13 ms·

Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

124 points by elorant 3y ago

newsclues 3y ago
It’s going to be interesting watching this play out in other over saturated markets after the last few years of cheap money
- TaupeRanger 3y ago
  It's happening in the gaming industry too.
apwell23 3y ago
stock seems to be up 160% from its low in 2022. So this piece of information is irrelevant to the future of the company ? website seems to be down. I read this link instead https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/12/28/shakeout-has-begun-after-5bn-streaming-loss-for-netflix-rivals/ https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/12/28/shakeout-has-...
- morsch 3y ago
  Which stock? This isn't about Netflix, but its rivals. Kind of a garden path headline.
  - apwell23 3y ago
    > Disney, Warner, Comcast and Paramount warner is up 22% this year. comcast 26%
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      That says nothing about streaming. Maybe it would have gone up even more if they didn't launch their streaming service.
    - frutiger 3y ago
      You have to compare any growth against a benchmark index which reflects what would’ve happened if the company had simply invested its assets in that index fund instead.
      - hattmall 3y ago
        Eh, not really, especially with the extremely dangerous weighting of the S&P.
        frutiger 3y ago
        You have to carefully choose the benchmark but you need to benchmark against something.
      - nightski 3y ago
        That's nonsensical when they are part of the index driving that growth.
        frutiger 3y ago
        That’s right, e.g. you can’t really choose SPX for any of the top 10 members (AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, NVDA, GOOGL, META, GOOG, TSLA, BRK/B, JPM) but after that it trails off pretty quickly.
    - lftl 3y ago
      S&P is up 25% this year.
- graphe 3y ago
  First sentence >The world’s largest traditional entertainment companies face a reckoning in 2024 after losing more than $5 billion in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.
zpeti 3y ago
Is it just me or has the quality of streaming content gone massively downhill? We are in the era of the McDonald’s of streaming. Everything is low quality mass market crap. At this point I’m only watching pre 2016 content or foreign stuff. It’s just so bad. And this is the stuff writers went striking over. I mean I’m not surprised they are threatened by AI, it’s not hard to copy American films and tv at this point. It’s like no one, not even hbo appreciates the importance of artistry any more. It’s all data driven, but what you get then is standardized crap. It might work for some industries, but definitely not tv.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  I have to wonder why consumers so desire new content. Old films and TV shows have much the same entertainment value, and are vastly cheaper to stick through some AI to turn to HD and strip out the no-longer-politically-acceptable jokes. There is also a wealth of content from other countries and languages, which could be translated with a little AI assistance to do lip sync etc. With far more content than anyone could reasonably watch in a lifetime, I really don't see why anyone is investing big money into making new stuff.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Why would you feel the need to have AI "cleanse" older shows? Otherwise, I agree there is a rich history of films.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      It really depends what the watcher desires... A lot of audiences will say "ewwe, I couldn't possibly let my children watch that, there are homophobic slurs in it". Or parts are simply outdated and won't be understood by viewers - like a key element of a plot being that someone erased an answerphone tape - perhaps in todays world you'd replace that with messages showing one tick only...
      - edgyquant 3y ago
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
It wasn’t all for naught, some hidden pearls came out of the low interest orgy thad made everyone and their dog open a streaming service. For instance, AMC+‘s „The North Water“ or Starzplay’s (yes, really) „Counterpart“. Any more recommendations?
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  Bosch Patriot Cobra Kai House of Cards
  - ohthatsnotright 3y ago
    Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Glow
- akritrime 3y ago
  Didn't they cancel Counterpart? I watched the first season but never watched the second one when I learnt that it was canceled.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    Yes, which I never understood. A plot with infinite potential (re: seasons) and Starz kills it. They seem to only want to produce the "Power" series with regularity at this point, and really low effort soft core adult TV series
  - zelias 3y ago
    Second season at least doesn't end on a cliffhanger. They take the time to end the story, especially JK Simmons' arc(s)
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  I think we only got new Trek due to Paramount trying to sell Paramount Plus. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is terrific and has the spirit of the original series. Star Trek: Lower Decks is also amazing in a very different way. It's like the writers made an adult cartoon show for all the super fans that references every meme, while still being very endearing and true to trek. Star Trek: Picard, is also supposedly really good, but I have only seen one episode so far.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
The one that surprised me the most to be struggling is Disney+. I thought they would have the strongest streaming story since they have so much of the prime IP: Star Wars, Marvel, Disney Animation, Pixar, etc, whereas Netflix is still heavily dependent on licensed IP.
- selcuka 3y ago
  > The one that surprised me the most to be struggling is Disney+. Smells like Hollywood accounting [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Hollywood accounting or not on the profit side it still doesn't explain why it has leveled off at 1/4 the revenue of Netflix too.
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    Turns out that streaming unlimited things to a family of 2+ for $13 a month is less profitable than selling $20 experiences per person per view? Doesn't seem too surprising to me.
    - selcuka 3y ago
      It doesn't explain how Netflix is profitable and Disney+ is not.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  I think that’s the problem. People have seen all of disneys stuff and what’s new isn’t original or appealing to anyone.
- sobellian 3y ago
  Maybe prime in the sense that they push out a lot of content, but let's face it - Star Wars and Marvel, they ain't Hemingway.
graphe 3y ago
Tim Dillon talked about this recently. He said they want to be too big to fail, merge and get bailouts and handouts like sports get, since they own lots of revenue streams. He mentioned it's dead too, this article says the same thing. Once it's too big to fail this happens, they can push any agenda they want, not be any "good" and when people wonder how are they still around making nothing but pushing agendas in not all subtle way it's because nobody is responsible for content anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility https://youtu.be/iIRZNlacGMI https://youtu.be/iIRZNlacGMI (second half) >But no deals emerged, leading some investors to conclude there is little appetite among private equity or tech companies for acquiring legacy businesses. Definitely dead.
- vel0city 3y ago
  But the thing it seems he's missing about sports teams sometimes getting bailed out or sweetheart rent deals is team identities often get intermingled with city identities. No municipality is going to bail out a streaming network even though they might bail out a football club or hockey team that's been in the city for ages and is connected to the city identity.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Sorry he just said too big to fail I threw that in there, the government will prop up their arms of propaganda if the nelib news sites and media convege the US isn't going to only save the news sites. I don't think the us will allow our propaganda to be lost unless they have a better way of dealing with it. He did mention them owning theme parks though, Florida can't get rid of them easily and if Disney went under now with their IP, real estate, theme parks, cruises, etc I think the US would bail them out or risk a lot of joblessness.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  > He said they want to be too big to fail, merge and get bailouts and handouts like sports get That is observation I can agree with. Same can be said with finance and airlines - both business models cant stand on their own with out help from the tax payer. > But no deals emerged, leading some investors to conclude there is little appetite among private equity or tech companies for acquiring legacy businesses. Probably also a product of increasing interest rates - risky investors (PE, VC, etc) can't pencil deals, the economics no longer work.
