With Mad Men and Breaking Bad winding down, I wonder if AMC can maintain it. They seem to have garnered the reputation of being hard on showrunners (Both Matthew Weiner and Vince Gilligan have had issues with the network). Walking Dead is on it's third showrunner.
Another network, FX, seems to be trying the HBO/AMC model in getting quality programming and is going out of their way to appear showrunner friendly. It'll be interesting to see if they can capitalize on some of AMC's missteps in nickel-and-diming their own shows.
"Pressing still further, AMC is giving new Breaking Bad episodes to Netflix viewers in the United Kingdom right after they air in the US, instead of the weeks-to-months delay that is typical for exporting top-flight US shows."
This. It blows my mind that in this era if your content doesn't require localization efforts why it isn't made universally available ASAP. Cult followers run off to news site and message boards and twitter and where ever else to talk about their favorite show and that gets more people interested. Not making it available spoils all of that momentum and waiting months is just shooting yourself in the foot.
Really? AMC makes 33 cents per month per cable subscriber. As of December 2012 AMC was making $30 million dollars a month off of an 80 million subscriber base [1]. They get that money because their product is in such high demand the relatively small number of viewers demands their cable providers include AMC. If they suddenly start giving away their content for next to free those demands go away and so does the revenue stream.
It rarely makes sense to give away new content on Netflix for next to free. You see it happen, but only rarely and in very select circumstances.
The reason it's being given to Netflix in the UK is because no networks here have paid for it. It was either that of let people download it illegally (as it's the last 8 episodes I'm sure most people would have done this).
> It blows my mind that in this era if your content doesn't require localization efforts why it isn't made universally available ASAP
Because shows are distributed by different companies in different territories.
In many cases the company that airs the show doesn't produce it. You even have cases where a show airs on one network but another network has digital distribution rights and a third has physical distribution rights, and that's only in the US.
International media rights are an extremely complicated thing and usually each show is negotiated individually.
I work in this space and it's crazy how complicated it can get.
I cut the cable about three years ago and I just subscribe to Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I'm also happy to spend $1.87 per episode for Breaking Bad. I don't miss cable one bit.
I watch TV shows by the season, in one sitting often times. So shelling out $70 for the box set of discs is terrible. Netflix is my kind of product, but I'm still waiting for the next season of Walking Dead. Can they just stop delaying it so long?
I will now have to find the time to watch these "quality" shows to see if in fact they are quality programming. It would be great to be able to tell TV networks that they should focus on creating quality programming, instead of just getting the best advertizement deal and that this would boost their ratings/revenue. While I cannot think of any great TV shows, there have definitely been exceptions, like The West Wing, which I didn't watch live, but I'm now watching on NetFlix and can certainly say that the show is of very high quality. The West Wing has set the bar for what I qualify as quality programming, so if AMC's programming is there, no wonder they are doing so well.
If the West Wing is your current high bar for high quality programming you're in for an absolute treat.
The West Wing was the last great show put out by the major broadcast networks before the rise of cable and the it pales in comparison to the output what has been dubbed "The Golden Age of Television". It's actually an embarrassment of riches right now on the television front.
Wait until after the first or second season is over until you start watching like I do. By then you'll be hearing which shows are good and can easily catch up on Netflix or Amazon/iTunes.
So many really good points made here in the comments. My two cents, I really really hope that GOOD WRITING some how wins the day. AMC shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Hell on Wheels, etc. are really well written in my humble option, compared to the "reality shows" that are staged/sort of written ugh, whatever. I hope that other networks see what HBO and AMC are doing and realize there is a market for good writing. Quality story, quality production, I will watch, otherwise, I can just surf hackernews or do something else on the internet.
I wonder when the movie industry will have a pioneer along these same lines.
It's an idea I've had for a while... produce movies on a moderate budget... with as many talented screenwriters as there are, there have to be good scripts that go unoptioned. Cast talented character and stage actors instead of big name (big $$) star talent, and quitely make a bunch of really good movies for not a ton of money (Think $15-20 million budgets).
The idea is to have a deep catalog that quitely does well, instead of trying for massive blockbusters that can be $200m losses if they bomb.
There are certainly some filmmakers that sort of take this approach (The Coen brothers, for instance), but I don't know of any studio that has taken the approach to heart. I'm not talking indie studios here, but full AAA productions, just not with big VFX budgets or $50 million cast members.
I think the issue here is with the marketing costs necessary to actually get people into theaters. It's so difficult to actually convince folks to get out of their homes for filmed entertainment that it generally takes a $50-$80 MM marketing budget for a film to do _any_ kind of business at the box office.
This ruins the economics of the 'mid-sized' film, since if you have to tack on $60 MM of marketing onto the production budget anyway, even the smaller films generally have a high level of risk. Thus the whole market has bifurcated between enormous $200 MM behemoths and $2 MM indie movies with limited theatrical distribution trying to promote themselves virally.
