Libraries, Research, and Public Access

Citizens and Scholars Are Losing Access to History

Authors: Shawna Kidman & Christine Smith

Librarians, archivists, and media scholars have long been at the forefront of ensuring film and television preservation and access. In and around Hollywood, institutions like the Motion Picture Academy and the Paley Center, and universities like USC and UCLA have funded, maintained, and innovated in the preservation of media for decades. Similar institutions and initiatives across the country and around the world share a collective goal of ensuring preservation of and access to televisual and cinematic heritage for current and future generations. These institutions remain as strong as ever, but corporate consolidation—which often brings with it the sale and purchase of vast media archives—poses a significant threat to these goals. 

Conglomerated studios that amass a large catalog of film and television titles often determine that making this material available to the public is not lucrative enough to warrant their resources. So while libraries and archival institutions continue to maintain a record of media, continued equitable public access to a breadth of collective cultural artifacts is greatly diminishing, and with it the significance, relevance, and richness these artifacts hold. 

A Paramount-Warner Bros. merger would exacerbate this problem. As part of its lobbying efforts, David Ellison’s team has actually boasted that the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. would own film assets “of more than 15,000 titles and thousands of hours of television programming.” We believe this estimate is an underestimate. More importantly, Ellison’s promise that the merged company’s possession of this vast archive would mean “greater choice” for audiences is empty. The introduction of streaming platforms like Paramount+ and HBO Max, which initially promised subscribers access to thousands of titles, has moved public access in the opposite direction. Companies routinely remove old films and television series from streaming services and increasingly, refuse to offer them elsewhere (through, for example, DVD sales, rentals, repertoire screenings, etc.) in order to create artificial scarcity. Studios are not only not offering their titles to citizens as consumers (via streaming or per purchase fees), but are no longer offering them to citizens in any context: not to researchers, journalists or documentarians and not in libraries, schools, movie theaters, or other institutions serving the public. As a result, many of these works are simply being erased from history.

Paramount-Warner Bros. Would Hold the Largest and Most Valuable Collection of Film and Television History in Hollywood

The combined film and television holdings of a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. would be quite large, likely larger than the estimates Ellison’s team cites in their lobbying materials. By 1999, before its merger with CBS, Paramount was distributing over 55,000 hours of programming. In 2019, momentarily independent from Paramount, CBS Studios boasted more than 70,000 hours of programming. After merging, the soon-to-be-named Paramount Global claimed more than 750 television series and 3,600 films, including not only the historic Paramount content (dating back to 1914), but also that of Republic Films (dating back to 1935), CBS Films, DreamWorks Pictures, and Nickelodeon. A year later, in 2020, Paramount bought the rights to Miramax’s film catalog, adding an additional 700 films. 

Separately, in 2022, Warner Bros. assessed its holdings at “more than 145,000 hours of programming, including 12,500 feature films and 2,400 television programs comprising more than 150,000 individual episodes.” Like Paramount, Warner Bros. had also spent decades purchasing other companies’ collections, so their film catalog goes well beyond Warner Bros. Pictures (dating back to 1923), and includes the films of RKO (1929-1957), Fine Line Pictures, New Line Pictures, and of course HBO. In summary, according to the studios’ own press releases in 2022, the combined assets consisted then of more than 16,800 films and 3,150 television series—a combined total of more than 270,000 hours of programming. By comparison, Disney, which owns ABC and streams much of its television catalogue on Hulu, has just 30,000 hours of programming. And, in the last four years, which included ramped production in television for the “peak TV” streaming era, Paramount Skydance’s and Warner Bros. count has likely substantially increased. 

Rights Holder	Year Cited	Films	TV Series	Hours of Programming
Warner Bros.	2022	12500	2400	145000
Miramax	2020	700
CBS Studios	2019			70000
CBS & Paramount	2019	3600	750
Paramount	1999			55000
at least...	by 2022	16,800 films	3,150 TV Series	270,000 Hours of Programming

With so much content, it may be easy to imagine neverending shelves of lost films and cancelled TV shows, and undoubtedly, many of the company’s titles have been forgotten. But Warner Bros. and Paramount were arguably the most important and prolific studios of the 20th century, and have continued to produce some of the mostsignificant film and television of the 21st century.

The television archive of these two companies is even more substantial. For decades, Warner Bros. Television Studios produced series for every network in Hollywood, and its portfolio included Wonder Woman, The Dukes of Hazzard, Full House, Murphy Brown, Living Single, Friends, ER, Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, Gossip Girl, and The Big Bang Theory. Meanwhile, HBO was considered the most valuable brand in Hollywood between the late 1990s and late 2010s for revolutionizing the medium with series like The Sopranos, Sex & the City, The Wire, Band of Brothers, Game of Thrones, Veep, Succession, and Euphoria. Through its many mergers, Warner Bros. also scooped up dozens of other television libraries dating back to the 1950s, including titles ranging from Gilligan’s Island to Roots, not to mention the entire Looney Toons and Hannah Barbera cartoon catalog. What Warner Bros. did not already produce or buy was produced or already held either by CBS or Paramount. There is, for example I Love Lucy, Mission Impossible, Star Trek, The Brady Bunch, Family Ties, Cheers, the CSI Franchise, South Park, Spongebob Squarepants and most of the best programming of the cable era via Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central. 

