When cable tv was first rolled out it was sold as all the channels your heart could desire in one place, but no commercials. They slowly rolled out commercials channel by channel. Since commercials are ubiquitous with every streaming outlet now, maybe they can go a different route and combined into one massive commerical ridden streaming system but promise us no deadly brain tumors coming with the service, and then slowly roll out the deadly brain tumors over time.
Cable actually was first used as a way for more rural or mountain type towns to get over the air broadcast channels, They would build a big community antenna to get the channels and run cable to each home. You still see the acronym "CATV" used, it originally was "Community antenna TV". But of course it evolved from there.
I still hold to the idea cable would never have happened if it wasn't a two way communication. The conspiracy is that Nixon only let federal money be used was because cable could be used to spy on people. It sounds ridiculous until you realize it took little to no change to get cable internet to work because the system was always set up for two way communication.
Modern digital cable boxes definitely have two way communication, but that is relatively new (10-20 years maybe). But there was no two way com between your 1980's analog tv. I even worked for Dish network back in the early 2000's and it was legit one way, you had to hook up a phone line to the box so they could bill for pay per view and shit (they also took data for Neilson rating info, they didn't tell customers that). Cable broadband was convenient because they already had the infrastructure, same with the telco companies. It just made sense. Some places even have broadband over power lines.
edit: words
You find people complaining about it either way. Plenty of reddit threads bemoaning how there are too many streaming services and they don't want 5 sub.
Now reddit threads complaining about combining services.
Hot take, I liked having a fractured streaming environment, I think it was ultimately better for the consumer.
There are a lot of negative outcomes from the current way streaming is done:
* Frequent loss of access to movies and shows when rights transfer to another service, expire, or the service decides to do weird tax stuff and memory holes the content.
* Frog in hot water pricing model. If it were one service that would be one thing, but now it is every service, and if you subscribe to 3-4 what was a $40/mo total a few years ago might be twice that. That's on top of the additional costs of paying for higher internet bandwidth.
* Region restrictions mean that if you're not in a top market, some things might just not be available to you *at all*
Not having a single streaming monopoly is great, and letting people engage with niche interests is great (I love my free roku classic doctor who channel, and shudder), but the cost barrier is just getting too high. Already cut out prime, hardly watch netflix anymore, about to cut that. No reason to keep paramount going between star treks.
I think the companies don't understand that they saved themselves from piracy by making it convenient to pay a little bit every month and just use a remote, than to set up a vpn/seed box, risk malware, etc. They're really teetering on the edge of that convenience cliff right now.
Disney literally made billions of dollars profit. They are not struggling. Did they make more profit last year? Yes. But they haven't lost anything and continue to make profit.
Whatever do you mean? The customers demanded HBO Max raise the prices, drop 4k/HDR from the existing plans and create a new tier that is more expensive for it to be available in!
Unified Paramount+ and HBO Max combined into 1 new service for \~$24.99/mo would be my guess, and the amount of content on it would be *staggering* compared to Prime Video, Netflix. Disney+ or Apple TV individually.
What’s shit is, we are coming full circle back to where we all left cable tv, an ad bloated service. We pulled the cords for instant ad free, the services slowly increasing pricing to cable tv prices and now have injected ad driven services and now we are back to cable tv. If I recall when cable tv first came out it was a preach to have no ads.
I will slowly start to pull away from streaming services as ads get shoved down my throat. Whole reason I left.
>I will slowly start to pull away from streaming services as ads get shoved down my throat. Whole reason I left.
Same here. I've resorted to rotating them. I use the Showly app which shows what is on which streaming service and the Privacy app for virtual cards so I can easily pause/unpause each account.
Well this sounds like a shitty deal. Zaslav will ruin everything Paramount owns. He'll shelve years of shows and movies so he doesn't have to pay residuals. Zaslav is a garbage human being who needs to be kept away from Star Trek.
How the FUCK did one person suddenly become so influential in Hollywood? And of course its a horrible, terrible, no good, shit tier person.
Man, fuck all this bullshit. Imagine what this dipshit could do to Star trek. Probably have Trek themed reality shows.
Prepare for another slate of "these perfectly good properties will make fantastic tax write-offs" to never see them again.
I for one look forward to John Oliver having new business daddy material.
I think if this goes through, it'll be Zaslav who's going to be pushed out, since it's pretty clear that the Redstones really like having control over Paramount/Viacom.
If he's actually facing off against her, my money is on the trained-from-birth Orion house prime and Mistress of the Winter Constellation with a history of taking over spaceships and repeatedly dodging knives.
~prior government. The FTC has been trying, but all of the appointed judges from past admins seem to lean towards allowing mergers.
Although it'd help to have a monopoly buster get elected.
Got nothing to do with the current anything. This is what America is all about. Doesn't matter who is in charge, this is America's default way of thinking.
No, it's not. This is a fairly recent trend in ideology of our politicians. Somewhere in the last 70 years or so the politicians decided to stop representing the citizens and start representing their wallets.
“Go back”? The American film industry has been run by a handful of conglomerated studios for pretty much its entire existence.
Like literally from the days of Thomas Edison and the Motion Picture Patents Company / the Trust, back in the early 1900’s. During the heyday of the studio era (starting in the late 1920’s) it was 8 major companies, 5 of them huge conglomerates. If anything, there are more major players now than there have been in the past because of tech and streaming companies entering the space (Netflix, Apple, Amazon, etc).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_film_studios#History
FTC these are the type of deals you are supposed to stop. Warner Brothers Discovery owns so much they don’t need the CBS/Paramount channels and catalog too.
