The high production value of traditional HollyWood productions are only sustainable due to their mass cultural appeal. The problem is that mass culture is in fact, losing mass. These tech giants appear to have misread the signs of this pending sea change and interpret behaviors such as cord-cutting among younger generations to mean they are merely moving their consumption online and that their consumption habits remain otherwise unchanged. One only has to look at the popularity of services like YouTube and Twitch with Gen Z to see that this is in fact not the case. Younger millenials and Gen Z as a whole have completely changed their consumption habits to prefer niche content made by individual creators (or at most a small group) on the cheap. While YouTube stars like PewDiePie cannot be said to be "niche" due to the simple fact that his content captures more eyeballs per year than literally anything else by an enormous margin, the content itself isn't exactly something that appeals to a universal audience in the way that a traditional HollyWood Blockbuster or hit TV show might. Ironically, while Google was the tech giant best positioned to capture the future (at least in terms of how I see it developing), they've severly damaged the future potential of YouTube by playing games with the monwtization and promotion of popular channels while also making it impossible for new creators to make money before they've built their channel into a relative behemoth.
While Apple, Amazon, Disney, et al are throwing massive amounts of capital trying to capture a slice of the streaming service market, they appear to have missed signs of cultural change which will likely cause that market to stagnate over the coming decade. I can't say that trying to create a YouTube competitor is a better idea at this point in time either as that market just isn't large or stable enough at this point in time to say there is even space for a second major servicd for small content creators. I can say the future of entertainment is going to look a lot more like YouTube, where the attention of tens of millions of eyeballs are spread over tens of thousands of channels, rather than a handful of sources for traditional mass media productions.
The real problem may just be saturation. The dream of having all streaming entertainment through one service for $12 a month was never realistic (and arguably not really desirable), and I think we may all have to get used to the idea of paying for several services to get everything we want. But there's "paying for several," and then there's "paying for a dozen or more"; the latter just isn't sustainable.
(Of course, there's no guarantee it will be on any premium streaming service, or indeed any streaming service at all. Or that it will even be video anything. Currently I'm sitting at a Starbucks listening to music that gave me a possible answer to your initial question: it's the soundtrack to "Hamilton.")
I will argue that Hamilton debuted almost 4 years ago now which is a long time ago in cultural terms. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic but I feel like there were at least 3 or 4 mass cultural phenomenons popping into existence each year back in the 80's and 90's.
The difference between Disney and the other two being that Disney would be spending that money anyway, and already owns every major entertainment franchise there is to own (and the merchandise rights to it). For Disney an additional streaming service is just a way of further monetizing what they already have.
I'd say it's always been this way, for every generation, but now there are finally options that cater to these niches since it's no longer necessary to consider mainstream appeal and resort to the lowest common denominator - a limitation of the linear broadcast format. I'm confident Youtube would have been just as valuable for earlier generations.
The reason people rush on small creators is they’re politically incorrect, meaning they’re non-PSA shows. People are so upset of being told that they’re sexist if they don’t date a transsexual, that they’re able to trade the quality of image/montage/content of traditional TV shows for a content that doesn’t constantly give lessons or disparage them.
What you call fragmentation will be instantly reunified if a platform ever succeeds to get rid of the pressure to put PSA-compatible characters under the customers’ eye. They’re tired of being the product.
I have no doubt that this may be the reason that you personally have abandoned mainstream media in favor of more niche sources, but to attribute that motivation to an entire generation is a huge amount of projection. It has everything to do with convenience and shifting habits, not a rebellion against political correctness.
Not everything is about right vs left culture wars.
> The reason people rush on small creators is they’re politically incorrect, meaning they’re non-PSA shows.
When I think of small creators [1] that I personally enjoy (e.g. Vsauce's Michael Stevens, Veritasium's Derek Muller, Game/Film Theory's Matthew Patrick, Because Science's Kyle Hill), those are all Youtube success stories, and none of them fit this description even a little bit. Grandparent is just mistaking his particular bubble for the average.
[1] Those all have subscribers in the millions, but I still consider them small media startups compared to the scale of traditional media conglomerates.
Apple is a much more powerful company than it was then and I see it as very likely they'll pull off a Netflix-sized coup.
For anyone who might not be aware of the history, Apple media products have always extended outside of the "walled garden". QuickTime appeared on Windows in 1991, iTunes for Windows was introduced in 2003, and Apple Music has been available on Android since 2015. AirPlay has been supported by 3rd-party devices for quite some time (close to a decade. IIRC).
Even though Apple has a gigantic pile of cash there's a real question as to whether they can actually make money this way. One could question whether you can just hire a bunch of famous movie people and then have a movie empire.
I'm looking forward to the fight though. There's a good case that we're currently in one of the most productive eras in storytelling, mainly thanks to these titans clashing.
This is about laying the groundwork for Apple's new video service -- the question was always whether they wanted to use it as a way to sell overpriced TV pucks, like they've traditionally done with their services, or it was going to be its own thing. they wanted to have everywhere. If you're surprised that they're choosing "have it everywhere," it's probably because you haven't been following the mounting tidbits of Hollywood noise about the original content being produced for Apple. We're not talking about Carpool Karaoke anymore. We're talking new shows from J.J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ron Moore, Damien Chazelle. We're talking about new children's programming with Peanuts and Sesame Street. Shows starring Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carrell, Chris Evans, Reese Witherspoon, Aaron Paul, Jason Momoa. A series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation.
The point is, there is serious firepower happening here, to the point where it's pretty clear this is not "service as adjunct to hardware." This is Apple establishing an actual entertainment division.