back to sailing the seas :shrug:
it's never been easier and with media servers like emby you can become your and your friends own VOD provider!
Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
101–110 of 844 posts
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#102Earlier 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.
Broadcast NBC was only "free" in the strictest sense. Every hour of content requires the viewer to sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials.
At a labor value of $50/hour, watching ten hours of content a week imposes an economic cost on the viewer of $825/month. By comparison subscribing to all the major streaming platforms would cost about $100/month. Let's not even get into issues of higher quality content and huge on-demand libraries. It's pretty clear ad-free streaming subscription is a massive improvement for consumers over "free" broadcast TV.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#103If I had to pick a single politically uniting issue, breaking up Amazon and big tech would be it. Why has this not happened yet? Is the out of power party afraid the in power party will get credit? (This has been discussed when both parties were in power) If the government can't get something with this kind of support done, I fear the road we are headed down .
They are close to hitting a critical point in terms of political and economic power where they literally will no longer be able to be stopped. We will have no recourse but to replace our government with Amazon. It will be like Buy n Large in Wall-e.
I disagree, there is a lot the government could do. Amazon is nothing with out the US Government. Protection of all of it's property, maintaining infrastructure, both the internet and transportation system. Simply charging business for the wear and tear the place on the roads would be a start.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#104So 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.
One wrinkle of that era was how they even had their own stable of actors working for them exclusively. The new vertical integration doesn't seem to be going that far down. I imagine there's not as much interest in that, and actors have a powerful union now.
I'm bad at name dropping, but I atleast know of Adam Sandler and Shonda Rhimes signing exclusivity deals. I'm sure there are many more examples.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 terrib…
Torrent clients are readily available in the Android app store (not sure about Apple), and web browsers can still get to any websites. Since the resulting download is DRM free, it can be viewed with standard video players.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#106Earlier 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.
How about something legal instead?
piracy and the subsequent success of platforms like steam and spotify prove time and again that it boils down to a delivery issue, not a human desire for illegal sourcing.
Same issue with sports streaming. Why pay six different services to watch a 720p legal stream when i can watch a stream from Russia in 1080p with questionable ads?
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#107> The deal can be viewed as a doubling down on business strategy that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, articulated at a conference in 2016: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” he had said, referring to Amazon's diverse business divisions. This part is a real nugget.
“When we win a Golden Globe, it helps me get a subsidized rocket program and HQ2," he said, referring to Amazon's diverse business divisions.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#108So 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.
> 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.
I’m guessing that you’re young-ish, then? Because that’s not how it was when I was a kid. That changed in the mid-nineties, and it was a fairly controversial decision.
From about 1970 to 93, antitrust regulations were put in place because only three networks could determine over 90% of broadcast media. A judge ended that rule under the rational that upstart networks like Fox and CW were now competitive. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/13/business/judge-rules-netw...
Critics said this would be bad because the networks would be incentivized to broadcast lucrative content over quality content, and subjectively I would say that is exactly what happened. But fortunately the Internet came along and made TV kind of moot… but anyway if you are of the opinion that radical centralization and corporate consolidation lead to crummy content, fewer opportunities for creators, and in a macro scale a widening wealth gap, this all just kinda sucks.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#109So 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.
What's interesting is that the government had to step in and break the movie theaters from the movie studio in a famous anti-trust case. I wonder how it'll play out in this case. Presumably Amazon may still license Bond movies (for example) to Netflix. In fact Netflix is included in my Prime bundle I believe...
“Had to”
They did not have to. They could have let market forces dictate how it played out.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#110Earlier 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.
'free to watch' as long as you like commercials.