Why Library Content Could Drive the Future of Streaming

“My So-Called Life,” the coming-of-age television series that catapulted Claire Danes to prominence, ended its one-season run on ABC in 1995. Twenty-eight years later, the television landscape has morphed into something very different. Danes recently turned her facial contortions not to an over-the-air TV network but the streaming service Hulu, playing a distressed spouse in the series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” In the modern streaming ecosystem, “My So-Called Life” is now what industry people call a “library title,” one of thousands of has-been series stranded in archival purgatory. Like everything, “Life” got old.

Or did it? Not long ago, when my wife and I exhumed the pilot episode from the Hulu vaults, having missed it the first time around, “Life” seemed every bit as fresh and urgent as the final episode of HBO’s “Succession.” Smitten from the opening scene — Danes’ character Angela and her friend Rayanne, goofily panhandling outside a bakery — we binge-watched all 19 episodes in a two-week immersion. Every pitch-perfect iteration of Angela’s crush on high school hottie Jordan Catalano seemed just as gripping now as it must have been during its Clinton-era premiere.

Thus, an existential question arose: Is a television show “new” when it’s introduced with fanfare by the television industry’s PR machine? Or is it “new” when you press “play” for the first time?

The answer matters a great deal to the streaming video ecosystem, where lately major players including The Walt Disney Co. are casting off some of yesterday’s video detritus. In the second quarter of 2023, Disney recorded an impairment charge of $1.5 billion to account for a video vanishing act, preferring to get out of contracts early rather than continue to pay licensing costs indefinitely for shows like “Dollface” and “The Mysterious Benedict Society” on Hulu and Disney+, respectively.

The steep price being paid to prune the library suggests Disney believes much of the business will be driven by the new and the novel, not the old and the graying. But in making that bet, it’s possible Disney may be sublimating one of the more compelling underpinnings of the digital video age. Surprise: It’s not “streaming.”

True, sending video over the internet has gifted us with slick user interfaces, personalized recommendations and boxes with names like Roku. But these are parlor tricks compared with a more transformational innovation: storage.

What’s different now — why television is hurtling toward generational change and why “My So-Called Life” has new life — isn’t that we stream television. Instead, it’s that we now have fingertip access to stored content — as in, old stuff — at scale.

Programs that once sat idly in basement vaults at CBS or Nickelodeon or the Warner Bros. studio, accessible only to archivists with credentials, are now loaded up on publicly available servers, where anyone with a subscription, or their aunt’s Max password, can access them.

Storage changes TV. In the old days, shows were fleeting events. You had to be stationed in the living room, dishes done, couch beckoning, precisely when the network said so, or you’d miss out. Save for awkward attempts to capture dribbles of video with balky VCRs and later digital offspring called DVRs, there was no scaled, accessible mechanism for reclaiming stored content.

Now there is. Nielsen tells us there are now more than 800,000 unique programs available to be summoned to the screen. As a consequence, we confront the TV set or the smartphone screen with a different set of expectations. We don’t ask, “What’s on?” Instead, we set off on an archeological journey, digging for the big find. It may be a series we read about in the New Yorker or overheard Jasmine from Logistics gushing about during Tuesday’s Zoom call. Or it might have popped up on a menu, courtesy of an algorithm that purports to know us better than our own partners.

Regardless of a show’s provenance, the medium is morphing into something that behaves less like legacy television and more like music. We pick and choose TV shows the way we pick and choose songs. TV show creators (say, Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine studio) are bands, TV series are albums, and TV networks are record labels — which is to say, not terribly relevant to most people. The new model for television is not so much Disney+ or Peacock as it is Spotify. (Pro tip: They who can amass the greatest library of titles, presented with the least amount of friction, will win the day.)

This seismic shift tilts attention away from the “new” and instead empowers TV watchers, more so than executives and promo departments, to decide what matters. We see this long-tail revolution percolating elsewhere. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” released in 1975, clocked in at No. 26 on an all-time most-listened-to list Spotify recently published. The Killers’ anthemic “Mr. Brightside” (2004) outranks nouveau tracks like the Dua Lipa/DaBaby entry “Levitating” (2022).

While players like Disney may opt to beat the promotional drum loudest for the new and the current — because old habits do die hard — the corollary reality is that TV shows must now compete not just with this week’s “new and notable” schedule but with precedent, pedigree and accessibility. This is good news for anybody who loves television. It turns viewers into free-range fans, able to exert control over their own TV destinies and, at least momentarily, to elude the hypnotic trance of the media hype machine.

For proof, see one Jordan Catalano. The actor who played him, Jared Leto, is now north of 50. But trust me: He’ll look every bit the brooding teenage antihero he was meant to be when he shows up on your screen for the first time.

Stewart Schley is a media analyst who has written about television since the dawn of MTV. He is co-writing a business history, "The Accidental Network," chronicling the transformation of the cable TV industry.

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