Click the link below to listen to this week’s episode of Culture Critically:
Contents:
- Show intro
- Story of the week: Amazon’s iRobot acquisition
- Main feature: Warner Bros Discovery
Full show script
Culture Critically script
Intro
Hello and welcome back to Culture Critically. We’re a podcast focusing on communication, media, technology, and popular culture, and how these impact the ways we think, know, and live.
I’m your host, James Gilmore, and I’m a professor of media and technology studies in Clemson University’s department of communication.
Today we’re jumping in and talking about the big announcements regarding Warner Bros. Discovery, including the news that HBO Max canceled multiple movies and others from their platform.
As always, Culture Critically is focused on generative and provisional conversation about these ideas. My hope is to get us thinking and talking about important issues.
The Story of the Week
Recently, Amazon acquired iRobot, the company which produces Roomba vacuums. Roomba are the most popular robot vacuum, which automatically navigates a floor and collects dirt
The acquisition has been alarming to privacy advocates, which may come as a surprise to you if you’ve never used a Roomba, or never really thought about how yours works. While early – and, still, less advanced — models of Roomba used sensors to note objects and walls and automatically redirect their path, more advanced models like the Roomba i3 actually use floor mapping to generate and store maps of your room, ostensibly to “help” Roomba learn how to navigate space and remember where things are located. As these Roomba scan spaces, they create maps, which can be stored and given designated areas to focus or avoid cleaning.
As Bloomberg put it over the weekend: Amazon has “acquired a mapping company. To be more precise: a company that can make maps of your home.” At its surface, the acquisition allows Amazon to integrate more of its smart home products together, and paves the way for even more appliances that are integrated.
But, like with Google and Apple, these products are also about turning the home not into a system of automation but also data collection. In a paper I co-wrote with one of my graduate students, Carla White, last year—and which hopefully is close to being accepted for publication!—we argued that products like Google Nest are partly about trying to make self-surveillance feel pleasurable and omnipresent, an ongoing part of domestic practice that changes the way we imagine our homes. Amazon is clearly part of this, too, and as they continue to expand into the so-called Internet of Things marketplace, we need to be mindful of how the very definition of “appliance” may be changing. While we tend to just think of them as a category for domestic goods, it’s worth remembering the early definitions of “appliance” derive from words like attach, adhere, join. What we’re watching—heck, what we’ve been watching with the efforts to make consumer-grade internet-connected home devices popular over the last 10-15 years—is a rearticulation of what appliances are attaching themselves to. They are connected, joined to data collection operations of massive technology and commerce companies, and they are part of the ongoing development of a culture of surveillance within our homes.
Main story: WB Discovery
Our main story in today’s podcast is the announcement that HBO Max and Discovery Plus would merge next year, creating a new streaming platform that comes out of the creation of Warner Bros Discovery, a company merger which took place earlier this year.
Now, this is an early announcement and there’s still not a lot that’s known about what this new streaming platform will be. As the company’s global streaming chief put it: the platform will have “something for everyone in the household,” from developing a decade-long plan for superhero media, housing legacy media offerings like Harry Potter and a steady stream of reality programming from Discovery’s line-up (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/hbo-max-discovery-plus-warner/)
Instead of speculating about the future, like how the two platform techs will merge, how content will be organized, and how the platform infrastructure will try to compete with successful platforms like Disney Plus, I want to take this episode to look at a series of recent decisions which tell us something about the chaos that’s guiding WB Discovery’s current approach.
So, in thinking about what’s to come, let’s understand how this streaming platform is related to three decisions that have happened since WB Discovery merged in April:
1 – The decision to gut the CNN Plus streaming news service
2 – The decision to cancel and permanently shelve two movies, specifically Batgirl
3 – The quiet move to remove half a dozen HBO Max exclusive titles from the platform
Now, before I talk about each of these, let’s talk about streaming platforms generally
They market themselves largely on accessibility – the ability for a subscriber to watch whatever they want from a library of thousands of titles, whenever they want. This anytime, anywhere, on-demand culture (as Chuck Tryon called it a decade ago) was how Netflix became such a big—pardon the phrase—disruptor in film and television production. As subscribers could watch entire seasons of television in a day instead of doled out over three-nine months, Netflix grew a massive subscriber base as other companies pivoted to streaming and tried to market their content against Netflix, leading to what’s been called “the streaming wars” between companies like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and has expanded to include HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount Plus, Disney Plus, etc etc etc
Okay, but what’s important to understand is that accessibility is a trap (or, at the very least, a misnomer). As I (and countless others) have written about, these are also about data collection and analysis, trying to satisfy the long-held dream of knowing exactly who is watching media and how they watch, from what titles they browse, to how long it takes them to make selections, to how often they actually finish what they start.
Companies like Netflix have long claimed that this allows them to personalize your experiences, or at least to more finely group and recommend content to you. Disney Plus does the same thing, and it’s reasonable to assume HBO Max does some form of it, as well.
