Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount Are Contemplating Cuts, Possible Mergers (arstechnica.com) 100
After losing more than $5 billion in the past year, the world's largest traditional entertainment companies -- Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount -- are contemplating cuts and possible mergers to ultimately help better compete with Netflix. The Financial Times reports (via Ars Technica): Shari Redstone, Paramount's billionaire controlling shareholder, has effectively put the company on the block in recent weeks. She has held talks about selling the Hollywood studio to Skydance, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick, people familiar with the matter say. Paramount chief executive Bob Bakish also discussed a possible combination over lunch with Warner CEO David Zaslav in mid-December. In both cases the discussions were said to be at an early stage and people familiar with the talks cautioned that a deal might not materialize.
Beyond their streaming losses, the traditional media groups are facing a weak advertising market, declining television revenues and higher production costs following the Hollywood strikes. Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said Paramount's deal discussions were a reflection of the "complete and utter panic" in the industry. "TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing," he said. "Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs." But as the traditional media owners struggle, Netflix, the tech group that pioneered the streaming model over a decade ago, has emerged as the winner of the battle to reshape video distribution. "For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars," analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. "Now, we are finally starting to feel the hangover and the weight of the unpaid bar bill." For companies that have been trying to compete with Netflix, Nathanson added, "the shakeout has begun."
After a bumpy 2022, Netflix has set itself apart from rivals -- most notably by being profitable. Earnings for its most recent quarter soared past Wall Street's expectations as it added 9 million new subscribers -- the strongest rise since early 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns led to a jump. "Netflix has pulled away," says John Martin, co-founder of Pugilist Capital and former chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. For its rivals, he said, the question is "how do you create a viable streaming service with a viable business model? Because they're not working." The leading streaming services aggressively raised prices in 2023. Now, analysts, investors and executives predict that consolidation could be ahead next year as some of the smaller services combine or bow out of the streaming wars.
Beyond their streaming losses, the traditional media groups are facing a weak advertising market, declining television revenues and higher production costs following the Hollywood strikes. Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said Paramount's deal discussions were a reflection of the "complete and utter panic" in the industry. "TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing," he said. "Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs." But as the traditional media owners struggle, Netflix, the tech group that pioneered the streaming model over a decade ago, has emerged as the winner of the battle to reshape video distribution. "For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars," analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. "Now, we are finally starting to feel the hangover and the weight of the unpaid bar bill." For companies that have been trying to compete with Netflix, Nathanson added, "the shakeout has begun."
After a bumpy 2022, Netflix has set itself apart from rivals -- most notably by being profitable. Earnings for its most recent quarter soared past Wall Street's expectations as it added 9 million new subscribers -- the strongest rise since early 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns led to a jump. "Netflix has pulled away," says John Martin, co-founder of Pugilist Capital and former chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. For its rivals, he said, the question is "how do you create a viable streaming service with a viable business model? Because they're not working." The leading streaming services aggressively raised prices in 2023. Now, analysts, investors and executives predict that consolidation could be ahead next year as some of the smaller services combine or bow out of the streaming wars.
Need more choice and not forced into big packages (Score:2)
Need more choice and not forced into big packages.
At the very lest make ESPN AN PREMIUM CHANNEL!
and make DISNEY CHANNEL AN PREMIUM CHANNEL again.
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We need real antitrust enforcement in this country, and screw the "light-handed regulation". We've been doing that since Reagan, and look at this place now.
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:1, Troll)
Why can't it just be good story telling instead of a pushing a social message like it's a big mole on Fred Savage that we're not supposed to talk about or wince at? Why do we have to care that it passed the Bechdel test? Why are gay people allowed to be annoyed with queer coloring but nobody else is? Why did Dark Fate have to create a temporal paradox and basically nullify every single movie in the series (including the first one where presumably there's no more Kyle Reese) just to replace John Connor with
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Why can't it just be good story telling instead of a pushing a social message
Ever watched the DS9 episode Far Beyond the Stars? You should. It answers why creative folks want to see themselves represented in their work far better than any explanation I could ever come up with.