s0l1dsnak3123 3y ago
The answer to this nonsense is quite clear to me: we need to build a federated media platform instead of building silos that create negative outcomes for the customer and perverse incentives for the distributors and producers. We need to homogonise the pricing just like cable bundles do, but without locking the customer into products they don't care about. Spotify, while having many issues of their own, have more or less managed to do this - you don't pay extra for categories of media you don't care about, like you do with cable TV. The problem is and always was the so-called "rights holders", who are just another form of landlord, looking to milk their licenses for as much as we can bare. Their power needs to be diminished. Whoever cracks that nut will revolutionise the media industry in my opinion.
- gcgbcfy 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - s0l1dsnak3123 3y ago
    Surely the free-market fundamentalist position would be to let it crash :)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- hattmall 3y ago
  It was piracy that really cracked the nut of the music industry though. They simply couldn't fight it so they had to offer an alternative. Video media hasn't gotten to that point with piracy and for the majority of people it's easier to pay for content.
- avidiax 3y ago
  I think what the industry needs is a fixed royalties regime like recorded music has. Spotify has the whole catalog, and the rights holders can't stop them. But Spotify does have to pay a certain industry fixed royalty per play. The trick will be that movies & TV have wildly different production costs and replay value vs. music singles, so the scheme would have to account for this in a way that is fair.
tom_walters 3y ago
I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content. Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. But the IP dilution and very real costs of beaming 4K video around the world on demand don’t mix well together. Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch - the models are vastly different, and perhaps in this case, lethal.
- graphe 3y ago
  > Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Cook in terms of profit, only apple products are still good.
  - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
    [dead]
  - kranke155 3y ago
    Marvel and Star Wars are managed in radically different ways, by completely different "PM"s.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      Weird, I couldn’t tell at all since they both have converged on the exact same format.
mindcrime 3y ago
Most of these companies should never have entered the streaming business to begin with. Approximately nobody wants to be in a position of needing to subscribe to 17 different services to see a broad swathe of general purpose content. OK, sure, if you have something really niche then maybe it makes sense to run as a separate service. But for most players, I can't help but think they be better off licensing their content to Netflix or Prime and not trying to be a separate platform.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Unless the government mandated some kind of maximum fees / compulsory licensing scheme, all that would happen is Netflix and Amazon would ratchet fees until they were talking all the value. This kind of licensing arrangement happened for radio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license) so it's possible.
- JoBrad 3y ago
  It was surprising to me that Netflix wasn’t even listed as a potential acquirer, with the “panic” levels being discussed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
steveBK123 3y ago
As all these competitors launched, I thought maybe NFLX's days were numbered. Basically NFLX was first mover, but now you have a mix of niche targeting streamers in play. If you have kids or want Star Wars you get Disney+, if you care about sports/live then you pick one of the competitors with that, if you want more highbrow you get HBO/Max, if you want Star Trek you get Paramount+. Now watching them all burn cash and now scramble to consolidate, maybe I think NFLX was right all along. They have a deep catalog of licensed content from other studios. They churn out absolutely endless amounts of mid content with no name actors at low cost. They have the highest subscriber base with which to attract advertisers to the ad supported tier. They have tons of people on the paid tiers. Most of the high budget flop boondoggles you keep reading about in streaming shows have been newer players. NFLX was and continues to be the only ones making money. Think of it as reversion-to-mid wars. NFLX churns out lots of decent forgettable mid but watchable 8 episode series, occasionally renews them for 2-3 seasons. The big brand studio streamers are instead taking expensive IP and high paid actors to ... churn out sequels/spioffs/prequels which turn out to just be high budget mid content. NFLX is very smart here.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Disney really fucked up here. As Netflix has figured out the number one quality a streaming service needs is endless content so that no one opens the app without at least scrolling for a while. Every single person has some sort of guilty pleasure show that can be produced cheaply, and Netflix figured out they can make everyone’s guilty pleasure show by just green lighting everything they come across
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    My wife watches more than me and I occasionally join. It's all genuinely decent stuff compared to awful NBC/ABC/CBS 12 season x 20 episode x ~20min weekly churned out dreck. But it is also completely mid / forgettable in a totally different way. A lot of the content is longer than a movie but shorter than a series. You get 5-10 episodes of ~40min length, enjoy it, and never ever think about it again. Rinse & repeat. A lot of the actors I jokingly refer to as "poor mans __" because they often cast people that sort of look like someone famous. They have a nack for casting decent early career actors/actresses. Sort of a corporatized studio that realized they didn't need prestige names. Maybe, darkly, they've also identified the fact that a lot of people "give it a shot" in acting and then move on, and they can be had a lot more cheaply than someone with a decade of film&TV under their belt. If you live in LA/NYC you've probably got a few of these types in your friends circle.
jmyeet 3y ago
I remember groaning when all the "me too" streaming platforms were announced. Netflix was good when it had what I called "remnant content" like full ad-free seasons of TV that I could finally catch up on. And at $8 (or even $10/month) I basically kept it forever even if I didn't watch it for a few months. But now all these services are rapidly pushing towards $20/month. My usage pattern is to sign up for Netflix about one month a year, binge what I want then cancel. I'll probably do similar with Hulu too. I only have HBO because it's bundled with my ISP. Netflix's big mistake was movies. The only thing that makes movies economical is theatrical releases. I'm sure Netflix has lost billions trying to create top-tier movies. Disney's big mistake was thinking their back catalog and milking the Marven and Star Wars properties could carry their platform. But there were always going to be losers in the "me too" streaming gold rush. But we saw cable haemorrhage customers due to continual price hikes. I'm surprised there hasn't been more focus on controlling costs. Below a certain level customers will just keep a service forever. What I think Netflix needs to do is build out regional content in a much bigger way. This means have a studio in Spain producing Spanish language content, another in Germany and so on. These should be completely focused on producing content desired by those local markets. Then you cherrypick content to internationalize with dubbing. For whatever reason, the voice acting I've seen on virtually every dub is awful. And it seems to be the same small group of people that does it too. Money Heist springs to mind. Even "3%", which is a great show, has some awful dubbing. So Netflix kind of does this but not nearly enough. Like there are Turkish shows produced in Germany that are popular in Spain for whatever reason. Or Korean soaps that have a non-Korean audience. I'm honestly shocked at how bad the dubbing and voice acting ecosystem still is.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  I’ve definitely noticed that there seems to be ~5 people who do all the dubs on Netflix. For instance there’s obviously one guy who does all the main character voices, one guy who does all of the black guy voices, etc
  - jmyeet 3y ago
    Yeah, it's deeply frustrating. I don't want to read subtitles so I like dubs. But compare it to American animated series (eg The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, etc) where voice acting is taken seriously as acting, which it is. Having the right voice actor matters. But for dubs it seems like they have like 6 people on staff whose job it is to do the dubs and they're just bad at it. It's clear it's not taken seriously. Being bad at it isn't the end of it either. The voice just has to be appropriate to the presentation and demeanour of the character. This shouldn't be an afterthought.
