What Do Streaming Services Provide to Build Your Own Live Broadcast? The Case of HBO and Barry, “The Last of Us”
There was going to be a live show on Sunday. Its scheduled start time was delayed by a couple minutes. It will be on in 15 minutes.
The service promised the show would be worth the wait in a few minutes. A screen that said it was almost time was on the screen when the subscribers tried to access the stream. The live event will start soon.”
Live broadcast rights are a high cost for the company and it has been notoriously resistant. The company lost subscribers as consumer behavior shifted. The company started experimenting with live broadcasts as the media landscape continues to shift.
The growing pains of streaming have been made clear by the popular show, “Love is Blind”, which reinforces some advantages that traditional and linear TV networks still enjoy.
While this debate is hardly a new one, the interest from streaming services in approximating what broadcast and cable networks do, at least occasionally, does seem like a tacit admission that there’s still life left in viewing patterns that persisted for decades. It also comes as TV channels ramp up to make their case to advertisers placing billions of dollars worth of bets on programming in what are known as the annual “upfront” presentations.
While streaming built subscribers with a consumer-friendly “Have it your way” approach – basically telling viewers that they can watch at their own pace, including the ability to binge series in their entirety over a few days – they have also seen wisdom in experimenting with more conventional, old-school distribution patterns.
The idea of having episodes at weekly intervals is being considered by more streamers because it would allow the audience to devour them all at once. The more traditional pattern has been used to build suspense and excitement in shows like “Barry” and “The Last of Us.” (Like CNN, HBO is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.)
As NPR critic Eric Deggans put it in a recent discussion of the pros and cons of the practice, staggering the release “spreads the impact of a show on the zeitgeist. People start talking about it, and it gets peoples attention, and it snowballs into a pop culture phenomenon.
The executives leading those networks have largely been on the defensive in recent years, as they watch ratings decline and more consumers “cut the cord” in terms of anteing up for a monthly cable or satellite bill, shifting their entertainment dollars to a hodge-podge of streaming services.