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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#441

Post by sharken »

waynesonfire wrote: post #359
divs1210 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS. Forcing consumers to sign up to 10 platforms to watch 10 movies will no doubt lead to a shift back to torrents. YouTube is pretty good in this regard, as it allows paying for renting a single movie for a weekend for a reasonable price.

I wish we had the data on this but I suspect a customer only selects a one or two video platforms and _MAYBE_ juggles a third when a hot show like GoT shows up, which is rare. There is a limited number of attention hours, it doesn't make sense to be on 10 platforms. Regardless, the end game of these streaming services is probably going to be consolidation or partners, if it makes since because the market is too dilut…

I think you're very much on point on the number services a customer signs up for.

In that light it makes perfect sense for Amazon to enhance their offering, as they are third or fourth in streaming.

There never seems to be something to watch consistently on Prime at least here in Europe.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#442

Post by igravious »

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

One of these things is not like the others.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#443

Post by IncRnd »

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. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.

That's similar to saying that stealing candy bars is a meaninful consumer response to high prices at convenience stores.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#444

Post by lotsofpulp »

libertine wrote: post #373
lotsofpulp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defining part of cable TV is that you had to deal with the company who owned the wire coming into your house, or the 2 satellite companies available in the US, assuming you could put satellite dishes on your residence. And you could not watch on any of your devices at any time and subscribe and cancel at your whim. None of that applies anymore. Content was always going to be owned and sold by someone. What other…

It's still a matter of distribution. You won't have to deal with the company that owned the wire or the satellite service, but you'll have to deal with one of the few companies that are purchasing IPs left and right (Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney). In the end it's just different people controlling the distribution. The difference was that the content owners still had the choice to have their content available in oth…

The content owners are also the distributors now.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#445

Post by carschno »

geodel wrote: post #361
johnchristopher wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frankly, I'm glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country. My mother recently gave me a sub-account to Netflix and while I was thrilled to rewatch some shows I liked (like the OA or good old star trek) I was quickly submerged by the sheer amount of YA novels adapted in TV shows or movies th…

> I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe. This is what machine learning, pattern recognition will get us. I watched one show in Amazon prime. One shocking thing I noted besides repetitive plots every few episodes, is that one character say something and after few minutes or next episode another character spoke exactly same sentence in different situation. And it ha…

I think the machine learning part in that is massively exaggerated, perhaps to avoid personal responsibility. Detecting the patterns in commercially successful movies hardly requires complex pattern recognition algorithms. I would claim that most movies made in the past decades were copying ideas that had turned out to be successful earlier. Maybe machine learning can add some tiny extra on top of the recipe, but I think it's still the producers who are to blame for the lack of creativity.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#447

Post by echelon »

akira2501 wrote: post #432
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.

> 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…

The solution is to break up big tech.

Amazon shouldn't be ten companies in one.

Google shouldn't be able to set web and mobile standards, then reap ad monies by forcing everyone to accept their anticompetitive changes.

Apple shouldn't be the sole guardian of iPlatform. You can't have a protection racket on 50% of all commerce (phones >> gaming consoles) and enforce what gets put on the device.

These companies don't have moats the size of an ocean. They have moats the size of a Schwarzschild radius, and they're sucking up everything in their path. Google, in particular, is being lazy as fuck because they don't have to actually do anything anymore.

Microsoft is literally the only tech giant behaving correctly, and it's probably because they got slapped with antitrust in the 2000s.

Competition is supposed to be good for the economy. These companies should have to try harder. The minute they no longer face existential risks, they become destructive.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#448

Post by IncRnd »

somethingwitty1 wrote: post #407
llampx wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time believing that that was the average monthly cost of a cable subscription. Mine was never more than $30-40 when I needed cable for the internet.

My current monthly cable subscription is $135 (plus "fees"). And when people say, "cable", they generally mean TV service. For many, that may mean a pricey satellite TV service (very expensive back in the day). Basic cable is likely what you are getting, but many people want to watch sports or movies, which requires premium subscriptions and it adds up quickly.

That's an insane price, and hopefully you can shop around or change packages.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#449

Post by joshstrange »

kyriakos wrote: post #383
joshstrange wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this can be true the local option can be quite attractive for the 90%+ use-case of watching at home. Not to mention the costs of storage in the cloud. Best deal I found was a Hertzner server for $30/mo with 6TB (2x3TB). I used that for a while but in the long run, local is king. I have gigabit fiber symmetrical so that does have to be factored in (if you have crappy upload and want to provide for remote access…

I have a basic nas at home which I periodically download content to from the seedbox so I'm getting away with just 1tb capacity online at around 11euro per month. Have plex running on a raspberrypi which just indexes from both seedbox and nas and serves to TVs around the house without transcoding.

So on the Pi are you mounting the cloud server (or part of it) and then Plex just "proxies" the file to the local TV?

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#450

Post by fullshark »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #322

Does anyone else think Amazon will acquire video game producers next? When I look at digital content, this seems the one area they're not already in, as they have TV, movies, books, but no games.

They aren't doing this to acquire movie producers so much as to acquire intellectual property. If there some game IP that fits well with twitch?
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