talkingtab 3y ago
It is surprising to me that the article does not mention Amazon. Starting in January Amazon is going to "feature" ads unless you pay more. I for one am sick of ads in everything and so finally have good motivation to quit prime. It seems to me this is a continuing example of fantasy businesses. We will deliver products the next day for free. Oops the next three days. Oops a week later. Oops, not for free. We will have free movies. We will make money by producing a constant stream of quality movies. Oops, pablum movies. Oops we have to put ads in the movies. A business is a thing that provides value to customers which the customers are willing to pay for. If you give your product away, or have get money from other sources to provide for your customers, then you are not a business. Lock in and other anti-customer practices do not make something into a business. Massive tax fraud does not make a business. And yes, I realize Amazon, Microsoft and Apple make money. At least for now.
- dudul 3y ago
  Amazon ads is also the last straw for me. I was already putting up with their previews at the beginning of a show, but ads are a big no.
  - dazc 3y ago
    Ads for other shows you have already seen or decided never to watch are annoying at best. I wonder what the question was when this was suggested as a solution?
- sophwood 3y ago
  I paused my prime membership after reading this comment. Was already considering it after the email announcing ads.
- e40 3y ago
  I got the Amazon email yesterday and called them. No way to get a prorated refund so I turned off auto renew on Prime. I had a nice conversation with the lady and said the only thing that would prevent the lapse of Prime would be no ads for the base price. If people cancel in droves they reconsider their position.
ugjka 3y ago
In Europe every country has their own competing streaming services, a lot of them very successful because of local content. But everyone pretty much has Netflix as well
- oblio 3y ago
  Many of these are propped up by local sports. Once the big American companies start branching out, many of these local streaming services will be acquired or wiped out.
  - ugjka 3y ago
    If the EU will allow for the big guns to step in and monopolize the market, also every country individually have their own regulatory powers
sidlls 3y ago
Streaming has become the new cable: a bunch of piecemeal services with mostly terrible content and a few gems each, with their own pricing plans and ad models. I have no interest in subscribing to all of them or even most of them. There's just too much junk, too many different subscriptions to monitor, and too much deception in their ad models (if I pay for "no ads" and see a 30 second unskippable ad for the service's content before every show that's a dealbreaker--AMC+ does this).
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  Cable was a much better setup. The gems, and what I liked and watched, was always spread among different channels. But it was all on one bill, one programming guide, etc. And now that it's all DVR based, no ad is unskippable. Imagine Amazon or Google releasing a device that's so customer friendly that you can fully control the video stream.
  - filoleg 3y ago
    > Cable was a much better setup No, thanks, the ability to pause/rewind/fast-forward, choice of sub/dub, and the ability to actually choose what to watch and when are something I am not willing to give up or negotiate on. With cable, you are watching a series that airs one episode per week, and then you missed an episode because you had something scheduled for that time slot the show was running on? Too bad, wait for a rerun, or plan ahead by recording it with a DVR, or by using some other subpar workaround with high friction. The show you care about runs at an inconvenient time slot for your schedule? Too bad. Want to watch with subs instead of a dub? Too bad. I can keep going with that list even further, but I think the point I am making is pretty clear already. Makes me often wonder what people clamoring for the “good old days of cable” are actually smoking.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      > ability to pause/rewind/fast-forward, choice of sub/dub FWIW, depending on the channel/show, one could do this with cable all the way back in the VCR era. Some shows had secondary audio programs with alternative languages and had multiple closed caption streams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_audio_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_audio_program I do agree, loads of content never bothered with this though and for sure managing recordings with a VHS or even a DVR was a lot messier than just clicking "play" on a stream. Just pointing out the tech technically existed back then to enable those choice of sub/dub options > Makes me often wonder what people clamoring for the “good old days of cable” are actually smoking. Fully agreed on this point.
gchamonlive 3y ago
It is interesting how round things come and go. First we had cabe TV and for a time it was good. Then there came the dawn of the internet and with it piracy and lawsuites. Then came the age of the streaming services, and for a time it was good again. It resembled the cable age of old, but with the power of choice! Or so it seemed. Then came competing services. Monopolies fuelled by publishing rights. The user had again to pay for each extra subscriptions, just like in the old days, with movie packages, sports packages and whatnot. Streaming is so bad now it makes sense to pirate stuff again. (This comment doesn't condone illegal practices). We kinda came full circle.
- yellow_lead 3y ago
  > Then came the age of the streaming services, and for a time it was good again. It resembled the cable age of old, but with the power of choice! Maybe this was because VCs were footing the bill. Once companies have to be profitable the fun seems to end.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    VCs footing the bill for such large disruptions of entire sectors only for them to end up the same seems like it should somehow be illegal. Uber killed off cab companies by being subsidized only to end up more (or just as) expensive except it screwed the workers in the process.
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      as far as I know cab companies are alive and kicking, they were just forced to give better service due to the increased competition. And I can tell you I unequivocally prefer cab over uber, cab drivers are humans, uber drivers are fleshy extensions of an algorithm. By this I mean I can ask a cab driver to wait and take me home, I cannot ask that of an uber driver.
- breckenedge 3y ago
  I want to be the consumer, not the product. With large media companies, it’s inevitable that I will become the product. Cable was supposed to be free of commercials. Streaming was supposed to be free of commercials. Thankfully books are still free of commercials.
neovive 3y ago
I recently dropped my cable service (cut-the-cord) after significant price increases over the past two years and switched to a few streaming providers. My household just doesn't watch enough to justify the costs. The plethora of streaming choices is overwhelming right now for consumers, so consolidation is a good thing IMO, assuming it doesn't come with a drop in quality. As others have mentioned here, the majority of new content recently is mid-level sequels, spin-offs, prequels, etc. It's becoming much harder to differentiate, so people stick with what they know: Netflix, Disney, HBO/Max. I just don't see enough of a market for the other providers to persist long-term (given the high-cost of managing a streaming infrastructure). I feel like Disney, in particular, should consider spinning off a few of their larger brands, like Marvel and Star Wars, opening them up for licensing revenue and new creative direction.
jncfhnb 3y ago
We should not allow distribution of media and software to be a cornerstone of society. If we passed some regulation to force it to be leased to wanting distributors at equal cost we could kill exclusivity and the middle man margins and just get on with it with a nice, basically free option like SFlix.
- stainablesteel 3y ago
  we had that once it was called television honestly it was pretty bad, and completely controlled by media organizations who used it to gaslight the poplace as badly as tiktok does today i think there's both every reason and right to maintain private platforms even if its annoying to consumers, being forced to be lumped in with others comes with regulations that eventually turn into tyranny
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    I’m pretty sure television has never worked like that
  - vehemenz 3y ago
    "Gaslighting" has an old etymology, but its usage as a pop psychology term is recent and mostly a Zoomer phenomenon. Applying it to the history of television strikes me as presentism.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Describing old things with old terminology is just confusing.
