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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#461

Post by lotsofpulp »

ghaff wrote: post #414
lotsofpulp wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a channel needed? You can go straight from copyright holder to viewer.

So you want to go to every individual studio to watch movies and TV and pay separately?

Makes no difference to me, I just spend a few seconds searching the title and pay and watch what I want when I want. But I also do not watch much.

If enough people want bundled content and are willing to pay enough to make it happen, then content owners will sell it. If not, then the buyers and sellers do not agree on price.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#462

Post by edgyquant »

echelon wrote: post #447
akira2501 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. No it isn't. It's a workaround. This is an 8 billion dollar deal, there would have to be an impossible amount of piracy for it to count as "competition." This is precisely the reason why government regulation here is correct, as consumers, we don't have a lever long enough to have any real impact on the core problem. And we're just one side of the deal. These types of…

The solution is to break up big tech. Amazon shouldn't be ten companies in one. Google shouldn't be able to set web and mobile standards, then reap ad monies by forcing everyone to accept their anticompetitive changes. Apple shouldn't be the sole guardian of iPlatform. You can't have a protection racket on 50% of all commerce (phones >> gaming consoles) and enforce what gets put on the device. These companies don't h…

I’m not sure I can agree about Microsoft. I’ve come to not hate them in the last decade but they definitely have been buying up the developer scene too. They aren’t as brazen as Google I’ll agree (likely because of the antitrust issues) but they are still setting themselves up as a monopoly over the long term.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#463

Post by throwaway894345 »

ghaff wrote: post #420
throwaway894345 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest gripe is that the prices are totally artificial. I rented The Fugitive (1993 irrc) for $5 for 2 days and it costs $20 to buy it—as much as a brand new blockbuster in HD on physical media. This doesn’t seem like a particularly free market.

It actually looks like the Blu-Ray DVD of The Fugitive is $10. Though in general, older content (whether e-book, streaming movies, or purchased music) never seems to be as much cheaper as you'd think it "should" be. I imagine most of the rights holders don't want to get into a race to the bottom for non-blockbuster content so they tend to stay around industry price norms for newer material.

> It actually looks like the Blu-Ray DVD of The Fugitive is $10. Though in general, older content (whether e-book, streaming movies, or purchased music) never seems to be as much cheaper as you'd think it "should" be. I imagine most of the rights holders don't want to get into a race to the bottom for non-blockbuster content so they tend to stay around industry price norms for newer material.

Right, the copyright holders effectively get to dictate the price and prevent redistribution (how does someone resell their digital [non-physical] copy to me without running afoul of DMCA and the like?). It's not a normal market, and the MPAA and similar organizations have lobbied to dictate the market rules to funnel as much money as possible to them.

For example, copyright terms these days are absurdly long--70 years beyond the lifetime of the original author.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#464

Post by lovegoblin »

IncRnd wrote: post #448
somethingwitty1 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current monthly cable subscription is $135 (plus "fees"). And when people say, "cable", they generally mean TV service. For many, that may mean a pricey satellite TV service (very expensive back in the day). Basic cable is likely what you are getting, but many people want to watch sports or movies, which requires premium subscriptions and it adds up quickly.

That's an insane price, and hopefully you can shop around or change packages.

> hopefully you can shop around

i.e., if you're lucky enough to have more than one alternative (if any).

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#465

Post by IncRnd »

lovegoblin wrote: post #464
IncRnd wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an insane price, and hopefully you can shop around or change packages.

> hopefully you can shop around i.e., if you're lucky enough to have more than one alternative (if any).

There may be places that have only one provider with only one option in that provider, but are those places really $135/month with all the TV channels? The issue might be paying for things that are already free over the Internet.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#466

Post by ghaff »

andy_ppp wrote: post #188
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

I still think DRM should be banned and paying for content should be super cheap - say per movie $1 for HD file download and $2 for a 4k version. For me I'd literally spend hundreds of dollars per year on content that I can own going forward. The funniest thing of course is I bet the studios would make more money than trying to charge me $4.99 to rent movies and absurd sums to "buy" them...

>The funniest thing of course is I bet the studios would make more money than trying to charge me $4.99 to rent movies and absurd sums to "buy" them...

That was actually the situation early on with videotape. The price of the tapes was set at something like $100 to make more money (indirectly) by renting because the rental stores had to pay a much higher price.

Over time, tapes started also being "priced to buy" (often things like Disney animation that kids would want to watch over and over again). Eventually, I think pretty much everything became priced to buy.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#467

Post by extr »

wayoutthere wrote: post #439
ascagnel_ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The show was weird from the start -- the first season was the first half of the first book, then they adapted the second half of the first book and the first half of the second book for season two (and likewise for S3 and books 2 & 3). Season 4 largely resolved that by wrapping up book 3 and adapting all of book 4 in one go, since book 4 is kinda slow on its own.

The show is weird because the source material is kind of schlocky and the show improves it significantly. I think season 4 is so hard to watch because book 4 is a self-contained story so they couldn’t blend characters and scenarios like in the previous book. The book characters are all a little too one-dimensional and the show does an excellent job condensing them into well-rounded characters. I had to stop reading h…

Jesus, if the show significantly improves on the books in that regard then I can't imagine what the books are like. I'm mid-way through S2 of the show right now. I like the realistic portrayal of what space travel/interplanetary colonies might look like. All the political stuff. But some of the dialogue and characterization is still embarrassingly cliched.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#468

Post by alborzb »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #323
johnchristopher wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frankly, I'm glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country. My mother recently gave me a sub-account to Netflix and while I was thrilled to rewatch some shows I liked (like the OA or good old star trek) I was quickly submerged by the sheer amount of YA novels adapted in TV shows or movies th…

Netflix is terrible if you have good taste in movies. I'm with you on the old black/white movies. I actually think Amazon got a great deal buying MGM. If TCM was available, Nefflix should look into buying it. They have a great library of old movies.

TCM was available (alongside all of Warner Bros. Media, Turner Media and DC Comics)... It's getting absorbed by Discovery [1], I imagine that a competitive bidding process must have taken place, presumably Netflix didn't see the benefits.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/24/john-malone-sees-warnermedia...

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#469

Post by kyriakos »

joshstrange wrote: post #449
kyriakos wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a basic nas at home which I periodically download content to from the seedbox so I'm getting away with just 1tb capacity online at around 11euro per month. Have plex running on a raspberrypi which just indexes from both seedbox and nas and serves to TVs around the house without transcoding.

So on the Pi are you mounting the cloud server (or part of it) and then Plex just "proxies" the file to the local TV?

Exactly.

Don't get me wrong I have Netflix and prime but Disney plus, hulu and hbo max are not available to me so I need to work around the stupid global restrictions.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#470

Post by edgyquant »

divs1210 wrote: post #225
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.

THIS. Forcing consumers to sign up to 10 platforms to watch 10 movies will no doubt lead to a shift back to torrents. YouTube is pretty good in this regard, as it allows paying for renting a single movie for a weekend for a reasonable price.

Amazon does this as well, I can rent pretty much any movie or tv show through it.
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