HBO's Max Cancels the Most Shows Among Streaming Services, Study Shows (variety.com) 48
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Streaming Era began with a promise of nurturing shows without fear of ratings pressure and quick cancellations. Of course, that was a lark. Soon enough, the streamers began slashing shows as quickly and brutally as any Nielsen-obsessed broadcaster, and they were all flooded with same complaint: "The streamers just cancel everything! Nothing gets more than a season anymore!" How true is that really? After all, the streamers are looking for hit shows, just like traditional networks. If a show gets high viewership relative to the cost of producing it, it gets renewed. Otherwise, it is canceled. That is how it has worked since the days of black-and-white TV.
To get to the heart of the matter, Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP+) and Luminate collaborated on a data exploration to determine how often the leading U.S.-based streaming and linear programmers have canceled series TV series over the past three years. The new report, "The Show Must Go Off," is an exhaustive statistical analysis that aims to settle one of the most hotly contested debates in the TV industry. The data covered all shows (scripted and unscripted) canceled between 2020 and Aug. 8, 2023. The major streamers (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Apple TV+, Peacock, Paramount+) overall had a combined average cancellation rate of 12.2% -- not much higher than linear TV (10.8%), but less than half of broadcast TV alone over that period. Warner Bros. Discovery-owned Max (formerly HBO Max) was by far the most brutal when it comes to cancelling shows, coming in at 26.9%.
To get to the heart of the matter, Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP+) and Luminate collaborated on a data exploration to determine how often the leading U.S.-based streaming and linear programmers have canceled series TV series over the past three years. The new report, "The Show Must Go Off," is an exhaustive statistical analysis that aims to settle one of the most hotly contested debates in the TV industry. The data covered all shows (scripted and unscripted) canceled between 2020 and Aug. 8, 2023. The major streamers (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Apple TV+, Peacock, Paramount+) overall had a combined average cancellation rate of 12.2% -- not much higher than linear TV (10.8%), but less than half of broadcast TV alone over that period. Warner Bros. Discovery-owned Max (formerly HBO Max) was by far the most brutal when it comes to cancelling shows, coming in at 26.9%.
My 0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Honestly, with the strikes going on, I am not watching any new or current shows.
It's not a support thing, I don't want to wait two years for the next season nor do I want a rushed season (like Heros Season 2.) Plus some streamers are canceling the next season of shows that were already renewed since the contracts that hold actors to the show are expiring (see The Peripheral).
It's a good time to go back to older already completed shows. There has been so much content over the past few decades that we have pl
Focus on mini series (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty much the same. I'm so tired of emotional blue-balling when a show gets cancelled without a satisfactory conclusion. It's been years and I'm still bitter about Revolution and Dark Matter.
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Revolution was just starting to get good as well.
Did you see what the creater did for season 3? He started releasing the (bare) scripts of it to let people know how the story would have went. Not sure if he finished it
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I did not see that. I'll have to go look for them.
Re:Focus on mini series (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny, I only somewhat share your sentiment - the best Sci Fi, in my opinion, always gets canceled rather than getting a series finale. Look at things like 'Odyssey 5' and 'FireFly' those are shows that are so good that I would still recommend them even though they are canceled.
To that point, other shows have suffered from going on too long before finishing, shows that had huge followings but weak finishes like Game of Thrones and Lost ended so poorly that it felt like the entire fandom just dropped the show, forgetting how awesome the first few seasons were.
Even shows that wrap in the 4-6 season area like Nurse Jackie felt like they went one to two seasons too long.
I actually kind of wish we didn't think in 'series' or 'seasons' and thought of TV narrative like movies where we make the entire story and then divide It into chapters. Nothing kills a great show faster than a writer's room that has run out of ideas but is told to make 10 more hours of content.
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They won't stick with shows long enough for them to build a following or get good.
