I’m not confident about my ability to predict the future, but some things I can see coming. When people started moving towards using streaming services, I said it was only a matter of time until a large chunk of people lost the libraries that they paid for due to mergers and acquisitions – and it’s started happening with Playstation owners losing chunks of their libraries. This is only going to get worse, as with streaming you don’t “own” anything – you’re just paying for the illusion that you’ll be able to access the content you want.
And next, after Paramount canceled Star Trek: Discovery and booted Star Trek: Prodigy off their network and shuffled off the movies, I predicted Paramount would lose Star Trek altogether before I’d even watched all of the Star Trek in my subscription (which is why I got Paramount Plus, or whatever it’s called this week). And, while I can’t predict the future, this too is also being openly discussed.
The golden age of television has come to an end – I date it from roughly Sopranos to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, though the actual death date was the Warner / Discovery merger and the axing of shows for tax reasons. But the real reason was the greedy corporate slimes in charge of the studios, figures like Bob Iger whose potential $27 million compensation belies his claims that striking writer’s demands weren’t realistic, even though his fellow leaders now admit the writers were basically right.
Streaming as we know it isn’t going away – it’s too convenient for too many people. But it’s also going to collapse as we know it, and things will appear to get worse before they get better. Overall, we may come out the other side with a stronger set of shows: there’s a period of time I used to think of as “the dark age of sci-fi television” when Enterprsise was struggling, Babylon 5 was canceled and you’d be hard pressed to find Andromeda on the airwaves; but the same period produced Battlestar and Firefly.
So don’t give up hope, but don’t think we’ll avoid tectonic shifts.
-the Centaur
