Baldur Bjarnason

Notes on Apple TV Plus, streamer business models, and the Foundation series

– Baldur Bjarnason

Business model constraints have always been a part of the creative process for film and TV. Art and storytelling that’s produced by a creative industry – a sector of the economy that employs people to make things – will inevitably be formed by circumstances of the businesses that produces it.

The moving image is an industrial art form and, as such, will probably always have to live with substantial business model constraints on the story itself and how its told.

This matters to us, the audience, because it dictates what is made, how it’s made, what’s made available to us, and what continues.

That last part has become a big issue in the streaming era of media.

Streaming services effectively have a cap for how much money they get from each viewer every month: they’re unlikely to ever get more than what the monthly plan costs. They also have less variability in audience numbers. You don’t need to follow reported subscriber numbers for the various streaming services for long to notice that individual blockbuster successes don’t really have that much an effect on the numbers. A breakout success like The Mandalorian might bump up the numbers but over time subscriber bases tend to revert to the mean. Growth, or lack thereof, seems to be a function of the service as a whole, not individual items in their catalogue.

Before streaming, a blockbuster success would normally result in a massive increase in viewership and and a corresponding increase in revenue for those making and distributing it. Ad revenue increased. More people bought tickets. DVDs sold like hotcakes.

A success meant more money for everybody involved.

Streaming has disconnected success from revenue.

This is as stupendously dumb and destructive as you’d imagine.

You could have the most popular series or the most watched movie on a streaming service and nobody – not even the streaming service – makes meaningfully more money than they otherwise would have.

People don’t buy discs because they “know” movies and series will be on streaming soon enough. And if those movies and series won’t land on streaming, the audience will forget they ever existed soon enough. Streaming is so much more convenient.

People don’t go into cinemas because they “know” the film will be on streaming. If that movie doesn’t land on streaming, viewers will just forget it existed soon enough. Streaming is so much more convenient.

Very few of the major streaming services have a free ad-supported tier where impact and audience scales with success. Next to nothing of what they make is released on Blu-ray. There’s no real success available any more to those working in TV or film – except as a part of the occasional big event cinema blockbuster.

Revenue and production have become detached and the causes of business success – for streamers, at least – are obscured. That’s a recipe for extremely fucked-up decision-making.

(Software isn’t media – it’s a medium but not exactly media, if that makes any sense – but an analogous dynamic can happen there where subsequent improvements or lack thereof don’t affect customer acquisition or churn and software quality and usability becomes detached from business outcomes, which is why it’s unfortunate that subscription-based Software-as-a-Service has become the default. There are many scenarios where paid-plus-upgrades is better for both the customer and the software business.)

Much of the decision-making surrounding movies and series – at least from our perspective as viewers – has become quite irrational because those who manage in the industry don’t have anything concrete to reason about.

Series get cancelled before most viewers even have the opportunity to watch them. If something gets launched as you start watching one series, the other is often cancelled by the time you finish watching a season of the first.

Almost everything that is being made has all of the symptoms of extensive executive meddling. Netflix’s movies are entirely synthetic – products of executive whim and business processes that result in the same kind of overall indistinct pap as you get from a generative model. Each streamer seems to have its own favoured narrative arc that gets meddled into the grain of every series. Netflix series tend to share similar narrative and pacing issues. Disney’s series all have effectively the same character arc (or lack thereof).

Many series cost an unfathomable amount of money with little to show for it on the screen. I’m sceptical of the notion that modern audiences will reject cheaper special effects out of hand, but even if you agree with that idea, many of the productions, such as Netflix’s action movies or Prime’s Citadel, seem to be expensive mostly due to mismanagement. At the very least, their expense doesn’t carry to the screen.

All of which is to say that I’m not sure what to make of Apple TV Plus.

Now, Apple’s streamer isn’t available here in Iceland. Unlike every other global streaming service, they didn’t bundle us in with the smaller Nordic countries in their rollout. We get Apple Music and the App Store, but not TV+.