So it’s potentially easy to see why WB Discovery would want to bridge HBO Max and Discovery Plus: They can gather even more data from a broader subscriber base OR understand how the same subscribers navigate content across these two platforms. For example, my wife and I are subscribers to both HBO Max and Discovery Plus. If audience data from these two platforms AREN’T shared, or part of the same analysis pool, the company may not know that we binged Property Brothers at the start of the pandemic and I’m a devout watcher of Barry. Those two things don’t necessarily go together, and it’s part of what has historically made understanding audience behavior at scale so difficult. On a pragmatic level, then, the creation of this service makes sense as a way to feed and continue to hone the data collection operations of the platform.
Okay, fair enough. But that also doesn’t explain the bizarre and antiquated charts the company used to explain the “unique and complementary” distinctions between HBO Max and Discovery Plus, saying for instance that HBO Max is “male skew” and “appointment viewing,” while Discovery Plus is “female skew” and “comfort viewing.” It’s a chart that reproduces some of the worst cliches of gendering an audience, most obviously ones which relegate supposed female shows to “comfort” (a synonym for things with lesser quality) and supposed male shows to “appointment” (a synonym for things with higher quality). If the company plans to actually make data-driven decisions, it’s hard to understand how they arrived at this chart, which seems to be locked more in the 1960s than the 2020s in the way it thinks about audiences.
But what about the three decisions the company has recently made regarding canning, shelving, and deleting its existing properties?
First, let’s think about CNN Plus. You may have forgotten about CNN Plus—it was only around for a month. As Axios reported soon after the service shut down (https://www.axios.com/2022/04/26/cnn-plus-pitch-deck-subscribers), the platform stumbled out of the gate and was poised to “burn through $400 million in 2022 alone,” as a summary on The Verge discussed (https://www.theverge.com/23043232/cnn-plus-axios-chat-shut-down-streaming-news) – News has historically been a loss leader for most media companies, and Discovery quickly realized that bifurcating the news audience between cable and streaming was only going to hurt sales for both.
But let’s think about CNN Plus in the context of controlled audience management. The dream may very well have been to eventually move everything onto streaming, allowing producers and network executives to better understand how people watch news, and change their formats and scripts to match that.
More perplexing was the decision to simply cancel and shelve the completed Batgirl movie, which cost $90 million dollars and starred Leslie Grace in the title role with Michael Keaton set to return as Bruce Wayne. As many outlets noted, it’s rare for a studio to simply not release a movie, even if they thought it was bad (look around, there are lots of bad movies released each year).
Rarer still was the decision to simply REMOVE original content HBO Max had produced and exclusively distributed. These include the Anne Hathaway pandemic film Locked Down, the Seth Rogen comedy An American Pickle, the sci-fi romance Moonshot and the Robert Zemeckis movie The Witches. One of the perceived advantages of streaming platforms is the ability for companies to simply stockpile enormous backlogs of content with variable quality.
Moreover, HBO Max didn’t even announce these titles would be pulled. It was folks on Reddit who first noticed and reported on their disappearance.
Instead, Warner Bros Discovery seems intent on writing off these assets. As the company’s CFO put it, the canceled films didn’t, according to a New York Times summary, “fit the combined company’s plan to generate ‘maximum returns’ on its investment in content.” The Times suggests these moves have to do with the $55 billion debt the company was “saddled with” at the end of the merger due to spinning off from AT&T. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/business/media/warner-bros-discovery-earnings.html)
So, this is a lot, especially since Warner Bros Discovery only went public in April. In less than six months, the company has canceled what was supposed to be a premier streaming news platform, shelved multiple movies in profitable intellectual property franchises, and removed assets from a platform library.
Let’s not forget that this isn’t even the only bit of turmoil to hit Warner Bros and HBO Max in the last two years. As COVID has battered the movie theater business, Warner Bros made the decision to release all its major movies day-and-date in theaters and on HBO Max in 2021, a decision that some embraced and made others roil. Director Christopher Nolan has said he won’t work with Warner Bros anymore after the way they distributed Tenet, and has taken his Oppenheimer movie to Universal.
Still, the HBO brand has staying power: the network had 140 Emmy nominations this year (https://variety.com/2022/tv/awards/emmys-nominations-list-2022-1235313788/) including 25 for Succession, the most of any show.
What all of this points to is a crisis that comes from several trends coming together:
1 – The crisis in theatrical revenue, which inspired a huge pivot to streaming
2 – The potential downturn in streaming, with Netflix reported losing nearly a million subscribers in the second quarter of this year, the biggest loss in the company’s history
3 – The ongoing swing of mergers and acquisitions, where different company cultures clash as media assets continue to be absorbed into huge telecommunication companies.
And while we can’t say for sure where it’s headed from here, I think it’s safe to say the people running WBD want to tighten the ship, cut costs, and work towards improving audience data collection across the company’s assets.
That’s to say, they’re invested in control, which for me remains the key word for understanding how platforms operate and how companies manage them, even when they make decisions that appear ludicrous.
Conclusion
Alright, that’s our show. Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of Culture Critically.
You can find us on social media, with rebranded accounts:
On Twitter, we’re @culturecriticly and on Instagram we’re @culturecritically
You can find me @JamesNGilmore
Thanks for listening and I look forward to being back with you soon.