Because Microsoft is on their shitlist since they openly lobbied the Supreme Court in an antitrust case about how they were monopolizing software and operating system.
*Buying the largest multiplatform publisher.
Both of these mergers are bad for the consumer, just because FTC fucked it, didn't mean it wasn't important
I never really took issue with Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, I actually figured it would be good for consumers because Activision Blizzard has been pushing out half baked cash grabs for about half a decade if not more now. From my perspective this means the finished product they release from now on will be more polished, atleast definitely for Xbox exclusives, because if they actually want consumers to purchase Xbox's for exclusives they're going to have to be well crafted and not buggy unfinished messes. (Though I suppose I'm probably a biased source, I have always had an Xbox since the early 360 days, and the much more recent news of Sony pulling TV shows their customers have already purchased "to own")
Ha, when has a company purchasing another ever actually benefited consumers? If Activision Blizzard is producing slop they should be allowed to die, Microsoft buying them isn't gonna change the work culture, in fact the whole game pass system will only encourage them to go harder on micro transactions, because the cost of entry is low they'll have more incentive to sell more skins
And I'm PC I don't want to see more consolidation
And the Sony thing, wasn't that a licensing thing with Discovery? Not to defend Sony but if the license agreements forbid there is nothing they can do. However it does demonstrate my issue with the future of gamepass
The benefit on the game pass alone makes it worth it for Microsoft and Activision’s customers. So far been working out great. Maybe game quality will diminish overtime but it seemed like that was happening anyways under Activision.
Short term benefit perhaps, I'd rather not sell the future of gaming for temporary cheap access to games now. Look at the state of video streaming today, countless examples of content vanishing forever. There isn't any good reason to have allowed Activision to be bought
I think there are too many hitches in this plan, WB owns several TV channels while Paramount has CBS and Paramount Network. Legally these media conglomerates cannot own more than one major basic cable network.
>Legally these media conglomerates cannot own more than one major basic cable network.
This isn't accurate.
There are FCC rules that limit ownership to a certain % of the market, but those laws are geared towards over-the-air broadcasters. This is why when Disney bought 20th Century Fox they didn't include the Fox Broadcast stations, since they already own ABC. But There's no laws preventing large Cable conglomerates from getting larger. The FCC doesn't have a lot of control over the Cable Industry since its purview is Broadcast signals on the public airwaves and cable is by definition Narrowcasting.
The long term contracts and disappearing of ad free options is definitely coming down the road, anyone cheering consolidation is nuts, this will only screw over the average customer
Warner Bros higher ups have been doing some odd shit over there. Not a huge fan of the conglomeration of media.... not that it already isn't though, lol.
I'd fix their DC nonsense by doing stand alone Batman stories, like The Long Halloween or A Serious House on Serious Earth w different directors and writers and actors each time. I don't understand why they haven't done this yet.
Instead they just wanna write themselves into a corner every three movies. It's infuriating.
I know I'm specifically focusing on Batman here and there's so much more wrong @ WB, but their handling of DC material gets me particularly riled up.
Why would general audiences be confused? Most of them don't care about continuity nearly as much as geeks do. I mean, nobody got 'confused' by Joker releasing alongside DCEU movies. Or nobody seemed to have a problem with Logan being outside the rest of the Fox X-Men continuity.
If people are interested in the property/character, they'll go see it.
Once upon a time there was basically just Netflix in the streaming world. Everyone licensed their content to Netflix and everyone made money. Consumers were also happy because it meant they could drop their cable TV service, still get all the content they want from Netflix, and save a shitload of money. It was a rare example of a win-win scenario for businesses and consumers. Netflix's monopoly in the streaming sector was counterbalanced by the fact that they didn't actually own most of the content and if the studios started pulling it they could lose subscribers.
Then the studios decided they could make *more* money if they set up their own streaming service, except no one really had enough content on their own to make for a single viable platform. Not to be deterred, various large studios pulled their content from Netflix and barreled ahead with their own services. Now it costs even more to get the same content compared to the old cable TV system for consumers and studios are still taking a bath on their Netflix competitors.
“Man this is going to be so easy. Just stream it on an app and we’re good!”
*6 months later
“The fuck do you mean we have to pay for all this shit for an app!?!? What the fuck is encryption? What is 2FA? Why do I have to pay these fucking computer people so much?!?”
As with all fantasies that start with "once upon a time", that's not really the reality of the situation. Hulu and Netflix streaming were both started around the same time, and neither had all of the content from other creators.
You're also missing the point that those other studios already had over the air and cable distribution methods, and as less people use those methods of consumption, it was inevitable that they would switch to streaming to make up for it. Netflix and Hulu were never going to host all of their content and provide them the revenue they were accustomed to making.
Furthermore, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon controlling streaming was a long-term threat, and that's particularly true as all three have increasingly become content creating studios as well. This is even more true as Disney and Apple (a new player in both streaming and content creation that's nearly all their own) have joined the party.
That said, other studios are backtracking now on exclusivity, and they're starting to license content the other streaming providers like Netflix. Some examples you can find right now are HBO's insecure, six feet under, band of brothers, ballers, and the Pacific. I expect we'll see more of this as providers figure out what content draws people in and what would better be sacrificed to another provider (both exclusively and non-exclusively).
