Why Streaming Doesn't Feel Like Home Anymore: The Evolution of TV

00:00How much do you spend on streaming every month? much do I spend? Yeah, this is Or how much do other people spend on my behalf? Thank you to Hostinger for sponsoring this video and to our patrons for supporting the channel. Okay, let me Google how much it costs because I don't know what these cost. Okay, I did some Googling. Thank goodness I don't pay for all this myself. I don't like hearing that. You want to know why? I have all of them and I'm paying for all of them. Who loses out if I have a VPN and a dream? Yeah, like why are they also so pressed about sharing passwords? Are they really that broke? Woman who doesn't pay for streaming services. Are you really that broke? Do you use all of

00:39these services every month? Ah, I open it every day. That's crazy. It might be. I ended up doing the math and it turns out I spend 97 Canadian dollars and 86 Canadian cents every month to watch videos on the internet. The thing you're doing right now for free. But the funny thing is, is that I don't really care about the money. My problem with streaming isn't the cost. It's that it just, it doesn't feel like home anymore. I might be the only person who feels this way. If you search up the state of streaming on the internet right now, you're gonna find a half dozen video essays with millions of views saying, gotta go back to piracy. But at risk of sounding like a bootlicker, I don't really

01:17wanna do that anymore. Don't ask me what's on this hard drive. Now, I do think there's a valid case for archiving work so it doesn't vanish in case some loser with a spreadsheet doesn't want to pay residuals, but beyond that, I don't mind using my disposable income on things that are important to me, and streaming services are weirdly important to me. Maybe it's because I've been using them since the beginning. Do you remember this? My family cut the cable in the late 2000s in favor of this, a Netflix disc for the Nintendo Wii console that connected to their video streaming service. It's so old that they had to remind people not to return the disc. For the first time, didn't need to worry

01:52about recording programs or managing our DVR. We didn't need to get a box set if we wanted to watch every episode of a TV show. Now, this meant a lot to me specifically because I'm a youngest child, which meant that I had no control over the remote during the best TV hours. But Netflix meant that I could watch what I wanted when I wanted. And it turns out that was all of the time. I am finally, finally, 100% caught up with Castle and

02:19I'm... They shaped my interest and personality in comically obvious ways. Whoever. I'm the castle, castle, castle. I really am, I'm the handsome one. I spent my days exploring different worlds with different characters. Top three, by the way, are 30 Rock, Psych, and now Scrubs. No particular order. They're all just so good. This sort of constancy was only possible thanks to streaming giving me a new way to watch TV. Shows weren't just something I caught when it was on. They were a place to live for a few seasons. And before you say that this is just what happens when you're an adult with responsibilities, I want to say that my life is comically similar to what it was ten years ago. Let me

02:58just find this one clip. So I'm eventually going to get up and go edit yesterday's daily vlog and probably just watch the Mindy project on my second monitor. But that's about all for today. If you want to see me keep making daily vlogs, make sure to like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you tomorrow. That was ten years ago. The only thing that's different is my glasses. my entire life has been making YouTube videos and watching TV, except I'm not watching TV anymore. I think my problem is that there's just too much friction. I'm reaching for my phone to use Instagram instead of watching TV because TV just feels like so much work nowadays. I know I sound cooked, but like, I just picture

03:34it as browsing, clicking through different apps and titles and watching the sorry excuse for what counts as a trailer nowadays as it auto plays while I'm trying to read the show description. I can't escape into another world because it feels like I'm stuck in traffic trying to get there. But I want to go to there because I love TV. So I want to figure out how to bring back the parts of the streaming experience that I loved as a kid to find my way back home. To start, I look for what was making streaming feel so insufferable nowadays. There were a bunch of articles explaining the rising cost and economics of it all, but when it came down to the actual experience of watching stuff, This one

04:12idea kept popping up in different words. Abundance of options. Content overload. Choice fatigue. Basically... My lobster too buttery! My steak too juicy! My content!

