this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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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.

“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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[–] Nobody 100 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] echo64 21 points 10 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Futurama did this already. I'm fine with just Hypnotoad.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Non-American here, 100/month for cable means channels have no ads? Is 100/month a normal price?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

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)

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[–] Rakonat 63 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] MrFappy 47 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Netflix does that, but then they cancel the shows before they can truly succeed.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MrFappy 5 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] AllonzeeLV 39 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

"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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AllonzeeLV 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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" 🤣

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[–] YoBuckStopsHere 7 points 10 months ago

Pirates were very democratic and shared the loot. Capitalists kept to to themselves and gave little to their employees.

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[–] hightrix 34 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago

Streaming services got so shitty so quickly

[–] GrammatonCleric 28 points 10 months ago

Cable TV never left, it just deconstructed itself, then made a Jenga tower out of the pieces

[–] YoBuckStopsHere 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

We will end up with Disney / Hulu and Netflix. The rest will die off.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (7 children)

Those are the only two I have right now. Lol And free Prime, until the ads kick in.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The last thing I want is services merging and combining into a giant cable package.

[–] thantik 22 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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... >_>

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You can also choose to pay nothing and sail the high seas to get your favorite shows to watch on whatever device you prefer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Orrrrr they can treat it like music streaming and the IP goes to multiple platforms. I have no idea if that is economically viable.

[–] GlitzyArmrest 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I hope they continue to lose billions, the listed companies are some of the most greedy, especially Comcast.

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[–] newthrowaway20 17 points 10 months ago

They've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas.

[–] rivermonster 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Their greed forced everyone to the high seas. There's no reason to head back to land anytime soon. Gyarrrrrr!

[–] CaptainSpaceman 5 points 10 months ago

Yarr harr, fiddle dee dee!!!!

[–] squirrelwithnut 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] rainerloeten 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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(?)

[–] EmpathicVagrant 28 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] rainerloeten 11 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Ohh, rivals is a noun here, I read it as a verb 😅 Thank you!

[–] hansl 9 points 10 months ago

That’s called a garden path sentence, and I as an ESL love those.

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

[–] AngryCommieKender 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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/

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