It’s “shakeout” time as losses of Netflix rivals top $5 billion. Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers.
It’s “shakeout” time as losses of Netflix rivals top $5 billion. Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers.
Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers.
The world’s largest traditional entertainment companies face a reckoning in 2024 after losing more than $5 billion in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.
Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount—US entertainment conglomerates that have been growing ever larger for decades—are facing pressure to shrink or sell legacy businesses, scale back production and slash costs following billions in losses from their digital platforms.
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“TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing,” he said. “Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs.”
Netflix was one place you could go to get a massive amount of quality content. Now, that content is divided among a dozen apps, each one perpetually raising prices and trying to include advertising.
Negotiate a bundle that recreates the old Netflix experience, price it reasonably, and promise absolutely no ads ever in writing. I’d sign up for that service and keep my subscription perpetually. Like we all did with Netflix.
That "reasonable" pricing needs to cover all of the development of tv and (most of) movies that we have today. This was the entire problem with the Netflix model.
The netflix experience of old only worked because media companies licensed shows and movies to it like they do to broadcasters in other companies. Paramount in 2011 is as happy to license Frasier to Netflix as they are to the BBC.
This only works when the media companies are making enough money via their main business, as such that licensing is just extra profit.
Netflix ate their lunch and devalued the entire ecosystem. Netflix sold the lie that tv can be made on 10 bucks a month instead of 100 like cable was. The economics of that just don't work, however. So now we have an industry where the bottom has fallen out entirely.
Maybe you'll be okay with a 100/month netflix subscription. I doubt most would. But that's what it would need to be to be the one subscription you have like it used to be. There's no cable audience to fall back on now.
Yep, so they're all going to continue to merge until there's 1-3 mega streamers, then they'll all add advertising, and we'll have come full circle.
Then there will be some new service which streams content directly to your brain and we'll begin again and continue until we have advertisements in our dreams.
Movies still make most of their money at the cinema. They can't survive without that. I can accept movies and TV moving to the Super Netflix after six months or so.
TV is kind of harder, especially for the really high budget stuff.
They need to have it like music, where you have multiple services but they all have the same content. Maybe some are cheap and cheerful 1080p stereo, and some are more expensive full fat 4K HDR Dolby TrueHD. But everything needs to be on it and stay on it.
I think Netflix has actually shown that it can be done a lot cheaper. They've pivoted to producing way more original content than just about anyone else, and it's still profitable. They just aren't paying for big names or marketing for most in house productions.
If anything, Netflix has shown us that movie stars are obsolete. Casting a "Ryan Reynolds type" saves $100M on production, so you can just do it 20 times and if a few of those productions are hits you'll make most money.
Do you have any real numbers to back any of that nice little theory up or is it all just pulled from your ass?
It's almost like you assholes shouldn't have cut up all your content into exclusive services, denying your 'competitors' the right to by rights to stream them and kick you back a % of the profit and you definitely shouldn't have jacked up your rates as your libraries shrunk dramatically, leading to a situation worse than where cable was 20 years.
Oh, and the moment you dared suggest I pay you a premium and still watch ads, you lost my subscription.
The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs.>
I mean, you could put out some quality programming...naaahhhhhhh
Netflix does that, but then they cancel the shows before they can truly succeed.
Indeed. Netflix is the new FOX TV network. The shows that I loved the most on Netflix are gone and replaced with lower budget reality. Such a bummer.
Permanently Deleted
I mean a merged service wouldn't be an issue. If I could pay once for one big thing including Disney+, Paramount+ and HBO Max, I'd actually consider it to have enough content to be worth people signing up, instead of it all being scattered like now.
I'd still not pay for it but I don't pay for shit no matter how much content and convenience the service offers, it's a miracle i haven't started shoplifting.
Those dumb bastards. Did they think we had unlimited money to spend on this shit?
Do you want Grandpa to pirate? Because this is how you get Grandpa to pirate.
"You will pay out the ass for cheap to produce, incoherent, patronizing 'Reality' garbage, because you don't deserve more, and you will be grateful."
-capitalists
Hey, fun fact: capitalists and pirates are natural enemies. ☠️ Yo ho ho.