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One of the things that made TNG and DS9 great was that it represents good, popular Sci-Fi -- exploring the social and moral implications of technology.
Far Beyond the Stars takes an opposite approach by taking a retrospective at where we came from. Jammer [jammersreviews.com] has an interesting note about how META that episode was.
Modern "Hollywoke" crap is all about pushing a social message at the expense of good story telling. The two don't have to be mutual exclusive. TOS was pretty inclusive about diversity. Same about TNG
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:2)
Oh come on..
You're wanting corporations to treat their consumers like humans with brains? They ran the focus groups on that! Turns out that sure, customer satisfaction goes way up, but it ends up dropping the share price by 0.0000174 cents per share. THINK OF THOSE POOR SHAREHOLDERS!!
Seriously though, this DOES have an impossibly easy solution. Stop consuming. ...that's it. Stop giving these idiots the money they depend on to do the dumb shit that they do. Super simple and equally super impossible.
You mean
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Preaching to the choir.
The problem is that there are FAR too many sheep. Boycotts generally don't work.
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:2)
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:4, Insightful)
It can be good storytelling, nobody ever makes the woke accusation against good writing because nobody cares, all the examples are terrible writing. No offense but case in point is is an example of the 6th film in a franchise already maligned for overstaying it's welcome, having non-sensical plot points and is clearly regarded as two classic movies with 4 pretty awful sequels. Nobody, and I mean nobody is carrying water for Terminator: Dark Fate
I mean you can make a case that for 1992 T2 is kinda woke but nobody cares because that movie fucking rules top to bottom.
"Yeah, right. How were you supposed to know? Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don’t know what it's like to really create something. to create a life. To feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction."
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also people are willing to let "woke" stuff fly if they're not really sure whether it's being played straight or not. Take the original Shrek for example, it's ostensibly a parody of the damsel in distress Disney movies, so all of the usual tropes are turned on their head. The princess doesn't need saving (she's a strong woman who knows kung fu), the dragon doesn't get slayed (does get *laid* though, with some freaky inter-species hanky-panky), and in the end the curse is "lifted" by the princess remaining in her cursed ogre form.
The movie is absolutely hilarious though, and it was a huge hit.
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup, it was well written and doesn't treat it's audience like a bunch of dum-dums. Just overall looking at the "wokeness" of something is to me just a poor way of evaluating media, just the same for people who demand empty representation in films without the artistic care behind it make it worth something.
If you're actually noticing the writing while you are watching the movie the writing is more than likely not very good.
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:2)
How the fuck is literally any of what you're talking about "woke "? That word lost its meaning in the real world years ago when people started using it as shorthand for "anything new, different, out of the ordinary, doesn't follow all the 'normal' social opinions, or hurt my tender feelers because I don't understand anything more complex than stuff go boom and boobies"
You can see why they needed a shorter way to say all that! Lol it's the Right's dog whistle for a just shy of retirement age "new crowd" of
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:2)
The other sequels (aside from 3) were decent, their only problem is they didn't hold a candle to T-2. I liked where they were going with Genesys though. They killed off John Connor in that one as well, but at least they did it in a way that left everything else intact.
Terminator didn't overstay anything. Nothing dies from too many sequels, only from shitty writers who always think they're underpaid.
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And just the same I found 3 the most entertaining of the sequels as I at least remembered a few of the action sequences (the truck chase was pretty slick) but even then I was groaning by the end as I realized The Terminator from a lore perspective is pretty boxed in, like Cameron didn't have in mind anywhere else for it to go other than his vision for both movies.
Not that it doesn't mean it can't be expounded upon but for me, I found the last 3 movies convoluted and forgettable even if Dark Fate tried to fo
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:2)
The problem I had with 3 is it was way too big on pop culture and cheap laughs (oh the Terminator made her boobs bigger! Haha, talk to the hand!) combined with some really bad sci-fi. It also had a distinct lack of grit. And no Sarah Connor, WTF? It had its moments, but most of it just didn't feel like a Terminator movie.
