For me, ________ is basically all sports games that have ever been broadcast. Most of them are just locked away somewhere, with literally no legal way for anyone to see them.
For me, ________ is basically all sports games that have ever been broadcast. Most of them are just locked away somewhere, with literally no legal way for anyone to see them.
Agreed. At the very least, there should DEFINITELY be some heavy regulation, governing how companies can go about transferring the rights, between each other.
I have a horrible feeling that some of this problem comes down to the media dragons waiting for some moment of peak nostalgia, for each media property, only desiring to sell it to another dragon when it’s at its most valuable. It’s like a fucking commodity market, but for our childhood memories, instead of copper or soybeans.
That’s the only explanation I can think of, for why they wouldn’t always want to take our money. Dragon A owns the rights to a specific show, but they don’t actually operate a streaming platform. They just have their hoard of media rights that they’re sitting on. They could sell or lease this particular media property to Dragon B, who does have a streaming platform, and maybe Dragon B has always wanted to buy it. But Dragon A is waiting for the nostalgia peak to happen, so they can charge the highest price possible.
Finally, when the specific Millennial age cohort that remembers that specific show starts talking about it on social media a lot, and noticing that you can’t watch it anywhere, Dragon A finally does decide to sell it to Dragon B.
But then, of course, Dragon B will never be satisfied with the result. Even if they do see an actual jump in their subscriber numbers, which can be at least somewhat reliably tied to that media acquisition, it’ll never be enough to actually pay for the ridiculously inflated price they shelled out. So, of course, when the time comes to re-up those rights, they angrily refuse to pay anything to keep them.
Annnnnd the media goes back into the limbo hole, not to be seen again for another few decades.
It’s basically a bubble situation. Our memories are just a series of goddamned market bubbles, being speculatively traded by these monsters.
In my opinion, that’s just a side effect of the fact that media dragons have changed their business model. Rather than earning profits by making things, they’ve discovered that it’s less risky to earn profit by owning things, and that making things is just an unhappy prerequisite for continuing to hoard them. They’re not only dragons hoarding all the things, they’re very timid dragons hoarding all the things, not willing to step out of their cave to get more gold because it might mean that the gold they bring back won’t be as much as the gold they already have.
That’s why Zaslav is killing off completed movies for a tax break, and that’s why the cost of hosting or producing discs for beloved old properties isn’t worth what they can make off of it, and that’s why they continue to milk old IPs and adaptations even when they’ve gone far past the point where it would make financial sense to just come up with something new. I mean, they really only make something new so that they can own it later.
You’re right about it being a bubble. They’re exactly like landlords, and they’re contributing just as much to society.