th season was nearly unwatchable. The Sopranos was good right up until the end, which is not how I would have ended it. HBO might as well sell Westworld to a less premium outlet.
Many (most) HBO shows do not live up to The Sopranos, and FWIW I completely agree with your assessment of Westworld, but I also agree with GP - part of the pitch of HBOGO, and then Max, is access to the whole back catalog of HBO. The Sopranos, yes, but also John From Cincinnati and a host of other ambitious also-rans. HBO isn't selling off Westworld because it's bad, they're selling it off because their penny pinching CEO doesn't understand what made HBO worth the subscription in the first place.
He has the numbers though. He can see if hardly anyone is watching Westworld on HBO and calculate he could make more money by selling it and then using that money to create something people do want to watch.
As for harming the brand, I know what HBO used to be but don't know if it's that anymore. I don't know anything about calculating a brand image or how much it's worth, so I couldn't say in a landscape of thousands of competing outlets
He thinks he has the numbers. He could also raise the subscription price and make more money that way too, if most people stick around. Do that enough and they won't, though.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my impression from the sudden change of fortune of all these movie and television streaming services is, maybe making really good content doesn't really make the business model work. Maybe it only really works if you're churning out low-budget, mindless trash reality TV. Though it is less clear if that was understood at front and this was a way of growing the subscriber base or if there was more optimism that was warranted.
Ok. But why ditch the shows you've already paid to produce? Maybe the future cash flows are greater by taking the cash today but that's a hell of a wager to place on the future.
My annual sub renews in 12 days. I will probably re-up for one more year but only because I can get a significant discount through my credit card. Will I, and others, re-up in for 2024? I am very uncertain.
Well yeah... the problem with Westworld was that it didn't really have an overarching plot, they just figured out what to do from season to season. Season 1 was brilliant, season 2 still good, but with some worrying misanthropic themes (like positing that human intelligence was vastly inferior to that of the androids), and then it apparently went downhill from there. I only ever watched seasons 1 and 2, but was planning on taking a look at 3 and 4, and finding out I won't be able to (legally) without forking out for the DVD box sets (which, at least in this case, still exist) makes me feel exactly like the article describes: as if someone stole a toy which I didn't play with, but was vaguely looking forward to playing with sometime in the future...
Disney;s business model for many years was to do just that, they would put popular titles "in the vault" only to re-release them a few years later
it is proven economic model of false scarcity. Just like the McRib, McDs would never put it on the permanent menu because they sell more due to it "limited run" every year.
I suspect these shows will be like that, they will be removed and readded periodically to boost subscriber numbers, probally to align with some exec needing a bonus, or if they are having a bad year and want to hide the bad news from investors
True - I should probably have said 99% of their customers. I never seemed to have a difficulty finding a movie when I wanted but then again I didn’t often want to.
Because it is effectual for the Disney-fanatics. If 99% of your customers will buy "the latest movie or whatever is on the shelf at Walmart" and 1% will buy multiple copies of something "from the vault" so they don't miss out, then the vault move is a winning play.
I worked in a retail movie store in the year 2000, and can assure you, customers absolutely did notice the shenanigans that Disney played with periodically cycling their classic films in and out of print on VHS and DVD.
McRib is in fact a good example. It’s marketed as “for a limited time only”, which is precisely artificial scarcity. That its availability is actually dependent on pork prices is kind of irrelevant. McD could bring it back in the future, or they may not, but if it is, it will be again be for a limited time only.
Importantly, it’s not marketed as being available at certain time of the year, rather its availability depends on McD marketing choices —- that’s what makes it an example of artificial scarcity and not a seasonal item.
Really no different to Disney having old releases in the “vault”, and selectively re-releasing them every so often at a time of their own choosing.
The rest of the video venues (what do we call them now that they're not channels?) caught up. HBO is still high-status, but it hasn't had any kind of singular status in years; FX, AMC, Netflix, Apple, Starz, and Amazon do just as good a job with original programming.
