So this is off the top of my head, although I’ve been thinking about it a fair bit, but I just had a discussion with someone over the era of modern streaming and the writer’s strike and lots of stuff like that. How did we get here? Where are things going?

Here’s what I happen to think.

First off, we’ve kind of been here before and I’ll get to that in a minute. Streaming exploded in the midst of the pandemic, where people had nothing better to do with their time than sit around and watch stuff online. Cable viewership went up. YouTube viewership went up and Netflix viewership exploded. Other companies, some of which had been experimenting with streaming, saw the trend and threw themselves into it, hook, like and sinker. It was the way of the future!

Except it wasn’t. It was a bubble and as with every bubble, it popped. This is hardly the first time we’ve seen this and apparently, people have short memories. Remember the .com bubble? Everyone was throwing money at Internet startups that had no plan, no concept of growth, so long as they had a website, they got funded.

Tons of people lost money in that because it was just stupid. Yet I bet a lot of those very same people saw the streaming bubble get started and threw their cash into the bonfire.

The thing is, Netflix was never doing well to begin with. They were keeping their head above water, but no more. Then came tons of others. Disney. Warner Bros. Paramount. You name it, everyone had their own streaming service and was dumping billions of dollars into new content. It was going to be a revolution!

Except, as I said, we’d seen this before with cable. There were hundreds and hundreds of cable channels that came out of the belief that cable was the future. Everyone and their brother made a cable channel, hoping to cash in. Guess what? Tons of them went out of business. We can see that right now with Discovery trying to trim Turner Classic Movies down. Why? Because nobody watches it, or, the number of people who do watch it isn’t enough to keep it in business. These things exist to make a profit and if it doesn’t make a profit, then it goes away.

I expect that what we saw in the cable TV realm is coming to streaming. A lot of these platforms are just going to go away because they will not have enough paying viewership to keep the lights on. Some of them are already pushing commercial-driven options in hopes that they can keep paying the bills. I don’t suspect it will work long-term.

So what does this have to do with the writers’ strike? A lot, actually. Once streaming took off, a lot of fledgling writers came into the industry, hoping to get rich on the back of the new content that would need to be constantly produced to keep viewers happy.

It didn’t happen. So now, they’re striking because they didn’t get what they had hoped to get. I don’t know if this was just unrealistic expectations or they were misled, but we simply don’t need as many writers as now exist within the Writer’s Guild. A fair number of them are going to have to go get other jobs and they don’t like that.

Too bad. What we’re really seeing is an attempt to prop up a dying industry with empty threats and unrealistic demands. They are convinced, I’m sure, that there is some vast conspiracy out there, trying to keep them from getting the rewards they so richly deserve. Except there aren’t any rewards. The streaming services won’t give us any actual numbers because actual numbers will show just how badly they’re faring. The writers say they want to know, but I figure that most of them are terrified at what the numbers might show. They are far less necessary than they want to believe that they are. The entire marketplace is going to collapse, probably back to just Netflix and one or two survivors, and all of the people who figured they’d get rich writing TV shows are going to be very disappointed.

This is the problem with some unions. They are based on entirely unrealistic expectations and then, they continue to pursue absurd goals because they value their own existence over the reality of the situation. I’m not even talking about the quality of the writing, which has been generally low IMO, there are just too many of them out there and that is going to have to change.

I don’t think anyone in Hollywood is going to be happy with that.