How Distribution Changes Content
Welcome to Entertainment + Tech!
Welcome to the first issue of Entertainment + Tech. Each week will cover an interesting way technology & entertainment are colliding and where things might go from here. The goal is to serve as the starting point for a conversation: we need more people who stand in both the entertainment and tech worlds if we’re going to build great products & create great content.
Cold Open
These are interesting days in the entertainment world. The media giants and the tech giants are lining up to battle, and at the heart is a fundamental question: is it easier for an entertainment company to learn to platform, or for a tech company to learn to content?[1] Or can they just acquire someone else to do it for them?
In streaming, Netflix got out the gates with an early start and has bonafides in both worlds, but their field so far has generally had them running ahead as the upstart innovator–battling Blockbuster, creating original content–so it remains to be seen how they fare in a fight without the high ground. [2]
Meanwhile, new media platforms pop up/explode/get banned/fail/get acquired by multinational financial interests on a monthly basis. 30 years ago, broad distribution of video content was for movies, TV, and music videos. Now it’s easy [3] to distribute all kinds of video. Through their decisions in product design, marketing, deal structures, and more these platforms open up avenues for new creators, different forms of content, and new user behaviors.
And what about social & sharing, which are huge on tech platforms? Some of Hollywood is jumping on the wave, while other execs are wondering why they should care.
But, we’ll get into all of this and more in future weeks. Welcome to the pilot episode of Entertainment + Tech.
Building a New Box
Content is king. If people don’t want to watch what you’ve got, they won’t come to you. People go to Amazon because they want to buy the products Amazon has available. Obvious. Simple. Except, it turns out that when Amazon becomes your major distribution path instead of Target, you start to shape your products for Amazon. Instead of flashy products that take up space & stand out on a shelf, you optimize to fit a small, flat box that Amazon can pack & ship easily.
It turns out that distribution also matters–if it’s not king, it’s a trusted royal advisor. The way a product is distributed will shape that product. In the Amazon case, these are additional constraints added by a physical distribution system for reducing costs. What if we drive the opposite direction and make our box less constraining? Turns out that’s a thing digital distribution is great at.
Let’s consider TV. For a long time, linear TV was the major distribution channel for TV content. It’s still big, of course, but streaming has burst on the scene with a new business model and a new viewing model, and this opens up new ways to design content. [4]
Linear TV
Linear TV is the standard model the millennials and older know–content is programmed to show at a specific time for everyone in a market. Parks & Rec at 8pm, 30 Rock at 8:30, The Office at 9. [5] One of the major ways linear TV makes money is by getting people to watch ads. Some implications of this:
To make it easy for viewers, shows start on the hour or at the half-hour. [6]
To fill in that schedule in predictable ways, comedies are put into 30-minute boxes & dramas into hour boxes.
To make room for ads, time is carved from the content. The standard is about 8 minutes per half-hour. Comedy shows are actually about 22 minutes long, and dramas are about 43.
We can already see how shows on linear TV are being shaped to the box they’re being distributed in. We write 22 minutes of content to fit the box. But wait, there’s more.
When a commercial break starts, it’s in the middle of the show. Viewers might get bored of commercials and surf to something else. At the very least, it interrupts the story.
To deal with this, TV shows are built around act breaks. In a comedy, at the end of act 1–aka just before the first commercial–we get into the heart of the episode. At the end of act 2, our protagonists hit their low point.
As a savvy TV viewer, this structure is part of the formula you naturally expect because you’ve seen it so often. I want to hammer home the point, though: the way these stories are written has been affected by the way they’re distributed.
One last constraint I won’t dive into here: for many good reasons, a big one being that one time slot can only belong to one show & airing anything blocks everything else, linear TV has to space out the release of a show’s episodes. You definitely wouldn’t see FOX release an entire season of 24 all at once in a 24-hour marathon. Homework for you is to think about how that affects linear TV content too.
Overall, this leads to content that has been optimized in a very specific way, only because it helps fit this particular box that’s easy for linear TV to “ship”. Of course, there is still incredible creativity in the creation of these shows, and many of my favorite shows fit this exact mold. It just turns out as distribution changes, these aren’t features that have to be true of all TV shows anymore.
Streaming
In this new world, all bets are off. People watch what they want, when they want. Many services have no commercials because they make their money on subscription fees. Some changes:
Episodes no longer have to fit a time-bound box, so they can be whatever length the show needs. In fact, we can easily change that from episode to episode. If the GLOW pilot needs 37 minutes to set up the premise or Altered Carbon has a big backstory episode that needs extra time to flesh out character, no problem from a distribution standpoint.
