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.”
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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.
Futurama did this already. I’m fine with just Hypnotoad.
The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg.
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.
Maybe some are cheap and cheerful 1080p stereo, and some are more expensive full fat 4K HDR Dolby TrueHD.
Well something is wrong then because on the music side you have spotify with the “1080p stereo” of a low bitrate lossy stream + paying less to artists and then you have high res lossless and atmos on the apple side… for the same price.
The move to streaming has bottomed out the music industry too, small artists can no longer survive as musicians as they make next to zero money from it. No cd sales, awful spotify payouts. It’s not a goal anyone should look to.
Non-American here, 100/month for cable means channels have no ads? Is 100/month a normal price?
Oh I wish. Aside from premium services like HBO, “cable TV” in the US is still full of ads. It’s just not “broadcast tv” (the original OTA channels)
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.
Netflix goes a billion into debt every year to pay for their original content
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.
That’s because of all the depressed people sitting in their bed forts and watching Friends for 10 hours a day every day. Why make a good new shows when the old garbage steamrolls them all in watch time.
Hey, their new garbage gets a lot of views too. Look at Wednesday. I wasn’t a fan, even though that should’ve been right up my alley, but I still watched, and so did everyone else apparently, based on the numbers they released anyway.
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.
That’s what HBO used to do. They didn’t have a dozen new shows a week, but what they did have was largely high quality. But with the Warner/Discovery merger I think those days are numbered. They’ll be devoured from within and the quality will take a hit across the board.
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” 🤣
Insert Jack Sparrow’s monologue about honest and dishonest men from the first PotC.
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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
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… >_>
I prefer having the choice. That’s what was bad about cable - you had to buy the bundle for one channel, and they lumped a bunch of other stuff you didn’t want in with it.
Have it been so long that people forgot how shitty this was?
You can also choose to pay nothing and sail the high seas to get your favorite shows to watch on whatever device you prefer.
I agree… But work is demanding and I have my family to think about, time wise. I don’t have the the time to properly deal with it, and I currently like the “subscribe to what you want” model.
Aaargh matey!
I hated cable/sat TV for this packaging but now with over 15 years since I cut the cord I wonder if they had the technology back then to piece meal out the channels to every single subscriber?
I’m not letting them off the hook for purposely packaging 1 good channel with 5 turd channels and then repeating this with the remaining good channels but I do wonder if there were any technical limits to how the channels were sold?
No
Absolutely not, they bundled because they knew no one would subscribe to certain channels individually. That and a combination of licensing deals. They could just have easily sold each channel a la cart.
The tech behind cable was the same RF signals as OTA, just pumped through a network of coax (and the days it’s digital over hybrid fiber coax via DOCSIS). Channels are encrypted at the headend and decrypted by your set top box, which is programmed from the mothership to know which channels you do or don’t subscribe to. They could have easily sold each channel on its own, but the media companies who own the content know no one is going to subscribe to the turd channels, so they bundle them with the most popular ones to ensure they’ll at least be scrolled through, all so that they can sell the space to advertisers.
Orrrrr they can treat it like music streaming and the IP goes to multiple platforms. I have no idea if that is economically viable.
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.
I struggle to fathom the idea of paying for 3 subscription services and thinking that’s ok. That’s not to bash, but I can’t imagine that’s any more convenient than pirating.
Kids. Easier for them to use and find something rather than having to download them.
If it weren’t for kids, yeah, I probably wouldn’t subscribe to any.
Paying is more convenient because you don’t have to set it up and maintain it.
Switching between 3 providers to maybe find your show sounds like a lot of maintaining
It is. I’ve got a Roku TV, which helps - I can search from the main screen, and it shows me which provider has the show.
It’s a matter of priorities. Figuring out a pirating rig, how to work it into my life, how to use it, etc has a high level of inconvenience. For you, it sounds like paying multiple services has a high level of inconvenience. We each go with what is most convenient for ourselves.
Sky TV in the UK displays (nearly) it all in a unified interface, I’m not sure how they have managed to do that and Google still hasn’t on android TV.
also funnily on my Nvidia shield, I used to use the Plex discover feature to list all my streaming service content next to my downloaded media library. But I think I remember the linking into the actual streaming app was broken last time I tried it—maybe a short lived bug, not sure.
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.
Ohh, rivals is a noun here, I read it as a verb 😅 Thank you!
That’s called a garden path sentence, and I as an ESL love those.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Totally understandable. I’m fluent in English and had to read the headline a couple of times to realize that distinction to get it to make sense.
Capitalization of “rivals” could have helped with clarity, but I don’t know how to tell the headline writer that
The titler could have used an apostrophe to show that the rivals belong to Netflix
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.