      - vehemenz 3y ago
        Only if the new terminology is better and actually adds something. Does adopting half-baked concepts from TikTokers really add anything here?
        3y ago
paul7986 3y ago
TikTok, YouTube and maybe Netflix are changing/have changed the media landscape. Soon Netflix is going to have all the big studios content again yet for certain demographics they arent using the other streamers & Netflix less n less as YouTube and TikTok are free. They also offer shorter forms of content that prompt sharing and discussions between friends (social). Content consumption habits are and have changed! Personally I watch YouTube 90 percent of the time (short to long form content) as its algorithm is the best .. it continues to feed me exactly what I'd like to watch day in/day out. Other percentage TikTok (rather Facebook reels for myself) and some HBO max. I canceled all the others I subscribed to in 2023(Disney, Hulu, peacock, etc) and never even bothered using friends account for Paramount.
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
I dropped cable in 2007, and streaming last year. If streaming is no longer a value and ad free then I don't have a need for it. I'm FAST and buy what I want on sale through a single ecosystem. The whole industry was hotshotted and its going to take a while before they game the CBAs. But honestly think that my time is better spent doing other things. Perhaps my money will be more appreciated in those areas. If I start now I still probably won't get to read every book I've ever wanted to read.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > I'm FAST and buy what I want on sale through a single ecosystem. What does that mean?
  - cocacola1 3y ago
    FAST is Free Ad-Supported Television. Sale through a single ecosystem probably means buy individuals things when they’re on sale through iTunes or physically or something.
softwaredoug 3y ago
No wonder - They all doubled down on streaming simultaneously and let quality of the produced shows / movies suffer. Disney, for example, thrived on scarcity and quality. You'd clamor to see that rare release in theaters, and show up for streaming wherever it ended up. Instead they decided to produce like a dozen Star Wars / Marvel series a year. Their movies have been lackluster. They push them to streaming really fast, kneecapping the box office. It all just becomes noise instead of an event reinforcing their brand. Some studios, like Sony, have just ignored trying to compete on Streaming, and just focus on the quality. Sell it to Netflix later, as Netflix increasingly is in the "quantity over quality" business.
kthejoker2 3y ago
Going one step up the ladder... So many products and services have been ruined by the need for a subscription/ recurring revenue model instead of a consumption / one time purchase model. I see so many products (mostly software) I would gladly pay $20 one time for but balk at paying $5/month in perpetuity for. Content in particular should be owned or rented, not subscribed to.
- graphe 3y ago
  What are some?
  - kthejoker2 3y ago
    A few that have come up recently: * an intermittent fasting tracking app * A Pomodoro timer app * So many apps want a subscription (!) to remove ads * Picker Wheel, an app that lets you spin a wheel of random choices * several apps that let you "access" a video library of exercises * Canva, Figma, Adobe, LucidChart, most design apps By contrast, Ableton and most DAWs still have a completely reasonable one-time payment model, and then upgrade / expansion packs to fit your needs.
    - graphe 3y ago
      I don't think you're looking hard enough or think differently then me. I don't need an IF app, but if I did I'd use Siri. Try this for pomodoro. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timer-loops/id1662287175 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timer-loops/id1662287175 For exercise I never felt like tech helped me at all. If it's a huge problem fdroid will probably have it free. I'm doing self hosting some cloud services and I've gone back to paper for so many since they're needlessly complex like taiga.io
      - kthejoker2 3y ago
        Sorry if I implied you could only get these types of things through subscription. I just meant I've seen the subscription model in a lot of places where it makes no economic sense.
e40 3y ago
Last I looked HBO had $53B in debt. Yep: https://the-media-leader.com/just-how-big-is-warner-bros-discoverys-debt-problem/ https://the-media-leader.com/just-how-big-is-warner-bros-dis... The money bugs won’t let this continue and big shakeups are coming.
- toxican 3y ago
  No it's fine! They'll just continue to merge with shitty media companies until the previously good HBO name is entirely worthless and the debt is some other overpaid executive's problem!
wolverine876 3y ago
Companies in many, many industries have been cutting as the economy is booming. What explains this phenomenon? Is it somehow political? Are corporate leadership following the all-is-despair-and-corruption trend, and lack vision, optimism, and drive?
- dfxm12 3y ago
  When unemployment is as low as it has been, employers lose leverage. They want to gain that leverage back. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/13/tim-gurner-unemployment/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/13/tim-gurner-u...
lprd 3y ago
I've come to despise all streaming services and hope they all burn down. We've gone full circle in terms of price and convenience. Hell, even Prime now wants to you pay extra to not see ads! Wasn't that one of the benefits over cable in the beginning? I've gone back to buying physical media and just put everything on my Plex server. The perpetual 'rental' model is a failing one and is not consumer friendly.
magnio 3y ago
The current top post is begging people to use Firefox to have more diversity in the browser landscape while everyone here complaining about the diversi... ehem, proliferation of streaming platforms. Is there an economic or psychological principle that explains this? Something like "people want lots of free choices but only one paid option". (On further thought, this might just be an implication of the trivial "people want to spend less".)
- yed 3y ago
  People want a single global pool of content they can access but many options for how they access that content.
steveBK123 3y ago
The stats for watched shows are pretty interesting - https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/netflix-amazon-disney-others-spent-a-record-23-billion-on-original-new-content-last-yearso-why-is-everyone-watching-movies-and-tv-from-the-past-aden-ikram/ https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/netflix-amazon-disney-others-... Nothing prestige, almost entirely NFLX. A lot of it is back catalog licensed stuff. NCIS, Criminal minds, lol. Disney+ on the scoreboard with basically a couple kids shows plus the Simpsons. Previous year stats pretty similar - https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-grew-its-audience-in-2021-drama-reality-and-kids-programming-lead-the-content-wars/ https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-grew-its-aud... Prestige stuff like Game of Thrones, Succession, even each of the Disney+ Star Wars shows is $100M/season. None of these make the scoreboard for views. Meanwhile most people are watching boomer reruns and midbrow stuff. Even Seinfeld licensing only cost $100M/year for NFLX to end up one of the top 10 viewed shows.
iteratethis 3y ago
I'm going to go against the popular narrative and say that the current fragmentation of streaming services is a net positive. The problem is that hard-core users are very vocal and dominate the conversation. My normie take is that most households will do just fine by having max 2 stream services, which they can regularly switch up. Many may have additional ones via account sharing. That should give you plenty of high quality stuff to watch, "high quality" meaning better than TV. Multiple streaming services fighting for your eye balls and them not being guaranteed of your business is a good thing. It's how a market is supposed to work. Competition. It's frightening how easily consumers would want to give that up for slightly more convenience of having everything under one roof. Everything under one roof would mean total price control on the supply side, even more flat repetitive content, the providers having total leverage over producers, etc. Our behavior enables monopolists. Stop doing that.
LanzVonL 3y ago
This is awesome. If everybody keeps canceling steaming subs, stops watching garbage, etc. we can literally force all entertainment companies to merge into one, unweildy, slow, and useless mega-beast and finally shake off videoized entertainment forever. It's retarding the species.
iancmceachern 3y ago
This is what happens when you take your customers, and your creative talent for granted, systemically, for decades.
navane 3y ago
A year ago the consensus here on HN seemed that Netflix didn't have the pockets to compete with the big players in the long run.

