521–530 of 844 posts
All they need now is a house building company and they can sell people everything they need for their entire life (the grocery store, entertainment, health, news, movies, music, goods). Then they can start selling Gatorade for plants to their customers.
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> 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.
Crypto "market cap" isn't really comparable to the market cap of companies. Nobody would (or could) ever buy Dogecoin for 44b. But companies are usually purchased for more than market cap.
> 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.
I'm sure Bezos knows what he's talking about, but how does this work exactly? Amazon Prime Video and the marketplace have different entry points. Is the idea just general brand awareness?
You can get standalone Amazon Prime Video membership — buuut it's about the same price as complete Amazon Prime membership! So you might as well get the complete membership and get all the perks you might want in the future.
And bam, you're now in the Amazon Prime universe. One day you'll be comparison shopping for a specific pair of shoes you like online, and you'll see that Amazon has the lowest (or one of the lowest) prices plus free one- or two-day shipping, and hey, you've got that Prime membership from back when you wanted to watch Amazon Prime Video. Deal sealed.
It lowers the barriers for every Amazon Prime-connected entry point.
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> 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…
> No it isn't. It's a workaround. Sure, but it's a trivially easy workaround. Our focus of attention on matters of regulation ought to be in those areas where working around the problem is not nearly as dead simple as a torrent client, a NAS, and a Plex server.
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.
Netflix, Apple TV, etc are broadcasters and crunchyroll is thematic.
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Piracy was the Easiest/Only way to get content until ~2008ish. Since then; Netflix and (...x streaming platform) made it easier/better to Pay for the content than pirate it. It does feel like we're approaching a tipping point now in the other direction with all of these streaming fiefdoms. My household has Netflix, Hulu, D+, and Prime streaming now - that's already too many and needs pairing IMO.
>> Piracy was the Easiest/Only way to get content until ~2008ish. Since then; Netflix and (...x streaming platform) made it easier/better to Pay for the content than pirate it. Fragmentation still hurts this to an extreme, and - worse - God-awful region locks. As a fan of obscure, cult and independent cinema in particular it’s a wasteland of titles strewn across 5 different services, and being Canadian, piracy is jus…
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> hopefully you can shop around i.e., if you're lucky enough to have more than one alternative (if any).
There may be places that have only one provider with only one option in that provider, but are those places really $135/month with all the TV channels? The issue might be paying for things that are already free over the Internet.
Virtually all places have "specials" on the first year of service, wherein the price will increase 50% or even 100% after the first year, which will almost always put you well into the $100+ range.
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.
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> hopefully you can shop around i.e., if you're lucky enough to have more than one alternative (if any).
There may be places that have only one provider with only one option in that provider, but are those places really $135/month with all the TV channels? The issue might be paying for things that are already free over the Internet.
Comcast hides their real rates as well as they can but in some places they are required to publish them. In my rural area (where they are the only real option):
$139.99 gets you "Select+ Includes Limited Basic, Expanded Basic, Digital Preferred Tier and HD programming for primary outlet, 20 Hour DVR Service, and Blast! Internet"
You can't buy ALL the channels as s bundle but the top tier bundle is $189.99/mo (plus fees)
The prices don't sum reasonably at all and it's not really feasible to calculate a price for TV without internet (and its very difficult to order such a thing)
Source: https://comcaststore.s3.amazonaws.com/prod/wk/urc/585bc33c5b...
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…
Worth noting that based on AAPL's latest 10-Q, the vast majority of their cash is invested in corporate bonds, which have a nominal annualized return of ~6%. I'm sure the financial value of any acquisition is pitted against this alternative.
In real business culture, there is an imputis (especially for tech companies) to "maKe money work." If their best investment is other companies' bonds, they should (again, in theory) just return cash to investors who can buy the bonds themselves.
More importantly, The ability to reinvest profitably is a sign of horizon, at least traditionally.
I stress "in theory," because theory is a long way from practice when it comes to modern tech giants. The theory is financial theory... how companies are financed. In theory, equity investment is a way of financing companies. Google and Facebook did not need to be financed by the time they became publicly traded. They never had debt. Software companies don't require capital investment to expand, like a theoretical "firm" does. In practice, public markets have no role in financing companies per se, they're only there to provide liquidity.