In the late summer of 1986, a small film was released about four 12-year-olds who venture into the wilderness to confirm rumors that a dead body has been found just outside their hometown. The event changes their lives forever.

For those of us who saw the film growing up, it instantly elicits an emotional response. When it appears, as another title on this or that streaming platform, we may hit play and find ourselves, invariably, wiping away a few embarrassed tears. This is not merely our aging cohort giving into cheap nostalgia. It is a creeping realization that the film’s depiction of bonding and loss cuts deeper with each passing year.

The film is, of course, Stand by Me.

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When the movie opened in theaters nationwide right before Labor Day, Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” was the #1 song on the radio. The now-forgotten detective show Riptide aired its very last episode on NBC. Top Gun, the testosterone-fueled phenomenon starring Tom Cruise, had come out a few months earlier. Hollywood and TV were in peak blockbuster mode. Cable and VCRs were transforming how and when people consumed entertainment. In just over a year, Tom Wolfe’s bestseller Bonfire of the Vanities, an epic of greed and glut, would be published to controversy and acclaim. Money was valued above all else—not merely as currency but as something akin to a second birth certificate for those who had it: with enough cash, you could buy your way into a new identity—one more befitting of those gilded years. Everything needed to be big, bold, sexy, and fast. Everybody clamored for more and more. And more.

In this frenzied pop culture environment, Stand by Me arrived as a throwback misfit; the kid in the corner of the classroom who actually read the assigned books while also trying to hold their own (and failing) at various blacktop sports. Kids like me.

Directed by Rob Reiner and based on Stephen King’s novella The Body (1982), the film tells a sensitive yet uncompromising R-rated coming-of-age story set in late 1950s Oregon. The 39-year-old Reiner, son of famed comedian Carl Reiner and recognized primarily as a comedy talent from All in the Family and This Is Spinal Tap (1984), did not yet have a track record as a proven director, let alone one known for tackling challenging material. Only days before filming was set to begin, Embassy Pictures—the movie’s financial backer and distributor—was sold to Columbia Pictures, a company which made clear that it planned to cancel production. Norman Lear, the legendary creator of All in the Family, personally invested $7.5 million to help complete the film based on his belief in the untested Rob Reiner and the script. However, the small movie no longer had a distributor following the sale of Embassy. As the story goes, after Paramount, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. all declined to serve as distributors, Columbia Pictures’ production head Guy McElwaine screened the film at his house with his daughters in attendance. Their enthusiastic review convinced McElwaine to distribute the film. Despite the risks and challenges attending the project, which was almost shelved from the start, Stand by Me finally began shooting in the summer of 1985.^1,2

Made for a modest $8 million, the movie would play in theaters for the rest of 1986, earning an impressive $47 million (or over $136 million in today’s dollars). Many critics lauded Stand by Me upon its release, with Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times describing the movie as “the summer’s great gift, a compassionate, perfectly performed look at the real heart of youth. It stands, sweet and strong, ribald, outrageous and funny, like its heroes themselves—a bit gamy around the edges, perhaps, but pure and fine clear through. It’s one of those treasures absolutely not to be missed.” It was also nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar at the 1987 Academy Awards.^3,4,5

The little film in a loud era became a hit. The risk paid off.

More importantly, though, the film became a multigenerational classic. Few movies speak as intimately to the rupture that happens when being ‘just a kid’ slips into sober adulthood. Stephen King recently wrote that, when Reiner first screened the film for him, he felt so emotionally overwhelmed that he “went into the nearest men’s bathroom and sat in a stall until I got myself under control. [. . .] When I came back from the men’s, Rob and I had a more normal conversation. He asked me for notes; I had none. I had just let the whole thing wash over me. I marveled at what a good story the truth could make in the right hands.” That’s high praise from King, the renowned writer and author of the source novella, which echoes ‘the past washing over’ feeling that affects many viewers.⁶

Indeed, the film is an unpretentious masterpiece, not so much concerned with lost innocence as with the secret reserve of strength we draw on to revive what we loved so unconditionally as children. This is the conjured inventory of everyday tokens, triggers and fragments we stubbornly keep from being deemed unremarkable and cliché…Cherry Pez. Backpack comic books. Pizza by the slice. Open hours. Closed adults. Summer night. Winter’s breath. Friends whose faces we can’t quite remember anymore. Tinny music. Movies.

…And movies most of all. When that giant screen lit up against an afternoon darkness, with the scattered crunching of popcorn filling the space between dialogue, it was a brand new reality, at least, for a few hours. Whether you sat in the multiplex anchoring your local mall or curled up in front of your modest ‘home theater’, the movies existed outside of, yet imprinting, the moments that passed. For those of us who fell in love with cinema at too young an age, our memories often seem indistinguishable from all those flashing-moving-singing images and sounds. This is probably not healthy—a thrilling, expressly American co-dependence between self and illusion—but no matter how good or bad the movie selection happened to be, it never let us down as an experience. Most things did. Most things changed out of decline or, more likely, because we changed, because we grew older and moved on. The movies, however, didn’t forget. They never do.

When I discovered Stand by Me, I found myself comfortably settling into the film nearly from the first frame. It was familiar but not forced like most rote flicks about pubescent angst and awkwardness. It also didn’t hide the world’s petty abuses that I intuitively knew clawed just below the surface. So, with my reflected visage hovering as an acned apparition in the corner of the television screen, I trekked alongside those 12-year-old boys as they struck out into the unknown wearing ratty t-shirts and bedrolls slung over their shoulders. All of them either resembled friends I had or revealed vulnerabilities I silently marked in myself. The film felt close. It served as a kind of cinematic shoebox filled with talismanic errata I had collected as a kid and kept securely in the invisible safe under my bed. I knew it would be there, always.

Stand by Me also helped steer me toward an obsession with film more broadly. While my father would show me everything from Captain Blood (1935) to The Godfather (1972) when I was still quite young, films that stirred the brain and heart in their own ways, Stand by Me seemed to play exclusively for my eyes. Getting to know those four boys testing their mettle by confronting the perils of junkyard dogs and swamp leeches, not to mention their own mortality, made it easier to explore the world on the other side of every film encountered afterwards. There is a definite, reeling thread in my mind that connects Stand by Me to The 400 Blows (1959) to 8 ½ (1963) and so on. Reiner’s funny, somber tale of childhood’s end ultimately served as a passage and promise all at once. It was part of a naive but protective prayer captured in the sacred Ben E. King pop ballad from which the film gets its title:

When the night

Has come

And the land is dark

And the moon

Is the only

Light we’ll see

No I won’t

Be afraid

No I won’t

Be afraid

Just as long

As you stand

Stand by me

Perhaps as a form of subconscious observance and penance, I still, soda pop in hand, revisit the movie every few years without fail.

And, at the risk of sounding like a heartsick old fool, I hope people, especially young people, will continue to see Stand by Me and other ‘small films’ like it—and appreciate what they inspire. Such works offer an antidote to today’s data-driven mandates and studio decision-makers who wrongly view legacy IP and anodyne blockbusters as the only way to keep the Hollywood system (or what’s left of it) running. If this was the case when Stand by Me was originally released, it’s exponentially more true today.

When films like Stand by Me get the recognition they deserve, it helps reinforce why we still make movies in an otherwise wearied and saturated media culture: to tell original stories that reflect, connect and reimagine who we are. They are the stories that arrive when you’re young, then return throughout your life. They are not transitory. They become part of you.

These types of films actually resonate and last, offering a durable source of solace (as that shoebox under the bed). This is especially true when, as one character in Stand by Me says, “It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life, like busboys in a restaurant.”

The films make the inevitable pain and loss you encounter in life a bit more tolerable.

***

Toward the end of Stand by Me, the four 12-year-olds finally come face-to-face with the dead body they set out to find. It’s the corpse of a fellow young boy decomposing in a bush by train tracks that lead back to their hometown. His eyes gaze past them, stupid and vacant.

It is what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. All the aphorisms apply, but don’t.

Eventually, the boys cover the body with a gray tarp before heading back home. The film’s narrator, voiced by a wistful yet resigned Richard Dreyfuss, proceeds to recount what happened over the years that followed for the four boys, now irrevocably altered by the journey.

One of them stayed behind in town and had a few kids. One ended up in jail, then drifted from job to job. One, Dreyfuss’s character as a boy in the story, became a writer, like most hapless observers. One, the de facto leader of the pack, got out of town against all odds to become a lawyer. While at a random fast food joint, two men ahead of him in line started a fight. He tried to help diffuse it. They pulled a knife. He was stabbed in the throat. He died almost instantly.

Life took them all down both expected and unexpected paths, but it took them, nonetheless.

When the film draws to a close, the titular song begins to play. It croons while the credits appear and fade from the screen.

***

After the success of Stand by Me, Rob Reiner would go on to direct and produce a series of well-regarded and iconic films across genres, including The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally (1989), Misery (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), and The American President (1995). He also became an outspoken activist and, over the course of his multi-hypehnate career, something of an unofficial statesman for Hollywood.

Then, like for his characters, there comes an event to change things.

On Saturday, December 13, 2025, Rob Reiner and his wife attended a Christmas Party with friends and family. At some point after the event, they were both assaulted and murdered in their Brentwood home. Their daughter discovered the bodies on Sunday morning. The Medical Examiner confirmed evidence of “multiple sharp force injuries.” They both had been stabbed to death. Their adult son was arrested and charged with the crime. Sources say he has had a history of mental illness and drug abuse. The case remains open at the time of this writing.⁷

The reasons for the murders remain unknown. Even if we ever know, we won’t.

Hollywood responded with shock. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Sean Astin, the president of SAG-AFTRA, said, “Rob Reiner is one of the most significant figures in the history of film and television. The impact he made on American culture simply can’t be overstated.”⁸

Wil Wheaton, who plays the narrator’s character as a boy in Stand by Me, wrote, “When I was turning 13, and realizing that my own father didn’t care about me, that my mother didn’t see me as a son, but as a thing she could put to work, Rob Reiner made me feel loved, valued, seen, and respected. He made sure I knew that I was important to him and his movie.”⁸

Rob Reiner was 78 years old when he died. His career in film and TV spanned seven decades. He made movies for people who live for and through the movies—people who unashamedly cry and fight for what’s up there on the screen. It’s personal. It’s us. As Reiner once said, “If you have tapped into something that is real for you, chances are you are going to tap into something that is real for someone else.”⁹

This is not an easy thing to do. It’s just the only thing to do if you want to produce anything worth a damn.

About two-thirds of the way through Stand by Me, the young boys share an emotional moment when one of them, a gifted storyteller, begins to doubt whether to follow his creative dreams. His friend tells him straight: “It’s like God gave you something, man, all those stories you can make up. And He said, ‘This is what we got for ya, kid. Try not to lose it.’”

Rob Reiner heeded that call, investing the requisite heart and chutzpah to reach others. He tried and succeeded.

***

When I first learned of the murders, and before the tributes started to pour in, the news pinged dumbly on my phone like so many other calloused headlines about Hollywood and the greater fragmented world we inhabit. Just another outrage, another tragedy to swipe through. I reflexively grew angry and exasperated, unable to process the event’s significance. I felt closed.

Gradually, though, the realization of what had happened began to register as a deepening dread and sadness. The feelings became all the more acute when I considered the upheavals in 2025 that have impacted the film industry. Catastrophic L.A. fires. Collapsing box office returns. Mass exodus of production and development jobs leaving California. Looming studio mergers and consolidation. Potential disruptions caused by AI technology. Theaters facing lower revenues and possible obsolescence. And, the additional deaths of giants and trendsetters like David Lynch, Robert Redford, Val Kilmer, Diane Keaton, and Gene Hackman….now the Reiner murders.

The industry and culture are undergoing seismic change. The dream factory we knew is going away. What comes next will be much different.

I am doing my best to handle this truth. It is not easy. Film and filmmaking will endure, but not without us stewarding it forward by holding to where we came from and who set the stage for making it happen. I find myself revisiting what the mixed glitz and art meant in the first place, what the unseen lights and cameras gave us—what they gave me—over all these years.

That’s when I remember sitting in those theaters or at home in front of the television. My undivided attention followed every beat of the unfolding story. Made-up worlds and movie stars appeared as paradoxically apart and a part of me. Somehow, the entire experience coalesced as the only real suspension of disbelief I ever knew, then or since. And, when the lights came on and the credits rolled, I studied the names of the crazed ones who made it real—at least, for a little while.

When I think of Stand by Me, I think of watching and rewatching the movie, how such a small film affected me so much. It’s always there. I think of seeing those kids on screen in the deadly adventure of their changing lives, and, in that brief instance, being seen myself. I think of where they’ll lead me next. I’m ready to be unafraid.

No, we may never have the friends and moments like the ones we had when we were 12, but we have the movies. Jesus, isn’t that worth something?

Sources

1. “‘Stand by Me’ Oral History: Rob Reiner and Cast on River Phoenix and How Coming-of-Age Classic Almost Didn’t Happen.” Variety, 28 July 2016, www.variety.com/2016/film/news/stand-by-me-30th-anniversary-oral-history-corey-feldman-1201824490/.

2. “How ‘Stand by Me’ Was Almost Left Standing at the Gate.” Chicago Tribune, 21 Nov. 1986, www.chicagotribune.com/1986/11/21/how-stand-by-me-was-almost-left-standing-at-the-gate/.

3. “Stand by Me.” IMDb Pro, pro.imdb.com/title/tt0092005/details.

4. Benson, Sheila. “Movie Review: ‘Stand by Me.’” Los Angeles Times, 20 Aug. 2016, www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-stand-by-me-review-20160820-snap-story.html.

5. “The 59th Academy Awards | 1987.” Oscars.org, www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1987.