124 points by elorant 3y ago

It’s going to be interesting watching this play out in other over saturated markets after the last few years of cheap money

TaupeRanger 3y ago
It's happening in the gaming industry too.

apwell23 3y ago

stock seems to be up 160% from its low in 2022. So this piece of information is irrelevant to the future of the company ? website seems to be down. I read this link instead https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/12/28/shakeout-has-begun-after-5bn-streaming-loss-for-netflix-rivals/ https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/12/28/shakeout-has-...

morsch 3y ago
Which stock? This isn't about Netflix, but its rivals. Kind of a garden path headline.
- apwell23 3y ago
  > Disney, Warner, Comcast and Paramount warner is up 22% this year. comcast 26%
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    That says nothing about streaming. Maybe it would have gone up even more if they didn't launch their streaming service.
  - frutiger 3y ago
    You have to compare any growth against a benchmark index which reflects what would’ve happened if the company had simply invested its assets in that index fund instead.
    - hattmall 3y ago
      Eh, not really, especially with the extremely dangerous weighting of the S&P.
      - frutiger 3y ago
        You have to carefully choose the benchmark but you need to benchmark against something.
    - nightski 3y ago
      That's nonsensical when they are part of the index driving that growth.
      - frutiger 3y ago
        That’s right, e.g. you can’t really choose SPX for any of the top 10 members (AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, NVDA, GOOGL, META, GOOG, TSLA, BRK/B, JPM) but after that it trails off pretty quickly.
  - lftl 3y ago
    S&P is up 25% this year.
graphe 3y ago
First sentence >The world’s largest traditional entertainment companies face a reckoning in 2024 after losing more than $5 billion in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.

zpeti 3y ago

Is it just me or has the quality of streaming content gone massively downhill? We are in the era of the McDonald’s of streaming. Everything is low quality mass market crap. At this point I’m only watching pre 2016 content or foreign stuff. It’s just so bad. And this is the stuff writers went striking over. I mean I’m not surprised they are threatened by AI, it’s not hard to copy American films and tv at this point. It’s like no one, not even hbo appreciates the importance of artistry any more. It’s all data driven, but what you get then is standardized crap. It might work for some industries, but definitely not tv.

londons_explore 3y ago
I have to wonder why consumers so desire new content. Old films and TV shows have much the same entertainment value, and are vastly cheaper to stick through some AI to turn to HD and strip out the no-longer-politically-acceptable jokes. There is also a wealth of content from other countries and languages, which could be translated with a little AI assistance to do lip sync etc. With far more content than anyone could reasonably watch in a lifetime, I really don't see why anyone is investing big money into making new stuff.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Why would you feel the need to have AI "cleanse" older shows? Otherwise, I agree there is a rich history of films.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    It really depends what the watcher desires... A lot of audiences will say "ewwe, I couldn't possibly let my children watch that, there are homophobic slurs in it". Or parts are simply outdated and won't be understood by viewers - like a key element of a plot being that someone erased an answerphone tape - perhaps in todays world you'd replace that with messages showing one tick only...
    - edgyquant 3y ago

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago

It wasn’t all for naught, some hidden pearls came out of the low interest orgy thad made everyone and their dog open a streaming service. For instance, AMC+‘s „The North Water“ or Starzplay’s (yes, really) „Counterpart“. Any more recommendations?

mr_mitm 3y ago
Bosch Patriot Cobra Kai House of Cards
- ohthatsnotright 3y ago
  Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Glow
akritrime 3y ago
Didn't they cancel Counterpart? I watched the first season but never watched the second one when I learnt that it was canceled.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Yes, which I never understood. A plot with infinite potential (re: seasons) and Starz kills it. They seem to only want to produce the "Power" series with regularity at this point, and really low effort soft core adult TV series
- zelias 3y ago
  Second season at least doesn't end on a cliffhanger. They take the time to end the story, especially JK Simmons' arc(s)
7thaccount 3y ago
I think we only got new Trek due to Paramount trying to sell Paramount Plus. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is terrific and has the spirit of the original series. Star Trek: Lower Decks is also amazing in a very different way. It's like the writers made an adult cartoon show for all the super fans that references every meme, while still being very endearing and true to trek. Star Trek: Picard, is also supposedly really good, but I have only seen one episode so far.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

The one that surprised me the most to be struggling is Disney+. I thought they would have the strongest streaming story since they have so much of the prime IP: Star Wars, Marvel, Disney Animation, Pixar, etc, whereas Netflix is still heavily dependent on licensed IP.

selcuka 3y ago
> The one that surprised me the most to be struggling is Disney+. Smells like Hollywood accounting [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Hollywood accounting or not on the profit side it still doesn't explain why it has leveled off at 1/4 the revenue of Netflix too.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Turns out that streaming unlimited things to a family of 2+ for $13 a month is less profitable than selling $20 experiences per person per view? Doesn't seem too surprising to me.
  - selcuka 3y ago
    It doesn't explain how Netflix is profitable and Disney+ is not.
edgyquant 3y ago
I think that’s the problem. People have seen all of disneys stuff and what’s new isn’t original or appealing to anyone.
sobellian 3y ago
Maybe prime in the sense that they push out a lot of content, but let's face it - Star Wars and Marvel, they ain't Hemingway.

graphe 3y ago

Tim Dillon talked about this recently. He said they want to be too big to fail, merge and get bailouts and handouts like sports get, since they own lots of revenue streams. He mentioned it's dead too, this article says the same thing. Once it's too big to fail this happens, they can push any agenda they want, not be any "good" and when people wonder how are they still around making nothing but pushing agendas in not all subtle way it's because nobody is responsible for content anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility https://youtu.be/iIRZNlacGMI https://youtu.be/iIRZNlacGMI (second half) >But no deals emerged, leading some investors to conclude there is little appetite among private equity or tech companies for acquiring legacy businesses. Definitely dead.

vel0city 3y ago
But the thing it seems he's missing about sports teams sometimes getting bailed out or sweetheart rent deals is team identities often get intermingled with city identities. No municipality is going to bail out a streaming network even though they might bail out a football club or hockey team that's been in the city for ages and is connected to the city identity.
- graphe 3y ago
  Sorry he just said too big to fail I threw that in there, the government will prop up their arms of propaganda if the nelib news sites and media convege the US isn't going to only save the news sites. I don't think the us will allow our propaganda to be lost unless they have a better way of dealing with it. He did mention them owning theme parks though, Florida can't get rid of them easily and if Disney went under now with their IP, real estate, theme parks, cruises, etc I think the US would bail them out or risk a lot of joblessness.
game_the0ry 3y ago
> He said they want to be too big to fail, merge and get bailouts and handouts like sports get That is observation I can agree with. Same can be said with finance and airlines - both business models cant stand on their own with out help from the tax payer. > But no deals emerged, leading some investors to conclude there is little appetite among private equity or tech companies for acquiring legacy businesses. Probably also a product of increasing interest rates - risky investors (PE, VC, etc) can't pencil deals, the economics no longer work.

