By Shelly Brisbin

March 8, 2023 11:23 AM PT

It’s not a classic era for classic movies

It happens to most of us: You search your streaming services or an aggregator site for a movie you remember fondly, or somehow never saw when it was new, only to come up empty. The withering of back catalogs has hit all of the big services, as they cut costs and execute mergers in the face of stiff competition. But for classic film fans, movies often go missing in bulk, taking forgotten-but-important titles along.

Really old movies—which I define as being released between the dawn of the sound era and roughly the end of the decade I was born—are what make me happy. They’re my comfort food, my geeky hobby, my excuse to host a podcast. I’ve loved this stuff since high school. And while media mega mergers mean libraries of old films get valued as assets when the deals are made, that doesn’t mean they’ll pop up on a streamer anytime soon. That’s not just a problem for me and fellow followers of the #TCMParty hashtag. It’s a loss for culture and film history—a memory hole for the 21st century.

Sure, you can find classic films on Amazon, HBO Max, or for rent or purchase on iTunes. But you can’t always watch the specific one you want to, much less take a deep dive into the catalog of a director or actor whose studio’s library is locked up by the current owners, or by a tangle of cascading legal rights. Truthfully, it’s been that way for years. It’s just the names on the buildings that change, as the number of ways you might be able to see a classic you love continues to shrink.

Right cross

The first thing to know about why a film is or isn’t available to stream is that it’s complicated. Last year, Amazon closed a deal to buy MGM, including a 4,000 film library that includes Rocky and James Bond properties. These aren’t MGM films from my classic era, but the deal is a good example of why owning a thing doesn’t mean it’s immediately available for your customers to stream. Rights to stream, remake, or make discs containing many of these titles are tied up for years to come, not to mention the costs associated with remastering and marketing a back catalog. So for viewing purposes, mergers and acquisitions of vast movie libraries just create delays, while the new owners wait out rights deals, or negotiate new ones.

Even within large film libraries, individual titles are caught up in rights disputes all the time, with the estates of directors or producers owning veto powers, or the chain of custody becoming murky over 80 or 90 years. Clearing rights is a legal specialty for a reason.

Locked in the vault

The pre-1986 MGM film library belongs to Warner Brothers, as do its own classics, and RKO’s, too. That’s a legacy of Ted Turner’s purchase of these assets from Kirk Kerkorian back in the 80s. Turner wanted to show the movies, and did so on his various cable channels, eventually including Turner Classic Movies. When Warner bought Turner out, it began selling physical media, creating the Warner Archive. They spent a lot of money to restore and remaster films, too, which was a great investment while people (like me) were buying physical copies of the movies they loved to be sure they would have a one.

Other classic film libraries haven’t been as available. Many of Paramount’s pre-1949 films were locked in Universal vaults for years before the company began various projects, including a YouTube channel, to release selected films. And the 20th Century Fox library is now owned by Disney, which is typically stingy with its own content, and has so far not brought those piles of old Fox films to Disney+.

The trouble with holding up Warner Archive as a model for other classic library owners is that its early success didn’t last. The business was built on physical media, and when Warner and TCM tried a classics-focused streaming service, FilmStruck, it failed.

Today, the closest we have to a streaming service with classic content is TCM, a commercial-free cable channel. Its availability on many over-the-top services means the majority of the MGM/Warner/RKO library content, plus other films the channels gets rights to show, have been relatively available to view. But the seas looked rougher for TCM fans following the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery. In January, Discovery president David Zaslav stated very publicly (while flanked by TCM on-air hosts) that the channel will continue. Plenty of us who love the channel could be heard muttering a skeptical “for now” when we read the news.

And as great as TCM is—with an on-demand component you can use to stream films shown in the past few weeks—the entire library is not (and has not been) available all at once, whether on a dedicated service or on a service like HBO Max.

Defensive Collecting

Long before streaming took complete hold of the media landscape, I was a physical media collector. I bought Warner Archive VOD releases, crummy transfers of public domain film noirs from a bin at Fry’s Electronics, and fancy box sets devoted to John Ford or to forgotten film noir.

I’m glad I did, because those discs form the backbone of my home Plex server, a library that can grow as big as the hard drives I have available to store them, assuming the movie made its way into some digital format, and I was there to grab it. I still collect discs. So Kino Lorber, Criterion and Warner Archive get the money streaming services do not. Choosing between access to the very old instead of the very new is not ideal, but it’s what I’m doing for now. And for the future of my access to classic film.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer, host of the Parallel podcast, and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By John Moltz

March 3, 2023 3:30 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Cocaine Bear

This week we wonder what the Apple headset will look like, hope that Apple will improve the Apple Watch’s battery life, and sigh loudly again at Twitter.