6. King, Stephen. “What Rob Reiner Saw in Me.” The New York Times, 16 Dec. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/opinion/culture/stephen-king-rob-reiner-stand-by-me.html.

7. “Rob and Michele Reiner’s Cause of Death Released by Medical Examiner.” The Guardian, 18 Dec. 2025, www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/18/rob-and-michele-reiner-cause-of-death-determined-by-medical-examiner.

8. “Rob Reiner Dead at 78: Hollywood Reacts.” The Hollywood Reporter, 15 Dec. 2025, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/rob-reiner-michele-singer-dead-reaction-1236450442/.

9. BUILD. “#AOLBUILD Hosts Director Extraordinaire Rob Reiner.” HuffPost, 17 July 2014, www.huffpost.com/entry/aolbuild-hosts-director-e_b_5595183.

— Note on Imagery: Unless I’ve provided credits for images in these posts, please assume they are generated by GenAI tools such as MidJourney, Gemini, and/or ChatGPT. I am not a designer or visual artist. An admirer, only. But I do enjoy concocting crazy-ass but relevant prompts, then reviewing and tweaking what the mighty engine delivers. With this said, I love to showcase the doings of flesh and blood artists. Send me a suggested work if you believe a particular artist’s contributions would be better suited to replace one of the generated images. These entries can certainly evolve. I will consider your request. Many thanks.

This is the end. Want more?

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Alright, you’re the average consumer in the world.

You’re between 18 and 45 years old (the global median age is 30.9).¹ After you awake each day to a cup of coffee…chai…tea…let’s call it chaiofftea, the amalgamated global drink of choice, what’s your weekly media intake like?

According to the data, you spend 5 hours and 8 minutes on streaming TV services and 5 hours and 7 minutes watching linear or broadcast television. If you’re so inclined, you catch a movie at the theater once a week, adding another 1.5 to 2 hours. That’s over 12 hours devoted to streaming, TV and movie theaters. This time also competes with the approximately 40 hours per week you spend on social media, long-form online video, podcasts, music, reading, and video games. Indeed, your senses are bombarded, your brain steeping in content.^2,3

The immediate takeaway is pretty obvious: We live in constant media overload delivered across too many channels. The party isn’t crowded, it’s breaking fire code. To survive as a content producer, you must understand if audiences connect with a given platform or piece of content. Does it pierce the everyday swarm of image and sound? If not, it doesn’t exist.

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In Part 1 of this series, we investigated how we arrived at the current mishmash film and TV ecosystem. Now, let’s explore what audiences actually want and don’t want.

Also, this ‘Part 2’ will be divided into two entries—post 2a and 2b, if you will. I had a lot to get through and, if TV series can cut up seasons in this way, why can’t I do so as well?

Pour some chaiofftea. Lean in.

Less a Stream, More Like a Flood

There’s the fact, too, that this average global consumer doesn’t exist. It’s a nice composite to help organize our initial thoughts…but c’mon, we live in the mad babel of audience segments splintering into sub-segments and sub-sub-segments (that’s a Moby-Dick joke there for any lit geeks out there). Individual consumers all demand customized platforms and tailored queues. This is the ‘personalization era’, after all. If you’re an entertainment publisher and/or provider, you’re sorting through endless cultural possibilities to pinpoint that exact right needle in a stack of needles.

When it comes to streaming, analysts point out that there are between 200 and 400 platforms active worldwide.⁴ It is difficult to know for sure, as not all markets report platforms in the same way. Some platforms blend with local TV providers, some are small enough to escape the radar, and some are illegal. All are spinning out content of some kind. Regardless, the last 10-15 years saw a seismic proliferation of options. The consequent saturation leaves audiences sorting through platform after platform, row after row of titles.

And, when your everyday consumer realizes it is impossible to afford the wide range of apps and channels crowding their various screens, they begin to ‘churn’ in and out of services, or strategically start and stop subscriptions based on when desired programs are available on a given platform. It’s a common occurrence: 42% of U.S. subscribers regularly sign up, cancel and resubscribe to services.⁵ The need and want of consumers to streamline entertainment options is very real. U.S. households alone spend approximately $840 per year on streaming subscriptions.⁶ This figure includes and reflects both regional service costs and the growing number of paid subscriptions per household worldwide.⁷ Based on a study conducted by TiVo surveying 1,410 U.S. and Canadian respondents, the average number of video sources per user stood at 10.87 in total, with 7 of these sources reported as being “paid”, or subscriber-based.⁸

As these stats indicate, price sensitivity is the single biggest factor for consumers. In one survey, 52% of U.S. TV viewers said subscriptions are getting too expensive, a 77% increase since 2020. Not surprisingly, 39% of global consumers who have considered or canceled a subscription say cost is the main reason, followed by price increases (32%), not using it enough (30%), and paying for too many services (29%).⁹

When asked about cost, approximately 60% of U.S. consumers in another recent survey said they would cancel their favorite streaming service over a $5 price hike in their monthly subscription—and this is relevant across all providers, even popular options like Netflix and Disney+.¹⁰ Consider these sentiments in relation to the fact that streaming services continue to raise their prices on a consistent basis. Apple TV+ raised its monthly subscription price by 30% in August 2025 for U.S. and select international markets, from $9.99 to $12.99 per month.¹¹ In October 2025, Disney+ went from $15.99 to $18.99 for its ad-free plan and $9.99 to $11.99 for its ad-supported plan.¹² HBO Max likewise raised their monthly subscription costs from $9.99 to $10.99 for ad-supported plans and $20.99 to $22.99 for premium plans.¹³ Such price increases are not new, nor expected to abate. The moment of so-called ‘streamflation’ is underway.¹⁴

Will subscription numbers begin to drop off as a consequence, or will the success of hit shows like Severance, The Studio, The Bear, and Bluey justify the additional cost for consumers? For comparison, as of this writing, Netflix charges $24.99 (before taxes and fees) in the U.S. for its ad-free Premium 4K + HDR tier plan.¹⁵ Though dominant in the premium streaming industry, even leaders like Netflix will confront more sensitivity to cost increases, especially when there are issues with content access, quality and discoverability due to the larding of services still competing for viewers.

But before we further investigate streaming, let’s first consider how cable+broadcast TV, YouTube and movie theaters factor into consumer choice and cost considerations. All of these platforms and delivery methods feed into viewers' broader media diet. Evaluating one source in isolation fails to understand the interplay of entertainment options at work—and what it says about the evolving state of audience preferences in the streaming, film and TV ecosystem.

Cable is on Life Support…What Keeps It Going?

How do cable and linear television fit into such a dynamic? To what extent will consumers part with cash and precious viewing time that is not already allocated to ever-more expensive streaming services? More and more, the answer is not so much. Audiences are leaving linear broadcast and cable in droves for digital-first options.

Only 40% of U.S. households in 2025 maintain cable TV subscriptions, a 34.6% decline from 2010. The cord-cutting trend has accelerated, with 86.7% of cord-cutters citing high costs as the primary reason for switching to streaming services.¹⁶ Age also significantly influences viewing preferences. Linear broadcast and cable TV maintains an over 66% share of TV viewing time among audiences aged 55-64 in the U.S. For 16-24 year olds, OTT/streaming accounts for 51% of viewing time—and some estimates say that figure could be much higher.¹⁷ As of now, the future of media and entertainment will be streamed.

There are, however, a few last bastions of broadcast and TV: news and sports.

When it comes to news programming, one survey found that 62% of U.S. viewers prefer getting their news from TV rather than other platforms.¹⁸ Still, once influential national news service providers like CNN and MSNBC have hemorrhaged viewers in the past. Fox News is an influential outlier, however, averaging a prime time audience of 2.3 million viewers in October 2025. MSNBC, in the same month, recorded 815,000 total viewers in prime (down 41% from the same period one year ago).¹⁹ Clearly, many conservatives or conservative-leaning viewers maintain an allegiance to the Murdoch media empire.

Local news providers, too, maintain a relatively consistent viewership. Even with the myriad news options available in today’s media landscape, more than half of American adults report watching local TV newscasts somewhat regularly.²⁰ Will this trend persist? It seems unlikely, as younger media producers and their Gen Z and Alpha audiences may look to news from popular podcasts and YouTube channels (more on that below).

Then, there’s sports, the most dominant remaining audience magnet on cable and broadcast TV.

One analysis shows that nearly 69% of the top content on Cable TV is sports-related content.¹⁶ For example, the NFL alone attracted over 20 million U.S. viewers in October 2025 across the major broadcast networks (i.e., CBS, Fox, and NBC).²¹ Fútbol/soccer also delivers massive TV viewership. For the FIFA 2025 Club World Cup, reports show that more than 131 million people across Brazil watched the tournament on television — the equivalent of 62% of the population (!).²²

But the barbarians are at the gate. Major sports leagues recognize the obvious reach potential of streaming. They are being wooed away from cable and broadcast media in gradual yet guaranteed fashion. Netflix now has exclusive rights to stream NFL games on Christmas Day through 2026.²³ In July 2024, Amazon Prime Video and the NBA announced an 11-year media rights agreement, beginning with the 2025-26 NBA season.²⁴ Beginning in 2026, Netflix will also commence a 3-year programming plan to feature the Major League Baseball season opening day game, Home Run Derby, “Field of Dreams,” “MLB at Rickwood Field”, and the “MLB Speedway” games.²⁵ FAST platforms and channels are also becoming high-profile destinations for marquee live events, exemplified by FOX providing a free livestream of Super Bowl LIX on Tubi in February 2025.²⁶ Emerging sports are also part of this growing trend. Consider FAST platforms like Free Live Sports (FLS), which offers 125 sports channels in over 70 countries. Each channel caters to a given sport and its fandom, while also allowing viewers to explore other sports. The potential here, particularly if one of these so-called ‘niche’ sports takes off, could be enormous.²⁷

The reasons for this development are obvious and manifold. Sports pull in significant revenue and attract short-term eyeballs while luring major advertising dollars. Yes, streaming platforms may face challenges, including high acquisition costs and the potential for increased churn among viewers after seasons conclude, but the writing is on the wall. Platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, and Fox (Tubi)—as well as up-and-coming entrants in the field like FLS—are coming in force with considerable cash to buy the prized sports rights previously held by traditional broadcasters.

Across the sports rights scoreboard, in other words, the streaming battering rams are rushing at the traditional cable and broadcast gatekeepers.

Still, we’re not quite to a place where audiences feel at home in this new environment. Whether seeking established major or niche sports options, audiences want the easiest option to view their favorite teams and athletes in one location alongside their other favorite programs. In this transition period, fans often complain about how difficult it is to simply find and watch their local teams. Some games air on local broadcast channels. Some can be accessed only through league pass app-based subscriptions. Other games can be viewed on streaming platforms. It’s a confusing mess. As a consequence, linear TV options (cable, traditional broadcast) that provide access to the greatest number of games in a given season will continue to retain eyeballs until the sports rights horse race gives way to a more navigable, sane and enjoyable viewing experience.

Regardless, the existential questions grow louder. Will news and the love for something akin to a nostalgic viewing experience keep the once multibillion-dollar cable industry on a lifeline? Will cable and broadcast continue to subsist on meager viewership if and when the sports rights issue resolves, with streaming services holding all the cards? Seems unlikely…

Wait! There’s That YouTube Thing

…unless we begin to redefine cable and traditional TV as part of the larger, integrated—still more complex—media mix delivered to evolving audiences.

This is where offerings from services like YouTube factor into the equation. YouTube TV, in particular, is a “cable-like” provider, or vMVPD, in the space exhibiting marked growth. Boasting 8-10 million subscribers, the service is expected to surpass Charter and Comcast to become the largest linear pay-TV provider in the U.S. by 2026.²⁸

In contrast, traditional Cable TV is now an albatross for media companies, with corporate leaders constructing death rafts and lifeboats accordingly. Comcast/NBCUniversal packaged its channel business into a new company called Versant. Warner Bros. Discovery is planning to do the same in 2026, too, unless the company is sold in its entirety beforehand to a bidder willing to take on the cable assets that are currently losing cash. Other companies, such as Disney with its ABC and cable holdings, may follow at some point (though leadership at the corporation has denied this will come to pass…for now).^29,30,31

It’s crucial to remember that YouTube TV is backed by the entertainment behemoth YouTube (which is supported by that modest company of Alphabet pulling all the strings). YouTube TV also offers subscription packages like NFL Sunday Ticket for sports fans, making the service even more attractive and lucrative for the foreseeable future. Cable providers must compete against a two-headed beast: YouTube TV for linear programming as well as live sports and YouTube proper, with its endless hours of uploaded and user-generated content.³²

And, how is regular ol’ YouTube doing since launching in 2005? As a monthly U.S. viewing platform in the television industry, the platform held 12.9% of market share as recently as October 2025, according to Nielsen. In the same measurement period, Disney’s streaming and television portfolio ranked second with a 11.4% share, followed by NBCUniversal with 8.6% of total TV watch-time, and Fox ranking fourth with 8.4%. So, across key metrics, it’s winning the market competition in terms of accessible, viewable content—pretty handily, in fact.³³

YouTube additionally benefits from being indispensable to traditional media companies. As Tony Maglio at The Hollywood Reporter wrote while providing some relevant examples, “it is YouTube—not [a company] like NBC — that is the true destination for NBC late-night programming. If NBC pulled SNL, The Tonight Show and Late Night content from YouTube, it would lose millions in revenue and millions of eyeballs. For YouTube, the loss could be written off with a shoulder shrug.”³⁴

More serious news programming could similarly share episodes on YouTube to complement the video podcasts and interview/news-adjacent shows already on the platform. Imagine a 60 minutes-type program or even a very old school Mike Wallace interview setup (relatively low cost, straightforward interviews) run by facts-driven journalists to counter the over-produced and biased news programming of today’s media ecosystem (I’ve also fantasized about this on LinkedIn)? Perhaps a pipedream. We’ll see. All you serious newshounds in your 20s, please take the baton and share ideas here on how to realize improved formats and economical production requirements, ideally suited for the next generation of audiences.

