No One Wants To Admit That Streaming TV Is Just Marketing

—by Adam Bumas

The record-breaking winner at the Emmys last night was Shōgun, which has been so successful that Hulu is making two more seasons despite the fact they’ve run out of book to adapt. Luckily, this has famously never ever been a problem for big period shows before. But after doing so well with both audiences and critics it’s a pretty understandable move. Although, that brings us to a curiously complicated question. How do you measure a streaming show’s success? 

You’d think that would be easy to answer, considering almost $250 billion will go into making them this year. But none of the traditional metrics paint a favorable picture. Thanks to last year’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, streamers now have to share some viewing data. But like a lot of actually meaningful data, the biggest takeaway is how little we really know.

Viewing numbers can only be so important when everything is on the same level — a level that pits dozens of pricey original shows against Suits and The Office. And new signups aren’t worth much when they’re so easy-come-easy-go. People who sign up for a specific show will likely cancel as soon as the season ends. Even winning awards only takes you so far. Quick, what movie won Best Picture at the Oscars with Will Smith’s slap? It was released by a streaming service. Do you remember what it was?

Time’s up! It was Apple TV+, which is the poster child for the weird, almost vestigial spot streaming services (that aren’t Netflix) now occupy. The movie was Coda. Since Apple TV started in 2019, its parent company has consistently spent enormous amounts of money on original shows like The Morning Show ($300 million for the first two seasons) and Severance ($20 million an episode). To make it even harder on themselves, they also refused to license anything they didn’t make until 2022, which always seemed like a “Steve Jobs would want this, right?” idea.

And, sure, if your metric for an entertainment company’s success is just “making good stuff”, it’s paid off. Apple TV+ probably has the highest standard of quality across any streamer that isn’t attached to a linear TV network. For all the COVID lockdown brain damage-induced cringe that was the last season of Ted Lasso, they’ve been really good about assembling good creative teams, letting them work, and not automatically canceling them after two seasons. Severance is transcendent, shows like Pachinko and Slow Horses have fiercely loyal fandoms, Dickinson and Mythic Quest are both criminally under-seen. 

But you could apply that last point to literally everything they make. According to Nielsen, Apple accounts for less than 0.3% of all TV viewing, and less than 1% of streaming. Between these dismal ratings and a few big swings that didn’t connect (anyone excited for Argylle 2?) Apple has a lot of disappointed shareholders to answer to. And they’re finally feeling the pressure. A few months ago, they announced they were planning to drastically cut spending on original shows, especially ones that were delayed by the strikes.

On its face, it makes sense as part of a larger swerve away from streaming, now that we have the numbers and are starting to realize there’s literally no sustainable business model here. In a move that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, HBO has been doing so well for Warner Bros. Discovery that it’s now a higher priority for them than their own streaming service. Over the summer, they announced that all their big upcoming IP series — an It prequel, that looming Harry Potter reboot, the fourth or fifth stab at a Green Lantern show — will be airing on regular week-to-week TV instead of being exclusively online. But even in this era of capitalism (I’m too pessimistic to call it “late”), there are other reasons to make shows, and most obscenely rich people in tech seem to understand that.

Amazon spent a billion dollars on its Lord of the Rings show before a single episode came out. Was it worth it? Not for the shareholders, who couldn’t seriously expect any direct return on investment, or for anyone who watched the show and wanted one story instead of six C-plots. But Amazon hasn’t tried very hard to pretend the money was anything other than a personal purchase by Tolkien dork Jeff Bezos.

Would I drop ten figures to adapt my favorite books, with myself in the role of Grand High Kibitzer to everyone doing the actual work? Probably! It would be an exaggeration to say literally everything streamers make is a personal pick by their CEOs, but I would also be surprised if that wasn’t a major reason behind Apple TV+ launching with Foundation, adapting a book series for people too nerdy for Dune (myself included). It works in the other direction too, as we saw when Tim Cook reportedly personally stopped production of a show about Gawker after the website bothered him for years.

And Cook has been playing this game since before the service launched, canceling anything with sex to maintain Apple’s rounded-corner brand identity. Years before this data was public, there was already an understanding that the real dividend of having a streaming service is more intangible, more cultural. Soft power, not hard power — or even hard cash.