I assume HBO has figured that out for itself, and it no longer makes sense for them to be anything less than ruthless; nothing they ever do is going to vault them back to the status they had in 2004, so why pretend?
I agree that HBO's brand has been broken, but that happened independent of the decision to remove canceled titles from the streaming back catalog. It happened first with the initial purchase by AT&T when the strategy 180'd from high-quality boutique productions released in small numbers one at a time to an attempt to emulate the Netflix "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" strategy, then again with the panic reaction to the pandemic releasing all Warners films on HBO Max rather than giving any exclusive theatrical run, pissing off directors and actors, then yet again when AT&T promptly bowed out and Warners merged with Discovery and they seemed to now reverse a bunch of the original decisions, canceling both shows and planned movies left and right and resetting the entire DCEU in the process.
Not even sure where to throw in the weird tendency to release all of these "limited" series they change their minds on and throw out adhoc future seasons that come out of nowhere and make no sense because the initial run generates some buzz. I'm just glad they started doing that after Chernobyl and at least didn't ruin that one.
Also putting aside the confusing launch of HBO Max itself, while also keeping HBO Go and HBO as a channel available for subscription from other streaming services, and all of the bugs the app had within the first few years of release.
They've been a complete shitshow for years now, obviously having no real plan that any set group of leaders consistently believes in. I'm reasonably sure having old titles becoming unavailable unless you bought a physical copy isn't a new thing anyway. What's new here is doing it to titles that were barely canceled just now, not to mention the whole Batgirl thing producing an entire movie and not even releasing it at all anywhere.
And this is why I unsubscribed. You can’t sell me Westworld, and then, after I’ve subscribed, take Westworld away so you can license it to some other revenue stream. I’m not paying for some percentage of HBO.
Westworld was cancelled without an ending as were some of the other shows on this list like Vinyl which was cancelled after 1 season. Personally I liked both shows at times but I kind of get why you'd not want to steer viewers to dead end shows.
If that is the justification, then HBO should refund everyone who paid for a product that HBO failed to deliver, and definitely shouldn't sell it to other customers on other platforms.
I'd still like to watch the old episodes of HBO's Real Sex. As far as I know, that was never available on their streaming platforms. I guess they were going for "Prestige TV", and Real Sex was too close to late-night smut. Even on torrents, I can only find a few episodes.
It’s funny because I actually watched an episode or two of Real Sex on my iPhone several years ago. I don’t recall whether it was off of their website or through their app, though.
I am a pretty loyal HBO max customer, despite the troubles with the service. The content is just too good.
I thought this would be about B-tier content. But Westworld? Arguably HBOs biggest hit since game of thrones? What are the MBAs looking at? It was bad enough that Westworld was not in 4K.
Now that the White Lotus is over, maybe i should cancel
DVD Netflix service (yes this service is still around, albeit the library a fleeting image of what it once was) has the first 3 seasons of Westworld on Bluray [1]. Hopefully they’ll have S4 soon as well.
I'm sad that the Rocky+Bullwinkle complete set I bought has different music from when it was aired. I'm sorry, I just hate the replacement music and it ruined the cartoon for me.
I do have a couple VHS tapes that had the cartoons with the original music.
This also happened with the TV show Northern Exposure, which had a notably great soundtrack. They couldn't get rights to a lot of the music, so it was replaced with more mediocre stuff on the hardcopy releases.
Rumor has it the issue is residuals but on the face of it that doesn't make sense. Why? Because you would expect residuals on a streaming service to have somethign to do with how many people watched the show.
If that were the case, there'd be no reason to remove it. So the obvious answer is that's not how it works. My guess is that HBO is paying residuals for having the show available regardless of whether or not people watch it. The problem then is that not enough people were watching it. That makes sense given it was also cancelled recently.
