When content gets removed from the internet and streaming services…where does it go? And should we be worried about the future of shows that have only ever existed online? Artwork holds a reified place in our culture, but history is filled with stories of lost films, discarded manuscripts, paintings hidden beneath other paintings, and plays performed once and then never again. The difference now is that with all the technology available, and with digitization making things like storage far easier, shouldn’t we be past these kinds of problems? Here’s our take on the thorny issue of disappearing content, and the responsibility we have to keep art – like our shows and movies – alive.
Transcript
When content gets removed from the internet and streaming services…where does it go? And should we be worried about the future of shows that have only ever existed online?
Netflix recently announced that horror series Hemlock Grove, which ran for three seasons, was being removed from the service. This follows HBO Max’s announcement that 36 titles, including 20 originals, were being removed from their platform as part of a change in creative direction.It’s not hard to find shows available to buy from other streaming services, but there’s no real guarantee that they won’t eventually disappear for good.
“Where did you disappear to, darling?”
- Hemlock Grove
Artwork holds a reified place in our culture, but history is filled with stories of lost films, discarded manuscripts, paintings hidden beneath other paintings, and plays performed once and then never again. The difference now is that with all the technology available, and with digitization making things like storage far easier, shouldn’t we be past these kinds of problems? At the same time, the internet has completely altered our entire approach to art…meaning more things could end up being lost than ever before.
“I’ve probably taped over it. Almost everything’s episodes of West Wing.”
- Love Actually
Here’s our take on the thorny issue of disappearing content, and the responsibility we have to keep art – like our shows and movies – alive.
CHAPTER ONE: HOW DOES ART GET LOST?
The word “lost” is a bit misleading. It makes it sound like content is just being misplaced, but the reality is far more deliberate. With regard to streaming services, analytical strategy director Julia Alexander says “Does a title bring in more value to the platform than its cost? If the answer is no, and especially if that title is a low engagement title, which many of these are, then removing titles can benefit a company’s bottom line.”
For HBO Max, like other streamers, their content-cull is motivated by the desire to drive growth while cutting costs. Playing to their strengths – the company is keeping around prestige dramas and shows aimed at adults, and shifting away from live-action kids and family programming, which was less-watched.
While it may be tempting to use this cold, cost-benefit analysis approach as a way to criticize streaming specifically, the problem of lost content has been around long before Netflix and HBO Max made their cuts. The BBC famously bulk-erased many of their old shows because it was cheaper to re-use the tapes. As a result, over 100 episodes of the first seasons of Doctor Who were lost, and while some have been recovered, the majority will likely never be seen again - and all this because nobody could have predicted what a cultural juggernaut the show would have become.
One of the most drastic cases of lost art is American silent cinema. Of the approximately 10,000 silent films made in America, only around 2,500 remain. The films were stored cheaply, or even disposed of when sound films began to dominate. Old nitrate film was also very fragile, prone to catching fire or degrading. But the lack of care afforded to these silent films – and those old BBC shows – is a result of the same short-term thinking that streamers are exhibiting now.
The problem with turning art solely into a numbers game is that you do end up losing things that have greater cultural value. And it can be hard to predict a piece of art or entertainment’s future impact. Even if a film isn’t a complete masterpiece, it may still have historical value, or be evidence of an artist developing. Horror movie, ‘His House’, is another Netflix original due to be removed in the UK and globally in the near future, and while it does exhibit some hallmarks of a first time filmmaker, it’s still clearly coming from an original voice putting a fresh take on the haunted house genre. For new directors to develop now, they need to be nurtured. That means supporting and platforming their work even if it doesn’t make immediate financial sense to do so.
“Don’t get your hopes up. They will send you back to die.”
- His House
CHAPTER TWO: THE CHALLENGE OF DIGITAL PERMANENCE
Even when we do want to preserve content digitally, doing so has proven to be a serious challenge. It’s often said that what goes online, stays online. But recently that assumption has been proven to be false. In 2019, MySpace lost all content that had been uploaded to the site prior to 2016, including 50 million songs from 14 million artists. There was a time when BuzzFeed was one of the biggest media companies in the world. However, as its influence has waned, the specific brand of easily digestible, list-based content that frequently pulled in images and GIFs from other sources has gone out of fashion. So now, if you scan through old BuzzFeed articles, it’s like looking through a digital graveyard, with many of the images used throughout being offline.
“The internet is…for eternity.”
- Pretty Little Liars
Digital preservation is actually a much more complex issue than it seems. Software developer Haissam Abdul Malak cites “...the fragility of storage media, the rapid evolution of technology, lack of funding, security and privacy concerns, and unclear ownership rights over digital information” as major challenges that need to be overcome. And when it comes to art, there’s a financial burden of preservation as well. Back in 2007, film preservationist Milton Shefter warned that given storing films digitally was so much more expensive – over $200,000 – versus storing actual film at a measly $486 — the industry would be sent “back to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away.”
