I’m old enough to remember when it seemed like all of sudden, seemingly overnight, everyone owned a VHS machine. Sure, some owned a BetaMax, but VHS was the thing. Video rental shops popped up everywhere and we’d see our neighbors there more frequently than at the grocery store, browsing the titles.
There was an old barn at the far end of the town that had sat empty for ages on a narrow, overgrown with honeysuckle corner curve in my small country hometown for ages. In the age before pop-up stores became popular someone popped it open as a video store, creating one of the first congested traffic nightmares that town had ever seen as folks parked along both sides of the shoulderless curve to rent a video.
Whether it was the local mom and pop video rental shop or later the BlockBusters, the display racks were bulging with titles. You’d walk in and be overwhelmed with the choices. To a degree that was the point. Flood the zone with more possibilities than anyone could keep track of to keep customers coming back. There may have been a pony or two in there, but eventually you realized that most of what was on the shelves wasn’t worth your time or money and the off the road parking on the curve eased.
When the next big hit finally made it into stores, the curve got crowded again as the aisles would fill up again while folks browsed, waiting for someone to return what they were really after, endlessly reading and rereading plot descriptions on the backs of boxes, hoping they were next on the waiting list.
VHS tapes became disks. Then along came Netflix.
Once Netflix moved into the video rental by mail business everything changed and the pop-ups pooped out, the video rentals that had become prevalent in grocery stores, pharmacies, and just about any other store that had a smidgen of floor space to offer them faded, and eventually so too did the big chains. The honeysuckle eventually reclaimed it’s territory.
And then along came streaming and the zones really flooded.
If you browse any of the streaming websites or apps today it’s like walking into one of those extinct video stores. Title card after title card scroll by in a waterfall of numbing repetition, often with the same title repeated line after line, category after category, too often in a weird trend that some marketing maven landed on of changing the cover art, hoping to get your eyeballs to land on a new image. It’s the same flood the zone approach.
When you flood the zone, eventually those you hope to lure in tire of treading water and turn their attention elsewhere. It happens in every sphere of human commerce, politics, art, music, you name it. Too much of a good thing becomes a problem when everything is just, well too much.
Now that just about every streaming service offers the same titles with the same upsell it’s overwhelming to the point of overdone.
I took the above trip around a winding corner curve in my memory lane after seeing news that Netflix, the company that changed it all by first flooding mailboxes and then streaming is wading into trouble waters. According to that article “user engagement has stalled due to a lack of popular content.”
There are many factors, but in my view that translates into an overabundance of quantity, not enough quality. There are big changes afoot as Netflix has fired Dan Lin, the head of its film division, along with six percent of its employees.
Netflix isn’t alone. It’s always been a leader, and leaders falter and flounder just like the rest of the pack. I certainly can’t say any of its competitors are that much better, but to my mind Apple TV has put out the best quality this year. After the Paramount/Warner Brothers merger that resulted in Skydance, with its promise of more movies each year who knows what the future will yield. I doubt quality will be the result.
That said, we started watching the 4th season of The Diplomat last night on Netflix, and it’s excellent. So there are gems that occasionally surface.
As all of the streaming services try to offer more, whether that be sports, or gaming, or just more of what the algorithm says enough want, they actually end up providing less, because the quality can too easily get swallowed in the flood zone.
It’s a tough job to program. As someone who has programmed seasons for live theatres I know you miss as much or even more often as you hit. It’s easy to get trapped into a formula when you find success. I’ve been there. It’s much harder to understand when a successful formula begins to fade. But when you focus on producing more rather than producing better, it’s easy to become mediocre, or worse, boring.
Rising prices and ridiculously programmed ad insertions certainly don’t help Netflix or any of its competitors either. Eventually it all becomes as numbing as the waterfall of titles that scroll down screens, like all of those titles on all of those old video store shelves. What quality there is too easily gets lost, even with the hype of a new release, when viewers have to wade through a flood of content that all looks the same.
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