Streaming platforms are going through a year with certain turbulence. HBO recovers two of Warner’s most indisputably powerful franchises, at Disney there are continuous changes, entries and exits that affect Disney +, and Netflix is not giving its best audience results. That is why it is changing strategies that until recently were more or less sacred to the platform.
Little Sky, spearhead. The last one, like unveils Deadline exclusively, is that he is going to commission a pilot for ‘Little Sky’, a modest project shot with a single camera and produced and interpreted by Samara Weaving (giving life to an ambitious journalist who arrives in a small town to find out where its mayor is, missing mysteriously). Its creator and director, Rightor Doyle, is going to put this pilot on its feet, and depending on the result, Netflix will order the entire series or not.
Pilots as tradition. Netflix has spent twelve years giving the green light to complete seasons without the need for pilots, which is the usual practice in traditional television, especially in genres such as sitcom, where you can experiment with tones and casts, and see if they work beyond a cold script. This function was fulfilled on Netflix by the complete seasons, which supposes a considerable expense.
At the moment, this shift in Netflix’s strategy is an isolated case, and it is not confirmed if it is the beginning of a change in the long run. In fact, with the advent of streaming Mixed formulas such as those of HBO Max and Prime Video have become popular, which commission both pilots of possible series and complete seasons. But it is a first sign that Netflix has realized how bad it feels among its audience to have so many series canceled after a single season.
There are still many things that set Netflix apart. It must be borne in mind that Netflix has invented, in many ways, the streaming business as we understand it today, and for this reason it remains faithful to some of its keys in terms of the dissemination of its content. For example, the release of full seasons, and not week by week. Netflix has flirted with the weekly premiere of episodes in series produced by others, such as ‘The Good Place’, and also reality for a couple of years, as he is currently doing in ‘Love Is Blind’.
As long as you continue to produce the huge volume of series that you produce, this way of distributing will not be a problem, but the excess of content and platforms may lead you to reconsider the validity of the binge-watching. And that would be giving up to a point never seen before. For now, this ‘Little Sky’ pilot may point to a rethinking of formulas, which is never a bad sign for a streaming platform.
Header: Netflix / Disney
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