YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia Alexander

lines on the record: 98
first: 2022-04-05
most recent: 2022-04-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Disney learned that throughout the, if they use the bundle, the subscribers who subscribe to the bundle are more likely to stay on longer, if anything, just because now they've got three services and it's more complicated to disengage from all of them. And so why not do it three months at a time? Same kind of theory.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I assume, but I do think there's a lot of potential lost revenue there that the companies are looking at and thinking of how can we keep people in for longer than a month at a time.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing I've been saying a lot, and I don't know if it'll actually come true, is I would look at them getting rid of the month to month payment. I think the next thing that's going to happen over the next two years is we will go from these colloquial streaming wars, which is a terrible term. I always say streaming race to the retention race. They will hit saturation in the United States and Canada, which is a primary market for all of them as they expand outward and try to make sense of South America and India and different very important countries and territories. In order to figure that out, they have to introduce cheaper plans in those different territories because they're mobile first territories. And in order to do that, they have to rely on the revenue coming from the United States and Canada, and they can't do that if they're losing a lot of customers because it's oversaturated and easy to cancel. So my suspicion is you'll see some experimentation within the payment structure month to month. At the same time, I say that and that would cause a lot of people to automatically cancel.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within their own app and to control how that flow is happening. So until that side of the equation is willing to say, okay, we're going to take a beat because we think for the betterment of our platform and of our app and for our business, we think we need to work well with our other partners and within this bigger kind of ecosystem until that happens, you're just going to have a lot of silos because they want to operate within silos because they think that's better for their business and for their customers, which is not necessarily inherently true. If anything, the data points to it not being true. But I mean, that's a big conversation with many, many, many teams, all of who have a very specific stake in that fight.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aggregators have a lot of power too. Think about how important it is for Netflix to have the Netflix button on the Roku remote. I mean, Google obviously puts the YouTube button on its remote, but the idea that you have it there automatically brings people to the streaming service. They don't have to think about it. It's automatically opened. That's huge real estate. It's something that's very valuable to them. The idea that this would kind of occur within the software space and give Roku more control or Google or Apple, whoever it might be, I think On the one hand, I can see it going that way where”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you want to have an interface that helps you look at all the stuff you have access to. And in the middle is all these companies saying, well, actually, we want you in our app. Do you see that flipping at any point? We've been talking about the cable bundle coming back so much that I'm like, why doesn't Roku just make the cable bundle and I'll pay them?”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, last question, and I feel like we could do another full hour on this one, but let's try. All the features you've described could also live at the operating system level, right? They could live on the Roku box. They could live on the Apple TV or the Amazon Fire Stick or whatever, and they don't, right? Like these companies want to build those features. Apple, I think very famously, has an entire app called the TV app that it cannot just make the interface of the Apple TV because Netflix and other services won't integrate with it. They want you in their app, not in Apple's app. Roku has some universal search features, but it can't do friend recommendations across services or that social stuff because the app partners will freak out and get mad at Roku and threaten to leave. At some point, what you really want is you want to buy a license to content from all these different networks.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, adding cool bumpers, whether that is figuring out a way to let friends recommend things within the app, all of those product details on top of having an app that works and having a distribution platform that works as a discovery platform, that gives you the edge. And that makes people say, I want to spend more time in the app and find my new favorite show here, not necessarily there. So I think it's a game of, yes, as long as you have the content people will come, this is the argument for theatricality. If you put the movie in theaters and it's a good movie, people will go out to see it. They will go to it. But in a space where it's online and it's all apps and you're competing with other apps to get people to open it and spend more time there, now becomes how do I make this app feel really personal, really fun on top of having good content.