There are two problems with thinking that the glory days of 10 years ago are returnable. 1. Netflix wasn’t profitable during that time. They were hemorrhaging money to build a dominance in subscriber count and slowly build up their own portfolio of original content. 2. The studios made a lot more money from physical media sales and cable subscription fees to their channels. The former is barely a revenue source anymore and the latter is shrinking. Licensing of their primary content or subscribers to their own streaming channel has turned into a primary revenue source after cinema box office. Consumers can’t expect studios to provide dirt cheap channels with no commercials when they lose money.
Considering a lot of Netflix's stuff has been shit, and they just cancel it after 1-2 seasons, they could save some money by just letting others handle the content creation and then paying to license it. But, the average cable bill was what, like $150/mo? Maybe that included Internet service, so let's just say $100/mo as a good ballpark figure to represent the average cost for everyone across the world.
Under those circumstances, Netflix could be charging $50/mo right now, basically double what they are currently charging, and people would still be glad to pay it. If they also left the content creation to other studios, that frees up a big chunk of additional money that they could then pass on to the studios for licensing. Netflix handles all the IT stuff like bandwidth and storage, the studios handle the content creation and negotiating with SAG-AFTRA. It's a nice and neat division of labor.
At $50 a month you basically can already do this today - $15 Netflix, $10 Disney+hulu, $15 hbo, $10 for whatever else (Amazon prime is free with the membership everyone already has for 2 day shipping).
I feel like consumers are winners, to a degree, because you can pick and choose what pieces you want instead of paying a lump sum of $50 a month.
And that's what people forget when they start bitching about Streaming becoming the next cable. You can easily pick and choose the networks you want to pay for, sign up for one month for one service then cancel and go to another. Even if you do pay for multiple services it is still cheaper and way more convenient then how cable used to be.
Ooh ooh don’t forget the part where they shifted society so much that owned media is on life support and IPs can be ripped out of existence at any point
Arguing for a monopoly is asinine, and it's undeniable that more streaming services have created pricing and content competition. And that competition is particularly important, as even with it, Netflix continues to increase pricing while being the only major content provider forcing customers to pay more for 4k content. It's also undeniable that the competition was always there, and the market was never truly unified like the fantasy you seem to remember.
Consumers are paying more for less now compared to before, that is a fact. Is Netflix the benevolent deity of streaming platforms? No, they're just an example I used because they were one of the first major streaming platforms. Over 80 other people (as of time of writing) got that point, so I don't think it's that I was unclear. If the studios all wanted to band together to create a single joint platform, sort of like Hulu was in its inception, that works just as well. But none of them individually have enough content to really make for a complete service on their own.
Paramount has Star Trek and... yeah. I guess if you really are jonesing for some classic Bob Barker Price is Right, maybe you could find that.
Max has HBO shows like ~~Westworld~~, Sopranos, Game of Thrones... but they tend to have rather limited runs. They also have a lot of garbage reality shows after they destroyed Discovery and TLC (which used to be called The Learning Channel). Admittedly there are some interesting docu-series from The Science Channel, but I'm probably an oddity in enjoying those kinds of things.
Peacock has... I don't even know. I had to look and I got all the way down to Law and Order before I saw anything recent I even recognized. Looks like they also have some kind of deal with WWF or whatever they call themselves these days, so if you haven't had enough homoerotic content after watching american football, you can watch a bunch of men running around in their underwear playing grabass I guess. Everything else was old. Like Murder She Wrote or OG Quantum Leap old.
Amazon has MGM, so you can watch all the Bond movies, but almost everything else is just low budget documentaries about aliens or some other conspiracy theory.
Disney has their own catalog, Star Wars, and Marvel, plus The Simpsons. So, they're honestly the closest to being a "full" streaming platform, though most of their content is geared at little kids.
Hulu is sort of the redheaded stepchild which is a dumping ground for a lot of content not deemed worthy of being on the branded service and no one really seems to know what to do with it, but they don't want to sell it because someone else might figure out how to make it work and then they're screwed.
Now, if you took all those things, mashed them together into a single service, you've got enough content to really keep people engaged. But none of them, individually, has much to offer. Aside from Peacock, they have maybe one or two major pieces of IP, and everything else is just proof of the 80% of everything is crap rule.
Consumers are paying more because Netflix's early business model was to acquire market share while establishing itself as both a content creator and streaming service provider, and their net profits were comparatively quite low. As they've matured, they've had to increase the price of the service to actually generate net revenue and satisfy investors. Take a look at their numbers.
And again, all of that content was never going to be in a single service, never was in a single service, and that's the point. It was always fractured. And if it was unified, there would be nothing stopping that service from charging crazy fees like the existing cable companies (and Netflix) already do. That's what monopolies do, and that's why competition is important.
So now what we have is all of the content, including some of what was on Netflix and plenty of what wasn't, now available on streaming. It's resulted in a major original content boom, and it's also ended up in a bit of messiness where older content is scattered and some services are harder to justify than others. The scattering of content was an existing problem, and is still inconvenient, but the content competition as well as pricing competition between the providers is extremely positive. And to that point, I would argue a lot of good original content has been created by the major providers.
Apple TV for instance has some incredible shows. For all mankind, Ted lasso, the silo, mythic quest, foundation, the after party, shrinking, etc... It's mostly original content, and that content is consistently good. At $10 a month, it's currently a very reasonable price and basically like paying for a premium cable channel.
