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"One interesting wrinkle in this march towards consolidated annoyance is the streaming sector’s interest in driving more users toward ad-based tiers, where prof

by jerf 3y ago

"One interesting wrinkle in this march towards consolidated annoyance is the streaming sector’s interest in driving more users toward ad-based tiers, where profits can continue to skyrocket:" Ah, but one must remember, we are in the streaming situation we are in now because the consolidation already happened. Netflix was The Streaming Service. But the content providers to Netflix looked at Neflix's profits and said, "Hey, we could have a larger slice of the pie if we ran our own services." So they went off and made their own. And, yes, they discovered they were wrong. But even if they consolidate again, it's just the nature of a MBA-executive in a content producing company to look over at the consolidated streaming service and say, once again, "Well, my predecessor couldn't make it work last time, but I'm sure that I can get a larger slice of the pie if I just make my own service. And look, customers will flock to my service because according to my numbers we can charge them a mere $9.99 a month whereas the consolidated service is $109.99." Streaming service consolidation requires all the MBA-executives to humbly submit to the idea that they have no effective choice but to fork over control of the revenues to the consolidated streaming service. Who will, of course, be taking full advantage of their position to squeeze the content providers and push them as hard as they possibly can in the direction of the economics of running their own service making sense again. I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.

zoeysmithe 3y ago
Under capitalism this is the stable solution, the same way there are so many auto makers, essentially making the same 3 or 4 cars/trucks, the same way there's the same PC OEMs making the same 3-4 laptops, desktops, etc. Consolidation, central command, efficiencies of centralization, guiding towards lower prices via these efficiencies, etc isn't capitalism. Maximizing profit by maximizing acceptable price is capitalism. What you're asking for isn't capitalism, but these are capitalist industries, not socialist ones controlled by, say a co-op or the government. Those MBA's are doing what they were hired for under a capitalist model. Their companies controlled IP's and those IP's are profitable outside of the Netflix umbrella, which ended up being true considering the success of Disney+, Hulu, etc. Of course now you're seeking a equilibrium. Will lower-tier offerings work like some no-name services or services with lesser content like Paramount? Maybe some players won't survive this, but that's also part of this model. Not to mention nearly all these services opened with predatory pricing. Disney+ was not going to work at $7 a month, but it got people to sign up, maybe cancel with someone else without predatory pricing, and now Disney just needs to boil the frog to higher prices. Under capitalism these anti-consumer tricks are perfectly legal and oddly acceptable. It seems now we're in the stage of the capitalist entrepreneur cycle where predatory pricing is out the door, and everyone is clamoring to get to the price point that works. All the players who would make a streaming service already have, so this little masquerade can stop. It just may be the case that your average US household can afford $150 in streaming services and everyone is just fighting to get that, which is close to what they paid with cable before streaming with inflation. This is the goal, not "lowering prices for good American families" and other dishonest marketing. If there's a $150 slice to be had per household, then capitalism will extract it. Or more, then people will revolt, cancel, and that will lead to price cuts and maybe some consolidation (say two weak services combine). I find it amusing that Americans who claim to love capitalism, actually dislike what it does, and instead quietly pine for socialism without knowing the word or concept. "Hey why dont all these inefficient companies just combine already? With strong consumer protections? Under a non-dishonest marketing scheme where efficiencies and where they co-operate deeply to maximize value and lower prices?" That's not the system you live under. Instead companies will fight each other, steal marketshare, raise prices, etc and maybe there's efficiencies there, but often not, but what matters is learning what the consumer can pay, and charging her that exact maximum. Which is what's happening here. No one but account sharers and college students etc are cancelling. Middle America isn't cancelling Disney or Netflix anytime soon. Maybe paramount or a weaker service, but everyone is in contention for that $150 and they're going to fight for it. It makes no sense under capitalism to consolidate back into a Netflix-like service. Its not going to happen again. Netflix was just capitalism getting there, but now that replicating the Netflix model got easier thanks to the cloud, these big IP holders just made their own. Imagine asking "God I hate paying to the Disney parks, why don't universal and disney and MGM just make one big park with all their IP run by another profit-seeking entity?" That would be absurd to ask under capitalism, but people are asking this for streaming?
- hedora 3y ago