But, let’s assume that I’ve figured out a way to do the manifestly impossible, which is to watch Apple TV Plus legally here in Iceland and let’s assume that I absolutely have not and will never pirate any of the series they have on offer.

And, again, I don’t quite know what to make of what I’ve been watching.

Case in point is the Foundation series, an adaption of Isaac Asimov’s series of novels.

Asimov was garbage and his Foundation series is garbage #

I have a thorough dislike of Asimov and his work. The man was a homophobe and a creep. His stories are self-important pap with all the character development and narrative depth of a Roger Corman production but without any of the sleaze or enthusiasm.

As with most of the scifi “greats”, he and his work is garbage.

The Foundation series is a fumbling mess based on a complete misunderstanding of what “dark ages” means in a historical context. (It’s “dark” because of a lack of records.) Each new entry in his series retcons major parts of the preceding entries in ways that make it clear that none of it was thought through or planned in any way.

Even the notion of psychohistory itself is just complete nonsense that’s just-about as preposterous as the notion faster-than-light travel in the first place.

The Foundation shortens the dark age. Yay!

No wait, there’s a Second Foundation that kept the first one on track. Plot twist!

No wait! Can’t water that down enough to fill another book. What about I contradict all of the bullshit ideas I presented in the other books and have a single bad guy that changes all of history?

No, no, no! What about…? Okay. Hear me out. What if it was robots all along!

It’s a rambling series that manages to both make a mess of itself and, retroactively, Asimov’s Robot series, which were probably Asimov’s only worthwhile works. (Except, maybe, Nightfall and a few of the short stories, if you’re feeling generous.)

But he had a few interesting ideas. This, in theory, makes his work a great candidate for adaptation.

Generally speaking, the best candidates for remakes or adaptations are works that have great ideas and hint at interesting arcs but are poorly executed. You can take the core concept, whittle the nonsense cruft away from the arcs, and then give it a decent execution.

So, I like the idea of a Foundation series, but it needs to commit. The concept doesn’t work unless you go the distance and find a way to cross the “Great Interregnum” – cover enough story to let the viewer discover whether the plan was successful or not to give the story a satisfying resolution.

That’s where the business constraints come in.

The kinds of stories Apple tells #

I don’t know what drives Apple TV Plus. The service looks like it’s haemorrhaging money, but they seem to be marginally more committed to their series than other streamers. I don’t think Amazon or Netflix would have given an alt-history science fiction series like For All Mankind five seasons, a spin-off, and the strong possibility of two more seasons to finish off the story.

They seem to inflict executive meddling to some degree, but of a different kind from the other streamers. The stories don’t get bent and conformed to a standard narrative structure like Disney’s or Netflix’s series, but their original series seem to be of a more consistent quality than Amazon Prime’s.

They also did try to set some limits to the subject matter of Jon Stewart’s series, which in and of itself justifies whatever concerns about executive meddling a viewer might have.

Maybe it’s just early days. Netflix did let series run for longer and with less meddling when they first started making original productions.

The Foundation series has some oddities that had me think there had been some behind-the-scenes meddling. The series is written like a premium cable show with occasional scenes that are narratively set up for things like nudity – the gardens on Trantor and many of the scenes with Demerzel – but the execution sometimes has a coy, almost Austin Powers style avoidance of showing what the story had built up towards.

The series would have been stronger if some of those scenes had been rewritten. Instead of obscured nudity, rely on the clearly excellent costume and props departments to deliver the same emotional effect. Or, just commit to doing it properly with less male-gaze-y ogling. It would certainly have worked better than getting the effects department to paint shadows over Laura Birn’s boobs in season two.

The producers clearly know what they’re doing – they have a better handle on storytelling than Asimov did, for sure – and I get that they were being deliberate in their choices, which is why I keep wondering whether Apple changed the goalposts for the producers during the post-production of the second season.

I keep asking myself that because it looks like the producers really did otherwise have the freedom to tell the story the way they wanted to.

Because…

The Foundation TV series is better than the original novels on every axis measurable #

Granted, that isn’t hard. Remember: garbage author, garbage books.