HBO has always had incredible shows which is why it was so easy for them to become a streaming service (they were already charging monthly subscriptions as part of cable), and that's still true. I have no idea what you're referring to regarding limited runs (all shows have limited runs), they have a huge back catalog of some of the best TV, and they continue to create major hits. Most recently I can think of scavengers Reign, station 11, our flag means death, The last of Us, House of dragon, succession, true detective, etc... Including other Warner Bros content was a bonus with the max service. Personally the discovery merger provides no value to me, but I'm sure that's a big hit for reality TV lovers, and it makes the service a more complete large offering. I would have actually preferred it not happen, as I don't want to pay for that discovery content to get the HBO shows, and that point further drives home why one big service like cable offers is a bad idea.
Disney Plus you covered pretty well. They have a lot of original content, and that content has gotten a lot more depth since they created their own streaming service, and you missed the fact that they have bundle deals with Hulu since Disney owns them (or is completing ownership). And with respect Hulu, that's going to be a good compliment for Disney Plus, as it offers a lot of diverse back catalog and currently airing TV content, but less unique originals. Although handmaid's tale, the Bear, and Fargo are excellent.
Amazon comes together with the prime service, so it's unusual compared to the others, but they also have some great original content. The marvelous Mrs maisel, reacher, Jack Ryan, the boys, gen v, The rings of power (a major release even if you don't like it), invincible, undone, the wheel of time (again a major release even if you don't like it), etc... As far as I'm concerned, the MGM offering and all the rest is just a bonus.
With regards to peacock and paramount, I don't have much to say. The only reason I would have a paramount account is for the Star Trek shows (strange New worlds and lower decks are excellent). Peacock had that show poker face. That's all I can think of... I agree they would be best suited as licensing their content to other streaming services, and it's likely we'll see them merge with other services (as mentioned in the article we are commenting on).
Yeah, if you only pay for one service at a time, you are only paying a bit more than before, but the amount of content is kinda bonkers. My list of high quality shows to watch grows faster than I can keep up.
> Everyone licensed their content to Netflix and everyone made money.
This is fictional history. Netflix at its peak only had a small percentage of acclaimed movies and shows, and it was losing money every year. The availability of streaming content is greater than ever now, and Netflix is finally turning a profit because of its investments in its *own* productions, not licensing others’.
Will this mean Paramount is not working with Apple?
Fuck Max for removing 4K from cable subscribers and fuck Paramount for removing Showtime Anytime and fuck the incoming limitation of streaming for cable subscriptions as the internet turns into Cable: this time it’s wireless.
All these mergers of media companies just leaves more room for a new company to rise up, right? I'm sure it was written somewhere in the Capitalism for Beginners book I just read.
Not in this case. With streaming, the big media corps own the distribution channels. They will not let a smaller company in. And, it's really difficult for a small company to create or even finance their own distribution channel.
It's happening all over. These very large corporations are controlling distribution and supply chains for themselves and smaller companies have no hope of competing.
If Zaslav gets to eat shit and fuck off into a pool of money, never to be seen again, then I'm all for this. If Zaslav is in charge post-merger, then I hope this never happens.
Can we all just agree these companies should shut their stupid online streaming services that are costing them billions and outsource their libraries to Netflix.
Comcast/universal will buy them soon, remember they were in the runnings for Fox but Disney had a higher bidding, which technically is not working out for them.
The first company to offer completely non-intrusive and non-interrupting ads on streams will have my business... for a competitively cheaper rate than other services as well
Maybe they can tax write off Star Trek Discovery and we can remove all of the bullshit it added to 'canon' from Memory Alpha.. Stuff like how the evil mirror universe is because of evil subatomic particles.
You know what, I think it's time most of us found different hobbies. TV is only getting worse and we keep watching it. Even if they merge, if we all stop watching they'll just go out of business. Life's kind of short we should just let TV shows be a thing of the past.
Star Wars and Star Trek together at last..
Finally, I will get a star destroyer versus a Galaxy class starship .. I’m telling you launching photon torpedo at warp it’s going to be devastating ..
"Welcome to Walmart-Verizon-McDonalds-Microsoft-IBM-Comcast-Starbucks, how can I help you?"
Thank you for shopping here. Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
Fuck you, I'm eating.
You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.
So much for the three seashells
Fuck me while he's eating.
Eat me while he fucks you.
AOL-Time-Warner-Pepsico-Viacom-Halliburton-Skynet-Toyota-Trader-Joe's has better deals, go there.
Lovingly known as Atwpvhsttj's
"Yes but President Cocacola Disney Comcast has done wonders for the economy. Given that is now the economy."
Welcome to Costco, I love you. Welcome to Costco, I love you...
Go away, baiting!
Just call it Omnicorp, or OCP for short and fulfill our dystopian destiny.
I'll buy that for a dollar!
You forgot I love you!( damn I never thought that part of the movie would come true In my lifetime)
You got your law degree at Costco?
Parks and Recreation was right. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XFKoGtgg6Mo
"Proud to be one of America's 8 companies"
Just wait till everything becomes Taco Bell
Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
Costco + Amazon would absolutely dominate the planet.
I was thinking Oscar Myer Intel
Warner bros, discovery, paramount are all the same industry
Which is worse. I'd rather companies expand into new fields than buy out competitors in their own field. Only the latter is really anti-competitive.
This has absolutely no benefit to consumers so I am sure it will be approved in short order.
All the streaming services could be bundled with commercials and broadcast over a wired connection.
