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Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

Beyond their streaming losses, the traditional media groups are facing a weak advertising market, declining television revenues and higher production costs following the Hollywood strikes.

But as the traditional media owners struggle, Netflix, the tech group that pioneered the streaming model over a decade ago, has emerged as the winner of the battle to reshape video distribution.

“For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars,” analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November.

Earnings for its most recent quarter soared past Wall Street’s expectations as it added 9 million new subscribers—the strongest rise since early 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns led to a jump.

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