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apps, where do we want to be here? What shows are they really watching? What shows are they kind of turning off halfway through? That's when the distribution arm is just as important as the content arm. Because if all of these networks make good television, which they've proven that they can, and they increase their content budget to all compete with each other, it kind of becomes a dime a dozen, where it's like Netflix has a good show this week, Disney Plus has a good show next week. And so people cancel whenever they're not necessarily interested in it for a month at a time. They come back to it, but there's no love for a lot of these services. There's love for some of the content. As that content increases to your point about it becoming bloated, now you really have to figure out a way to diversify your product and to make it seem like it's a better experience, whether that is adding a shuffle button that actually works properly, whether that is”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think your theory is mostly right. We are at a point when you look at something like HBO, HBO is going to have week after week good television. So, the people who are using HBO Max for HBO are going to use it regardless because they were using HBO. Like it's the same kind of thing. Even if the app experience for them is bad, their HBO diehards. The issue is you have this new generation of kids who are coming up and they are used to having too much television, but it's good. And they're used to having products that work and they have it through Netflix, they have it through TikTok, they have it through YouTube. It's these algorithms that really, really know them and recommend what they want. But at the same time, what we need to really look at with these streaming services is how do you engage your audience beyond just them coming in for that one episode or two episodes a week so at that point especially if you're getting into an ad supported version of these apps which we didn't have time to cover but you know netflix is now saying never say never to ads disney plus is going to include an ad support it's here now when the advertisers are like how often are people using your ads”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that would be my theory is that because HBMX is just kind of fine, they're still just making great TV shows. And the second it becomes streaming, it'll get that kind of like streaming TV bloat.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, let me flip that on you. I would say Netflix has the best technology. The app is the best design. They've been at it longer. One of the theses of decoder at large, and one that you've come back to repeatedly here, is the distribution affects what you make inherently. I would say Netflix's distribution model has dramatically impacted the way Netflix shows work. They're all kind of bloated. They all have like that one episode in the middle where you can definitely just check your phone. Like this is like a Netflix series to me. I should disclose that we're working on a Netflix series. So I'm trying not to do that on Netflix series. But that's like Netflix, right? I would not say they have the most talked about series out there. They do not have the big prestige TV wins the rate they used to. All that stuff is happening on an HBO Max or a Hulu or Apple TV with Severance, even if those apps aren't as good. Is that because the distribution hasn't yet affected the creative?”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tedious to use, and there will be so much competition and so many more things to do, including outside of streaming, right? Including Fortnite and YouTube and whatever else it might be and TikTok, that you just kind of lose that engagement. And if you lose the engagement and if you lose your subscribers adoration for what you're doing, it doesn't matter. It's an app at the end of the day. The hardest part is getting them to open the app. And if you make it difficult, they're just not going to open the app.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That matters if people can't access the app. And so what we see with HBO Max when they first launched, and it was like, hey, we'd love to use your app, we literally cannot use it, you get them all of a sudden they're like, we have to totally revamp this app. You know, there's a reason Disney bought BAMTAC and it was like, we can't build the tech arm for it. We're going to buy this one that, you know, HBO Now was built on top of, and hopefully that works for us. But unless they increase investment into that area, eventually at the rate that they're spending their money on, the content is all going to be There's going to be a hit show every week from a different platform, but that's not necessarily going to be a thing that keeps your customers coming back. It's not going to make sure that they are spending more time within an app. Netflix has hyperbolt its algorithm to make sure that you are having the best time in the app and then you're staying there and you're finding stuff that you didn't even know you wanted. And so it feels like a great experience. And unless the other ones do it, it just becomes”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a very specific reason Netflix has two headquarters, and one is in Silicon Valley and one is in LA. And there is the idea at Netflix that is the basis of their company, that you cannot have the creativity without the tech distribution and the powerful tech arm to help provide a great experience to make people want to stay within that app, to make people want to use it. I mean, that is what gives Netflix a major advantage over its competitors. And there is a reason why a lot of these Hollywood companies are not in Silicon Valley and they're working out of Burbank or they're working out of New York and they're kind of hyper focusing their streaming, the oversight team, the executive team with creative development and creative executives. And so their focus is inherently on the creative product and their focus for investment is inherently on let's have the best rights. Let's spend $100 million on getting the JJ Abram show because if we don't, it will go to someone else.