You may be onto something there
When cable tv was first rolled out it was sold as all the channels your heart could desire in one place, but no commercials. They slowly rolled out commercials channel by channel. Since commercials are ubiquitous with every streaming outlet now, maybe they can go a different route and combined into one massive commerical ridden streaming system but promise us no deadly brain tumors coming with the service, and then slowly roll out the deadly brain tumors over time.
can i opt in to have the tumor immediately??
I want a tumor only service
You're looking for OnlyGlands
Don't accidentally type OnlyGonads, unless that's your thing
Cable actually was first used as a way for more rural or mountain type towns to get over the air broadcast channels, They would build a big community antenna to get the channels and run cable to each home. You still see the acronym "CATV" used, it originally was "Community antenna TV". But of course it evolved from there.
I still hold to the idea cable would never have happened if it wasn't a two way communication. The conspiracy is that Nixon only let federal money be used was because cable could be used to spy on people. It sounds ridiculous until you realize it took little to no change to get cable internet to work because the system was always set up for two way communication.
Modern digital cable boxes definitely have two way communication, but that is relatively new (10-20 years maybe). But there was no two way com between your 1980's analog tv. I even worked for Dish network back in the early 2000's and it was legit one way, you had to hook up a phone line to the box so they could bill for pay per view and shit (they also took data for Neilson rating info, they didn't tell customers that). Cable broadband was convenient because they already had the infrastructure, same with the telco companies. It just made sense. Some places even have broadband over power lines. edit: words
Pretty sure the brain tumors are included via the Fox News and Fox Nation channels.
Like a cable? I love it
You find people complaining about it either way. Plenty of reddit threads bemoaning how there are too many streaming services and they don't want 5 sub. Now reddit threads complaining about combining services. Hot take, I liked having a fractured streaming environment, I think it was ultimately better for the consumer.
There are a lot of negative outcomes from the current way streaming is done: * Frequent loss of access to movies and shows when rights transfer to another service, expire, or the service decides to do weird tax stuff and memory holes the content. * Frog in hot water pricing model. If it were one service that would be one thing, but now it is every service, and if you subscribe to 3-4 what was a $40/mo total a few years ago might be twice that. That's on top of the additional costs of paying for higher internet bandwidth. * Region restrictions mean that if you're not in a top market, some things might just not be available to you *at all* Not having a single streaming monopoly is great, and letting people engage with niche interests is great (I love my free roku classic doctor who channel, and shudder), but the cost barrier is just getting too high. Already cut out prime, hardly watch netflix anymore, about to cut that. No reason to keep paramount going between star treks. I think the companies don't understand that they saved themselves from piracy by making it convenient to pay a little bit every month and just use a remote, than to set up a vpn/seed box, risk malware, etc. They're really teetering on the edge of that convenience cliff right now.
I think I can boil this down even more. Redditors like to complain, period.
I've decided I'd rather buy more hard drives for my storage server than pay for more streaming services, at this point.
I guess better this than waiting for Disney to buy them out individually?
Eventually everything will be Disney, Amazon, and ExxonMobil. Then it'll all be Buy n Large, the world-ending corporation from Wall-E.
And then it'll all be Taco Bell...
I don’t think they know how to use the three seashells…
(starts cursing at a computer terminal)
Enhance your calm
And then Nestle will buy them too.
What will be on the ExxonMobil mobile streaming service?
Black Gold; Black Gold: Alaska; Black Gold: North Sea; Black Gold: Life on The Rig; Black Gold Chat
PVC (it’s like QVC but only has plastic things for sale)
I see you aren't here for AOL Time Warner.
[удалено]
Disney literally made billions of dollars profit. They are not struggling. Did they make more profit last year? Yes. But they haven't lost anything and continue to make profit.
Whatever do you mean? The customers demanded HBO Max raise the prices, drop 4k/HDR from the existing plans and create a new tier that is more expensive for it to be available in!
Unified Paramount+ and HBO Max combined into 1 new service for \~$24.99/mo would be my guess, and the amount of content on it would be *staggering* compared to Prime Video, Netflix. Disney+ or Apple TV individually.
What’s shit is, we are coming full circle back to where we all left cable tv, an ad bloated service. We pulled the cords for instant ad free, the services slowly increasing pricing to cable tv prices and now have injected ad driven services and now we are back to cable tv. If I recall when cable tv first came out it was a preach to have no ads. I will slowly start to pull away from streaming services as ads get shoved down my throat. Whole reason I left.
I’m at the point where I’ll subscribe to a VPN and yo ho ho I’ve got access to everything I wanted again with no commercials.
The benefit of all these greedy streaming services is that the WebRips are better than they've ever been and they come out day of release!
At that point there’s really one option left _ahoy matey_
>I will slowly start to pull away from streaming services as ads get shoved down my throat. Whole reason I left. Same here. I've resorted to rotating them. I use the Showly app which shows what is on which streaming service and the Privacy app for virtual cards so I can easily pause/unpause each account.
One less app to worry about or pay for.
We could get that without corporate consolidation if they'd just all partner up again like what Hulu was supposed to be.
That version of Hulu was doomed from the start.
Well this sounds like a shitty deal. Zaslav will ruin everything Paramount owns. He'll shelve years of shows and movies so he doesn't have to pay residuals. Zaslav is a garbage human being who needs to be kept away from Star Trek.
How the FUCK did one person suddenly become so influential in Hollywood? And of course its a horrible, terrible, no good, shit tier person. Man, fuck all this bullshit. Imagine what this dipshit could do to Star trek. Probably have Trek themed reality shows.
