“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost; for none now live who remember it.”

While Lady Galadriel wasn’t talking about the current landscape of TV, I think I can twist and contort it to apply to said TV industry. The world is now full of cable-cutters like me — not, not people who turned to satellite (don’t let Dish Network try and convince you that going with them is the same as cable-cutting) — who rely solely on streaming and download services for all of their TV entertainment.

Personally, I get all my stuff from iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, Amazon Prime, and Crunchyroll. Sure, you can throw in an occasional The CW app and some other miscellaneous news apps, but on the whole, that’s where the majority of my TV diet comes from. As comfortable as I am with this current landscape, things are set to change yet again, especially with the merging of major companies.

This is something that cannot be neglected and is also something FX Networks CEO John Landgraf points to in his discussion of the future of the industry.

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“You can see at least four large media companies that are going to be aggressively pursuing a large streaming platform — Netflix, Amazon, Disney in its future iteration, and AT&T-Time Warner,” Landgraf said during the Q&A held Sept. 6 as part of Variety’s Entertainment and Technology Summit in Beverly Hills:

“I don’t think those are the last combinations, and I don’t think those are the last entrants. I’m not saying that YouTube isn’t making original series or that Facebook isn’t hedging around the edge of it. And you have to add Apple. But in terms of somebody saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to commit whatever it takes’ — $5 billion, $10 billion — there are four companies. … It would be surprising to me, for example, if Comcast didn’t eventually take a step toward creating a large streaming platform.”

“As long as this titanic competition between large media companies exists and we don’t see the outlines of the end state, I think you’re going to see that kind of peak spending. But I think our industry is looking at the biggest hangover it has ever had at whatever point you reach the end state.”

When Landgraf says “peak spending,” he’s not kidding. Not too long ago, networks wouldn’t spend more than a couple million dollars on an episode of TV. Nowadays, we have shows like Game of Thrones pushing $10-$15 million. But it’s not just the cost of each episode, but the sheer amount of content being produced. When last checked, there were 487 scripted series on the air.

That ain’t nothing to sneeze at! But with these numbers being as high as they are, it’s bound to come tumbling down…though it’s impossible to know when.

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SOURCE: Variety