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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

#41

Post by steveBK123 »

As all these competitors launched, I thought maybe NFLX's days were numbered. Basically NFLX was first mover, but now you have a mix of niche targeting streamers in play. If you have kids or want Star Wars you get Disney+, if you care about sports/live then you pick one of the competitors with that, if you want more highbrow you get HBO/Max, if you want Star Trek you get Paramount+.

Now watching them all burn cash and now scramble to consolidate, maybe I think NFLX was right all along. They have a deep catalog of licensed content from other studios. They churn out absolutely endless amounts of mid content with no name actors at low cost. They have the highest subscriber base with which to attract advertisers to the ad supported tier. They have tons of people on the paid tiers.

Most of the high budget flop boondoggles you keep reading about in streaming shows have been newer players. NFLX was and continues to be the only ones making money.

Think of it as reversion-to-mid wars. NFLX churns out lots of decent forgettable mid but watchable 8 episode series, occasionally renews them for 2-3 seasons. The big brand studio streamers are instead taking expensive IP and high paid actors to ... churn out sequels/spioffs/prequels which turn out to just be high budget mid content. NFLX is very smart here.

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

#42

Post by edgyquant »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #13

The one that surprised me the most to be struggling is Disney+. I thought they would have the strongest streaming story since they have so much of the prime IP: Star Wars, Marvel, Disney Animation, Pixar, etc, whereas Netflix is still heavily dependent on licensed IP.

I think that’s the problem. People have seen all of disneys stuff and what’s new isn’t original or appealing to anyone.

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

#43

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

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…

[dead]

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

#44

Post by HDThoreaun »

sethd wrote: post #38
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…

> and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. Mixing in a lot of foreign language content to make their library seem larger is a sad joke and one of the main reasons I no longer subscribe to Netflix. Edit for clarity: I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor. I c…

Netflix’s foreign content is quite good. Especially the Korean stuff is pretty high quality and way cheaper to produce, seems like a good idea to me.

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

#45

Post by zamadatix »

selcuka wrote: post #18
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #13

The one that surprised me the most to be struggling is Disney+. I thought they would have the strongest streaming story since they have so much of the prime IP: Star Wars, Marvel, Disney Animation, Pixar, etc, whereas Netflix is still heavily dependent on licensed IP.

> The one that surprised me the most to be struggling is Disney+. Smells like Hollywood accounting [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Hollywood accounting or not on the profit side it still doesn't explain why it has leveled off at 1/4 the revenue of Netflix too.

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

#46

Post by edgyquant »

londons_explore wrote: post #11
zpeti wrote: post #7

Is it just me or has the quality of streaming content gone massively downhill? We are in the era of the McDonald’s of streaming. Everything is low quality mass market crap. At this point I’m only watching pre 2016 content or foreign stuff. It’s just so bad. And this is the stuff writers went striking over. I mean I’m not surprised they are threatened by AI, it’s not hard to copy American films and tv at this point. I…

I have to wonder why consumers so desire new content. Old films and TV shows have much the same entertainment value, and are vastly cheaper to stick through some AI to turn to HD and strip out the no-longer-politically-acceptable jokes. There is also a wealth of content from other countries and languages, which could be translated with a little AI assistance to do lip sync etc. With far more content than anyone could…

I would prefer if the current zeitgeist didn’t go around stripping older content of what it deems incorrect. There’s no guarantee that twenty years from now there won’t be a totally different view of what’s correct anyway.

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

#47

Post by edgyquant »

londons_explore wrote: post #30
JKCalhoun wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you feel the need to have AI "cleanse" older shows? Otherwise, I agree there is a rich history of films.

It really depends what the watcher desires... A lot of audiences will say "ewwe, I couldn't possibly let my children watch that, there are homophobic slurs in it". Or parts are simply outdated and won't be understood by viewers - like a key element of a plot being that someone erased an answerphone tape - perhaps in todays world you'd replace that with messages showing one tick only...

Luckily there’s tons of movies that don’t have those slurs for people to show their kids.

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

#48

Post by jmyeet »

I remember groaning when all the "me too" streaming platforms were announced. Netflix was good when it had what I called "remnant content" like full ad-free seasons of TV that I could finally catch up on. And at $8 (or even $10/month) I basically kept it forever even if I didn't watch it for a few months.

But now all these services are rapidly pushing towards $20/month. My usage pattern is to sign up for Netflix about one month a year, binge what I want then cancel. I'll probably do similar with Hulu too. I only have HBO because it's bundled with my ISP.

Netflix's big mistake was movies. The only thing that makes movies economical is theatrical releases. I'm sure Netflix has lost billions trying to create top-tier movies.

Disney's big mistake was thinking their back catalog and milking the Marven and Star Wars properties could carry their platform.

But there were always going to be losers in the "me too" streaming gold rush. But we saw cable haemorrhage customers due to continual price hikes. I'm surprised there hasn't been more focus on controlling costs. Below a certain level customers will just keep a service forever.

What I think Netflix needs to do is build out regional content in a much bigger way. This means have a studio in Spain producing Spanish language content, another in Germany and so on. These should be completely focused on producing content desired by those local markets.

Then you cherrypick content to internationalize with dubbing. For whatever reason, the voice acting I've seen on virtually every dub is awful. And it seems to be the same small group of people that does it too. Money Heist springs to mind. Even "3%", which is a great show, has some awful dubbing.

So Netflix kind of does this but not nearly enough. Like there are Turkish shows produced in Germany that are popular in Spain for whatever reason. Or Korean soaps that have a non-Korean audience. I'm honestly shocked at how bad the dubbing and voice acting ecosystem still is.

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

#49

Post by aCoreyJ »

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 really shouldn't even be included in the first sentence of this article, according to itself they have 8 million subscribers and are expecting to be profitable next year.

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

#50

Post by sethd »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #44
sethd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. Mixing in a lot of foreign language content to make their library seem larger is a sad joke and one of the main reasons I no longer subscribe to Netflix. Edit for clarity: I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor. I c…

Netflix’s foreign content is quite good. Especially the Korean stuff is pretty high quality and way cheaper to produce, seems like a good idea to me.

I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor.
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