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Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

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Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#21

These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch g…

What you’re proposing would lead to a terrible market structure. It would eliminate the most important differentiating factor: content. Subscribing to multiple streaming services might be somewhat less convenient, but it also allows competition based on producing and distributing quality content.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#22

A large part of the initial appeal of Netflix, in particular for foreigners, was that they seemed to house digitized versions of straight-to-VHS movies that never left USA. But after the initial raving success, the big studios have been clamping down on giving blanket access to their back catalog of obscurities. Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.

> Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.

Is this profitable in the age of The Pirate Bay or illegal streaming?

I'd argue easy legal access & better discoverability would more than make up for the cut taken by middlemen like Netflix.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#23
post #18
post #5

If those company think it’s about content libraries they’re going to lose. All those companies think: we own a lot of media, we can just build a streaming media platform. And I think they’re way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has. Netflix has an engineering team and a development and deployment process that has some production studios attached to it. Disney can…

Disney does realtime streaming already. What does Netflix have that they would have problems to “copy”? Edit: the question was obviously in the context of the parent comment talking about “the technology stack and processes“. Regarding the market share advantage, it’s debatable if each user is worth over $1000.

Marketshare?

People are happy to pay a single Netflix subscription, and many people already have one.

People would be less happy to shell out for yet another subscription, especially for a single kind of content (unless you watch Disney all day, it doesn't make sense to subscribe).

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#24
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. So you want one company to control all media? Seems like a poor plan longterm.

There seems to be quite a few available for music. Using apple music, spotify, tidal or whatever else doesn't seem to have the exclusivity problems that TV equivalents have. I can probably count the number of exclusive artists to each music provider on my hand.

They're trying to recreate the cable TV channel package model on the internet, because it's a mechanism for price discrimination.

If you make twenty shows and you want to sell subscriptions a la carte, how much do you charge per show? If you charge $10/month per show then you lose the business of everyone who might have paid you anything even slightly less than that. If you charge $.50/month per show to get those customers, you lose $9.50/month from everyone who would have paid $10/month per show. But if you put all twenty shows together in a bundle and sell them collectively for $10/month, you get $10/month from everyone who values the collection of shows at $10/month or more, regardless of the value they place on each individual show. Which can turn out to be more money.

But that is less likely to work in a more competitive market. People only have so many hours to watch television. It may be worth $10/month for a package of shows to get the one you really want when that's the only option, but when someone else is offering an equivalently good show a la carte for $10/year and you don't have time to watch both, people will choose the one that saves them $90/year worth of shows they weren't actually interested in.

The broader problem is that without a distribution monopoly to use as a chokepoint, content creation is a highly competitive market, and highly competitive markets have low margins. So the incumbents are flailing around trying to find something that looks like the model they're used to, even though that model is now defunct.

The model which is likely to out-compete a la carte is the one where content producers make non-exclusive licenses to multiple aggregation companies that sell flat rate plans to their customers. Because $10/month for twenty shows can't out-compete $10/year for the one show you actually want anymore, but $20/month for every show can.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#25

I think maybe the title could use some punctuation or reworking > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner... Ok, yes, they bought Time Warner > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast... They bought Comcast too? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney... And Disney!? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney want Fox AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast; Disney w…

>Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox.

The comma after the 'and' in English lists allows us to apply 'why' to both "AT&T bought Time Warner" and "Comcast and Disney want Fox"

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#26

I think maybe the title could use some punctuation or reworking > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner... Ok, yes, they bought Time Warner > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast... They bought Comcast too? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney... And Disney!? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney want Fox AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast; Disney w…

"Want" disambiguates to plural subject, so it can only be "Comcast and Disney want Fox".

It's a subtle nuance that people often get wrong, though -- or they may be speaking in a dialect like British English, where 'want' (plural subject) is used for corporate entities. (I admit the latter is unlikely for an American publication.)

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#27
Verizon wanted to divest itself of HuffPo almost immediately. The service provider(s) who ignore content and focus on the network infrastructure (Internet pipes, if you will) and practice(s) “net neutrality” as fundamental to the business model will come out on top. The vertical integration of service providers and content producers will only end poorly.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#28

I think maybe the title could use some punctuation or reworking > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner... Ok, yes, they bought Time Warner > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast... They bought Comcast too? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney... And Disney!? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney want Fox AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast; Disney w…

AT&T bought Time Warner. Comcast and Disney both want Fox?

Not that the Fox News outlet is the only thing that Fox does, but I for one would prefer cartoon substitutions for the human hosts on Fox News. At least it would equalize the current hosts with their true reality.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#29
post #21

These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch g…

What you’re proposing would lead to a terrible market structure. It would eliminate the most important differentiating factor: content. Subscribing to multiple streaming services might be somewhat less convenient, but it also allows competition based on producing and distributing quality content.

Subscribing to many services because each offers some exclusive stuff is inconvenient and taxes the user with the overhead of each service. People want to find more in their favorite stores.

If creators would have been independent of distributors, this wouldn't have been a problem to begin with. Each creator would distribute in each store. But all this integration causes exclusivity that only inconveniences the end user. Netflix isn't any better in this sense, since they have tons of exclusives too. Competition on exclusivity is not good in the end and only benefits the distributor.

In this sense, the idea above is spot on. How are these fragmented services (with DRM to boot) going to compete with torrents that offer everything without DRM through unified hubs? Film makers need to pull stuff together and fix it.

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