Comment
Sara Polo Madrid
Madrid
Updated Wednesday, January 24, 2024-21:34
These days the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos
is celebrated
, but its creator
David Chase
is up for little fanfare.
"Maybe we should see it as a funeral," he warns sarcastically.
In 1999, Chase was a frustrated and desperately depressed television writer who listened to the same Elvis Costello song on loop and hummed, while sharpening his pencil,
"I want to bite the hand that feeds me
. "
Boy did he bite her.
"I made them regret all their decades of stupidity and greed," he congratulated himself a few days ago in an interview with
The Sunday Times
.
Then, and until not so long ago, cinema and television were watertight compartments.
A TV scriptwriter couldn't even get close to film studios, while a Hollywood director would have had his hand cut off before being associated with the small screen.
"It was
apartheid
, "
Chase recalls.
How we have changed, right?
The so-called
"golden age of television"
was inaugurated by that gangster of yours who went to therapy with HBO, the first channel that operated under subscription.
The freedom that not having ads gave him allowed him to bet on a series that he had little to nothing to do with what he already knew people liked.
And he liked it.
He liked it very much.
But now...
"Now we return to the origin, the advertisements return
," he laments in the same pages of the British newspaper.
He has three scripts and five meetings for a series that has little sign of succeeding.
They have told her to simplify it and, of course, at 78 years old she is not there to follow orders.
That's why she talks about "funeral."
To know more
Operation Trump, the Big Brother of generation Z.
"What we live and what we see outside are parallel realities"
Editor: ÁLVARO ONIEVA Madrid
"What we live and what we see outside are parallel realities"
Changes in consumer habits have forced platforms to reformulate their business models.
As far as the user is concerned, 2023 was the year of price increases and plans with ads, but it also opened a new line of content that seems to be here to stay.
Those thoughtful, calm, tremendously cinematic series are today a minority in a market flooded with fast, impactful and also, why not, less transcendent formats.
Welcome to the new television within the new television.
«As the human race advances we tend to multitask more.
Who can really concentrate anymore?
"Your mother could be dying and you would be in the hospital next to her bed taking calls," argues the creator of
The Sopranos
.
«The audience can't keep their mind on one thing, so we can't do anything that has a lot of depth, that requires the viewer to concentrate.
"We go back to where we were."
High.
Is this a man speaking here who is angry because they don't buy his idea or an accurate analyst of the reality of
streaming
who knows the ropes from the inside?
"Television is in another stage," calms
Elena Neira
, professor of Communication at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and author of
Streaming Wars: The new television
(Libros Cúpula).
«It doesn't have so much to do with attention - in fact,
binge watching
helps to better understand complex plots, and only the platforms allow that - but with the way the series are canned: more compressed chapters, shorter seasons and much more niche production, cheaper and more effective," he explains.
"With that and with an economic context that forces austerity."
"The advertisements are back
," the creator of the series that opened the ban on great author blockbusters for television was sad.
Indeed, 2023 was the year of the paradigm shift in subscriptions.
Netflix
launched its plan with ads already at the end of the previous year, and all the other platforms followed.
On January 29, the last one will be added, the colossus
Prime Video
, which will start with a pilot in the US, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, and will continue with another half dozen countries, including Spain, in the following months.
But there is more.
If users experienced firsthand the war economy of
streaming
,
"now it is the turn of creators to also tighten their belts
," Neira advanced in an article in
Business Insider
with a revealing title: "This 2024 will be the year in which that
streaming
will stop writing blank checks to creators.
PRIME VIDEO
To understand this prediction, just take a look at the three phases of the
streaming
war analyzed by
Matthew Ball
in
The streaming book
, available for free
online
on his website.
The first, the longest, begins with the birth of HBO in 1972 and culminates with the surprise of Netflix as the largest video-on-demand service in 2017. For Neira, the turning point is the multimillion-dollar signing of Shonda Rhimes, creator of
Anatomy from Gray
and
Scandal
on the red N platform.
"She opened a new paradigm," emphasizes the teacher on the phone.
The second phase of the war began, based on quality content through the signing not so much of stories but of creators.
The famous
"blank check"
.
«It was a time of crazy spending.
“Netflix went into the red in 2019 and continued to pay millions to its creators, often with absolute freedom and without taking into account the result: 'Do what you want',” Neira elaborates.
The rest of the platforms quickly imitated the model: "The big names attracted subscribers."
It was in the midst of rampant content production when Netflix landed in Spain and opened its Tres Cantos production center, the largest in Europe.
Filming here is cheaper and offers juicy tax incentives, but a Spanish series can also open up, at least, a market of 600 million Spanish speakers.
The global platforms have understood this well, which have made our country the main destination for their investments in Europe (along with the United Kingdom, it accounts for 37% of the total), with an annual growth of 9% since 2012. Also the most strength of our environment according to data from the European Audiovisual Observatory.
More than 50% of the total investment in fiction content in Spain already originates from
global
streaming
operators .
"Once the distribution barriers have been eliminated thanks to
online
entertainment , it is authenticity that connects with the public," they justify from Netflix.
"The international market is the goose that lays the golden eggs," confirms one of the largest series producers in Spain, with titles on practically all platforms.
For example, a fact:
only 38% of the content on the platforms is in English
.
It is only possible to speculate about its success: no operator provides audience data.
The problem of the "blank check" comes when they are given incorrectly.
The pandemic brought with it an explosion of subscriptions - the whole world had nothing better to do than watch TV - but also a crisis from which we have not recovered two wars later.
"Netflix begins to lose subscribers and panic spreads," says Neira.
«Wall Street focuses on profits and says: if you want me to invest, your accounts have to balance.
And for that there are three formulas: add ads, cut out and sell content to third parties.
The third phase of the
streaming
war begins : every euro counts.
If in 2022 43 series were released in Spain, in 2023 there were 49.
"There is no less production, but the investment per title has decreased, especially in
marketing
, "
corroborates the aforementioned producer, who prefers to remain anonymous.
"Before they went more with their pockets open, you asked them for two million for a series and no one would argue with you."
To take the pulse of the street, that of what they call the real Spain, he takes advantage of his visits to his town, stops by the bar and asks the customers: they watch fewer and fewer series.
PRIME VIDEO
And what do you see?
The answer to this question opens what will probably be a new phase in the war, the fourth, and whose beginning we are witnessing as you read these lines.
"The platforms no longer compete not only with linear channels, but also with each other for more demanding and volatile subscribers," says
Antonio Asencio
, director of communication and strategy at Sigma Dos, which together with Dos30 form the communication consultancy Sigma Dos30.
"So they must include new dishes on the menu, fiction alone is no longer valid," he anticipates.
And these new dishes are inevitably reminiscent of traditional television.
Let's take a quick look: Prime Video
's latest big bet
has been none other than
Operación Triunfo
with all its ingredients, including its live galas.
The new
MAX
platform , which will replace HBO Max in Spain next spring, is presented with
Beijing Express
as its banner, in addition to two
reality shows
- by the way, both based on the nudity of its participants - and the signing of the fetish presenter of Telecinco,
Marta Flich
.
Netflix will premiere the second part of
Every Man for Himself
on February 1st !
, the
docureality
that follows the American vicissitudes of the collaborators of the extinct
Sálvame
, and as this newspaper has learned, it does not rule out returning to the classic magazine.
Álvaro Díaz
, content director of Netflix in Spain, neither confirms nor denies and prefers to focus on the three episodes to come: «This
reality show
was a great challenge for us: they were references for the Spanish public, they were beginning a new stage after 14 years and They left a set for the first time to travel to Miami and Mexico.
"The public has received it with open arms," he says by email.
Wait: is David Chase right and are we going back to the beginning?
Are platforms adopting the linear television model?
Elena Neira warns in advance that her opinion will bring her problems, perhaps that is why she is chosen to close this report.
«They are not becoming television but improving it, they take advantage of the freedom that the on-demand service gives to adapt it to new consumer needs, with programs that do not need to be artificially lengthened to increase the intake of advertising and a crossmedia strategy
that
they have understood very well. "Prime Video with
OT
by integrating the Amazon store, the songs on Amazon Music and Alexa responses into the same universe, and which allows us to improve the free-to-air television viewing experience," he concludes.
"The disadvantage, yes, is that to enjoy it you have to pay
. "
Same content, multiple screens
There is something paradigmatic about Prime Video hiding the audience data for
Operación Triunfo
live and recorded, but trumpeting from the rooftops how well its program works on social networks.
Increasingly, viewers watch TV with their mobile phones, and the Amazon platform has decided not to waste even an iota of our attention.
24 hours on YouTube.
Becoming the Big Brother of generation Z, his peak came in the distribution of songs at Gala 6 with 179,000 attendees.
TikTok soundtrack.
With 3 billion views, the themes of each gala become the most shared.