Another potential reason is the way residuals are structured. Writers' residuals decay over time. That is you might get $1000 for writing a show that you wrote a year ago and is broadast/streamed. If it's a 10 year old show you might get $100 for the same audience. Residuals for writers for streaming service is one of the big issues threatening to boil over into another writers guild strike.
Given that though, HBO might be removing Westworld while residuals are the most expensive and it could come back in a couple of years.
Yes, there's a lot of speculation here.
I agree it does feel like HBO is breaking their viewer expectations by removing one of their own originals.
First of all this move is enough for me to never subscribe to HBO Max so don't take my defense as positive, just explanatory.
> If that were the case, there'd be no reason to remove it
If the deep parts of the catalog don't generate subscriptions they are a money hole.
Remember you don't want to supply users with everything they want when paying residuals. You want to give them exactly enough content to justify the subscription cost and nothing more.
The ideal user is one that only watches a single show and nothing else.
Of course the problem with this perspective is it assumes users ignore such actions. Hopefully the user base proves them wrong.
> Given that though, HBO might be removing Westworld while residuals are the most expensive and it could come back in a couple of years.
That isn't necessarily true, it could be that by pulling the content the residuals are frozen or even worse (as someone suggested on an article on the topic) reset when you begin streaming again.
> I agree it does feel like HBO is breaking their viewer expectations by removing one of their own originals.
Honestly I would bet a lot of money viewers were ignored for this discussion. It is exactly the kind of "short term profit at all costs" play that has become more popular.
The practice of Amazon Prime, Frontier, and other on-demand services just up and removing movies (or tv shows) you "bought" is weirder to me. I assume it's because they lost rights in some negotiation, but the movies just disappear. No notice, no refund.
I think it is reasonable to buy the DVD or BluRay, then download DRM-free rip from PirateBay with same resolution. I think the same is fair if you bought a digital lifetime license (as we just learned: "not really") from Amazon. Then if Amazon steals your copy and does not refund you, you still have a copy.
Has anyone ever tried to sue Amazon in small claims court for a "disappeared" film? I guess Amazon will force arbitration, but you have a good case in arbitration. All you want is either: the original digital film, or a refund of original payment. This could be arbitrated very quickly since the sum is so small.
It happened to me with both providers I mentioned. With Frontier, it's when they bought Verizon FIOS, and I lost several movies. On Amazon Prime Video, I lost 2 seasons of a British detective show.
have you really bought it, in terms of paying extra money besides the prime costs just for the show? Or just subscribed to prime? Since you put "bought" in quotes I guess it could mean both. And I think LeoPanthera was referring to that things that are payed extra for shouldn't vanish - which would also have been my understanding. So far everything payed extra for is still there - but it's a sample size of 2 mainstream movies, so it probably doesn't tell much.
I mean specifically paid to "buy" that movie and/or TV show. As opposed to either renting it, or it coming with the service subscription. I put "buy" in quotes because in hindsight, that's clearly not what happened.
This should never happen on Prime Video. Major breach of customer trust.
If it’s happened to you please call customer service and complain. If they can’t fix it or refund you, please get in touch with me and I will try and get it fixed for you
What angers me the most is that they never bother to get subtitles (closed captions) on a lot of films I'd like to watch. Being deaf, it's a major pain when a decent film doesn't come with subtitles !
I don't think this is necessarily true. Amazon owns the rights to Star Gate and right now SG1 has a warning that it is about to be removed. Rather odd to do when they own the franchise.
They also have a honor all contracts previously signed by MGM so it is entirely possible SG1 was included in another deal.
Also I believe MGM is still being operated Separately from Prime Video, or Amazon Studios so likely they would need to negate between the business units.
If I buy something on Prime, it’s exclusively with those “thanks for using slow shipping” credits they provide during the holidays. I have about $30 of credits this year.
HBO was the original prestige programming channel, Netflix briefly got into that game but seems to have given up and preferring on making programming decisions solely based on KPIs to maximize total profit and now it seems like HBO will no longer be any kind of prestige programming destination.
