| Every Wednesday, I answer a question from the Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the October 23 chat here, and submit questions for the October 30 chat here. This week, we ended up having an interesting discussion about the syndication model, and I wanted to pull in a couple of other readers’ responses here. Our original poster asked: Paying for Cable TV is enough for me, I don’t need bills for HBO, Netflix, CBS, and whatever other company wants me to pay to watch their programs. That said, will any of the premium series (“Star Trek: Discovery,” “House of Cards,” “Game of Thrones,” etc.) ever be syndicated? As I explained in the chat, I think there’s very little likelihood of that happening. The entire business model that leads HBO to create an expensive show such as “Game of Thrones,” or Netflix to invest in “House of Cards,” or CBS to green light “Star Trek: Discovery” for its new streaming platform, is based on the idea that if they create highly desirable content that isn’t available elsewhere, people will pay for access to it and then become attached to the other content on that platform. If you can access that content on another service or network, then the whole economic model that supports the outlet that created it goes out the window. As one reader pointed out in the chat, there is one minor exception: “There is some cross-pollination happening in some of these series,” he or she wrote. “For example, Amazon Prime members can watch previous seasons of HBO content like ‘VEEP’ and ‘Game of Thrones.’ You would need to pay (a la carte) to see the latest episodes, or have HBO. Some older HBO shows like Deadwood, you can watch the entire series on Amazon Prime. As the business model grows and changes, I think you’d be seeing a lot of shows that span several streaming services.” But when it comes to adapting these shows to air on other networks, there are constraints that go beyond the financial model. As another reader chimed in, “With the odd length of some episodes of premium content (an hour one week, 75 minutes the next, 67 minutes the one after that and varying amount of content that would have to be cut or blurred) it certainly seems that they are not *planning* to syndicate in any meaningful way as we currently think about it.” I think that’s right. But fortunately, there are a lot of other ways to pay for just the premium shows you want to watch, rather than a whole extra subscription service. |
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