Major Streamers Are All Making the Same Mistake

Addition by subtraction.

As I noted in my piece about Love and Monsters, I’ll plan out my viewing habits based around what’s leaving a particular streamer in a given month. However, it’s getting harder and harder to track down this info. Streamers love to tell you what’s coming to their service, but they’re reluctant to tell you what’s leaving—or, if they do, they’ll do it in a clumsy, low-key manner where you’d have to be skimming through your own list of to-watch titles to notice a message saying “Leaving Soon”¹.

I want to talk about why that’s a huge mistake in a business where viewer attention is the metric that matters most.

At first glance, this strategy makes sense. Every streamer wants the perception that their libraries are only growing—constantly filling in their back catalog while also adding original films and TV series. After all, why have Peacock if you can’t count on a wealth of titles owned by sister company Universal? Why have Paramount+ if there won’t be a bunch of Paramount stuff?

But as we all know by now, those content libraries aren’t static; titles rotate in and out of streaming services all the time. By keeping mum about when content is leaving their platforms, streaming services are missing a critical opportunity to leverage scarcity to drive views.

This came to mind as I was awaiting Max’s announcement of what will leave the service in April and they just…didn’t say. They used to send out that information in a press release alongside the titles they were adding, but now, it appears they’ve made the decision to not let users know when certain titles will leave the service. They still have a “Last Chance” section, but it’s unclear if this contains all the titles that are leaving.

Almost all of the major streamers keep making this mistake. Scarcity drives action. It’s nice that you’re telling people a new thing is on your streamer, but that may only get them as far as clicking the little “plus” button. We all know how to load up our watchlists, but there’s no impetus to go one step further and press “play”—particularly as the mountain of unviewed content grows larger and more daunting with each new add. Too much responsibility gets offloaded onto the hopes of something catching on across social media, but that’s like saying your marketing strategy is, “We’ll just go viral.” It also doesn’t do anything for your back catalog that doesn’t have a marketing push.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

In the days of the video store, it’s not like the shelves were filled with wall-to-wall greatness, but you had to make a choice. You took the time to drive out to store, so you needed to make a decision; otherwise you’d wasted your time. Streaming doesn’t make that demand, so it has to make it in a different way. People tend to respond to scarcity, even if that scarcity is artificial (look at the success of the Disney Vault). Limited streaming windows created by licensing agreements is real, and it puts a clock on streaming titles.

This is an upside for streamers, not a negative. If you know time is running out, you’re more likely to finally watch something instead of scrolling endlessly before returning to a comfort watch you’ve seen a billion times before.

Every streamer has more movies and TV than anyone could watch in a year, so rather than try to simply boost newer titles in the hopes of making a splash, they should simply tweak their platforms to provide a little more transparency with subscribers. It’s a low-cost way to retain a subscriber base that will feel less inclined to pause a subscription if they find themselves consistently using the service. What you gain from subscriber loyalty far outweighs the risks of telling people that time is running out to watch a particular title.

What I’m Watching

George MacKay as Lewis and Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle in The Beast | Image via Cinetic

Yesterday, I watched Bertrand Bonello’s new movie The Beast, which will arrive in New York and L.A. on Friday before expanding to more cities (it arrives in Atlanta on April 12th). This is a movie I’ll likely be kicking around in my head for days to come. It takes place across three time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) and three genres (period romance, home invasion thriller, and sci-fi, respectively) but follows a single pair of ostensibly doomed lovers, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Lewis (George MacKay). What gives the film such a fascinating hook is the question of whether Gabrielle and Lewis, who are continually thrust together across time, should be together if it always results in their deaths. This leads to the larger question of if love is worth the risk when the arc of human progress is finding ways to minimize risk and maximize safety. Where I wrestle with the film is if it’s simply reiterating dystopian tropes (the future setting has an A.I. that attempts to flatten people’s emotions similar to soma in Brave New World) or if it has something deeper to say about fear and desire without veering into a cautionary tale. I’ll say at the very least it’s an interesting film and worth your time.

I feel like this Daily Show segment about A.I. is well-intentioned, but Stewart hasn’t really dug deep enough past the obvious level that any technological push is meant to eliminate labor, not enhance it. On that count, he’s right, but the “reality of A.I.” is that it’s clearly not ready for prime time, but the tech industry is pushing it as the hot new thing to keep investor cash flowing in. It is a bubble no different than the crypto bubble because there’s A) no clear and appealing use case for it that would make people rush to adoption; B) all of its promise is simply that—a promise. It will one day do amazing things, but we’re supposed to accept its hurdles in the present. Anyway, the strongest part of this segment is the first five minutes where Stewart pokes fun at cable news’ handwringing.

What I’m Reading

I finally finished Before the Storm! It was dense but also delicate. Perlstein had to walk the line of showing the rising power of the Goldwater fans in the conservative movement while also showing that Goldwater himself was a supporting figure in this movement rather than its protagonist. Essentially, his followers loved the idea of Goldwater despite his uneven performance as a speaker (he could rally people but also drone on about military minutiae) and utter incompetence as a Presidential candidate (he chose to surround himself with his buddies from Arizona rather than anyone who knew how to run a national campaign). But it’s filled with fascinating insights about 1950s and 60s politics. All that being said, I’m going to take a breather before moving on to Perlstein’s next volume in the series, Nixonland.

I’ve now moved on to Number Go Up, which already is far better than Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite. Whereas Lewis thought he had another math-whiz game-changer in Sam Bankman-Fried, Number Go Up author Zeke Faux puts SBF and the whole crypto scheme in a larger business context to paint an illuminating portrait of grifters running wild as they buy into their own hype. Faux is also more humble in his reporting than Lewis, admitting where he misstepped or was slightly too credulous as Lewis continued to double down on a guy who just got sentenced to 25 years in prison while arguing he’d do it all again.

In other reads:

Transparent Vice by Elizabeth Lopatto [The Verge] - In other stories of financial hubris, this is a good read about how the executives at Vice tried to keep the wheels spinning despite having no idea how to run a business. I found this story particularly interesting because of what Vice represented. During the brief window when Collider was owned by Complex (so about 2014-2017), there was a big presentation at the end of 2014 or 2015 where one of the execs at Complex made it clear that they were looking to overtake Vice. That was whose success they sought to emulate. But Vice was a poorly run company! And the C-suite guy making this claim should have known that, or at least been suspicious of a guy like Shane Smith. Anyway, I’m getting pretty tired of an age where what’s supposed to enchant us isn’t what we make but the deals that rich guys seek to close. Their sweaty salesmanship is not inspiring, and as was the case with Vice, it lost a lot of hard-working, intelligent people their jobs.

What I’m Hearing

Last week I finally watched The Long Good Friday, and I loved it. It’s got a terrific Bob Hoskins performance in the lead role, and the score by Francis Monkman is incredible. It makes you feel like you could take on London’s entire underworld.

1. Netflix has this issue, and sometimes it rebounds on itself; last month they labeled The Great Debaters as newly added, but if you clicked on the title, you could see it was leaving on March 30th, so both were true—it was newly added at the start of the month, but a closer look showed it was also leaving at the end of the month.