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Dennis Broe<\/strong> explains the decline in the quality as well as quantity of streamed series, and the exploitative use of Artifical Intelligence by the industry. Photo above:\u00a0SORA\u2019s \u201cartificial\u201d creation of a walk in Tokyo\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Last year\u2019s retrenchment in the world of streaming TV is continuing with Netflix holding even on bankrolling series at $17 billion but with all the other streamers cutting back. The big money players are searching for, as one studio exec put it, the \u201cright show shot in a cost effective location,\u201d where \u201cit is possible to make a whole series for the cost of an indie film.\u201d<\/p>\n The industry way of portraying these cutbacks, seeing the glass half full, is there is now an emphasis on \u201cquality over quantity,\u201d but when one observes what is coming down the road it\u2019s hard not to see these cutbacks as simply less quantity amid decreasing quality. The new emphasis on safe investments is being translated into increased concentration on what the industry terms IP, intellectual property, ie going with what has already been established in another medium (books, films, music) or in television itself.<\/p>\n Baywatch<\/span> uber alles: beefcake meets cheesecake\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n One look at the low end of production, that is the TV network pilot season, is a scary reminder of what this trend entails. CBS is chiming in with: Matlock<\/em>, perhaps with an AI Andy Griffith; a Young Sheldon <\/em>spinoff with the original, itself a spinoff of Big Bang Theory<\/em>, having just ended; a Young Sheldon <\/em>version of NCIS <\/em>titled NCIS Origins <\/em>with Mark Harmon\u2019s narration (like Sheldon\u2019s in Young Sheldon<\/em>) of his on-screen younger self; and Watson<\/em>, a Sherlock Holmes series without Sherlock and with the good doctor taking up the crimefighting duties.<\/p>\n Fox, in an even less daring move, is reviving the sexist Baywatch <\/em>and NBC, besides Suits: L.A.<\/em>, a spinoff of the cable series, is dressing up its revivals as St. Denis Medical <\/em>could easily be St. Elsewhere <\/em>and Dr. Wolf<\/em>\u2019s gruff medical practitioner is supposed to remind viewers of House. <\/em><\/p>\n The high end of this lack of originality was on display in a Max (Warner Bros) presentation which trumpeted Season 2 of Game of Thrones, The Penguin <\/em>from the DC Batman franchise and a series based on the Harry Potter books and films. All three of these fall into the blockbuster category, that is the streamers copying the Hollywood studio format that began in the \u201970s while shelving original series, which were what brought Max subsidiary HBO to prominence in the first place, as recounted in Peter Biskind\u2019s new book Pandora\u2019s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed upended TV. <\/em><\/p>\n As more and more series rely more and more on IP or already proven material, what was once a \u201cGolden Age\u201d of originality begins to skew close to the now partially abandoned Hollywood studio format of sequels and comic book adaptations, a format that is working less and less for the movie studios as audiences decline, because of the lack of creativity.<\/p>\n \u00a0 Gone Producer<\/span>, a synthetically created game show\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The other major trend, which has creators terrified and investors and studio executives \u201cexcited\u201d, is the rapidly expanding use in every phase of the business of artificial intelligence, AI. Perhaps the scariest projection of the technology, described by one longtime independent film assistant director as \u201cnothing but plagiarizing software,\u201d is a new gameshow on Korean TV titled Gone Producer. <\/em>In this nightmare gameshow scenario, the entire series is cast, directed, and produced by AI which also judges the videos that contestants submit in a competition.<\/p>\n According to the studio, \u201cThe fun factor is not only that the show is produced by AI, it is also the contestants getting confused and bewildered confronting the AI.\u201d In other words, the show not only uses the service to replace jobs, it also makes a virtue of the fact that, as everyone knows, AI often \u201challucinates,\u201d that is returns incomprehensible information and opinions.<\/p>\n The contestants and the viewers are asked then, as the media critic Theodore Adorno put it, to participate in their own demise. Korea is well-known for its game show formats, having produced a \u201cspin off\u201d of the Emmy-winning fictional series Squid Game<\/em> and Gone Producer <\/em>has already been sold to Sweden and Norway.<\/p>\n Less Is More? <\/strong><\/p>\n These observations about the business come from two recent French TV festivals, Lille\u2019s Series Mania, one of the largest of its kind in the world, and Cannes\u2019 MIPTV, with this year\u2019s meeting of buyers and distributors ending the convention\u2019s 61-year run. The latter had 130 companies represented but was still a shell of its former self, a sacrifice to the new austerity where, because of the entry fee and the Cannes boardwalk prices, buyers consolidated by going to a February conference in London or to the larger MIPTV conference in October.