Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#101

Post by TMWNN » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 1:58 AM UTC

prepend wrote: post #91

> The article also noted that a minority of the viewers who started The Rings of Power, Amazon’s most expensive project ever, finished the series. It’s funny how something is so bad people won’t even watch it for free. I don’t think this is a completely correct assumption, but since Amazon doesn’t give viewership numbers (or Netflix or Hulu or hbo) it’s hard to know if a show is successful or popular or profitable. I…

>> The article also noted that a minority of the viewers who started The Rings of Power, Amazon’s most expensive project ever, finished the series.

>It’s funny how something is so bad people won’t even watch it for free.

By contrast, ratings for The Last of Us on HBO rose steadily through every episode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series)#Rat...>.

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#102

Post by kyriakos » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:10 AM UTC

prepend wrote: post #92

starkparker wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Andor ... severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets Severance S2 reportedly costs $15–20 million per episode to make, and Apple+'s average original series budget is ~$10M/ep.: https://www.gq.com/story/severance-season-2-delayed-behind-t... Andor S1's budget was reportedly $250M for 12 episodes ($20.8M/ep): https://www.ign.com/articles/andor-season-1-reported-budget-... Which is more exp…

That’s weird about Andor’s budget. They don’t have complicated effects and no huge names in the cast. At least Severence had lots of named actors.

Andor had a big variety of settings, lots of outdoor scenes and the sfx were of better quality than mandalorian by far.

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#103

Post by kyriakos » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:11 AM UTC

prepend wrote: post #96

Apocryphon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really lavish sets and impressive costuming, though.

Both were nice, but $250M nice surprises me. I expect you could spend $25M and I’d enjoy it as much.

It's 250M for the whole season

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#104

Post by andsoitis » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 2:33 PM UTC

Plasmoid wrote: post #60

andsoitis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the movie/TV industry is built on false scarcity What is the “false scarcity”?

Think of it as the Spotify model vs the Netflix model. In the music world, basically all music is available on all platforms. I can listen to basically anything on Spotify. In the Netflix model, it's all exclusives. Everything is spread all over the place.

I associate “false scarcity” with the case where one company or a cartel dominates an industry and limits output as a way to raise prices (control supply).

However, when it comes to movies a TV, that’s not the case. There are many studios around the world and they want to have a direct-to-consumer relationship (for various reasons), vs having no consumer relationship.

Put differently, it isn’t that there’s scarcity of output (in fact, many people complain there’s too much so it is hard to find something great to watch), it is that you (and others) want to have a one stop shop to satisfy all your TV and movie watching needs. But how would that work? Force all content producers to not be able to distribute their work or to have direct to consumer relationships? And then have 1 (several?) companies limited to distribution (and they aren’t allowed to also be studios, must it be country specific or must it be global and what regulatory body would govern that)? Etc.

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#105

Post by prepend » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

kyriakos wrote: post #103

prepend wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both were nice, but $250M nice surprises me. I expect you could spend $25M and I’d enjoy it as much.

It's 250M for the whole season

I understand. I meant $25M for the whole season would have been ok for me. The parts I liked were all dialog and intrigue.

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#106

Post by ilrwbwrkhv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 3:47 PM UTC

cowsup wrote: post #26

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #13

Unfortunately the place where I buy toilet paper from is not the first place I think of when I want to be entertained. Unfortunately it's a culture and branding problem which I don't think Amazon can fix.

More companies need to utilize different brand names when launching vastly different products. If there was a service called “Comcast (Stream / Video / Watch / Play),” the numbers would be in the toilet; but they brand their streaming platform as “Peacock” and it’s quite respectable. Had Amazon named their service something unique, and announced it as some sort of bonus subscription you get as part of Prime (or somet…

Absolutely. Branding and what space things take in your head is very important. I associate Amazon with mostly generic stuff which I can get a good price on and it will get delivered fast and a huge amount of Chinese knockoffs which are super over priced compared to Ali express (aka Ali express with better English copy). Prime is also associated with that and by extension so is Prime video.

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#107

Post by red-iron-pine » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #35

nullindividual wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netflix's proliferation of reality TV (Love is Blind etc) felt absolutely jarring to me at first but it's just the tip of the iceberg. This should be seen as a death-kneel for any channel/service, yet those cable channels keep going after decades of truly terrible TV. I wonder what kind of person these shows pander to.

> I wonder what kind of person these shows pander to. An absolutely massive audience that just wants to switch off at the end of the day rather than engage in a deep drama or similar. I'm not exactly defending it but don't underestimate the size of that audience.

Yeah I'll bite.

James Cameron said something to the effect of "a ticket to a movie is a promise to give something 100% of your attention for 2 hours" -- and most of the time I'm NOT willing to do that.

Reality TV or something is fine much of the time.

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#108

Post by theonlybutlet » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

Plasmoid wrote: post #60

andsoitis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the movie/TV industry is built on false scarcity What is the “false scarcity”?

Think of it as the Spotify model vs the Netflix model. In the music world, basically all music is available on all platforms. I can listen to basically anything on Spotify. In the Netflix model, it's all exclusives. Everything is spread all over the place.

This is exactly what I mean.

Re: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

#109

Post by theonlybutlet » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #104

Plasmoid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as the Spotify model vs the Netflix model. In the music world, basically all music is available on all platforms. I can listen to basically anything on Spotify. In the Netflix model, it's all exclusives. Everything is spread all over the place.

I associate “false scarcity” with the case where one company or a cartel dominates an industry and limits output as a way to raise prices (control supply). However, when it comes to movies a TV, that’s not the case. There are many studios around the world and they want to have a direct-to-consumer relationship (for various reasons), vs having no consumer relationship. Put differently, it isn’t that there’s scarcity o…

They're limiting output to their own platform as a way to force you to use it. Instead of raised prices they're squeezing a subscription out of you.

Instead of complaining about piracy, put your content on all platforms. There's a clear correlation between the return of exclusives and increased piracy. Drop prices/make it more available and you'll displace piracy (there'll be a structural level of piracy always, they can't change that but this is beside the point).