  What you are describing isn’t how any functional capitalist system has worked. Predatory pricing is illegal, and the first sale doctrine is core to how capitalism works. Similarly, current copyright terms are laughably long. The problem here is not capitalism, it is corruption: The US has laws that will not be enforced, or that have been modified via regulatory capture / bribery.
  - zoeysmithe 3y ago
    No true scotsman arguments are pretty unconvincing. What I described is how much of the world economy works in capitalism. It may not be to your ideological liking but this is what capitalism does, and the laws its writes, the social norms it dictates, the types of governments acceptable under it, the way it fights reform, the way it creates incredible inequality, the way it seeks for max allow price, and the politics it creates. Had waving this with a vague "but but corruption" ignores the forest for the trees here. Not to mention your comment is provably false. Even the least corrupt capitalist states suffer from the exact same mechanisms and their own streaming prices are going up as well.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    Capitalism creates corruption, regulatory capture and bribery. Also created those laughably long copyright laws. It's the same picture.
pottertheotter 3y ago
You said they were wrong about getting a larger slice of the pie. Do you have any sources for this? Interested in learning more.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/business/media/disney-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/business/media/disney-ear... > Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million. It seems unlikely they were losing money on the Netflix licensing deals.
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    I'm intensely curious about how Disney has lost $7.5 million per day running Disney+. Could that be a real number? Surely there have to be accounting shenanigans at play... right? I mean, if they're really losing half of a billion dollars per quarter, they'd need to do something like doubling their subscriber count to even approach breaking even. Is that really the case?
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    That's including platform capex against ARR though...
  - jerf 3y ago
    Yes, this is the sort of thing I'm referring to. It looks like maybe WB is doing OK: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/warner-bros-discovery-revenues-1235640322/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/war... But in general, Netflix was in a broad Silicon Valley sense profitable at the time (in that I don't recall and I'm not going to dig it out, but if they weren't profitable, they were in a growth mode and definitely pulling in revenue and choosing debt-for-growth, which isn't really the exact same thing as straight-up losing money), and the competition is losing billions at a time. That's not a "larger slice of the pie". Maybe they'll make up for it later, but at the moment I wouldn't bet on all of them managing it. I actually think the recent Hollywood strikes were darkly funny; the writers were striking because they want a bigger slice of what they perceive to be that sweet, sweet streaming money, whereas almost all of the news about the actual streaming services is them losing billions. When the real numbers come out we'll probably hear accusations of more Hollywood accounting, and while there will be some truth to that (inevitably), Hollywood is already reporting huge streaming losses when it is actually against their interests to do so.
dboreham 3y ago
The solution would be one where the user could just "ask the internet" to deliver them the content they're interested in watching, and they paid per-hour. Of course we're not going to see that solution for many reasons.
- Retric 3y ago
  Amazon basically provides that right now. If my mom wants to watch some movie or series she checks if it’s on a streaming service then rents/buys it from Amazon. D+ for a month is a lot cheaper than paying 20$ for The Last Jedi, but they are happy to take 20$ from you.
- antasvara 3y ago
  The vast majority of popular content can be bought/rented online via platforms like Amazon. It's just very expensive in comparison to streaming.
  - bitlevel 3y ago
    It really depends on how much you actually watch on a service. I thought that £7.99 for D+ was pushing it as there was a limit to the content that we wanted to watch. Pay for that over multiple months, and you own nothing at the end. Should have bought the discs instead. At least then I could continue to watch that content at leisure, without spending any more.
fullshark 3y ago
I'm pretty sure having a single service act a monopoly for all film/video content will not be a net win for consumers going forward. Also the DVD/physical media market is now mostly dead and never coming back. Those rights will not be given away for almost nothing again.
- msabalau 3y ago
  Physical media has been trending towards poorly. But in a changed world where streaming media costs for consumers are doubling, at the same time content on the services are shrinking, it's not clear that this trend will continue. Why wouldn't consumers want own more media as the relative value of streaming options plummets? I mean, sure, Best Buy evidently thinks this is the right time to exit physical media. They might be right. But "never coming back" seems like an a possibly overly confident prediction at a time when the major substitute causing the decline is on fire?
  - fullshark 3y ago
    It's never going to be what it once was. Like physical music, which has a healthy niche vinyl audience so it's not completely dead, I think there's going to be physical media for the diehard fanatics (who want to be able to watch again and again and like collecting). The previous physical media world existed without ad-supported and subscription based streaming / social media competition for eyeballs and vast majority of people are going to choose that v. buy physical media.
