Like Sports? You’ll probably like 2024. If not, too bad. Looking at the near future content desert/flood.
You might have noticed that it appears every streaming service is talking about sports options coming up. If you’re wondering why, just a quick guess that the Hollywood writer and actor’s strike that is going on is going to make content scarce.
Max now has live sports starting October 5th, Apple TV is expanding what they cover, and even Disney+ is getting in on the action with a real-time alternative presentation of football games with virtual recreations set in the Toy Story Universe. Even YouTube (not YouTube TV) is advertising sports on my TV, although I need to get back home to click the link and see what that is about.
The last writer’s strike in the late 1980’s brought us reality television. One of the most engaging and inexpensive workarounds that let people do basically nothing except create impossible drama on a weekly basis and disguise it as a real time documentary or a game show while writers marched the picket lines.
I believe we probably reached peak reality show saturation a while ago, although there will be plenty of these being added to an already oversaturated segment of programming as the strike wears on though as most reality stars are not part of SAG-AFTRA.
However, I suspect we’re going to see more and more things like Toy Story’s Funday Football… imagine the Real Housewives getting a simulcast with a Simpson’s makeover (Disney also owns Simpsons.)
I suspect with modern computing ability we’ll be able to have deepfaked versions of movies playing where they remove problematic actors by next year and re-release these as newish, or cartoonize a movie entirely and change the voicing to churn out differently skinned content.
One of the reasons why the actors and the writers are striking.
In the short term though more sports than you can possibly watch, reskinned sports for kids, more import cartoons and hours of dead space repeats where talk shows used to be.
American Ninja Warrior as Disney Princesses… instead of the heavyweight boxers streaming two chonky kittens fighting… make it happen 2024.