Looks aren’t everything, but they’re something

Remember Google Glass? Sure you do. You laughed so hard milk came out your nose. And you weren’t even drinking milk at the time.

Which is how we found out you were a replicant. Different story, though.

The point is, it looked silly and everyone hated it because they didn’t want someone in their face recording literally everything. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the inevitability of the surveillance state in a weekly wrap-up column, so let’s focus on the looking silly part. Because if Xiaomi’s new prototype AR glasses are any indicator, that particular issue has still not been fixed. For some reason I am reminded of the unibrowed baby from The Simpsons.

Based on precedent, it is not unreasonable to expect the industry to quickly jettison their existing designs and immediately follow the cues of whatever Apple ships. There’s certainly a lot of movement in the space based on expectations of an Apple announcement in a few months. Meta is cutting prices on its existing lineup, which is already priced significantly below what Apple is expected to charge.

It’s possible a differentiating factor for Apple will be a newly patented handoff method that allows a user to transfer content and focus with facial expression and gestures. That sounds like it beats my usual shuffling of papers and confusedly using my Mac mini’s mouse for several seconds while wondering why the cursor on my MacBook isn’t moving.

The low power mode lifestyle

I scream, you scream, we all scream for more battery life.

I mean, I wouldn’t say no to ice cream, but… c’mon.

Is Apple finally taking the hint?

In an interview with India Today, Apple Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers discusses one of the places battery life is most acutely felt: on the Apple Watch.

Borchers says that the question of battery life on Apple Watch is a tricky one and the company is hoping to answer it in various ways.

Oh, good, now we’re going to get some solutions!

One of them is faster charging…

Customers: “The real problem with the Apple Watch is when I’m out wearing it and it dies.”

Apple: “Ah! Well, what if you could charge it faster?”

Customers: “That’s not… that… What?”

At the same time, the company also continues to explore how it can achieve the best way to balance features … and battery life.

Uh. OK.

“We were going to put lasers into the Apple Watch but they burned through the battery in 15 seconds so we didn’t do that.”

The message here seems to be less “We’re focusing on Apple Watch battery life!” and more “Apple Watch battery life continues to be a product in our lineup.” It’s always interesting that when you ask Apple customers what they want, more battery life is usually fairly high on the list. But the company usually only ships minimal battery upgrades that are measured in the “how long you can watch a movie” metric. Which, incidentally, is why every time there’s an iPhone event Martin Scorsese suddenly feels sad, though he does not know why.

Certainly the company has managed to greatly improve battery life on the Mac by switching to Apple silicon, but the iPhone and Apple Watch particularly continue to be just sort of fine. Looks like we can continue to expect more just fineness in the future.

If anything, it’s unfair to the bear

Twitter-related drama is the new normal, as the steady rain of nuclear fallout from Electric Bugaboo’s purchase of the platform continues to fall.

This week the makers of both Twitterrific and Tweetbot, most likely after hashing out options with Apple, shipped what are likely to be final updates to their apps. As Dan describes, the updates let users choose whether or not to get a prorated refund for the amount time the app(s) were no longer able to connect to Twitter or, in the case of Tweetbot, convert the subscription to a license to Ivory, Tapbots’s Mastodon client. If you do nothing, you’ll receive a refund.

There’s been some question as to why Apple is forcing these refunds when they have no material impact to the company’s bottom line but will have substantial impact to The Iconfactory and Tapbots. No one has really said so publicly, but it’s most likely because there are certain jurisdictions where if a service is no longer being provided, you legally have to give the option of receiving a refund.

Going to the trouble to choose not to get a refund might seem like a ridiculous exercise—an excessercize, if you will¹—but I’d urge you to consider doing it.

I don’t know about your finances, but if someone said they were going to have to garnish my wages because a capricious billionaire decided to take away one of my revenue streams so he could trash a platform like a bear that has accidentally taken too much cocaine, that would cause me some financial distress. And anger, honestly.

If you think comparing one of our titans of industry to a hopped-up ursine is unfair, consider that Twitter outages are on the rise, Musk has backed a cartoonist who went on a racist rant, Twitter is being sued over unpaid bills, and misinformation is on the rise on the platform. And these are all just stories from the last week.

There has long been a concern about the race to the bottom created by the App Store in terms of pricing. If we’re legitimately concerned about the negative effect of downward price pressure, it’s pretty easy to argue that we were probably not paying enough for these apps in the first place.

In the end it comes down to who you think needs the money more. It really might be you. But if it’s not, consider taking a few seconds to help out some valuable members of the app community.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]