Hey, it’s #ThrowbackThursday and each week we look to the past and highlight something in cinema history that’s fascinating, amusing, perhaps something you never knew or have seen, you name it.
Who would have thought that an A-list Hollywood celebrity could have invented two of the biggest media streaming platforms in the world 15 years ago? Well, at least he conceptualized their business models. So, who is this mystery entrepreneur? None other than Ben Affleck.
During an interview in 2003, Affleck described Shareware, or a try before you buy feature, as a necessary predecessor to music and movie streaming. He predicted that the most efficient model for consumers to listen to music was to have all of the artists compiled into one preexisting library. He explains that there’s less overhead, you pay no shipping, and you pay no fees to executives, meaning more money goes to the artist. Sound similar? That’s because it’s basically a description of Spotify.
“That’s the paradigm that Adam Smith would most want,” Affleck told the interviewer. “I think there are inefficiencies in the market right now, and I think they’re being worked out, and I think file sharing is pushing the industry toward that balance because of its availability right now.”
Wow, name-dropping Adam Smith. Looks like somebody read his “The Wealth of Nations” before the interview.
Essentially, Affleck described the same thing for film distribution, except the price would hypothetically increase for consumers who stream new, theatrical releases at home. He said that streaming films doesn’t quite have the technology to flourish in the economy, yet, but in five years, it would. He was almost right about that, as well, as Netflix launched its streaming service four years later, changing the film distribution game forever.
Check out the interview. It’s fun and it’s interesting to hear a minority opinion expressed back in the day. Many economists and smart, wealthy entrepreneurs were theorizing ways to move forward after the stock market downturn of 2002 (“the Internet bubble bursting”); after the fall of Napster in 2001 and the subsequent rise of software such as Shareware, many speculated about the idea of music and film streaming services via the internet for a while. It was simply a matter of sustainably obtaining that growth over a plausible period of time, naturally allowing technology to progress, and not repeating the same mistakes that led to the stock market crash.
All that to say, Ben Affleck is a freaking genius! (Okay, maybe not. ‘Batman v. Superman’ would prove that he has lapses in judgement everyone once in a while.)
… wow. Ben Affleck perfectly predicting Spotify and Netflix in a random 2003 interview
Almost exactly right about the unit economics of annual music subscriptions and the timing of online movie streaming. Solid point too on how shareware (Napster) is a necessary predecessor pic.twitter.com/mpEgRPK4zL
— John Backus (@backus) July 8, 2018