No commercial interruptions mean that act breaks don’t have to happen. The overall shape is still ingrained in people’s heads and writers’ sensibilities, but there is more flexibility available in story structure. Marvelous Mrs. Maisel feels fresh and energetic because it leans into this well.
Making a show available doesn’t block other shows from airing, so seasons can be dumped all at once. One implication here is that it’s easier to create streaming shows that work like a book-movie hybrid–a more cohesive narrative the whole way through, with episodes/chapters to organize along the way. Viewers are generally watching over shorter time frames, so stories can rely on them to remember more detail. [7]
Further afield from content creation, but for the streamer, the notion of programming a schedule is completely different. There’s no nightly schedule to fill, and there’s no block scheduling. It also means they can’t shore up a weak performer with a strong lead-in, a classic programming tactic. Instead, they’re trying to capture the viewer’s time from anywhere in their day, rather than issuing the simpler demand that they tune in when the channel wants.
Since a viewer can tune in whenever they want, rather than having to make time every Tuesday at 8pm, the barrier to trying a show is much lower. This can help riskier shows find an audience and make it easier for slow burn shows to succeed. [8]
For the most part the content we’re seeing is still pretty similar to linear TV, but writers & producers have started to act on this. The main differentiation has been in the bucket of season length & how the season’s arc is told, which is also driven by business & production concerns.
It does take time for these effects to filter upstream, and there’s no need for all content on streaming platforms to adapt. There’s no formula for a great TV show, and people do watch a lot of The Office on Netflix. That being said, it’s exciting to see where these dynamics gave more unusual shows a chance - a Bojack Horseman or Difficult People. Even something more easily palatable like Stranger Things would have looked totally different on a linear network. [9]
So What?
When we change distribution, we change the content we can get. Here, we’ve seen a major simplification in the box content is shipped in, and therefore restrictions on the content itself are lifted.
Digital distribution generally reduces inherent restrictions because it’s easier to distribute over the internet. Platforms of all sorts do set their own rules for distribution, though. They get defined as a matter of business, product, marketing, etc. You won’t find episodes of This is Us on TikTok or user generated content on Netflix.
The rules these platforms set have implications for content generation, of course. Changes in Instagram’s algorithm prioritize different posts, and posts change to match. Quibi invested a lot of money directly into content because they had to jumpstart it, but once they get going and prove themselves as a viable platform, they open up a space for people who do want to create 10-minute TV shows–a form very few others have encouraged. [10]
The expansion of distribution means that doors are open to all kinds of content beyond what we’ve seen so far. If you’re aiming for your platform to generate particular types of content, consider how your distribution will shape it - whether through explicit choices or emergent properties.
Build a new platform, give it new rules, and you define the content.
—————
[1] As an industry based on innovation and disruption, you may be partial to the tech companies’ chances. If you believe Michael Bay, though, sometimes it’s just easier to teach the driller to be an astronaut.
[2] Or how they reclaim it against the company that literally owns Star Wars.
[3] Well, not easy–as some platforms are finding out–but at least a lot more feasible.
[4] The economics of these platforms also change what streamers want to buy and the risks they can take, especially when it comes to genre or niche content, but that’s a topic for another week.
[5] Don’t fact check me on this. I have no idea if NBC actually ran them in these specific slots.
[6] Not counting the brilliance of Turner Time.
[7] This has had some downsides. Lots of Netflix shows have a huge spike in attention with release, then fade from the public consciousness quickly. Disney+ had great results releasing The Mandalorian weekly, which allowed them to take better advantage of hype, the shared watching experience, and prolonged obsession with Baby Yoda as new gifs came out with each episode.
[8] Content discovery also becomes much more important in the streaming world. There’s an enormous amount of content available to the user but not all of it is important to them, so a lot of work goes into surfacing the right title for the right user at the right time.
[9] There are also examples of streaming breathing new life into linear TV shows: Breaking Bad feels like it was made for binging and didn’t get huge until it was on Netflix; You and Money Heist became Netflix hits after floundering on linear.
[10] These dynamics are obviously also driven by the incentives for creators to put content on these platforms. We’ll talk more about those incentives in a future issue.
Thanks for reading the first issue of Entertainment + Tech. I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas. You can respond to this email or reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you know someone else who would enjoy this newsletter, please share!