Storage isn’t the only thing that makes preservation a costly process – streaming services have to pay for the rights to keep shows and movies on their service. Netflix is currently paying an estimated $100 to $250 million for blockbuster movies, and $300 to $500 for popular TV shows with multiple seasons. And even when a streaming service owns a show or film outright, that doesn’t mean it’s “free” for them to keep around – there are residuals to pay to the cast and crew. HBO Max will reportedly save over $100 million annually from its most recent culling.
“The days where shows like Family Guy and Futurama can be canceled, air reruns on another network, then brought back to life based on successful residual numbers is a long and gone process”
- The Real Reason
Another major challenge is more of an ethical one than a technical or financial one, driven by the fact that data centers consume massive amounts of energy and electricity and contribute to our growing, global CO2 emissions. We’re generating more data now than ever before and that will only continue to increase. Some companies have been trying to combat this problem – like Microsoft – who recently experimented with underwater data storage off the coast of The Orkney Isles in Scotland, which is powered by 100% renewable energy. But the problem is driven by the fact that the ease and ubiquity of cloud storage means we’re now primed to archive all of our digital material on there, rather than deleting it when we no longer need it. So, there does need to be a “survival of the fittest” approach to content preservation, but how do we decide what gets kept, and what gets wiped?
“This project give us the ability to feel like we’re working not just on computers, not just on data centres, but moving forward environmental responsibility.”
- Project Natick
CHAPTER THREE: WHAT GETS KEPT ALIVE
While it’s understandable that financial decisions motivate what art gets kept alive, we should be striving for an industry that looks beyond the bottom line, and prioritizes artistic worth and cultural value, as a reason to preserve and determine what gets made.
Take a look at Questlove’s recent documentary, ‘Summer of Soul.’ Archived footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival was stored in a vault for decades despite containing live performances from the likes of Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone. It would take over half a century for the footage to get seen, and only because society had moved on so much in that time. Thankfully, Questlove stepped up as a director and musical historian with enough influence to get that footage. But in piecing it together, he not only shines a spotlight on an event that otherwise would have been forgotten, he uses it to make the point that people need to fight to keep these histories alive, because otherwise, they will be forgotten. This spirit is what drives Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation project. Set up in 1990, it focuses on preserving films from underdeveloped film industries, and countries that may not have the means to preserve their own cinema. So again, there may not be a financial motive, but there is undeniably a valuable cultural and historical one. Because were it not for The Film Foundation, we could potentially lose entire cinematic cultures.
“We were zealots for cinema expression, movie expression, film expression, whether it was Hollywood, Europe, Japan, North Africa.”
- Martin Scorsese
A troubling recent development is content disappearing before it even gets the chance to be seen. The $ 90 million Batgirl had already finished production, but as part of the new HBO Max strategy, its release was pulled – as the company determined that taking a tax write-off for the movie made more financial sense than releasing it commercially. Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav stated “we’re not going to launch a movie to make a quarter, and we’re not going to put a movie out unless we believe in it.”
An issue that network television hasn’t been a stranger to, streamers are also being canceled before they’ve been allowed to finish telling their full stories. Westworld was canceled by HBO Max after four seasons due to falling viewership – despite the fact that the show’s creator thought it needed a fifth season to come to a satisfying conclusion. Tuca and Bertie, which was canceled first by Netflix after just one season, has been canceled prematurely yet again after its third season on Adult Swim. Netflix actually has a habit of canceling shows before their story arcs completely play out — like with Santa Clarita Diet, American Vandal, and One Day At A Time.
Once again, this ignores the potential cultural impact these shows and movies could have. Batgirl would have been the first superhero movie helmed by an Afro-Latina actress in Leslie Grace. LatinX-led family sitcom, ‘Gordita Chronicles’ was another victim of the HBO Max programming shift, despite the fact that there’s a great need for more LatinX representation in television.
This practice could also have a far more damaging psychological impact on creators who may now feel as if it doesn’t matter how much work goes into a movie, when the plug could be pulled at the last minute.
“The reputation of both the writers, the directors, the lead actors, the actors in it. That gets rubbished.”
- Good Morning Britain
We should instead be encouraging artists to take risks because that’s often when we get some of our most celebrated art. 2011’s The Artist took a huge risk by putting out a silent film in our modern era – and was met with critical acclaim and the Academy Award for Best Picture. If Disney had listened to critics – who were doubtful that anyone would pay to sit through a 90 minute cartoon – we may have never gotten our first American animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Money might be easier to analyze, but ultimately, it’s impossible to know the true value of a piece of work until after it’s been released.
OUTRO
Making calls based on artistic merit, cultural value, and potential long-term influence are all subjective, and trickier than making a purely objective call based on a balance sheet. But by prioritizing things this way around, we can create a more interesting ecosystem that encourages experimentation, nurtures new and diverse talent, and generally comes with more pros than it does cons.
There’ll always be things that get lost, deleted, or destroyed…but by being more careful about things, we can hopefully ensure that work of real value will be preserved.
“It just sat in someone’s basement for 50 years. My purpose was to correct history.”
- Summer of Soul