04:28That's what I sound like. And you know what? I'm right. Because it is a problem. For two reasons. First we have the paradox of choice. Or overchoice. Or choice overload. Bit of an ironic name. But it's when too many choices gets in the way of making a decision. Alongside that we have decision fatigue. where making too many decisions impairs your ability to make more decisions. Both of these things can collide after a long day of living in a society. YAY! Maybe we're fighting off a crash out over a customer, or a coworker, or an exclamation point in an email. But we also need to decide what to eat, when to do our laundry, whether or not we should cancel that gym membership that we never used,

05:01or maybe we should just start going to the gym? All the while our phone just sends us more things that we need to decide. Should I text them back? What do I do about the news? It just won't shut up! All of these choices can build up into this big lump of exhausting reality. So you might want to escape for a second to a different world. But to do that... You have to make more choices! Bah! Bah! Now I'll admit, struggling with what to watch isn't new. Before all of this, we were loitering in a blockbuster or flipping through TV channels. But the difference now is that there is so much more. We're all choice overloaded and decision fatigued, so it can be tempting just to choose not to choose.

05:46Just settle back into a comfort show or scroll on social media, which makes all the decisions for you. But,

05:52I don't know. I just don't want to be so passive with this thing that I care about. I don't want to be the kind of person who's convinced that all of the good TV shows were made when I was a kid during my formative years, just because I haven't had the time to really engage with anything new. So how do we fix this? Well, the same way we always do. With a website made with Hostinger! They've been sponsoring videos on this channel for almost five years now. So, I want to get rid of all the decisions that don't matter and focus on the only one that does. What do I want to watch? So I made a simple tool that lets you browse titles and add it to your watch list. Nice! So understimulating. Then it

06:30just tells you which streaming service has the most stuff that you actually want to watch. Wow! This should simplify the math of which streaming service you should get and help you stay focused when you actually use it. You've already made the one choice that matters, so you're free to ignore all the chaos. Or embrace it. I don't know where you sit on the alignment chart. I think they should make streaming easier. And I know that it was easy to make, thanks to Hostinger. I got my premium hosting plan, which is available for just $2.99 a month. I got my free domain that comes with a hosting plan. And I got my free business mailbox so all your bug reports don't clog up my main email address.

07:02But there won't be any bugs. Because I didn't code the backend. Instead I made no code workflows with NADAM. They have hundreds of nodes and integrations that you just drag and drop. No need to code, no need to worry about semicolons. Now, N8n does have a cloud platform, but I prefer to self -host because I don't want to have to worry about rate limiting in case you guys make this website go viral like you did for spellcheck. More than a thousand people still go to this website every day! I made this game as a joke! Self -hosting also keeps my data and your data, if you use the site, more private. So I use Hostinger's self -hosted N8n plan. It's really convenient being able to manage all

07:35things related to my website in one dashboard. These two plans make it possible for me to make basically any website, web app, tool I can imagine while writing basically no code. It's awesome! I'd call it a miracle, but it's actually just Hostinger. One of the most comprehensive and affordable web hosting platforms out there. You can make your portfolio, online store, vibe -coded app all in one place. Literally, you can host multiple websites with one plan. If you're ready to get started, could go to hostinger.com forward slash answerinprogress or click the first link in the description. And you can use our code ANSWERINPROGRESS for 10% off your first purchase. Either way, we've got a

08:09website, now let's use it and see if we saved streaming. No big deal. I made a website. Oh no. Do you guys remember how I have all the streaming services? Oh That you pay for every single one of them. To be honest, my problem isn't the money. My problem is that I just want to be using the streaming services. spoken like a true secret billionaire. My problem isn't the money, it's the principle of it all. Okay, explain, explain. The problem is... When I was younger, I built my identity around what I watched. I loved it so, much. And

08:54that just doesn't happen anymore. And it made me sad. Well, you have all of these streaming services. How are you not getting lost in pop culture? You have them all at your fingertips. That's exactly it. I should be able to do this thing that I was able to do back when like there was one streaming service Why does it seem harder than ever? And I think it's because there's just too much streaming services. I'm having This is actually the funniest conversation we've ever had I pay for 10 streaming services My problem is that there are too many streaming services you pay for 10 streaming services Hearing it out loud. I don't even know what this video is about This conversation

09:39is so funny. I love the two juicy Like truly like what are we talking about?