Much of it felt like it was its own sci-fi slasher comedy, and Jason X was the sequel.
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Now Jason X, there's a movie!!
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South Park's creators like to play both sides against each other for the lulz. It's a show that will mock "wokeness" while simultaneously having what is arguably one of the wholesome depictions of a same-sex relationship (Tweek and Craig) in an animated series. And, when they did a flash forward with the characters as adults for the Covid special, they're still together.
Re: Maybe stop the bleeding first? (Score:2)
At first I figured you'd be talking about Garrison and Richard. Tweek and Craig aren't gay, they're just going along with it because some Japanese girls drew Yaoi of them, so after that everybody (including PC Principal) expects them to go along with it and gets upset when they don't, and (like many other things in South Park, such as the gluten free beer gag) they've just kept it going. They may or may not end it with some kind of reckoning at some point as they've done with other gags, like Kenny dying in
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It was supposed to be a joke, but fans on the internet overwhelmingly loved the idea of Tweek and Craig as a couple so the creators ran with it. As I said, they're still together even in the Covid special as adults.
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South Park's creators like to play both sides against each other for the lulz.
Funny, I do the same on Slashdot and only the lulz from one side get modded down into oblivion. The other side get untouched and even sometimes modded up insightful or informative while it should be obvious that it makes no sense at all.
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I agree. Let's go back to the good old days. Not like Milton Berle ever dressed in drag https://wpde.com/news/nation-w... [wpde.com] or even Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason https://www.cinema-crazed.com/... [cinema-crazed.com]
I guess maybe the 1950s was a more liberal time for drag queens?
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Wow guys, you're right. The "pander-stone" episode was totally a compliment to Disney.
Looking forward to every new movie being a remake, but turning the lead into a chick that's gay!
That will absolutely draw the 50% of the country that doesn't buy into wokeness!
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They are losing money, when it costs 300 million + advertising to make a movie, then don't even get 300 million, that's a loss.
Let me introduce you to the shenanigans [wikipedia.org] Hollywood uses to account for expenditures. I highly doubt they're loosing anything, other than on paper.
Wokey Mcwokeface (Score:1)
They are obviously too woke, so they should try the following:
Re:Wokey Mcwokeface (Score:4)
Remake ST:TOS, but without the politically correct characters like Uhuru and Sulu
You're forgetting Pavel Chekov. It was quite a statement at the time to have a Russian character who wasn't a "bad guy" on a TV show.
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Star Trek IP (Score:3, Interesting)
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Probably make the next hologram doctor sing more horribly.
Re: Star Trek IP (Score:2)
And then end up in bankruptcy.
Re:Star Trek IP (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't be any worse than what Paramount has done with Trek. Maybe we'd finally get a Wars/Trek crossover. I'm also oddly okay with Seven of Nine being a Disney princess.
Re:Star Trek IP (Score:4, Funny)
7 of 9 as a Disney princess! Hells yes! Assimilate me now!
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This is exactly what my first response in my mind was.
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Episode -XXI: The Awesomening (Score:2)
Lieutenant Spock steals a slaver freighter for Vulcan for Pon-Far, but first he must escape THE EMPIRE. Lord Vader has sun-slingshot-time-travelled the Death Star VI: Dark as a Moon to the MILKY WAY to obtain lemurs. Force savvy creatures native to EARTH that Vader will use to prevent ascension of the other Sith Lords.
Meanwhile, the crew of the USS Eisner, captained by young Anakin Skywalker who takes command after her original captain, Admiral Pike suffered untreatable burns in a Sandpeople attack on Romul
And the fascist corporate concentration continues (Score:5, Interesting)
I think I'll see all news, television and entertainment companies being owned by one single owner in my lifetime, and I'm not that young. Already the number of newspaper owners is frighteningly small. So is the number of agro companies...
This is exactly like in the Soviet Union: many brands, many newspapers, many magazines, but same owner behind them all, giving only the illusion of freedom and diversity. The only difference being, when the state owns all the brands, it's called communism. When it's gigantic corporations in bed with the state, it's called fascism.
