Streaming services are hurting the movie industry and their audience

Streaming platforms are making the quality of many movies and TV series go down recently. Here are the reasons why.

We all remember the time when Lord of The Rings, Avatar or Star Trek hit the big screen. The storyline, the cast, the action and the image were phenomenal.

Movie quality has been hit recently

Before the booming of the streaming service throughout the world, movies seemed to have a much higher quality compared to what we are having right now, especially those that are available on Netflix, Hulu, etc…

So what happened? Does the director, actor and producer just suddenly lose touch with the job? The answer lies in 2 aspects of today’s market:

• Average budget for a movie/TV series project
• Competition

1. Their budget is getting smaller:

Before the streaming service boom, most studios, at most, produced around 3–4 quality movies a year. They put their entire budget into those chosen movies and hence, helped the quality to reach a high level.

There are many films produced in the 2000s that beat today’s movies in terms of quality, storyline and action wise.

When the booming of the streaming service started to take over the world, these platforms required a huge quantity of titles to satisfy their audience and hence, their budget for a single movie, on average, got smaller.

Let’s take Disney for example. Disney has long been a producer of many great movies. In fact, if we take a look at the top 20 highest grossing box offices, more than half of the titles are Disney owned.

However, with the introduction of Disney+, they have to diversify their budget into the streaming service and we can see a significant drop in their movie’s quality.

It’s like the director has to rush to the ending of the storyline because of the lack of budget. Yes, I am talking about this one.

Disney's Artemis Fowl is a huge flop — Lack of budget?

And many more…

2. The competition is getting ridiculous:

With the founding of more and more streaming platforms every year, one has to do everything to stay on top of the others. I mean, look at this!!!

So many streaming services today…

With so many streaming platforms are introduced every year, implementation of various strategies is necessary for one’s survival. They have to find a way to make their platform unique to all of the others.

One of the strategies is to offer their audience a variety of choices. Companies start to pour their money into producing as many movie titles as they can, since it will appear as more attractive to the people.

With so many projects on hand at the same time, the quality control of those titles will not be thoroughly screened and therefore decrease the quality of the movies on the platform.

3. Some thought on the future of the movie industry:

I don’t know when we, once again, can enjoy great titles like we used to in the 2000s. Avatar, Titanic, Star Trek, etc… you name it. But one thing for sure, if the streaming services have defined a new era of producing, putting quantity over quality, the end day when we can see quality movie on the big screen will be near.