When the Streaming Platform Dies, What Happens to Its Shows?

The ever-evolving media landscape is on a fascinating precipice at this moment, because shiny new platforms like Disney+ and Apple TV+ are due to launch soon with high profile original series, and right on their heels will be HBO Max and Peacock, waiting to suck up even more streaming dollars from the beleaguered consumer already subscribing to Netflix, Hulu and/or Amazon. It’s a crazy time, but the hype is as effervescent as the bubbles in champagne.

However, bubbles pop, and no one knows that better than the people who have been working to make TV shows and films for digital platforms for over a decade now. These are people who are watching the announcements of new exclusives with a wary eye — because they know that this is a cruel world, and all it takes is one executive decision for fan-favorite content to vanish seemingly forever.

Even being hosted on YouTube has been no guarantee that a show will stay online indefinitely. Many creators were shocked earlier this year when Machinima, one of the digital content world’s biggest brands, shut down after being acquired by Warner Bros. in 2016. Not so much about the fact that the company shut down — it actually had a longer lifespan than other players in the space — but because when it did so, it essentially deleted its YouTube account, which had hosted thousands of videos and had reached 12 million subscribers.

“Anything can turn off on a dime — you never know,” creator and actor Felicia Day told Decider. “And I think the Machinima thing was a big wake up call about devoting a large portion of your life to something could be turned off.”

No warning was given to the creators who had, at one point or another over the network’s 10-plus years of operation, contributed their creativity to helping the video game-focused platform rack up views and subscribers. Machinima had not just produced low-cost short-form series about the video game world, but also greenlit plenty of high-budget live-action shows like Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist, aiming to offer up premium-level content for its audience. And all those shows were lumped together in the shutdown.

Bite Me, a post-apocalyptic zombie comedy created by Andy Shapiro and Bob Quinn, was one of those series. Director Jarrett Conaway said that he’d met many fans of the show over the years, but that while he understood that it was Warner Bros., the owners of Machinima, who made the decision to shut down distribution, “I feel bad for the actors that participated in it. I think they take that harder than anybody.”

Machinima isn’t the only high-profile shutdown in recent memory — another important example is Seeso, the comedy-focused NBCUniversal subscription service that offered audiences a wide range of both archival content (like the full remastered Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live) as well as a number of original exclusive series.

Seeso was founded in 2016 by executive Evan Shapiro, who is now president of the National Lampoon comedy studio. After failing to find enough subscribers to be sustainable, the service ended in November 2017, theoretically leaving its many originals in limbo. But over a year after the shutdown, Shapiro was able to tell me with ease where all of Seeso’s original series had relocated, from Take My Wife (now on Starz Digital) to There’s Johnny (moved on Hulu). At that point, the one “orphan” (his word) was Kulap Vilaysack’s Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, which only found a new distributor in September 2019, thanks to Pluto TV.

“I think that’s going to be true of most good shows,” he said. “As an artist, though, you have to do whatever you can to tie yourself to that chain of ownership for as long as you can.”

Seeso creators had the ability to shop around their shows, due to their deals with NBC Universal — even the remastered Monty Python episodes made it to Netflix. Not everyone is so lucky.

The YouTuber-focused company Fullscreen launched a subscription-only platform for original content featuring a number of creators, including Grace Helbig, Tyler Oakley and Shane Dawson, in 2016. One of those shows, Kingdom Geek, was a longform talk show hosted by Andre “Black Nerd” Meadows and Katie Wilson, in which celebrity guests would hang out to discuss their nerdy passions.

Because Meadows and Winter made Kingdom Geek in house with Fullscreen, Fullscreen retains ownership of both the title and completed episodes, which are no longer viewable anywhere since the platform shut down.

“That was the part that was the biggest bummer,” Wilson said about the fact that the episodes are offline. “Because we still get asked to this day, where those interviews are, and will we be doing more? That’s the hardest thing for us, that we just don’t have an answer for that.”

The series was well-liked by publicists looking for outlets for their clients, because the unconventional format let the talent relax and have fun — much to the pleasure of the fans, who still today share clips and photos of Kingdom Geek episodes featuring favorites like The 100‘s Eliza Taylor and Resident Evil star Milla Jovovich. “If you think about late night talk shows, even with celebrities the general public knows, you get, like, a sentence,” Meadows said. “We were giving access to a full hour.”

Wilson said that when Fullscreen shut down the platform “we did attempt to find out what sort of deal we would be able to make with them to be able to get the episodes. But unfortunately, I don’t think that our requests quite made it all the way up the chain far enough. It may take a higher power than us.”

Wilson and Meadows were friends well before Kingdom Geek, and still book hosting gigs together. While the title Kingdom Geek is still property of Fullscreen, they are actively looking to host another talk show together that wouldn’t be wildly different from that show — just under a different title.

Also, they are lucky enough to have archived copies of the Kingdom Geek episodes they made. (If they ever leak online, Meadows joked, it definitely wasn’t them who did it, “like that Ryan Reynolds Deadpool clip.”)

Not every creator is so lucky. In talking with many people working in the digital space, there were some who were hyper-vigilant about making sure they had versions of their work, and some whose shows are, as far as they know, are gone forever.

To some degree, there’s a level of personal responsibility involved here, though those who were able to archive their shows were also more often than not actively involved in the post-production process, which meant they were able to ask editors for copies of the final product. Meanwhile, if a network shuts down and takes its content offline, that very often means that there are no longer any employees available to answer these sorts of requests.

