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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#81

Post by lotsofpulp »

mivade wrote: post #75
lotsofpulp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch an NBC show, you had to watch it on an NBC network. What is the difference? At least nowadays you can just pay, watch, and cancel at your leisure with the click of a few buttons.

The difference is simple: NBC was (and still is) free to watch if you have a television and an antenna.

And if you lived in a location close enough to a city to receive the airwaves. I do not see what that has to do with it, but you can swap out NBC for a non broadcast media owner like Comedy Central.

Point is content is more accessible and cheaper than it has ever been in history, and that is partially due to the elimination of middlemen like cable/satellite TV distributors.

But media is always going to have an owner, who is always going to be able to license it to whoever they want at whatever cost they want.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#82

Post by FridayoLeary »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

It's important to remember is happening now is not without precedent. There have been large monopolies in living memory. It's also telling that they have all but faded from the memory. It's not just some hopeless, "evil" power - grab. [Edit: so thanks for mentioning that!]

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#83

Post by paganel »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #66
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.

Or we could fall back to watching movies made from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, that’s what I have been doing for more than half a year now and it has been wonderful for my mental well-being (they really knew how to make comedies back then, even after the Hayes code).

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#84

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #66
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.

How about something legal instead?

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#85

Post by vishnugupta »

My thesis is that to justify their P/E and valuation Amazon has no option but to keep expanding into new business lines.

A side effect of this expansion is lack of attention to their existing lines of businesses. For instance, Amazon retail UX and website has largely remained unchanged for like well over a decade and in fact gotten worse as they cram more and more things to sell within a screen.

Same with AWS, quite a lot of highly asked features haven't been implemented for years now, and AWS console is showing its age.

I have a feeling those Alexa* devices will not age well.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#86

Post by simias »

libertine wrote: post #38
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

This will be my prediction: the usage of piracy to consume this type of content will increase. And they will blame PLATFORM X (or just the ol'piratebay) for the losses of revenue, when in reality it's just a matter of people not being able to access content because everything has a paywall gate. It's like they want to bring cable TV back to the internet, and you had massive bills just for channels subscriptions.

I wonder if the rise of smartphones will dampen this. Back when PCs were the standard piracy was relatively simple, you downloaded bittorrent or edonkey and sailed the high seas.

Nowadays it would be rather difficult to install a piracy app on your phone (not impossible, but definitely harder than simply downloading a binary from sourceforge). So you're left wish shady streaming sites who in my experience have terrible usability.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#87

Post by vimy »

paganel wrote: post #83
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.

Or we could fall back to watching movies made from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, that’s what I have been doing for more than half a year now and it has been wonderful for my mental well-being (they really knew how to make comedies back then, even after the Hayes code).

Any recommendations?

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#88

Post by wiz21c »

> It was overturned by new legislation in 2020.

Interestingly, there are some guys powerful enough to push that kind of legislation... I don't like Musk but sometimes I'd really love to leave for Mars :-)

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#89

Post by spideymans »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

It's wild to see. It feels like only a matter of time before the tech giants eat Hollywood.
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