<\/p>\n Walking through what was once production house stalls and was now an empty space that looked like a parking garage, one former attendee mourned the passing of a place in which she said she had spent many years.<\/p>\n The streamers and television magnates in general are attempting to combat churn (subscribers signing in watching the few creative series on the streamer then signing out), the fact that working-class audiences have less to spend because of continuing inflation, and the streamers\u2019 raising of their subscription rates.<\/p>\n The way they are choosing to combat this situation though betrays a lack of imagination, with the same assistant director suggesting that instead of AI replacing writers and actors, the technology might better be used to replace CEOs and studio executives.<\/p>\n At the Series Mania Forum, discussing the business of television, it was reported that \u201cPeak TV\u201d was over, because in the U.S. the number of series declined from almost 600 two years ago to 516 last year. In Europe not only are the number of series declining, but so are the number of episodes, by an average of one episode per series \u2013 and also the length of each episode, now cut by almost 10 minutes. One of the original promises of streaming TV was both would be determined by what was needed to tell the story and that priority is vanishing.<\/p>\n \u00a0 Isabelle Adjani on television\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n There is also more monetization of back catalogues, using former material to create series and the sale of catalogue entries, so that subscribers who are looking for a show on their service may find that it has been sold to another service.<\/p>\n European series are trying to nab viewers by bringing to television now more faded film stars, a trick that was formerly used on American TV. In France Isabelle Adjani (The Story of Adele H.) <\/em>is starring in a series about family secrets and in the Netherlands Famke Janssen (Golden Eye<\/em>) heads a cast in a series on the Amsterdam marijuana scene.<\/p>\n Another way of monetizing content without the peril of trying something new and original is selling the format to a different market, as the BBC has done with Ghosts<\/em>, a hit on CBS in the U.S., harking back to, or trivializing, Hawthorne and the New England horror tradition and now being developed in a German version which commercializes the Romantic tradition in that country.<\/p>\n Sony TV\u2019s Wayne Garvie explained to the Series Mania forum audience that the answer to the end of peak TV, \u201cthe boom,\u201d is not necessarily \u201ca bust\u201d but rather just fewer shows with more quality. He almost immediately contradicted himself by then citing the superhero series The Boys <\/em>which he said with its spinoffs \u201cwill go on for years\u201d. In the same vein he noted that the problem with single season series, which have often been some of the most creative and awarded (think Chernobyl) <\/em>is that \u201cyou can\u2019t build a business on mini-series.\u201d<\/p>\n The result of this cost-cutting and budgetary as well as creative retrenching, described at the Forum as the industry \u201clooking for more reassuring content,\u201d plus a demand on Wall Street that streamers show a profit, is that streaming audiences are declining to the point where the S&P accounting firm recently downgraded Paramount\u2019s debt to \u201cjunk.\u201d<\/p>\n The race is now on to see who will buy the streamer or if it will simply go under, since any buyer is now saddled with the company\u2019s debt. In Europe the French streamer Salto is now defunct while the Scandinavian Viaplay, which was expanding into the U.S. and Britain, has had to cease that effort and return to its local audience.<\/p>\n Here Come The Machines <\/strong><\/p>\n A main topic of both events was AI which, as in other industries, is being touted as a money-saving, cost-cutting entity. The \u201cbuzz\u201d at the industry-oriented MIPTV centered around what the technology could do for producers and studio profit margins. Pre-conference, \u00a0The Hollywood Reporter <\/em>ran a full page on AI\u2019s \u201cBuried Perils\u201d without mentioning the thrust of its creators toward job destruction \u2013 and nowhere was there a conversation about how the lost jobs will be replaced.<\/p>\n The Series Mania Forum debated the issue but began with an opening presentation from two shills for the practice, who showed articles from the business press, including Bloomberg News, \u201cproving\u201d that AI was a boon to job creation. In The Future of Work, <\/em>the French theorist Bernard Stiegler, citing an Oxford study predicting an ultimate 50 percent loss of employees when the technology was fully developed, decried the development as \u201cthe negation of know-how itself,\u201d inducing \u201ca functional stupidity.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0 Shoshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism <\/em>described the technological solution which is dreamed of by producers and studio execs which offers the illusion of \u201comniscience, control, and certainty\u201d but where \u201cthe idea is not to heal instability \u2013 the corrosion of social trust and its broken bonds of reciprocity, dangerous extremes of inequality, regimes of exclusion \u2013 but to exploit the vulnerabilities produced by these conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n The Series Mania Forum day was titled benignly \u201cAI: The Technology We\u2019d Love to Like\u201d with one panel called \u201cPast the Sideration,\u201d a French word that the panel defined as \u201cfascination\u201d but which equally \u2013 and in this case more accurately \u2013 means \u201cdisturbance.