Nevertheless, there’s a recognizable pattern: easily digestible clips of shows—if not shows in their entirety—are posted on YouTube > people view and engage there, and audiences may or may not also tune in to future broadcasts on the actual TV channels. Viewership numbers, though, suggest that most consumers DO NOT take this action; YouTube is typically the final destination.

Is YouTube TV and YouTube proper, then, the replacement of TV? It’s a hot debate between industry analysts, but such distinctions may ultimately not matter very much. What are people watching most at home or on their phones? The answer is YouTube and streaming services. Could that change? Probably not.

While the media landscape may further evolve for audiences as a combinatory experience of platforms and apps, it’s probably a safe bet that the old world order of cable and broadcast will be a shadow of its former prominence or collapse altogether like an old Vegas casino dynamited into memory. This era-ending shift will likely coincide with the streaming universe sorting itself out by paring down to a more manageable, cost-effective set of options for viewers seeking news, sports and live entertainment—as well as, of course, scripted and unscripted programming.

Indeed, ongoing ecosystem transformation seems an inevitability, but not without pain. Audiences will demand rapid industry-wide action over the next 5-10 years to improve their home and mobile entertainment experience. This will be determined by how they direct attention and spend their money. Rest assured that not all providers and purveyors will make the cut.

Do You Want to Go See A Movie?

What of movie theaters? Can we envision a future for the church of cinema and popcorn dream room, or the urgent appeal of ‘get out of your damn house and off your phone’ film entertainment? Where do they fit in the entertainment ecosystem, not to mention in the consumer media diet more broadly? Will audiences fork over money for theaters when they’re already doling out for a crowded suite of SVOD options and sampling AVOD and FAST alternatives while potentially holding onto lingering cable subscriptions?

Many analysts have been lamenting the inevitable death of theaters for years. The actual state of affairs is a bit more complicated.

As discussed to an extent in the first entry of this series, the numbers tell a story of decline or, at least, a possible rethinking of theatrical movie-going culture and economics. The money doesn’t lie: U.S. Box Office sales in 2024 fell to roughly $8.6 billion, a 23.4% drop from pre-pandemic levels; this is partly due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. The downward trajectory is nonetheless noteworthy.³⁵ Simply put, fewer people are going to the movies: 25% of consumers attend the cinema at least every other month—a significant decline from the 40% pre-pandemic benchmark.³⁶ And, the number of theater screens in the U.S. has shrunk to approximately 39,000 from over 41,000 before Covid struck in 2020.³⁷ In turn, some experts proclaim that theatrical demand has likely permanently declined by as much as 20% as consumers increasingly favor streaming and digital-first releases.³⁸

Keeping these gloomy figures and shifts in media consumption in mind—it’s reality—there are still indications that consumers remain interested in going to the movies. While survey results often highlight how expensive it is to see a film in theaters, especially for families, consumer sentiment remains surprisingly positive despite understandable cost concerns. For instance, 95% of one U.S. moviegoer sample in 2025 expressed satisfaction with their experience. Crucially, 70% also agreed that the moviegoing experience “cannot be recreated at home”, though that was down from the 80% figure recorded in the previous year’s survey.³⁹ Perhaps even more surprising, 72% of a global audience sample still considered movie theaters a “good value for money”.⁴⁰

And, when theaters additionally introduce so-called ‘premium’ onsite features and pricing benefits, audience satisfaction and interest increase as well. One study found that 74% of respondents valued premium large-screen experiences (IMAX, Dolby). As for nuances on the costs involved, 83% preferred discounts for less high-demand showtimes, and 56% were willing to pay more for preferred seating. When the theater environment offers a clear improvement on the everyday ease of watching from one’s couch, the incentive to leave the house becomes more compelling.⁴¹

Theater-going by age group is additionally noteworthy. In one research sample, 68% of audiences expressed enthusiasm for upcoming releases, with 83% of viewers under 34 excited about future content.⁴¹ This latter stat aligns with findings in an intriguing study released by the National Research Group (NRG) in which 60% of Gen Alpha participants said that they enjoyed watching movies in theaters more than at home. How does this compare to older viewers? The difference is significant: Gen Alpha is 14 points more likely than Millennials to say they favor movie theaters over streaming.⁴²

The study highlighted that “Gen Alpha wants going to the movies to feel like a true event.” Theater-going is not viewed as burdensome, but as an appealing, large group activity—perhaps a refuge from their otherwise digitally saturated online lives. Only 31% of Millennials and 40% of Gen Z reported feeling the same.⁴² In real life (IRL) connection offers shared human moments apart from the endless scroll and autoplay of their otherwise plugged-in existence.

So, are movie theaters actually relevant again for younger generations, or merely a transient vibe that will fade away as present-day tweens embark on whatever GenAI-derived or techsynthetic stimultainment awaits them around the bend? It’s too early to tell. Forthcoming longitudinal studies will tell us one way or another.

And yet, though the movie-going culture may never be what it was in the past, there still seems to be a (literal) place for such experiences to lure audiences if programmers and exhibitors concentrate on making movie theaters an event for gathering and sharing entertainment in the moment. In this way, theaters can be both an antidote to the everyday gorge at the streaming buffet and an elevated addition, or a kind of capstone, to what people consume at home.

In turn, many theater chains have modified their offerings to raise the standard of customer service. Alamo Drafthouse, for instance, provides themed menus and curated programming. Even Netflix is now showing finales of popular TV shows like Stranger Things in theaters.⁴³ The traditionally streaming-first powerhouse is also now opening massive fan-oriented environments complete with viewing rooms/theaters like Netflix House, which are permanent, year-round venues “free to enter and brings some of our most popular shows and movies to life [ . . . ] through first-of-their-kind, immersive, story-driven experiences”.⁴⁴ Part marketing venture, part amusement spectacle—bigger than a pop-up, smaller than but clearly inspired by Disney and Universal parks—such theater showings and event-based attractions could bolster and redefine theatrical exhibition.

This type of revamped customer experience for theaters is not necessarily new, either. For instance, should theaters return to a modern-day approach that ironically harkens back to the film industry’s legendary ‘picture palaces’ of yore? In the 1920s, film exhibitors built enormous, architecturally ornate ‘pleasure domes’ to serve as nightly electrified beacons where “the statuary, the carpeting, the mural decorations, all worked together to create an effect of overwhelming grandeur, but the frame had grown far more important than any picture. This was no accident, but the conscious plan of the theater’s manager and owners.” Maybe that’s not what they call ‘scalable’, but that kind of invested showmanship may be needed to cultivate customer wonder and genuine endearment, where ticket buyers arrive at the…

“[. . .] motion picture theater to live an hour or two in the land of romance. They seek escape there from the humdrum existence of daily life. Civilization has crowded from their lives other places where formerly they could get mental rest and imaginative release [. . .] However, people realize with gratitude that for a charge they can be picked up on a magic carpet and set down in a dream city amidst palatial surroundings where worry and can never enter, where pleasure hides in every colored shadow and music scents the air.”⁴⁵

Grandiose? Bit much? Doubtless. But what is the 21st-century equivalent of making theaters—and, frankly, in-person entertainment altogether—a welcome distinction from ‘the humdrum existence of daily life that affords mental rest and imaginative release’?

Another quite blunt way to put it: if you’re going to ask people to fork over money for an in-person entertainment when they are already saturated with readily available options that distract and absorb, then you have to make it worth their while.

What’s Next to Take In?

How often have you topped off your chaiofftea while reading this? Or, did you move on to something a bit harder when you tallied up your own monthly subscription bills?

Based on the data we’ve reviewed, the odds are that you, too, feel a bit dizzy as a film and TV consumer. Streaming is convenient and offers endless hours of content, but rising costs and a surfeit of apps on the screen are reaching a precarious tipping point for the industry. Cable and broadcast TV may still hold onto a significant percentage of sports and news programming, but providers like Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube are not so much knocking on the doors of these audiences as they are trying to tractor beam them in with a vengeance (“we made you a tailored foam finger avatar if you come over to our side!”). Movie theaters, while likely never to regain the cultural primacy of their heyday, aim to become social gathering places replete with spectacle and whiz-bang features to remain relevant for ticket buyers who have become ever so choosy about when to leave the warm embrace of couches back home.

Remember, too, that this is about entertainment. It’s supposed to be enjoyable, rather than a stressful attention vacuum in which people must remain vigilantly aware of what and where they allocate those limited 12 or so hours per week to get their fix of streaming, TV and film. The precious, inextricable currency of hours and cash grows ever more scarce, and there are many additional forms of media clamoring for the same limited resources. The sensory overload is revved up to 11. No one at the party can hear themselves think.

For the next entry, we will continue to explore in greater detail how providers and publishers attempt to distinguish their value for audiences across the competitive streaming, film and TV ecosystem, particularly when it comes to achieving global reach and maximizing consistent ENGAGEMENT with their audiences—the holy grail priority of all providers and platforms these days.

Where we’re really headed with this discussion, however, is to a sobering realization for audience consumers, no matter where they are in the world: we live in an era where myriad forms of entertainment are available every minute of the day. What matters? What is worth the sacred moment of your attention that, once gone, can never be reclaimed?

Time to refill the cup and not let it go to waste.

What Else?

• Stay tuned: Part 2b of this series will be coming soon. Per above, get ready to further investigate what consumers want out of a streaming, film and TV ecosystem now aggressively invested in global expansion, content diversification and in-depth audience engagement. After that undertaking, I will pivot to writing a shorter Observations post, then turn my attention to entry #3 in this series, which will address the looming consolidation expectations for the media and entertainment industry.

• Further reading: Rather than suggesting everyone read another study on one form of media in decline relative to another (check the sources below…there are many), I think this is an opportunity to contemplate the state of cultural influence, reflection and exchange in a greater sense. Are we in a constant cultural feedback loop consequent of uber-fragmentation due to technological advancements and the wider media world providing us constant access to everything ever produced? Can we be new anymore? There is an intriguing article on the subject in the New York Times, published 3 years ago, that I haven’t been able to forget: "Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill" by Jason Farago. It’s a piece worth revisiting, too, as we go warp speed into the tortuous whorl of GenAI (“Hi Chat, can I get a complete syllabus on readings for understanding the entire history of human culture?” “Sure! That’ll only take a few minutes.”).

  
  

  Of course, this extends far beyond the focus of this series, but the observations and principal questions posed by this article haunt the edges of the Escherian room we find ourselves in right now. Our multitudinous communities of fucked up selves bounce around this streaming, film and TV echosystem trying to fathom a possible entertainment future characterized by what is by turns eminently resonant and shareable—a day to come unveiling fresh sensoriums of that which is actually novel, inspired and…god forbid…joyful.

  
  

  How do we collectively tap into this spirit again without throwing up our hands, wearied by the constant doubt accreting on our data-drugged brains that fail to process—let alone slow the metastasization of—our lack of basic connection? And, wasn’t improved connection supposed to be the whole bloody point of this marvelous, tech-driven information age? Maybe there are more mirrors and recognizable human stories to explore than we currently allow the world to reveal.

• Challenge: Try to remember your media consumption for one weekend (Friday-Sunday). It may help apply an intimate, personal example of what we’re working through in these entries. Could be revealing for ya, too:

  • Record everything over 15-20 minutes (or less) on a Sunday evening. Do not overthink and do not record as you progress through the weekend—the point is not to be meticulous, but rather to see how much you can remember—basically: what sticks, retains value and why?

  • See here for a sample template to fill out if wanted. Modify as you see fit. Example shown in row 1. Record hours for each piece of media consumed in .25 increments, rounding up as needed (i.e., .25, .5, .75, 1, 1.25, etc.)

  • Questions after you’ve completed the exercise: What media consumed the most of your time? Do you wish you consumed more or less (altogether and for each form of media)? What stood out as the most memorable media? Why? If you could have the weekend to live over again, would you consume more or less of anything recorded (as applicable)? Would you want to be more intentional or less so? Any overarching patterns or insights?

  • Let everyone know what happened—Drop your takeaways in the comments section.

• Media intake: Things that want to steal you away…

– Books: IT (1985) by Stephen King. I knocked out the quietly subversive Lonesome Dove a bit ago, then turned right into another 1980s magnum opus about the evils seething beneath mid-20th Century Americana. Though I still have a soft spot for the driving terror engine of Salem’s Lot (1975), and remain convinced King’s most effectively disturbing novel is Pet Sematary (1983), the intimate torments meted out by the ancient Pennywise the Clown leave a mark. The book amounts to a confession of how we sacrifice our misfit children to insatiable fears, hoping trauma and repression will fortify, numb and protect them to ensure their survival…for a while, anyway. What’s whispering from the drain? “It was a real voice, real as houses.”

– Small Screen(s): The Night of the Juggler (1980) directed by Robert Butler. So, I’m flipping through the Kino Lorber streaming app—which I just started exploring—in search of a curio to watch when I stumbled upon this gritty and unhinged urban action thriller. The premise? Beautifully exploitative pulp: an ex-cop chases after his tween daughter kidnapped by a wastewater treatment laborer turned delusional psychopath. The father, played by a relentless and calloused James Brolin, must outlast delirious car chases, passenger street preachers, quarter-operated peep shows, and homicidal police in a 1970s New York City limping along on the brink of collapse. When I started the film on a whim at 11:00pm, my heavy eyes were on the edge of closing…twenty minutes in, I was laughing and cheering at the screen. Before you watch, slather a boiled hot dog with spicy mustard and onions. Crack a cold beer. Have some fun.

