Dont Tell NetflixDont Tell Netflix

By George Robbins

These past months have proven to be quite a difficult time for just about everyone and the TV and Movie industry are in the same boat as everyone else. It has become a tremendous effort for studios to try and come up with ways to capture the attention of people when their minds are focused on so much more. Unlike the movie side of things though is the TV side which has actually managed to flourish more in this new environment than its counterpart. The movie industry is in a state of near suspended animation with a few notable exceptions being laid out here and there in such a way that they can make some kind of revenue. That part of the industry is the section which has become more devoted to the streaming side of movie releases.

The fact remains that movie releases are the toughest decisions being made within the industry at the moment because studios are trying to figure out just what the best move to make would actually end up being. For most studios, they believe the best choice at their disposal is to wait for the pandemic to either be over, or to wait until there is a much better handle on things. This has become a way of thinking that some within the industry are not happy with and even director Christopher Nolan has said that they should really be looking at alternative solutions for these issues. The alternative approach some studios are taking with some of their films is the aforementioned alternative, straight-to-digital releases. Whereas these are the problems being faced by the movie industry, the TV industry is facing its own issues.

While not as terrible as what is happening in the movie industry, the TV industry is trying to deal with the fact that they cannot as readily make content. This means that they are stuck trying to come up with better ways to try and get people’s attention and keep that attention since television relies almost entirely on viewership. With this in mind, TV studios are trying to play shows to the best of their ability in an effort to keep viewership even if it means just playing re-runs. Unfortunately, we all know that re-runs of TV shows can get very boring after enough time passes seeing the same old thing. Thus, a majority of TV viewership has been going to streaming services and while this may be working out for some companies, there are many who are now suffering.

Like television, streaming services are all under different contracts and they possess a lot of different programming depending on those contracts. Hence, the reason why you need to have something like 10 different streaming networks is so that you can watch the various shows and programs as much as you want. That is the main selling point for many streaming services since watching whatever you want, whenever you want is kind of a gift. Unfortunately though, some things we want to watch are under exclusivity contracts which force us to only be able to watch them on television. This just so happens to be the case with the ‘Harry Potter‘ movies which are under contract to appear on NBCUniversal cable networks instead of their streaming service Peacock.

NBCUniversal, like most other major networks at this point, owns Peacock which is meant to be their premiere streaming service that houses all of the movies and shows under contract with the network. The ‘Harry Potter’ films were all put onto the service as a way for fans to be able to go on and watch the films they have loved for so many years. Unfortunately this was not mean to last though as they inevitably took the movies off of the service and put them back onto their cable channels in an effort to follow contractual obligations. Those obligations made it so that the movies would be on television networks for the foreseeable future, so anyone who wants to stream the movies will have to wait awhile in order to do so once again. In the meantime, plenty of other content is available on the service and there are plenty of shows on the network to fill space between movie airings.