I thought of another script, this time it's Sony dunking on all the major streaming services. Ian, feel free to use any jokes in a future video (just give me some credits). I also don't know how accurate everything is, it's mostly just to make fun of current streaming nonsense.
Open on a well composed, rather cocky and jovial man.
Hi, I'm Tony Vinciquerra, head of Sony Pictures, the same company that makes the Spiderverse and Hotel Transylvania movies, and TV shows like Seinfeld and Married with Children, and golden age short subjects like The Three Stooges, in fact we have quite a large catalog of media that people enjoy. So much so that many people ask me why Sony doesn't have a dedicated streaming service like everyone else. I mean, it's all the rage to lock your own content behind a proprietary streaming service because people love your library so much. But it seems like everyone's forgetting that we were actually one of the first companies to try that kind of business model with Crackle back in the day, and I'm going to be honest with you, there's no money in streaming and it's far more profitable to just sell your stuff to the idiots who are doing streaming.
See back in the days of the PSP we bought a user generated video platform called grouper because we could see this was going to be big, then we got rid of all the low quality user generated stuff and used the infrastructure to launch a streaming site for our own movies and TV shows while changing the name to crackle, because that made sense. Who cares about low quality cat videos, people want real production value, this user generated content thing isn't going to last.
But you know, people wanted to watch all the old Godzilla movies we had in our library, and married with children, and astro boy, and voltron, and it was better they watch them on our platform where we got ad revenue instead of pirating on youtube. But this did offer a new avenue of content possibilities. This was the internet, there aren't any censors, and a lot of people had these great ideas for short series that would be perfect for this new frontier. We gave David Faustintino a million dollars to make this web series called Star-Ving, where it shows a fictionalized depiction of his failed career after Married with Children, and it did pretty well for a 13 episode web series with lengths of 5-15 minutes. Years later we gave Jerry Seinfeld a couple million dollars to make another short web series where he hangs out with fellow comedians in a car, creatively titled "Comedians in Cars." We also tried our hand at making some low budget movies like Joe Dirt 2 and Woke Up Dead. For all these projects we had to keep the budget down low because it was pretty obvious we were going to struggle to make our money back. I mean, who would put tens of millions of dollars behind a cinema quality production that's going strait to streaming, [zoom cut with translucent Disney logo] that'd be stupid.
Speaking of the PSP, a great thing about crackle was that you were able to watch it on your PSP, we even kind of built crackle with the PSP in mind. Of course we also made crackle available on the PS3, that new Roku device, early smart phones, and of course computers. What did you think we were going to limit our potential customers to just the Sony ecosystem? [Zoom cut with a translucent quibi logo], what idiot would think that was a good idea?
Over the years with Crackle we kind of let a lot of the originals fall out of the rotation and off the face of the earth. We already made our money back on them, it wasn't that big an investment, and nobody but those weirdos on the Lost Media Wiki cared about Star-Ving and the other crackle original minisodes. It had ran it's course and had fallen into obscurity so it wasn't a big deal that these went lost for the longest while since nobody cared about it anymore. If people actually wanted to watch it we would have made it available somewhere. [Zoom cut with translucent HBO logo] because it'd be stupid to make something unwatchable that people actually want to watch.
Fun fact Star-Ving was lost for a while until Pokematic, the writer of this script, made an article on the lost media wiki.
But then there was stuff like Joe Dirt 2 that people were actually interested in watching. So what'd we do? We made it available on DVD and Blu-Ray and licensed it out to cable TV channels and other streamers like Hulu and Netflix. [Zoom cut] what did you think we'd make something exclusive to our unsuccessful streaming platform and then make it disappear forever instead of trying to make money off of it somewhere else more successful? [Zoom cut even closer with a translucent WB logo] No one's that dumb.
But anyway we got out of the streaming business a long time ago because it was just too much work. Even though we have culturally significant classic works like the 3 stooges and seinfeld, it's so much easier to just license that out to existing streaming services instead of trying to build our own. [Zoom cut with a transparent peacock logo on it] I mean, who'd make an entire streaming service and hope that by making their flagship series exclusive to said service it would bring customers over? People just aren't going to watch it now and it's going to fall out of the public consciousness. That's a stupid idea.
It's also so much easier because we don't have to worry about exclusivity and brand cheapening. We made a TV cartoon of our flagship movie franchise Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, it's original run was on Cartoon Network but then Paramount Plus had it for streaming. It didn't matter to us because the check cleared both times, and they didn't care because they were just licensing it from us. It's not like the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs series was some cartoon network production that then started airing on the nickelodeon streaming service. [Zoom cut with a translucent south park logo] how ridiculous would it be if you weren't able to host your own flagship series because of some exclusivity deal with another streaming network? That would be peak insanity right there.
To be fair, streaming is very popular. No one under the age of 40 has cable anymore, [as a name is listed add the logo] it's just netflix, and hulu, and disney plus, and max, and peacock, and amazon prime, and apple tv plus, and tubi, and pluto, and freevie, and roku channel, and paramount plus, and crackle under new ownership, and how is this easier than cable? Oh what do I care, they're all paying me to either license my stuff or make new stuff for them. Disney wanted to have the Toby Parker and Andrew Parker spiderman movies on Disney Plus because of the No Way Home plot line, and Amazon wanted their own Hotel Transylvania movie, and I don't care if either are successful because I'm getting paid either way.
[Alternate joke about it being cable 2.0]
No it's not, it's the a la cart cable service everyone has been asking for for years. If this was cable you'd have to subscribe to paramount plus and Netflix to get Disney plus, now you can just subscribe to what you want. If there's a single show you want to watch on peacock, then subscribe for a month, watch it all in that month, and then cancel. If it's getting drip fed out, then just wait for it to finish and binge it all at once. [Zoom cut] what loser would constantly pay for something they aren't always using. Prove to mister I like money Netflix you're not an idiot who will keep paying regardless of how slow they make stuff. [Zoom cut back] what it's not profitable to have people subscribe for 1 month out of the year and have a constantly rotating set of subscriptions. [Zoom cut with a dramatic pause] hahahahha now do you see why I got out of the streaming business?
The streaming wars, the only winners are those that don't compete.
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