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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#151

Post by ameister14 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #129
ameister14 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that people are united about breaking up Amazon and frankly I don't really see the damage to consumer necessary to break it up; products come faster, cheaper. Could you articulate why Amazon should be broken up? Most of the arguments I've seen boil down to "It's so big" and not really "It's effectively dominated x market and there is no competition there" or even "they are harming competition by pre-ins…

> "It's effectively dominated x market and there is no competition there" Amazon often enough dominates local labor markets - they strategically set up their fulfillment centers in places that have high unemployment, so that employees have no practical (!) alternative than to accept the exploitative working conditions that Amazon offers. Regarding marketplaces: in accessible online shopping, Amazon and eBay are a de-…

>That one was literally used as a justification for the IE de-bundling many years ago.

Yeah, that's what I was referencing by using it - that said my phone comes bundled with trash that I can't uninstall

>Regarding marketplaces: in accessible online shopping, Amazon and eBay are a de-facto duopoly for the vendors. Get booted off of either and watch your business go dry in a matter of days.

Their marketplace does seem to be pretty powerful, but I've seen a lot of vendors do well with a standalone site + Instagram/Facebook ads and marketplace so I'm not sure it's really a duopoly for all vendors. If you are only in one market and that market bans you your business will go dry immediately either way.

>Amazon often enough dominates local labor markets - they strategically set up their fulfillment centers in places that have high unemployment, so that employees have no practical (!) alternative than to accept the exploitative working conditions that Amazon offers.

This one I don't think works - it can apply to any employer that moves into a high unemployment area and I think that's something we want to encourage companies to do

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#153

Post by ocdtrekkie »

The upside here is that MGM has been limping along for ages, and if Amazon ends up paying off their debts and relaunching a bunch of their titles, even if this all collapses in a few years, MGM will probably end up better off for it.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#154

Post by ascagnel_ »

throw0101a wrote: post #126
someperson wrote: post #17

This makes it very likely that the beloved Stargate franchise will return as an Amazon Prime exclusive franchise, which will be great news for those of us like myself with appetite for 60+ more seasons of that show (after the 17 seasons that have already been made). I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compa…

> Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable. Season 4 follows book 4, whereas previous seasons split the books in a non-typical fashion: e.g., S02E05 ("Home") was the end of book 1. Book 4 is also part of the second kind-of-trilogy and so is a bit slower paced, because it set ups…

The show was weird from the start -- the first season was the first half of the first book, then they adapted the second half of the first book and the first half of the second book for season two (and likewise for S3 and books 2 & 3). Season 4 largely resolved that by wrapping up book 3 and adapting all of book 4 in one go, since book 4 is kinda slow on its own.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#155

Post by psychomugs »

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).

Reminds me of "breaking bread with the dead" by turning away from the constant deluge of content and looking at works of the past.

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/no-time-but-the-present-...

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#156

Post by ngngngng »

enragedcacti wrote: post #35
someperson wrote: post #17

This makes it very likely that the beloved Stargate franchise will return as an Amazon Prime exclusive franchise, which will be great news for those of us like myself with appetite for 60+ more seasons of that show (after the 17 seasons that have already been made). I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compa…

If it makes you feel better the fourth book of The Expanse is the most boring in my opinion and the show stuck to the plot for the most part throughout. I still enjoyed both the book and the fourth season but the action and production really picks back up in the fifth season. EDIT: VAGUE REFERENCES TO SPOILERS BELOW

I'm chugging through book 2 at the moment, I hate reading books right after I watched a show since I'm already aware of most of the events and the plot direction, but I want to see where the show diverged in the later seasons and of course get to the books after that.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#157

Post by texaswhizzle »

someperson wrote: post #17

This makes it very likely that the beloved Stargate franchise will return as an Amazon Prime exclusive franchise, which will be great news for those of us like myself with appetite for 60+ more seasons of that show (after the 17 seasons that have already been made). I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compa…

Season 4 is bad because the book is bad. Unfortunately, the source material doesn’t get any better after this.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#158

Post by ipaddr »

simias wrote: post #86
libertine wrote: post #38

Earlier 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 widely available for android.

iPhones attractive a different sort of user who would probably prefer to keep paying .

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#159

Post by elithrar »

tzs wrote: post #77

I wonder if Amazon will change MGM's stance on "Movies Anywhere"? MGM is one of the few major studios that currently does not participate in that. OT: how the heck does MA actually work? Suppose I buy a movie from Apple that came from a studio that supports MA. It almost immediately shows up in my Amazon Prime Video library, my Fandango library, and others. I then stream it using the Fandango app on my TV. Does it st…

> Or does it stream from some common CDN that keeps track of all this and bills each seller for their share of bandwidth?

You might be overestimating the costs here: it’s a fraction of a penny per GB to deliver.

> Or does some magic happen so that even though I'm playing the movie in the Fandango app, it is actually streaming from Apple servers?

It’s directly from Fandango - there is a shared revenue model + Fandango treats the MA content just as they would any third party content. They acquire source material and ingest it into their catalog as they would from any other studio.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#160

Post by tguedes »

wut42 wrote: post #16

> 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.

From https://stratechery.com/2021/distribution-and-demand/:

`I do get the argument that Prime Video is a waste of money for Amazon; Brad Stone notes in his new book Amazon Unbound that “there was little evidence of a connection between viewing and purchasing behavior” and that “any correlation was also obfuscated by the fact that Prime was growing rapidly on its own.”`

Is that nugget actually true or is Bezos just obsessed with the glamor of Hollywood?

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