09:53Anyway, you have ten streaming services and that's a problem for you because you were a child once I kind of wish we had this Conversation a little earlier because it feels like the answer should have been only use one streaming service But it's... What have you done? I made a website. Wow. What do I do? You make a watch list on the website and then it tells you which streaming service has the most of the stuff on your watch list. Way, actually kind of good. this might be, no offense, Sabrina, this might be the first genuinely useful website that you have made for a video. You can kind of create your list of things that you want to watch without being overwhelmed by an

10:38actual streaming service that's trying to tell you that you want to watch this thing. You're like, do I actually want to watch this thing? So you can make your list without the distractions of streaming services. So true. It made choosing what I want to watch stop feeling overwhelming. And I just got to experience the fun of discovery again. I also liked there's a section where it'll show you one item and you can say yes or no. That's great. Okay, so remind me again. What is your problem? Are you trying to reduce the number of subscriptions that you are currently subscribed to? Okay, so theoretically yes. This should have helped me manage my streaming service subscriptions. I can't cancel

11:13any of my plans because they're all annual subscriptions. Oh no! Theoretically it could help though. My website, while I think it's useful, it didn't solve every problem people have with streaming. I shared the website with our audience and 33% of people just said, no, this was not useful to me. A lot of it boiled down to the fact that like there are people out there who want to boycott big streamers entirely for a lot of reasons. There are the labor disputes that drove the writer and actor strikes. There are these unpredictable catalogs due to licensing or memory holding work for a tax break. There's the introduction of ads, which kind of defeats the entire purpose that streaming started

11:57with and like some people just want to opt out of that. only subscribe to a couple of streaming services, but when there's something that I want to watch that's just not on a streaming service, I will just buy the digital copy. Really? I think this comes from me when I was a kid, I would just buy the DVD box sets. I have three Minion movies in high res Blu -ray 3D. You really need to see that. I think that a lot of people's problems with streaming is very valid and it makes me appreciate physical media a lot more. One thing I think I'm going to try and do with the website is also use like the eBay API to add another option on top of streaming for like everything that you search for. Check if

12:35there is a DVD available for it but honestly ever since I made this first version I haven't spent that much more time working on it because I have been too busy watching things again guys since I made this site last week I have watched two entire TV series. Whoa, I thought you were say two movies. Me too! That's crazy! Seasons or series? Two series. Five seasons total of media. In two weeks? In one week. In one week? I watched all of Barry and season one of Widows Bay. It... Ah! So good! The Tumblr girl is back. Well! She's ready to make some gift sets. Yes and no. What do mean? They're both like really good. Like I

13:19was watching them and I was like, oh, this is like art. Like I'm watching something that is like just truly beautiful craftsmanship. Uh oh. But it doesn't hit the same as like... That's cause you're not a child! That's cause you're not a child! No no no! That's not true! At the same time that I was watching these two shows, I have also been making my way through the West Wing. I hate this show. Aaron Sorkin needs to pay for his crimes! And yet here I am searching it up on Pinterest and Tumblr and AO3. AO3 of the West Wing? What even is... That is a fan fiction website. Hands off the keyboard. Okay.