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What they do with anything is an abomination.
You know, I'm old. Almost 50. I come from a time when movies were made to be watched. You know, movies that people would go to, pay tickets for and watch them. Hell, there were movies good enough that people got out of the cinema and got back into the line right away to see it again!
I am not kidding.
It's been a long, long time since there was a movie like that. Well, maybe I'm old. maybe I'm not a teenager with a lot of time and some spending money anymore, who w
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You're old enough to recall all the cheesy crap Hollywood put out in the 80s. The difference is back then they didn't have to compete with YouTube for eyeballs. People are gonna judge "professional" Hollywood entertainment much more harshly when some dude shooting a show in his garage results in an equally entertaining time sink for the viewer, and there's no movie ticket purchase required.
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In this case we might want to wonder how that's possible. How is it possible that some idiot with a hand cam, a shoestring budget and some friends who think "acting" means "overacting to the point of silliness, but it's fine as long as you don't look into the camera" can be as successful as a movie shot with a budget bordering on a billion, actors that get millions for their "acting" and a year in post-production to blow through a quarter billion to polish the turd?
Could it be that effects don't work as a s
Re:Go Woke Go Broke (Score:5, Insightful)
Some movies off the top of my head that I have seen multiple times and would watch some or all tonight if it were my program grid:
- Airplane! (multiple in the theater)
- Blazing Saddles
- Life of Brian
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
- Goodwill Hunting
- The Departed
- Pulp Fiction
- Dr. Strangelove
- Deliverance
- A Clockwork Orange
- The Martian
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Back then movies were evolving faster, especially special effects, but also the art of writing them. And there was a lot less content to choose from, a lot less other stuff to be watching.
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Let's be honest, there isn't that much to watch today either when you consider "worth my time" a relevant indicator whether you should watch it. Yes, the quantity increased. But did the quality? I dare say, on average, it went down. Yes, that still means there are more quality movies, simply by mass (if you tenfold the quantity and the amount of good stuff is only halved, you still have five times more good stuff). But it also means that you'd have to spend a lot more time digging through crap to find it.
An
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Are you sure the cause is woke? Could it be that stagnant wages and the prices of groceries and other goods has caused people to spend less on entertainment? Or making movies about comic book characters that require the viewer to consult Wikipedia because nobody has heard of them? (Blue Beetle).
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It'd say it's more likely just Sturgeon's law. Most stuff is just crap, and when you have instant access to a back catalog where time has distilled out the unwatchable garbage, the stuff being put out today seems all the more awful by comparison.
How to compete with Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple: Don't do it.
License your crap to them and rake in the bucks. Nobody is going to sign up to your streaming service for your particular little niche. License your show to them and watch the money roll in. Try to compete with them and burn another 5+ billions.
Your choice.
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Yeah it's funny how all these companies pulled back their IP, thinking they were gonna get rich running their own streaming channel. Now they're discovering that doing so profitably takes a lot more content than they have and that coming up with additional, actually decent self-produced stuff is harder than it seems (and very expensive to boot).
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Yeah it's funny how all these companies pulled back their IP, thinking they were gonna get rich running their own streaming channel.....
... with a small set of programs offered at a monthly rate comparable to Netflix.
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"But they CLEARLY only signed up with Netflix to watch OUR show!"
Re:How to compete with Netflix (Score:5, Funny)
One upon a time...
There was one streaming service (Netflix) and they had licensed (most) everyone's content, and customers were happy to pay Netflix, and Netflix was happy to pay the content creators.
The content creators saw this and felt that they could cut out the middleman (Netflix) and keep all the money for themselves, so they started their own streaming services and made their content exclusive. Customers were not happy, because the things they wanted to watch were no-longer available on Netflix, and they had to subscribe to a bunch of other services to see shows.
Then came the realization that unhappy customers were just jumping from service to service giving each a little money, but not enough to cover the costs of running the streaming services.
And so the consolidation began. The deep pockets buying up the lesser operations until there was only Disney... and Netflix, who was still making a profit streaming whatever they could license or make in house.