This used to be the Hollywood model. In the 1970s, for example, studios made movies like you describe. Over time, they've found it's more profitable to release fewer movies that are surer bets, which is how you get this endless parade of formula movies with $250m budgets.
There are multiple problems with that approach though. Serious problems.
with as many talented screenwriters as there are, there have to be good scripts that go unoptioned.
Sure, but can you spot them? Are you capable of spotting a right script which would make a good profitable movie? Or do you know someone who can? Check out http://blcklst.com/
Cast talented character and stage actors instead of big name (big $$) star talent
Stage acting and film acting are two different disciplines. Vastly different in technique and experience needed. Another point here is that 'big star' talent brings marketing power to the table as well, something you haven't touched upon on at all. Marketing is big part of the game. That's why usually in 'smaller' productions you get a lead or co-star 'big name' with rest of the cast relatively unknown. Not everyone unknown. Not to mention casting is a difficult job in itself. You may find an actor that suits role perfectly, but all of the cast has to function together on screen as well.
Think $15-20 million budgets
$20m range falls in small production range, so that checks out. Productions are not spending happy, remember that when you see those vertigo inducing budgets. They have thought through their spending well.
The idea is to have a deep catalog that quitely does well, instead of trying for massive blockbusters that can be $200m losses if they bomb.
Why not both? That's what studios do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent-pole_(entertainment) Otherwise you'd better have deep pockets in order to churn out multiple films and 'hope' some of them will rake in cash. That's because most of the films on smaller budgets aren't profitable at all. It's a numbers game in your proposal then, more risky than tent pole approach. What you propose would be a YC for films, where budgets aren't $10k because they can't be for various reasons and production time isn't two months, but two years.
Producing movies involves a metric shit-ton of work. You need a LOT of really good people to do just one movie well. Doing a whole bunch? Quality will inevitably suffer due to lack of attention. It's not just acting talent. Pre- and post-production is ridiculously hard to do right, and will ruin all your hard work if it isn't.
I have a friend who does it. Writes, directs, acts, produces. He works constantly, 12-14 hours a day. I feel bad for his new wife. Trust me, the movie craft cannot be scaled like this by solo players who aren't part of the establishment. Not with the current state of the art.
That's the "Moneyball" approach. Hire people who can consistently get to first base. With that steady income, you can afford to try an occasional big budget production.
In a world where network television has moved to unscripted reality shows filled with B actors trying to "make it" a good quality, well produced, well scripted show with talented actors is going to be a gold mine. The real issue is that network TV never really recovered from the writer's strike. AMC just came along and started offering the type of quality shows that were previously available on the network channels.
Sidenote: it looks like the people behind qz.com fixed the 'feature' whereby scrolling up past the top of an article would replace it with the previous article. This has made reading articles on that site less aggravating.
this strategy is starting to smell like double-dipping. the networks charge the cable company an increasing cost per subscriber that subscriber's can't opt out of. (cable bill just goes up), and on top of that, run ads.
either be like HBO and be an optional premium channel with no ads, or stop making my cable bill go up to subsidize crap i don't watch.
There's something fundamental that's changing in business.
Profit = Revenue - Cost
(That's not what's changing, of course.) This admits two strategies: increase revenue, or cut cost.
What's changing? Traditional MBA-style business is about cost reduction. Provide some static service, drive costs to zero or as close as you can get it, and hope like hell you're better at this than any of the other players. That's rapidly becoming obsolete.
Everything becomes a commodity, under this view. "We need 24 hours of programming. Get it together." Excellence (which might increase revenue faster than cost, but goes against every principle of cost-cutting) gets killed off. It's not important. Also, excellence is a bitchy problem from an MBA (polymorphic management) viewpoint because you actually need to know something fairly deep about the work and the problem domain to achieve it; whereas executive-level cost-cutting is a skill that can be applied (if to mediocre results) anywhere.
AMC has been taking the other tack: a long-term revenue-oriented approach that seems to be working quite well. Why? If you're in an oligopoly providing a commodity product or service, cost reduction often spells the difference between survival and failure. However, in this "long tail" world where there are hundreds of players competing for visibility, what you have instead is a world where almost no one gets a large proportional "slice of the pie", but the pie's much bigger. The payoff curve (between investment/quality and results) becomes convex and that favors risk, but it also favors let's-do-this excellence instead of traditional MBA-style cost-cutting.
The problem with the excellence strategy is that cost is predictable but excellence is not.