hotpotamus 3y ago
> I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. I just quietly download copies of media I may want to watch to an archive NAS so that they'll always be available when I want to watch them. I don't try and justify this to myself as a good thing; it's just the pragmatic thing I do because I don't like being at the whims of some publicly traded company or other (I've had WAY too much of that in my life). Most of my friends do the same.
ethbr1 3y ago
I read history a bit differently. Netflix bought DVDs to ship out as rentals. Content providers had no say (first sale doctrine?). Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted. At this point, streaming was a new revenue stream. Most content provider money was still coming through cable/broadcast. So they said "Sure, we'll license you a bunch of stuff for cheap to do this thing we don't care about." Streaming's growth led to it overtaking other revenue streams. At this point, content providers looked at the numbers and said "The main channel for eyeballs is getting our content for cheap. We should do something about that." And then built their own streaming services, e.g. Hulu. The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft. Why, for the love of profit, didn't they say "Hmm, we have data centers, software expertise, and bandwidth... let's build a B2B streaming platform offering for content providers."
- sbarre 3y ago
  The missing piece here is that streaming was not profitable for a very long time, and all the studios and content producers cannibalized their existing profitable businesses to make equally unprofitable deals with Netflix, just to be where all the users were going. Now that industry is stuck in a situation where they wrecked their own income streams, expectations have been set with customers about what streaming costs, and they are scrambling to figure out how to re-gain that income but no one wants to go back to those pre-streaming prices. This whole problem was one of the foundational issues behind the recent writer and actor strikes.
  - 0xParlay 3y ago
    The people who write the movies, build the sets and act in the films are in guilds. Surprised there wasn’t a more direct-to-consumer avenue to explore. Maybe they could bootstrap a production and distribution guild.
    - sbarre 3y ago
      I've wondered this as well.. I think Netflix, Amazon and Apple were sort of that for a while, with all the deals they were cutting with production companies.. But in the end it was just Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..
b112 3y ago
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution. Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms. Do this, and we'll have competition for stability, and cost. And it's 2023 ffs. There should be a backend deal, where you can watch anything ever made, and the streamer can on demand snag from the studio if rare. EG "Please wait 2 minutes, while we snag and cache super-rare content from studio X." This sort of dynamic arrangement should be so logical, but instead, I have 120TB of storage. All with rare, hard to get media. Because the people that own it, won't make it easy to consume.. if they'll even keep it available.
- geodel 3y ago
  > Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms. In addition I'd add, force identical pricing for all TV/Movie actors auditioned for same role. All players same salary for same position in team. That will definitely change landscape for sports and entertainment business.
Shish2k 3y ago
> I don't know that there's a stable solution to this A probably-dumb idea that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere: a federation of services (I pay $30/mo to the federation -- if I spend 2/3 of my time on Netflix and 1/3 of my time on Hulu, then Netflix gets $20 and Hulu $10)
- just_boost_it 3y ago
  Then Netflix is the uber driver, and has to watch as the uber-netflix eats more and more of the streaming fees as years go by.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
I don't believe there is a stable solution. I think what we are witnessing is an industry hitting a wall it can't overcome. I do firmly believe that Hollywood is dying. Their structure just can't work in the world we live in. Look at music streaming. Music was a crusty old industry rife with nepotism and abuse of artists, where some big companies scooped up all the profit. It was heavily disrupted, but the artists and their agents were free to list their music on any service, no exclusivity required, the services were just conduits that took a small cut. Now, that's mostly the world we live in. The problem with video is that a single artist with a computer can't usually make a complete season of a TV show or a marvel movie. It cannot be disrupted in the same way because content cannot be produced unless big players are involved, its just too cumbersome and expensive. But you already see that it's moving to the music model anyway, more people spend time watching tiktok, Instagram and YouTube than they spend watching TV shows and movies. And, with compute becoming cheaper and AI generated this and that, soon it will be possible for a single artist with a good computer to make good content. The key thing here is that video content will move the way music content did, except the incumbent content producers will not make it to the other side, whereas with music they can.