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know we talked about it a little bit earlier, but it just seems like okay, this is the first point of differentiation, right? You're saying the entire future of your business is in this screen. Why is there so little emphasis on, okay, this screen should be easier to use or the tech aspect of how this works should be top of the line? Like, do they feel the competitive pressure or is it just, hey, we can get you one with a buzzy new show and then keep you with the catalog? That's the business and the app is just table stakes.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Julia's just trolling me with Packers' references. That's all that's happening here. So that kind of brings me to my last big overall question, which is, okay, here's the shape of the industry. You've got the big legacy players like Disney and Warner Media trying to shift their businesses, reorg them into being streaming first platforms. That's expressed as an app. You've got newer players like Apple and Amazon. They're buying movies or winning Oscars that's expressed as an app. You've got the future of live sports expressed as God knows how many apps. Why aren't the apps better”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They know that the fans are going to come out and find a way to watch this game. They know that they're going to pay for a way to do it. They know that they can own that relationship, that there's only one route to go through. With music, yes, they have to find different ways to differentiate themselves so it becomes all about the quality of what you're streaming. But it's much easier to go around the hurdles to go get that album. And really, to your point about the diminishing the audience for artists, that's a bigger deal when artists are like, hey, we want you to listen to our music so we can get the most people who come out to our concerts to buy our t-shirts. With the NFL, they want the most people to watch their games as well, but they're pretty guaranteed that if they, you know, Roger signs for the Packers for another four years, they'll sell more jerseys. People are still going to go to those games and they're still going to be able to sell Monday night football or Thursday night football at the highest price, the highest bidder. So they sell exclusivity because there's still real value in that.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in sports, fundamentally gets into the situation where if you're going to try to pirate a game, if you're going to try and look for a live feat of a game, it is by no means impossible, and Google has taken measures to make it more difficult. But it's still relatively easy. It shows up on like the fourth page of Google. There's a link that's like, watch this game. And so you can, and the quality is not great, but if someone really just wants to watch that game, it takes an effort to go find it, but they can do it with music if you can't find the album. It's relatively simple to download it from somewhere to have someone send you the links. Like, that's not necessarily a big hurdle with the games. It still feels like a challenge, even if it's Google a bull. There's still this challenge to get really good quality live streaming happening with the game. And they know that you're only going to get one Packers versus Vikings game, and that's going to be on a Monday. I use those teams for a reason. You're only going to get Packers versus Vikings on Monday.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I'm just going to go watch. Is that because all the deals are exclusive? Like, I would just compare that to music, for example. The music industry moved to streaming. There was a huge rush of exclusives. Then everyone sort of realized, oh, this is horrible. Like if you're on Apple Music and you get the exclusives, that's right. But if the exclusives on Spotify, that's horrible. The artists hated it because their audiences were getting diminished. They didn't like being used as marketing for services in that way. Eventually exclusives in a way. Everything's sort of everywhere now, but Apple competes with spatial audio or title has the highest quality or Amazon has its own version of both of those things. There's market differentiation and quality there because there are no exclusives. It sounds like the opposite in streaming where there's all kinds of exclusives. So there's really no emphasis on how sports look.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Room in there for competitors to kind of come in and say, We're going to focus really strongly on this, and then we're also going to figure out the right situations and kind of build our way up that way. You could look at ESPN on the Disney side, Disney could invest into the tech side and try to make it more of a better experience, but we don't see any actual investment being made here. And this is a conversation I have with friends in the industry who both work at these companies and people who don't. And it's always, well, we have the money for it. We could go into it. We could invest more, but we're investing everything in the rights, into content rights, into content acquisition. And so all the rest of it kind of gets left on the side because they just assume people will show up.