AMC didn't invent the strategy of going for the high end, HBO did, and lots of networks have tried the same strategy since. AMC has done well by it, but others have not -- see Showtime and Starz for examples. This despite the quality of their programming; Showtime's Dexter is well-regarded, for instance, but has failed to give a "halo" to the rest of the network. Starz has been trying to move up-market with shows like Boss and Magic City, but for whatever reason none of those shows ever really found an audience. (Even AMC's efforts have been fitful -- for every Mad Men or Breaking Bad there's a Rubicon and Hell on Wheels.)
So betting on "excellence" is a tough thing to do, because you have to spend a ton of money without any guarantees that the public will like the results. But the results of cost-cutting are very predictable, in the near term at least; it takes a long time for a run of really bad programming to tarnish a network so much that people stop tuning in. So for the bean-counters the "logical" choice is obvious.
I am pretty sure a MBA told them they were doomed if they stayed the way they were. What happened next is very much typical business. They got lucky. One good hit and they were off and running. Now what they have to avoid is the SyFy debacle of turning into cheese. Sadly they have started reality TV shows and that seems to be a staple of far too many channels.
They could have equally floundered in their choice of scripted shows. The difference is that compared to network TV they don't have a dearth of "original" programming to fall back on and hide the fails
Notably AMC makes a lot of money by bundling 48 hours of unwanted programming alongside its flagship station.
to get AMC on your network, you also have to accept some of AMC Networks other products, such as WeTV and IFC. They can lose a little money on AMC itself as long as advertising on their other channels makes it.
I think the change in this business is distribution, not necessarily cost vs revenue. Surely MBAs are running AMC as well. Revenue/Cost ratio is perhaps is more important - wider digital distribution leads to increased revenue over a fixed cost
Did you read the article? They're talking about how AMC releases their content on iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix sooner than other networks. It's hardly exactly what HBO does.
[+] [-] tharris0101|12 years ago|reply
Another network, FX, seems to be trying the HBO/AMC model in getting quality programming and is going out of their way to appear showrunner friendly. It'll be interesting to see if they can capitalize on some of AMC's missteps in nickel-and-diming their own shows.
[+] [-] steauengeglase|12 years ago|reply
This. It blows my mind that in this era if your content doesn't require localization efforts why it isn't made universally available ASAP. Cult followers run off to news site and message boards and twitter and where ever else to talk about their favorite show and that gets more people interested. Not making it available spoils all of that momentum and waiting months is just shooting yourself in the foot.
I'm looking at you BBC/PBS-Masterpiece joints.
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|12 years ago|reply
It rarely makes sense to give away new content on Netflix for next to free. You see it happen, but only rarely and in very select circumstances.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/magazine/the-mad-men-econo...
[+] [-] clicks|12 years ago|reply
All, full episodes are there.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mason55|12 years ago|reply
Because shows are distributed by different companies in different territories.
In many cases the company that airs the show doesn't produce it. You even have cases where a show airs on one network but another network has digital distribution rights and a third has physical distribution rights, and that's only in the US.
International media rights are an extremely complicated thing and usually each show is negotiated individually.
I work in this space and it's crazy how complicated it can get.
[+] [-] tomsaffell|12 years ago|reply
What shows are you referring to? (Downton Abbey is not BBC, its aried on ITV in the UK.)
[+] [-] Pwntastic|12 years ago|reply
http://qz.com/114483/amc-is-succeeding-by-breaking-the-rules...
[+] [-] dkl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstalin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Amadou|12 years ago|reply
Compared to what they earn from regular viewers - subscription fees and commercials - that pricing is nuts.
[+] [-] logn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehme|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] L_Rahman|12 years ago|reply
The West Wing was the last great show put out by the major broadcast networks before the rise of cable and the it pales in comparison to the output what has been dubbed "The Golden Age of Television". It's actually an embarrassment of riches right now on the television front.
[+] [-] driverdan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zw123456|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TylerE|12 years ago|reply
It's an idea I've had for a while... produce movies on a moderate budget... with as many talented screenwriters as there are, there have to be good scripts that go unoptioned. Cast talented character and stage actors instead of big name (big $$) star talent, and quitely make a bunch of really good movies for not a ton of money (Think $15-20 million budgets).
The idea is to have a deep catalog that quitely does well, instead of trying for massive blockbusters that can be $200m losses if they bomb.
There are certainly some filmmakers that sort of take this approach (The Coen brothers, for instance), but I don't know of any studio that has taken the approach to heart. I'm not talking indie studios here, but full AAA productions, just not with big VFX budgets or $50 million cast members.
[+] [-] danko|12 years ago|reply
This ruins the economics of the 'mid-sized' film, since if you have to tack on $60 MM of marketing onto the production budget anyway, even the smaller films generally have a high level of risk. Thus the whole market has bifurcated between enormous $200 MM behemoths and $2 MM indie movies with limited theatrical distribution trying to promote themselves virally.
