They've wanted to probably end it for a couple years now, but knew they'd be accused of political cowardice if they did. The pending merger was the perfect force majeure to justify ending it quietly and dignified with a year-long head's up.... except they never dreamed TDS would be so strong in the union hall that they'd be declared not only political cowards anyway... but a criminal conspiracy on top.
There's a whole ecosystem in entertainment, a conglomeration of writers, managers, assistants and stage hands, that is obsolete in the modern day and has been since arguably the early 00's due to fundamental changes in technology/the product. But, due to it's own institutional inertia? Kept on gliding for an extra couple decades past that point before finally crashing.
Bethlehem Steel chose not to modernize their mill in the 70's..... it still managed to operate at a justifiable profit until the 90's, then it closed.
We're seeing the same thing right now in entertainment, where the "Mill" is TV. It missed it's chance to modernize in the 00's, but managed to stay afloat on momentum and legacy customers for an extra 20 years, then it failed and got shut down.
FWIW? Movies and Music are suffering from the same issues too... with record companies STILL trying to DCMA the entire internet so that album sales as a building block of the industry returns, while Hollywood is stuck in an endless loop of remakes and reboots with the only changes allowed being more diversity casting to attract the "modern audience" that has failed to materialize..
They both are trying to keep living in 1998 forever.
One unfortunate side effect of Alec Baldwin killing that woman was that it justified to the Hollywood unions that creating a Hollywood movie without unions is something you cannot do and your best hope is hoping theaters pick it up anyway without much marketing. Some independent films do well, 2023's
Sound of Freedom was one such film—but I would bet that higher-ups specifically made sure that
Rust would not enjoy that sort of success.
The main problem with these types of media is content. Moving to a streaming platform won't save
The Late Show in its current incarnation. I mean, we've already seen CNN+ bomb after just a few months and the entire catalog scrapped (
Who's Talking to Chris Wallace? survived and continued on Max, but ended in late 2024 as his contract expired and not renewed).
If we're talking about 1998, if you look at the
films of 1998 you had the top two movies make a billion between them.
Saving Private Ryan,
A Bug's Life,
The Big Lebowski,
Mulan, and the
Prince of Egypt all came out that year. A wide variety of movies for all tastes were released and chances are you'd go to the movies several times that year, even if some of them kind of sucked, even at the time. Compare that to
2024. Even accounting for streaming exclusives, look at that trash. There's only a few that rise above just being mediocre, and what you get for the Christmas season is Disney's live-action
The Little Mermaid with the black girl with eyes on the side of her head,
Mufasa: The Lion King, and
Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
Video games? 1998 was a golden age. There was
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time,
Fallout 2,
StarCraft,
Pokémon Red & Blue, and a whole lot more. What was in 2024?
Balatro,
Astro Bot, and a whole lot of other forgettable titles.
Newspapers? A thick almanac with comics, sports, sections on food and gardening, news from all over the world, classifieds with job offerings, film, arts & culture, and everything else. Now? Republished AP news and maybe a local story if you're lucky.
tl;dr Legacy media is struggling because it can't output the same content it used to