\u201d<\/p>\n A YouTube representative, a company owned by Google which is a leader in the race to dominate the field, proclaimed AI would allow \u201cunprecedented speed\u201d and its use would be \u201cbold and responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n Curbing the power of the unions<\/strong><\/p>\n Clearly the implementation of AI is one part of a studio attempt to curb, in the wake of last summer\u2019s writers\u2019 and actors\u2019 strikes, the growing power of the unions. Kate Ballard from the U.S. Writers\u2019 Guild acknowledged that AI is moving faster than any contractual or legal limits that can be imposed on it, and said that the Guild had done the best they could to ensure that AI be a tool for writers, not a way of getting rid of them and that they would revisit the situation again in two and a half years, when the current contract expires.<\/p>\n One of the claims for AI in job creation is that the machines need \u201cprompters,\u201d since it is crucial that what is fed into them be specific and limited, but the host of one of the panels revealed that she had just read an article stating that AI creators were now working on machines that could learn to prompt, thus eliminating the most fruitful arena for new jobs.<\/p>\n The Cotton Club<\/span>, the movie and not the AI fabrication, erroneously set in Chicago<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n At MIPTV, one developer, who claimed that AI could be used in every phase of film and television production, listed for example programs such as Storyfit, designed to predict whether a story will be commercially successful; Storyboarder, which produces storyboards for shooting; and SORA, which creates synthetic AI images and which produced an intriguing image of a smoky 1920s nightclub but which claimed that The Cotton Club<\/em>, the title of the film, was in Chicago, not in New York\u2019s Harlem.<\/p>\n A scarier development was that another CEO had trained AI to identify the predominant emotion of each scene (happy, sad, fearful, joyful) in a film or series and select clips aimed at enticing particular audiences. The ultimate goal, one CEO claimed, was \u201cto be able to make a complete film from your bedroom.\u201d<\/p>\n Craig Peters, from Getty Images, stated that the answer to controlling the device was not in legislation, such as the recent European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, but rather through \u201call of us putting our collective minds together.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the unions will also put their collective minds together?<\/em><\/p>\n This solution seems like a na\u00efve way of warding off legislation in the U.S., but what Peters did explain was that with the drive to feed more and more data into the machines to train them, the IP of books, movies, films, songs would soon be exhausted. The current drive is to feed as much personal data into the machines as possible, that is, to turn each of our individual experiences into training vehicles and to \u201charvest\u201d this \u201cpersonal IP.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t long ago that the major catchphrase in the information industry was \u201cbig data\u201d used for its predictive capabilities. Now that has been replaced by the quest for synthetic creation, which might someday eliminate the human element entirely and which would be the next level up in current cost-cutting.<\/p>\n Instead of, as the writer and showrunner Frank Lipsitz (X-Files, The Man in the High Castle<\/em>) put it, making \u201cus as writers, better, faster smarter\u201d, studio heads envision using AI to \u2018scale\u2019 creativity, that is to simply produce more, faster.<\/p>\n The battle is on around AI in the film and television industry, like everywhere else. Will it simply become a cost-cutting tool fostering mass unemployment, or an enhancement to creators in the industry, enabling leaps in original and relevant content?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dennis Broe explains the decline in the quality as well as quantity of streamed series, and the exploitative use of Artifical Intelligence by the industry. Photo above:\u00a0SORA\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":472,"featured_media":16708,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649],"tags":[3076,3078,3082,3077,2085,3075,3080,3079,3081,2804],"class_list":["post-16716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-radio-internet","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-batman","tag-getty-images","tag-harry-potter","tag-netflix","tag-paramount","tag-peak-tv","tag-series-mania","tag-surveillance-capitalism","tag-writers-guild"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/472"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"S2\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/S2.png\")
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