🍿🎞 Slecht nieuws voor bioscopen, maar goed nieuws voor het publiek: de filmindustrie is voorgoed veranderd door corona

Quickish background: Hollywood movie studios and the big movie theater chains have been fighting for years over “windows”: the amount of time between when a movie comes to theaters and when you can watch it at home. Most of the studios have been trying to shrink that window. They want you to be able to rent a big movie at home weeks, not months, after it debuts in theaters. Theaters, for obvious reasons, want to keep that gap as big as possible.

According to an internal memo sent from Peretti to staff, little will change in the short term on a day-to-day-basis. “Our business strategy is to make sure that the two newsrooms maintain their own identities to preserve the big and loyal audiences that each has built up,” he wrote. BuzzFeed News will remain a separate news organization, as will HuffPost. HuffPost will continue to operate its own website, social channels and app. It will also have its own editor-in-chief, which the company is still looking to hire.

The New York Times, Peretti argued, can’t really be called “the paper of record” anymore — because of that same subscription model. “A subscription business model leads towards being a paper for a particular group and a particular audience and not for the broadest public,” Peretti said. He’s alluding, in part, to the theory that the Times’s subscriber base wants to read a certain kind of news and opinion — middle/left of center, critical of Donald Trump, etc. — and that straying from that can cost it subscribers. But he’s also simply arguing that the act of requiring readers to pay to read cuts the Times off from a big audience.

“Just as Spotify helped people discover the best music for them — it didn’t just know what you liked, but it was able to predict what you might like,” Polgreen said. “There’s a lot of really fascinating work going on at the company that’s trying to solve this problem for spoken word audio too.”

In 2013, Netflix debuted House of Cards – technically not its first original TV show, but certainly its first big-budget prestige series. The launch established what is now the dominant strategy for acquiring streaming customers: rapid IP expansion. Within a few years, media conglomerates and tech platforms spanning from Amazon to WarnerMedia were engaging in massive bidding wars and spending tens of billions of dollars to acquire new shows and movies. I think we’re already seeing a similar dynamic play out in the podcast space.