Is there anywhere now to pick up the prestige programming torch?
I breezed through the article, we don't watch TV on the streaming services. We use free HD OTA since we're not that far from the towers. Do a lot of people watch TV shows on the streaming networks? It doesn't seem like something I'd want to pay for or if I did, maybe I'd just go back to cable? We use streaming services for movies and documentaries.
Yes, many people watch shows and n streaming services. Why would cable be preferred? With streaming you can watch any time you want not on a fixed schedule.
Do you watch OTA live? I am shocked by the number/length of commercials on OTA broadcasts. Even when I watch network television from NBC/CBS/etc. on their websites, it's much easier to switch to a different window, mute the volume, and check back in a minute or two (and rewind if needed).
Nostalgia - I missed so much stuff forever as a kid because I had to eat dinner right that damn second, for some reason it was not possible to eat dinner five minutes later, at the commercial, while watching something that there would never be an opportunity to watch again. It took my parents forty years to loosen up on their dinner time schedule - these days they are perfectly happy to watch TV during dinner, next to their grandchildren.
Though it is still an occasional pain when a show like Firefly or Stargate Universe gets canceled before it’s time. Whatever happened to “Er ist wieder da”? It seemed to disappear everywhere overnight.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadJust recently paid for Angry Boys. It’s totally obvious why they would want to remove it from their platform in this culture, and even more so when they are still selling it elsewhere.
I wonder if other titles removed are similarly as politically incorrect, or if it’s another reason like not drawing in a huge audience.
They expected Westworld, for example, to do Game of Thrones-class numbers and continue to draw subscribers for years as a catalog title. It didn’t sustain that level of interest. And the new ownership doesn’t seem to believe in the value of catalog titles in the first place: I wouldn’t be surprised if The Wire and The Sopranos eventually get moved or sold elsewhere.
Ironically, I think Nolan & Joy made the same kind of mistake Dr. Ford criticizes in the premiere: They forgot why people wanted to watch Westworld. Fundamentally, the show was about the park, with all its mystery and detail. They seemed to think it was actually about the ideas around AI, consciousness & free will they wanted to explore. Those were modestly compelling, and enough to ride the momentum of the first couple seasons to some passable storytelling assisted by some great performances. But not the same show at all & the plummeting audience reflected that.
Concerning the former I guess that is a matter of taste. I watched it with my wife and she was extremely dissatisfied with the change of genre and pace. Lets pretend you know her. You understand why she disliked it right? She loved S1.
On the other hand, I think it would have required robbing S1 of the coherent, two track, beginning-middle-end story that made it as compelling as any single season of any show.
I haven't seen S2, but with that description, and as an avid fan of the various incarnations of Ghost in the Shell, I want to see S2 to see how they explore those concepts.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
I'll be keeping this bookmarked to refer back to.
I should also say, a few years ago I read "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" and it totally changed my thinking on how the brain works, as in it has clearly evolved in an entirely "evolved" manner, ie. unstructured, pieces fitting together as they randomly develop. The one sentence description I've come up with is: the brain, our logic engine, doesn't actually work in a way that we would consider logical.
What this means for me, combined with my abstract understanding of your commentary, is that consciousness won't be achieved when you're trying to build it, consciousness will be achieved by trying to build the pieces that can grow and work together over time to become consciousness (I can't quite find the right words to demonstrate what I mean - we can't build "it" but we can build something that can evolve into "it").
Final space for instance https://gamerant.com/final-space-warner-bros-discovery-tax-w...
Yeah okay... but we are in a post-VCR world. Are any of these [modern, but removed from streaming] shows not preserved and available through online filesharing? I think they probably all are.
> Did you even read the
Right back at you buddy.
