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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#541

Post by lukifer »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #287
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - and this is by far the strangest aspect of it all. My local telecom advertising that Netflix is bundled into the cell service. Netflix licensing shows from BBC or ordering content from other outfits. Netflix being built on top of AWS infrastructure. Streaming brands being available as “apps” on AppleTV. HBO becoming a property of Paramount, and both being owned by ATT. So many examples of complex relationships…

All this superficial cooperation is a front to hide the anti competitive and price gouging that’s happening. Joe average doesn’t understand that the marginal cost of delivering a 4K stream is a few cents, nor does he think critically about why it costs 9.99 to “buy” a decade old movie that’s liable to be removed his account at any time.

Low marginal costs presents an economic conundrum in general: it's expensive to produce material and yet cheap to distribute it, so how do you fairly divvy up the cost? If each viewer only paid the marginal cost ($0.01), it no longer makes sense to invest in production; and in the success case, once the production money is recouped, one could certainly argue that charging $9.99 for a $0.01 stream is difficult to distinguish from price-gouging (or more formally, "rent-seeking" [0]).

One answer to this is "club goods" [1]: bundle large collections of content together for a fixed price so that per-unit access is zero-cost, but every participant pays their share of the whole; this is the model of both cable packages and streaming services. It's hardly perfect (especially in that it centralizes both data and power), but it's arguably a better win-win than arbitrary unit prices.

I do think it's shady that vendors are allowed to sell content using "buy" and "ownership" metaphors of physical goods, when in fact it's a limited license that can change or disappear at any time. I'd love to see some regulation in this space, to the effect that content can only be labeled "buy"/"own"/etc if the content is DRM-free and carries a permissive license for backups, remixing, transforming, etc.

And of course, there's an excellent case for reforming copyright laws more generally, such that content that has already had plenty of time to recoup its costs enters the public domain. I think the original duration (14 years) struck a reasonable balance; and on a cultural level, there's a great deal of value in each generation having unlimited access to the previous (still-living) generation's culture, in addition to culture of dead antiquity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#542

Post by dang »

There are a lot of comments in this thread and the first page contains only the first subthread. To read the rest you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27289924&p=2

(Sorry for the interruption. Comments like this will go away eventually.)

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#543

Post by twoodfin »

paulpan wrote: post #497
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…

In this vein, $8.45B seems a bargain for the likes of Apple to instantly booster their very limited TV+ offerings. Was this an exclusive, closed door negotiation between owners of MGM and Amazon? 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.

What about MGM’s back catalog makes Apple TV+ qualitatively more compelling to your marginal subscriber? Versus say spending that same $8.5B on new content?

There’s not much “forward looking” IP of value tied to MGM except the Bond franchise, and it sounds like the Broccoli’s aren’t giving up control of that in this deal.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#544

Post by Hongwei »

krono wrote: post #538

A radical idea but please hear me out: A new Stargate series that is not a reboot, not a remake, not set in an alternate timeline, not set far in the past or future, but rather a continuation of the story we know!

Could be the same timeline, but would still need a mostly new cast. Stargate SG-2 just doesn't have the same ring to it!

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#545

Post by throwaway3699 »

keyboardCowBoy wrote: post #399
hardwaregeek wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love old movies, especially around the 50's-70's, but I'll admit that you're not gonna see a whole lot of diversity in that era. I'm not meaning to moralize. It's just hard to find movies that say, have an Asian character that isn't a horrible racist caricature.

Awe yes diversity. Can't go a day with out reading this ever lasting buzzword. Is that really your determining factor while deciding to watch a movie? It isn't mine. I watch a movie because its a good movie, I don't go searching for diversity, I like watching a movie because of its entertainment value. You should try it.

Forced diversity is one of the big issues with modern media. Instead of making an actually diverse character, yano, with human thoughts and feelings, they just tick some skin and gender boxes and leave it at that. It's just another form of stereotyping.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#546

Post by aerosmile »

echelon wrote: post #447
akira2501 wrote: post #432

Earlier 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…

I love how the term "break up big tech" includes "break" in it. Kind of makes you realize what's really at stake here. Sure, you don't want monopolies, but is breaking US companies going to actually prevent monopolies, or are you just shifting the balance of power from US companies to Chinese companies? Because you sure as hell are not going to break those up - and Tik Tok has demonstrated what should be obvious: we are already neck-deep in the water trying to fend off Chinese companies from taking over the US market, and our competitive margin is only getting slimmer every day. A family member works a lot with Chinese companies and predicted this 13 years ago, and I remember laughing him out of the room. I am no longer laughing today, and I think most of us won't be with each passing day.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#547

Post by soheil »

It's important to note MGM went bankrupt not too long ago, they also sold a lot of their original releases to Warner Bros and others. To put this in perspective MGM is more and more just a shell company or just a brand that you use (by posting posters of James Bond franchise, which btw they only partially own) to lure in subscribers to your Amazon Prime service.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#548

Post by leetcrew »

powerslacker wrote: post #528
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.

I don't think you can prove that piracy is an effective means to incentivize good behavior on the part of the media industries. Also, it seems irresponsible to openly promote theft as a 'good idea'. I understand there are arguments against calling or treating piracy as theft but at the end of the day you are taking something that isn't yours without paying for it. Encouraging people to take part in illegal activity o…

meh, it's a problem of their own making. I used to torrent tons of music. now that I can just buy unencumbered flac files (bandcamp) and stream the rest in good quality for a reasonable price, I don't torrent music. I have room in my budget for a $50/month or even $100/month service where I can stream any movie/show I want. I don't have room in my budget for 5-10 $10/month services where I have to keep track of who has what content and use a bunch of different UIs. it's not even about the money. it's that the paid service manages to be less convenient than VPN+NAS+plex.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#549

Post by GFischer »

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.

Very insightful comment, I ended up reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/american...

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-day-the-supreme-cour...

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#550

Post by adrianmonk »

dcolkitt wrote: post #102
mivade wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is simple: NBC was (and still is) free to watch if you have a television and an antenna.

Broadcast NBC was only "free" in the strictest sense. Every hour of content requires the viewer to sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials. At a labor value of $50/hour, watching ten hours of content a week imposes an economic cost on the viewer of $825/month. By comparison subscribing to all the major streaming platforms would cost about $100/month. Let's not even get into issues of higher quality content…

The important implication of broadcast TV being "free" isn't that there's zero cost. It's that there's no subscription.

Subscriptions mean you have to pay a certain minimum amount, even if you want to watch just one episode of something. That's a much bigger burden than changing the channel.

Yes, in theory you can carefully manage things and cancel as soon as you've watched what you wanted, but in practice that effort is a cost too (like watching a commercial is a cost).

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