More Canon in Fewer Hands
1) Kitty understands what to do with birthday candles, plus mommy hugs.
2) I've been reading some old Trek tie-ins on my bookshelf in preparation for weeding items. I read The Lost Years by J.M. Dillard which fills in part of the gap in between the Enterprise's 5 year mission and the first Trek film. I thought it did a remarkably good job of explaining what might have sent Spock, McCoy and Kirk on their separate ways and what might have convinced Kirk to accept a promotion.
What interested me is that I'm also re-reading Enterprise by Vonda McIntyre about Kirk's first voyage as Enterprise captain, and I noticed that there are things in it that Dillard apparently followed up on, such as the nature of Arcturus and Uhura's musical instrument maker. Just one of several reasons why the early tie-in novels were so much better than what started happening in the 90s.
3) Saw the Christmas episode of British Baking Show with the Derry Girls, which was apparently last December. Very enjoyable, rather a mix of GBBS and Nailed It! When the showstoppers were being reviewed we laughed so hard in parts that we had to pause the playback.
4) Given that I haven't been in the fandom in years, my account has rather a lot of Supernatural icons and I acquired one more in this past week. It made me realize there are bigger issues at work here.
SPN isn't just a dinosaur because it was around for 15 seasons -- it's because TV has changed since they started. If you've got shows that run 3 seasons with about 10-13 episodes each, your whole canon may contain 30 or so hours of content (less if it's a half-hour comedy or has lots of time cut for commercials). SPN had that in under two seasons.
Also if more shows now are ensemble ones -- and there are some signs that they're increasing even if a minority -- then the amount of screen time given to each of those character will be less than if there were just 2-3 regulars.
That means that an artist or vidder has a TON more content to create from in SPN than for most other shows in the last decade. Also, the fact that it was so long running means that it didn't just have more hours of material, but that there was continuously new stuff to create from vs a relatively long closed canon from 20 years ago.
All of which is to say that there are fandoms I'd be interested in having icons for that I haven't seen any content for, while new SPN icons will probably keep appearing for years.
5) "The sale of song catalogues has become a booming business during the Covid-19 pandemic, with investors seeing music as a relatively stable asset in an otherwise turbulent market. The likes of Blondie, Barry Manilow and the estates of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain have all sold the rights to their music in recent years.
The London-based Hipgnosis SongsFund alone has spent more than $1bn (£750m) buying up hits by Rihanna, Beyonce and Justin Timberlake - with the Church Of England amongst the investors who share the royalties."
Meanwhile, "The biggest book publisher in the United States is about to get bigger. ViacomCBS has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for more than $2 billion in a deal that will create the first megapublisher."
For literary agents and authors, the wave of consolidations has meant fewer potential buyers for books from authors without a proven track record.
“There are projects that would have sold for $150,000 years ago that might not sell at all now to the big five, whereas the book that would have sold for $500,000 might go for a million,” said the literary agent David Kuhn. “They would rather go in bigger for the thing that they have the most consensus on.”
Of note here is that the book business is doing pretty much what the film industry has been doing in the past decades -- jacking up prices while also reducing risk by spending money on blockbusters, while greatly reducing the midlist sort of films and leaving small projects to indie producers.
And they're not wrong about what sells. While there is still money to be made from quality dramas, for example, that tends to be outstripped by more mass market fare like thrillers, action films, and scifi/fantasy content.
Take, for example, all the fuss about The Crown's latest season. It wasn't among the top streaming content in 2019 in the UK and remains a lot less viewed worldwide than other content, even though Netflix has gone from counting a view as 70% watched (which I think was actually too restrictive) to just 2 minutes which could be hit easily by autoplay. (I'd be fine with 30% counting as a view which would mean a range of 10-20-1 hour depending on the content size).
He said BBC drama series with smaller budgets, such as Bodyguard, were watched by more people than The Crown.
"I mentioned the Bodyguard finale reaching 17 million viewers," he told a media conference in London. "That was in one month. Our data suggests The Crown reached seven million users in 17 months."
Netflix also announced that new fantasy drama The Witcher was watched by 76 million households in its first month. The show, about a mutated monster hunter, gave Netflix its best result yet for a first-season original TV series.
Meanwhile, the second season of You was watched by 54 million households, and Michael Bay's action thriller film 6 Underground, starring Ryan Reynolds, was seen by 83 million.
People have been complaining about how smaller, quality niche shows, are increasingly being cancelled by Netflix 1 or 2 seasons in. And in some cases the amount of money spent is not that high overall, but you can be sure that they have stats and benchmarks about how much return they expect to get in terms of views and subscriptions from a set amount of money. One thing's for sure -- a few big players in an industry does not lead to more experimentation or risk taking when it comes to less "sure thing" projects.