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a diminishing product. It's whenever we watch it, you know, in my own household, was working with the Google Chromecast with TV and the 4K was not great. I don't even know if there was, but it was not great how it looked. So I upgraded to the new Apple TV. The 4K looks great on television in terms of what TV shows and movies, but it's still, you're not doing great with the sports. When you run YouTube TV through the Apple Stepbox, and the situation with that is you end up going to a bar and you're like, I'm just going to go watch this or I'm going to go to a friend's house who has cable and you're still spending more money on it. The idea seems to be we don't necessarily need to worry about how this looks because we have the content exclusively so people will have to come to us regardless. Almost like you're taking people hostage in the situation where like I'm going to pay for this because I want to watch the game or whatever it might be. But the lack of focus on the actual tech side of things, on the visuals of it, having a nice quality game.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That just sounds like my biggest frustration with sports streaming right now is that over-the-air antennas look better for sports than any app that I can currently subscribe to. Like sports look bad on YouTube TV. They look bad on the Fox Sports app. They look bad on Amazon. And then if you're in a major city, you can just put up an antenna and get the broadcast and look great. I understand that there's like a huge business dynamic happening here where you're going to say, okay, we've bled this stone dry and now we're going to migrate everyone over to streaming. But it seems like the lack of emphasis on the product itself is the actual biggest problem. Because if you told me, okay, you can get NFL Sunday ticket and all the games will look great. The best they can look in 4K, whatever, I would pay almost any amount of money for that.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By a large amount, it's getting more fragmented at the major level, the national level, and then it's also getting more fragmented within the actual RSN space and the regional sports network space. Bally, who owns a bunch of different regional sports networks, was going to launch its own app. So you'd pay basically $20,000, $30 to them to get some access to some regional sports, and you'd still need ESPN for Monday night football or NBC and CBS, or if you're trying to cut the cord entirely, you go to Peacock, you go to Paramount Plus. And so you end up paying more for arguably less of what you were actually getting within cable, but the idea is that as PTB households diminish, this is eventually going to happen. And the theory is that these companies are just waiting for that to drop below 50 million, 45 million households before they start saying, let's migrate everything to streaming, and the leagues will get behind them.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yankee games exclusively, which means that if you use Yes Network in the tri-state area, you cannot watch it. You have to go to Amazon to watch these games. That gets really annoying for people who essentially are going to have to use a service like Just Watch.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if the theory is that Amazon Prime Video is a way to sell additional retail products, sure, but also reduces churn for Amazon Prime, that is never actually been proven by the company in any meaningful public way. So it's hard to really state that the continued bet on sports from Amazon without that information is interesting because it clearly there's something that Amazon is seeing from the sports package, whether it's advertising, whether it is additional retail purchases when people come to watch it, whatever it might be, whether it is lower churn. The fact that they're continuously invested in different leagues seems to signify that there's some success there. But I do think what's going to happen with sports is that it is going to become, as I've been saying this podcast, much more fragmented, much more difficult to navigate, and much more annoying for fans. If we think about the most recent Amazon deal with the Yankee games, which is Amazon is going to host”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and you, I mean, that's exactly it, though. When we look at Apple and Amazon, we talk about them as major competitors in the SVOD space because they are major competitors no matter what space they want to be in. They are huge companies. But they've never broken out what Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV Plus do for their companies. The last time we heard about Amazon Prime Video, Jeff Bezos was still CEO, and he said at least of 175 million subscribers, everyone's watched at least one movie. And I was like, I hope that they're watching at least one movie.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tell you my theory Apple services revenue is almost entirely in app purchases in video games. That's not fancy. So they make TV shows so they can, when they talk about services, they can show pictures of Jennifer Anderson and Reese Witherspin.