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Once upon a time, movie studios owned their own theater chains, with exclusivity down to the actors themselves. Radio stations were linked into networks so successful they remained roughly in place for a century including through the transition to TV instead. But the evil government forced the movie studios to divest their theaters and accept distribution contracts from other parties. And the evil government forced the TV studios not to make extra money from syndicatin
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They probably don't want to be beholden to Netflix, because if they were Netflix they would use their dominant position to squeeze the other networks and lowball them on licensing fees.
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Setting up a streaming service is heaps easier than setting up a TV network. And they all have experience with the latter. If they got lowballed to the point where running your own show (and signing up the rest of the disgruntled suppliers of Netflix) was more interesting, you'd see this happen.
What we see happen instead is every network trying to set up its own little fiefdom again, like they did with TV networks. The difference here is that the customer gets those networks bundled, and thus doesn't care t
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They won't license their crap because they need more competitors.
The TV and movie content industry isn't going to repeat the iTunes Music Store problem. They saw what happened and what it took to get break Apple's monopsony (when there's only one consumer, it's a rev
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There's a small but important difference here: Netflix has no control over the customer end of the bargain. You cannot "lock down" the TVs, computers and whatever other device people use to watch streams to Netflix only. This is what made the Apple Store the dominant distribution service. Customers had a device that would make them prefer this store, and IIRC it was the only way you could DRMify your music if you wanted it to play on a iPod, so studios had the choice of either letting customers actually use
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Exactly!
Be whores and license your content far and wide. Cut deals with whomever will pay. Use those studios on a contract basis to do filming for the other putzes that still want to create and show their own stuff.
That way, you're getting mailbox money in the form of royalties, residuals, and studio filming / usage fees.
Attracting sufficient eyeballs and subscribers is someone else's problem now. "What's that, the overhead on the new movie was higher and not a lot of people watched it? Fuck you, pay me
It was predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't get people to pay as much for your streaming service as they did for a cable package... for one thing, you only have a fraction of the content and they're splitting their money across multiple services.
The natural end of this is one streaming service that licenses material from many content producers. The only reason Netflix produces its own is because all the producers tried to corner the streaming market themselves - and that isn't going to work... at least not so long as they all insist on charging so much.
I'd argue that beyond that, they will end up using a consignment/royalty model and Netflix will end up being the streaming supplier of everything from the latest blockbuster movie to what would previously have been your local public access channel. Who cares how much they have when storage is inexpensive and they only pay when someone streams it?
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Experiencing some narrative dissonance here. We were told how all the Netflix competitors were going to eat Netflix's lunch: the party is over, the grownups are at the helm now and Disney et al. are about to put Netflix in its place. The back catalogs and studio prowess of the great media empires were insurmountable and Netflix can't possibly make enough content to compete. All those stories from WAPO, Kiplinger, FT and the other groupthinkers are still around from late 2022 and early 2023.
Netflix made $4.5b in fiscal 2023.
They failed with the most popular franchises (Score:5, Insightful)
What is especially remarkable: all these giants completely failed with pretty much the absolutely biggest franchises that film and TV has ever seen. And they failed HARD.
It cannot be an easy feat to ride e.g. StarWars and StarTrek so completely into the dirt and fail so utterly to fascinate a new audience with such beloved material to work with.
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Most Star Trek fans like the new series, myself included. Is the new Trek too woke? It's not like the original series had an episode about people who were literally half black and half white fighting. Or Riker having a fling with a species with only a single gender. And let's be real here. Garrick was definitely attracted to Dr. Bashir. The actor even says so in the documentary! How about a species that has a symbiotic relationship with a host and changes genders. Isn't that crazy!
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You've found exactly the thing, though.
Paramount had ONE SHOW that I wanted to watch. And a lot of backlog that I'd seen.
Amazon Prime had ONE SHOW that I wanted to watch. And a lot of fluff that I didn't care about.
If the service only has the one show, once the season is over, so am I. So... using streaming services serially. Streaming them, as it were.
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Most Star Trek fans like the new series, myself included.