Many of the characters of the series have been completely reinterpreted for the series in ways that make them far more interesting and complex than anything Asimov has ever coughed up onto the page. Some of that involved gender-swapping characters and deepening their back stories. Some of it involved just throwing out everything except for the name. The character work is one of the series strengths, which is unusual for something with such a high-concept hook.

A lot of that work is done by the actors, like the absolutely amazing Ben Daniels who I’ve absolutely adored ever since I first saw him in a single episode of Drop the Dead Donkey back in 1990. His character arc in season two is one of the main reasons to watch the series.

(I’m biased. I’d watch Ben Daniels read the phone book. I even watched the botched and confused Jupiter’s Legacy from beginning to end. And this reminds me that I really need to figure out a way to watch the Interview With A Vampire series.)

The characters are, overall, much stronger than anything Asimov ever wrote.

The world-building is also more human, with familial and societal details dotting the story just enough to make it feel more lived in than the books ever felt. (Again, not hard.)

The series also lays down the, well, foundations of the various series narrative threads much earlier than Asimov did in the books. Instead of a sequence of half-baked ideas each rewriting what came before, much of those threads are spooled out in parallel in the live action series. (Remember, the original series was about as well planned, executed, and creatively engaging as an amateur improv night at a business school – psychohistory being mystical economics woo-woo and all. “Wharton presents… a bunch of guys making incoherent supply-and-demand jokes. Comparative advantage, am I right? You know I’m right.”)

There’s also Demerzel’s storyline, which could either be brilliant or disastrous, depending on how it’s resolved. I don’t know if the producers truly understand what the decisions they made about Demerzel’s agency and objectifications mean, and it won’t be possible for us to know until the thread gets resolved in a future season.

And that’s the core issue.

By introducing core narrative threads early that then need to be tied up later, by tackling ideas like male control over the agency of a female-bodied person without resolving it, by setting up the series as a single story with a multi-season structure, we don’t know, as viewers, whether the series is good or mediocre until we start to see how a few more resolutions.

Whether Foundation is an A+ or C+ series depends on Apple TV Plus’s business model. Are they gambling on building a catalogue of completed and re-watchable series to bring the service into the black in the future? Or, is it a hobby like the Apple TV hardware was for so many years and series will be cancelled on an executive’s whim? Will Apple executives meddle in the production of the later seasons as the producers face having to either make brave – possibly challenging – choices to tie threads up in an interesting way or to go for the formulaic and predictable?

We don’t know. Whether the series ends up being any good depends just as much on the business model and strategy of Apple’s streamer as it does on the producers or writers.

Streaming has broken the media industry #

Systems with clear mechanics are easier to understand than systems that are black boxes. Individual success in the pre-streaming era of film- and TV-making was hard to predict, but the core notion was very simple: make something the audiences liked and you’d make money. Post-streaming and – except for the occasional “big event” blockbuster like Barbie – there is very little in terms of a direct relationship between business success and the popularity of a given work. Business outcomes are dictated by the behaviour of a large number of subscribers, in aggregate, in a system where no single work seems to have a meaningful effect on long-term success.

A time traveller erasing Stranger Things from history would probably have scuttled the careers of the people involved, but Netflix would still be where it is today and with roughly the same subscriber numbers.

This is why studios can scuttle series or movies for tax purposes. A film today is just inventory that doesn’t represent potential capital like it would have before streaming.

Movies and series get worse because their quality generally doesn’t matter as much as it did.

It’s that last point that worries people in the industry and was one of the driving forces behind the strikes. The problem is that streamers don’t really benefit from individual successes. Their outcomes are a function of their catalogue in aggregate. If they don’t benefit from individual successes, there’s nothing to pass on to those making the successes.

Modern media needs a different business model if it is to thrive again. It needs alternatives. Apple could have had a role to play in making that future, but they’re too concerned with control and playing “studio” to even begin to imagine what sort of market innovation that would require.

So, we’re left with making bets.

Will this multi-season story be finished?

Will the producers be allowed to finish it in an interesting way?

Will I, here in Iceland, even be allowed to watch it?