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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#631

Post by TeMPOraL »

jandrese wrote: post #510
llampx wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I had cable the $30 plan was the "just the stuff you can get OTA plus some shopping channels" plan. If you wanted actual cable channels you had the choice of: 1. "Basic" bundle, $60 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you ESPN, Food Network, SciFi, Cartoon Network, USA 2. "Complete" bundle, $100 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you BBC, a bunch of foreign language channels, Starz…

> and the streaming services don't have ads.

Yet. IIRC, when cable started, it didn't have ads either. It was its selling point.

Advertising is a cancer on society that infects and poisons every communication medium available. It has already metastasized to streaming platforms, though it's not conspicuous yet. You don't have to watch interstitial ads between episodes of your favorite show on Netflix, but if that show is a modern production, it's likely overflowing with product placement ads. When that and other means of making easy money get used up, you can be sure that overt ads will follow.

"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." And that's a salient argument in favor of torching the whole advertising industry to the ground.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#633

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

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 prefer Apple controlling their platform thank you very much. I remember Verizon controlling what I could use to connect to an old flip phone, not allowing me to use bluetooth but some service they charged for.

I remember Verizon controlling what OS version was installed and what firmware and what updates were even supported by them.

Remember when Cell Service providers charged us PER SMS text?

I do.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#634

Post by bogwog »

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…

This is such a cowardly view.

> or are you just shifting the balance of power from US companies to Chinese companies?

That's not going to happen. The biggest Chinese companies only exist because of stolen technology. This is a well documented fact. Tencent for example has this business model:

1) Identify trending games from competitors outside of China

2) Clone those games and release them internationally

3) Petition the Chinese government to block the game they cloned in China

Maybe in the short term they'll see some growth, but in the long-term innovation will always prevail.

If anything, breaking up these monopolies will lead to more innovation as the smart people working at Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will no longer be tied by the "golden handcuffs" and will be driven to build and experiment with new ideas and technologies, instead of spending their days working on ads or other money printing businesses that provide little value to society.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#635

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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.

Fragmentation across streaming services may do more to increase piracy than overly-expensive cable packages. Even if the total monthly cost is lower with six streaming services, there is a higher likelihood to look at each of the $10/mo services and say “not worth it” than a single $100/mo cable subscription. The music streaming industry was smart enough to avoid primarily competing on catalogue exclusives. When all services have near-identical catalogs, they are forced to compete on price & UX.

Amazon did not take over online shopping because it had the lowest prices at any cost. It grew dominant because it was the everything store and any higher prices they charged were not higher enough to make it worth the time to comparison-shop or look for specialty retailers.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#636

Post by w0m »

odiroot wrote: post #519
w0m wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're more into movies and don't care about the run-off-the-mill series then Netflix hasn't been a solution for a long time now.

I can probably cancel Netflix now; it's been my generic 'stream something' service for a decade now; out of habit as much as anything else.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#637

Post by seniorivn »

ksec wrote: post #564
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.

>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.

Russia and China are paying almost as much(adjusted to income)

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#638

Post by MattRix »

Pmop wrote: post #626
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.

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."

For those who haven’t seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#639

Post by bogwog »

paxys wrote: post #321
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The studios are basically paying the burden of cost for MA. It's one of the big reasons Paramount and MGM haven't joined, it's expensive on the studio side. Bandwidth is a nearly zero cost for a lot of the companies streaming the video on MA anyways. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all don't care meaningfully about bandwidth cost anymore, especially for prerecorded content they can CDN all over the place. The bigge…

Why is it expensive for studios if streaming companies don’t care about bandwidth? What are they paying for then?

Opportunity cost of not being able to sell the movie multiple times to the same customer on different streaming platforms?

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#640

Post by archie_diak »

rhino369 wrote: post #579
archie_diak wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, yes they would. Thousands of people already have, that's why its 44bn. It's a market cap not a paper valuation. Are you suggesting that if someone wanted to buy Doge outright they could pay less than it's market cap?

There is no mechanism to buy all Doge and the "market cap" of Doge includes lost coins. If you bought all of Doge, its value would be gone since it would be like it didn't exist. You might as well calculate the market cap of baseball cards. It's just not the right way to measure the worth of a crypto. Put another way, if Doge owners decided to collectively sell it would be worth 0.

Hypothetically if some whale wanted to 'buy' Doge say to shut it down or something, they would probably have to spend a lot more than the market cap and as you yourself point out they still wouldn't have bought all the Doge that existed. OP was comparing amounts i.e $8bn seems like peanuts when 'joke' coins are hypothetically worth more than $44bn, and not really comparing market caps (which doesn't really make sense, again as you yourself pointed out).
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