John Linton ...or, for that matter, no new movies? That could never happen.....or could it?
In an ethicless and immoral society that considers (or rather doesn't consider at all) stealing other people's property as something they 'just do because they can' it may happen that the producers of products that are not paid for simply don't produce them any more:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703779704576074283037958472.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews
It should be obvious to anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size that if a studio cannot make more money from selling its products than it costs to make them then it will have to stop making them before the banks foreclose on their loans. Making quality TV shows is very expensive which is why 'reality TV' shows have proliferated over the past five years - getting a bunch of wankers to act out their stupidities on a box set costs mega millions less than having to bother with things like script writers, actors and locations.
The Hulu experiment is the result of copyright theft. For three years three of the biggest entertainment makers in the world have tried to find a way around the stealing of their products and have managed to partially 'control' the distribution of their products to the copyright thieves. Reading the cited article they have not been able to do that and are now looking for new ways to address the concept of making products that do not generate financial returns that are more than the cost of making them. Like every other financial problem in the worlds of business, innovative thinking and fiscal bravery may eventually deliver a solution - but the studio owners have never been noted for either of those characteristics outside the fiction of their products - and in some cases their own lives.
The other factor is 'studio consolidation'. Over the past three decades the number of studios (i.e. those enterprises that own and operate sound stages, the requisite equipment and other necessary infrastructure) have reduced quite significantly. The issue raised by this is if the number of movies/V shows made continue to decrease then the cost of 'renting' these necessary facilities will increase or, as with the merged studios, will disappear completely. The whole point of studio consolidation was to keep some percentage of the facilities that are needed to make movies/tv shows in place so that their cost of production could be lowered. The less studio square meters (square feet?) there are the less footage will be made (has "footage" been replaced by "meterage" yet?
Before anyone can say "it will never happen" you would have to consider that it actually not only could happen but that it inevitably WILL happen/may already BE happening - for the simple reason that all money invested in commercial enterprises requires a realistic return. At the moment, and since it's inception, the movie business was based on investing a sum of money in making the product and getting a return on that money from ticket sales and latterly 'merchandising'. TV shows were made on the basis that the TV channels would pay a higher price for them than it cost to make them because the advertising revenue they received was greater than their cost. Even a child would know those obvious facts let alone their parents......but........
...the history of the human race shows it contains the seeds of its own destruction which is a high falutin' nonsense that means human beings use finite resources that they depend upon with no thought to how those resources exist or what they will do when they run out.....assuming they ever think about why the resources exist in the first place or whether they will run out and what they might do if that occurred. In the cases of the Egyptians, Romans, Incas, Nazis etc there were serious consequences. Certainly no-one other than 'movie stars' will be even slightly inconvenienced if no new movies or TV shows were made - in fact every person on the planet and the planet itself would almost certainly be better off.
Maybe the parents of their ethicless and morally bereft children are actually doing a public service?
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