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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#561

Post by michaelmrose »

llampx wrote: post #336
kangaroozach wrote: post #275

Earlier 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.

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.

The price for essentially just 120Mbps (sold as 200) down and 6 up is over 100 for internet + 15 for the box if you don't get your own. With TV and a few premium channels it would easily be $200. They are also have only one competitor of note in the downtown of a city of 50K people, a DSL provider offering a service slow enough that its not technically considered broadband anymore by present standards.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#562

Post by kyriakos »

leetcrew wrote: post #551
kyriakos wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. And do yourself a favour and rent a seedbox where you can run all the above and stream from anywhere. Costs less monthly than the electricity costs for running them in your home.

this probably adds complexity for non-savvy users. for instance, my TV can handle a ~20mbps unencrypted stream. turn on encryption in plex, and that drops down to ~8mbps. I'm fine with routing an unencrypted stream through my LAN, but I'd rather not do that with pirated media through my ISP.

I see your point and it makes sense but it always depends on where you live.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#563

Post by enterdev »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #296
croes wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful what you wish for.

Whatever, there is too little of sci-fi anyway. Having already watched everything many times, I feel suffocating.

What do you recommend? Loved Star Trek Discovery, The Expanse, Travelers, Lost

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#564

Post by ksec »

kangaroozach wrote: post #275
DrBazza wrote: post #230

Earlier 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…

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.

>We have not yet approached the pre-streaming willingness to pay

Even if that is true, I am pretty sure it is specific to US only. I dont believe any other place in the world are paying that much for monthly TV content, where Free ( paid by Tax or not ) OTA TV are the norm, and paid are mostly for Live Sports Content.

In US it seems you need "Cable" for everything.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#565

Post by question000 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #165
question000 wrote: post #122

As a football fan I hate this, now a major broadcaster (Amazon TNF) owns a gambling company (MGM sports book) not good for the sport.

That is a different company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Resorts_International

It's actually looks like a slush fund for MGM execs to stash their money, pretty troubling.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#566

Post by sircastor »

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.

I see the meaningful difference here being that there is no limitation to distribution across consumers. With studio owned theaters, if there wasn’t a Paramount theater in your town, you’re outta luck.

Today, you can get Peacock and Paramount+ and Disney+, etc on virtually any device. Even Apple, who has been historically resistant to distribution on other devices has Apple+ on Roku and Amazon devices

Because antitrust favors impact on consumers, I doubt we’ll see any substantial legislation is this space.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#567

Post by jjkaczor »

rhino369 wrote: post #426
thayne wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I don't understand why streaming a movie is so much more expensive than renting a physical DVD or VHS from a brick-and-morter store. If I want to watch a new movie, it is generally much cheaper to rent a DVD from redbox than watching it from any of the streaming services that allow you to rent it online.

It's because of the first sale doctrine. Redbox and family video can buy DVDs and Blu-Rays (at a maximum) at the same price as consumer DVD/Blu-Ray--and rent them out without permission from the copyright holder. That means video rental stores can undercut the VOD prices. Consumers are willing to pay more for VOD because its easier. Having to return the disc is a pain in the ass.

... There used to be this little startup company and service, where you could queue movie/TV shows, then you would receive the discs in the mail, with a paid envelope to return them as well...

AFAIK - only in the US though, there was much talk at launch of how they got special deals with the US postal service.

Whatever happened to those guys...? (https://dvd.netflix.com/)

Apparently they still do it - I thought it was phased-out for streaming years ago.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#568

Post by ska »

rocqua wrote: post #498
watwatinthewat wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't it an issue if "willingness to pay" drops too much? In the end, content costs money to make. If money coming in goes down, then there might not be enough money to make all that content.

> If money coming in goes down, then there might not be enough money to make all that content.

Content will be made, it just won't be the same content.

Production budgets expand to consume available resources, but there is a very non-obvious relationship with quality.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#569

Post by bg24 »

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…

US can do so. Other countries, eg. China, Korea etc. will not. Their big players will trample on small companies of US.

Anti-trust is good, and keeps them in check.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#570

Post by teawrecks »

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.

It's not though. If you have a system with no piracy, it's an indication that the industry could be more greedy. This is what we saw with Netflix's disruption and the drop of piracy, followed by all the other streaming services and the return of piracy. So there's an acceptable amount of piracy that they're shooting for, and that amount is the line where it's cheapest to lobby the govt to prosecute pirates than it is to give customers a better experience. That's not consumer friendly IMO.
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