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?
Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
491–500 of 844 posts
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#492Earlier 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…
Well Netflix formula is throw a bunch of stones in the ocean and see what sticks and then make more of it. Its a bad strategy because users waste time watching content they would rather not watch. HBO imo is the only platform that focus on quality rather than the number of shows.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#493The 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…
> The meaninglessness of $8.45b relative to amazon's scale is mind boggling. My coworked compared it to the Dogecoin marketcap of $44b... kinda puts things in perspective.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#494Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Piracy is competition to bad content behavior I really wish we had the bandwidth we have now, back in the Napster-era. Napster, and others forced, persuaded and cajoled the music industry to consolidate, whether they liked it or not, on Spotify, and iTunes. If we'd had easy free sharing of movies, it's not hard to envisage something similar to what we see now in the music industry forced on the movie companies. Now…
> 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…
(see Avatar is Dances with Wolves with Blue Aliens)
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 h…
Ask Slack if they agree. Microsoft used the dominance of Office to take over that market by bundling Teams.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#497The 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…
I'm perplexed how the final price isn't a lot higher due to a potential bidding war between all the streaming giants. Even Netflix would benefit - if anything to force competitors to pay more.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have not yet approached the pre-streaming willingness to pay (WTP). People used to pay $150 to $200 plus onDemand for the whole package with their cable provider. Today you can have YouTubeTV, HBO, Netflix, Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+, and Spotify for less than that. So perhaps the average will hover around $100 with many paying closer to $200 a month. We are creeping back up to those numbers because people will pay.
That's a good point, though I think the time/generational factor may cause it to trend downward. My parents unhappily paid cable prices their whole life. I've never once paid for cable TV and never will be willing to pay that much for subscription entertainment, but I'm willing to pay for one streaming service and have considered a second at times. Anecdotally reading places like here, I don't think I'm an uncommon c…
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
The characters are so good. The plot lines are great. The enemies are actually bad. While TNG is idealistic and more or less wholesome, SG1 definitely lines up with DS9 in that it's more real/gritty yet still has all the hope, fun, morals, ethics, etc.
With the possible exception of the Ori, the villains in SG-1 weren't usually the "like the last one, but MORE POWERFUL" villain trope we see in most series. And the evolution of the replicants... that was a complicated adversary. Also, golfing through the Stargate.
Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. A single service, with a single bill, that makes available every movie, TV show, or album ever produced. That's it. If you can provide this you can have my money. This is not a technical problem anymore. It's a business problem. The company who can make these nebulous "licensing problems" and "distribution rights issues" go away can make a fortune. I don't care that Company A can't distribute the digital version…
> Yes. A single service, with a single bill, that makes available every movie, TV show, or album ever produced. That's it. If you can provide this you can have my money. For this, don’t expect to get this kind of service for 10 or 20 bucks a month; be prepared to shell out at least $100 or even more. Would you be willing to do that? How many people would be willing to do that?