The article ignores filesharing and tries to suggest that the ''disappearance'' of modern shows is somehow worse than the disappearance of pre-VCR shows: "TV Has Always Disappeared. This [disappearance of shows in 2022] Feels Different"
The real reason it's different is because these modern shows haven't actually disappeared, unlike those pre-VCR shows.
Sadly in the 1960s and 70s tapes were very expensive but from the 80s on if it aired you can find it.
I don't think this undermines the premise of this article, that the current crop of streaming execs are moving TV backward to a more ephemeral medium. It's gonna be essential for independent archivists to preserve assets that are being discarded.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/23513277/westworld-hbo-where-to-stre...
Prestige TV imported the creative standards and financing levels of Hollywood films into dramatic television. Now, just like the movies, it’s become hit-driven.
If you want to own an actual copy of a TV show or movie, buy the physical disc. Optionally you can rip it and store/stream it digitally. Nobody can take that away from you no matter what anyone decides. It's yours forever. If you can't download the file, you don't own it.
Also, most of us are comparatively rich, adult, first worlders. If you like something and want to support it, pay for it! If you literally can't get some obscure media, or if the company is no longer selling it, that's different. But piracy of things you like and want more of is not only unethical, it's shortsighted and immature.
Under what law?
The venue may redistrict it, that is not a law though at most they could do to you for violation is kick you out
There is no law I am aware of that prevents such a recording, only redistribution of the recording made would be a violation of the law
Personally I only follow laws I agree with.
edit: Brittney Griner too.
IIRC this is the argument that Apple uses to de-duplicate copies of users' music libraries, sometimes to deleterious effect[1].
[1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252932712
That being said, just like possessing a pound of marijuana can be considered an amount with intent to distribute, the same can be said for having a NAS server with 20TB of copyrighted media. In addition, there are state criminal/civil laws to take into account as well.
Not even close to being the same thing under the law, not even in the realm of the same thing. Show me one case, even one where a person was sued or even implied that the amount of digital content stored on a storage server was considered "intent to distribute" for the purposed of copyright violation
>>In addition, there are state criminal/civil laws to take into account as well.
Name them, copyright is 100% US federal law. So what other laws are in play here
One of the reasons indivual consumers were targeted for torrents was the fact they were UPLOADING while at the same time downloading
Copyright law is about DISTRIBUTION of a protected work, if I have a copy of a movie, and never distribute it even if the person I obtained it from was not authorized to give me a copy of that money I did no violate copyright law, the person that gave it to me did.
I have yet to see anyone cite the section of copyright law, or any other law that covers the act of DOWNLOADING, only the act of UPLOADING, Sharing, or other wise distributing the work is what violate copyright
Or, say I purchased a record of Rolling Stones "Sticky Fingers" back in 1977 or whenever. It is a copyrighted work that I paid for, as you stated. Now, can I go into Sam Goody in 1983 and just walk out with a cassette of the same album? In 1994 can I snag a CD off the shelf at Tower Records? Today, can I demand Amazon or Google or Apple provide me with a MP3 copy?
Let's say I bought every single Rolling Stones album, in every format, etc. I own every song they have ever released. Tomorrow they come out with a new box set -- every song in the collection is one that I already own... so now I can possess the box set for free without buying it?
Or back them up on your computer.
Or load them onto your phone.
You’re conflating the physical media with the umm, non-physical media.
If you're confusing the medium with the actual work, consider the following. You own an original painting. Is it illegal to take a picture of that painting and not redistribute it? A picture is not an exact replica of the painting, but someone might say it is a close enough copy. What if you copied the painting by hand on a new canvas to be indistinguishable by human eye from the original. How about if you move the painting from one painting frame to another. Is the painting from considered part of the art? Are any of these illegal if you don't redistribute it? Stealing is illegal. If you take a box set, you're stealing the DVDs not just the contents of the DVDs. If you remux a movie, you didn't pay for that exact version that you now possess. Is that illegal if you don't redistribute it? If you buy a fork, 3D scan it and then 3D print it and eat dinner with it, is it illegal?
