From the LA Times:
Last year, #Hollywood braved the summer of strikes. This year, a cruel mirror image has appeared: a brutal season of layoffs.
The #entertainment industry is reeling from cuts at Paramount Global, which last week began a deep cost-cutting effort that is expected to eliminate 2,000 jobs, or 15% of staff, by year’s end ahead of a long-in-the-works ownership change.
As part of that effort, the struggling media giant closed down Paramount Television Studios, the unit responsible for #streaming shows such as “Reacher” and “The Offer.”
The workforce reduction is just another example of the full-on reset the #film and TV business is enduring in the aftermath of the streaming wars. Debt-saddled Warner Bros. Discovery targeted nearly 1,000 cuts in its latest round of downsizing. The Walt Disney Company’s #TV division last month shed 140 workers, the latest in a round of layoffs
Studios used the writers’ and actors’ strikes as cover to reduce their spending after losing billions of dollars trying to catch up with Netflix . All the while, the cable TV business continued to disintegrate, like a slowly melting glacier that suddenly broke into pieces.
Paramount‘s and Warner Bros. Discovery’s decisions to write down the value of their cable networks felt like an admission that the TV business had reached a point of no return, and that once formidable brands including TNT, HGTV, MTV and Comedy Central had lost relevance.
Between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, $15 billion in value were wiped out in a matter of days. In another major change, Warner Bros. Discovery said Friday that it would shift oversight of its networks to television studio chief Channing Dungey.
It all seemed like the logical result of what Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger foresaw in 2015, when he sent the stocks of media companies, including Disney, plunging with comments about the challenges ahead for cable channels such as ESPN . More ominously, between his first and second terms as Disney’s CEO, he remarked that traditional TV was “marching to a distinct precipice,” and would be “pushed off.”
The Times’ review of the numbers found that major entertainment companies’ commissions for traditional broadcast television, cable and streaming shows in the U.S. and Canada increased 39% to 1,013 programs in the first half of 2024, compared to the second half of 2023. The data factored in green lights from Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Amazon , Disney, Apple , Paramount and Comcast (not including theatrical movies).
But green light activity was still down 9.9% compared with the first half of 2023, according to Ampere Analysis data. Even more dire are comparisons with the first half of “peak TV” year 2022, when the companies commissioned 1,515 programs in the U.S. and Canada. Taking a more global view, the data also show that a large portion of the newly commissioned shows and streaming movies are being produced abroad and for less money.
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6moI also saw a recent interview with Matt Damon where he said the change in how we consume media has negatively affected how movies are made. The industry previously relied heavily on the 2nd revenue stream of VHS/DVD rentals. With new movies now available nearly the same day in streaming, it's eroded both the 2nd wave of revenue and movie theater sales. Many families choose to pay for the price of 1 ticket for the entire family without leaving their home instead of paying for 4 or 5 tickets at the theater. Plus snacks and concessions.