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Rosita Westhouse

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Aug 2, 2024, 8:49:05 AM8/2/24

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It would certainly be a welcome development for people who represent on-air news talent. The traditional TV networks that pay their clients handsomely are losing audience and revenue. Some agents fear significant downsizing and cost-cutting after the 2024 presidential election in November and nothing would lift their spirits more than having a new, deep-pocketed bidder enter the playing field.

The company has internally discussed the opportunities in news, just as it has for many formats on traditional TV that attract audiences. But when asked about any plans along those lines, a Netflix representative cited a recent interview with Netflix Chief Executive Ted Sarandos in which he said the platform has no plans to pursue breaking news.

One reason is that news is not quite like sports. League media rights fees have escalated in recent years, because live game telecasts are the most reliable way to attract large audiences for appointment viewing. The buyers of those rights have some degree of certainty of what they are getting when they sign the deal. Not so with news.

News is not only unpredictable but expensive to produce and perishable after it goes on the air. Breaking coverage is not exclusive to a single outlet. Live feeds of events are now ubiquitous in the streaming and social media era.

Cable news remains highly profitable, but cord-cutting is slowly depriving them of the subscriber fees that have sustained the businesses for decades. Younger consumers are bypassing traditional TV and not developing the habit of news viewing (although many network news programs are repeated on their favorite platform, YouTube).

They also built stature for their parent companies. Affiliate stations still depend on the national broadcast networks for news to supplement their own local coverage. News provides a brand identity for networks, right down to the logo painted on production trucks that show up for live shoots on a neighborhood corner.

Netflix would be better off licensing programs produced by an existing news organization that already has a news-gathering infrastructure in place, several TV executives said. (Netflix carried original shows from CNN before Warner Bros. Discovery moved them over to its streaming service Max, which now offers a streaming feed of the channel.)

Avatar News is in no way affiliated with Paramount, Nickelodeon, Avatar Studios, Dark Horse Comics, Abrams Books, Insight Editions, Netflix, or any other entity whose property may be present on the Avatar News website (avatarnews.co & korranews.com) or Avatar News social media accounts. Avatar News makes no claim of ownership to any content owned by any such entities.

Like the title says, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the co-creators and showrunners of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, have left their positions as executive producers and showrunners of the live-action adaptation of ATLA at Netflix, and will have no involvement with it going forward.

Before I get to the crux of this statement, I would like to make it clear that I am very aware and appreciative of the fact that I am in an exceedingly fortunate position, and that the following issues are indeed good problems to have - even more so now that we are in the grips of a global pandemic and a cratering economy which have left millions unemployed. With that crucial context, here is the big news from my little world.

To be clear, this was not a simple matter of us not getting our way. Mike and I are collaborative people; we did not need all of the ideas to come from us. As long as we felt those ideas were in line with the spirit and integrity of Avatar, we would have happily embraced them.

Though I am profoundly disappointed by how things turned out, there are wonderfully talented people who are still working on the series, some of whom Mike and I personally hired and got to know well during our time on the project. We worked very hard together towards a shared dream of how special this adaptation could be. I want to see them employed, and I hope they get the chance to do their best work on the series. Perhaps the team that remains might still be able to make something fans of the original and an entirely new audience can enjoy.

By and large, I have an incredibly charmed career and I am very grateful for it. And I am enormously lucky for the amazing global community of fans that has grown around the shows Mike and I have created and run together. I will continue to be deeply involved in the Avatar universe, telling the stories that my partner and I want to tell in the way we want to tell them. I will put my time, energy, and talent towards the projects that give me the most fulfilment [sic], and where I am afforded trust and respect.

Many of you have been asking me for updates about the Avatar live-action Netflix series. I can finally tell you that I am no longer involved with the project. In June of this year, after two years of development work, Bryan Konietzko and I made the difficult decision to leave the production.

When Bryan and I signed on to the project in 2018, we were hired as executive producers and showrunners. In a joint announcement for the series, Netflix said that it was committed to honoring our vision for this retelling and to supporting us on creating the series. And we expressed how excited we were for the opportunity to be at the helm. Unfortunately, things did not go as we had hoped.

This time, they both talk about how they will be heavily involved in Avatar moving forward. They just spent two years enthusiastically jumping back into the franchise, and at the tail end of that, Avatar became bigger than ever before. (The huge news articles about them leaving is testament to that alone!)

This week, several major TV networks gave their annual elaborate pitches to advertisers in venues across New York City, and never has the showcase been more focused on digital. Usually, streaming and digital media news is mostly confined to the NewFronts, but this year Amazon and Netflix joined the weeklong events with legacy networks like NBCUniversal, Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, all of which devoted significant stage time to their streaming services.

Netflix also used the upfronts to announce an in-house ad tech platform and that its advertising tier has doubled in size since the start of 2024, reaching 40 million monthly active users. Netflix President of Advertising Amy Reinhard said that 40% of all signups now come from its ads plan.

And on Tuesday, Comcast, parent company of NBCUniversal, announced its own bundle called StreamSaver, which includes Peacock, Netflix, and Apple TV+, and will debut this month at a "deep discount" compared with buying all those subscriptions separately. These announcements come after the February news of the upcoming sports bundle launched by Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox. The idea could be to make it more difficult for viewers to drop subscriptions on a monthly basis by giving them more options for content they want to watch. It also extends the marketing reach of the individual services.