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's still an audience for it. And so if you're the league, you know you can get more money out of Amazon and Apple than you are out of the broadcasters for the most part. You still want to be in most homes because that is still important. You still want to be in the bars. You still don't trust their tech delivery. You're still concerned about is this going to lag? Is this just not going to be a thing? And then we alienate more viewers. But you're at a point where you're like, we want to experiment. So we're going to give you some of these deals. And if you're Apple and Amazon, you're saying we also would like to experiment and see if this is a business opportunity for us. For Apple, we're going to buy into a low stakes league. We're going to have some baseball. We're going to see if there's an audience for sports. We're going to see if this is something that we want in our Apple TV Plus package. You know, the question about what Apple TV Plus does for the services sector for Apple to the Apple I bundle and then to a larger extent Apple's core product, which is hardware and kind of keeping people within that ecosystem is still relevant.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we look at why sports was important to Linear is that sports was the easiest way to bring in new customers because people will seek out their favorite teams, fanatics will seek out every version of a game that they can. And so sports became the foundation for a lot of these cable networks and a lot of broadcast, of course. And it still works. I think what we're looking at is the league saying we don't know where we're going to generate the most revenue and we are open to new discussions. So when the NFL is saying we have different games and different packages that we can sell in Amazon is worth more money than God three times over and says we can bid however much they're going to bid on something and the other companies just can't. And for Amazon, it's a diamond, a bucket, same as Apple, it becomes a really great place, especially for leagues like the MLB, where the MLB has viewership issues. They're not pulling in good ratings, but it's still America's sport.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The unspoken player in this moment is Amazon, where Amazon goes, hey, part of the reason we work as a company is because a lot of these industries became much more fragmented and terrible to use and terrible to navigate. And we can offer things as one package and we'll come in and we'll underprice certain things because that's how Amazon has done it to build up prime. And then Amazon can come in and say, we have good TV, we're going to have a bunch of sports. They have baseball, they have football to an extent. And Amazon gets to come in and say, also, you're going to be able to shop and you're going to be able to stream Twitch and you're going to be able to listen to music or whatever you want to do with it. And that's the package that I think more people will gravitate towards, which is if I'm going to pay you for a bunch of this stuff, what else do I get with it?”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I literally started a hashtag what was like but why and people were I told people to use it to express their frustrations with UI and UX on streaming platforms because it's such an ongoing issue that's so noticeable what is going to happen my prediction is that the tech will not necessarily get better it will be usable and people will pay for it because they want the content and they will just deal with it but”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You hit the nail on the head, and also you know this from my time at the Verge where I would complain to you many times about UI and UX on streaming services. It's an issue and it's an issue that is not necessarily getting better. What happened is a lot of these companies came in after Netflix and they realized Netflix is making money on our content. We would like to own our content on our own platform. That's a decent thought that's, yeah, we would like to own that customer relationship, especially if we have other products like Comcast has their product, Disney has other stuff. You know, they have other things going on. The issue is they work content suppliers. And so they said, we will supply the content. We will make it. And the carriers, you carry it to people. It's on you. That's your thing now. Now they have to own both routes. Not only are they the content suppliers, they're carrying it to people. And if they don't carry, well, if the distribution does not work well, people will notice and they will tweet and they will say things and it becomes a whole issue for the companies.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is when they talk about being a tech company, they're still just talking about being an app, right? And owning your user journey, if you want to call it that, when you load the app, you're going to load it because you want to watch one thing. And then they're going to recommend another thing and then another thing. And they're going to market you a third thing that you'll watch tomorrow. And they control your experience the way that a cable company used to control your experience on a cable box, but they don't seem that invested in making those experiences great. And that is like the even Disney Plus is like a fine app, but I would not call it a great app. And it just seems like Netflix, for all of its various troubles because the market is totally saturated and they're still looking for growth and they might add ads or do games. For all that Netflix stuff, they still have the best app that does the best job of showing you things you might want to watch.