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The Shutting Down of FilmStruck and the False Promise of Streaming Classics (newyorker.com)
The FilmStruck indie, arthouse and classic film subscription-streaming service will shut down next month, Turner and Warner Bros. Digital Networks announced this week. The New Yorker's film critic Richard Brody writes: The site isn't accepting any new subscribers, and it's a good bet that it won't be adding films, either. In the year and a half that I've been offering recommendations here of movies to stream, FilmStruck titles have featured prominently. One could keep busy, happy, and cinematically sustained for a long time on the sole basis of FilmStruck movies, and all the more so with the inclusion of movies from Turner Classic Movies. (The movie diet wouldn't be an entirely balanced one: the site does poorly with such domains as American independent filmmaking, African cinema, and the past forty years of film history. Its over-all flaw is its reliance on recognized classics: the programming of the site is more responsive than it is proactive, and it might have been improved by more personalized, idiosyncratic selections that would have made it more like a permanent online film festival.)
The site instead offered various modes of promotional outreach. Some, such as essays, and some home-produced videos, were significant works in themselves, but the site over all diluted its offerings with a home page of diversions and distractions that felt like a tawdry sampling of multiplex ballyhoo raising an unwelcome racket amid the art-house tranquillity. That conspicuously commercial waiting room to the classic-cinema library suggests the culture clash at the heart of the enterprise, the one that arises from its odd original fusion of Criterion with TCM, which was then a part of Time Warner -- and which foreshadowed its doom. That air of doom arises from more than the inherent conflicts of the high-culture outpost and the mass-market colossus. Slate's arts and culture critic Joanna Scutts writes: FilmStruck did not care who you were: It set out to teach you something new, not just to feed you more helpings of what you already know you like. It employed a team of smart women and brought in directors like Barry Jenkins to record short, passionate introductions to films they loved. Its personality shone through tightly curated collections, from a timely gathering of all the previous incarnations of A Star Is Born, to a larger batch of Japanese horror titles, to deep dives into a particular director or cinematographer. It offered up inventive double-feature pairings and led you through its extensive archives in ways that were creative, cheeky, thought-provoking, and unpretentious. It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men. That kind of personality, that kind of discoverability, that kind of curation, can't be replicated by an algorithm. It takes time, money, and effort. It takes thought and education. It takes human beings.
The site instead offered various modes of promotional outreach. Some, such as essays, and some home-produced videos, were significant works in themselves, but the site over all diluted its offerings with a home page of diversions and distractions that felt like a tawdry sampling of multiplex ballyhoo raising an unwelcome racket amid the art-house tranquillity. That conspicuously commercial waiting room to the classic-cinema library suggests the culture clash at the heart of the enterprise, the one that arises from its odd original fusion of Criterion with TCM, which was then a part of Time Warner -- and which foreshadowed its doom. That air of doom arises from more than the inherent conflicts of the high-culture outpost and the mass-market colossus. Slate's arts and culture critic Joanna Scutts writes: FilmStruck did not care who you were: It set out to teach you something new, not just to feed you more helpings of what you already know you like. It employed a team of smart women and brought in directors like Barry Jenkins to record short, passionate introductions to films they loved. Its personality shone through tightly curated collections, from a timely gathering of all the previous incarnations of A Star Is Born, to a larger batch of Japanese horror titles, to deep dives into a particular director or cinematographer. It offered up inventive double-feature pairings and led you through its extensive archives in ways that were creative, cheeky, thought-provoking, and unpretentious. It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men. That kind of personality, that kind of discoverability, that kind of curation, can't be replicated by an algorithm. It takes time, money, and effort. It takes thought and education. It takes human beings.
"It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men"
WHO CLAIMS THIS?
I haven't even finished watching "Black Mirror" on Netflix, or "The Motorhome Experiment" on Youtube, or any of the movies I have waiting to watch. I have video games that I bought, still in their shrink wrap because I didn't have time to play them. I always mean to go back to that excellent restaurant I ate at, but it will probably go out of business before I find the time to return to it. I'll probably end up watching the Incredibles 2 in some flight on a tiny screen in the back of the seat in front.
Too many options to entertain in my time, and too little time for all the options.
Classic Turner you say? Pass.
This really goes to show the weakness of streaming. Sometimes a company is streaming exactly what you want, and owns the content - but will just decide to shut down that access anyway because they don't see quite enough profit in it.
That is why, even though it seems like madness these days, I still prefer to buy a handful of movies I really want to see again off and on.
You can even imagine some distant future where a corporate AI conglomerate that takes over Netflix vanishes some Netflix original content you enjoyed, for some inscrutable reason...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...it's to buy and own your own media.
Don't misunderstand me. This service sounds like something to which I'd have subscribed, had I known about it. I have no idea why the service shut down, but you can bet it was due to licensing arrangements and the like. All you know is that you are now deprived of something valuable.
I know that streaming is the shit right now, and that guys like me who still buy audio and video discs and run their own home media servers are viewed as retrogrades. On the other hand, I'm not subject to the caprices of those who run those services, or those who cause those services to be shut down. I get to watch La Jetee any time I like.
Here's hoping FilmStruck comes back, or something even better replaces it.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
They had better advertising when closing down then any other time, I probably would've signed up if I'd known.
Obsession with skin color is a red flag, and probably means they're willing to sacrifice quality to satisfy it. It's very likely that nothing of value was lost here.
I've never even heard of it before today, but I still know exactly what happened to it.
I say 'Congratulations, you have just proven yourself to be racist, and sexist', and I'm not even white.
BTW, you continue to live in America - so stop trying to signal virtue, its like smoking a cigar while explaining to children how to live healthy..
Granted, I spend zero time looking for the next cool thing, but I had never heard of this service before, and I probably would have subscribed had I known about it. My kids are too young to watch some of my favorite movies from when I was a child, but so many of the classics that used to be shown on Turner Classic Movies are appropriate for many ages, and those films are not available on Netflix or Amazon. Looking at the comments, the management completely missed an entire category of film buffs. More "old white men" subscribing to the service might have kept it afloat. I bet they had interesting advertising algorithms.
Make love, not reality television.