I have to admit that I don't follow entertainment news as closely as some people who are fans of classic movies do. So I don't think I found out until Thursday about the layoffs of the top brass at TCM that happened on Wednesday, and how a lot of famous and not-so-famous names are deeply distressed by the news. I've been thinking about what it might mean for those of us who are fans of old movies. I don't claim to be an expert, and certainly am not plugged in to what's going on. I just read a lot (and came across TV-related stuff in a bunch of different areas over the past week) and try to think logically about things as much as possible.
First, I think everybody knows that cable channels in general are in a difficult state these days. Part of that is the general financial situation, and part of that is the surprisingly rapid move to streaming services, especially what I saw referred to as FAST (free, ad-supported streaming). YouTube TV sent me an email the other day announcing that as of the end of the month, it would no longer be carrying SNY, the regional sports network (RSN) that carries the Mets baseball games. Apparently, the RSNs around the country are as a group in a more difficult state than other channels on average, which I'd guess has to do with the carriage fees they want because they have to finance the sports they show.
There's also a reason various media conglomerates are trying to move to the premium subscription app model. With a lot of people cutting the cord, there's the thought that a provider that has a lot of content offer a cheaper alternative. Indeed, if you look at the various FAST services, it's amazing juts how much stuff they have on offer. It's all fragmented of course, but with FAST that's just an annoyance. With the subscription models, the fees add up. I remember on the old TCM boards people clamoring for an a la carte service, claiming they only watch one channel (TCM) and pay some high figure for it. I always thought then, and still believe, that a la carte was not only not going to save people money, but also leading to a lot of channels going bust. I may be wrong on the latter half: the old "linear" channels may be going bust, but are replaced by all those FAST services. But look at how much people are complaining about all those subscriptions are adding up. I could have told them, but no, they couldn't be bothered to listen.
TCM is in a rather weird market segment. It's nominally commercial-free (certainly within the movies, but between the movies a fair number of the promos are hawking TCM stuff or barters to get the rights to show films from non-Warners rights holders), but one that tries to stay in a lower tier of cable. It doesn't have a whole family of channels to go to a premium tier the way that Showtime, Starz/Encore or HBO do. However, it also has an insanely loyal fan base, which includes some people who in theory at least should be fairly influential in the entertainment world. Granted, not on the business side of entertainment, which is part of the problem. Economically, you can have a loss-leader, but there's always the pressure to produce some sort of revenue.
TCM in addition to catering to a niche interest (old/"classic" movies), is also paradoxically fairly commercial for the most part. After all, the bulk of the movies shown on the channel always came from the so-called "Turner Library" of MGM, Warner Bros., and RKO films that Ted Turner got in the 1980s. It's really only been the foreign films that delve into the pretentious and the mindset that it's actually better that the movies not be commercial especially if it pisses off the people who prefer conventional stuff.
So what sort of streaming could TCM do assuming the coupling of the Watch TCM app with the requirement to have a service provider went away? Well, it seems obvious that the old Turner library could easily form the sort of movie channel you can find on the FAST services, where they pick the schedule. But of course, that's ad-supported, which would piss a lot of people off. Especially because to me it seems like there are still issues with the ad placement. TV shows generally had natual ad breaks so that, when you put such a program on a streaming service, it should be easy to signal to the streaming app that ads go here. If the streaming ad model is anything like broadcast or traditional cable, there were ad breaks that were for the creator of the content (or the network), and breaks that were for the local broadcast affiliate or the cable service provider. (The fact that broadcast TV didn't have local ad slots for the cable services is why in the early days there was always the dispute over carrying the over-the-air channels.) People watching other cable channels, or streaming some old public domain Z-grade movie, don't seem to care about it; after all, there's no way these movies would see the light of day otherwise. TCM fans, on the other hand, would go apoplectic.
A premium service? I've brought this up before in relationship to things like the old Filmstruck service, that this is one area where I absolutely don't understand the economics involved. To me, it would seem that all those movies that were digitized for putting on DVD or Blu-ray for the Warner Archive should be ready-to-go for an on-demand service. And yet, most content rights holders don't want to seem to go the route of simply putting a ton of old (but not in the public domain) stuff and having one massive library. Instead, there's the insistence on "curating" (god I hate that word) it. The rental services like Amazon Prime Video may be different, although if you can get away with a fee for each individual viewing (I'm not a prime member so I don't know how much of the stuff not produced in-house is free to rent) that's different from the subscription model. Don't get me started on "buying" a streaming copy either; as we saw with Disney's censorship of The French Connection you're not really getting the movie but just a semi-permanent right to stream it as many times as you want.
So that's a lot to say about a topic that I really don't know much about. I have no idea where TCM as a brand, never mind as a cable channel, is going to end up. But things are certainly changing rapidly.
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