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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#611

Post by thaumasiotes »

vanderZwan wrote: post #219
brightball wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our whole family has been doing that this year. Watching older movies and TV shows is much more pleasant all around. This was tougher growing up when kids all watched the same shows and talked about them, but with content so all over the place now that common thread seems to be mostly gone at school (outside of internet video stuff).

> Watching older movies and TV shows is much more pleasant all around. My girlfriend somehow grew up completely unaware of Star Trek, so I introduced her to The Next Generation last year and we've been watching it (rewatching in my case, but for the first time in over two decades) one episode a day. It's so relaxing, in a way that almost no modern TV is. No end-of-episode cliffhangers or other mechanisms trying to ma…

> My girlfriend somehow grew up completely unaware of Star Trek, so I introduced her to The Next Generation

> It's so relaxing, in a way that almost no modern TV is. No end-of-episode cliffhangers

That is not how I would describe Star Trek: the Next Generation. Every season ends with a cliffhanger.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#612

Post by NikolaNovak »

caeril wrote: post #512
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…

> 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.

It's really not.

I'm a computer geek, and I'm LONG past the point where setting up safe VMs and signing up to half a dozen services like newsgroup server and directories and search engines and what nots, download software with impossible names like sabnzbd (I'm waiting up for somebody to scream how nobody uses sabnzbd anymore, it's been replaced by jidwiaj and iqerqip, which are super easy, and that just proves my point:P), setup my own webservers that talk to themselves internally so my downloader would work with my cataloguer that would work with the sorter that talks to the video player, figuring out a VPN to keep me somewhat safe while introducing a whole 'nother threat vector... gawd I get a headache just thinking about it. And I end up paying the same as I would for 2-4 monthly legit services. And then my wife wants to watch this movie that's just come out and I download eight versions of it but four are fake and two have hieroglyphic subtitles in three languages baked into video stream and take up half the screen. And then it stops half way through. And then I'm on a business trip (remember those? hah!) and my family wants to watch something and now I have to spend 47 minutes on the phone trying to guide her on how to do that before we all quit in frustration.

My few friends who still do that try to get me back on board, and their "quick & easy explanation on how to do it because it's so easy now" is still three pages long, while skipping 70% of crucial steps & detail.

Just, NO. Whoever thinks piracy is "trivially easy" has a very specific mindset (Hey, it's OK, I used to as well...!), and lacks empathy for those with different mindset/circumstances/skills/priorities... who happen to make up the clear majority of public.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#613

Post by ElFitz »

Nkuna wrote: post #584
Joeri wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If UX isn’t much of a moat, why do most of the streaming platforms get it wrong? Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime have terrible UX for example. You might argue people don’t care about UX and that’s why it’s not a moat, and maybe they don’t, but personally I wish everyone would just plug their content into netflix and I could use that as the only platform.

Can't really vouch for Netflix's UX. I'd believe other platforms are better based on my experience with Netflix. Major personal gripes: 1. No watch history. Have to visit the web, dig into account settings to view it, having to click through 5 items at a time! 2. Content added to your list is displayed randomly, not by date added. No option to sort with various standard parameters such as aforementioned date added, p…

I’d add that it’s impossible to move profiles between accounts.

Broke up recently. What do I do with my former girlfriend’s profile?

Delete it and make her loose her watchlist and where she was in some shows?

Keep it and get that awkward moment when I invite someone over and we want to watch something?

Give her my account and lose my profile?

Ridiculous

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#614

Post by thaumasiotes »

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. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

We have those laws for cars and beer and they are considered ongoing disasters. Why are films different?

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#615

Post by socialist_coder »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #601
socialist_coder wrote: post #598

I wish people didn't watch so much television. It's too good and too easy to watch an unlimited amount of content. Every hour you spend being entertained in front of your screens is an hour less you could be spending building actual social bonds with people in your community. There is a correlation to increasing tv watching and decreased social club engagement. By social clubs I mean bowling clubs, skating clubs, 4H…

>>"Every hour you spend being entertained in front of your screens is an hour less you could be spending building actual social bonds with people in your community." I feel it didn't used to be like that; there was a brief period of limited TV choices where it seemed to increase the bonds - it was a shared experience, and unlike most shared experiences which you have with couple of people physically present, it was s…

Yeah, agreed.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#617

Post by Black101 »

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

dang, since there are a lot of comments in this thread, you tell us about the next page link, thanks a lot... why don't you tell us about the flag link?

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#618

Post by AlexandrB »

tmp231 wrote: post #109
xiaolingxiao wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting is that the government had to step in and break the movie theaters from the movie studio in a famous anti-trust case. I wonder how it'll play out in this case. Presumably Amazon may still license Bond movies (for example) to Netflix. In fact Netflix is included in my Prime bundle I believe...

“Had to” They did not have to. They could have let market forces dictate how it played out.

The market is currently "dictating" that I have to do business with Amazon no matter how odious I think their practices are. They're almost as hard to avoid as Google at this point.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#619

Post by nightski »

aerosmile wrote: post #546
echelon wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you truly believe multinational conglomerates are the pinnacle of innovation then you may be right.

But from my perspective they acquire because they can't innovate internally.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#620

Post by snowwrestler »

caeril wrote: post #512
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…

> 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.

Well-crafted regulation is constructive, in that it expresses the social problem and provides guidance on the expected behavior. That can shape investment and allow companies to make long-term decisions.

Piracy can have many reasons behind it, including just not wanting to pay for things in general. And it’s easy for companies to dismiss as just an expense to manage, like shoplifting (“loss”) in the retail channel.

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