streaming wars | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! In Defense of Apple TV+…

Posted on February 16, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist earlier this week. With the upcoming release of Severance on Apple TV+, it seemed like a good excuse to take a look at one of the most interesting players in the streaming wars.

Apple TV+ lacks many of the advantages shared by its competitors. It doesn’t have a deep library of back content and intellectual property like Disney+, HBO Max and Paramount+. It also lacks the reach of Netflix or Amazon Prime. However, slowly and surely, without the comfort of existing brands and established intellectual property, Apple TV+ has managed to carve out a unique and distinctive identity in the stremaing wars. Not everything on the service works, but there’s generally a sense that anything that made it to screen is there because somebody fought for it.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: apple tv, brand, dickinson, intellectual propert, see, severance, streaming, streaming wars, ted lasso | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “The Mandalorian”, Continuity and Brand Synergy…

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. There’s been a lot of Star Wars continuity dropped into the second season of The Mandalorian, with Boba Fett returning to the show following his apparent death in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, and the live action introduction of characters like Bo Katan and Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars.

This is interesting, in large part because the first season of The Mandalorian was comfortable aiming for a broader sort of Star Wars nostalgia, things that looked like existing elements of continuity, rather than things that were existing elements of Star Wars continuity. The second season is much more heavy of Star Wars cross-promotion, populated with references designed to push viewers towards supplementary material. This is a nice illustration of transmedia storytelling in the streaming age, where it isn’t enough to attract fans, services have to retain them.

Streaming services hold on to existing subscribers by adding value, and Disney appear to have figured out that continuity offers its own added value. In its second season, The Mandalorian increasingly feels like an advertisement for the other riches that the streaming service has to offer, and a promise that any subscriber who doesn’t cancel once the season is over will have a treasure trove of archival material to binge at their leisure.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.