Everything old is new again! Or at least, is accessible again

Once upon a time, a movie was released in the theaters, ran for a few weeks and was done. Once it had outlived its useful life, it was finished. Probably never to be heard from again.

Then, home video happened. That extended the life of movies far beyond the time they were done in theaters. Aside: the movie studios obviously fought this transition because, why wouldn't they? Regardless, they make a lot of money from this new revenue stream.

In comes Netflix and online streaming. In comes the future. There's an old IBM commercial that I talk about a lot where some crappy hotel has no showers, but access to every movie ever made at any time right in your room. That was a crazy concept once (the commercial is 10-15 years old and I can't find it on YouTube). This is it, now you can have access to (almost) any content any time. What an amazing triumph for consumer choice!

But now, if you are creating new content, your life has just gotten much much harder. Now, every movie ever made competes for your time with every new movie getting made. The classics are well regarded for a reason, why not watch them? Sure, there will always be a market for new content. Things change, so there is a market for old stories updated and retold for new eras. As has been said, "There are no new ideas, but there are new ways of making them felt."

So, you might expect the amount of content to drop dramatically since fewer rational people would be making it. But, luckily, there are two other factors at work. First, artists pride themselves on being irrational (that's a great bit of circular reasoning). Second, the costs of creating content have dropped dramatically as well.

These factors combine to entice more and more people to create content of one form of another. Most of it will continue to be crap and the major earnings will continue to flow to a small few who make the biggest hits.

This is not just relevant for movies, but for all forms of content. Big hits will still drive the content business and that will drive people to create more of it. Smaller percentages will be consumed. Aggregators (like studios of the past) will have to exist in order to monetize this content at all and the content creators will continue to be starving artists.