[+] [-] bcgraham|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|12 years ago|reply
with as many talented screenwriters as there are, there have to be good scripts that go unoptioned.
Sure, but can you spot them? Are you capable of spotting a right script which would make a good profitable movie? Or do you know someone who can? Check out http://blcklst.com/
Cast talented character and stage actors instead of big name (big $$) star talent
Stage acting and film acting are two different disciplines. Vastly different in technique and experience needed. Another point here is that 'big star' talent brings marketing power to the table as well, something you haven't touched upon on at all. Marketing is big part of the game. That's why usually in 'smaller' productions you get a lead or co-star 'big name' with rest of the cast relatively unknown. Not everyone unknown. Not to mention casting is a difficult job in itself. You may find an actor that suits role perfectly, but all of the cast has to function together on screen as well.
Think $15-20 million budgets
$20m range falls in small production range, so that checks out. Productions are not spending happy, remember that when you see those vertigo inducing budgets. They have thought through their spending well.
The idea is to have a deep catalog that quitely does well, instead of trying for massive blockbusters that can be $200m losses if they bomb.
Why not both? That's what studios do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent-pole_(entertainment) Otherwise you'd better have deep pockets in order to churn out multiple films and 'hope' some of them will rake in cash. That's because most of the films on smaller budgets aren't profitable at all. It's a numbers game in your proposal then, more risky than tent pole approach. What you propose would be a YC for films, where budgets aren't $10k because they can't be for various reasons and production time isn't two months, but two years.
[+] [-] RandallBrown|12 years ago|reply
It's a similar model though. Make lots of cheap movies and make money off of all of them.
[+] [-] vinceguidry|12 years ago|reply
I have a friend who does it. Writes, directs, acts, produces. He works constantly, 12-14 hours a day. I feel bad for his new wife. Trust me, the movie craft cannot be scaled like this by solo players who aren't part of the establishment. Not with the current state of the art.
[+] [-] chiph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
You talk as if noone is doing this. But you appear to be ignoring all the Euro cinema produced each year.
[+] [-] consultant23522|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] login1234|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osi|12 years ago|reply
either be like HBO and be an optional premium channel with no ads, or stop making my cable bill go up to subsidize crap i don't watch.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|12 years ago|reply
What's changing? Traditional MBA-style business is about cost reduction. Provide some static service, drive costs to zero or as close as you can get it, and hope like hell you're better at this than any of the other players. That's rapidly becoming obsolete.
Everything becomes a commodity, under this view. "We need 24 hours of programming. Get it together." Excellence (which might increase revenue faster than cost, but goes against every principle of cost-cutting) gets killed off. It's not important. Also, excellence is a bitchy problem from an MBA (polymorphic management) viewpoint because you actually need to know something fairly deep about the work and the problem domain to achieve it; whereas executive-level cost-cutting is a skill that can be applied (if to mediocre results) anywhere.
AMC has been taking the other tack: a long-term revenue-oriented approach that seems to be working quite well. Why? If you're in an oligopoly providing a commodity product or service, cost reduction often spells the difference between survival and failure. However, in this "long tail" world where there are hundreds of players competing for visibility, what you have instead is a world where almost no one gets a large proportional "slice of the pie", but the pie's much bigger. The payoff curve (between investment/quality and results) becomes convex and that favors risk, but it also favors let's-do-this excellence instead of traditional MBA-style cost-cutting.
[+] [-] smacktoward|12 years ago|reply
AMC didn't invent the strategy of going for the high end, HBO did, and lots of networks have tried the same strategy since. AMC has done well by it, but others have not -- see Showtime and Starz for examples. This despite the quality of their programming; Showtime's Dexter is well-regarded, for instance, but has failed to give a "halo" to the rest of the network. Starz has been trying to move up-market with shows like Boss and Magic City, but for whatever reason none of those shows ever really found an audience. (Even AMC's efforts have been fitful -- for every Mad Men or Breaking Bad there's a Rubicon and Hell on Wheels.)
So betting on "excellence" is a tough thing to do, because you have to spend a ton of money without any guarantees that the public will like the results. But the results of cost-cutting are very predictable, in the near term at least; it takes a long time for a run of really bad programming to tarnish a network so much that people stop tuning in. So for the bean-counters the "logical" choice is obvious.
[+] [-] Shivetya|12 years ago|reply
They could have equally floundered in their choice of scripted shows. The difference is that compared to network TV they don't have a dearth of "original" programming to fall back on and hide the fails
[+] [-] hapless|12 years ago|reply
to get AMC on your network, you also have to accept some of AMC Networks other products, such as WeTV and IFC. They can lose a little money on AMC itself as long as advertising on their other channels makes it.
[+] [-] adamio|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cremnob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfunk911|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autarch|12 years ago|reply