The lack of director commentaries and behind the scenes content on streaming has always baffled me as the rights to that must be much cheaper to acquire and would result in more minutes of streaming watched for less licensing money.
It's telling that VFX subcontractors are putting out their own BTS content on YouTube now as promotional material, since the primary production companies for shows and films (with a few exceptions) have completely stopped doing this.
I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.
Is there just too much content now? Or has streaming become such a "content mill" that the creators aren't inspired enough about their own work to sit down and talk about it after it's complete?
I would guess this is the reason. Before there was unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting more for their money.
But now, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 people would respond to that, since there is always something else that can be instantly switched to watching or playing, so why go through the effort?
We’ve started watching Pluribus on Apple TV and it seems like when they’re making the show Apple contractually obligates them to make a podcast about each episode. Some of them are very interesting (like costume design) and some are less so.
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
I noticed the same with Severance (also Apple TV). After every episode, there is a short director commentary/crew interviews about random episode specifics or more higher level thoughts.
The Chernobyl tv show had a nice podcast that went with it as well. I think these kinds of extra features are especially nice when it is for a show based on real life. They get to point out things that may not have been 100% historically accurate due to budget/time, and also get to bring in experts to speak about things related to developing the show.
It is funny that these things often just get released on podcast platforms and aren't really integrated into the streaming service.
Especially since this show, and the shows mentioned in these parent comments are all produced by the platforms they got released on. So they also have a whole lot more control to actually integrate this extra content.
These streaming platforms often state they are competing to keep you on their platform consuming things, and it seems odd to me that they wouldn't want to try and capture people for longer with these kinds of extras. Especially since as the other user indicated, these would be much lower cost to produce and license compared to the original content. And for someone who really enjoyed what they watched it would be a pretty appealing extra to have.
