Arguments for a content bubble – – revisiting 2.

We've been talking about the content bubble (under various names) for going on five years now, but we haven't mentioned it recently so here's a quick primer. The basic argument started out with the claim that original scripted programming on cable only made good business sense under certain conditions and that more and more of the programs were in a corner of the market that could not sustain them indefinitely. My concern, then and even more now, was that when hype drives decision-making, the easily hyped will increasingly be favored over the sound, profitable, and sustainable.

Since then, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu not only jumped into the field, but started a major bidding war. Netflix in particular was willing to pay more for licensing rights to a show than other outlets had been willing to pay for outright ownership. At the same time, basic cable channels continued to invest more heavily in the idea that they could only be defined by having a "______ original."

The inevitable result has been a huge mass of product that can't possibly find an audience large enough to sustain it. As mentioned below, there are over 450 shows now in production. It has become obvious to pretty much everyone that the majority of the shows will be costly failures. This has led to a parallel bubble in marketing and PR as everyone tries desperately to have one of the handful of shows that gets noticed. Here in LA, I routinely see billboards for shows I've never heard of, often on channels and streaming services I've never heard of.

On top of this immense surplus, there's another problem we noted back in February 2015:

2. Content accumulates. While movies and series tend to lose value over time, they never entirely go away. Some shows sustain considerable repeat viewers. Some manage to attract new audiences. This is true across platforms. Netflix built an entire ad campaign around the fact that they have acquired rights to stream Friends. Given this constant accumulation, at some point, old content has got to start at least marginally cannibalizing the market for new content.

Which brings us to this recent story from the Los Angeles Times by Meg James and Yvonne Villarreal. It's a good piece of reporting. I would have liked to have seen a bit more on the role of companies like Weigel Broadcasting, but the LAT has done an excellent job covering the terrestrial superstations story, particularly compared with the virtual news blackout from papers like the NYT and the WSJ, so I don't have much to complain about on that score.

Jessica Mata wasn’t even a year old when “The Golden Girls” ended its broadcast run on NBC in 1992.

But this summer, she has been captivated by Dorothy, Blanche, Sophia and Rose, the Florida senior-citizen housemates of “The Golden Girls.” Mata watches at least four episodes a day of the sitcom, which joined streaming service Hulu’s programming offerings earlier this year. She views them on her phone or her laptop during breaks between her college classes.

“I know ‘Game of Thrones’ is all the rage — and I watch it too, sometimes — but it doesn’t have me hooked like ‘Golden Girls,’” said the 25-year-old from Houston. “I’m on my third round of watching the series right now.”

Viewers like Mata are discovering reruns of network shows not by flipping through TV channels but on streaming devices such as Hulu and Netflix. These digital platforms are doing something unexpected: They are creating new audiences for old TV shows.

At a time when television is booming with more than 450 original series in production this year, viewers have a multitude of options. But shows such as HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and NBC’s family drama “This Is Us” also are competing for fans’ attention with such well-worn fare as as “The Golden Girls,” “Full House,” and the political drama “The West Wing,” which debuted when Bill Clinton occupied the White House.