Capitalists and pirates.
One is a turpitudinous group of greed-mongers that engages in despicable acts, operating outside the bounds of all morality and civility, fueled by the pursuit of stolen wealth and ill-gotten gains, preying on innocents, not above committing the most heinous acts of violence against their very brethren for the slightest sliver of filthy gold.
The other are pirates.
Pirates are at least honest in intention. "Give us yer shit or we take it by the means at our disposal!"
Capitalists lie like breathing when it comes to their intent. It's literally about getting more than the person accross the table. Many of them lie to themselves about this to feel honest. They call their greed and lack of integrity "rational self-interest" 🤣
Pirates were very democratic and shared the loot. Capitalists kept to to themselves and gave little to their employees.
… and a bottle of rum.
Reading between the lines, the days of adfree streaming are coming to an end.
Assuming this continues, expect the big player to start including ads and, the next step will be removing adfree plans entirely.
Get you torrenting and Usenet skills up to par. You’re gonna need them.
Had Hulu with ads a couple months, the worst part about it was that they push the same 3-5 ads, over and over and over.
Been back to sailing the high seas and never been happier. Even the shittiest YTS download looks better then "4k" streaming services. Their product just is horrible.
Curious, what plan did you have? I watch Hulu a ton and never see ads.
Streaming services got so shitty so quickly
Cable TV never left, it just deconstructed itself, then made a Jenga tower out of the pieces
We will end up with Disney / Hulu and Netflix. The rest will die off.
Those are the only two I have right now. Lol And free Prime, until the ads kick in.
I have been getting Prime ads for a while now and they are all ads for Amazon. Sometimes, the same ads would play back to back. If the continuous ads about Amazon weren't bad enough, they were of horrendous production quality as well.
The last thing I want is services merging and combining into a giant cable package.
I mean, it's either they don't merge, and you have 8 different $15/month services each to be able to watch everything, or they do merge and you end up paying $120 for access to everything.
We've come full circle... >_>
Orrrrr they can treat it like music streaming and the IP goes to multiple platforms. I have no idea if that is economically viable.
I hope they continue to lose billions, the listed companies are some of the most greedy, especially Comcast.
Noooo won't someone think of the small studios and trickle down economics 🥺🥺
They've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas.
Their greed forced everyone to the high seas. There's no reason to head back to land anytime soon. Gyarrrrrr!
Yarr harr, fiddle dee dee!!!!
Just go back to selling the broadcast rights to Netflix. You no longer have to pay development costs, infrastructure costs, the staff to maintain it, or advertising. The IP owners still get sizeable revenue, massively reduced cost, and customers go back to having a simple, one-provider way of easily and legally streaming everything they want that is worth watching. It's literally a win-win for everyone. Except it will never happen, because the IP owners want ALL the money; some money just isn't good enough.
Do you think Netflix is a charity?
Can somebody "translate" or rephrase the headline for me? I kinda have troubles sometimes reading headlines in English, they just don't make any sense to me. When comparing German headlines (my native tongue), I guess the reason for that is heavy usage of ellipses(?)
Netflix is the only one still making money, the other streaming companies are going to compensate by selling//merging instead of changing their pricing and business model to adapt to (lack of) demand for their overpriced nonsense.
The irony is that they were actually making money licensing their content, and that consolidation also largely kept consumers happy, but then they got greedy. I really hope some white collars actually bleed for this, but I'm sure these idiots will just blame bad tech like usual.
Headlines in English have a distinctive grammar. It came from the need to fit a lot of content in the small space allotted to a newspaper headline, as I imagine is the case in other languages too. If you're curious,
https://englishlessonsbrighton.co.uk/8-grammar-rules-writing-newspaper-headlines/
Netflix competitors (Disney, Comcast, Paramount,...) lose over $5 bilion, and now some of them are thinking about merging into one huge corporation.
lmao
Sucks to be them! I'm canceling all my services and just bought an additional 2TB NVMe drive for the Orange Pi 5 powered HTPC I am going to build tomorrow. Even got a Logitech keyboard/trackpad combo for it.