Dana Blankenhorn

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The Coming Streaming Shakeout

Streaming is about to learn what the printed web learned 20 years ago.

In a world of unlimited content, the gating factor for your audience is time.

There’s a corollary. Don’t depend on ads to make up for this. There’s just too much inventory.

I have a bad tendency to be early to things. I screamed about the dot-com bubble in 1997. I’ve been yammering about the coming streaming crash since 2019.

But now it’s here. First Netflix (NFLX) fell from grace. Then Disney (DIS) did the same. The Cloud Czars are worth half what they were now that you can get paid for having money. When interest rates were 2%, a price to earnings multiple of 45 looked OK. With money at 5% you need to be below 20 to be competitive.

Positives of a Tech Recession

Despite some stunning investment losses, I’m enjoying the latest tech recession.

No one likes a recession, but sometimes it’s like spring cleaning, necessary to clear the excess. There were a lot of zombie technologies, zombie companies and zombie assumptions that have been overrun since the Fed decided that money should cost money and there should be less of it around.

Web3, the metaverse, and crypto were all fake from the jump. Advocates for streaming and podcasting didn’t understand that the gating factor is time, not money. A lot of companies were selling themselves based solely on sales growth, ignoring the need for profit.

This means there’s now opportunity, in the form of talent, for new ideas that will power the economy forward. The main trends I described in 2019 – the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a Programming Language – they’re still on. But there’s a lot more, too.

Fixing Twitter on Mastodon

Twitter is broken beyond repair.

But it can be fixed. On Mastodon. If users learn something I learned back in 1988.

I’m @danablankenhorn@journa.host on Mastodon. Journa.host is run by Adam Davidson, formerly of The New Yorker. It’s one of thousands of servers supporting Mastodon on the Internet.

Users can block users on Twitter. But on Mastodon servers can also block servers. Users can also move between servers. This means people choose whatever server conforms to their standards on what should be blocked and what allowed. You can have alt-right servers, alt-left servers, and alt-bicycling servers.

A lot of people, looking at Mastodon over the last few weeks, have looked askance at this. People are isolating behind their server walls, they complain. Or they might.

But that was always true for Twitter. It was designed to be. The problem is that many people didn’t use their block commands aggressively enough. Journalists amplified extreme views by retweeting them. Hate was amplified by user outrage.