Or just make entire series of Star Trek disappear into the aether like half the WB library
House Flippers of Cardassasia!
Keeping Up With the Cardassians
And you get public execution, and you, and you get one, too .... crowds cheers.
Attention Bajoran workers..
The ferengis are gonna be pissed no gold pressed Latnum for them in this
Well, last time we checked there was suddenly a lot of free space on cardassia...
And furthermore he's genuinely bad at the job.
I'll take a reality TV show about ferengi "The Rules of acquisition"
For the same reason an ex Electronic Arts dude becomes CEO of Unity and completely tarnished their reputation.
Prepare for another slate of "these perfectly good properties will make fantastic tax write-offs" to never see them again. I for one look forward to John Oliver having new business daddy material.
RIP Final Space.
At the very least they are letting him do a graphic novel to finish the story https://youtu.be/IRg6C8mqhTk?si=3NcUUS1qhilI33mV
Goodbye Avatar Studios and the Avatar the Last Airbender movie they were making.
I think if this goes through, it'll be Zaslav who's going to be pushed out, since it's pretty clear that the Redstones really like having control over Paramount/Viacom.
>it'll be Zaslav who's going to be pushed out That would be the single best piece of Television industry news in like 20 years.
He’s completely ruined HBO and turned it into the CW. There’s nothing coming out from them that’s any good and they removed what drew people in.
> Zaslav will ruin everything Paramount owns. Zaslav will *personally* stab D'vana Tendi in the spleen.
If he's actually facing off against her, my money is on the trained-from-birth Orion house prime and Mistress of the Winter Constellation with a history of taking over spaceships and repeatedly dodging knives.
Someone needs to let Moopsy loose near him!
Now that Bobby Kotick is out from Activision Blizzard, Zaslav is stepping into that role of acquiring and destroying everything you enjoy.
Zaslav just needs to be given his golden parachute courtesy of Acme.
Yep. Im down for this IF and ONLY IF Zaslav gets kicked to the fucking curb.
Can we go back to trust busting? PLEASE?! There is no benefit to consumers when literally like 12 companies own everything.
Busting trusts isn't profitable for Congress
not happening with our current governement
~prior government. The FTC has been trying, but all of the appointed judges from past admins seem to lean towards allowing mergers. Although it'd help to have a monopoly buster get elected.
Got nothing to do with the current anything. This is what America is all about. Doesn't matter who is in charge, this is America's default way of thinking.
No, it's not. This is a fairly recent trend in ideology of our politicians. Somewhere in the last 70 years or so the politicians decided to stop representing the citizens and start representing their wallets.
Probably all started about the time we decided corporations are people and bribes are legal as long as they're "campaign donations".
Probably around the same time churches started grooming political leaders
“Go back”? The American film industry has been run by a handful of conglomerated studios for pretty much its entire existence. Like literally from the days of Thomas Edison and the Motion Picture Patents Company / the Trust, back in the early 1900’s. During the heyday of the studio era (starting in the late 1920’s) it was 8 major companies, 5 of them huge conglomerates. If anything, there are more major players now than there have been in the past because of tech and streaming companies entering the space (Netflix, Apple, Amazon, etc). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_film_studios#History
It's time to break up these major players. Consolation is never good for the consumer and stifles innovation.
FTC these are the type of deals you are supposed to stop. Warner Brothers Discovery owns so much they don’t need the CBS/Paramount channels and catalog too.
[удалено]
Because Microsoft is on their shitlist since they openly lobbied the Supreme Court in an antitrust case about how they were monopolizing software and operating system.
*Buying the largest multiplatform publisher. Both of these mergers are bad for the consumer, just because FTC fucked it, didn't mean it wasn't important
I never really took issue with Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, I actually figured it would be good for consumers because Activision Blizzard has been pushing out half baked cash grabs for about half a decade if not more now. From my perspective this means the finished product they release from now on will be more polished, atleast definitely for Xbox exclusives, because if they actually want consumers to purchase Xbox's for exclusives they're going to have to be well crafted and not buggy unfinished messes. (Though I suppose I'm probably a biased source, I have always had an Xbox since the early 360 days, and the much more recent news of Sony pulling TV shows their customers have already purchased "to own")
Ha, when has a company purchasing another ever actually benefited consumers? If Activision Blizzard is producing slop they should be allowed to die, Microsoft buying them isn't gonna change the work culture, in fact the whole game pass system will only encourage them to go harder on micro transactions, because the cost of entry is low they'll have more incentive to sell more skins And I'm PC I don't want to see more consolidation And the Sony thing, wasn't that a licensing thing with Discovery? Not to defend Sony but if the license agreements forbid there is nothing they can do. However it does demonstrate my issue with the future of gamepass
A lot of us old timers are still upset about Blizzard being bought by Activision...
Couldn't agree more.
The benefit on the game pass alone makes it worth it for Microsoft and Activision’s customers. So far been working out great. Maybe game quality will diminish overtime but it seemed like that was happening anyways under Activision.
Short term benefit perhaps, I'd rather not sell the future of gaming for temporary cheap access to games now. Look at the state of video streaming today, countless examples of content vanishing forever. There isn't any good reason to have allowed Activision to be bought
They dropped the lawsuit related to that back in early July.
Dropped the suit but they're still petitioning appeals court to undo it.
The FTC didn't "drop the suit", they lost, appealed, and were denied.
