Amy Landecker, left, and Jeffrey Tambor appear in a scene from the Amazon Digital show, "Transparent." (Photo: Beth Dubber, Amazon Digital via AP) 
 
 It rather seemed like a one-two punch: Amazon winning a Golden Globe Award for its series Transparent last week; and then Amazon signing up Woody Allen, the incomparable filmmaker, to make an original video series. Amazon, the great disrupter, was disrupting again. 
 
 Except what the great disrupter was doing wasn't so much blazing a new digital trail but making good, even perhaps excellent, television — in fact, joining what seems to be an ever-increasing competition to make new golden-age TV. 
 
 Among the post-millennial media revolutions has been the dramatic, even frenzied, expansion of buyers of high-quality television. Quite recently, the financiers of big-budget dramas and comedies consisted of four networks and HBO; now, depending on how you count, there are 17 to 20 serious players, more if you include the British underwriters making shows that also find a home here. 
 
 Not that long ago, television — losing market share, ever subdividing the cable dial, afraid of the Internet and desperate to cut costs — looked like it was on its way to becoming just a new wasteland of cheap reality programming. But now, as though in the blink of an eye, a recast industry has an insatiable appetite for a level of original, intelligent and culture-shaping projects not seen, on this level, since arguably the movies of the 1960s and 70s. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it is the movies now that seem like a ho-hum commercial backwater of predictable sequels and franchises. The true medium for actors and writers is television. There's not only lots of work here, but a high premium on the new, the inventive, the eccentric and really, in the context of traditional television, the virtually unimaginable. 
 
 The phenomenon is, of course, as everything in big-budget media always is, an economic one. 
 
 Television was once exclusively supported by advertising dollars that demanded mass market audiences, and encouraged safe and bland product. But then, gradually, cable subscriber fees began to add another revenue stream to cable channels and, with retransmission fees, broadcast too was getting paid, such that, television is now 50% subscriber supported. Television is no longer just free dross, but a paid product — quite an expensive one at that. 
 
 The implications of this have been powerful. 
 
 First, for people to pay, they have to want the product. It can't just be default "what's on?" programming. It has to be: Without it, I'm missing something. Fiction has to be as compelling and as vital as sports. 
 
 Second, it can't be kid's stuff. At 80 or 90 bucks a month for cable, it has to pay off for the adults in the house. What's more, Netflix and Amazon Prime, each at about $100 a year, require a credit card (a line in the generational sand). Scripted video is no longer a teenage product. It's something of the great media demographic rollback. Media needs to be for people who can pay for it upfront. Hence, much of the great new television, from The Sopranos and Mad Men, to House of Cards and Transparent, to The Good Wife and Veep, is middle-age television. 
 
 What's more, with its binge-watching habits, television further defies modern media conventions — particularly the Internet kind — favoring short and fleeting teenage and millennial attention spans (Breaking Bad is 62 episodes over five years). 
 
 Indeed, what Amazon and Netflix, and a hopeful Yahoo, and undoubtedly Google and Facebook, want in on is something profoundly unInternet. 
 
 The Web's unlimited supply of free content has had the certain effect of devaluing advertising everywhere in a medium where advertising is, as television used to be, the preponderant revenue source. Amazon and Netflix, and innumerable other digital media businesses, see the value of investing in expensive programming because people pay for it. As ad rates are falling, subscriber fees are rising, creating a rather irresistible logic. 
 
 Scripted video series defy almost all the other conventions of digital media, too. They are an old-fashioned, passive entertainment experience — no participation here. No social. No sharing. 
 
 And, notably, the low-value contributors in streaming video are the legions of programmers and techies, suddenly just mere facilitators. The high-value players are, in one of the greatest and most unexpected comebacks of the digital age, the writers, those few people who can actually create an original show. No user-generated content here. 
 
 Curiously, too, the value of high-grade content, of the critically acclaimed, of the lavishly awarded, of the big hit, is that it gets consumers to buy the whole package. The Internet promise, that it would unbundle television, that it would let you cut the expensive cable cord that makes you pay for what you don't want, has in fact, by the economic laws of producing good stuff, merely turned into an offer of new bundles. You pay a not-insubstantial and no doubt ever-increasing price for the bundle of Amazon Prime because you want the unmissable individual shows. 
 
 The ultimate effect, bad for the pocketbook but good for the imagination and the culture, is not an unbundled world, but many more bundles. After all, just for signing up (with credit card details), we boomers, in a grateful respite from social media, get to binge on Woody Allen. 
 
 Digital is not the future. The future is back to television. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1Bqkgzx ||||| Amazon Studios is going to start making movies, and you'll be seeing them in theaters before they become available for streaming on Prime. Fresh off Golden Globe wins for its original series Transparent, the company today announced it will produce and acquire full-length feature films for theatrical release. Amazon Original Movies, which "focus on unique stories, voices, and characters from top and up-and-coming creators," will become available to US Prime subscribers just 4 to 8 weeks after they premiere in theaters — a shorter transition to streaming than you'd see from the major movie studios. 
 
 12 movies a year sounds ambitious 
 
 And Amazon's not exactly starting small; it plans to produce up to 12 movies each year as part of the new initiative, and those efforts will kick off in earnest later this year. "Not only will we bring Prime Instant Video customers exciting, unique, and exclusive films soon after a movie’s theatrical run, but we hope this program will also benefit filmmakers, who too often struggle to mount fresh and daring stories that deserve an audience," said Roy Price, VP of Amazon Studios. 
 
 Steering the creative development of Amazon Original Movies is Ted Hope, who co-founded the Good Machine production company, responsible for films like Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Interestingly, the latter title ties in with Netflix's original feature film plans. Amazon's chief competitor will make the upcoming sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon available on its service at the same time it premieres in IMAX theaters. Jeff Bezos' plan is quite different; he seems happy to give Amazon's movies some exclusive screening time in theaters so long as they get over to Prime within a month or two. And while Prime Instant Video customers may bemoan the wait, the benefit is that moviegoers will have a better shot of actually finding Amazon's movies someplace nearby.
– First Amazon's Transparent won big at the Golden Globes, then the company scored a Woody Allen television series; the trifecta comes as the behemoth announces the rollout of Amazon Original Movies—a series of up to a dozen full-length flicks a year that "focus on unique stories, voices, and characters from top and up-and-coming creators." As the Verge reports, Amazon will acquire and produce the films, put them in wide release, and then make them available to its Prime members after only four to eight weeks in theaters. Original Movies is set to roll out later this year. Maybe Amazon can help shake up the silver screen in the way that it's helped shake up the small screen, which Michael Wolff, writing at USA Today, says is now crammed with "competition to make new golden-age TV," which he calls "the true medium for actors and writers," even as Hollywood's film scene now seems "like a ho-hum commercial backwater of predictable sequels and franchises." Rather than descending into a "wasteland of cheap reality programming," the likes of Amazon, HBO, and Netflix have transformed the industry into one with "an insatiable appetite for a level of original, intelligent, and culture-shaping projects." He concludes: "The future is back to television." Click for Wolff's full column.