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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#431

Post by aero-glide2 »

asperous wrote: post #409
dalbasal wrote: post #300

The meaninglessness of $8.45b relative to amazon's scale is mind boggling. It represents 0.5% of their market cap, 20% of their cash-on-hand, nevermind their borrowing capacity @ near 0%. If a problem is worth the Jeff/Andy's personal attention, it's worth spending $8bn on. I'm a broken record but, current equity prices and financial climate generally makes massive consolidation very likely. Antitrust, or fear of is…

They actually are doing pretty large buybacks though: https://www.barrons.com/articles/tech-giants-have-ramped-up-... Apple recently $77B in buybacks, Alphabet $8.5B, Facebook $3.9B

They could have used that $77B to fund fusion research, carbon capture research, build private space stations and put man on Mars, but no they wanted to make their already high share price even higher.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#432

Post by akira2501 »

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.

> Piracy is competition to bad content behavior.

No it isn't. It's a workaround. This is an 8 billion dollar deal, there would have to be an impossible amount of piracy for it to count as "competition." This is precisely the reason why government regulation here is correct, as consumers, we don't have a lever long enough to have any real impact on the core problem.

And we're just one side of the deal. These types of distribution setups are not just bad for consumers, but for actors, directors, producers and anyone who makes a living on any part of these productions.

The knee jerk responses to avoid meaningful government regulation are always baffling to me.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#433

Post by thakoppno »

chrisseaton wrote: post #415
thakoppno wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials Commercial detection and skipping has worked well for me via MythTV for nearly twenty years at this point. Seems like there’s a free startup idea in there somewhere. $100 worth of equipment and a webapp and now your parents can watch network TV, local news, sports, and weather without ads.

How can you skip the commercial in a live broadcast?

You can’t skip live without a time machine. You can disable the audio and replace the video. Alternatively, you start the game 22 minutes / hour late. It’s all about trade-offs but attention is being under-valued imho.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#434

Post by dalbasal »

aero-glide2 wrote: post #431
asperous wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually are doing pretty large buybacks though: https://www.barrons.com/articles/tech-giants-have-ramped-up-... Apple recently $77B in buybacks, Alphabet $8.5B, Facebook $3.9B

They could have used that $77B to fund fusion research, carbon capture research, build private space stations and put man on Mars, but no they wanted to make their already high share price even higher.

In fairness, it is impressively large.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#435

Post by ghaff »

tomjen3 wrote: post #256
margaretdouglas wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cable providers were charging you $80/mo for commercial laden network aggregation. You cut that cord and complain when paying less for more content, without commercials, and is on demand, because it is unbundled and you need to manage each $5-15 "network" fee individually, instead of a single itemized bill. This is like complaining you have to pay for NBC to watch Friends when you'd much prefer to watch it on ABC so…

We never paid for networks, we paid for a handful of shows that were worth watching, which happened to be on different channels because physics. Now they are on different platforms, because no good reason at all. A copyright holder of a creative work should be able to set the price, but should not be able to use their monopolistic powers to control who pays the price. Let each channel decide if they want to buy a giv…

So let's imagine the streaming services operate like channels--which is to say they have some content they get created and other content that they license. Now imagine there's a common platform or at least common portal that aggregates them all and bills you for access to everything. You've now effectively recreated the cable bundle and your monthly bill is probably going to be $100-$200/month. (Maybe more if it includes something like YouTube TV.) Is that actually what you want?

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#437

Post by germinalphrase »

vimy wrote: post #87
paganel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Casablanca

Dead of Night

Modern times

The third man

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#438

Post by pjc50 »

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).

We've had a regular "bad movie night" throughout the pandemic, and there are a lot of these that are available to pirate up to about the 90s on Youtube (or occasionally dailymotion) simply because their distributors no longer care about them.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#439

Post by wayoutthere »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #154
throw0101a wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The show is weird because the source material is kind of schlocky and the show improves it significantly. I think season 4 is so hard to watch because book 4 is a self-contained story so they couldn’t blend characters and scenarios like in the previous book. The book characters are all a little too one-dimensional and the show does an excellent job condensing them into well-rounded characters.

I had to stop reading halfway through book 5 because I couldn’t take the heavy use of cliched language and tropes. The books are a great story at the macro level, but the writing is pretty terrible, especially as the series goes on.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#440

Post by potatoman22 »

proto-n wrote: post #394
muxator wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the most appropriate word for this? There could be many, but I am a bit tired of justifications. For me it's greediness, distillated.

Capitalism? Greed is a very human emotion, corporations are like very powerful sociopaths. No-emotion machines that optimize for a single end goal (shareholder money) within the given ruleset: the law. (Or more realistically whatever they can get away with while still turning profit, ie profit is greater than whatever the repercussions cost).

In many ways, Capitalism is fueled by greed.
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