– Big Screen: It Was Just an Accident (2025) directed by Jafar Panahi. Anybody remember that Roman Polanski revenge thriller Death and the Maiden (1994)? In that film, Sigorney Weaver portrays an escaped political prisoner that binds and prods a man she believes to be her former torturer. It’s a tense test of wills between the characters involved, and it mostly plays out in the claustrophobic confines of the woman’s seaside home. Now, imagine this type of psychological pressure cooker translated to a day spent traversing an entire Iranian city where its residents try to endure an authoritarian state in any way that makes ends meet. In this masterful moral tale, a former political prisoner turned mechanic hears the voice and creaking prosthetic leg of a man entering his garage that very much sounds like one of his former captors who blindfolded and interrogated him in the past. Consumed by fury and shame, the mechanic kidnaps the man with the aim of burying him alive, then finds himself plagued by doubt… is it him? What if he’s wrong? So begins the mechanic’s journey around the city, seeking out other former survivors to help positively identify a possible horrible embodiment of their haunting collective past.

Unlike the closed and somewhat histrionic stage dynamic of Death and the Maiden, Panahi’s tightly directed but expansive take on the quandaries involved captures a society comprising not simplistic stereotypes but flesh-and-blood humans, where the line between good and evil, right and wrong, authoritarian and subject increasingly blurs by the minute. When did the ‘accident’ first happen? How do you repair? What does justice mean in such a context? No matter what you do, will the sound of your approaching tormentor ever go away?

Sources

1. “World Demographics 2025 (Population, Age, Sex, Trends).” Worldometers, 2025, www.worldometers.info/demographics/world-demographics/.

2. “Digital 2025 July Global Statshot Report.” DataReportal, 2025, www.datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-july-global-statshot.

3. “Global Cinema Attendance Drops in 2024.” Inquirer Business, 17 May 2025, business.inquirer.net/525910/global-cinema-attendance-drops-in-2024.

4. “Streaming Services Statistics and Facts (2025).” Market.us Scoop, 2025, scoop.market.us/streaming-services-statistics/.

5. “Many U.S. Streaming Users Regularly Cancel and Resubscribe, But Bundles Reduce Churn.” The Hollywood Reporter, 2024, www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/streaming-bundles-churn-cancel-resubscribe-ampere-analysis-1235941007/.

6. “Consumers Are Spending $22 More a Month on Average for Streaming Services. Why Do Prices Keep Rising?” Los Angeles Times, 21 Nov. 2025, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2025-11-21/why-do-streaming-prices-keep-rising-disney-netflix-paramount-what-to-know.

7. “35 Streaming Services Statistics You Need to Know in 2025.” Cloudwards, 14 Mar. 2025, www.cloudwards.net/streaming-services-statistics/.

8. “Number of Video Services Consumers Use Rebounds.” Stream TV Insider, 2025, www.streamtvinsider.com/content/number-video-services-consumers-use-rebounds.

9. “28 Streaming Trends and Statistics For 2025.” GWI, 2025, www.gwi.com/blog/streaming-trends-and-stats.

10. “2025 Digital Media Trends: Social Platforms Are Becoming a Dominant Force in Media and Entertainment.” Deloitte, 2025, www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/digital-media-trends-consumption-habits-survey/2025.html.

11. “Apple TV+ Hiking Price, Will Now Cost $13 per Month in U.S.” Variety, 2025, variety.com/2025/tv/news/apple-tv-plus-price-increase-streaming-subscription-1236494949/.

12. “Disney Announces Price Increases for Streaming Services.” The New York Times, 24 Sept. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/business/media/disney-streaming-price-increase.html.

13. “HBO Max Plan Price Changes.” HBO Max Help Center, 2025, help.hbomax.com/US/Answer/Detail/000002580.

14. Korn, Melissa. “Streaming Prices Are Soaring—and Consumers Are Still Paying.” The Wall Street Journal, 13 Nov. 2025, www.wsj.com/business/media/streaming-prices-are-soaringand-consumers-are-still-paying-1bb7dbae.

15. “Plans and Pricing.” Netflix Help Center, 2025, help.netflix.com/en/node/24926.

16. “Cable TV Statistics (2025) – Subscribers & Streaming Data.” Evoca TV, 2025, evoca.tv/cable-tv-statistics/.

17. “Digital 2025: TV Trends and Realities.” DataReportal, 2025, datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-sub-section-tv-trends-and-realities.

18. “More Americans Prefer to Watch the News Than Read or Listen to It.” Pew Research Center, 20 Nov. 2025, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/20/more-americans-prefer-to-watch-the-news-than-read-or-listen-to-it/.

19. Joyella, Mark. “Fox News Crushes Cable News Ratings In October, Leads All Of Television In 2025.” Forbes, 29 Oct. 2025, www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2025/10/29/fox-news-crushes-cable-news-ratings-in-october-leads-all-of-television-in-2025/.

20. “Spectrum News/Morning Consult Poll Finds 83% of Americans Trust Local News.” Charter Communications, 25 Aug. 2022, corporate.charter.com/newsroom/spectrum-news-morning-consult-poll-finds-83-percent-of-americans-trust-local-news.

21. “NFL’s Popularity Advances TV Seasonal Viewership Growth.” TV Technology, Nov. 2025, www.tvtechnology.com/news/nfls-popularity-advances-tv-seasonal-viewership-growth.

22. “FIFA Club World Cup 2025™ Achieves Global Success with 2.7 Billion Audience.” FIFA, September 9, 2025, https://inside.fifa.com/organisation/media-releases/club-world-cup-2025-achieves-global-success-with-2-7-billion-audience.

23. “Netflix Scores Two NFL Christmas Day Games Under Three-Year Deal.” The Athletic, 20 Dec. 2024, www.nytimes.com/athletic/5978068/2024/12/20/netflix-christmas-day-nfl-chiefs-steelers-ravens-texans-tv-media-streaming/.

24. “NBA on Prime Video.” Amazon MGM Studios Press, July 2024, press.amazonmgmstudios.com/us/en/sports/nba.

25. Marchand, Andrew. “Netflix to Stream Yankees-Giants on MLB Opening Day 2026 as Part of New 3-Year Agreement.” The Athletic, 25 Sept. 2025, www.nytimes.com/athletic/6662421/2025/09/25/netflix-stream-yankees-giants-mlb-opening-day-2026/.

26. “2025 Super Bowl LIX: Sign Up and Stream for Free.” Tubi, 2025, tubitv.com/superbowl.

27. “Cathy Rasenberger on How Free Ad-Supported Streaming Is Giving Smaller Sports the Visibility They Deserve.” USA Today, October 21, 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/special/contributor-content/2025/10/21/cathy-rasenberger-on-how-free-ad-supported-streaming-is-giving-smaller-sports-the-visibility-they-de/86820257007/.

28. “YouTube TV Is Forecast to Be the Largest Pay-TV Distributor in 2026.” Forbes, April 7, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2024/04/07/youtube-tv-is-forecast-to-be-the-largest-pay-tv-distributor-in-2026/.

29. “NBCUniversal Sets Date for 2026 Upfront, Which Will Include Networks Spinning Off Into Versant.” Variety, (date unavailable from URL), https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/nbcuniversal-date-2026-upfront-versant-1236543430/.

30. “And So It Begins: Paramount, Netflix And Comcast Formally Submit Bids For Warner Bros. Discovery.” Deadline, November 21, 2025, https://deadline.com/2025/11/paramount-netflix-comcast-submit-wbd-bids-1236625396/.

31. “Disney Is Reportedly Selling Some of Its Cable Networks.” Cord Cutters News, (date unavailable), https://cordcuttersnews.com/disney-is-reportedly-selling-some-of-its-cable-networks/.

32. “YouTube TV, Fox Standoff Impacts NFL Home Market Broadcasts, Not Sunday Ticket.” Reuters, August 26, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/sports/youtube-tv-fox-standoff-impacts-nfl-home-market-broadcasts-not-sunday-ticket--flm-2025-08-26/.

33. “Media Distributor Gauge – October 2025.” Nielsen, November 2025. https://www.nielsen.com/data-center/the-gauge/.

34. “YouTube TV Standoff With NBC Is a Warning Shot to the Industry.” The Hollywood Reporter, October 4, 2025, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/youtube-tv-nbc-carriage-deal-industry-power-shift-1236392578/.

35. “Box Office Revenue in the United States and Canada from 1980 to 2024.” Statista, January 10, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/.

36. “Movie Theaters: Biggest Problems With The Industry In 2025.” Deadline, April 1, 2025, https://deadline.com/2025/03/movie-theaters-biggest-problems-2025-1236354239/.

37. “U.S. Lost 2,000-Plus Movie Theater Screens Amid Pandemic.” The Hollywood Reporter, March 16, 2023, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/movie-theater-screen-losses-ticket-prices-1235346523/.

38. “Hollywood’s Theatrical Business At Risk Of Entering ‘Negative Feedback Loop’, Wall Street Analyst Warns.” Deadline, March 26, 2025, https://deadline.com/2025/03/hollywood-box-office-negative-feedback-loop-wall-street-1236351034/.

39. “Theater Bound: Moviegoing Trends & Insights Study Spring 2025.” Fandango, Spring 2025, https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets/3aea72c0-05dd-11f0-8321-2b978811c524--fandango-2025-moviegoing-trends-insights-study.pdf.

40. “GCF Global Research Amplifies Movie-Goers’ Voices: They Want More.” Yahoo Finance, March 19, 2025, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gcf-global-research-amplifies-movie-180000354.html.

41. “Moviegoers Want More Comedies, Thrillers and Action Titles, Global Cinema Study Finds.” Variety, March 19, 2025, https://variety.com/2025/film/news/moviegoers-comedies-thrillers-global-cinema-study-1236340585/.

42. “Gen Alpha at the Movies: From Pixels to Popcorn.” NRG (National Research Group), August 2025, https://www.nrgmr.com/our-thinking/entertainment/gen-alpha-at-the-movies-from-pixels-to-popcorn/.

43. “Stranger Things Series Finale Coming to Netflix and Select Theaters for Fan Events.” Netflix Tudum, October 23, 2025, https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/stranger-things-5-finale-in-theaters.

44. “What Is Netflix House? Netflix House Philadelphia Open, King of Prussia, Dallas Tickets On Sale, Opens Dec. 11.” Netflix Tudum, (date from article content: November 2025), https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-house.

45. Koszarski, Richard. An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928. University of California Press, 1994, p. 25.

— Note on Imagery: Unless I’ve provided credits for images in these posts, please assume they are generated by GenAI tools such as MidJourney, Gemini, and/or ChatGPT. I am not a designer or visual artist. An admirer, only. But I do enjoy concocting crazy-ass but relevant prompts, then reviewing and tweaking what the mighty engine delivers. With this said, I love to showcase the doings of flesh and blood artists. Send me a suggested work if you believe a particular artist’s contributions would be better suited to replace one of the generated images. These entries can certainly evolve. I will consider your request. Many thanks.

This is the end. More?

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We’re in a busy newsroom—enormous, fluorescently lit. Reporters on deadline rush back and forth. The calendar on the wall tells us it will soon be the last quarter of the tumultuous 20th century before the onset of the fragmented 21st. Clacking typewriters sound like a steady downpour punctuated by harried chatter. Phones ring nonstop. Stacked printouts crowd desks, redlined paragraphs measure words spent and sleep unslept. This is a fact distillery. The pressure is constant. Putting out ‘the first draft’ of an unpredictable, addled history is not for the half-hearted or risk-averse. Most are unable or unwilling to separate leads from hearsay, truth from falsehoods. There’s an individual, though, who draws our attention. His hair is dusty blonde, his face strikingly handsome but worn and alert. His denim-colored eyes scan the commotion. He recognizes something wrong. He rises, calmly.

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That individual is Robert Redford. He’s portraying Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men (1976). Directed by Alan J. Pakula, the New Hollywood-era classic is a fitting testament to the dynamic Redford, who also served as a producer instrumental in getting the movie made. In the scene above, Woodward catches a colleague ‘polishing’ his article draft without permission. He approaches the offending reporter, Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), and requests his draft back, but agrees to read the edited version. Bernstein defends his actions, but Woodward interrupts: “All right, yours is better,” he says. Woodward strides back to his desk, then returns promptly with a clutch of loose legal pad paper. He drops the pile in front of Bernstein. “If you’re going to do it, do it right,” he states simply. “Here are my notes. If you’re going to hype it, hype it with the facts. I don’t mind what you did; I mind the way you did it.”

Yes, this is a character in a movie. But it is a fiction informed by a commitment to honesty and integrity. The cinematic moment perfectly encapsulates the career and legacy of the late Robert Redford, a world-famous star turned film industry disruptor.

Striving for truth and value produces better work.

The way and reason you do things matter.

***

Many pieces have and will be written about the life and storied career of Robert Redford, who passed away on September 16, 2025, at age 89. One of Hollywood’s most sensitive and private leading men, he appeared in classics like Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Sting (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Natural (1984), and All is Lost (2013). He was also an accomplished director of such lauded films as Ordinary People (1980), A River Runs Through It (1993), and Quiz Show (1994).

His distinction came from an understated charisma and endearing but never cloying presence. This characterized his contributions as both an actor and director. He held forth as a quiet westerner with idol good looks imbued with wizened somberness that bordered on the mysterious. Though dashing enough to play Jay Gatsby, he seemed more at home in quiet retreats or the outdoor expanses he championed as a devoted environmentalist. These qualities remained constant whether he donned the pinstripes of a conman in Depression-era Chicago or the coarse beard of a 19th-century frontiersman struggling to stay alive.

Though I could further discuss Redford’s life and career—he was certainly an intriguing individual—I’ll leave that to other critics and biographers. What interests me here is how he leveraged celebrity to become one of the most transformational figures in the modern film industry by acting as a maverick turned mentor and agent for change. He devised a blueprint on how to produce opportunities for creators while forcing myopic executives to recognize a culture outside the echo chambers of Manhattan boardrooms and Hollywood backlots.