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely paying more for television than I was when I paid for every channel. From Verizon FIOS, right? Like I just paid for every channel and ever thought I was nuts. But I was like, well, now I've ever channel. I'm just paying this one company for this bundle, but it has every channel. Now it's like, well, I'm paying YouTube TV. I'm paying for HBO Max. I'm paying for Netflix for a minute. I had to pay for Discovery Plus because there was one documentary that my wife wanted to watch and then I set a reminder on my phone to cancel it. Like that's where we're at, right? Like I'm just actively churning on and off these services. But like a combined Warner Media Discovery, yep, it might be cable light. But when we talk about tech companies, when we talk about these apps, the apps, like HMX is not well known for being a great app.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's parts of the landscape right now that are phenomenal, but it's getting really complicated and bloated and tedious again.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that creates a really annoying and frustrating and disingenuous experience for consumers that almost makes you say like, I'm going to go to Fubo TV or YouTube TV or Who With Light TV and just pick up one of those packages. And the only problem with that, the only problem is that these companies are no longer making good television for TV. They're saying if you want the really good series that everyone's talking about, you have to subscribe for a streaming services. And that is where this moment is going to come, this moment of friction is going to happen where you have your live TV for sports fans mostly who are basically saying, I'm going to subscribe because I want sports and news. It's why Rupert Murdoch kept Fox Sports Network and Fox News when he sold his company to Disney. But on the other side of it, you have all these people are saying, I want to watch the show. There's too many streaming services and I can't get any of them through a cable bundle if I go to get cable. So it's not great right now for consumers.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That generate revenue, and we want to kind of bundle them in some way, whether that's creating one platform that's an internal bundle, or the Disney streaming services bundle aspect where they're going, you pay $14, $15 and you get all three services, which is Hulu, ESPN plus Disney+.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot about how we're getting back to things feeling really bloated in a way that when streaming was first coming out, the promise of it was this idea of a la carte that you could not get via cable. That cable was you pay $100 and whatever it might be. That's how long it's been since I had cable. I don't know how much cable is these days, but you'd pay for the whole suite and it would be easy. There's a lot of things in one specific setting, but it's bloated. You have 500 channels and you're using maybe 40 of them. It just didn't feel good. And you couldn't get out of it. You know, trying to call a cable company to do anything with your plan was a tedious affair. So with streaming and especially with Netflix, it was this idea of, hey, you can just pay 10 bucks a month and you're going to get a bunch of different things, but you really control what you want. You're choosing to buy into it. It's your choice. And now with the consolidation happening and the conglomerates coming back in, they're basically saying, well, we have all these different products.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's super annoying because, especially because they won't allow the apples and the Rokus and the Amazons of the world to build an interface on top of all these apps, right? Like some of them will, some of them won't, and you're still jumping between apps.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always think of my mom in these situations. Would she care about the difference between HBO and HBO Max show? And she wouldn't. And a lot of people don't. A lot of people watch Station 11 and thought it was an HBO show. And then they figure out it's an HBO Mac show. People watch Euphoria and thought it was an HBO Mac series and it was an HBO show. Where this really matters is to the executives who oversee them and are kind of like, that's an HBO show. It's very different from HBO Max thing. And so it's important to them. But I think for the general consumer, the inherent value of just having all of that programming is better than trying to figure out who it belongs to eventually it just becomes, well, effect shows are on Hulu and I assume they're Hulu and HBO shows are on HBO. Max, so I assume they're HBO Max. As long as customers are paying, the top CEOs and COOs, they don't really care whether it's HBO or HBO Max. It's all being streamed.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually still don't know what the difference between HBO show and an HBO Max show is like they're labeled differently in the app, and I'm like, I don't, does that mean one's worse? And I think CNN Plus has the same problem.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so, and this is the whole issue when we talk about cable. I mean, the reason that CNN Plus can't carry CNN coverages because the affiliate revenue that they make from CNN and all the rights agreements that they have with advertisers is for CNN. They cannot bring it to CNN. Plus, it would be a whole headache for them. They can't do it. So until you figure out that situation, CNN Plus is basically just documentaries and reality programming. They can give it the CNN logo. That's what they did at HBO Max. They just had CNN programming and added a CNN block to it. And that's what it should be within a larger bundle. The idea of CNN Plus without news doesn't make any sense to me.