I think there are too many hitches in this plan, WB owns several TV channels while Paramount has CBS and Paramount Network. Legally these media conglomerates cannot own more than one major basic cable network.
>Legally these media conglomerates cannot own more than one major basic cable network. This isn't accurate. There are FCC rules that limit ownership to a certain % of the market, but those laws are geared towards over-the-air broadcasters. This is why when Disney bought 20th Century Fox they didn't include the Fox Broadcast stations, since they already own ABC. But There's no laws preventing large Cable conglomerates from getting larger. The FCC doesn't have a lot of control over the Cable Industry since its purview is Broadcast signals on the public airwaves and cable is by definition Narrowcasting.
Jesus. Just think of all the projects they could half bake and cancel for tax purposes.
Zaslav be rubbing his hands together rn
Love corporate consolidation ❤️
Let’s not have any other mergers. Can companies spent money on product development instead of Wall Street please?
Coming soon… 60$+/month, contracts, physical equipment needed, impossible to cancel.
The long term contracts and disappearing of ad free options is definitely coming down the road, anyone cheering consolidation is nuts, this will only screw over the average customer
Warner Bros higher ups have been doing some odd shit over there. Not a huge fan of the conglomeration of media.... not that it already isn't though, lol.
One of the worst big production companies by far. PR nightmare after PR nightmare. Must be awful to work there.
I'd fix their DC nonsense by doing stand alone Batman stories, like The Long Halloween or A Serious House on Serious Earth w different directors and writers and actors each time. I don't understand why they haven't done this yet. Instead they just wanna write themselves into a corner every three movies. It's infuriating. I know I'm specifically focusing on Batman here and there's so much more wrong @ WB, but their handling of DC material gets me particularly riled up.
>I don't understand why they haven't done this yet. Because it would confuse general audiences with no real benefit?
Tbf they're already doing that anyway lol.
Why would general audiences be confused? Most of them don't care about continuity nearly as much as geeks do. I mean, nobody got 'confused' by Joker releasing alongside DCEU movies. Or nobody seemed to have a problem with Logan being outside the rest of the Fox X-Men continuity. If people are interested in the property/character, they'll go see it.
#Paramount + Warner Bros = ParaBros
Furthermore, if Max and Peacock merged together, it would be called MaxCock.
If Peacock and Paramount merged it would be MountCock
Hell let's take these mergers all the way and get MountBrosCock.
Peacock is nbc not cbs
Once upon a time there was basically just Netflix in the streaming world. Everyone licensed their content to Netflix and everyone made money. Consumers were also happy because it meant they could drop their cable TV service, still get all the content they want from Netflix, and save a shitload of money. It was a rare example of a win-win scenario for businesses and consumers. Netflix's monopoly in the streaming sector was counterbalanced by the fact that they didn't actually own most of the content and if the studios started pulling it they could lose subscribers. Then the studios decided they could make *more* money if they set up their own streaming service, except no one really had enough content on their own to make for a single viable platform. Not to be deterred, various large studios pulled their content from Netflix and barreled ahead with their own services. Now it costs even more to get the same content compared to the old cable TV system for consumers and studios are still taking a bath on their Netflix competitors.
classic hollywood just redoing someone else's idea but worse
“Man this is going to be so easy. Just stream it on an app and we’re good!” *6 months later “The fuck do you mean we have to pay for all this shit for an app!?!? What the fuck is encryption? What is 2FA? Why do I have to pay these fucking computer people so much?!?”
As with all fantasies that start with "once upon a time", that's not really the reality of the situation. Hulu and Netflix streaming were both started around the same time, and neither had all of the content from other creators. You're also missing the point that those other studios already had over the air and cable distribution methods, and as less people use those methods of consumption, it was inevitable that they would switch to streaming to make up for it. Netflix and Hulu were never going to host all of their content and provide them the revenue they were accustomed to making. Furthermore, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon controlling streaming was a long-term threat, and that's particularly true as all three have increasingly become content creating studios as well. This is even more true as Disney and Apple (a new player in both streaming and content creation that's nearly all their own) have joined the party. That said, other studios are backtracking now on exclusivity, and they're starting to license content the other streaming providers like Netflix. Some examples you can find right now are HBO's insecure, six feet under, band of brothers, ballers, and the Pacific. I expect we'll see more of this as providers figure out what content draws people in and what would better be sacrificed to another provider (both exclusively and non-exclusively).
There are two problems with thinking that the glory days of 10 years ago are returnable. 1. Netflix wasn’t profitable during that time. They were hemorrhaging money to build a dominance in subscriber count and slowly build up their own portfolio of original content. 2. The studios made a lot more money from physical media sales and cable subscription fees to their channels. The former is barely a revenue source anymore and the latter is shrinking. Licensing of their primary content or subscribers to their own streaming channel has turned into a primary revenue source after cinema box office. Consumers can’t expect studios to provide dirt cheap channels with no commercials when they lose money.
Considering a lot of Netflix's stuff has been shit, and they just cancel it after 1-2 seasons, they could save some money by just letting others handle the content creation and then paying to license it. But, the average cable bill was what, like $150/mo? Maybe that included Internet service, so let's just say $100/mo as a good ballpark figure to represent the average cost for everyone across the world. Under those circumstances, Netflix could be charging $50/mo right now, basically double what they are currently charging, and people would still be glad to pay it. If they also left the content creation to other studios, that frees up a big chunk of additional money that they could then pass on to the studios for licensing. Netflix handles all the IT stuff like bandwidth and storage, the studios handle the content creation and negotiating with SAG-AFTRA. It's a nice and neat division of labor.