Not included in this far from exhaustive list is news. As the oldest network, CBS has been producing news programming—including 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News, and CBS Mornings—since 1941, before television was even invented. It began with CBS Radio in 1928, an American institution that David Ellison shuddered just last month. According to the Vanderbilt News Archives, which records television news broadcasts to loan out to U.S. based researchers, CBS has amassed nearly 270,000 hours since 1968. For decades, Warner Bros. was the only major studio without a broadcast network, and so lacked a news outlet. But since 1980, its subsidiary CNN has produced over 140,000 hours of televised news, also recorded and catalogued by the Vanderbilt Archive. The combined archive 

would thus control 410,000 hours of aired news. For comparison, Disney-owned ABC, the second largest news producer, has just 285,000 hours logged by Vanderbilt. 

In addition to these staggering numbers are the countless additional hours of B-roll—extra footage of every major event in U.S. history from JFK’s assasination to the breaking of the levees during Hurricane Katrina. For decades, this footage has been vital for historians and documentarians researching our collective past and making it accessible for future generations. If the proposed merger goes through, an enormous amount of this history would belong, exclusively, to one company, a company indebted to Middle East sovereign wealth.

Consumers Would Have Limited Access to Cultural History

Although the major studios promised potential subscribers that streaming would make access to titles easier, in the past five years, subscribers have discovered over and over and over that titles disappear constantly. It turns out that streaming platforms like Paramount+ or HBO Max pull TV shows and films for a wide variety of reasons. The residuals may be too costly, the company may want to create temporary scarcity and increased demand, or hide objectionable material of the past, or redirect consumers toward newer content instead. Regardless of the specifics, corporations have frequently decided it is more financially beneficial to remove the content than to maintain it. A merged streaming platform that combines two massive collections and faces enormous amounts of debt would likely have more cause to disappear films than before.

And because a combined streamer would represent one of only two legacy platforms (alongside Disney+), it would continue to have a lock on journalists, researchers, cinephiles, and TV fans who seek out old content. These audiences cannot simply choose a different platform on which to find their favorite old movies and series; it would simply exist on just one platform, with decisions made by just one company.

Years ago, audiences had other means of accessing content; physical purchases of DVDs or VHS cassettes permanently belonged to the buyer, and there were also rentals and the ability to record directly from your television. The major media companies, however, have brought an end to physical media by refusing to produce it; the demand for these products continues to exist, but consolidated Hollywood has determined the profit margins are too low. Unfortunately, the decline in physical media products, have hastened the phasing out of physical media recording devices and physical media players. While consumers can still purchase individual titles via Amazon Prime, Google Play, or Apple, rights holders like Paramount Skydance do not have to make titles available on these platforms, and often choose not to. So audiences, more than ever before, find themselves at the mercy of the archive owners. 

Public Access to Film and Television History is Already Limited; The Merger Would Worsen It

If the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. cannot make enough profit from distributing films and TV programs to libraries, schools, museums, and arthouse theaters, or from making news archives available to researchers, it would cease to do so. Not surprisingly given budget cuts at many public institutions, this space has not proved to be a thriving business opportunity in recent years. So, by and large, the studios have ignored them and left them to fight for the bare minimum.

University libraries are a great example of these worsening trends. For decades, university libraries have bought and maintained physical copies of films, TV series, and other physical media. Students, researchers, and professors could come to the library, check out the material, and watch or screen it for an audience via cassette or DVD players. Fair use carve outs for educational purposes have meant these practices were perfectly legal. Today, viewing habits and content availability have changed, so content, if screened in a class or for an event, often must be streamed. But rights holders typically require libraries to re-negotiate licenses for these products each and every year. A small number of companies dominate this market with only one company, Swank, licensing major studio films and classics like Citizen Kane and La Dolce Vita. Swank has exclusive deals with the major studios, and thus has exclusive access not only to university libraries, but to K-12 Schools, correctional institutions, parks & recreation departments, patient entertainment, museums, and more. It is a $60 million per year market, which is not a huge amount in Hollywood terms, and hardly a blip for the dozen or so companies that license their content through Swank. 

To the resource-strapped (and often publicly run) clients of Swank—the libraries, prisons, and non-profit institutions who want to give their constituents access to our collective cultural past—the financials are mind-bongling. University libraries must often allocate tens of thousands of dollars per year, every year, to maintain licensing platforms. And these fees do not get them unlimited access to a library of titles, but more likely just a hundred or so top titles. If a librarian wants individual titles on top of that package (because a particular film class shows a particular film every year), they have to pay hundreds of dollars per title. Recently, these prices have risen dramatically, with some institutions reporting increases of 20% over just the last 5 years. Revenue at Swank has gone up approximately $10 million over this period, but notably, the company’s profits have remained flat. In all likelihood, the extra revenue is going directly to higher costs set by the studios, whose consolidated control of the movie titles Swank licenses tightens with every merger and buy-out. 

Unfortunately, university libraries have few alternatives. In the initial transition to streaming, institutions put significant resources into digitizing their physical collections, making bought and owned DVDs available to classrooms and exhibits via their own owned and operated streaming technologies. While such educational applications are still protected under fair use, universities began receiving cease and desist letters and other threats from large media corporations. As a result, lawyers at most of the nation's universities have instructed librarians to end their digitization and streaming programs. 

Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance are currently the largest two licensors in Swank’s “Top 1000” film library. Post merger, they would exercise enormous control over the entire catalog, and with it, the ability to dictate prices, availability, and other as-of-yet unknown terms. In this particular instance, the dollar value of the market is of basically no consequence, making the non-existent level of competition irrelevant to most economists and lawyers. But for scholars, researchers, documentarians, archivists, librarians, and students of film, television, and media, or in other words, the community that has dedicated their lives to the preservation, analysis, and dissemination of our cinematic and televisual heritage, the future of media history preservation and access looks dim.