It would be easy to talk about Brexit or IoT as a reason to become cynical and jaded in the UK, but it wouldn’t be interesting, nor novel. There’s just way too much that’s already been said, and in any case it tends to polarise people into the pro- and anti- camps, and I don’t want to be walking that road this morning. Instead I will mention streaming video.
If there’s one thing that really annoys me about this, it’s delays. They pretty much cause me to lose interest in a show. This was brought home to me recently when the news broke that SyFy were dropping The Expanse and that it was looking for a new home for season 4, since found with Amazon I believe. Now it’s a good show, and I enjoyed the first two seasons, but it’s hard to care about whether or not there’s going to be a season 4 when you are restricted from even seeing season 3 while the Internet is raving about how good it was… It’s impossible to search for news on a release date without wading through pages and pages of spoilers. Even if I’d not already read the books, I’d know the story by now. So no, I couldn’t care less whether it’s rescued or not… It’s too late for me. It was too late the moment spoilers started appearing in magazines (both online and dead tree). It was too late when search engines published pictures and described scenes about an hour after it first aired. It’s no longer worth the cost of a Netflix subscription.
Game of Thrones is as bad. A whole year of waiting after it aired in the US before there’s any legal way to watch, no matter how much money or subscription you throw at it. And now an extra delay and shorter seasons mean even less value for money on disc versions when eventually they become available. Again, spoilers have done the rounds long before the source material arrives. Is it any wonder that video piracy¹ is so rife? Of course, in Game of Thrones case, they strayed so far from the source that it’s barely worth the effort anyway… The only positive is that at least it’ll be available before the final book, but then so will the heat death of the universe.
These are just a couple of big name examples, but everything seems to be going back to the bad old days where everything is released in the US a year before anywhere else, even home grown UK shows go out there first! At least when I was growing up we didn’t have the internet rubbing our collective noses in it with spoilers. Ok, we just didn’t have an Internet back then but still.
Basically I no longer care. Why should I have to pay a premium for something that is years out of date? I’ll just wait for it to appear on mainstream TV² or something. These shows might be good, but they’re not that good, not by a long way.
¹ LOL piracy. Yaarrr, I sharll be taking your maaarster copies and ye’ll be waaalking the plank ye skurvy landlubber…
² I know, even broadcast TV carries a premium in this waste of a country.