OK, was going to necro the thread for the conversational context, but basically it was complaining about streaming services and how you have to subscribe to a whole package for maybe one show you'd want to see. I'd started making notes for a reply, comparing this to buying magazines back in their heyday. Never got around to posting or finishing the notes. Normally when I come across such notes later, I delete them, but I had made a New Year resolution to participate in the group more, if not helping with the signal to noise ratio, at least to contribute a higher quality of noise. I'd begun researching to get it ready to post in February, but here we are halfway through the year.

Back in their heyday, buying a magazine would be the only way to read a serialized novel (with no guarantee that it would become a book) or a new story in any series any author may or may not be making.

Taking our epoch to begin in Feb, 1953, sf mags cost 25 to 35 cents out of a dollar that is worth ten to eleven of 2023's, so $2.50 to $3.85.[1] A search on "streaming deals" and just scrolling through the prices gives us $3..99 to $14.99, often as an introductory deal. That's a closer comparison than I expected to get, given that audiovisual has a premium over print -- in terms of time, a normal length movie has a novella or novelette's worth of story, let alone that text can be produced by a starving artist in a garret, while a performance needs somewhat pampered performers, plus somewhat husky personnel to move around the physical representations of the setting.

Which brings up the first thing streamers have learned from cable companies on how not to engender goodwill, not giving clear costs. A heavily advertised starting rate, increasing to some agreed-upon, if not clearly stated, rate for some period, followed by them charging whatever they think they can get you to pay that month. The second comparison is subscription; the magazine you can buy one off the rack. Do all streaming services require multi-month signup? And why? It's not like the cable company has to go to the trouble of running a wire out to your house for this new service and then wind it back up afterward. How troublesome would it be with automated recordkeeping to change your service status on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis, as non-fans of anthologizing would say, "Why subscribe to a whole streaming service? Why can't I just rent a movie from them?"

[1] Inflation is only an average. Checking magazines of February 2022, I find, if I am reading
https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/fc.cgi?date+2+2022
correctly, prices from $2.99 to $5, for the web versions (one slim outlier at $1.99), print $7.99 and up. This probably reflects the shrinking of the print industry, and the loss of economies of scale.

Here is where I drove off into the weeds.

Comicbooks, come to mind as an example of the loss of economy or scale -- current issues cost thirty to fifty times what they did in the '50s -- and perhaps the first rise of the non-fan of anthologizing: they handled changes a bit differently from other magazines.

Action Comics #1, the first 12-page story of Superman,
http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/series.php?seriesid=28&page=gallery
and Detective Comics #27, the first 6-page story of Batman,
http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/series.php?seriesid=693&page=gallery

offered a number of other stories as part of packages that give you 59-61 story pages. The Detective title was the more focused, with Action being more like Argosy or All Story magazines as far as genre content.

Moving to my chosen February 1953 cover date, you can pick out the covers of Detective Comics #192 and Action Comics #177 and see they have used what we now call "shrinkflation" to still sell comics for a dime, but with four stories totaling 32 pages. Detective is mixing genres into its mysteries, with Batman, another detective with a gimmick of working through TV, a Sioux detective from the 1880s, and... well, a robotman detective. Action has Congo Bill, and Tommy Tomorrow, who wear their settings on their sleeve -- or I should say on their lapels, if they had nametages. The Vigilante wears his on one of the bandanas of his story title; I don't know if "vigilante" would raise any connotations *but* the old west in those days.

Struggling company Marvel was putting out anthology titles such as Journey into Mystery
http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/series.php?page=gallery&seriesid=3980
with story pages in the low twenties. (I had chosen Journey into Mystery as a special case. Of the Marvel Age heroes, the Fantastic Four and Daredevil premiered in their own title, the others appeared as a story in an anthology title, became the star story in that title, and later shared the book with another hero (each story being 10-12 pages). Journey into Mystery is where Thor got his start, he went on the share the book with... himself. The main Thor stories of about 17 pages were followed by "Tales of Asgard": stories of Thor as a boy living in Smallville. When the "split books" actually split into separate books, one hero would get his own title beginning numbering with 1, and the other would get the anthology book (Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, Strange Tales) renamed, but carrying on the numbering. Journey into Mystery did a clever process of gradually changing the size of the fonts, so that it changed from JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY with the contents advertising of "with The Mighty Thor" to what looked like a slogan "Journey into mystery with" over the title THE MIGHYT THOR. You can see this gradually happening from issues 103 to 104. Eventually they pretended it had always been called The Mighty Thor.)

As we skip forward 70 years, we pass over some more shrinkflation and good old inflation. Story pages shrank down to a low of about 17, but stabilized around 22. Stories grew to be "novel length" by which they mean "fill the whole book" by which they mean "the pamphlet." Genres other than superhero atrophied. And prices rose.

