5 ms·

I never imagined that a service that ships DVD via mail would one day buy Warner Brothers. It is amazing how innovation and focus can change the game. Someday a

by srameshc 10mo ago

I never imagined that a service that ships DVD via mail would one day buy Warner Brothers. It is amazing how innovation and focus can change the game. Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.

djtango 10mo ago
More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  > how did these companies drop the ball so bad Companies didn't, leadership did. For a big, fat check. And they're happily retired now, sitting in their expensive villas with millions on their balance. They couldn't care less about your happy childhood memories that the content produced by their predecessors engraved in your mind.
  - djtango 10mo ago
    I am not attached to any memories, I am remarking that a company that is currently 170~B market cap allowed a tiny upstart become a 460~B company when they had all the means and distribution to have stop them or outcompete them at many stages of the ascent. Really, it is probably an inevitable and somewhat healthy feature of life and the business cycle, but it is also baffling to witness. When I was at Amazon, I came away feeling that the gap between retail and Amazon was too large and the disruption was warranted. But in the case of Sony, it feels they were so much closer to the space that it feels like a much bigger own goal...
- maeln 10mo ago
  > Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.
  - busssard 10mo ago
    Silo-ing is the biggest brake on human progress
  - yannyu 10mo ago
    Innovator's dilemma. Leadership won't invest in the up-and-coming product because they've got a $1 billion revenue target they need to hit this year. Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma. I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture. > “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.” https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-streaming-pivot-included-a-surprisingly-harsh-decision https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-s...
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They still do all those things? And they're still successful in most of them? They haven't "failed" or "dropped the ball" based on any metric I can think of. I'm not sure what you're referring to here to be honest.
  - tonyhart7 10mo ago
    Yeah lol, Sony still doing good in Music,Film etc Sony just focus at their home market more
    - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
      They purposefully stayed out of the money losing streaming wars and sell their content to the highest bidder
      - embedding-shape 10mo ago
        They have a streaming platform though! Sony Pictures Core. Seems half the comments in this submission is just straight up guessing and assuming whatever guesses they make are correct. Would take like 30 seconds to just fact-check what you're about to write.
        raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
        It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want. That’s a completely different market. They are not trying to compete with Netflix and in fact have a deal with them that Netflix has first right of refusal to stream any Sony film https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408 https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408 Sony created KPop Demon Hunters and sold the streaming rights to Netflix . If you look at any of their popular back catalog TV content, it is all being streamed on other services.
- tonyhart7 10mo ago
  Sony has crunchyroll They didn't fumble around as much, also Sony still has leverage a lot on Japan Industry
- sznio 10mo ago
  >They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. Maybe it's better now, but looking at the PS3-era PSN, that expertise had negative value.
- JKCalhoun 10mo ago
  And no OS. That certainly helped Apple.
- bee_rider 10mo ago
  If everybody is dropping the ball, my first guess is that catching it is actually legitimately difficult.
- whycome 10mo ago
  It’s exactly the reason why. They focused on proprietary formats/devices to lock consumers in
- fullshark 10mo ago
  Hindsight is 20/20 and the Innovator's Dilemma is very real.
- jimbokun 10mo ago
  > Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. The answer to that one is simple: they were bad at software. Apple and then Android killed the market for all those hardware devices and physical media.
  - djtango 10mo ago
    Maybe but they were still good enough to in house a whole bunch of dev - console OS, games, mobile OS, various forms of content distribution...
    - jimbokun 10mo ago
      Not good enough. Apple and Google were much, much better at it.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- ssl-3 10mo ago
  I remember Sony. Sony Rootkit, Sony BetaMax, Sony MiniDisc, Sony ATRAC, Sony Memory Stick [Select / PRO / Duo / PRO Duo / PRO-HG Duo / M2 / XC / PRO-HG Duo HX / WTF], Sony UMD, Sony Elcaset, Sony SDDS, Sony VAIO, Sony Walkman, Sony Discman, [...] At least they had some lasting success with their Umatic video tape cartridge, and with the CD that they co-developed with Philips. Their Trinitron tubes were unique and generally quite good -- and they lasted as long in the market as any other CRT did, I suppose. And their various iterations of PlayStation console have all been popular despite being Sony products.
- rtpg 10mo ago
  Sony still makes TV they get to sell to the highest bidder! They get to sell to Apple TV or Netflix. Not recurring revenue but they have their thing set up
- seabrookmx 10mo ago
  Sony is still the 2nd largest music distributor and label in the world, behind Universal Music and ahead of Warner music. My 65" Bravia is one of the best TV's in its class and runs Google TV (IMO a major leg up over the junky Tizen/WebOS offerings from competitors). They make some of the best noise cancelling headphones money can buy. They have the PS5 and own a bunch of game studios to provide exclusive content for it. They're doing just fine!
Y_Y 10mo ago
> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later. Is that a financialised version of piggybacking?
sumtechguy 10mo ago
Considering WB was once the champion of that format too. Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- andsoitis 10mo ago
  > Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format and neither do consumers. video over the internet is the future that Netflix saw 20 years ago, when others didn't, except YouTube.
  - autoexec 10mo ago
    That's absolutely not the case. Demand for physical media not only continues to exist but it's growing as streaming services prove undependable at keeping shows available, and are willing to censor/edit shows at a whim.
    - andsoitis 10mo ago
      For most things in the world there’s some demand, but that doesn’t mean it is a big business. I buy vinyl but mostly listen to music on Tidal. People buy cassettes and CDs, but that’s, for all intents and purposes, a dead business. The physical medium is not the content.
raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
Well, AOL did ship 1 billion CDs over its heyday and they acquired Warner Brothers in 2000…
palata 10mo ago
> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later. I think what history shows us is that the modern monopolies managed to destroy antitrust to the point where nobody will ever do to them what they did to others.
- paxys 10mo ago
  People said that a generation ago as well, and the one before that. Yeah monopolies make it hard, but every one of them eventually crumbles to the next wave of innovation.
  - butlike 10mo ago
    Yup. Can't redirect the ocean. So-to-speak.
  - palata 10mo ago
    I disagree. I strongly recommend this talk by Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
  - venturecruelty 10mo ago
    So innovative, the toilets have cameras in them now! I love the future.
  - daseiner1 10mo ago
    “””innovation”””
touristtam 10mo ago
They have to as a stop gap before going on generating full feature film on demand. Those streaming service are all struggling to have an attractive enough catalog for an extended period of time for a lot of folks with their shitty pricing policies.
andrewla 10mo ago
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
Seattle3503 10mo ago
> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later. Netflix got it's start shipping CDs, which was only possible due to the first-sale doctrine. The rights landscape hasn't adjusted for the new technologies. How could an new player disrupt a streaming world when everything is so locked down?
venturecruelty 10mo ago
It's less "innovation and focus" and more "wealth consolidation and monopolization".

