Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

131–140 of 256 posts

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

#131
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lionsgate Starz isn’t a big company with a lot of products so paying extra to watch things for that channel will be a challenge no matter what. On the other hand, HBO seems to be doing well enough with their not so cheap stand alone offering. Disney with Fox’s media would be a pretty big streaming provider and many people would likely get onto it. Good chance of it becoming a standard streaming service. So I don’t se…

If you're talking about HBO Go, I don't know how you gauge success, but if it's subscriber numbers I would take that with a grain of salt. I am a Comcast subscriber, and like many Comcast subscribers I'm sure, I have one of their boxes in my house, with the most basic Cable TV package, because if I don't take it my cost goes up (I mean the overall price of the monthly billed amount from Comcast/Xfinity). We get crapp…

HBO had $8.6B [0] in revenue last year.. For comparison, Netflix had $11.7. HBO is clearly succeeding..

0. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hbo-had-its-largest-subscr...

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>forgetting which show is on which On my Android TV device (Mi Box $60 at WalMart) if I search a show it aggregates results from all my apps so it doesn't even matter which app it's on I just click from the results and it opens what I want. Disclaimer: Not affiliated with anything I just mentioned just a happy customer.

My current and my previous Samsung TVs had this built-in as well. It can search the channel guide in the cable-box, the installed apps, as well as some pay-per-view alternatives. Works pretty damn well, actually.

I have a Samsung 'smart' tv. Oddly enough, I'm pretty tech averse when it comes to media. Do you mind sharing where this global search is, if I had it?

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

#133

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…

>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. No. That's not the correct way to think about this. You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise. You will see multiple s…

>Age of piracy is going to end as well.

I don't know how to break this to you but as long as there are more than one country there's going to be one that will not hunt down the privateers of the other.

>You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise.

Then so do my sails

>Talk about entitled!

Not really, I'm willing to pay you something for it, just not the scalpers price you want me to pay to test the waters. If a show is really good I buy it on blueray because I value the show and want more of it/want to reward the quality of the show. If studios weren't greedy and produced objectively garbage content I would buy a product on faith but in a world where there are how many Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I'll be more skeptical.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human rights are a very politically controversial topic, so let's instead reverse our focus and address this via Dawkins's concept of memetics. Looking at a piece of well-designed popular consumer entertainment content, we can see that its main reason of being is to spread out as if it were an epidemic, infecting people's minds and getting them to pass it around. Continuing with the epidemiological metaphor, there ar…

I think most of us are aware of why people steal content without lengthy, pretentious explanations. The point is that the OP acts as if he couldn’t possibly consider not watching. He believes that someone should provide it to him on the terms he deems fair or he has no choice but to steal it. OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath.

> He believes that someone should provide it to him on the terms he deems fair or he has no choice but to steal it

He made no such claim. You have to foundation from which to argue he believes this.

> OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath.

Blatantly lying about what someone else believes to paint them in a negative light is much more sociopathic than pirating something.

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

#135
post #62
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The down voting you’re getting is emblematic of the entitlement mentality among tech folks when it comes to content. There is no right to consume entertainment someone else produced for free. If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.

If that feeling went both ways I could agree. Companies however, obviously don't like not controlling everything the public has and do things like increase copyright to a length that their own company would have never started(Disney), or try to claim that users no longer own products they buy and can no longer repair things themselves (John Deere). Companies have already taken multiple sustained attacks against consu…

“Companies” are not an undifferentiated mass. What does John Deere have to do with Dexter or Game of Thrones? Are people only pirating the work of “bad” companies?

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

#136

It's interesting it took ATT and Disney this long to figure out that this is a thing.

Netflix's profit has only started to grow big enough in the past few years to even become a blip on those massive companies radar.

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

#137
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that feeling went both ways I could agree. Companies however, obviously don't like not controlling everything the public has and do things like increase copyright to a length that their own company would have never started(Disney), or try to claim that users no longer own products they buy and can no longer repair things themselves (John Deere). Companies have already taken multiple sustained attacks against consu…

“Companies” are not an undifferentiated mass. What does John Deere have to do with Dexter or Game of Thrones? Are people only pirating the work of “bad” companies?

Consumers aren't an undifferentiated mass either. Why are paying customers sitting through 5 minutes of FBI warnings in front of DVDs because some other people pirate? These arguments go both ways but a large portion of this forum seems to only view it from the companies perspective

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

#138
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t want to subscribe, then don’t. But these services are cheap compared to what they’re replacing. The average cable bill is over $100. These streaming services are the a la carte channels everyone was always saying they wanted in the bad old days when content was bundled together in cable packages.

What we have today is far from a la carte. Yesterday: if you want shows 1, 2, and 3, you have to purchase cable bundles A, B, and C, even if you don’t watch 99% of the content in those bundles, since the shows were spread across those bundles. Today: if you want shows 1, 2, and 3, you have to subscribe to streaming service A, B, and C. There is almost no difference, except now you’re paying three separate companies i…

You can buy shows and movies a la carte on iTunes and Amazon Video if you want. Perhaps a company should create a $9/month streaming service where each customer gets to choose their catalog personally.

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

#139
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Netflix, Hulu, etc. not the same? You pay $10.99 a month and get unlimited access to an entire library of content. What device that you own can’t play Spotify music?

As I explained above, their problem is offering renting only video which you can't buy. > What device that you own can’t play Spotify music? Anything they didn't think about? DRM-free formats can be accessed anywhere, you can re-encode them in any codec and etc. For example I can take my audio files and play them in RockBox on my portable Sansa player. How would Spotify help for that? Benefits of DRM-free are quite s…

I have 700 songs in my various Spotify playlists and growing. Back in the day I would have had to pay $700 for my songs. Now so pay $10 a month.

I pay $10.99 for Netflix. That doesn’t pay for one movie, let alone a dvd box set.

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

#140
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…

See, I think the content piece is harder to achieve. Not to take anything away from Netflix’s technical accomplishments, of course, but I think it’s easier to become them than it is to become Disney, or 21st Century Fox.
Post reply on HN