21–30 of 67 posts
I am sure Disney is renting Disney+ ancient content at premium market rates and so the platform appears to be unprofitable.
What happened to the company that made Cool Runnings and other great films?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like Disney having a government enforced monopoly on their content that lasts for about a century, combined with changes in technology w.r.t streaming that allow them to never create a "first sale" and thus make it illegal for anybody to possess a copy of their content without paying them a monthly fee that they get to set?
Whenever there's something that looks like a market failure, there's almost always a governmental grant of monopoly privilege or some government regulation to prevent competition. Why are prescription drugs unaffordable? Because of a grant of monopoly privilege called "patents" that allow a company to monopolize a drug for around 2 decades. Why is health care so expensive? Because the government subsidizes employer p…
Why doesn't Disney have meaningful competition? Because they bought them. (Also applies to health care. PE firms buying up everything has hurt us a lot.)
Why don't other just-shy-of-monopoly streaming companies lower their prices to take Disney's customers? Monopolies over streaming rights for shows and back-room deals.
Why don't customers take them to court? Binding arbitration clauses in the click-wrap contracts. (This also applies to your housing problem, by the way - the free market can not work when there is collusion. And that's not my assertion, that's economists' take on the effects of collusion.)
I'm pretty sure this isn't the government who has fucked this up for us customers, it's the corporations. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the Regan era and the polarization of the FTC and other administrative agencies is what allowed this kind of collusion, copyright abuse, and monopoly formation.
EDIT: I'd also ask one further question: Why is the government taking any action in big company's favor? I posit that it's due to the the companies taking semi-legal actions with the legislators who can make laws. Why are the actions legal? Because of prior illegal actions - more back-room deals - no doubt.
This feels... grotesque? The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong.
> it feels like something has gone terribly wrong.
I don't meant to be rude, but I am going to be: have you had your head in the sand for the last.. decade and a half? Something has gone terribly wrong and it's late stage capitalism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like Disney having a government enforced monopoly on their content that lasts for about a century, combined with changes in technology w.r.t streaming that allow them to never create a "first sale" and thus make it illegal for anybody to possess a copy of their content without paying them a monthly fee that they get to set?
Whenever there's something that looks like a market failure, there's almost always a governmental grant of monopoly privilege or some government regulation to prevent competition. Why are prescription drugs unaffordable? Because of a grant of monopoly privilege called "patents" that allow a company to monopolize a drug for around 2 decades. Why is health care so expensive? Because the government subsidizes employer p…
There are three general ways to address that. (1) Ignore it, which tends to lead to underproduction. (2) Have the government pay for production of IP, which becomes public domain. The downside of this approach is the government has to decide which IP to pay for. (3) Give IP the necessary properties by law for it to work well with a free market. This can fix the underproduction problem but does result in underconsumption.
It might be possible to address the issue in (2) of the government deciding what gets funded. One common suggesting is to fund production through a tax on something that tends to correlate with consumption such as internet access. The money from the tax would fund creation, with the money a work earns going up the more it is downloaded. There'd have to be something to deal with cheating though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like Disney having a government enforced monopoly on their content that lasts for about a century, combined with changes in technology w.r.t streaming that allow them to never create a "first sale" and thus make it illegal for anybody to possess a copy of their content without paying them a monthly fee that they get to set?
All of this I think just serves to underscore the importance of piracy’s role in the debate — in a world where physical media isn’t rented or loaned out, piracy provides the needed pressure to keep rightsholders honest on price and terms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like Disney having a government enforced monopoly on their content that lasts for about a century, combined with changes in technology w.r.t streaming that allow them to never create a "first sale" and thus make it illegal for anybody to possess a copy of their content without paying them a monthly fee that they get to set?
You could also just...not watch it. You don't have a right to consume someone else's creations just because you want to.
This feels... grotesque? The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong.
wait till you hear about luxury brands
Like Hollywood I expect Disney accounting to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. Disney has a massive back catalog, the oldest movie on the platform is nearly 90 years old. I am sure Disney is renting Disney+ ancient content at premium market rates and so the platform appears to be unprofitable.
Disney+ massive loses was cited as a major reason for the previous CEO being ousted by the Board, and Iger reinstituted.
The difficulty with screaming is that you can no longer create $100M big budget movies and expect to show a profit from a service costing just $10/mo.
https://insidethemagic.net/2024/04/not-a-profitable-business...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like Disney having a government enforced monopoly on their content that lasts for about a century, combined with changes in technology w.r.t streaming that allow them to never create a "first sale" and thus make it illegal for anybody to possess a copy of their content without paying them a monthly fee that they get to set?
Another way to say that first part is that after a certain amount of time the government strips away your control over your own creation.