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bundle and it will effectively be not a net loss for Warner Media, but they will just kind of invest in it as part of additional content to the overarching bundle. It's not going to be its own standalone product. It's not going to be a big thing that they are talking about. mentioned on Twitter at one point that it seemed like a way to retain talent as the talent wars are heating up when all of the different anchors are being talked to by all the different big companies to take on different roles and to be the face of all these streaming services. And I heard from someone at CNN who told me that they felt it was the exact same thing and that's how”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the type of app that gets launched for what we would refer to as super fans, ESPN Plus would be comparable. It is for a specific type of person who is interested in what I refer to as infotainment. It is Anthony Burdain. It is kind of documentaries. It's daily shows from the CNN host that are not about CNN. And this is the main issue, right? You use the term plus for CNN. You would assume you get CNN and then some, but it's CNN minus. You don't get CNN. You don't have live programming really. You don't have access to the type of journalism that people turn to for CNN when there's a war, when there's a pandemic, when they want to get first up to the minute news. And so what we will see happen with CNN Plus, I am positive, is it will exist for maybe about a year, maybe a little bit longer, and then it will kind of be thrown into the inevitable HBO Max Discovery Plus CNN.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Him and the company at large, but Zaslav seems much more inclined to say we're going to bring sports onto the platform. So you got a little bit of sports, you got a little bit of news via CNN Plus, which just launched, and I'm sure that will roll into whatever the one platform is that they launch, which it will be Discovery Plus, HEO Max, and CNN Plus. And the question that comes out of this is what do you price it at? And at what point are you just recreating cable, but in a much more fragmented and almost annoying way?”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now Warner Media is merging with Discovery, which has split people on whether it's a good or bad idea. But I think what makes the most sense for those two companies is they are perfectly complementary of each other. HBO Max tends to skew a little bit older and much more male. Discovery is a little bit older as well, but much more female. And the reality programming of discovery can become younger if they focus on those creative pursuits. And HBO Max can figure out a way to go a little bit younger with the animation side that they're really trying to get into. And so if you combine those things, what you effectively have is cable light. It's basically like here's where you can get all of your favorite entertainment. We're going to maybe do a little bit of sports in here. This is a conversation that David Zaslav, who's the CEO of Discovery, will have with his team, Jason Kyler, again, CEO of Warner Media, famously said he did not want sports on the platform. They also own TNT. Sports on TNT is a very big deal.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. The initial thought from John Stanky in the AT&T team was that if they could vertically integrate Warner Media into their division, they could use Warner Media to sell better phone plans. The idea was always to supplement the core product, which is a conversation I have with many of my clients, which is what is your core product that you were trying to build around with the introduction of a direct-to-consumer platform? Like what is this thing you're trying to do? So AT&T thought if we have Warner Media, this will help us in the same way that Comcast and NBC Universal worked as a company in 2011 when they emerged and are still together. It did not go as great as expected. It turns out that if you offer HBO Max on an assortment of platforms, an assortment of ways people will not necessarily watch it on their phone via AT&T wireless. They may watch it in different situations.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was proof that if the movie is good, people will find it. And also, if it's available online, it becomes much easier to create earned media around it. And that was a big part of the Encanto success story. But the question for Pixar, for Disney Animation, for everyone else, is if we lose that theatrical placement, if the theaters just become morbious and Spider-Man and whatever it might be, what does that mean for the future of our entertainment? How does that affect our value? And that's something, again, that comes back to the miscommunication sector where this is something a CEO with really strong emotional intelligence like Eiger would have many, many conversations about this and try to figure out how to make everyone happy, shareholders, consumers, and employees. And I think Bob Chapek is much more focused on shareholders and consumers.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Declining over the last 20 years, which is true, but attendance for certain films, which tend to be superhero sequels, and scaries. I call them the 3S's, tend to increase. So what that means is people are going to theaters less, but they're going to see more of a certain type of movie. The argument from the other side of it is if studios remove 30% of their theatrical releases to move to streaming, which is what a lot of these companies are doing, how can you argue with the data that actually there is a decline if there's no opportunity to see if people will actually return to those movies if it's quote unquote superhero fatigue, which isn't really proven, kicks in. And this is this.”
2022-04-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT