This week’s insights: Netflix deletes user reviews… Streaming services are recreating cable TV… Movie theatre subscriptions seem to be catching on… What is the role of theatre in “activating” its community?
- Netflix Ditches User Reviews: Not just ditches them, but deletes ten years of comments, including negative reviews of Netflix original content. The streaming service is the latest to cut back on audience participation. In the past year many publications have cut reader comments at the end of articles because the forums had become cesspools of unmanageable dreck. This signals the next phase of the web, which is more corporate, less free, and where unfettered speech is less found on mainstream platforms and publications. The lesson: valuable audience participation doesn’t flourish in a cacophony. It takes management and care. Simply opening up access to all comers doesn’t mean something valuable will result. The Netflix deletions though? More than likely a corporate giant that has decided never a discouraging word will be heard (on Netflix).
- Streaming Seemed Liberating (For Awhile) Until Streamers Began Recreating Cable TV: Cord-cutting was cool – don’t pay the big bad cable companies for TV! But as more and more streaming platforms get into content creation, they’re inadvertently recreating the cable TV model in which you have to pay subscriptions to access the shows you want. And with more and more services, you could end up paying a lot to see what you want. Each new app or content library looks like a different channel to consider, and each one is essentially a premium cable offering that requires a separate subscription to view. Services that previously acted as content aggregators are losing outside content with the launch of each new service. Instead, they are creating their own content to maintain value in a crowded marketplace.
- Subscriptions Everywhere: While MoviePass might not be long for this world, its model has shown an appetite for subscriptions to movies. Theatre chain AMC jumped into the subscription game, and is reporting early success. AMC said the service, an extension of the company’s loyalty program, has accounted for about 1 million admissions, or roughly 4% of attendance at the company’s U.S. theaters. Meanwhile, a new service intends to do the same for recipes. CKBK wants to be “the Spotify of recipes.” “Like Spotify, for a fixed monthly fee ($8.99 in the U.S.), users can browse CKBK’s collection of more than 500 cookbooks and 100,000 recipes, which [co-founder Matthew] Cockerill said was just a starting point. ‘We have a huge pipeline of content that we will add to the service as it grows,’ he said.”
- Theatre + Audience = Activism? Should theatre be trying to “get out the vote”? Theatre itself can be activism, of course, through subject matter and through subtle casting changes or donation asks at the end of the play or musical. But “public service” – part of most nonprofit theatres’ mission statements – does that mean taking a more active part in the civic/political life of the community?
In general, it seems we are seeing the Internet gradually being adapted to reflect the same hierarchies we saw before the Internet became popular. Something that was probably inevitable.
When the Internet began to become widespread in the mid 90s, the major orientation was dialog. Email listservs had become very popular, especially among academics and artists. Anyone could raise a topic, and anyone could respond. There were no hierarchies. It was very democratic. Especially in the initial stages, the discussion was lively and very beneficial, even if moderators had to sometime step in.
Listservs seem to wane as blog arose. A new hierarchy was established. The blog owner commented, and readers could comment. Discussion became secondary to the blogger’s posts. As time passed, bloggers learned to stifle discussion critical discussion by relegating comments to sections much farther down on the page after ads, and other info. And they were often even put into small, grayed-out print. Sometimes an entirely different window has to be opened to read comments. The message sort of became: “I state my ideas and observations. I don’t want to hear what you think, unless its concise, unquestioning praise.” The days of the democratic, non-hierarchical, listserv dialog were gone.
In another development, businesses like Netflix quickly learned that customer ratings and comments could be a problem, especially given the company’s concentration of inferior, cheap movies as its business model.
Other companies did not suffer this problem, and make good use of dialog. Amazon is a product pass-through company. A bad review for one product simply results for more business from another using Amazon as a distributer. There is less incentive to suppress the truth. The customer reviews are often very informative and helpful.
Another model is for sites to have so many trashy comments that genuine critical thought is lost in the noise. The YouTube model. Even if the Internet is useful for dialog, it seems the general trend is moving away from discussion.
You’re quite right about the diminution of commenting and dialogue online. But I think the problem is that good discussion takes work. It’s not enough to simply open it up to all comers and then just watch what happens. The lowest common denominator quickly takes hold and it’s a race to the bottom. Look at the comments sections in most newspapers and you see that. Once the yahoo factor takes over, anyone intelligent leaves and it’s over. Then there’s the spam factor. The spam filters for this Audience page, for example, tell me they have blocked more than 150,000 spam comments in the past month. Where you see good comment management – the NYTimes, for example – there’s no shortage of thoughtful, sometimes very insightful comments. One of the problems on sites like Amazon or Yelp is that you never know whether the “review” is real or not.
But it’s fascinating to see the different levels of comments at various sites. YouTube, for example, is a massively-used platform, and the prefered sharing platforms for many young people. But the comments sections are typically dreadful. But YouTube also has mastered the fostering of response videos, many of which are quite interesting.