So…Netflix has to make about $250M on “Stranger Things” to break even? That would be 15-20M viewers I would guess—that is, people whose sole interest in Netflix is “Stranger Things”. Netflix says 40M have watched so…maybe?
Weird that they’ll pursue this approach and kill new series because “more people watch season 1”.
Jeff Smith on the Netflix cancellation of Bone…
Tell him about Kickstarter. 
An entire animated TV series would be beyond the scope of a Kickstarter campaign, I’m afraid.
Maybe start with a short or two, then shop them around…?
I don’t think Simon The Cat graduated to a full-length film or show, but he does have about 5.75 million followers on LeTube.
Everything I want to watch is on Tubi and the Roku Channel anyway.
I only keep Netflix because of MST3K season 11 & 12, Aggretsuko and Disenchantment.
Tubi is free and I also use YouTube for video viewing. And some of us still use physical media - I have no shortage of DVDs and Blu-Rays!
They constantly cancel popular shows - nothing on there lasts very long. I would have left them too, as soon as MST got the axe, if it weren’t for Umbrella Academy and Russian Doll.
Bone would require a much different style of animation, though. It would not be a cheap show to make at all, and it would be better to not do it at all than to half-ass it.
I don’t know about the other two, but you could buy seasons 11 and 12 and have them forever. 
I always see the “Netflix cancels popular shows after one season” as an argument against them. But let’s not pretend that they are the only “network” that does that. Regular teevee networks cancel popular shows all the time for myriad of reasons.
And what defines “popular”? Netflix doesn’t divulge viewership numbers, so maybe those things you thought were popular weren’t so much?
I think the style he used in this very comic strip hints at there being potential for something of a simple, introductory nature and a short length. A shorter story unconnected to the larger narrative. Which nonetheless might rally fans and impress studios when it’s aired and shopped around. Not that budgets are my thing. But if nothing else has worked so far… 
I did read some of these back in the day and I remember enjoying them. Same with Marder’s Beanworld and especially Katherine Collins’ Neil The Horse… which almost sort of became a TV show, nearly kind of. [sighs, rocks on porch while sipping a lemonade]
Services like Pluto and Tubi are probably catching on. Both are getting better every month and offer a decent lineup for free. I’ve been getting my fix of B-movie horrors from Tubi.
I’m wondering if Netflix will be like Hulu and offer a reduced rate with limited ads while you watch. With all these streaming services it will be interesting to see who survives or gets bought out.
Edit: Looking at my Netflix subscription. Can downgrade from full HD at $15.49 to standard definition for $9.99/month. Anybody do this and notice a big difference in picture quality?
Pluto is GREAT. we get lots of classic stuff that isn’t on anywhere else… Like the Bob Barker channel. practically live on there.
What Hollyweird dosn’t get is that, eventually, there will be TOO MUCH competition. and every service will eventually hit a ceiling and have short bursts at other times. Especially since they can’t be coming out with new content all the time.
It’s good that netflix has competition, but it’s TOO MUCH compettion. you can’t remember what is where…and something that should be on one service is really on another service due to deals made before. and it gets confusing very fast.
and adding in commercials to a paid service is a bad idea. people will just go back to dvd’s.
Hulu is for broadcast TV shows and movies that don’t fall under the Disney/Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars brands. EDIT: to add, since Disney bought Fox and NBC pulled out and made Peacock, it kind of lost its original raison de etre of being a Netflix alternative where NBC, ABC, and Fox could put their shows .
Hulu with no ads is $12.99/mo. They already let you subscribe to all 3 of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ for $13.99 (with ads) or $19.99 (with no ads), which is significantly less than all three individually. They’re certainly moving toward bundling them.
I subscribe to Hulu and Disney+, so if they fold them together and just have “hubs” like HBO Max does (or Disney+ already does to some extent), so be it. But I could see Disney keeping three separate font ends with a mostly common back end, maintaining distinct brand identities. They’re muddying the case for that by mixing the more “adult” Marvel stuff that was on Netflix into Disney+ though.
A little more about Cheers - In the several years before that, Fred Silverman had been hired away from ABC to reverse NBC’s dismal ratings and he had been frantically adding and cancelling shows at a pace never seen before. By 1982, Brandon Tartikoff and Grant Tinker were running NBC and they decided they were going to try to program good shows and stick with them, as a contrast to what Silverman had done.
That new attitude was why Cheers and other shows like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were allowed to grow. If Cheers had come along two years before and performed as badly, it would have been gone in 3 or 4 episodes.
Jeff Smith should hook up with an independent animation studio, create a short pilot, and then shop it around… not rely on a streamer to handle the production.
Did I mention streaming? I never really thought of YouTube as a streaming service though I guess it kind of is, since you can buy a subscription to it now if so inclined. 
In any case, I only brought it up so I could mention another independent artist who has a respectable following over there.
The fact that they’re adding in the parental controls on D+ to me says that eventually Hulu’s stuff (at least the shows that belong to a Disney-owned property) will be folded into D+. Things like The Handmaid’s Tale and Animaniacs though are not from studios owned by Disney, so they’ll presumably either end or go to whatever streaming service their parent company owns or has a stake in instead. It doesn’t make much sense to continue to operate two separate streaming services that have somewhat similar purposes when you can just streamline it down. ESPN+ will still remain separate I’m sure, but that’s a niche market anyway.
The streaming bubble may be starting to burst a little. It probably was delayed a year or so by the pandemic.