It all comes down to laws of one's country. But your analogy doesn't work because you're talking about physically stealing media and we're talking about digital piracy. Some countries it's actually not illegal to download, only upload. It gets even more complicated in the US when it comes to federal and state laws, copyright law, fair use, personal property, etc. I agree that it is not as clear cut legal as he's making it, but it's not as clear cut illegal as I feel you are making it.
Do I think the actual likelihood of an individual being prosecuted or sued for downloading torrents is more than 0.000001%? I do not. But getting away with it is not the same as being in the clear.
From a US law it is not even theft to distribute it, it is infringement of copyright which is not theft.
>Now, can I go into Sam Goody in 1983 and just walk out with a cassette of the same album?
That is shoplifting of a physical product, very very different than replication of digital product
if you were from the future with a Star Trek replicator an when in to Sam Goody, Scanned the Cassette and made a perfect replica of it it would not be theft
Similar if I am a talent artist and I make a perfect replica of a famous Painting to hang on my own wall it would not be a crime, it would only be a crime if I attempted to sell the painting as if it was the original work
See that is the key point, duplication of copyright is not a crime, selling it is, distributing it to others is.
This is certainly false, no need to speculate. There is presently an entire underground industry of fake Louis Vuitton handbags, and other luxury brands. The goods may be amazing replicas but the legality is clear... an unauthorized source simply cannot produce LV handbags at will, and knowingly purchasing one is not legal either.
Do I think there is any actual risk that an individual person would be prosecuted for buying one of these bags? As I said elsewhere, no. It still doesn't make it legal.
I can take material and make an exact replica of a Louis Vuitton handbag for my own personal use, however if I tried to SELL it as a Louis Vuitton handbag it would be fraud and trademark violation.
So in the case of the Sam Goody, Scanned the Cassette I can take a star Trek replica for my own personal use, perfectly legal. I just could not SELL IT, or DISTRIBUTE IT
>> and knowingly purchasing one is not legal either.
I would love to see the statute on that, not saying your wrong but it would have to be a local law and I bet would not apply to the context of a digital download.
Edit:
Under US Federal law there is no prohibition on Knowingly buying counterfeit goods ( https://www.findlaw.com/consumer/consumer-transactions/buyin... )
https://www.cbp.gov/trade/fakegoodsrealdangers#:~:text=It%20....
That is way way off course from the topic of digital nor does it make it illegal to buy just illegal to import
You have yet to provide the needed statute citation to back your claims that it is either illegal to buy a counterfeit nor how that would apply to the original thesis that it is note illegal to download a copyrighted work only illegal to distribute or upload it
This isn't the full story either though. You can be in possession of a file that has a DRM encryption applied. If the service revokes you keys, that encrypted file in your possession is worthless. So, do you really own that file?
Can I pirate that installer? When I'm caught, which file is the pirated version, and which is the legitimate one I got from GOG's servers? If I wave around my emailed receipt, is that (moral) license enough?
I imagine few of us want "cable all over again," but that's what it looks like we're headed toward? Offhand, I'd e.g. like to pay for individual shows. Let me pay $5 for Severance and I literally need nothing else from Apple TV.
I bought a ton of MP3 records off their platform over the years, and recently it all went to hell. I'll take responsibility for not downloading it all right away, but I still think their recent behavior was sketchy.
My mistake was listening to the music that I owned using Amazon's music player. I'd download it locally to whatever device I was using, but my collection was large enough that I rarely kept it all on my mobile devices. When they changed their subscription model for amazon music I no longer was able to stream my music that I had bought. I couldn't even download it on mobile. Zero explanation of what happened.
Instead I had to login on my desktop, and download tracks one by one. It was painfully slow and totally unintuitive.
Keep in mind this all happened without explanation as it relates to music you owned, but still resided on their servers. It was pretty clear that they wanted you to sign up for the new streaming service and we're making it hard to get to your music otherwise.
