![]() Incompetence, a mindless obsession with consolidation, and slash-and-burn VC brain worms have come to streaming in a big way, triggering a major wave of the kind of enshitification Cory Doctorow routinely warns about in most sectors. Nor do they note how these companies spend untold billions on completely pointless mergers that set vast piles of money on fire. Rarely do outlets share the context that these same companies see no problem paying incompetent executives comically bloated compensation packages. Often, when these decisions are explained to the public in major outlets, it’s framed as essential, cold calculus. Getting canceled is bad enough now creatives have to worry that their work will disappear forever, often without any way to access it ever again. Why such a tax loophole exists for content that has been written, produced, and platformed (even for only a short time) is something that Hollywood might want to look into, as this increasingly popular move from streamers has introduced a new level of instability to the industry. The reason behind the removals, here and elsewhere, is a tax write-down that streaming services can get by Thanos-snapping their own original series. ![]() Again, because it was too cheap to pay residuals and wanted a nice tax cut: Same thing with CBS and Paramount owned streaming platform Paramount Plus, which is being criticized for also pulling a long list of shows that were still popular with consumers. Disney, which generally has more money than it knows what to do with, recently stopped hosting a slate of its content (like its recently produced and relatively popular show Willow) because, again, it was too cheap to pay artists’ residuals and it wanted to nab a big fat tax cut. We’ve already documented the pointless horror of the Warner Brothers Discovery merger, in which “acquisition for acquisition’s sake” nitwits spent billions of dollars on numerous properties only to turn around and fire oodles of employees, pull numerous popular programs from their streaming catalogs to avoid paying residuals, and generally creating a worse product than when they began.īut it’s not just happening at Warner Brothers Discovery (Max). And while streaming delivered on many of its original promises, as the sector grows and consolidates at the hands of predatory, fail-upward VC bros, things are getting… stupid. As in, you’d have access to any show you’d like, at any time, without having to go hunting and pecking through old VHS archives. One of the benefits of the shift to streaming music and video was supposed to be (and often is), convenience.
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