And it all began in Redford’s beloved American West. Drawing on his earnings from star-making roles in the 1960s, Redford purchased a ski area northeast of Provo, Utah. He named it “Sundance” after the character he played in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a movie about outlaws who rob trains owned by industrial tycoons. An active local community member, Redford collaborated in 1978 with the Utah Film Commission to serve as the first chairman of what was then called the Utah/United States Film Festival. In a nod to Redford’s persistent rebellious streak, the festival promised to help filmmakers develop projects outside the corporatized Hollywood system. The event would eventually move to Park City, Utah, fall under the control of Redford’s Sundance Institute, and take on the name of the Sundance Film Festival.^1,2

Over the ensuing decades, the festival served as a vital beacon and incubator of independent film that quickly grew in scale and prestige. In 1985, the festival received fewer than 200 submissions, which would increase to 15,775 submissions by 2025.^3,4 During that same timespan, event attendance surged as well. Small audience numbers in the hundreds would lead to a combined in-person and online viewership of more than 344,000 in 2025. As an event with a significant footprint in Utah, the 2025 festival alone registered $162.4 million out-of-state visitor spending while generating an estimated 2,697 jobs with $103.3 million in wages and over $21 million in state and local tax revenue.⁵

What was once essentially a small artist retreat had become a primary magnet of film culture carrying significant industry clout.

Though impressive, these stats pale compared to what Sundance has culturally and economically generated over the years when considering the films picked up at the festival for distribution. It is astonishing to review some of the filmmakers and movies spotlighted for the first time at Sundance through the decades. The list reads like a master’s course syllabus on modern American cinema.

The festival launched careers spanning generations, from early discoveries like Steven Soderbergh with sex, lies, and videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) to breakouts like Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013), Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014), and even recent Oscar winners like Siân Heder’s CODA (2021). The breadth is staggering: art house auteurs, genre innovators, and mainstream crossover successes all found their first major showcase at Sundance.^3,6

Such multigenerational-defining output aligned with Redford’s ambition to, in his words, make the world “safe for artistic diversity. If you want to bring about real, sustained change, you have to be constantly aware that you are not just taking care of yourself. You end up using whatever power you’ve gained to take care of yourself and others by creating a category that others like you can work in.”⁷

Redford made good on the bold gambit to leverage his fame as a launchpad for independent cinema. He expanded the notion of what a diverse film culture could encompass and generate if given the essential support and space to do so. As a result, filmmakers could forge their own path with greater confidence, tycoons in power notwithstanding. Redford, rather than accepting derivative Hollywood fare, helped set the standard for encouraging colleagues to craft original stories and advance fresh voices usually tamped down by the entertainment industrial complex.

It would have been easy for Redford to coast on movie stardom. Instead, he stood up and took action on what he believed: giving filmmakers a chance to produce groundbreaking, uninhibited work. He established a sense of place, home, and community where you could take on “projects that were different from the run of the mill.”⁷

The Sundance Kid and his little film festival were not interested in diluted vision. He went for it. Others joined in. They made history.

***

Praise aside, it is important to acknowledge that Sundance has faced criticism over the last several years for succumbing to what it set out to counter. Some claim the festival has become overly commercialized. Journalist John Cook described it as “an annual industry junket and trade show” rather than being about independent cinema.⁸

Redford himself addressed these issues in 2006: “Once the festival achieved a certain level of notoriety, then people began to come here with agendas that were not the same as ours.”⁸ A Utah State University study similarly concluded that “Hollywood studios have been able to infiltrate and commodify independent projects from the Sundance Film Festival” and that the festival “currently operates as a marketplace for films rather than an independent festival.”⁹ The grassroots origins of the festival and institute matured into a major acquisition arena, fundamentally altering Sundance’s character.

Additional issues have plagued the festival. Its remote, expensive Park City location is prohibitively priced for most moviegoers. The outsider filmmakers who once called Sundance home have been, according to observers, infiltrated by pretentious hipsters and celebrity seekers. There have also been complaints about insufficient attention paid to women filmmakers and artists of color.

In response, Sundance leadership has taken measures to address these problems, including the expansion of diversification initiatives. Notably, organizers recently announced a permanent move to Boulder, Colorado, starting in 2027. According to Sundance Institute Acting CEO Amanda Kelso, the relocation capitalizes on Boulder’s improved accessibility and reputation as an “art town, tech town, mountain town, and college town. It is a place where the festival can build and flourish.”¹⁰

When announcing the move, Redford’s team reinforced the Sundance ethos: “Change is inevitable; we must always evolve and grow, which has been at the core of our survival. [...] The move will ensure that the festival continues its work of risk-taking, supporting innovative storytellers, fostering independence, and entertaining and enlightening audiences.”¹⁰ It’s the same rebel mentality in action. If successful, it will amount to the Sundance Kid in spirit and his inheritors reimagining the next iteration of the festival and institute for a new generation.

***

Despite critiques over the years, however, there is little doubt about what the greater Sundance phenomenon says about Redford’s lasting influence. If anything, the constructive criticism leveled at the festival only shows that pursuing artistic integrity requires dogged, tireless effort. The sense of place, home and community Redford sought is not geographic at its heart—it’s an idea located wherever filmmakers test the boundaries of what a contemporary film industry can be as we navigate the radically changing media landscape.

This means reaffirming a dedication to independent-minded film and television. It means challenging corporate media decision-makers on what is financially viable while advancing the medium to reach audiences where they are—and where they never imagined they could go.

Pressing questions remain: Will filmmaker festivals and labs like Sundance become a countrywide network enhanced by online communities? Can partnerships with streaming and connected TV platforms ensure wider independent content distribution? Will digital creators discover storytelling vehicles that bypass traditional pipelines? Might audiences grow so bored with cookie-cutter intellectual property that the Sundance ethos becomes not just ‘nice to have’, but a cultural and commercial imperative?

What’s not in question is the profound impact of the Sundance Festival and Institute—both their years-long cultural reverberations and positive implications for the film and television industry going forward.

We should take our notes from Robert Redford, who understood what his character Bob Woodward knew in that raucous newsroom alive with confusion and possibility: it’s not just what you create, but how and why you create it. Let risk act as a catalyst. Be true to your voice. Support systems that don’t exploit and neuter but empower and nurture artists.

In a period of franchise filmmaking and algorithm-driven content, Redford’s legacy feels more vital than ever. The Sundance experiment proved that committed individuals can reshape an industry. The blueprint exists, ready for adaptation to the 21st-century media madhouse. Will people use it?

Sources

1. “Robert Redford and His Beloved Utah Canyon.” The New York Times, 18 Sept. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/us/robert-redford-utah.html.

2. “Sundance Film Festival | Robert Redford, Moving Pictures, Independent Films.” Britannica, 16 Sept. 2025, www.britannica.com/art/Sundance-Film-Festival.

3. “Festival History.” Sundance Institute, 2 Apr. 2025, www.sundance.org/festival-history/.

4. “Sundance Film Festival 2025 Announces Feature Film Lineup.” IMDb, 22 Sept. 2025, www.imdb.com/news/ni65005790/.

5. “2025 Sundance Film Festival Attendance Recap and Economic Impact Report.” Sundance Institute, July 2025, www.sundance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-Sundance-Film-Festival-Attendance-Recap-and-Economic-Impact-Report.pdf.

6. “Timeline.” Sundance Institute, 17 Sept. 2025, www.sundance.org/timeline/.

7. “Robert Redford Legacy.” Sundance Institute, 17 Sept. 2025, www.sundance.org/redfordlegacy/.

8. “Redford Defends Direction Of Sundance.” CBS News, 12 Feb. 2006, www.cbsnews.com/news/redford-defends-direction-of-sundance/.

9. Cottrell, Matt Dee. “The Question Concerning the Cooptation of the Sundance Film Festival: An Analysis of the Commodification of Independent Cinema.” Utah State University Digital Commons, 30 Nov. 2009, digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/485/.

10. “Sundance Institute Announces Boulder, Colorado, as the New Home for the Sundance Film Festival Beginning in 2027.” Sundance Institute, 26 Mar. 2025, www.sundance.org/blogs/sundance-institute-announces-boulder-colorado-as-the-new-home-for-the-sundance-film-festival-beginning-in-2027/.

— Note on Imagery: Unless I’ve provided credits for images in these posts, please assume they are generated by GenAI tools such as MidJourney, Gemini, and/or ChatGPT. I am not a designer or visual artist. An admirer, only. But I do enjoy concocting crazy-ass but relevant prompts, then reviewing and tweaking what the mighty engine delivers. With this said, I love to showcase the doings of flesh and blood artists. Send me a suggested work if you believe a particular artist’s contributions would be better suited to replace one of the generated images. These entries can certainly evolve. I will consider your request. Many thanks.

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Note: This is the first entry in the ‘Observations’ series, which will feature quick take writings on timely subjects released between more in-depth pieces covering major topics in the media and entertainment world.

Speaking of in-depth pieces…stay tuned for > Part 2 of Making the Party Fun Again: The Shifting Landscape of Our Streaming Film and TV Ecosystem. Coming soon. See here for Part 1.

In the moments of doubt and grief, we tell ourselves stories to cope and create meaning.

Many fables endure to serve this purpose. Passed down across the centuries, they resolve in the overarching moral: you will encounter bad experiences and awful people. Expect to be hurt. You must learn to live anew in the aftermath.

These shared tales help us process pain and make sense of destructive forces—whether we wish to call them chaos or evil. Simply put, it is the great, ghoulish unknown coming for a little visit. Doctors leaving a voicemail to discuss results. Someone harassing you on the street. A car pulling into the driveway to change your life forever. These are the stories we remember most, because they capture our desperation to demand understanding of terrible events—and the silence we get in return.

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And, it’s near impossible to conjure these types of tales for film and TV with any true emotion and intelligence when you’re tasked to produce a script for some watered-down sequel in a saturated marketplace of disposable entertainment. Whether spotlighting rhinoplastied superheroes or talking animals, most of today's stories prioritize temporary escape over lasting resonance. The trials and travails dramatized in modern-day comic book mythologies and regurgitated IP dross often wrap everything up with conclusions scrubbed clean of doubt or uncertainty. As a consequence, the majority of our era’s popular films are transitory and interchangeable. If you want to be effective and substantive when talking about loss and hope, you must break out the pen and paper because of the heart-wrenching need to do so. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s not romantic bullshit, either. It’s quality assurance. Motivations cannot be based solely on monetary gain or fulfilling creative aims committed purely to exceptional (but often soulless) craft. You need to actually feel it.

This is where Weapons (2025) comes from. It is therapy via horror. Almost literally. Written and directed by Zach Cregger, the film’s script acted as a vehicle for the author to explore how people handle sadness and rage after a devastating tragedy. Cregger, a talented young filmmaker who surprised Hollywood with the success of his debut feature Barbarian in 2022, became well-acquainted with tragedy. On August 6, 2021, the writer-director’s close friend and former collaborator, Trevor Moore, died suddenly after falling from a balcony.¹ He was only 41. Out of nowhere, a random accident ended the man’s life. Attempting to deal with this shocking death, Cregger turned to Weapons as a kind of cathartic reckoning: "The movie's about that overwhelming emotion you get when you lose someone close to you [...] This script was me venting about that. So I didn't explode.”² As it turned out, this reckoning yielded a film that's terrifying, devilishly funny, and oddly comforting. It invites viewers to sit down for a meal with evil, then ask for seconds.

The premise and plot of Weapons are simple but riddled with mystery, like all good fables. One night at 2:17 a.m., in a nondescript American suburb, seventeen children from the same classroom of a local grade school simultaneously run out of their homes, not to be seen again. Authorities are baffled. The school teacher who taught the children before they disappeared is viewed with suspicion. Distraught parents cry for an explanation. Structured in the tradition of Rashomon (1950), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Magnolia (1999), the film shows how locals handle the event’s fallout through a series of chapters told from the perspectives of several different characters. Some of the characters hunt for clues. Some of them follow standard operating procedures in their given institutional professions, praying answers will materialize. All of them, regardless, flail and try to survive their own dilemmas, addictions and diversions against the backdrop of the unfathomable disaster that has left a psychological crater at the center of the traumatized community.

Not wanting to spoil the fun, I will not divulge the reason eventually provided for why the children suddenly take flight into the night. I will say that the ultimate reveal, though, is not so much a resolution as a final set of lingering questions: what do you do when life doesn’t completely spell out for you how to navigate loss? Even if you discover what brings pain to others, does the culprit—whether human or otherwise—not contain some unknowable agency that drives its actions?

It is by no means neat and tidy. No easy answers. Snaps of sorcery and deployed superpowers cannot promise peace of mind. You can use magical thinking to help salve psychic wounds, but the underlying problem remains. The weapons are everywhere. No one is coming to save the day, nor offer real reasons for what happens. You love and live while you can, learning and creating anew in the aftermath. Quite the children’s tale, no?

This is not, in other words, a film for the faint of heart. However, it is a deftly crafted and multifaceted work that satisfies a desire for defibrillator-strength thrills while simultaneously not preaching its themes and ideas (an issue plaguing my beloved horror genre right now) or pandering to the lowest common denominator. A rarity these days.

But is it an indication of things to come in the industry? Made on a budget of approximately $39 million, Weapons was initially fought over by a number of studios in a highly publicized bidding war.^3,4 Warner Bros.’ New Line division ultimately won the rights. It is encouraging that 1). Many industry players saw the potential in Zach Cregger’s work; 2). A major studio like Warner Bros., in particular, took a chance on the property, then offered a theatrical run and resisted ripping the movie to shreds in development hell; and, most importantly, 3). original storytelling that honors cinematic tradition without being pretentious or self-indulgent was able to find an invested, receptive audience. As of this writing, Weapons has grossed over $240 million on its way to becoming one of the most profitable releases of 2025.⁵ These are exciting signs of what could be coming our way.