It (theoretically of course) is not easier than piracy?
DVDs used to cost about $20 / season, right? And digital purchase of shows (rather than subscriptions) when it used to be more of a thing was typically $2 / episode. Are you still game at those prices?
No.
If you buy an iTunes movie and keep the downloaded file (there is a single file), it works so long as you retain an iTunes account (it is DRM protected, that DRM is account-specific, NOT media-specific)
Originally, one couldn't even re-download a movie after purchase.
Customers don’t care about corporate mergers.
For the vast majority of new TV shows, that option simply doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been that way for a couple of years now. You can only hope to find a torrent in good enough quality.
For example, looking at Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the best TV show of 2020, only a good 10% have a US Blu-ray release: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-tv-shows-of-...
For what I personally watch, it’s more like 5% at most.
> For example, looking at Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the best TV show of 2020, only a good 10% have a US Blu-ray release
That's a top 129 list. "The 129 most popular TV shows in 2020" is not a category of much interest. How many of the top 130 American TV shows in 2007 have a blu-ray release?
I distinctly remember buying a single season of Westwood for 40 euro!
3rd season was just a confusing mess, fourth was so bad that by the time i reached then end I completely did not care about it.
You do you. But many people love to rewatch their favorite movies and shows.
I would append that with "If you cant download the file, DRM free, in a format that can be read with OpenSource Software you do not own it
Because this is the first time anything quite like this has happened. Yes I know shows disappear from streaming platforms all the time.
Anyone who says they aren’t surprised is, imho, full of shit. This is surprising because the economics of it seemingly don’t make sense. Which means the contracts must be structured in a way that people didn’t expect. TBH eve after the announcement it still doesn’t make sense to me! The only way it can sense is if you know the contract details. And I’m pretty sure you don’t, which means I think you’re full of shit. I’m not trying to be rude, just honest! However if you do know what the Westworld contract looked like please let us all know!
As for harming the brand, I know what HBO used to be but don't know if it's that anymore. I don't know anything about calculating a brand image or how much it's worth, so I couldn't say in a landscape of thousands of competing outlets
He thinks he has the numbers. He could also raise the subscription price and make more money that way too, if most people stick around. Do that enough and they won't, though.
My annual sub renews in 12 days. I will probably re-up for one more year but only because I can get a significant discount through my credit card. Will I, and others, re-up in for 2024? I am very uncertain.
It's weird that they are removing content like Westworld but there's a ton of trash on their platform that they could axe and no one would even know.
it is proven economic model of false scarcity. Just like the McRib, McDs would never put it on the permanent menu because they sell more due to it "limited run" every year.
I suspect these shows will be like that, they will be removed and readded periodically to boost subscriber numbers, probally to align with some exec needing a bonus, or if they are having a bad year and want to hide the bad news from investors
McDonalds would bring back McRib when pork prices would drop and they could negotiate large purchases of pork at favorable rates.
Importantly, it’s not marketed as being available at certain time of the year, rather its availability depends on McD marketing choices —- that’s what makes it an example of artificial scarcity and not a seasonal item.
Really no different to Disney having old releases in the “vault”, and selectively re-releasing them every so often at a time of their own choosing.
I assume HBO has figured that out for itself, and it no longer makes sense for them to be anything less than ruthless; nothing they ever do is going to vault them back to the status they had in 2004, so why pretend?
A bit of a strange analogy since pulling stuff from shelves to create artificial scarcity has been a signature move of theirs for quite some time.
Not even sure where to throw in the weird tendency to release all of these "limited" series they change their minds on and throw out adhoc future seasons that come out of nowhere and make no sense because the initial run generates some buzz. I'm just glad they started doing that after Chernobyl and at least didn't ruin that one.
Also putting aside the confusing launch of HBO Max itself, while also keeping HBO Go and HBO as a channel available for subscription from other streaming services, and all of the bugs the app had within the first few years of release.