14:04And so it's not because I'm an adult now, because I'm still capable of being cringe. Oh sure that's another way to put it. The West Wing was made 20 plus years ago. There's something about it that feels different compared to shows that are made more recently. Shows that I know that are objectively good, but it just doesn't trap me in the same way. And I don't know why. think that streaming has probably changed the way TV is made. But I don't know if that means that it doesn't hit the same. Maybe you are just not watching the shows that hit the same way as that show. So I decided to watch what the fangirls were watching. To be honest, it was a blast,

14:49especially watching with friends. However, it still wasn't hitting the same. Something still felt off. Now, don't get me wrong. I am having a great time watching the Summer I Turned Pretty Season 1 Episode 4 Summer Heat. But if I think about it, I'm like 15% of the way through the show. There's just not enough show. And the interesting thing is, if I want more show, I get directed towards the books instead of fan fiction. These fandoms are not popping off in the way that I would expect from like the cultural reach of these shows. Not only is there less stuff, but there's also less space to play with it. And then I think about the equivalent shows that would have been made 20 years ago,

15:27Gossip Girl, The O.C., those shows, they made some unexpected choices, some of which got turned into some of the greatest SNL skits of all time. This is a loose homage to the final moment of the season two finale of The O.C. It was incredibly stupid, but also, I don't know, incredibly human? There is a chance that I'm just being nostalgic about the past, but it really feels like moments like that don't happen in TV anymore. Somebody in the comments is gonna say like, no, this show does that, this show does that. I've been watching a lot of TV. Still looking for it. These weird human choices that don't necessarily serve the story, where did they go? It's been a

16:11process for creators of figuring out how to effectively tell stories in different ways. My name is Amanda Latz. I'm a professor of media studies currently at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. But I am by birth American and spent much of my career studying media industries in the US. And she studied them. This is just a handful of her books exploring how technological infrastructure actually impacts the stories that get told. So in order to really appreciate what is different about TV shows today, I think we need to understand the past. We need to know how older technology shaped the foundations of TV in order to see how streaming changed it. Amanda was kind

16:53enough to walk me through the major evolutionary stages of TV, starting with broadcast. Broadcast, I think the word that I would use in conjunction with that is scarcity. Building off radio technology, broadcast work by capturing audio and video, converting it into an electrical signal, and transmitting that signal through the air at a specific frequency, or channel. As in, TV channel. Now, anyone with an antenna could catch that transmission and convert the signal back to a show. But not just anyone could send transmissions. It was a technically difficult thing to do, but more importantly, if there were too many transmissions, it would clog the airways. It would make them unusable. The

17:29government would organize them, we created licenses, and in most places there weren't very many licenses, and that's where the scarcity comes from. With only a handful of broadcasters needing to appeal to entire nations at once, the programming was pretty generic. the early 50s and 60s, there were lot of family sitcoms. Westerns were really big. Police shows, medical shows. The game was to try to attract the most attention because that attention would be sold to advertisers. Now we all know that our attention is being sold to advertisers, even the good ones. You can use Code Answer in Progress for 10% off your first website by clicking the link in the description. But it's important to note

18:05just how mass appeal this media was meant to be. Early broadcast programming was designed to appeal to as many people as possible, no matter the age, race, politics, education. Broadcast technology was for everyone. And so the shows were designed for numbers, not niches. That started to change with cable. Cable started actually fairly soon after television, only as a technology to help people who, due to geography, like mountains or living with big skyscrapers, couldn't receive those signals over the air. So cable just started as an alternative way to transmit and receive shows. The advantage for cable companies was that they could charge people for access in a way that broadcasters

18:45couldn't. But in order to get people to pay, they needed to offer something new. In the 70s, you have the launch of some new kinds of content. It's mostly around specialized channels, So sports, ESPN is one of the earliest ones. CNN was probably particularly important. That ability to be able to watch news at any point in the day, that was new then. HBO, they start to sort of do things that people would say, can't do that on television, partly because they weren't governed by the same rule as broadcasters. But I'd say even more so because of their business model. They were able to cater to people who wanted something different and were so desirous of that that they were willing to pay. Now,

19:28when I hear sports, news, HBO, I don't think niche, but that might just be because I am in the niche. This thing that happens in the early 2000s, like the New York Times would talk about HBO as though this was, you know, the thing that everyone was consuming. was probably very important to people who read the New York Times. Not only is this the sickest burn I have ever heard, it's also kinda true. The finale of HBO's Succession, one of the greatest TV shows of this decade, had a series high of 2.9 million views. Young Sheldon's series finale had 9 million! And that wasn't even the highest viewed episode! I think that that is