Indeed, perhaps audiences are ready for engaging stories that aren't algorithmically designed to hit every quick fix receptor that numbs and helps us avoid our sorrows, doubts and fears. Perhaps we want fresh content that makes us feel and think again. The success of Weapons suggests we do.

***

Throughout Weapons, the school teacher of the children who have disappeared is shown repeatedly going into convenience shops of one type or another. At first, we see her at a liquor store reaching for what seems to be a daily, long-running succession of vodka bottles purchased in bulk. Then, when she returns to the same store to replenish her supply, a local woman attacks the teacher for sleeping with her husband. Another way to dull the pain gone awry.

When we see the teacher later in the film, this time running through an unremarkable but familiar-looking gas station, she is being chased by something far more uncompromising in its pursuit. The teacher, played with a feisty sensitivity by Julia Garner, cannot outrun the insatiable thing that hunts her now. She can no longer drown out the depression, avoid the problem through diversion, or move onward from her bad luck of being the teacher, or the 'witch’—as the locals paint in dripping red letters across her car—who happened to be teaching when tragedy struck. No matter how difficult, she must learn how to face it. The film makes us face it, too.

Hopefully, more studios and filmmakers will follow suit, delivering movies with the same power and unique voice to opening day crowds hungry for a tale well told that will carry on in their deepest thoughts long after the last credits roll to black.

Sources

1. "'The Whitest Kids U Know' Co-Founder Trevor Moore's Death Ruled An Accident." Deadline, https://deadline.com/2021/12/the-whitest-kids-u-know-co-founder-trevor-moores-death-ruled-an-accident-1234899712/.

2. Murrell, Morgan. "'Weapons' Is A Wild Horror Movie, But These 21 Facts Have Me Looking At It Completely Differently." BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/morganmurrell/weapons-movie-behind-the-scenes-facts.

3. "Why 'Weapons' Is the Best Thing to Happen to Horror This Year." No Film School, https://nofilmschool.com/weapons-best-horror.

4. "New Line Wins Intense Auction for 'Weapons,' the New Movie From 'Barbarian' Filmmaker Zach Cregger." The Hollywood Reporter, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/barbarian-director-zach-creggers-weapons-1235308587/.

5. "Weapons." Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3882385409/?ref_=bo_hm_rd.

…and, “Beware of Darkness”.

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You want to pay for another streaming service? Do you feel anxious when asked to sort through even more content? The answer is yes, of course.

Nevertheless, film and TV providers still try to lure you into a tangle of platforms and subscriptions so complicated you need a forensic accountant to analyze your monthly statement.

But everyone must keep up. “There’s a lot of good content out there,” they all say. In fact, some films and shows are mind-blowingly excellent, but you can’t always find what you’re looking for or afford the costs involved. It’s like being at a party jam-packed with the greatest artists and entertainers alive. You want to interact with everyone, moving easily from table to table, but the crowds and noise prove too much. You resign yourself to engaging with whomever you first recognize, all the while wondering what you're missing. Then, the bill comes.

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Could there be a better way? As equal parts industry observer and fellow audience member, I think it pays to examine the trajectory of the streaming era and what it signals for the future of the film and TV ecosystem.

There are other readings on this topic, but I often long for a more thorough review to orient my inundated brain as to what the hell has exactly happened over the last twenty-five years—and, importantly, what matters most at this transformative point in the industry’s history. We’re sprinting through this already overwhelmed century, and I’m trying to make sense of the substantive versus the not so much, especially when it comes to the state of entertainment and our hypermediated culture more broadly.

Accordingly, this is the first installment of a 4-part series to help get our bearings on the streaming film and TV industry. The series will cover the following:

• Revisiting the transition from the dominance of linear TV and theater to the ascendancy of streaming platforms (that’s the entry you’re reading now)

• What audiences report wanting (and not wanting)

• Looming industry consolidation and simplification

• Possible improvements and challenges in the years ahead

Let’s take stock. Indulge with me.

Acronym Soup

We are now a few decades into the era of big tech transforming Hollywood. Gone are the days of studio and cable company dominance. This is the heyday of Squid Game, KPop Demon Hunters and Mr. Beast. In May 2025, the streaming industry, valued at over $108 billion, hit a significant milestone that many would have thought absurd just a few years ago: streaming won the battle for TV viewership, capturing 44.8% of total TV usage compared to 44.2% for broadcast and cable television combined.^1,2 Annual revenue by the end of 2025 is expected to show a nearly 7% annual growth rate with a projected 2030 market value of $164.41 billion.³ This didn’t happen overnight…but nearly so. From 2021 to 2025, streaming usage increased globally by an estimated 71% through the proliferation of at least 200 distinct platforms; some sources estimate that the total number of active streaming services could be even higher, perhaps amounting to more than 400 worldwide. ^4,5

Netflix and YouTube (Alphabet/Google) preside as indisputable giants. In Q4 2024, Netflix reported 301.6 million subscribers. YouTube touts a staggering 2.7 billion monthly active users and accumulates approximately 3.8 billion unique visitors and hundreds of billions of views monthly.^6,7 Other key players in the field stand (with varying success) as the outcome of Old Hollywood attempting to meld with corporate goliaths. The usual suspects are present here: Apple, Amazon (Prime Video), Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount/Skydance. There are also a slew of additional providers and subsidiaries ranging from AMC to The Criterion Collection to ViX that cater to more targeted, demographic-specific or genre-oriented audience segments.

To reach audiences, these streaming providers serve content in myriad, sometimes perplexing ways. The primary delivery models are legion: Streaming Video on Demand (SVOD), Transaction Video on Demand (TVOD), Premium Video on Demand (PVOD), Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD), Hybrid Video on Demand (HVOD), Free Ad-supported Streaming Television (FAST), and Virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (vMVPDs). All these acronyms strung together may sound like various strains of a rare communicable disease, or cue you to scream WTFOD…and I may not have catalogued all of them.

Quick glossary of sorts:

If you go outside of the U.S., the complexity magnifies. Market-specific platforms may only be offered in certain countries. International streaming giants often also piggyback on popular over-the-air providers, combining forces and bundling options with regional cable companies. Approximately 1 in 3 streaming services have established partnerships with regional over-the-air and Pay TV providers, and up to 77.9% of these alliances are with telecom and Pay TV operators. Commercial bundles represent 63.7% of the collaborations, especially in regions like Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Latin America (LATAM), with local giants (e.g., Vodafone, Orange, Telia, Claro, VIVO) hosting partnerships with Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and Prime Video.⁹

There’s also the sometimes overlooked role of TV and device manufacturers, such as Samsung TV, Amazon Fire Stick and Roku, getting into the mix with operating systems (OS) and platforms granting access to a range of third-party streaming apps and FAST channels (e.g., Prime Video offering access to Apple+ or AMC ‘channels’ for an additional cost).⁶

It's a convoluted global market saturated with options.

Though the next post will get more in-depth on how this registers with audiences, suffice it to say that people must navigate a ‘room packed beyond capacity’. The related phenomena of so-called consumer ‘choice paralysis’ and ‘subscription fatigue’ are real. It is not a sustainable state of affairs.

Still, to understand how we arrived at this complicated streaming context, it is necessary to remember what we were trying to leave behind. What were the incentives for choosing streaming services, anyway? This is where we revisit cable TV and the movie theater experience before the rise of Netflix, YouTube, and the many platforms that followed.

Cable’s Appointment Viewing or Anything You Want?

Remember when cable TV dominated home entertainment? At its height between 2000-2010, cable reached over 105 million pay-TV households (cable plus satellite), which equated to 90% penetration of U.S. TV homes.^10,11 By 2013, the average household received 189 channels (though viewers typically reported watching only about 17 channels). Cable also offered access to exclusive and niche content compared to the scant channels available through over-the-air broadcast (VHF/UHF). Popular channels like HBO, ESPN, MTV, Nickelodeon, and CNN provided premium, news, niche, and live content unavailable elsewhere. Also, the 1990s-2010s saw cable networks release widely acclaimed original series made with a degree of creative freedom and ambition largely unknown to the broadcast networks. Scripted shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad elevated television to a level of artistry previously associated only with feature film culture. By 2015, cable networks produced 189 scripted shows compared to broadcast TV's 119. Abundance, speciality and creativity characterized this new peak in TV programming.¹⁰

Viewers also came to expect a user experience vastly improved from the TV standards of past decades. Premium channels like HBO offered commercial-free viewing, a welcome improvement over ad after ad disrupting cinematic flow. Payment was simple, too. One monthly bill—commonly bundled with internet and phone service for integrated convenience—covered dozens of channels, with all content accessible through a single interface and remote control.

But people started to grumble. While the payment process was straightforward, cable bills could exceed $100 per month when accounting for forced bundling of unwanted channels, equipment rental fees, and hidden charges. Also, outside of premium options like HBO and Showtime, most channels afforded limited creative leeway to content makers and often interrupted programming with commercials, as networks were still beholden to advertiser requirements and traditional approval standards. The user experience suffered as a consequence. Compounding these problems, the glut of channel offerings made locating content inefficient and time-consuming.

Finally, constraints on when and how audiences could view content proved to be the most crucial drawback. Cable and broadcast TV were linear and aired on a set schedule. This required viewers to coordinate their day around primetime television. The situation also forced people to be home at designated times to watch their favorite shows unless they had DVRs to record shows. However, even this technology required a waiting period between episodes. At a time when the burgeoning internet had begun to train people on grabbing information whenever they wanted, such a condition of ‘wait-to-see’ gradually became untenable and antiquated for impatient audiences.

Multiplex Versus Multiscreen

“I strongly believe the future of cinema will be on the big screen, no matter what any Wall Street dilettante says. Since the dawn of time, humans have deeply needed communal storytelling experiences. Cinema on the big screen is more than a business, it is an art form that brings people together, celebrating humanity, enhancing our empathy for one another — it’s one of the very last artistic, in-person collective experiences we share as human beings.”

- Denis Villeneuve, Director of Dune (2021), Blade Runner 2049, Arrival¹²

Quite the strong sentiment from Monsieur Villeneuve on the vital importance of theaters to film culture and the movie viewing experience. What informs such an impassioned statement? It is partly a response to the documented decline of movie theater attendance over the last several years. Much like the downward trajectory of cable TV, movie theaters during the first quarter of the 21st century confronted an audience changing how they seek out entertainment.

The numbers are pretty clear on this front. Movie theater admissions in the U.S and Canada reached 15.8 billion in 2002, the peak year in the 21st century for theater tickets sold. Adjusted for inflation, the U.S. and Canadian domestic box office for that same year (2002) reached $17.8 billion. For comparison, theater admissions in 2024 reached 760.5 million in the U.S and Canada, with box office returns hitting $8.6 billion. That’s roughly a 48% drop in ticket sales and domestic box office returns. Ouch.¹³

Note that this decrease in theater attendance and box office returns predates the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic theater shutdowns, one of the most traumatic upheavals to impact the film and television industry (not to mention the world at large, of course). Though that year proved a disaster, issues existed before then. The long-term downturn does, however, historically align with the increases in widespread digital media access, complemented by the ultimate ascendancy of film and TV streaming. These factors are not the only reasons for the recorded decline, but it is hard to argue with the fact that digital media and streaming have dramatically—and perhaps permanently—impacted theater-going behavior and box office return potential on a year-over-year basis.

Regardless, before the mid-2010s—when streaming services truly began to assert greater influence on the direction of film and TV—international film studios and distributors released a raft of great films spanning various genres and tastes. As one barometer to consider, when the New York Times published the top 100 films of the 21st Century, sixty-eight of the listed films were released between 2000 and 2015. The diverse range of cinematic achievements during this period is impressive, with films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mulholland Drive, There Will Be Blood, Spirited Away, Zodiac, Memento, Amélie, and Y Tu Mamá También (as well as many others) opening to audiences across a decidedly more globalized world.¹⁴ For those seeking blockbusters, sophisticated franchise filmmaking could be found in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, early Marvel films, and genre-bending thrill rides like The Dark Knight. Viewers could get their theatrical fix, whether they wanted arthouse fare, Frodo Baggins, or the Joker.

The period also saw the world's first entirely digital-enabled theaters installed in 2004, revolutionizing picture and sound quality with 4K definition, massive screens, and immersive audio systems.¹⁵ IMAX and 3D screenings became mainstream, offering experiences impossible to replicate at home. By 2009, 11% of box office revenue ($1.1 billion) came from 3D showings alone.¹⁶ It was the multiplex era, with complexes boasting 18-30 screens and offering 100-seat theaters as well as premium 400-seat immersive auditoriums.¹⁷

Despite these innovations, problems with the theater-going experience began to surface. Individual movie tickets could cost $10-20+ each per person (let alone if you threw any concessions on the bill), making frequent viewing expensive, especially for families on a tighter budget. Ticket buyers were also paying for a limited selection at a fixed location. At a turning point when cable TV served up over 100 channels and the internet seemed a boundless, depthless sea of content, most theaters showed only current releases with limited scheduling. And, similar to cable constraints, movie theaters required travel to specific locations at pre-determined showtimes, with no ability to pause, rewind or rewatch. You were beholden to one location at a set time in an otherwise digitally abundant and mobile world.

‘Cinema on the big screen as an art form that brings people together’ contended with a difficult question: what if people were beginning to value fundamentally different aspects of the movie-going experience?

Streaming Swoops In

All this is to say, when Netflix burst onto the scene with its online streaming service in 2007, the benefits seemed clear: unlimited streaming for a flat subscription cost (initially $8 per month for streaming-only plans!) with no advertisements and 24/7 access to an eclectic and international content library anytime, anywhere. Expensive cable bundles and theater visits would no longer be an issue. No equipment rental fees or long-term contracts. Reduced channel surfing and time waste. This was quite the user-friendly and streamlined experience compared to cable TV and movie theaters.