They've been a complete shitshow for years now, obviously having no real plan that any set group of leaders consistently believes in. I'm reasonably sure having old titles becoming unavailable unless you bought a physical copy isn't a new thing anyway. What's new here is doing it to titles that were barely canceled just now, not to mention the whole Batgirl thing producing an entire movie and not even releasing it at all anywhere.
One show I was in to a while ago was Amazon's Mozart in the Jungle and it was canceled when a new studio head came in. It ended on a cliff hanger.
I thought this would be about B-tier content. But Westworld? Arguably HBOs biggest hit since game of thrones? What are the MBAs looking at? It was bad enough that Westworld was not in 4K.
Now that the White Lotus is over, maybe i should cancel
Considering the new bosses have a reputation for producing pure garbage media, I would expect this to change in the near future.
[1] https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Westworld/80066897
I do have a couple VHS tapes that had the cartoons with the original music.
Apparently, it's happened to other shows, too: https://www.vox.com/2014/11/3/7145231/shows-not-on-dvd-music...
Rumor has it the issue is residuals but on the face of it that doesn't make sense. Why? Because you would expect residuals on a streaming service to have somethign to do with how many people watched the show.
If that were the case, there'd be no reason to remove it. So the obvious answer is that's not how it works. My guess is that HBO is paying residuals for having the show available regardless of whether or not people watch it. The problem then is that not enough people were watching it. That makes sense given it was also cancelled recently.
Another potential reason is the way residuals are structured. Writers' residuals decay over time. That is you might get $1000 for writing a show that you wrote a year ago and is broadast/streamed. If it's a 10 year old show you might get $100 for the same audience. Residuals for writers for streaming service is one of the big issues threatening to boil over into another writers guild strike.
Given that though, HBO might be removing Westworld while residuals are the most expensive and it could come back in a couple of years.
Yes, there's a lot of speculation here.
I agree it does feel like HBO is breaking their viewer expectations by removing one of their own originals.
Ouch, apparently the writers were even planning on the next season being the final one.
> If that were the case, there'd be no reason to remove it
If the deep parts of the catalog don't generate subscriptions they are a money hole.
Remember you don't want to supply users with everything they want when paying residuals. You want to give them exactly enough content to justify the subscription cost and nothing more.
The ideal user is one that only watches a single show and nothing else.
Of course the problem with this perspective is it assumes users ignore such actions. Hopefully the user base proves them wrong.
> Given that though, HBO might be removing Westworld while residuals are the most expensive and it could come back in a couple of years.
That isn't necessarily true, it could be that by pulling the content the residuals are frozen or even worse (as someone suggested on an article on the topic) reset when you begin streaming again.
> I agree it does feel like HBO is breaking their viewer expectations by removing one of their own originals.
Honestly I would bet a lot of money viewers were ignored for this discussion. It is exactly the kind of "short term profit at all costs" play that has become more popular.
EDIT: And if that isn't a reasonable option, I can probably download a DRM-free version of the movie from some "movie preservationist".
Has anyone ever tried to sue Amazon in small claims court for a "disappeared" film? I guess Amazon will force arbitration, but you have a good case in arbitration. All you want is either: the original digital film, or a refund of original payment. This could be arbitrated very quickly since the sum is so small.
If it’s happened to you please call customer service and complain. If they can’t fix it or refund you, please get in touch with me and I will try and get it fixed for you
https://www.slashfilm.com/574053/amazon-sued-purchased-movie...
Also I believe MGM is still being operated Separately from Prime Video, or Amazon Studios so likely they would need to negate between the business units.
Is there anywhere now to pick up the prestige programming torch?
Though it is still an occasional pain when a show like Firefly or Stargate Universe gets canceled before it’s time. Whatever happened to “Er ist wieder da”? It seemed to disappear everywhere overnight.