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Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

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Re: Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

#201

Post by dsl »

JamesBarney wrote: post #140
dragonwriter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like the money being split between Disney and Twenty-First Century reduced the amount being used to lobby against sane copyright laws; the two firms were perfectly aligned on that issue. There are others where they might have different interests, but not that.

Yes it does. Because when they're separate companies they run into free rider problems when they try to coordinate. This is why if you have one person bargaining with five the one holds a much better bargaining position.

Everyone pours money into the MPAA which lobbies on their behalf. The reason every major studio supports the MPAA rating system is because the $25k/film fees mostly go to lobbying, concealed as a cost of doing business.

Re: Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

#202

Post by ralmidani »

As an American, I've always found it mind-boggling how average Americans cheer these types of M/As. The argument is that consolidation leads to more "efficiency" and "synergy", but those benefits are usually not passed down to consumers (actually, market domination allows a company like Disney to price-gouge even more on movies and merchandise).

Re: Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

#203

Post by 40acres »

Generally what does huge mergers in industry mean for disruption (in the more traditional Clay Christensen model). For example, if the #1 and #4 player in a specific industry does that mean there is more space for an upstart to grow since #4 has left the party? Or does the new #1 suck up all the air and put such a choke hold on industry that new players cannot flourish?

Re: Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

#204

Post by tvon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #122
jakozaur wrote: post #24

Sane antitrust regulations should kill this deal. It is bad for everybody other than shareholders of those two companies. In particular bad for customers, other companies and employees: https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2172555... https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21695385-profits-are...

It's not so black and white. Stratchery posits consolidation may promote competition at the distribution layer, where Netflix presently stands to dominate: "To that end, might it be better for consumers, not-so-much today but ten years from now, if Disney were fully empowered to compete with Netflix? What is preferable? A dominant streaming company and a collection of content companies trying to escape the commoditiz…

In what way(s) is Disney not currently fully empowered to compete with Netflix?

Re: Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

#205

Post by blowski »

nothis wrote: post #148
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so black and white. Stratchery posits consolidation may promote competition at the distribution layer, where Netflix presently stands to dominate: "To that end, might it be better for consumers, not-so-much today but ten years from now, if Disney were fully empowered to compete with Netflix? What is preferable? A dominant streaming company and a collection of content companies trying to escape the commoditiz…

Haha, that's hilarious. In order to fight one quasi-monopoly in one field, we're combining two of another. What could possibly go wrong?

Lots of things could go wrong in either breaking up the quasi-monopoly, or doing nothing at all. None of these are obviously the right path.

Re: Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

#206

Post by bolasanibk »

cableshaft wrote: post #119
reubeniv wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it's crazy how much stuff Disney can pull off Netflix, I don't know if they will, because it's in their interest to have some stuff accessible over more than one place, but they own ABC (Lost, Castle, Firefly, etc), ESPN, Marvel, LucasArts, now Fox and their assets, not to mention they distribute on behalf of many publishers (Dreamworks for example), they would probably clear more than half of Netflix's content if…

Almost seems like Netflix knew what they were doing when they started funding a bunch of original content. I remember when people thought they were being silly.

"The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." - 2013, Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer, Netflix

https://gizmodo.com/5980103/netflix-the-goal-is-to-become-hb...

Edit: He just got the company wrong.

Re: Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

#207

Post by papercrane »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #187
glenstein wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Imagine where Netflix would be without it's original content at this point. Initially, I thought it was just a kind of frustration. For the cost to acquire rights to shows, you could just create your own original content that you own outright, and they did just that. But now I see that even if the cost of acquiring other series were dirt cheap, the negotiating posture of companies offering the content to Net…

But didn't Netflix make the worst move possible? They developed a heap of MARVEL original content, that Netflix funded, which now Disney is able to pull from them.

I would hope that Netflix negotiated a licensing agreement that prevented Disney from just pulling their rights to the shows they funded.

Re: Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox

#208

Post by vidarh »

bighi wrote: post #138
paulus_magnus2 wrote: post #60

Why not go all the way and merge all companies into 1 big one. Being born on the wrong side of the iron curtain I already saw economy based on monopolies. Communism failed because prices were centrally set. We knew how to build useful things (that don't break 1 day after warranty) but not which ones to build and how many. (wiki) A price signal is information conveyed to consumers and producers, via the price charged…

That's what I've been saying for a long time. Some people say "it's just capitalism working as intended", but that's not exactly true. A lot of the mechanisms of capitalism depend on competition. Capitalism without competition is no different from Communism or any other system in which one party rules supreme.

Incidentally Marx argument for why he believed a revolution would eventually become inevitable also depends entirely on competition: He argued that it is the ongoing effectivisation of capitalism through competition that will eventually trigger revolutions by making too many people unemployed and/or destitute.
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