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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

#151

Post by aqfamnzc »

maxerickson wrote: post #80
mhaberl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a subscriber base of 8 million, assuming hypothetically that each pays $15 monthly over an entire year (a figure which is inflated), the resultant annual _revenue_ would be approximately $1.4 billion. However, their financial losses this year have exceeded even this ($1.6 billion in first 9 months alone) Their projection of achieving profitability in the next fiscal year seems, under these circumstances, quite o…

Disney also has Hulu and ESPN+. (They rolled up Hulu after acquiring a majority share with the purchase of Fox)

Oh, interesting. I'm surprised they haven't merged them / moved people over / shut down Hulu.

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

#152

Post by lolinder »

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.

It depends on the age of the kids—for the price of a Disney+ subscription you can buy ~2 DVDs a month, which at my kid's age (4 and 2) is way more frequently than they actually want to watch new movies. When I was a kid, (and I'm seeing it with my own kids) we had a tiny selection of movies that we loved to watch repeatedly. Why pay rent for that selection when you could own it for the same price?

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

#153

Post by geodel »

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

Well of course they'd have been. But prevailing wisdom just few years back was Disney's of the world can just steamroll Netflix of the world because they own all the content. Developing streaming system is only some low level implementation detail in larger scheme of things.

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

#154

Post by graphe »

erellsworth wrote: post #138
graphe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. They tried to use the IP to make money. Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.

Religions don't wring up other religions by making more media of other religions.

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

#155

Post by pnutjam »

erellsworth wrote: post #138
graphe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. They tried to use the IP to make money. Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.

Bingo, I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like I can't start in the middle and it's impossible to track back to the first story or there are just way too many so I just give up and don't watch any. They did that with Pirates of the Caribbean first... I blinked and there were 5 of them.

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

#156

Post by jonplackett »

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…

It’s funny how crap the other streamers apps still are compared to Netflix.

Little things matter.

Netflix always picks up the exact second you left a show. Apple, Disney and prime sometimes jump back 5 minutes or even more.

Netflix app opens super fast even in my crap old smart TV. Apple, Disney, prime take ages. Even when open the UI is very sloppy.

Netflix adjusts the streaming quality depending on your connection. Which means things download fast / stream reliably and also presumable saves them a tonne of bandwidth.

An then they actually have good content too…

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

#157

Post by nightski »

frutiger wrote: post #25
apwell23 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disney, Warner, Comcast and Paramount warner is up 22% this year. comcast 26%

You have to compare any growth against a benchmark index which reflects what would’ve happened if the company had simply invested its assets in that index fund instead.

That's nonsensical when they are part of the index driving that growth.

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

#158

Post by graphe »

vel0city wrote: post #143
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.

Sorry he just said too big to fail I threw that in there, the government will prop up their arms of propaganda if the nelib news sites and media convege the US isn't going to only save the news sites. I don't think the us will allow our propaganda to be lost unless they have a better way of dealing with it. He did mention them owning theme parks though, Florida can't get rid of them easily and if Disney went under now with their IP, real estate, theme parks, cruises, etc I think the US would bail them out or risk a lot of joblessness.

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

#159

Post by evandrofisico »

edgyquant wrote: post #125
surgical_fire wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is so much larger than the US, you wouldn't believe.

How exactly is that relevant to a streaming service located in, and targeted at, the US?

It is not targeted at the US.

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

#160

Post by homarp »

sethd wrote: post #97
surgical_fire wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is foreign language for such a global service? If I am in Spain, should shows in English be bundled in a "Foreign Language" along with Korean dramas, Japanese animation, and a couple of odd series in Dutch? How is this helpful? Not saying that language categorization is a bad thing. Being able to filter shows that are available in a specific audio language, or with a specific language available for subtitles, wo…

I think the right approach would be to label content that is not in the source language you have set as your device locale. It’s not about filtering out the content, it’s about making it easy to tell whether or not it’s going to start playing with dubbed audio so the viewer can make a better choice.

Hollywood is not in the source language for most of the world. Netflix brand new English content is also not in the source language for most of the world.
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