Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.
There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
> There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
I just don't pay for it. If there's something I really wanna watch I might buy one month of the service binge it then cancel.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
It feels like all media, from tv shows to movies are all following a certain formula, with a goal to drive a certain social perspective about people and society.
I think we are still in a hangover from the financial cocaine the governments were handing out during the pandemic (and even long after it was a problem).
Also, nobody has any time for entertainment. Office workers all working 80 hours a week fearing stack ranking, PIPs, layoffs, needing to scramble to get a new H1B job or risk getting kicked out of the country and having to uproot kids. Service workers are working 120 hours a week across 3 jobs. Single people are working 100+ hours a week studying and interviewing and not getting jobs.
While this may be true for some people, overall this is not backed up by the data.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
Interesting, I have seen people be stretched thin and more stretched but I haven't seen people working 80-120 hour weeks. Different circles maybe?
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
I'm not who you're replying to, but I tuned out big movies and TV long ago, and just recently, YouTube became a hostile enough environment for me to start limiting it. When I do go there, it's to watch specific channels I already know. Clickbait titles and slop suggestions just aren't worth the psycholigical hassle when I want to relax.
I had been replacing it with podcasts, but they are so ad-infested now that it's been pushing me more and more to audiobooks. I also watch a fair bit of content on smaller special interest platforms, like CrunchyRoll for Anime or Pepperbox for guns. They're easy to sub and unsub depending on what I'm interested in. I often rent old movies. And more and more... I read.
I had used Prime's videos for a while when they had something I liked, but the ads have gotten so bad that I now go out of my way not to emotionally invest in anything they produce. The experience has left me skeptical of other platform exclusive shows and I generally just go do something else with my time.
Being all in on AI doesnt mean they have to be all in on bottom of the barrel slop videos. Youtube actually does a great job of not serving you slop if it gets to know you well enough. And it does notify you if it detects the video is AI generated. I would hope tech companies are awake to the fact that people’s feeds being deluged by the absolute uncanniest and disturbing visuals you’ve ever seen is feeding into anti-AI sentiment, and they probably shouldn’t be further enabling that.
There is some resurgence in quality here and there but then there is Avengers, MCU, Star Wars and idk how you can balance that with any amount of quality indie products
The last Avengers movie was 7.5 years ago. The last Star Wars episode was 7 years ago. (The Mandalorian one is the only standalone one since then.) Avengers are included in the MCU btw. There have only been about 1 to 3 MCU movies per year for the last few years. (2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 2). There are tons of other, really good movies to watch. Not just indies either: Did you happen to see Project Hail Mary this year? The Odyssey? I missed Spider-man: Brand New Day (the MCU movie that came out this year so far), but it has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think that drags down the average in terms of quality either.
This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
This 100%. All the layoffs started before AI. High interest rates means businesses can't afford to take risks. Our entire economy is based on easy money from cheap debt. The tech layoffs are about being able to pay for AI whether that's paying for data centers or tokens.
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
Some of these graphs don't support the hypothesis. The movie one for example shows that employment is just slightly below what it was just after the financial crisis of 2008, and shows record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
That's part of the point. If anyone can create cheap garbage, flood it on socials, and get people to click see what goes viral the old attention economy is just totally disrupted
> record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
Very little. It's that America's tax incentives are not competitive. They fly crews to make game shows from LA to london because its cheaper to shoot a show there. There's strong momentum to change that at the moment, there's a bill that might actually get passed that will make the tax environment competitive again in the states that stack theirs on it.
The outsource comment was interesting. Gaming didn't come up in this article but seems similarly hit. I was recently surprised to see how much game dev work is done outside the US for American companies.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
Not even short form. I found myself watching an hour and a half long YT video of a dude jet skiing from WA state to Alaska and can’t even hype myself up to watch a feature film.
Scruples likely has something to do with it, but not in the way you suggest. My feed is full of dancing and singing. Seeing a dance trend go viral and with 48 hours people all over the world are posting their rendition of it is remarkable.
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
This is my thinking. TikTok is very entertaining. I can’t do hours, but 30 minutes to an hour is great. Compare it to an unswipable hours long sporting event, 30 minutes looking for the right movie you quit 30 minutes in or have to pause till another day because something comes up, or tv shows with unresolved endings that leave you feeling like you are in a toxic relationship-hating the commitment but afraid of the sense of loss.
Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.
The only thing I’ve been watching lately are Soviet films on youtube. Mosfilms and Gorky films have their full catalogs on there. Sergei Bondarchuk’s films are deeply moving. Seventeen Moments from Spring is incredible as well- the Soviet answer to James Bond. For some reason it feels deeply refreshing to watch these films instead of what the US has been producing.
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
Every streaming service feels more and more user hostile. If I want to watch South Park it’s a 15$ a month subscription just for that .
Paramount Plus has nothing else.
I want to watch Lanterns, another 30$ a month.
Maybe King of The Hill , 20$ a month. The Reboot has this weird lazy animation style.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
What came out this year that you think you'll watch again in 10 years?
I bet the median American has more real disposable income than four years ago.
I bet the median American spends more in real terms on entertainment (and streaming specifically) than four years ago.
Almost without fail, the data in almost any area of modern life seems to be way less negative than people’s vibes about it are.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
That doesn't mean there isn't trash, and I suppose if tv series are your jam it's likely sub-par, but for me it's unmatched by light years.
(I still jump in for the occasional video tutorial etc but it’s always targeted - go for one thing, swoop in, close it when I’m done.
I had been replacing it with podcasts, but they are so ad-infested now that it's been pushing me more and more to audiobooks. I also watch a fair bit of content on smaller special interest platforms, like CrunchyRoll for Anime or Pepperbox for guns. They're easy to sub and unsub depending on what I'm interested in. I often rent old movies. And more and more... I read.
I had used Prime's videos for a while when they had something I liked, but the ads have gotten so bad that I now go out of my way not to emotionally invest in anything they produce. The experience has left me skeptical of other platform exclusive shows and I generally just go do something else with my time.
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
> What actually happened is cooler than what could happen
It’s hard to think of a fictional story that beats actually rowing across the world.
Also how much is the end of ZIRP and how much is jobs moving abroad? I'd love to see the article go a bit deeper
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.