by jerf 3y ago

zoeysmithe 3y ago

Under capitalism this is the stable solution, the same way there are so many auto makers, essentially making the same 3 or 4 cars/trucks, the same way there's the same PC OEMs making the same 3-4 laptops, desktops, etc. Consolidation, central command, efficiencies of centralization, guiding towards lower prices via these efficiencies, etc isn't capitalism. Maximizing profit by maximizing acceptable price is capitalism. What you're asking for isn't capitalism, but these are capitalist industries, not socialist ones controlled by, say a co-op or the government. Those MBA's are doing what they were hired for under a capitalist model. Their companies controlled IP's and those IP's are profitable outside of the Netflix umbrella, which ended up being true considering the success of Disney+, Hulu, etc. Of course now you're seeking a equilibrium. Will lower-tier offerings work like some no-name services or services with lesser content like Paramount? Maybe some players won't survive this, but that's also part of this model. Not to mention nearly all these services opened with predatory pricing. Disney+ was not going to work at $7 a month, but it got people to sign up, maybe cancel with someone else without predatory pricing, and now Disney just needs to boil the frog to higher prices. Under capitalism these anti-consumer tricks are perfectly legal and oddly acceptable. It seems now we're in the stage of the capitalist entrepreneur cycle where predatory pricing is out the door, and everyone is clamoring to get to the price point that works. All the players who would make a streaming service already have, so this little masquerade can stop. It just may be the case that your average US household can afford $150 in streaming services and everyone is just fighting to get that, which is close to what they paid with cable before streaming with inflation. This is the goal, not "lowering prices for good American families" and other dishonest marketing. If there's a $150 slice to be had per household, then capitalism will extract it. Or more, then people will revolt, cancel, and that will lead to price cuts and maybe some consolidation (say two weak services combine). I find it amusing that Americans who claim to love capitalism, actually dislike what it does, and instead quietly pine for socialism without knowing the word or concept. "Hey why dont all these inefficient companies just combine already? With strong consumer protections? Under a non-dishonest marketing scheme where efficiencies and where they co-operate deeply to maximize value and lower prices?" That's not the system you live under. Instead companies will fight each other, steal marketshare, raise prices, etc and maybe there's efficiencies there, but often not, but what matters is learning what the consumer can pay, and charging her that exact maximum. Which is what's happening here. No one but account sharers and college students etc are cancelling. Middle America isn't cancelling Disney or Netflix anytime soon. Maybe paramount or a weaker service, but everyone is in contention for that $150 and they're going to fight for it. It makes no sense under capitalism to consolidate back into a Netflix-like service. Its not going to happen again. Netflix was just capitalism getting there, but now that replicating the Netflix model got easier thanks to the cloud, these big IP holders just made their own. Imagine asking "God I hate paying to the Disney parks, why don't universal and disney and MGM just make one big park with all their IP run by another profit-seeking entity?" That would be absurd to ask under capitalism, but people are asking this for streaming?