The recent Cowboy Bebop live action show was a great example of that. It wasn't perfect, but it has some good things about it and was for a while doing very well on Netflix. A second serious could have really built it into something, but they killed it and then tried again with One Piece, which is pretty good. It took them a couple of attempts to nail the anime to live action formula, but they killed shows off instead of letti
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For All Mankind (Score:2, Insightful)
If you guys haven't seen For All Mankind on Apple+, it's nearing season 4 and it's freaking AMAZING. For me, writing, dialog, and characters are king, and this show has it in spades! It's also pretty clear of the woketardism that ruins most writing rooms these days, though you might have to endure some chicks and black dudes getting all uppity (joke, don't kill me), but that stuff is based on real events so it adds very nicely to the story. I advise going in without even reading the byline of the show, i
Re: For All Mankind (Score:4, Interesting)
If Apple wants me to watch their shows, they'll support Chromecast on Android, like every other streaming service known to man. Until then, they're never going to get to water cooler status like HBO.
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I watch on my laptop, so no skin off my whatever.
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Not a fan of Apple TV+ (despite generally being a fan of Apple products), so I’m not trying to convince you of anything, but maybe it’s because they made some sort of deal with Google to serve it up via Google TV starting in 2021? Genuinely not sure, but seems plausible, given that it’s in virtually every other platform belonging to their rivals.
https://blog.google/products/g... [blog.google]
Re: For All Mankind (Score:2)
It's most definitely because Apple sees the iPhone as a walled garden to generate attachment services. There are way fewer iPhone sales than Android, but Apple doesn't care because they intend for you to subscribe to a bunch of services to generate ongoing revenue. Apple TV set top boxes make the iPhone more valuable because you can then use your services on your TV. Same with Google TV. But supporting the market leader Chromecast would devalue the iPhone, and each lost iPhone sale is $hundreds lost in subs
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It's most definitely because Apple sees the iPhone as a walled garden to generate attachment services. There are way fewer iPhone sales than Android
I actually don’t disagree with your overall premise here, but it’s worth noting that while iPhone has roughly a 20% global share, iPhone sales are roughly on par with or even exceeding Android sales in many of the most lucrative markets (e.g. US, UK, Japan) that are most like to be able to afford additional services, which does undermine the point a bit.
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Bait not taken.
You found something that suits you (Score:3)
Well, to be brief, Firefly.
Fuck you very much!
Back to the pirate bay then (Score:3)
HBO has such a great catalog of older shows, many of which aren't available on their streaming service. So back to piracy it is then. And at that point, why pay for the service if I'm pirating their stuff already? I'll take that subscription money that I'm saving and put it towards a VPN.
And on a side note, these companies keep dropping their shows for tax breaks. So in exchange for those tax breaks, why not make the shows that they're dropping public domain? We're all subsidizing them at that point, but currently getting nothing for it.
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HBO has such a great catalog of older shows, many of which aren't available on their streaming service. So back to piracy it is then. And at that point, why pay for the service if I'm pirating their stuff already? I'll take that subscription money that I'm saving and put it towards a VPN.
And on a side note, these companies keep dropping their shows for tax breaks. So in exchange for those tax breaks, why not make the shows that they're dropping public domain? We're all subsidizing them at that point, but currently getting nothing for it.
Pretty much this. I'd watched seasons 1 and 2 of ST: Lower Decks on Amazon Prime but S3 is "not available in my region" but is available to rent at £2 per episode... Fuck that shit, I've just gone back to piracy.
Most shows should end after one season. (Score:2)
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I hear you. I'd much rather have a season be 8-13 well-written, tightly-paced episodes than dragged out over 20+ episodes of which some are filler and barely advance the story.
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Where are you finding streaming shows with 20+ episodes per season? I have been watching streaming and cable run series pretty much exclusively for a few years now and few, if any, run more than 12 episodes per season, 10 is very common, and even 8 is not rare.
What streaming shows do, which is my book nothing but a good thing, is that they aren't constrained to having either 22 minutes or 44 minutes of content exactly, but can vary from show to show, and even run longer than a hour when story telling makes
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I miss the longer season shows where I could live and enjoy a world more fully.
Babylon 5 could have been told in 10-13 episode seasons but we would have lost out on a lot of great stories and time with our characters that didn't advance the main story fast enough.
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I hear you. I'd much rather have a season be 8-13 well-written, tightly-paced episodes than dragged out over 20+ episodes of which some are filler and barely advance the story.
