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AT. & T., the new company head of Warner Bros. Digital Networks and Turner will close FilmStruck, the streaming service launched in November 2016. The site, created by TCM, the essential cable channel for classic films, draws most of its offer from Criterion cornucopia, DVD and Blu-ray releases of world cinema, as well as related films not yet commercialized on disc. Recently, Hollywood classics from the TCM range have been added to FilmStruck offers.
The site does not accept new subscribers and it's a good bet that it will not add any movies either. Since a year and a half that I propose recommendations for films to broadcast, the titles of FilmStruck are in the honor. One could stay busy, happy, and sustainably filmed only with the help of FilmStruck movies, and this even more with the inclusion of TCM movies. (The film regime would not be entirely balanced: the site is poor in areas such as the production of independent American films, African cinema and the last forty years of the history of cinema. in its dependence on recognized classics: the programming of the site is more reactive than proactive, and it might have been improved by more personalized and idiosyncratic selections that would have made it more like a permanent online film festival. )
Instead, the site offered various promotional methods. Some, such as home-made essays and videos, were important works in their own right, but the site diluted its offerings with a hijacking and distraction homepage that looked like a dismal sampling of ballyhoo multiplexes a din annoys the tranquility of the art house.
This remarkably commercial waiting room of the classic movie library suggests the shock of culture at the heart of the business, one that results from Criterion's original merger with MTC, which was then part of Time Warner – and who announced his destiny. . This air of misery stems more from the conflicts inherent in the high-tech outpost and the mass market colossus. This is the result of another conflict, between the ownership of physical media and the mere purchase of access to data – between the permanent and the revocable, between the single purchase and the monthly subscription. Anything worth revisiting over the years is worth buying – whether on a physical medium or at least a digital file.
The physical-media equivalent of Subscription-forever calls it going to the movies: a viewer buys access to each showing and never owns anything except the memories. That's why the best analogy and best use of streaming video is a complement to new releases, especially movies that are unlikely to be widely distributed in theaters. Streaming puts the low-budget, independent or foreign film on the same footing as a broad availability that a studio-style movie. But as far as the classics are concerned, the era of streaming corresponds to that of repertory theaters, except that the limits were technical and financial. Film copies and projectors are expensive and cumbersome. Now, the limits are those of scarcity made under the guise of abundance, manufactured dependence commercialized as freedom. Consumers have been weaned off discs with the promise of convenience, weightlessness, no space, infinite portability and a vast (but unstable) library of offerings. In return, they are tied to the mother ship for good.
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