All Over Bar the Streaming

I bade farewell to Neighbours, again, yesterday.  The Australian soap has long been an indulgence of mine and when it first ended a few years ago, it was a wrench - it may have been trivial, lightweight, TV, but it had been a constant in my life for decades - sometimes as just a casual viewer, sometimes as a regular viewer.  As I've mentioned before, as one gets older, programmes like Neighbours, where you can be reassured that nothing really bad ever happens and that, in general, everything always turns out for the best, become more important.  They provide us with reassurance that, no matter how bad the real world gets, there's always a place you can retreat to for comfort and stability.  This time around, though, the soap's demise felt like a damp squib, with an air of sad inevitability surrounding it.  That Amazon, it's home in this latest incarnation, would pull the plug after only a couple of years, despite good viewing figures and audience appreciation, was hardly surprising.  It's just typical of modern streaming TV, where the main players just don't seem to give a damn about the building of loyal audiences for existing properties, instead seemingly thinking that what will keep audiences is throwing up a constant diet of new shows instead of developing existing ones.

It is one of the many reasons why I have never bought into streaming TV, or at least the established streamers that dominate the market, (I have no subscriptions whatsoever).  Their approach to TV simply  doesn't engage me.  In truth, rather than being innovative, constantly providing viewers with new viewing experiences, they instead simply constantly re-hash older ideas and properties.  Originality - despite what they might want you to believe - is not their strong suite.  They prefer to serve up re-treads of old films (ludicrously expanded to unsustainable lengths), existing TV properties or adaptations of books, demonstrating little respect for the source material in the process.  (My expectations for the Amazon-led James Bond revival are not very high, based upon their previous track record).  Of course, the specific reason for Amazon pulling the plug on Neighbours was that it had outlived its usefulness to them - they'd originally revived it as part of their launch of FreeVee, their short-lived  ad-supported streaming service, for which they needed shows with established audiences, to draw people in with.  But then they axed FreeVee and Neighbours was folded into the main Amazon streaming service, still ad-supported, but costing money to produce but with, I'm guessing, only a minority of its audience taking out full subscriptions to the service.  (Amazon relentlessly kept trying to get me to sign up to Amazon Prime, right up to the final episode of Neighbours, to no avail).  We were only there to watch Neighbours, the rest of their shit was of no interest, so we, ultimately, were of no interest to Amazon.  That's the thing, unlike conventional, linear, TV, the streaming guys have no concept of public service or loyalty to viewers.  TV shows are just product, an item of inventory to them - if one doesn't sell big, ditch it and replace it with something else and hope that sells instead.  But, to look on the bright side, Amazon's cancellation of Neighbours means that I no longer have to engage with their shitty streaming service - their Roku app is amongst the slowest and most cumbersome I've had the misfortune to use.  Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say.