View poll: Kudos Footer-241
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
2) I've been reading some old Trek tie-ins on my bookshelf in preparation for weeding items. I read The Lost Years by J.M. Dillard which fills in part of the gap in between the Enterprise's 5 year mission and the first Trek film. I thought it did a remarkably good job of explaining what might have sent Spock, McCoy and Kirk on their separate ways and what might have convinced Kirk to accept a promotion.
What interested me is that I'm also re-reading Enterprise by Vonda McIntyre about Kirk's first voyage as Enterprise captain, and I noticed that there are things in it that Dillard apparently followed up on, such as the nature of Arcturus and Uhura's musical instrument maker. Just one of several reasons why the early tie-in novels were so much better than what started happening in the 90s.
3) Saw the Christmas episode of British Baking Show with the Derry Girls, which was apparently last December. Very enjoyable, rather a mix of GBBS and Nailed It! When the showstoppers were being reviewed we laughed so hard in parts that we had to pause the playback.
4) Given that I haven't been in the fandom in years, my account has rather a lot of Supernatural icons and I acquired one more in this past week. It made me realize there are bigger issues at work here.
SPN isn't just a dinosaur because it was around for 15 seasons -- it's because TV has changed since they started. If you've got shows that run 3 seasons with about 10-13 episodes each, your whole canon may contain 30 or so hours of content (less if it's a half-hour comedy or has lots of time cut for commercials). SPN had that in under two seasons.
Also if more shows now are ensemble ones -- and there are some signs that they're increasing even if a minority -- then the amount of screen time given to each of those character will be less than if there were just 2-3 regulars.
That means that an artist or vidder has a TON more content to create from in SPN than for most other shows in the last decade. Also, the fact that it was so long running means that it didn't just have more hours of material, but that there was continuously new stuff to create from vs a relatively long closed canon from 20 years ago.
All of which is to say that there are fandoms I'd be interested in having icons for that I haven't seen any content for, while new SPN icons will probably keep appearing for years.
5) "The sale of song catalogues has become a booming business during the Covid-19 pandemic, with investors seeing music as a relatively stable asset in an otherwise turbulent market. The likes of Blondie, Barry Manilow and the estates of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain have all sold the rights to their music in recent years.
The London-based Hipgnosis SongsFund alone has spent more than $1bn (£750m) buying up hits by Rihanna, Beyonce and Justin Timberlake - with the Church Of England amongst the investors who share the royalties."
Meanwhile, "The biggest book publisher in the United States is about to get bigger. ViacomCBS has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for more than $2 billion in a deal that will create the first megapublisher."
For literary agents and authors, the wave of consolidations has meant fewer potential buyers for books from authors without a proven track record.
“There are projects that would have sold for $150,000 years ago that might not sell at all now to the big five, whereas the book that would have sold for $500,000 might go for a million,” said the literary agent David Kuhn. “They would rather go in bigger for the thing that they have the most consensus on.”
Of note here is that the book business is doing pretty much what the film industry has been doing in the past decades -- jacking up prices while also reducing risk by spending money on blockbusters, while greatly reducing the midlist sort of films and leaving small projects to indie producers.
And they're not wrong about what sells. While there is still money to be made from quality dramas, for example, that tends to be outstripped by more mass market fare like thrillers, action films, and scifi/fantasy content.
Take, for example, all the fuss about The Crown's latest season. It wasn't among the top streaming content in 2019 in the UK and remains a lot less viewed worldwide than other content, even though Netflix has gone from counting a view as 70% watched (which I think was actually too restrictive) to just 2 minutes which could be hit easily by autoplay. (I'd be fine with 30% counting as a view which would mean a range of 10-20-1 hour depending on the content size).
He said BBC drama series with smaller budgets, such as Bodyguard, were watched by more people than The Crown.
"I mentioned the Bodyguard finale reaching 17 million viewers," he told a media conference in London. "That was in one month. Our data suggests The Crown reached seven million users in 17 months."
Netflix also announced that new fantasy drama The Witcher was watched by 76 million households in its first month. The show, about a mutated monster hunter, gave Netflix its best result yet for a first-season original TV series.
Meanwhile, the second season of You was watched by 54 million households, and Michael Bay's action thriller film 6 Underground, starring Ryan Reynolds, was seen by 83 million.
People have been complaining about how smaller, quality niche shows, are increasingly being cancelled by Netflix 1 or 2 seasons in. And in some cases the amount of money spent is not that high overall, but you can be sure that they have stats and benchmarks about how much return they expect to get in terms of views and subscriptions from a set amount of money. One thing's for sure -- a few big players in an industry does not lead to more experimentation or risk taking when it comes to less "sure thing" projects.
View poll: Kudos Footer-241
Comments at Dreamwidth
.