ST:D could've been better. Big problem was that it felt like some other sci-fi series with the "Trek" name slapped on it. I wondered WTF happened until Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds came out, then it was obvious what all the writers who actually were familiar with Trek had been working on.
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People didn't like the prequels that Lucas cranked out
Us olds didn't like them. Ask a millennial who grew up with the prequels and you'll get an entirely different perspective.
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I suspect they figured "hey, it worked for us with cable". But they didn't think about the additional complexity that comes with running your own streaming service.
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What are you talking about? Star Trek is going strong with SNW and Lower Decks. Discovery had a good run, and there is also a movie coming. Prodigy season 2 should be great as well.
Re: They failed with the most popular franchises (Score:2)
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That's true. I'm glad season 2 will air, but it's such a shame what happened to Prodigy, because it's actually one of the best Trek shows. It really is proper Trek, with the core Trek values and spirit.
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You can't even explain Marxism without googling it.
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It's well recognized that cultural Marxists are the ones pushing businesses to make bad decisions, to destabilize American society.
If this was the intended goal of someone, what is to be gained from it?
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Another walled-garden (Score:2)
A walled-garden works only when it has a time-saving benefit that a multi-vendor service doesn't.
These media groups thought they could sell a few old movies for the same price as modern movies. Thought that, now the revenue stream skips a middle-man, they can make any piece of junk and turn a profit. Netflix learnt first, it can't make any old thing, even when there's a quality script and cast.
Media groups are learning they can't own the internet the same way they can own and sell cable services.
My prediction is that Netflix will pull an Amazon (Score:3)
... and buy one big Film+TV conglomerate, just like Amazon bought MGM.
Either Paramount (most likely target), WBD, or, if push comes to shove NBCU.
You see, those guys have a few things that Netflix lacks. First and foremost, they know how to say no to producers, and do not greenlight each and everything that lands in their desk. Netflix greenlights pretty much everything, so much so, that they have become the but of jokes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Which in turn leads to another problem, since they approve so much crap, they have to cancel a lot of shows, which earns them the ire of whatever vocal users who were watching said show.
Also, having an outlet (i.e. TV channel) where to air "Netflix Exclusives" after a while may help those shows to increase their reach, making people perhaps stream the rest on netflix.
Finally, all those movie studios (WB, Paramount & Universal) have a good deal of "tentpole franchises" and IP, which is something that netflix still lacks after all these years...
Sooo, there is that
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Isn't this saying Netflix should do what all the loses that lost money are doing? They're making new content across the board, and it seems to have paid off a lot more than others trying to milk old content.
Not really. Let's use Paramount as an example, since it is the one already on the chopping block:
* Paramount+ is loosing money hand over fist, dragging the rest of the units with it. That will be super-easy to fix, as that service (along with the subscribers and content) will be subsumed into Netflix sooner rather than later. Same thing WB and Discovery Did. Netflix subscribers will not abandon ship because they get more content now (unless the extra content is acompanied by an egrerius price hike), and per
Ads (Score:2)
Re: Ads (Score:1)
Itâ(TM)s TikToc, YouTube eating traditional (Score:1)
Hey olds, the game has changed. For those who are 25, itâ(TM)s 90% TokToc and Youtube and maybe 10% Netflix. Itâ(TM)s not going to change back. The revenue shrinking isnâ(TM)t close to being finished for the traditional media companies.
Cord cutter here, S##w them all !! lol (Score:1)
subscriptioned out (Score:2)
Greed kills (Score:2)
If these companies took the time to invest in well made content and focus on their customers rather than racing to the bottom to mimic Netflix and squeeze as much profits out of what they already have then maybe they wouldn't be in this position. They literally treat their customers like chattel and expect them to just keep paying "Just a little bit more" each year. Also playing games with the content that people want to watch like removing it from their services just to get better tax breaks. It's all t
Superhero clusterfuck (Score:2)
Wake me when the cgi comic book superhero trope
is finally abandoned. Until then, it's HBO all the way.
Acquisition Gone Mad (Score:2)
it's really not rocket science (Score:1)