The problem with pay per item is that they try to stretch and tretch the amount of items/movies/episodes you watch.
Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual story telling.
I kind of long for the sitcoms of my youth. Something like Night Court, where it's a half an hour of jokes and then you're done. It's nice and relaxing and doesn't try and hook you into watching hours on end.
This niche has largely been replaced by casual mobile games. Pop open Candy Crush and play for as long as you have time. You're never really done, but each session is basically independent of the past and doesn't require a whole lot of mental effort.
TV in general is losing viewership to games. A decade ago, the watercooler conversation at work would be "So, what TV shows are you watching?" Now, it's "So, what games have you installed lately?" This may be a big part of Netflix's problem.
I have trouble imagining what the games / movies hybrid of the future will be. It's clear something is changing (game revenue exceeds hollywood - even if that's not a totally fair comparison).
There is a VR-movie called Pearl by an ex-Disney director - you basically sit in a passenger seat watching the plot but can turn your head etc.
Take that one step further and be at the table with Michael Corleone and the Police Captain. But what happens if you wonder out into the kitchen and check on the veal. Linearity and emotion get sacrificed. But the techniques games designers find to bring our attention will undoubtedly be useful for journalists and campaigners to highlight real issues, and marketers to highlight crap.
My guess is we either find you cannot get the mass of humanity to focus on one thing, and that news cycles and games will just be sharded - the people who know about and care about this space battle are limited, just like those that care about the fifth series of this tv show or the text of an a to of parliament.
I doubt we shall all have a more curated world - it's hard to imagine any media outlet having the sort of range of power TV stations of the 60s and 70s did. But maybe we can all have a better shared mental model of the world - so what is truly(!) important is perceived important by most people. This might be a bit naive - it if games are simplified models and faithfully represent the world maybe we will learn. Most Sim games generally teach co-operative politics in the end
I can sense it matters. I just don't understand it. I do wonder if i played more games it might help !
I've been watching some of them recently. It's amazing how relevant All In The Family still is today. The Jeffersons is still good, Cheers is relaxing after a stressful day. That easy-watching episodic nature is nice for a change.
There are some good recent sitcoms, but you don't get the same sort of 12 seasons of 22 episodes run.
"serie" is the singular for series in a bunch of languages, which honestly makes more sense than having a singular noun ending in s and the plural form being identical to the singular.
This happened irrespective of Netflix streaming. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, BSG, Lost, etc. The thing is serial was fairly annoying if you had to be in front of the TV on Wednesday at 9pm every week to watch something. People would do it for a must-watch miniseries. But as soon as you could do on-demand it was a nice format for a lot of things.
Totally disagree, all of my favorite shows would have made terrible movies. Breaking Bad is just barely long enough as it is, trying to compress that down into even a long movie would have destroyed the story.
Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual story telling.