Notable shifts in film and TV development, production and programming took place at this time as well. With Netflix at the forefront, streaming services reeled in respected filmmakers and showrunners by offering them previously unheard of creative control to produce original, critically-acclaimed shows. In 2013, Netflix released House of Cards, a bona fide hit that officially announced the arrival of streaming on the doorstep of prestige television. Additional streaming hits like Orange is the New Black and Transparent solidified streaming as not just a player in the space, but as a brazen leader in both their approach to programming and how they addressed the entire audience experience. Online platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Prime Video, once treated as a sideshow by Hollywood power brokers, started to exert major influence across the entertainment industry.

Netflix and the early streaming services built on this success by introducing several advancements to revolutionize the entertainment delivery business model and on-service/on-platform user experience. Netflix's all-episodes-at-once release strategy dramatically changed viewing habits. ‘Binge-watching’ became a trend. With direct-to-streaming premieres, the company eliminated traditional theater windowing requirements and TV scheduling constraints. Established as a tech-first, digitally native company, Netflix employed viewing data and state-of-the-art algorithms to show that sophisticated analytics could help guide creative decisions and better tailor services to the subscribers’ specific viewing habits and interests (i.e., ‘personalization’), whether audiences were watching in living rooms or on their ever-present smartphones.¹⁸

The sway of legacy studios over the film, TV, and media elite began to flag. Major stars and directors increasingly moved from traditional networks to streaming. The success of originals such as the aforementioned House of Cards and global phenomenons like Stranger Things notably reduced streaming companies’ dependence on licensed content from other film studios and TV networks. Live event media providers and sports leagues, too, began to flirt with streaming services, airing shows and games as a preview of the more comprehensive and lucrative rights packages formalized in the years that followed.

In short, something of a paradigm shift was taking shape beyond mere adjustments to the mechanisms of production, distribution and exhibition. Film and TV were becoming more immediate and constant in everyday life.

Rise of YouTube: Wait…Is Mr. Beast really that ubiquitous and filthy rich?

During the initial growth of film and TV streaming, YouTube was concurrently founding an empire. Launched in 2005 and purchased by Google in 2006, the platform was the first globally available, completely free, user-driven video platform that enabled instant uploading, sharing, and discovering video content at scale. The service handled millions of daily uploads and views, quickly outpacing the reach and content diversity of traditional broadcasters. This effectively trained viewers to move from scheduled programming and physical media to on-demand digital video while simultaneously growing the careers of independent creators, influencers, and mainstream digital-first artists, thus establishing a whole new pathway for online entertainers and celebrities.

Then, in 2007, YouTube introduced ad-supported streaming. Creators could now monetize their content directly, and advertisers gained access to micro-targeted video audiences. This set the groundwork for bringing advertising (and its financial power) back to the fore of the viewing experience, while also creating a vehicle for independent creators on the platform to earn actual money outside of the traditional entertainment and monetization pipelines. A select few of these creators, like Mr. Beast and Jake Paul, amassed huge fortunes and significant cultural influence in the process. YouTube, in turn, gave rise to major linchpins of the modern streaming business: the previously non-existent ‘Creator Economy’ and the ‘Ad-supported Video on Demand (AVOD)’ model later adopted by various other streaming platforms.¹⁹

The platform’s technology, business model, and content variety set the standard for all subsequent streaming video services. This established YouTube as one of the more influential pioneers in digital media.

Streaming Meets the Ghosts of Cable Past

With the meteoric rise, early successes and business model contributions of platforms like Netflix and YouTube, the writing was on the wall: streaming was here to stay and changing everything in the process.

And, everybody wanted to be a part of it.

Competition for subscribers and views became fierce. From 2008 to 2020, major media, entertainment and big tech companies launched one or more streaming services, each promoting their own value proposition. As providers struggled to convince consumers that piling on subscriptions was worth the money, they positioned themselves as more affordable, having better programming, offering access to extensive libraries—or some variation on all of the above. Several companies accrued millions in debt to build these services. Platforms, like Hulu, Tubi and Samsung TV Plus, implemented the AVOD model initially pioneered by YouTube. The linear programming and advertising setup for FAST channels found its precursor model in, well…cable. The streaming wars were underway. Here’s a breakdown listing some—but by no means all—of the notable streaming service launches since 2005:

The onslaught of streaming services produced an entertainment delivery ecosystem that opened the door to a rich and extensive, if overwhelming, range of options.²⁰ Monthly rates per service gradually began to fluctuate based on content demand and plan tier (i.e., ads or no ads). Inevitably, the bewildering accumulation of streaming subscriptions, models and options proved costly and confusing.

That brings us to where we are today.

It’s hard to miss the irony: monthly subscription bills have gotten out of control. Most platforms now offer ad-supported tiers. Even with streaming war winners like Netflix and YouTube drawing in more views than ever, content is still spread across numerous platforms to produce the same bundling issues that streaming aimed to solve. Sounds a bit like the old complaints against cable, no?

Full Circle Questioning

So, you can now get everything, everywhere, all at once…but it comes at a price. The willingness to navigate such complexity no doubt tests viewers' patience (and sanity). It is also no surprise that commentators raise alarms about market saturation and the need for consolidation. In response, media and entertainment companies are beginning to pursue mergers and acquisitions while plotting how to streamline content discovery and simplify payment.

But what do consumers and users really want? What platforms and models are indispensable for the future? Can the film and TV streaming revolution achieve its initial promise of a better entertainment experience and ecosystem? More on this topic in the subsequent entries of this series.

How do we make the party fun and easy to enjoy again?

What Else?

• Stay tuned: With some vital background context established, upcoming entries will report on what audiences want from streaming and the prospects for the sector’s future.

• Further reading: To think about streaming is to think about the attention economy writ large. The former is a subtopic of the latter—believing otherwise is foolish. Check out McKinsey & Company’s attempt to quantify the value of attention invested in different media and experiences. Strongly concur? Vehemently disagree?

• Challenge: Consider what you most love and despise about the film and TV streaming ecosystem. I’m interested to hear from you whether 1). You’ve never known anything else (i.e., too young to remember using cable) or 2). You can compare the present-day entertainment experience to what came before.

• Media intake:

– Books: Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry. Beloved by many. My first time reading. Some of the best character descriptions and dialogue I’ve ever encountered. I’m not a Western enthusiast, necessarily, but this novel works far beyond any genre preoccupations. The delicate and honest touch McMurtry applies to the sad sweep of the lethal, moony American West…quite something. And, ol’ Gus gets a nod for being one of the funniest, charismatic characters ever put to page.

– Small Screen(s): Grosse Point Blank (1997) directed by George Armitage. Revisited this sometimes forgotten piece of charming absurdity. Comedies once had no compunction about blending bizarre story premises and knife-sharp sardonic worldviews shot through with an unrepentant romantic streak. Peak Cusack(s). Minnie Driver as that-girl-you-fell-in-love-with-then-realized-she-wasn’t-real-but-shucks-she’s-great. Repartee worthy of 40s screwball comedies cut with 90s edge and filtered through 80s nostalgia. I’ve since been listening to Echo & the Bunnymen and wondering if I would survive a high school reunion (the answer is no).

– Big Screen: Seeing Weapons directed by Zach Cregger in the next few days. Hearin’ great things, and I love me some good Horror more than just about anything else. I’ll let you know.

Sources

1. "Media Streaming Market to Hit USD 108.73 Billion in 2025 Amid On-Demand Content Boom." Globe Newswire, 11 May 2025, www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/05/11/3078702/0/en/Media-Streaming-Market-to-Hit-USD-108-73-Billion-in-2025-Amid-On-Demand-Content-Boom.html.

2. "Streaming Reaches Historic TV Milestone, Eclipses Combined Broadcast and Cable Viewing For First Time." Nielsen, 17 June 2025, www.nielsen.com/news-center/2025/streaming-reaches-historic-tv-milestone-eclipses-combined-broadcast-and-cable-viewing-for-first-time/.

3. "Video Streaming (SVoD) - Worldwide | Market Forecast." Statista, 2025, www.statista.com/outlook/amo/media/tv-video/ott-video/video-streaming-svod/worldwide?currency=USD.

4. "Video Streaming Services Stats (2025)." Exploding Topics, 2025, https://explodingtopics.com/blog/video-streaming-stats .

5. "Streaming Services Statistics and Facts (2025)." Scoop Market, 2025, https://scoop.market.us/streaming-services-statistics/.

6. "Netflix Subscribers Statistics 2025 [Users by Country]." Evoca TV, 2025, https://evoca.tv/netflix-user-statistics/.

7. "YouTube Content Creator Statistics (2025)." Exploding Topics, 2025, https://explodingtopics.com/blog/youtube-creator-stats.

8. "Premium Video on Demand (PVOD): Definition." G2A News, www.g2a.com/news/features/premium-video-on-demand-pvod-definition/.

9. "Global Streaming Platform Partnerships: Telecoms, Bundles, and Growth Opportunities." BB Media, https://bb-media.com/streaming-platform-partnerships-telecoms-bundles-growth/.

10. Adgate, Brad. "The Rise and Fall of Cable Television." Forbes, 2 Nov. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2020/11/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-cable-television/.

11. "Streaming Vs Cable TV Statistics: The Slow Demise of Cable TV." PlayToday, https://playtoday.co/blog/stats/streaming-vs-cable-tv-statistics/.

12. Villeneuve, Denis, director. Dune. Variety, 23 Apr. 2021, https://variety.com/2020/film/news/dune-denis-villeneuve-blasts-warner-bros-1234851270/.

13. "Movie Market Summary 1995 to 2025." The Numbers, https://www.the-numbers.com/market/.

14. "The 25 Best Movies of the 21st Century." The New York Times, 2025, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/movies/best-movies-21st-century.html#movie-10.

15. "Digital Decades: GDC Technology Celebrates Its 20th Year." Box Office Pro, www.boxofficepro.com/gdc-technology-20th-anniversary-dr-man-nang-chong/.

16. "Theatrical Market Statistics 2009." TechCrunch, Aug. 2010, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/091af5d6-faf7-4f58-9a8e-405466c1c5e5.pdf.

17. Meissner, Christofer. "The Scale of the Screen: Auditorium Size and Number in the American Movie Theater." Media Fields Journal, https://mediafieldsjournal.org/scale-of-the-screen.

18. "Netflix's History Killed Blockbuster." Variety, 2025, https://variety.com/2025/film/news/netflix-history-killed-bl.

19. "History of YouTube - How it All Began & Its Rise." VdoCipher, www.vdocipher.com/blog/history-of-youtube/.

20. "List of streaming media services." Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streaming_media_services.

— Note on Imagery: Unless I’ve provided credits for images in these posts, please assume they are generated by GenAI tools such as MidJourney, Gemini, and/or ChatGPT. I am not a designer or visual artist. An admirer, only. But I do enjoy concocting crazy-ass but relevant prompts, then reviewing and tweaking what the mighty engine delivers. With this said, I love to showcase the doings of flesh and blood artists. Send me a suggested work if you believe a particular artist’s contributions would be better suited to replace one of the generated images. These entries can certainly evolve. I will consider your request. Many thanks.

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“I’d Like to Check Out…”

The bell trills to greet your entry. Right away, you hear the ambient noise of anchored televisions and afternoon seekers on the hunt between aisles for the exact right selection. In the backroom, where prized new releases are readied for eager patrons, you can detect a few familiar notes of a rock standard trickling out from a stickered boombox: “Some'll win, some will lose…Some are born to sing the blues…”

There’s a strange but intoxicating waft of processed candy and packaged popcorn mingled with the very specific, almost sickly sweet industrial scent of hundreds of plastic movie cases arrayed for your browsing pleasure. Some bespectacled, wry clerk spins through whorls of thought on a stool behind the counter, chewing away the microburst of artificial flavor delivered by his sixth stick of Juicy Fruit for the day. He wears a faded charcoal t-shirt featuring an obscure metal band from Dayton, Ohio, or maybe a cartoonish robot from some 1950s sci-fi serial or, somehow, both.

Lurid film posters of now forgotten creature features share limited wall space with beloved foreign films only the initiated can claim to have seen, let alone understand…

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Over 43,000 Titles

If you were drawn to the weird depths of film and TV culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the above would immediately bring you back to the place you belong: the local video store of yore.

For me, growing up in Boulder, Colorado, this was The Video Station. Opened in 1981, the centrally located magnet for jonesing movie hounds offered up two floors of everything from the latest hits to back catalogues of long-ago broadcast TV shows to lovingly curated alcoves of film titles ordered by genre, country of origin, director, actor, year, staff favorites…The organizational criteria certainly evolved, sometimes on the whim of whoever happened to be working that week.

At first, this hometown staple provided seemingly every VHS known on the planet (“Please be kind, rewind”). Then, came the rare luxury of laserdiscs (which always seemed so unattainably fancy to my lowly VCR family) mixed in with the endless shelves of videocassettes. Finally, the explosion of the DVD age came into full swing (“Oh, the quality is so much better...don’t scratch it!”). No matter how obscure your title of choice, The Video Station had your fix. This remained true for more than two decades. Those of us who couldn’t get enough of the place should probably admit—when not showing polite deference to our devoted parental units—that we, to some extent, were raised between those well-stocked shelves, one rental to the next.

Now. Always and Forever.

Things began to change for The Video Station around the early 2000s—slowly at first, then in earnest.

The queue of fans desperately waiting to get their hands on the latest release began…to thin out a bit. People gravitated in steadily growing numbers toward this DVD-by-mail service you accessed online like, increasingly, every other service in the world. Even the far more popular, ubiquitous Blockbuster rental chain locations began to see declines in customers.