djtango 10mo ago

More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles

wiseowise 10mo ago
> how did these companies drop the ball so bad Companies didn't, leadership did. For a big, fat check. And they're happily retired now, sitting in their expensive villas with millions on their balance. They couldn't care less about your happy childhood memories that the content produced by their predecessors engraved in your mind.
- djtango 10mo ago
  I am not attached to any memories, I am remarking that a company that is currently 170~B market cap allowed a tiny upstart become a 460~B company when they had all the means and distribution to have stop them or outcompete them at many stages of the ascent. Really, it is probably an inevitable and somewhat healthy feature of life and the business cycle, but it is also baffling to witness. When I was at Amazon, I came away feeling that the gap between retail and Amazon was too large and the disruption was warranted. But in the case of Sony, it feels they were so much closer to the space that it feels like a much bigger own goal...
maeln 10mo ago
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.
- busssard 10mo ago
  Silo-ing is the biggest brake on human progress
- yannyu 10mo ago
  Innovator's dilemma. Leadership won't invest in the up-and-coming product because they've got a $1 billion revenue target they need to hit this year. Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma. I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture. > “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.” https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-streaming-pivot-included-a-surprisingly-harsh-decision https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-s...
embedding-shape 10mo ago
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They still do all those things? And they're still successful in most of them? They haven't "failed" or "dropped the ball" based on any metric I can think of. I'm not sure what you're referring to here to be honest.
- tonyhart7 10mo ago
  Yeah lol, Sony still doing good in Music,Film etc Sony just focus at their home market more
  - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
    They purposefully stayed out of the money losing streaming wars and sell their content to the highest bidder
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      They have a streaming platform though! Sony Pictures Core. Seems half the comments in this submission is just straight up guessing and assuming whatever guesses they make are correct. Would take like 30 seconds to just fact-check what you're about to write.
      - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
        It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want. That’s a completely different market. They are not trying to compete with Netflix and in fact have a deal with them that Netflix has first right of refusal to stream any Sony film https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408 https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408 Sony created KPop Demon Hunters and sold the streaming rights to Netflix . If you look at any of their popular back catalog TV content, it is all being streamed on other services.
tonyhart7 10mo ago
Sony has crunchyroll They didn't fumble around as much, also Sony still has leverage a lot on Japan Industry
sznio 10mo ago
>They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. Maybe it's better now, but looking at the PS3-era PSN, that expertise had negative value.
JKCalhoun 10mo ago
And no OS. That certainly helped Apple.
bee_rider 10mo ago
If everybody is dropping the ball, my first guess is that catching it is actually legitimately difficult.
whycome 10mo ago
It’s exactly the reason why. They focused on proprietary formats/devices to lock consumers in
fullshark 10mo ago
Hindsight is 20/20 and the Innovator's Dilemma is very real.
jimbokun 10mo ago
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. The answer to that one is simple: they were bad at software. Apple and then Android killed the market for all those hardware devices and physical media.
- djtango 10mo ago
  Maybe but they were still good enough to in house a whole bunch of dev - console OS, games, mobile OS, various forms of content distribution...
  - jimbokun 10mo ago
    Not good enough. Apple and Google were much, much better at it.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
ssl-3 10mo ago
I remember Sony. Sony Rootkit, Sony BetaMax, Sony MiniDisc, Sony ATRAC, Sony Memory Stick [Select / PRO / Duo / PRO Duo / PRO-HG Duo / M2 / XC / PRO-HG Duo HX / WTF], Sony UMD, Sony Elcaset, Sony SDDS, Sony VAIO, Sony Walkman, Sony Discman, [...] At least they had some lasting success with their Umatic video tape cartridge, and with the CD that they co-developed with Philips. Their Trinitron tubes were unique and generally quite good -- and they lasted as long in the market as any other CRT did, I suppose. And their various iterations of PlayStation console have all been popular despite being Sony products.
rtpg 10mo ago
Sony still makes TV they get to sell to the highest bidder! They get to sell to Apple TV or Netflix. Not recurring revenue but they have their thing set up
seabrookmx 10mo ago
Sony is still the 2nd largest music distributor and label in the world, behind Universal Music and ahead of Warner music. My 65" Bravia is one of the best TV's in its class and runs Google TV (IMO a major leg up over the junky Tizen/WebOS offerings from competitors). They make some of the best noise cancelling headphones money can buy. They have the PS5 and own a bunch of game studios to provide exclusive content for it. They're doing just fine!

Y_Y 10mo ago

> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later. Is that a financialised version of piggybacking?

sumtechguy 10mo ago

Considering WB was once the champion of that format too. Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 10mo ago
> Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format and neither do consumers. video over the internet is the future that Netflix saw 20 years ago, when others didn't, except YouTube.
- autoexec 10mo ago
  That's absolutely not the case. Demand for physical media not only continues to exist but it's growing as streaming services prove undependable at keeping shows available, and are willing to censor/edit shows at a whim.
  - andsoitis 10mo ago
    For most things in the world there’s some demand, but that doesn’t mean it is a big business. I buy vinyl but mostly listen to music on Tidal. People buy cassettes and CDs, but that’s, for all intents and purposes, a dead business. The physical medium is not the content.

raw_anon_1111 10mo ago

Well, AOL did ship 1 billion CDs over its heyday and they acquired Warner Brothers in 2000…

palata 10mo ago

> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later. I think what history shows us is that the modern monopolies managed to destroy antitrust to the point where nobody will ever do to them what they did to others.

paxys 10mo ago
People said that a generation ago as well, and the one before that. Yeah monopolies make it hard, but every one of them eventually crumbles to the next wave of innovation.
- butlike 10mo ago
  Yup. Can't redirect the ocean. So-to-speak.
- palata 10mo ago
  I disagree. I strongly recommend this talk by Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
- venturecruelty 10mo ago
  So innovative, the toilets have cameras in them now! I love the future.
- daseiner1 10mo ago
  “””innovation”””

touristtam 10mo ago

They have to as a stop gap before going on generating full feature film on demand. Those streaming service are all struggling to have an attractive enough catalog for an extended period of time for a lot of folks with their shitty pricing policies.

andrewla 10mo ago

If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.

Seattle3503 10mo ago

> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later. Netflix got it's start shipping CDs, which was only possible due to the first-sale doctrine. The rights landscape hasn't adjusted for the new technologies. How could an new player disrupt a streaming world when everything is so locked down?

venturecruelty 10mo ago

It's less "innovation and focus" and more "wealth consolidation and monopolization".