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We don't have to break this to know it's real
And today I check my e-mail and find out that FilmStruck is shutting down. No explanation was offered in the e-mail I received, but it seems to be the blinkered result of the acquisition of Warner by AT&T. I am tremendously grieved and disappointed, not least by the corporate reasoning cited in this article and others:
"We're incredibly proud of the creativity and innovations produced by the talented and dedicated teams who worked on FilmStruck over the past two years," Turner and Warner Bros. Digital Networks said in a joint statement provided to Polygon. "While FilmStruck has a very loyal fanbase, it remains largely a niche service. We plan to take key learnings from FilmStruck to help shape future business decisions in the direct-to-consumer space and redirect this investment back into our collective portfolios."
First of all, that last sentence should never be spoken anywhere the ghost of Preston Sturges can hear you. Second, of course it was a niche service. It made classic and arthouse cinema as available and accessible as the latest Netflix Original and while that was a beautiful and a necessary thing, I would not in fact have expected it to rake in the bucks of contemporary mass-market media. (Though, of course, once upon a time these movies were as mass-market as you could get.) But in another sense, its offerings weren't niche at all. FilmStruck was not a hot recent targeted slate of small-screen house product pipelined to the consumers of one streaming monopoly or other. It was a deep-cut, sprawling archive of multiple decades, genres, and studios, reaching from the beginnings of cinema to just last year with a glorious labyrinth of non-American, non-Anglophone highways and byways in between, and that was also the beauty of it. You didn't just watch Warner Bros. on its website. You didn't just watch MGM. You didn't have to watch Hollywood movies at all if you didn't feel like it. It was full of strangeness as well as canon and I loved it. It made my life better. It will not make my life better to have it yanked in favor of shaping some executive's collective portfolio. I understand it was more in the way of a private than a public library, but I still feel you don't close libraries and especially not because they are insufficiently feathering a golden parachute.
The Criterion Channel doesn't know where it's going to go. It offered movies not yet or maybe never available through the DVD/Blu-Ray Criterion Collection, more than one of my actual favorite movies included. I hope they will be able to find a new home, but I liked the one they had.
Remind me again when we actually get to have nice things?
"We're incredibly proud of the creativity and innovations produced by the talented and dedicated teams who worked on FilmStruck over the past two years," Turner and Warner Bros. Digital Networks said in a joint statement provided to Polygon. "While FilmStruck has a very loyal fanbase, it remains largely a niche service. We plan to take key learnings from FilmStruck to help shape future business decisions in the direct-to-consumer space and redirect this investment back into our collective portfolios."
First of all, that last sentence should never be spoken anywhere the ghost of Preston Sturges can hear you. Second, of course it was a niche service. It made classic and arthouse cinema as available and accessible as the latest Netflix Original and while that was a beautiful and a necessary thing, I would not in fact have expected it to rake in the bucks of contemporary mass-market media. (Though, of course, once upon a time these movies were as mass-market as you could get.) But in another sense, its offerings weren't niche at all. FilmStruck was not a hot recent targeted slate of small-screen house product pipelined to the consumers of one streaming monopoly or other. It was a deep-cut, sprawling archive of multiple decades, genres, and studios, reaching from the beginnings of cinema to just last year with a glorious labyrinth of non-American, non-Anglophone highways and byways in between, and that was also the beauty of it. You didn't just watch Warner Bros. on its website. You didn't just watch MGM. You didn't have to watch Hollywood movies at all if you didn't feel like it. It was full of strangeness as well as canon and I loved it. It made my life better. It will not make my life better to have it yanked in favor of shaping some executive's collective portfolio. I understand it was more in the way of a private than a public library, but I still feel you don't close libraries and especially not because they are insufficiently feathering a golden parachute.
The Criterion Channel doesn't know where it's going to go. It offered movies not yet or maybe never available through the DVD/Blu-Ray Criterion Collection, more than one of my actual favorite movies included. I hope they will be able to find a new home, but I liked the one they had.
Remind me again when we actually get to have nice things?
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*head!desk*
As you say, such a comfort to know it's been added to someone's portfolio! Marvellous! Now, what about all your films???
I'm sorry. It's so rotten when they take away the good things. I hope something else crops up to try and replace it.
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“The bulldog's just gone to press.”
"Well, hooray for the bulldog."
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Forty-nine thousand acres of nothing but scenery and statues and no streaming media.
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Thank you. There's never a good time to lose good things, but this is an especially wretched one.
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Thank you. I'm just really disappointed over the whole business. No one involved in the creation of FilmStruck can have expected it to be a runaway moneymaker, so killing it for not being one feels disingenuous. It had a "very loyal fanbase." What more do you want? Don't burn those people. They may not necessarily follow you to your future business decisions.
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Thank you. TCM and FilmStruck are really the only two I have much experience with. I interact with Netflix at rare weird intervals these days. (I used to watch a lot more from them when they had a wider array of older movies, not just their own stuff.)
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Thank you. They were in fact a major source of movies for me. I am sure I will still be able to find things that are rare and neat and worth writing about, but.
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I'm so sorry. This was not a clever decision on the company's part.
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I had been going to add it, too, after learning about it because of you.
So, uh, if you find a different service/are eventually aware of where Criterion goes, let us know?
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Thank you. And I was so enjoying my restored access, too.
I had been going to add it, too, after learning about it because of you.
I am really unimpressed by the business acumen of whoever decided to axe it.
So, uh, if you find a different service/are eventually aware of where Criterion goes, let us know?
Absolutely.
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P.
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Thank you. I realized I am feeling especially bitter because my first year of FilmStruck was a present from
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people with a lot of money should be forbidden to have custody of anything. Their values are warped
Fucking seriously.
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I worry very much now about TCM.
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I'd just heard about DramaFever, but I hadn't realized until I was trying to find out what happened to FilmStruck that it was the exact same business-with-heavy-sarcasm-quotes model.
I'm not sure what AT&T's strategy is in acquiring niche streaming services and then shuttering them, but it seems a poor one.
I agree.
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Extra motivation to finally check out Kanopy.
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Agreed, but I would really have enjoyed a world in which we just got both.