s0l1dsnak3123 3y ago

The answer to this nonsense is quite clear to me: we need to build a federated media platform instead of building silos that create negative outcomes for the customer and perverse incentives for the distributors and producers. We need to homogonise the pricing just like cable bundles do, but without locking the customer into products they don't care about. Spotify, while having many issues of their own, have more or less managed to do this - you don't pay extra for categories of media you don't care about, like you do with cable TV. The problem is and always was the so-called "rights holders", who are just another form of landlord, looking to milk their licenses for as much as we can bare. Their power needs to be diminished. Whoever cracks that nut will revolutionise the media industry in my opinion.

gcgbcfy 3y ago
[flagged]
- s0l1dsnak3123 3y ago
  Surely the free-market fundamentalist position would be to let it crash :)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
hattmall 3y ago
It was piracy that really cracked the nut of the music industry though. They simply couldn't fight it so they had to offer an alternative. Video media hasn't gotten to that point with piracy and for the majority of people it's easier to pay for content.
avidiax 3y ago
I think what the industry needs is a fixed royalties regime like recorded music has. Spotify has the whole catalog, and the rights holders can't stop them. But Spotify does have to pay a certain industry fixed royalty per play. The trick will be that movies & TV have wildly different production costs and replay value vs. music singles, so the scheme would have to account for this in a way that is fair.

tom_walters 3y ago

I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content. Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. But the IP dilution and very real costs of beaming 4K video around the world on demand don’t mix well together. Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch - the models are vastly different, and perhaps in this case, lethal.

graphe 3y ago
> Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Cook in terms of profit, only apple products are still good.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
- kranke155 3y ago
  Marvel and Star Wars are managed in radically different ways, by completely different "PM"s.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Weird, I couldn’t tell at all since they both have converged on the exact same format.

mindcrime 3y ago

Most of these companies should never have entered the streaming business to begin with. Approximately nobody wants to be in a position of needing to subscribe to 17 different services to see a broad swathe of general purpose content. OK, sure, if you have something really niche then maybe it makes sense to run as a separate service. But for most players, I can't help but think they be better off licensing their content to Netflix or Prime and not trying to be a separate platform.

rwmj 3y ago
Unless the government mandated some kind of maximum fees / compulsory licensing scheme, all that would happen is Netflix and Amazon would ratchet fees until they were talking all the value. This kind of licensing arrangement happened for radio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license) so it's possible.
JoBrad 3y ago
It was surprising to me that Netflix wasn’t even listed as a potential acquirer, with the “panic” levels being discussed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

steveBK123 3y ago

As all these competitors launched, I thought maybe NFLX's days were numbered. Basically NFLX was first mover, but now you have a mix of niche targeting streamers in play. If you have kids or want Star Wars you get Disney+, if you care about sports/live then you pick one of the competitors with that, if you want more highbrow you get HBO/Max, if you want Star Trek you get Paramount+. Now watching them all burn cash and now scramble to consolidate, maybe I think NFLX was right all along. They have a deep catalog of licensed content from other studios. They churn out absolutely endless amounts of mid content with no name actors at low cost. They have the highest subscriber base with which to attract advertisers to the ad supported tier. They have tons of people on the paid tiers. Most of the high budget flop boondoggles you keep reading about in streaming shows have been newer players. NFLX was and continues to be the only ones making money. Think of it as reversion-to-mid wars. NFLX churns out lots of decent forgettable mid but watchable 8 episode series, occasionally renews them for 2-3 seasons. The big brand studio streamers are instead taking expensive IP and high paid actors to ... churn out sequels/spioffs/prequels which turn out to just be high budget mid content. NFLX is very smart here.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Disney really fucked up here. As Netflix has figured out the number one quality a streaming service needs is endless content so that no one opens the app without at least scrolling for a while. Every single person has some sort of guilty pleasure show that can be produced cheaply, and Netflix figured out they can make everyone’s guilty pleasure show by just green lighting everything they come across
- steveBK123 3y ago
  My wife watches more than me and I occasionally join. It's all genuinely decent stuff compared to awful NBC/ABC/CBS 12 season x 20 episode x ~20min weekly churned out dreck. But it is also completely mid / forgettable in a totally different way. A lot of the content is longer than a movie but shorter than a series. You get 5-10 episodes of ~40min length, enjoy it, and never ever think about it again. Rinse & repeat. A lot of the actors I jokingly refer to as "poor mans __" because they often cast people that sort of look like someone famous. They have a nack for casting decent early career actors/actresses. Sort of a corporatized studio that realized they didn't need prestige names. Maybe, darkly, they've also identified the fact that a lot of people "give it a shot" in acting and then move on, and they can be had a lot more cheaply than someone with a decade of film&TV under their belt. If you live in LA/NYC you've probably got a few of these types in your friends circle.

jmyeet 3y ago

I remember groaning when all the "me too" streaming platforms were announced. Netflix was good when it had what I called "remnant content" like full ad-free seasons of TV that I could finally catch up on. And at $8 (or even $10/month) I basically kept it forever even if I didn't watch it for a few months. But now all these services are rapidly pushing towards $20/month. My usage pattern is to sign up for Netflix about one month a year, binge what I want then cancel. I'll probably do similar with Hulu too. I only have HBO because it's bundled with my ISP. Netflix's big mistake was movies. The only thing that makes movies economical is theatrical releases. I'm sure Netflix has lost billions trying to create top-tier movies. Disney's big mistake was thinking their back catalog and milking the Marven and Star Wars properties could carry their platform. But there were always going to be losers in the "me too" streaming gold rush. But we saw cable haemorrhage customers due to continual price hikes. I'm surprised there hasn't been more focus on controlling costs. Below a certain level customers will just keep a service forever. What I think Netflix needs to do is build out regional content in a much bigger way. This means have a studio in Spain producing Spanish language content, another in Germany and so on. These should be completely focused on producing content desired by those local markets. Then you cherrypick content to internationalize with dubbing. For whatever reason, the voice acting I've seen on virtually every dub is awful. And it seems to be the same small group of people that does it too. Money Heist springs to mind. Even "3%", which is a great show, has some awful dubbing. So Netflix kind of does this but not nearly enough. Like there are Turkish shows produced in Germany that are popular in Spain for whatever reason. Or Korean soaps that have a non-Korean audience. I'm honestly shocked at how bad the dubbing and voice acting ecosystem still is.

edgyquant 3y ago
I’ve definitely noticed that there seems to be ~5 people who do all the dubs on Netflix. For instance there’s obviously one guy who does all the main character voices, one guy who does all of the black guy voices, etc
- jmyeet 3y ago
  Yeah, it's deeply frustrating. I don't want to read subtitles so I like dubs. But compare it to American animated series (eg The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, etc) where voice acting is taken seriously as acting, which it is. Having the right voice actor matters. But for dubs it seems like they have like 6 people on staff whose job it is to do the dubs and they're just bad at it. It's clear it's not taken seriously. Being bad at it isn't the end of it either. The voice just has to be appropriate to the presentation and demeanour of the character. This shouldn't be an afterthought.