hedora 3y ago
What you are describing isn’t how any functional capitalist system has worked. Predatory pricing is illegal, and the first sale doctrine is core to how capitalism works. Similarly, current copyright terms are laughably long. The problem here is not capitalism, it is corruption: The US has laws that will not be enforced, or that have been modified via regulatory capture / bribery.
- zoeysmithe 3y ago
  No true scotsman arguments are pretty unconvincing. What I described is how much of the world economy works in capitalism. It may not be to your ideological liking but this is what capitalism does, and the laws its writes, the social norms it dictates, the types of governments acceptable under it, the way it fights reform, the way it creates incredible inequality, the way it seeks for max allow price, and the politics it creates. Had waving this with a vague "but but corruption" ignores the forest for the trees here. Not to mention your comment is provably false. Even the least corrupt capitalist states suffer from the exact same mechanisms and their own streaming prices are going up as well.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Capitalism creates corruption, regulatory capture and bribery. Also created those laughably long copyright laws. It's the same picture.

pottertheotter 3y ago

You said they were wrong about getting a larger slice of the pie. Do you have any sources for this? Interested in learning more.

ceejayoz 3y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/business/media/disney-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/business/media/disney-ear... > Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million. It seems unlikely they were losing money on the Netflix licensing deals.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  I'm intensely curious about how Disney has lost $7.5 million per day running Disney+. Could that be a real number? Surely there have to be accounting shenanigans at play... right? I mean, if they're really losing half of a billion dollars per quarter, they'd need to do something like doubling their subscriber count to even approach breaking even. Is that really the case?
- ethbr1 3y ago
  That's including platform capex against ARR though...
- jerf 3y ago
  Yes, this is the sort of thing I'm referring to. It looks like maybe WB is doing OK: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/warner-bros-discovery-revenues-1235640322/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/war... But in general, Netflix was in a broad Silicon Valley sense profitable at the time (in that I don't recall and I'm not going to dig it out, but if they weren't profitable, they were in a growth mode and definitely pulling in revenue and choosing debt-for-growth, which isn't really the exact same thing as straight-up losing money), and the competition is losing billions at a time. That's not a "larger slice of the pie". Maybe they'll make up for it later, but at the moment I wouldn't bet on all of them managing it. I actually think the recent Hollywood strikes were darkly funny; the writers were striking because they want a bigger slice of what they perceive to be that sweet, sweet streaming money, whereas almost all of the news about the actual streaming services is them losing billions. When the real numbers come out we'll probably hear accusations of more Hollywood accounting, and while there will be some truth to that (inevitably), Hollywood is already reporting huge streaming losses when it is actually against their interests to do so.

dboreham 3y ago

The solution would be one where the user could just "ask the internet" to deliver them the content they're interested in watching, and they paid per-hour. Of course we're not going to see that solution for many reasons.

Retric 3y ago
Amazon basically provides that right now. If my mom wants to watch some movie or series she checks if it’s on a streaming service then rents/buys it from Amazon. D+ for a month is a lot cheaper than paying 20$ for The Last Jedi, but they are happy to take 20$ from you.
antasvara 3y ago
The vast majority of popular content can be bought/rented online via platforms like Amazon. It's just very expensive in comparison to streaming.
- bitlevel 3y ago
  It really depends on how much you actually watch on a service. I thought that £7.99 for D+ was pushing it as there was a limit to the content that we wanted to watch. Pay for that over multiple months, and you own nothing at the end. Should have bought the discs instead. At least then I could continue to watch that content at leisure, without spending any more.

fullshark 3y ago

I'm pretty sure having a single service act a monopoly for all film/video content will not be a net win for consumers going forward. Also the DVD/physical media market is now mostly dead and never coming back. Those rights will not be given away for almost nothing again.

msabalau 3y ago
Physical media has been trending towards poorly. But in a changed world where streaming media costs for consumers are doubling, at the same time content on the services are shrinking, it's not clear that this trend will continue. Why wouldn't consumers want own more media as the relative value of streaming options plummets? I mean, sure, Best Buy evidently thinks this is the right time to exit physical media. They might be right. But "never coming back" seems like an a possibly overly confident prediction at a time when the major substitute causing the decline is on fire?
- fullshark 3y ago
  It's never going to be what it once was. Like physical music, which has a healthy niche vinyl audience so it's not completely dead, I think there's going to be physical media for the diehard fanatics (who want to be able to watch again and again and like collecting). The previous physical media world existed without ad-supported and subscription based streaming / social media competition for eyeballs and vast majority of people are going to choose that v. buy physical media.