Writer Jacob Fleischer said that as someone working on projects like the Ed Helms-starring Tiny Commando for Yahoo Screen, he knew that asking for his episodes would be futile, because of the scale of the company involved. “I have the experience of knowing that it would be crazy to even try,” he said.

The issue of control is what matters here. One of the digital content world’s biggest success stories remains The Guild, as the series created by and starring Felicia Day became the platonic ideal for those aspiring to break into Hollywood by making their own shows. Day made the first season independently with help from PayPal donations, but in 2008 the show attracted the attention of Microsoft, which became interested in working with her to produce future seasons.

Day came into the deal-making process with one priority. “I was determined not to sell the rights,” she told me. “I still own the rights to this day because I just refuse to give them up. Even though very often producers came and wanted to work with me, I was just so afraid of them disappearing into a vortex.I had seen, even back then, that this had happened to some creators with their shows, and how they never saw the light of day again.”

Scott Nocas, who was the executive at Microsoft who made the deal with Day and her team, said that his pitch for bringing original series to Xbox Live and other platforms was that “we’re going to let the creators own it, and we’re going to have participation and the right to distribute it on our platform, make money on it, all of these things. But we wanted them to be able to feel like they could own this and have a chance to grow this as a franchise.”

Microsoft’s various video options thus got a month-long exclusive on the premieres of seasons two through five of The Guild (after which new episodes debuted on the show’s official site). But because Day had never sold the rights, that meant that she was able to return to making the show for her own YouTube channel for Season 6, and more importantly, years later, Day was able to place the show on Netflix. “And if it wasn’t able to be on Netflix, I could put it back somewhere else. I’m in charge of the distribution, and that’s cool,” she said.

If she hadn’t been able to maintain ownership, Nocas noted, The Guild could easily have been trapped in the Microsoft vaults, unseen today — like so many other shows.

Day’s The Guild might still be online, but another passion project of hers is not — because she made it for Machinima. The original fantasy series Dragon Age: Redemption, based on the Electronic Arts video game, was one of the shows taken off YouTube when the channel was shut down, and while you can still acquire Redemption via various VOD services, it is no longer available to the public otherwise.

“I was disappointed to say the least,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t own that project, but I put my heart and soul into it, and to have it sort of just disappear… it’s upsetting.”

She is relatively zen about it, though, because “as a creator, I was hired to do a job, and writers don’t have a lot of say when it comes to just where the business end of your product generally is.”

One of many people who knows this well is writer Lon Harris, who was the showrunner on FANtasies, a collaboration between Fullscreen, New Form Digital and the fan fiction platform Wattpad. FANtasies brought to life fanfic stories written about YouTuber using the YouTubers themselves, and today only one episode remains online thanks to a “free sample” posted to the New Form Digital YouTube account featuring Helbig, Mamrie Hart and Hannah Hart. The rest are now unavailable, even to Harris himself.

Harris admitted that knowing his shows were no longer online was “not a great feeling,” while acknowledging he got paid for the work, and thus “it’s not my content, it’s not my platform and I’m being paid to make it — not to exhibit it. I get that. And it’s fair, I don’t think I was wronged in any major way.”

However, he added, while he was grateful to the FANtasies experience because it was his first time getting to showrun a series, “you’re taking these jobs with the expectation that, well, it isn’t just the money, it’s the opportunity to work on this great thing, to have your work out there and to make this product that people might see and might discover you and want to work with you on something else. And that element just gets totally lost if after a year or two — or not even that — it’s going to disappear and no one is ever going to see it again. It’s like, well, then it really was just for the money. There’s no other compelling reason to do it. You start to think, well, maybe I should have asked for more money.”

When it comes to owning the rights to your content, Shapiro went old school with his reference points. “This goes back to the very earliest days of television. The only reason Desi Arnez and Lucille owned [I Love Lucy] is because they owned the physical product. In the 1970s, BBC called [Monty Python member] John Cleese and said, ‘We’re about to toss out The Flying Circus, do you want it?’ He said yes, and he became the IP owner. In the case of Johnny Carson, starting in 1972, he started taking the show home with him every night and in the 1980s, as he renegotiated, he owned the show. The best advice in that case is to just have the file. Never give up the only copy of the master.”

It’s good advice for creators, and maybe also valuable advice on the audience side. Megan Westerby is the head of research and audience for entertainment studio Madison Wells Media, and as she noted to me, right now “there’s a generational divide between wanting to own something in a physical format, or just wanting to feel like you always have access to something, whether or not that is buying it through iTunes or Amazon or pirating it.”

Which means, she added, “we are already seeing a rise in piracy. Worldwide peer-to-peer piracy rates were on a downward trend for a really long time. And it’s already starting to inch back up. U.S.piracy definitely started to drop as more options were available for people to have a better user experience. And definitely, as people got confused as to where things were going from licensing, or wanting to make sure they could still have access to something they cared about, piracy started to creep up again.”

The dimensions of this issue are massive, but what stands out is that while streaming service users have become so used to being easily able to access their favorites, to rely on the continued success of any platform may be, in the long term, foolish. It’s an unpredictable world, and while it’s lovely to believe that the best shows will still be viewable in some way, no matter what the fates have in store, that’s just the sort of plan at which God laughs.

To quote the 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot, “all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.” But, be aware: When NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service launches, it will become the exclusive home for that show. So in a few years, if Peacock doesn’t succeed, you might not be able to check if that quote is accurate.

Liz Shannon Miller is an LA-based writer and editor who has been published by Vulture, Variety, The AV Club, The Hollywood Reporter, IGN, The Verge, and Thought Catalog. She is also a produced playwright, a host of podcasts, and a repository of “X-Files” trivia.