talkingtab 3y ago

It is surprising to me that the article does not mention Amazon. Starting in January Amazon is going to "feature" ads unless you pay more. I for one am sick of ads in everything and so finally have good motivation to quit prime. It seems to me this is a continuing example of fantasy businesses. We will deliver products the next day for free. Oops the next three days. Oops a week later. Oops, not for free. We will have free movies. We will make money by producing a constant stream of quality movies. Oops, pablum movies. Oops we have to put ads in the movies. A business is a thing that provides value to customers which the customers are willing to pay for. If you give your product away, or have get money from other sources to provide for your customers, then you are not a business. Lock in and other anti-customer practices do not make something into a business. Massive tax fraud does not make a business. And yes, I realize Amazon, Microsoft and Apple make money. At least for now.

dudul 3y ago
Amazon ads is also the last straw for me. I was already putting up with their previews at the beginning of a show, but ads are a big no.
- dazc 3y ago
  Ads for other shows you have already seen or decided never to watch are annoying at best. I wonder what the question was when this was suggested as a solution?
sophwood 3y ago
I paused my prime membership after reading this comment. Was already considering it after the email announcing ads.
e40 3y ago
I got the Amazon email yesterday and called them. No way to get a prorated refund so I turned off auto renew on Prime. I had a nice conversation with the lady and said the only thing that would prevent the lapse of Prime would be no ads for the base price. If people cancel in droves they reconsider their position.

ugjka 3y ago

In Europe every country has their own competing streaming services, a lot of them very successful because of local content. But everyone pretty much has Netflix as well

oblio 3y ago
Many of these are propped up by local sports. Once the big American companies start branching out, many of these local streaming services will be acquired or wiped out.
- ugjka 3y ago
  If the EU will allow for the big guns to step in and monopolize the market, also every country individually have their own regulatory powers

sidlls 3y ago

Streaming has become the new cable: a bunch of piecemeal services with mostly terrible content and a few gems each, with their own pricing plans and ad models. I have no interest in subscribing to all of them or even most of them. There's just too much junk, too many different subscriptions to monitor, and too much deception in their ad models (if I pay for "no ads" and see a 30 second unskippable ad for the service's content before every show that's a dealbreaker--AMC+ does this).

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
Cable was a much better setup. The gems, and what I liked and watched, was always spread among different channels. But it was all on one bill, one programming guide, etc. And now that it's all DVR based, no ad is unskippable. Imagine Amazon or Google releasing a device that's so customer friendly that you can fully control the video stream.
- filoleg 3y ago
  > Cable was a much better setup No, thanks, the ability to pause/rewind/fast-forward, choice of sub/dub, and the ability to actually choose what to watch and when are something I am not willing to give up or negotiate on. With cable, you are watching a series that airs one episode per week, and then you missed an episode because you had something scheduled for that time slot the show was running on? Too bad, wait for a rerun, or plan ahead by recording it with a DVR, or by using some other subpar workaround with high friction. The show you care about runs at an inconvenient time slot for your schedule? Too bad. Want to watch with subs instead of a dub? Too bad. I can keep going with that list even further, but I think the point I am making is pretty clear already. Makes me often wonder what people clamoring for the “good old days of cable” are actually smoking.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    > ability to pause/rewind/fast-forward, choice of sub/dub FWIW, depending on the channel/show, one could do this with cable all the way back in the VCR era. Some shows had secondary audio programs with alternative languages and had multiple closed caption streams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_audio_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_audio_program I do agree, loads of content never bothered with this though and for sure managing recordings with a VHS or even a DVR was a lot messier than just clicking "play" on a stream. Just pointing out the tech technically existed back then to enable those choice of sub/dub options > Makes me often wonder what people clamoring for the “good old days of cable” are actually smoking. Fully agreed on this point.

gchamonlive 3y ago

It is interesting how round things come and go. First we had cabe TV and for a time it was good. Then there came the dawn of the internet and with it piracy and lawsuites. Then came the age of the streaming services, and for a time it was good again. It resembled the cable age of old, but with the power of choice! Or so it seemed. Then came competing services. Monopolies fuelled by publishing rights. The user had again to pay for each extra subscriptions, just like in the old days, with movie packages, sports packages and whatnot. Streaming is so bad now it makes sense to pirate stuff again. (This comment doesn't condone illegal practices). We kinda came full circle.

yellow_lead 3y ago
> Then came the age of the streaming services, and for a time it was good again. It resembled the cable age of old, but with the power of choice! Maybe this was because VCs were footing the bill. Once companies have to be profitable the fun seems to end.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  VCs footing the bill for such large disruptions of entire sectors only for them to end up the same seems like it should somehow be illegal. Uber killed off cab companies by being subsidized only to end up more (or just as) expensive except it screwed the workers in the process.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    as far as I know cab companies are alive and kicking, they were just forced to give better service due to the increased competition. And I can tell you I unequivocally prefer cab over uber, cab drivers are humans, uber drivers are fleshy extensions of an algorithm. By this I mean I can ask a cab driver to wait and take me home, I cannot ask that of an uber driver.
breckenedge 3y ago
I want to be the consumer, not the product. With large media companies, it’s inevitable that I will become the product. Cable was supposed to be free of commercials. Streaming was supposed to be free of commercials. Thankfully books are still free of commercials.

neovive 3y ago

I recently dropped my cable service (cut-the-cord) after significant price increases over the past two years and switched to a few streaming providers. My household just doesn't watch enough to justify the costs. The plethora of streaming choices is overwhelming right now for consumers, so consolidation is a good thing IMO, assuming it doesn't come with a drop in quality. As others have mentioned here, the majority of new content recently is mid-level sequels, spin-offs, prequels, etc. It's becoming much harder to differentiate, so people stick with what they know: Netflix, Disney, HBO/Max. I just don't see enough of a market for the other providers to persist long-term (given the high-cost of managing a streaming infrastructure). I feel like Disney, in particular, should consider spinning off a few of their larger brands, like Marvel and Star Wars, opening them up for licensing revenue and new creative direction.

jncfhnb 3y ago

We should not allow distribution of media and software to be a cornerstone of society. If we passed some regulation to force it to be leased to wanting distributors at equal cost we could kill exclusivity and the middle man margins and just get on with it with a nice, basically free option like SFlix.

stainablesteel 3y ago
we had that once it was called television honestly it was pretty bad, and completely controlled by media organizations who used it to gaslight the poplace as badly as tiktok does today i think there's both every reason and right to maintain private platforms even if its annoying to consumers, being forced to be lumped in with others comes with regulations that eventually turn into tyranny
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I’m pretty sure television has never worked like that
- vehemenz 3y ago
  "Gaslighting" has an old etymology, but its usage as a pop psychology term is recent and mostly a Zoomer phenomenon. Applying it to the history of television strikes me as presentism.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Describing old things with old terminology is just confusing.
    - vehemenz 3y ago
      Only if the new terminology is better and actually adds something. Does adopting half-baked concepts from TikTokers really add anything here?
      - 3y ago

paul7986 3y ago

TikTok, YouTube and maybe Netflix are changing/have changed the media landscape. Soon Netflix is going to have all the big studios content again yet for certain demographics they arent using the other streamers & Netflix less n less as YouTube and TikTok are free. They also offer shorter forms of content that prompt sharing and discussions between friends (social). Content consumption habits are and have changed! Personally I watch YouTube 90 percent of the time (short to long form content) as its algorithm is the best .. it continues to feed me exactly what I'd like to watch day in/day out. Other percentage TikTok (rather Facebook reels for myself) and some HBO max. I canceled all the others I subscribed to in 2023(Disney, Hulu, peacock, etc) and never even bothered using friends account for Paramount.