hotpotamus 3y ago

> I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. I just quietly download copies of media I may want to watch to an archive NAS so that they'll always be available when I want to watch them. I don't try and justify this to myself as a good thing; it's just the pragmatic thing I do because I don't like being at the whims of some publicly traded company or other (I've had WAY too much of that in my life). Most of my friends do the same.

ethbr1 3y ago

I read history a bit differently. Netflix bought DVDs to ship out as rentals. Content providers had no say (first sale doctrine?). Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted. At this point, streaming was a new revenue stream. Most content provider money was still coming through cable/broadcast. So they said "Sure, we'll license you a bunch of stuff for cheap to do this thing we don't care about." Streaming's growth led to it overtaking other revenue streams. At this point, content providers looked at the numbers and said "The main channel for eyeballs is getting our content for cheap. We should do something about that." And then built their own streaming services, e.g. Hulu. The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft. Why, for the love of profit, didn't they say "Hmm, we have data centers, software expertise, and bandwidth... let's build a B2B streaming platform offering for content providers."

sbarre 3y ago
The missing piece here is that streaming was not profitable for a very long time, and all the studios and content producers cannibalized their existing profitable businesses to make equally unprofitable deals with Netflix, just to be where all the users were going. Now that industry is stuck in a situation where they wrecked their own income streams, expectations have been set with customers about what streaming costs, and they are scrambling to figure out how to re-gain that income but no one wants to go back to those pre-streaming prices. This whole problem was one of the foundational issues behind the recent writer and actor strikes.
- 0xParlay 3y ago
  The people who write the movies, build the sets and act in the films are in guilds. Surprised there wasn’t a more direct-to-consumer avenue to explore. Maybe they could bootstrap a production and distribution guild.
  - sbarre 3y ago
    I've wondered this as well.. I think Netflix, Amazon and Apple were sort of that for a while, with all the deals they were cutting with production companies.. But in the end it was just Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..

b112 3y ago

I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution. Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms. Do this, and we'll have competition for stability, and cost. And it's 2023 ffs. There should be a backend deal, where you can watch anything ever made, and the streamer can on demand snag from the studio if rare. EG "Please wait 2 minutes, while we snag and cache super-rare content from studio X." This sort of dynamic arrangement should be so logical, but instead, I have 120TB of storage. All with rare, hard to get media. Because the people that own it, won't make it easy to consume.. if they'll even keep it available.

geodel 3y ago
> Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms. In addition I'd add, force identical pricing for all TV/Movie actors auditioned for same role. All players same salary for same position in team. That will definitely change landscape for sports and entertainment business.

Shish2k 3y ago

> I don't know that there's a stable solution to this A probably-dumb idea that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere: a federation of services (I pay $30/mo to the federation -- if I spend 2/3 of my time on Netflix and 1/3 of my time on Hulu, then Netflix gets $20 and Hulu $10)

just_boost_it 3y ago
Then Netflix is the uber driver, and has to watch as the uber-netflix eats more and more of the streaming fees as years go by.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

I don't believe there is a stable solution. I think what we are witnessing is an industry hitting a wall it can't overcome. I do firmly believe that Hollywood is dying. Their structure just can't work in the world we live in. Look at music streaming. Music was a crusty old industry rife with nepotism and abuse of artists, where some big companies scooped up all the profit. It was heavily disrupted, but the artists and their agents were free to list their music on any service, no exclusivity required, the services were just conduits that took a small cut. Now, that's mostly the world we live in. The problem with video is that a single artist with a computer can't usually make a complete season of a TV show or a marvel movie. It cannot be disrupted in the same way because content cannot be produced unless big players are involved, its just too cumbersome and expensive. But you already see that it's moving to the music model anyway, more people spend time watching tiktok, Instagram and YouTube than they spend watching TV shows and movies. And, with compute becoming cheaper and AI generated this and that, soon it will be possible for a single artist with a good computer to make good content. The key thing here is that video content will move the way music content did, except the incumbent content producers will not make it to the other side, whereas with music they can.