Hacker Cinema
Utopia
2020 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Gillian Flynn
A group of young adults who met online are mercilessly hunted by a shadowy deep state organization after they come into possession of a near-mythical cult underground graphic novel.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I expected an article about whether the Amazon Prime TV series Utopia would be renewed for a second season.
> Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists ... not wanting to mess around with tasks that are unrelated to creativity such as managing a web server farm to distribute their videos to their fans.
This exact same argument can also be made wrt Musicians. Justin Bieber has no interest in managing a web server farm to distribute his music to fans. And yet, I'm able to go online and purchase specific Justin Bieber songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.
> Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists not having money to self-finance their projects
This seems like a much stronger argument, and I agree that making a TV show is vastly more expensive than making songs. But the vast majority of new musicians do not self-finance their first few albums either. They sign up with a record label, and the record label finances the production/marketing/distribution costs. And ultimately, when consumers pay money to buy the songs/albums, a cut of that money goes back to the record company in order for them to recoup their investment.
The exact same model can work for television shows as well. HBO bankrolls David Fincher $100M to produce Utopia. Customers who want to watch Utopia can pay money just to watch Utopia, without having to sign up for HBO. And as "equity holders", a percentage of that customer money goes back to HBO.
I'm sure there are many other niggling issues that need to be worked out, but at a fundamental level, I don't see why this revised model can't work. Allowing consumers to pay only for the shows that they want to watch, instead of forcing them to pay for an entire monthly bundle, seems like it should be much more economically efficient.