It'll take too long to write out the aversion for split books after comics readers got used to "novel length" stories. In 1988, Action Comics changed to Action Comics Weekly from #601 to #642, containing six stories averaging eight pages each for 48 pages. One story starred Superman, the others various other superheroes, many not currently having their own book. As you can tell, that lasted less than a year. Around the same time, Marvel started an anthology book, Marvel Comics Presents, four stories in 32 pages, biweekly, and slightly cheaper -- not in cost-per-page, but in less "waste" if you are only interested in one or two of the features, I guess if you are only interested in the same number of features as in the other up to four. With these advantages and settling on a lead feature of Wolverine and/or Ghost Rider at the height of his popularity, it ran six years.

The comics had begun to disappear from newsstands and magazine racks. Being cheaper than a regular magazine, but taking about as much space to display, they were less profit. In rec.arts.comics.* at the turn of the century there was fan concern about getting comics back on the newsstand as necessary to keep them alive. The main thought was to bulk them up to the value of magazines, probably by combining several books from different creators that would be ready that month. My memory is many posters objected to having to buy other books they might not want. Monthly comicbooks are still coming out in the same form factor of the '70s, and the industry is still dying the death it's been going through since the end of WWII.

To now take a look at movie theaters. Used to be admission got you in and you watched until you got bored. With the projectionist changing reels every ten minutes or so, they could mix any number of shorts in with the features -- hopefully not mix them into the feature. I'm not clear on how shorts were packaged. Possibly some yearly bundle of a certain number, delivered over time, and the theater could mix suppliers. Theaters had experience being vexed with "bundling," of good movies with bad known as "block booking," but did not have a convenient way to pass that on to their moviegoers. Still, whatever the studios were dishing out, they thought they themselves could take it; they also moved to own theaters themselves. Both of these practices were thought to possibly be monopolistic, and investigated from the beginning of the sound era up until the 1948 decision in US v. Paramount (et alia) put a stop to it. This and other forces were changing movie-going from the multiple-story format. I found out just last month that Warner Brothers and MGM would each briefly lay off their animation departments later in 1953 while they were considering the costs of upgrading them to 3-D, the wave of the future. We were far past the days when Disney's Technicolor cartoons or a double-length Popeye would be the draw on the marquee, but feature movies were still shown with shorts, the Three Stooges, for example, would still make shorts up until 1959. Republic and Columbia were the last studios to make serials into the '50s, the first giving up in 1955, and the other a year later. From what I've seen, audience complaints against multiple shorts have not been about money, but about time. I guess folks want to get home to watch television.

Which brings us to TV. Like radio before it, it had to fill the void of broadcasting all day -- if not yet all night. Essentially any random thing that came into the studio, or that they could go out and record. The limited number of stations in any one area led to an understanding of "something for everyone" in its programming. With the coming of cable channels also came the possibility of "narrowcasting." Not to get into the history of that, but maybe if I did I'd find that the first, obvious, ones have been the most popular subdivisions, and have remained truest to their brands. Nevertheless, any narrow interest is not going to be as popular as a broad interest, and there's temptation for every channel to chase that audience. But that's not the complaint I'm looking at; it's the way cable bundled and charged for channels. Here the complaint seems to settle around money, all up and down the hierarchy.

Then there are the arguments for bundling.
....
Technological? It struck me that theaters began with the ability to show any selected short to any viewer that wanted it -- as the Nickelodeon. This lost out to the economics of collecting a nickel from several customers and having to invest in only one motion picture player... two, what with changing the reels, maybe three, to keep a handy spare. Books can be thin, chapbooks provide one story unassociated with others, but I suppose that can only go so far until the two hard covers are thicker than the pages in between them. (The size of scrolls can be guessed from the Bible's twelve minor books of the prophets that are kept on one scroll for ease of use.) Popular music (did I mention music before?) had been on the unit of the song for more than a century, either as sheet music, 78s, or 45s. Since the introduction of the Long Playing record, able to hold as much music as an album of the shorter forms, an interesting dichotomy has emerged, with connoisseurs of some artists who pride themselves on listening to the "deep cuts" while others still maintain there is "no time to play B-sides." Cable TV has always puzzled me; they can turn on or off the premium movie channels, run their "tiers," and even offer packages of the genres that have more than one channel: sports and childrens' programs, mostly -- they had steadfastly resisted a customer selecting a slate of individual channels. Streaming services also package multiple programs together... WAIT! I didn't notice until now they have gone back to the "serve all audiences" model of broadcasters! Well, there's one narrowcaster called "Nebula" being promoted by my science YouTubers, but the ones started or bought by studios are just a potpourri. The operative phrase is "started or bought by studios." The selection of movies and shows groupe by the source of investment money from firms seeking a diversified portfolio, no wonder they throw a haystack of programs over the needle I want!

What I suspect the true reason for bundling is a combination of 90% of everything being crap, and only being able to fool all of the people some of the time. Quite an astonishing number of movies don't make back the money it took to make them. I don't know if anyone has looked at the number of TV shows that get produced past their first order of episodes.

Conclusion: I haven't come across one yet. Maybe someone can suggest something?

--
-Jack