I Thought Piracy Was Killing Entertainment? New Record In Scripted Shows In 2016

from the look-at-that dept

Remember how piracy was supposed to be killing the entertainment industry and no one would make anything any more? Of course, almost exactly five years ago, we showed this wasn't true at all, and the actual output of creative content was way, way up. Obviously, some of that was "amateur" creations, but it was true of professional creative content as well. One area that we pointed out was that the internet had made it possible to create much more new content and release it in new ways -- and that certainly has held true in the realm of scripted TV shows. A new report from FX Research shows that the amount of scripted TV shows has absolutely exploded over the past few years. Since just 2010 the number of scripted series available has more than doubled. That's crazy (but also awesome): Of course, it won't surprise people to see that a bunch of the new shows are on online services (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.). But it does seem noteworthy that all the other areas have been growing also -- even broadcast TV, which is a very limited resource, has somehow figured out how to cram in a few more scripted shows.

And, of course, many people now consider this to be "the golden age of television" because there are so many amazing shows on TV. So it appears that -- contrary to the whining that we've heard in the past about how all this new content creation would lead to more crappy content, it's actually done the reverse -- and pushed more scripted TV show creators to up their game, and to be even more creative and original. Of course, you'll hear stuff about TV execs being "worried" about there being too much TV content, but that's just them trying to suppress competition.

What's most hilarious about all of this is that I remember in the early 2000s, when "unscripted" or so-called "reality TV" was everywhere, being told that it was because of piracy that scripted TV was "dying." We were told that the big TV studios would no longer invest in scripted TV, because it just couldn't make any money in the internet era -- and at least "reality" TV often created a demand for live viewing. And yet, look at how things have changed. And look at how little "piracy" seems to actually be an issue.

Filed Under: internet, piracy, scripted tv, streaming, tv