But if that’s the case, they need to understand that and drop the pretense that they expect it to make any money. Cutting spending is one thing, but Apple and other low-level streamers should put a lot more focus on promotion, engaging with fans, and cultivating whatever cultural awareness and importance they’re getting. Apple has been mocked a lot for how poorly they market their shows compared to the production values, and maybe they’d do better if they started viewing the entire streaming service as marketing. At least that would excuse all the needless plot points in their shows that involve a character using FaceTime across a variety of Apple-built devices.

A Good Video

Bluesky’s First Video Moment

Bluesky has had a big September. It was flooded with Brazilian X users earlier this month and then, last week, it gained a native video player. The timing of both of those things is very important because over the weekend, the São Paulo mayoral debate got very spicy when candidate José Luiz Datena hit his opponent Pablo Marçal with a chair on live television. I did not personally see anyone on X or Threads talking about this. (There were some other important American political stories this weekend.) But the moment was huge on Bluesky.

Before we get to the platform dynamics at play here, some context. Datena is a right-wing journalist and TV presenter that hosts a lot of crime shows, not dissimilar to Nancy Grace. He also once successfully negotiated a hostage situation live on air. Marçal is your classic fascist Brazilian hustle bro life coach. He once tried to climb a big mountain and almost died and had to be rescued by firefighters. During the debate, Marçal referenced sexual harassment allegations against Datena, Datena didn’t like that, and then Marçal essentially said something to the effect of, “well, hit me with a chair then if you don’t like it.” So Datena did. This has been your brief Brazilian politics update.

The interesting thing here, to me, is how this viral moment did not break Bluesky containment, even on Threads, which gained just slightly fewer Brazilian users post-X ban. And I feel comfortable saying that because I’m following Brazilians shitposters and news outlets on both platforms. Now, it could be just that Bluesky is still very small, so it’s going through a bit of a Tumblr 2018 moment, where it’s generating viral content that doesn’t really break through, but I’m going to throw another theory out there.

I think there are A LOT of people that still think Bluesky is invite only and it’s going to take a long time to get over the idea, held by both its own users and users not on the platform, that you can just go over there and look at what people are talking about.

It Happened Again

Someone allegedly tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump again. You will probably not remember this even 12 hours from now. But for posterity, the shooter was apprehended by Secret Service on one of Trump’s golf courses. He had an assault weapon and is suspected of traveling from Hawaii to carry out the attack. He was obsessed with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was a well-known fraudster among the international defense community. Per the Associated Press, he was briefly a public supporter of Trump, but has recently been posting content in support of President Joe Biden. The median American voter strikes again! Law enforcement haven’t released a motive yet.

Prominent Republicans pounced on the attack and are doing their best to try and get people to remember/care about this one, unlike the last one, but that seems doubtful. Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire and Elon Musk deserve a special “probably got a call from the FBI” award for using the news as an excuse to incite violence against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero,” the New Hampshire Libertarians posted and then deleted yesterday. And Musk posted and deleted, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔”

Before we move on, though, it is probably not a good sign for, uh, the collective mental health of America that this morning the hashtag #StagedAssassinationAttempt was trending.

The Laura Loomer Situation

Alright, look, there are a lot of crazy rumors flying around about far-right influencer and violently unhinged racist maniac Laura Loomer and her newfound proximity to Trump. If you want to read those, you can go find them. Here at Garbage Day, however, we like to stick to what we know. And what we know is that Loomer did, in fact, eat dog food on a livestream earlier this month.

Derek Guy, the menswear guy, claimed that he created a fake dog food company to trick Loomer into eating the dog food, but that was just a troll. Stanford-based tech researcher Becca Lewis did some digging and found out that the dog food brand that Loomer ate on stream is from an anti-woke pet food brand and they promise that their pet food is “5G-free,” which is equally funny, I’d say.

AI Gordon Ramsay Is, Unfortunately, Very Funny

A Really Good Reddit Thread

I am very excited to say I can across this very Reddit thread over the weekend shared to r/malelivingspace. You should definitely click through and read the whole thing, but here are some of my favorite comments:

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s Moo-Deng in movies.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***