Meh, that's not always better. There are actually a lot of different ways to tell a story. Sometimes "filler" episodes that don't advance the story can be stellar gems. Sometimes it's a matter of personal taste, with some people finding them gems and some people not. A number of shows have done musical episodes, for example. Now, good writers can advance their story arc and character development even in one-offs like that. Overall, I would say that, generally, series are better off for some episodes like th
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Canceled or removed? big difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
Canceling an unsuccessful show, that's a given (though the binge model preferred by Netflix may be doing more harm than good, because without a common weekly frame of reference, there's no discussion about it without "spoilers" and so a show can't really build a word-of-mouth water-cooler that the weekly shows like the MCU and Star Trek shows can get).
It happens. Sad, really. Anyway...
But the matter of actually REMOVING shows from the service and then taking a tax write-off for doing so (which is something done by both D+ and MAX, and I think Netflix has as well)? That's different. That is actually a sign of a broken law that absolutely needs to be fixed, because now us taxpayers are giving the streamers a gift (a tax rebate) and not getting the product that we are paying for. The streamers are using a vocabulary loophole around "losses" to extract money from us all (not just subscribers) as they take away product.
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Like the Willow series on Disney plus. There were some clear disappointments and ways it could have been better, but that was true of the original movie too. I can understand not renewing it. What I can't understand is the way Disney memory holed it. It was an original show, created for their streaming service, yet they still pulled it off their streaming service. Incomprehensible.
When did it start? (Score:2)
Warner Bros. is a slow motion train wreck... (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact is if they were in charge when the first season of The Wire originally aired it would have been canceled because it had low viewership numbers... Widely considered the greatest TV series ever made and has made back its production costs at least 50x by now.
Sometimes low viewership has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of a tv show, sometimes its just poor marketing and/or a disconnect with the watching trends at the time. I think The Wire suffered from both, but it was **absolutely** worth the cost of giving the show 2 more seasons to tell its story.
All WB cares about is immediate gratification and its going to destroy their streaming model soon enough. That and their stupid pursuit of the destruction of the HBO brand, which is literally the only brand they own that has an ounce of value in and of itself. They lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the process of switching from "HBO" to "HBO Max" to just "Max" and it is a completely self inflicted wound.
The leadership is just fucking stupid.
Re:Warner Bros. is a slow motion train wreck... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a really proof positive case of why these large scale mergers should be far more heavily scrutinized. What does the consumer get from Discovery eating/merging with Warner in this case?
They're not getting more content, the platform is being stripped bare of what many would say is it's most valuable options nor are they getting cheaper prices (their CFO said today they are not charging enough so expect price hikes soon). Same can be said for Comcast buying NBC/Universal and Disney buying Fox.
It feels like these mergers are allowed to happen for no other reason than "we've already allowed so many to happen" but at some point we need to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
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You're kidding yourself if you really believe that HBO is the only brand they have of any value. Warner Brothers is a freaking empire and the fact that you don't know it is a big part of why it works.
The Barbie move was WB, by far the biggest movie of the year. It was setup to succeed by a wild marketing machine, WB's CEO said something along the lines of "for a solid month, every cake on HGTV was Barbie themed." HGTV is wildly valuable.
The long game they're playing will likely work. They are destroying the
Every new show is an experiment (Score:2)
If a show takes several years to find an audience it could be brought back, or change streaming service, as The Expanse did.
Erased (Score:2)
Two cancelled Max shows, Made For Love and The Gordita Chronicles, were pulled, and are currently unavailable anywhere.
Disney+ is a close second in cancellations at 21%
You'd think ... (Score:2)
It may be a case of HBO executives not wanting their judgement to be second-guessed by the audience. Where the marginalization of a series they believed to be bad comes back to bite them (like Star Trek). And they get moved to scheduling the late night TV slot following Amazon Women On The Moon.
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Bialystock and Bloom.
Canncellations are why I dont waste money on them (Score:2)
Useless study (Score:2)
Including unscripted shows completely fucks up the numbers, since unscripted shows ("Reality" TV, news, and sports) are predominantly on non-streaming platforms, and are, by and large, far cheaper to produce and less likely to be cancelled.
It's like people who do these studies always lack fundamental knowledge of how to fucking set up a study
Just watched Firefly (Score:1)
Am I the only person who is like 10 years behind? (Score:2)
I still have not got around to watching Game of Thrones because I have so many other things to do including a stack of books I have not read.
TBH, it is starting to feel like too much media, not too little.
Or from another perspective (Score:2)
best book publisher india (Score:1)