Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 844 posts

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#621

Post by hollerith »

cronix wrote: post #385
gentleman11 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of having cable, I used to rent or buy movies. It’s no fun to rent now and the terms and duration suck and it’s hard to get a physical copy now so you’re tied to some service for life if you “buy”

Netflix still offers their original service that got them started and helped them wipe out Blockbuster and other competition: DVD's in the mail. https://dvd.netflix.com/

Did we just have a poor DVD player or are scratched disks a problem for everyone using this service?

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#622

Post by jbay808 »

rhino369 wrote: post #582
thayne wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like there should be a similar mechanism for VOD. Although, VidAngel tried to do that and was sued almost to death by big media.

It's not possible to lend digital media out without making a copy(remotely streaming it still copying), which isn't protected by the first sale doctrine. Redbox isn't making a copy. That's the big difference.

Is it possible to play a DVD without making a copy in the DVD player's RAM?

What if I extend an HDMI cable from my DVD player to your TV?

My library manages to lend ebooks; they even have wait lists for them.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#623

Post by mbesto »

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.

“Gentlemen, there’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.”

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#624

Post by snowwrestler »

bombcar wrote: post #532
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft is literally the only tech giant behaving correctly, and it's probably because they got slapped with antitrust in the 2000s. Ask Slack if they agree. Microsoft used the dominance of Office to take over that market by bundling Teams.

What's more amazing to me is Google had Chat and Docs/Sheets all ready to go and integrate and take on Office and instead they closed down chat and brought out Hangouts which I've still never understood.

I’m also astounded at how badly Google has squandered the opportunity in business productivity.

Even companies that were all-in on Google for email, calendar, and documents went with (for example) Slack for chat and Zoom for meetings. Google has had multiple products in both categories for years! And yet somehow could not put together a compelling package the way Microsoft did with O365 + Teams seemingly overnight.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#625

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

That's a very scary thought. What you're saying is, these big companies already are, or about to become, effectively untouchable, because they're now important strategic assets for United States in its struggle to maintain global economic dominance.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#626

Post by Pmop »

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.

This comment reminds me of the classic "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#627

Post by rapind »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #612
caeril wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 po…

Well there is put.io (no affiliation). If it became popular enough though I’m sure it’d get shut down some how.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#628

Post by bogwog »

edgyquant wrote: post #462
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’m not sure I can agree about Microsoft. I’ve come to not hate them in the last decade but they definitely have been buying up the developer scene too. They aren’t as brazen as Google I’ll agree (likely because of the antitrust issues) but they are still setting themselves up as a monopoly over the long term.

The other day I was helping my brother setup Python on his Windows 10 computer. So I went to python.org and installed it as usual, then why I typed "python" in the console, it launched the Microsoft Store app and took me to the download page for their distribution of Python.

Apparently, it's some kind of alias "feature" they added to Windows at some point. What legitimate reason is there for that if not to try and trick people into thinking they need to download the Microsoft Store version of Python (which probably includes analytics/telemetry not in a standard Python distribution)?

Google, Apple, etc are all shameless, anti-competitive monopolists. Anyone can see that because they make no attempts to hide what they're doing. Microsoft's intentions are exactly the same, but they're a lot sneakier about it because they've already been burned in the past for their bad behavior.

People who think the new Microsoft is different! because they released a free text editor and other open source projects are naive. Microsoft wants to lock you into their platforms and technologies like Apple, and wants to collect and monetize your personal data like Google.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#629

Post by fairity »

dalbasal wrote: post #530
fairity wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 theory, sure. 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 p…

> If their best investment is other companies' bonds, they should (again, in theory) just return cash to investors who can buy the bonds themselves.

This is what they're effectively doing, in practice. AAPL has conducted ~$500B in share buybacks since the commencement of their buyback program in 2013. Their current cash and cash equivalents sits at ~$200B.

So, one could say that of the $700B AAPl could have returned to shareholders, it returned $500B (or most of it).

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#630

Post by avaldes »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #556
xixixao wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started watching SG1 again (I saw it incomplete as a kid). It’s incredibly good. It pushes rationalism and feminism in a sane way that I’m not sure would happen in today’s environment. It’s incredibly rich in historical references and concepts. It’s rarely dumb and often preempts cliches. It’s still worth watching imho (and is much less known that Star Trek in US).

Like you I also recently restarted watching SG-1 for the first time since I was a kid. It holds up a lot better than I expected it to. There's the occasional eyerolling cliche (and Carter's dialog about internal vs external gonads is kinda ridiculous) but like you said the cliches are also lampshaded pretty often. I just watched an episode where the Stargate broke and there was an exchange that went something like th…

SG1 was a gold mine of genre savvy moments

>Carter: We just passed -40 degrees > >Jackson: Farenheit or Celsius? > >Mitchell: At that temperature they're the same

Post reply on HN