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Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

arstechnica.com

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Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#141

Post by jncfhnb »

stainablesteel wrote: post #139
jncfhnb wrote: post #107

We should not allow distribution of media and software to be a cornerstone of society. If we passed some regulation to force it to be leased to wanting distributors at equal cost we could kill exclusivity and the middle man margins and just get on with it with a nice, basically free option like SFlix.

we had that once it was called television honestly it was pretty bad, and completely controlled by media organizations who used it to gaslight the poplace as badly as tiktok does today i think there's both every reason and right to maintain private platforms even if its annoying to consumers, being forced to be lumped in with others comes with regulations that eventually turn into tyranny

I’m pretty sure television has never worked like that

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#142

Post by nothercastle »

sethd wrote: post #115
matthewdgreen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content quality is excellent, but the English-language voice acting is horrible.

On top of that, the English subtitles don’t match up with the English voiceovers.

That’s normal. You have to match appropriate sentence length in dubs otherwise when another person is taking the wrong person will still be talking in the dubbed language. Subtitles allow for better translation as that limitation isn’t there

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#143

Post by vel0city »

graphe wrote: post #14

Tim Dillon talked about this recently. He said they want to be too big to fail, merge and get bailouts and handouts like sports get, since they own lots of revenue streams. He mentioned it's dead too, this article says the same thing. Once it's too big to fail this happens, they can push any agenda they want, not be any "good" and when people wonder how are they still around making nothing but pushing agendas in not…

But the thing it seems he's missing about sports teams sometimes getting bailed out or sweetheart rent deals is team identities often get intermingled with city identities. No municipality is going to bail out a streaming network even though they might bail out a football club or hockey team that's been in the city for ages and is connected to the city identity.

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#144

Post by babyshake »

graphe wrote: post #37
tom_walters wrote: post #29

I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content. Disney na…

> Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Coo…

> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it.

I take issue less with the volume of Star Wars and Marvel content, and more with how Disney makes small gestures toward "genre" while keeping all of that content within a tightly brand-controlled realm where there are no real stakes or diversity and everything needs to be canon. This is one of the areas where I can appreciate WB's approach more with having a variety of movies and shows with vastly different styles and audiences that obviously can't fit together in the same universe.

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#145

Post by Tao3300 »

tom_walters wrote: post #29

I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content. Disney na…

> classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch

The Mall of Damocles

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#146

Post by edgyquant »

yellow_lead wrote: post #71
gchamonlive wrote: post #69

It is interesting how round things come and go. First we had cabe TV and for a time it was good. Then there came the dawn of the internet and with it piracy and lawsuites. Then came the age of the streaming services, and for a time it was good again. It resembled the cable age of old, but with the power of choice! Or so it seemed. Then came competing services. Monopolies fuelled by publishing rights. The user had aga…

> Then came the age of the streaming services, and for a time it was good again. It resembled the cable age of old, but with the power of choice! Maybe this was because VCs were footing the bill. Once companies have to be profitable the fun seems to end.

VCs footing the bill for such large disruptions of entire sectors only for them to end up the same seems like it should somehow be illegal. Uber killed off cab companies by being subsidized only to end up more (or just as) expensive except it screwed the workers in the process.

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#147

Post by lolinder »

ren_engineer wrote: post #121
tom_walters wrote: post #29

I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content. Disney na…

Everybody wanted to control the entire pie, when in reality almost all of them would have been better off just licensing their content to Netflix and not worrying about streaming distribution

So much this. Netflix was valuable to me because I could watch any movie at any time, but now the streaming space is so fragmented that no single provider is worth the price of the subscription, so our family doesn't pay for any of them.

We told ourselves that if we really want to watch movies we'd just rent them off Amazon on a case-by-case basis, but in practice we just completely stopped consuming streaming content as a family. If there are other families like us, then their greed made the whole pie much smaller.

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#148

Post by dpflan »

jl6 wrote: post #130
geraldwhen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney could have done that and I would have paid. But they don’t make shows people want to watch any more. Live action Mulan could have been awesome! But they destroyed the themes of family honor and removed the music and comedy. Pander fatigue is real. I’ve got kids but I’m letting my Disney sub lapse. Anime is way better than the schlock Disney puts out.

All the old Disney back catalog is still new to my kids so they just watch that and ignore the new junk.

Important point about relative novelty, but kids aren’t subscribers / account holders / bill payers, so I can see how the population with children can become a persistent subscriber base, but growth requirements necessitate either more children (joking) or providing better content.

It’s pretty interesting to think about how technology and scalability play into the costs of the streaming model. Netflix’s engineering capabilities are well respected, I find it hard for another company to replicate this success without using better technology to offer the same service: do we know the technological infrastructure quality of Disney+ or Hulu? Have they encountered costly scaling problems that eat into budgets?

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#149

Post by softwaredoug »

No wonder - They all doubled down on streaming simultaneously and let quality of the produced shows / movies suffer.

Disney, for example, thrived on scarcity and quality. You'd clamor to see that rare release in theaters, and show up for streaming wherever it ended up. Instead they decided to produce like a dozen Star Wars / Marvel series a year. Their movies have been lackluster. They push them to streaming really fast, kneecapping the box office. It all just becomes noise instead of an event reinforcing their brand.

Some studios, like Sony, have just ignored trying to compete on Streaming, and just focus on the quality. Sell it to Netflix later, as Netflix increasingly is in the "quantity over quality" business.

Re: Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

#150

Post by kthejoker2 »

Going one step up the ladder...

So many products and services have been ruined by the need for a subscription/ recurring revenue model instead of a consumption / one time purchase model.

I see so many products (mostly software) I would gladly pay $20 one time for but balk at paying $5/month in perpetuity for.

Content in particular should be owned or rented, not subscribed to.

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