I wonder how much the end of syndicated reruns has hit revenues all across the TV industry.
If you were a network TV affiliate, you had your Simpson’s hour, your Friends hour, your…ugh I guess King of Queen’s hour…you had all this good content (for some value of good) that was seemingly syndicated at reasonable rates, and then you could lard up with ads. And then not just for conventional TV—how much of Netflix was Office back catalog?
But now, the reruns live in their corporate streaming silos. If you are a streaming service, you have to have your own content, and if you’re what remains of a conventional TV channel, you’re seemingly coasting on cheap-as-hell talk shows.
Of course, syndication also provided cheap airtime on TV channels for all the people who turned on the TV as background or who wanted to mindlessly channel surf. There's no reason to assume that will always be a common behavior and, even if it is, it seems more common on YouTube etc. than streaming television.
One also wonders about the value of the film back catalogs some services are acquiring. My sense is certainly that a lot of movie watching at home has shifted to TV and other things.
If you were a network TV affiliate, you had your Simpson’s hour, your Friends hour, your…ugh I guess King of Queen’s hour…you had all this good content (for some value of good) that was seemingly syndicated at reasonable rates, and then you could lard up with ads. And then not just for conventional TV—how much of Netflix was Office back catalog?
But now, the reruns live in their corporate streaming silos. If you are a streaming service, you have to have your own content, and if you’re what remains of a conventional TV channel, you’re seemingly coasting on cheap-as-hell talk shows.