You thought Disney buying Fox was bad? The fact that Netflix is now big and rich enough to buy Warner Bros. signals the death of movie theaters. Some of you might see this as a good thing, but this potentially spells the destruction of movies as we know them.
The thing about streaming media is it actually affects your perception of media. Think about why people still collect vinyl records. Yes, you could just stream something on Spotify, but it's not the same experience. You go from, "I'm gonna consciously pick out a record from my shelf and put it on and listen to some music" to "Let's just put on some randomized playlist for background noise."
It's the same thing with movies. It's a lot cheaper and more convenient to stream something than it is to go to the theater, but when you do that, you go from, "I'm gonna plan my day around seeing this movie, and I'm gonna sit there with my popcorn and watch it, and it's gonna be an event" to "Eh, let's just pick something on Netflix to kill a couple hours. We can read tweets at the same time." The convenience trivializes it, makes you less likely to pay attention, and less likely to remember the experience. When the movie ends, instead of reflecting on it and analyzing it, you just say, "Okay, that's over. Onto the next thing."
And this doesn't just affect how you watch a movie, it affects how movies are actually made. Companies like Netflix know you're only half paying attention when you stream a movie, and just putting on movies in the background while you do something else. That's why they dumb down movies on purpose (and that's not a conspiracy theory, there are leaked memos confirming this). They make dialog blunt and obvious, and they make the cinematography lazy, and their movies increasingly look the same because the color grading is optimized for viewing on tiny screens. And as streaming dominates, the dumbing down of our entertainment will only get worse.
You thought Disney buying Fox was bad? The fact that Netflix is now big and rich enough to buy Warner Bros. signals the death of movie theaters. Some of you might see this as a good thing, but this potentially spells the destruction of movies as we know them.
The thing about streaming media is it actually affects your perception of media. Think about why people still collect vinyl records. Yes, you could just stream something on Spotify, but it's not the same experience. You go from, "I'm gonna consciously pick out a record from my shelf and put it on and listen to some music" to "Let's just put on some randomized playlist for background noise."
It's the same thing with movies. It's a lot cheaper and more convenient to stream something than it is to go to the theater, but when you do that, you go from, "I'm gonna plan my day around seeing this movie, and I'm gonna sit there with my popcorn and watch it, and it's gonna be an event" to "Eh, let's just pick something on Netflix to kill a couple hours. We can read tweets at the same time." The convenience trivializes it, makes you less likely to pay attention, and less likely to remember the experience. When the movie ends, instead of reflecting on it and analyzing it, you just say, "Okay, that's over. Onto the next thing."
And this doesn't just affect how you watch a movie, it affects how movies are actually made. Companies like Netflix know you're only half paying attention when you stream a movie, and just putting on movies in the background while you do something else. That's why they dumb down movies on purpose (and that's not a conspiracy theory, there are leaked memos confirming this). They make dialog blunt and obvious, and they make the cinematography lazy, and their movies increasingly look the same because the color grading is optimized for viewing on tiny screens. And as streaming dominates, the dumbing down of our entertainment will only get worse.