20:13crazy, but now I understand why. Young Sheldon is a broadcast show. It is mass appeal by design. succession is specialized. It appeals to a narrower audience who is more invested. It's not fungible! Now this isn't a strict dichotomy. As broadcast and cable evolved side by side, I think there were shows that blended the best of both worlds. 30 Rock and Psych followed the broadcast formula. They were workplace procedurals, but they were weird. The West Wing was also broadcast, but was written like a cable show, except the seasons were way longer. This led to lot of filler episodes and storylines, some of which were great! Squeezes piece of rye bread.

20:50Now what do I do? most of which were terrible. But we gotta just spend time with the characters in their world. I think that's what I miss. Weirdos with the airtime to play. Barry and Widow's Bay and Hacks and Shrinking and Severance and all the great shows today have incredible characters and worlds that I don't get to spend time with because the plot keeps getting in the way. I know what I sound like. I know that that is a stupid thing to complain about, but it's my stupid thing, okay? Television used to have space for this full spectrum of tight stories and shows about nothing. But in the streaming age, things feel off balance. So what changed? Netflix seems to have learned from cable. It

21:31didn't come in trying to do cheap shows. It was sort of like a shock and awe campaign. That was, I think, important for what Netflix was trying to do, which was not necessarily to get people to watch House of Cards, but subscribe to the service. That's how they win. Streamers needed to offer something that broadcasts and cable couldn't, something that played to specific strengths. They had venture capital to pay for stars. They had algorithmic recommendations to reach more specific audiences and connect them to a more diverse array of creators and stories. But most importantly, they weren't confined to an airtime. They didn't need to worry about people missing an episode or filling a time

22:07slot or building in an ad break. And that's really the big difference. One is about trying to get people to watch specific shows at certain times so that you can sell their attention. And the other is about getting people to pay for your service month after month. Watching a television show in the same way that they would read a book. You know, I have some spare time on Monday, I will watch an hour. I have more spare time on Wednesday, I will watch two episodes. Part of why maybe the storytelling, I think, does feel substantially different to audiences is, you know, those are very different. That's a different mode of production. And this different mode of production, big stars, small

22:39seasons, driven by plot, is only becoming more dominant as traditional broadcasters and cable networks launch their own platforms. And I pay for more streaming subscriptions. Because honestly, I think this is a good thing. At least for storytelling. It turns out you get better stories if writers aren't building the plane as they fly up. But this has also really clarified what I miss about the pre -streaming era. I miss when shows weren't so polished. Even today's fangirl -friendly shows are adaptations. The story is already written. But TV used to be filled with drop storylines and forgotten characters, the types of stuff that, like, fandoms could explore without consequence. For long

23:16-running shows, writers would break the procedural format for just one episode to do something weird and fun. A musical. A fourth wall break. A live show. A love letter to television as this unique and distinct medium. So I guess the reason why TV doesn't hit the same way it used to is just because it isn't the same. The fancy academic way that we could put it is, well, if you change the mode of production, you change what can be made. And if you change what is made, you change the culture. It's kinda weird knowing that the thing I loved about old TV shows was definitely a bug, not a feature. Broadcast television was just trying to compete with cable, but they had way more airtime to fill.

23:57So there was space for things to get a little weird, and incentive to make dramatic choices that don't really have any other purpose than getting people to watch the next season. Streaming has made it possible to tell stories in a new way, and therefore tell new sorts of stories. Ones that are way more precise, and for audiences that are so specific that you can only reach enough of them if you have an algorithm. That's not a bad thing, it's just a different thing. And I'll always have my DVDs and my completely unrelated hard drive. But I think it's time for me to stop focusing on the past because it's getting in the way of me appreciating the present and all the ways TV is evolving. What

24:33stories can only be told in this world, in this culture, with this technology? I don't fully know yet because there is a lot of them, but I can't wait to find out.