The world was moving on. People were migrating toward easier access and endless supply, from the province of physical media that you bought, stacked and collected, to another kind of otherworldly fluid digital realm referred to simply as ‘streaming’. You no longer needed to go anywhere for your entertainment. It came to your living room, then your laptop, and, ultimately, to your smartphone (a.k.a. the greatest entertainment/drug delivery system ever invented). You became the programmer, separated by only a thin layer of tactile glass from the ol’ tube you once huddled around with your family—you and your device were the station for everything. Now. Always and forever.

There were moments at this point in history, no matter how fleeting, when we would wonder what happened to the legions of film clerks out there. What was that raggedy t-shirt they used to wear?...smirk lifting at the corners of your mouth.

They all went online, of course. Some became trolls. Others became podcast hosts. Some became Ted Sarandos.

We Have Choices, Folks

All of us, though, with our tailored video-on-(“RIGHT GODDAMNED NOW!!”)-demand platforms, compiled playlists, and private viewing theaters of the modern-day-multi-mediated-extravaganza will dictate the years ahead for all things culture and entertainment. No matter how it may seem like we are led by the nose, or click baiting, we choose what films, television, theater, books, and music will occupy our scant time and assaulted senses. This is true whether we’re mindlessly scrolling or leaning in to track every detail viewable on our high-definition screens.

That’s what this blog will be about. Yes, you’re right, I did bury the lede. Sometimes you need to settle in and get comfortable before the opening credits roll across the screen.

Yours truly, Tony Cleasby, will be studying trends and offering musings on what’s going on in the strange world of arts and entertainment. I aim to discuss how we got here, what we’ve left behind, and where we can go in the future. I will do this by piecing through data and attempting to distill accordingly.

For my initial posts, I will focus primarily on the state and trajectory of the film and TV industry (whatever ‘TV’ is at present day…), as this remains a source of fascination for me both personally and professionally. However, I will also delve into the related worlds of publishing/books, theater, music…and whatever alien, multisensory medium is concocted by Gen Alpha and ChatGPT. I will take on this project, too, because all such cultural, well, ‘streams’ are interdependent and inextricable. You can’t understand where all these ideas, stories, and memes come from without comprehending where they connect and diverge, where they feed each other and create something new.

Art and CEPTC

What I hope sets this blog apart from the endless commentary inundating people’s feeds is my aim to take into account not just the economics of our collective entertainment mediasphere or concentrate solely on the critical appreciation of the present day cultural deluge, but rather to locate and examine what happens at the intersection of art and commerce—and, in the process, fashions the cumulative sociocultural experience of our melded, cacophonous lives.

It’s so easy to get lost in subscription numbers, engagement metrics and earnings reports or, conversely, fixate entirely on the art (whatever it may be) without interrogating its origins in the sometimes grubby, but also illuminating realm of what I affectionately call the CEPTC (or the ‘crazy economics of power and technology cycle’). Kidding…kind of. Digging into both is essential: this dual analysis provides context for the cultures of tomorrow. The questions of ‘value’ and ‘impact’ are not viewed in purely quantifiable or qualitative terms, nor simply as matters of money and merit, but as the confluence of forces leading to various outcomes simultaneously driving the generative machinery of show business while unlocking previously unknown reserves of imagination (or so we hope).

It’s additionally just fun, engrossing and, I think, pretty damn important.

Why? Well, contrary to what the common 21st century impulse to doom scroll like an addled lab rat stuck in the algorithmic labyrinth would lead you to believe, the subject matter of arts and entertainment should not be raced through on a daily basis without deeper thought. Labeling ALL ‘this entertainment stuff’ as cheap gossip and mere escapism misses out on insights into our Frankensteinian character. The stories, ideas and—heaven forbid!—actual empathy we find in literary tomes and late-night movies and Instagram clips alike should not be dismissed as little more than transitory fluff.

Sifting Through Madness to Bottomless Popcorn

Sure, there’s plenty of nonsense churned out to fill the coffers of a conglomerated attention economy cartel. We should also never forget to view the arts and entertainment industries with a sense of humor that wholeheartedly embraces the madness at play. Art and storytelling are fundamentally about making stuff up for people to feel something, anything, more than they already do as conscious entities overcoming unfathomable odds to cohere from cosmic pollen into sentient beings that somehow live, breathe and cogitate about unrequited cravings for spicy Cheetos. In other words, part of the reason why we write books and make movies is that we’re bored with an infinite universe of possibilities. That’s ridiculous. And hilarious. For the love of god (any of them, really), please laugh. A lot.

But it’s not the only reason we produce such art. Whether we want to commune with artistic geniuses of past ages or mash-up clips of cats pushing babies into clothes hampers: it’s about the insatiable pursuit of attempting to experience and understand more. It’s about communicating and capturing—before our lives and loves get tossed into the grand recycling bin of existence—the complex nuances of what it means to be human at a given point in time as part of a group we identify community or family, or fellow space travelers. It’s aspirational. Raw. Reckless. Masterful. Fucked. Flawed. Wondrous. It’s us.

Maybe, too, it prepares and aids us as we attempt to process and make the most of that infinite universe of possibility waiting out there like the vigilant language arts teacher who sits alone in that giant classroom between periods, their chalk gently tapping on the ready blackboard in wait for all those crazed kids to come rushing in when the bell rings.

Or, maybe, we need movies, TV, books, theater, and internet reels to help us get down as much of that bottomless popcorn as we can. Regardless, we need it.

This is why, in short, I plan to be here writing on a (semi) regular basis, piecing through topics addressing our current era of media and entertainment—an era I am confident will be remembered as a turning point when we learned to either a). keep and transform or b). discard and forget what we cherished most while our societies and technologies advanced hand-in-hand at warp speed into mind-altering dimensions of creativity, storytelling and expression.

Just a Video Store (?)

You know, The Video Station really tried to hang on. As streaming and digital applications became the standard of entertainment over the 2000s-2010s, the once proud beacon for cinephiles and TV aficionados in my hometown began to run into the age-old problems of declining profits and unsustainable rents. But the owners kept up a good fight, with the local faithful coming in whenever they could—for a while, anyway.

During this period, I grew up and left home for college. English major…shocked, right? After graduating, I took to a greenhorn professional life in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, often taking suspiciously cheap bus trips to urban puzzle boxes like New York whenever a few bucks could be had. On these trips, for a few arctic days in February (“why are you going to Manhattan in February?!”), I would pretend I was in one of the film noirs or screwball comedies I had rented from The Video Station. I would conjure film shots I had watched over and over again, superimposing them in my mind over the Flatiron building or Grand Central Station while rubbing my hands together to keep warm. I stomped blood back into my frozen feet to the sounds of Gershwin that I kept primed on my iPod for just such occasions. No, you’re right, I was not getting laid, per se. But I still loved it. All my filmic relations would sit on the bench with me as I flipped through some experimental novel I bought—very legitimate-like—at the Strand. "A lamb loose in our big stone jungle."

In 2013, the owners of The Video Station moved to a much smaller location outside the main drag of downtown Boulder. The once crowded, multistory cinema haven in which I discovered auteurs like Melville, Fellini, Fuller, Kurosawa, De Palma, Burnett, Malick, Pakula, Varda, Truffaut, Goddard, Bogdanovich, Ray, Powell & Pressburger…and actors like Brooks, Garfield, Rowlands, Stanwyck, Fondas (all of them), Masina, Wright, Hackman, Mason, Poitier, Laughton…let alone used as my library to plumb the depths of anything I could get my hands on from masters like Hitchcock, Coppola, Scorsese, Brando, Bergman, Kubrick, Fincher, Welles…had devolved into a nondescript, one-floor shop tucked away in a strip mall next to a Subway and a few other last-ditch businesses with names that now elude me. When I was home for the holidays, I would still go rent a film or two at the new condensed version of my former church, smiling when I paid in a vain attempt to not acknowledge what was happening. It’s still there, anyway, I would think as I left.

When I returned in 2016 to Denver, Colorado, I had fully converted to all that streaming services had to give. I remember, for instance, watching this little upstart series called Stranger Things premiere on Netflix that same year. Historically speaking, the kids in the show were a bit older than me, but dear lawd did I relate to them. Outcasts? Check. Playing games and loving movies? Check. Hapless dreamers hoping to draw from the love of pop culture to save lives? Check. In fact, would those kids—and what they represented—have loved something like The Video Station? Check. Every so often, I would think of that sacred place, but I rarely, if ever, went there. When I did venture to Boulder, some 25 minutes away, I would focus on dutifully visiting my family instead of stopping to rent movies. I could watch them at home or get them sent my way in the mail, anyhow. Life went on.

Then, in 2017, the fateful day arrived. The Video Station had finally announced it would be closing its doors for good.^1,2

I remember sitting in my apartment, and, as a full-grown adult, crying my eyes out. My girlfriend at the time looked on with some shock, not knowing really how to console me as I feebly tried to articulate what the place had meant to me. Was I surprised it had happened? No, it was inevitable. Did I feel like part of my home—a cornerstone source of my very identity and sense of self—had been tossed away due to, as industry commentators soullessly described, ‘technologically-driven shifts in consumer behavior’? Absolutely. The refuge that had taught me how to think and dream just as much, if not more than any other single destination on earth, wasn’t there anymore. What’s the big deal? It’s just a video store, right?

Shape of the Cultural Trove to Come

Eventually, however, I became heartened by what I saw happening online. The hallmarks of a rich film and TV culture became a reality.

…Streaming services with sophisticated watchlists. Spotlights on once forgotten gems. New filmmakers talking about their paths through libraries, bookstores, theaters and, yes, video stores to becoming directors in their own right. Dear god, even the hallowed Criterion Collection secured its own channel! Free Ad-supported Television (FAST) providers like Tubi and others showcasing obscure B-movies and classics from the 1960s-1970s while also lasering in on Gen Z tastes at the same time. On apps like Letterboxd, cinephiles rate every film imaginable and even customize the poster art of their top choices across genre and subgenre. Super dorky and beautiful…

It’s not all quite what it was in ‘the old days’, nor are the economics even remotely the same, but the cultural trove and experience I sensed to be slipping away seems less endangered. This does not mean it is fully saved and preserved, let alone felt in the same way as in the past, but it is better and shaping into a new version of the essential culture we knew way back when.

As a teenager, I would step from shelf to shelf to turn over the film cases in my hand, deliberating internally with deadly seriousness what I would watch that night. With amped nerves, I would approach that resident film historian/hungover clerk to get his erudite opinions on what mattered versus what should be micturated upon by a co-worker’s beagle. Now, you just listen to the Big Picture podcast or watch classic interviews with famed Hollywood royalty uploaded to YouTube. And, if you want (and should), then there’s nothing stopping you from purchasing the newly restored Blu-Ray editions of gems like Night Moves (1975) or shimmering pop extravaganzas like Wicked to place on your own private shelf at home.

…And On: A Moving Space

In us and by us, the culture persists, taking new forms. I miss what’s been lost, but look forward to participating with fellow obsessives not afraid of data or debate to similarly invest in improving and evolving what we have now. It will be difficult. There are uncertainties at hand (e.g., reduced production and publication; faltering cultural mainstays and institutions; AI coming into its own). We live, as they say, in a volatile period. Correction: It’s a shit show in many ways…but also an opportunity for…who knows?

I’m optimistic IF we can stop to ask honest questions about what came before while not inhibiting our capacity to endlessly re-imagine what’s possible on the screens, page and stage of our joined, multiplatform lives.

So, fear not, all you fellow arts and entertainment lovers. You can find wise solace in the same silly song you hear playing in nearly every dream-drunk barroom or concluding famous television shows or beaming from the ghost radios playing in the video store backrooms of your memory…you hear that romantic, ironic, hopelessly hopeful tune galvanizing today’s creative junkies and their champions.…

Some'll win, some will lose

Some are born to sing the blues

Whoa, the movie never ends

It goes on and on and on and on

And, yes, I did partly steal my blog title from the storied Journey song (with another ‘and on’ eternally left in my back pocket for what comes around the bend). Feel free to laugh. In addition to encapsulating how some people would describe my propensity to ramble—readers can keep me in check on that front—it also fits as a perfect reverberating distillation of the downright sublime and utterly absurd. Applicable to our interests here, no?

It also just felt stupidly right: a moving space we can fill with everything from pop errata to brain-enflaming discourse on the very future of arts and entertainment. Why not?

Join in. Let us follow it and see what happens. Onward.

What Next?

• Upcoming pieces will focus on an overview of key streaming trends such as subscriber growth, engagement, consolidation, bundling strategies, international growth, and shifting business models (e.g., AVOD, SVOD, FAST).

• I’ll look forward to your thoughts as the observations and findings unspool for consideration and discussion. Thank you, truly, with everything I can muster for reading and supporting this weird endeavor.

  ---

Sources

1. Brennan, Charlie. “Boulder’s Video Station Closing after 35 Years.” The Denver Post, Mar. 2017, www.denverpost.com/2017/03/01/boulder-video-station-closing/ .

2. Weismann, Brad. “Boulder’s Iconic Video Station Closes after 35 Years.” Filmpatrol.com, 2017, www.filmpatrol.com/2017/03/boulders-iconic-video-station-closes.html.

— Note on Imagery: Unless I’ve provided credits for images in these posts, please assume they are generated by GenAI tools such as MidJourney, Gemini, and/or ChatGPT. I am not a designer or visual artist. An admirer, only. But I do enjoy concocting crazy-ass but relevant prompts, then reviewing and tweaking what the mighty engine delivers. With this said, I love to showcase the doings of flesh and blood artists. Send me a suggested work if you believe a particular artist’s contributions would be better suited to replace one of the generated images. These entries can certainly evolve. I will consider your request. Many thanks.

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