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

I dropped cable in 2007, and streaming last year. If streaming is no longer a value and ad free then I don't have a need for it. I'm FAST and buy what I want on sale through a single ecosystem. The whole industry was hotshotted and its going to take a while before they game the CBAs. But honestly think that my time is better spent doing other things. Perhaps my money will be more appreciated in those areas. If I start now I still probably won't get to read every book I've ever wanted to read.

wolverine876 3y ago
> I'm FAST and buy what I want on sale through a single ecosystem. What does that mean?
- cocacola1 3y ago
  FAST is Free Ad-Supported Television. Sale through a single ecosystem probably means buy individuals things when they’re on sale through iTunes or physically or something.

softwaredoug 3y ago

No wonder - They all doubled down on streaming simultaneously and let quality of the produced shows / movies suffer. Disney, for example, thrived on scarcity and quality. You'd clamor to see that rare release in theaters, and show up for streaming wherever it ended up. Instead they decided to produce like a dozen Star Wars / Marvel series a year. Their movies have been lackluster. They push them to streaming really fast, kneecapping the box office. It all just becomes noise instead of an event reinforcing their brand. Some studios, like Sony, have just ignored trying to compete on Streaming, and just focus on the quality. Sell it to Netflix later, as Netflix increasingly is in the "quantity over quality" business.

kthejoker2 3y ago

Going one step up the ladder... So many products and services have been ruined by the need for a subscription/ recurring revenue model instead of a consumption / one time purchase model. I see so many products (mostly software) I would gladly pay $20 one time for but balk at paying $5/month in perpetuity for. Content in particular should be owned or rented, not subscribed to.

graphe 3y ago
What are some?
- kthejoker2 3y ago
  A few that have come up recently: * an intermittent fasting tracking app * A Pomodoro timer app * So many apps want a subscription (!) to remove ads * Picker Wheel, an app that lets you spin a wheel of random choices * several apps that let you "access" a video library of exercises * Canva, Figma, Adobe, LucidChart, most design apps By contrast, Ableton and most DAWs still have a completely reasonable one-time payment model, and then upgrade / expansion packs to fit your needs.
  - graphe 3y ago
    I don't think you're looking hard enough or think differently then me. I don't need an IF app, but if I did I'd use Siri. Try this for pomodoro. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timer-loops/id1662287175 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timer-loops/id1662287175 For exercise I never felt like tech helped me at all. If it's a huge problem fdroid will probably have it free. I'm doing self hosting some cloud services and I've gone back to paper for so many since they're needlessly complex like taiga.io
    - kthejoker2 3y ago
      Sorry if I implied you could only get these types of things through subscription. I just meant I've seen the subscription model in a lot of places where it makes no economic sense.

e40 3y ago

Last I looked HBO had $53B in debt. Yep: https://the-media-leader.com/just-how-big-is-warner-bros-discoverys-debt-problem/ https://the-media-leader.com/just-how-big-is-warner-bros-dis... The money bugs won’t let this continue and big shakeups are coming.

toxican 3y ago
No it's fine! They'll just continue to merge with shitty media companies until the previously good HBO name is entirely worthless and the debt is some other overpaid executive's problem!

wolverine876 3y ago

Companies in many, many industries have been cutting as the economy is booming. What explains this phenomenon? Is it somehow political? Are corporate leadership following the all-is-despair-and-corruption trend, and lack vision, optimism, and drive?

dfxm12 3y ago
When unemployment is as low as it has been, employers lose leverage. They want to gain that leverage back. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/13/tim-gurner-unemployment/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/13/tim-gurner-u...

lprd 3y ago

I've come to despise all streaming services and hope they all burn down. We've gone full circle in terms of price and convenience. Hell, even Prime now wants to you pay extra to not see ads! Wasn't that one of the benefits over cable in the beginning? I've gone back to buying physical media and just put everything on my Plex server. The perpetual 'rental' model is a failing one and is not consumer friendly.

magnio 3y ago

The current top post is begging people to use Firefox to have more diversity in the browser landscape while everyone here complaining about the diversi... ehem, proliferation of streaming platforms. Is there an economic or psychological principle that explains this? Something like "people want lots of free choices but only one paid option". (On further thought, this might just be an implication of the trivial "people want to spend less".)

yed 3y ago
People want a single global pool of content they can access but many options for how they access that content.

steveBK123 3y ago

The stats for watched shows are pretty interesting - https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/netflix-amazon-disney-others-spent-a-record-23-billion-on-original-new-content-last-yearso-why-is-everyone-watching-movies-and-tv-from-the-past-aden-ikram/ https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/netflix-amazon-disney-others-... Nothing prestige, almost entirely NFLX. A lot of it is back catalog licensed stuff. NCIS, Criminal minds, lol. Disney+ on the scoreboard with basically a couple kids shows plus the Simpsons. Previous year stats pretty similar - https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-grew-its-audience-in-2021-drama-reality-and-kids-programming-lead-the-content-wars/ https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-grew-its-aud... Prestige stuff like Game of Thrones, Succession, even each of the Disney+ Star Wars shows is $100M/season. None of these make the scoreboard for views. Meanwhile most people are watching boomer reruns and midbrow stuff. Even Seinfeld licensing only cost $100M/year for NFLX to end up one of the top 10 viewed shows.

iteratethis 3y ago

I'm going to go against the popular narrative and say that the current fragmentation of streaming services is a net positive. The problem is that hard-core users are very vocal and dominate the conversation. My normie take is that most households will do just fine by having max 2 stream services, which they can regularly switch up. Many may have additional ones via account sharing. That should give you plenty of high quality stuff to watch, "high quality" meaning better than TV. Multiple streaming services fighting for your eye balls and them not being guaranteed of your business is a good thing. It's how a market is supposed to work. Competition. It's frightening how easily consumers would want to give that up for slightly more convenience of having everything under one roof. Everything under one roof would mean total price control on the supply side, even more flat repetitive content, the providers having total leverage over producers, etc. Our behavior enables monopolists. Stop doing that.

LanzVonL 3y ago

This is awesome. If everybody keeps canceling steaming subs, stops watching garbage, etc. we can literally force all entertainment companies to merge into one, unweildy, slow, and useless mega-beast and finally shake off videoized entertainment forever. It's retarding the species.

iancmceachern 3y ago

This is what happens when you take your customers, and your creative talent for granted, systemically, for decades.

navane 3y ago

A year ago the consensus here on HN seemed that Netflix didn't have the pockets to compete with the big players in the long run.