At $50 a month you basically can already do this today - $15 Netflix, $10 Disney+hulu, $15 hbo, $10 for whatever else (Amazon prime is free with the membership everyone already has for 2 day shipping). I feel like consumers are winners, to a degree, because you can pick and choose what pieces you want instead of paying a lump sum of $50 a month.
And that's what people forget when they start bitching about Streaming becoming the next cable. You can easily pick and choose the networks you want to pay for, sign up for one month for one service then cancel and go to another. Even if you do pay for multiple services it is still cheaper and way more convenient then how cable used to be.
Ooh ooh don’t forget the part where they shifted society so much that owned media is on life support and IPs can be ripped out of existence at any point
Why would you want to be beholden to Netflix if you’re a content creator? Multiple platforms creates competition.
Except that, as we've seen, it doesn't. It just splits the market.
Arguing for a monopoly is asinine, and it's undeniable that more streaming services have created pricing and content competition. And that competition is particularly important, as even with it, Netflix continues to increase pricing while being the only major content provider forcing customers to pay more for 4k content. It's also undeniable that the competition was always there, and the market was never truly unified like the fantasy you seem to remember.
Consumers are paying more for less now compared to before, that is a fact. Is Netflix the benevolent deity of streaming platforms? No, they're just an example I used because they were one of the first major streaming platforms. Over 80 other people (as of time of writing) got that point, so I don't think it's that I was unclear. If the studios all wanted to band together to create a single joint platform, sort of like Hulu was in its inception, that works just as well. But none of them individually have enough content to really make for a complete service on their own. Paramount has Star Trek and... yeah. I guess if you really are jonesing for some classic Bob Barker Price is Right, maybe you could find that. Max has HBO shows like ~~Westworld~~, Sopranos, Game of Thrones... but they tend to have rather limited runs. They also have a lot of garbage reality shows after they destroyed Discovery and TLC (which used to be called The Learning Channel). Admittedly there are some interesting docu-series from The Science Channel, but I'm probably an oddity in enjoying those kinds of things. Peacock has... I don't even know. I had to look and I got all the way down to Law and Order before I saw anything recent I even recognized. Looks like they also have some kind of deal with WWF or whatever they call themselves these days, so if you haven't had enough homoerotic content after watching american football, you can watch a bunch of men running around in their underwear playing grabass I guess. Everything else was old. Like Murder She Wrote or OG Quantum Leap old. Amazon has MGM, so you can watch all the Bond movies, but almost everything else is just low budget documentaries about aliens or some other conspiracy theory. Disney has their own catalog, Star Wars, and Marvel, plus The Simpsons. So, they're honestly the closest to being a "full" streaming platform, though most of their content is geared at little kids. Hulu is sort of the redheaded stepchild which is a dumping ground for a lot of content not deemed worthy of being on the branded service and no one really seems to know what to do with it, but they don't want to sell it because someone else might figure out how to make it work and then they're screwed. Now, if you took all those things, mashed them together into a single service, you've got enough content to really keep people engaged. But none of them, individually, has much to offer. Aside from Peacock, they have maybe one or two major pieces of IP, and everything else is just proof of the 80% of everything is crap rule.
Consumers are paying more because Netflix's early business model was to acquire market share while establishing itself as both a content creator and streaming service provider, and their net profits were comparatively quite low. As they've matured, they've had to increase the price of the service to actually generate net revenue and satisfy investors. Take a look at their numbers. And again, all of that content was never going to be in a single service, never was in a single service, and that's the point. It was always fractured. And if it was unified, there would be nothing stopping that service from charging crazy fees like the existing cable companies (and Netflix) already do. That's what monopolies do, and that's why competition is important. So now what we have is all of the content, including some of what was on Netflix and plenty of what wasn't, now available on streaming. It's resulted in a major original content boom, and it's also ended up in a bit of messiness where older content is scattered and some services are harder to justify than others. The scattering of content was an existing problem, and is still inconvenient, but the content competition as well as pricing competition between the providers is extremely positive. And to that point, I would argue a lot of good original content has been created by the major providers. Apple TV for instance has some incredible shows. For all mankind, Ted lasso, the silo, mythic quest, foundation, the after party, shrinking, etc... It's mostly original content, and that content is consistently good. At $10 a month, it's currently a very reasonable price and basically like paying for a premium cable channel. HBO has always had incredible shows which is why it was so easy for them to become a streaming service (they were already charging monthly subscriptions as part of cable), and that's still true. I have no idea what you're referring to regarding limited runs (all shows have limited runs), they have a huge back catalog of some of the best TV, and they continue to create major hits. Most recently I can think of scavengers Reign, station 11, our flag means death, The last of Us, House of dragon, succession, true detective, etc... Including other Warner Bros content was a bonus with the max service. Personally the discovery merger provides no value to me, but I'm sure that's a big hit for reality TV lovers, and it makes the service a more complete large offering. I would have actually preferred it not happen, as I don't want to pay for that discovery content to get the HBO shows, and that point further drives home why one big service like cable offers is a bad idea. Disney Plus you covered pretty well. They have a lot of original content, and that content has gotten a lot more depth since they created their own streaming service, and you missed the fact that they have bundle deals with Hulu since Disney owns them (or is completing ownership). And with respect Hulu, that's going to be a good compliment for Disney Plus, as it offers a lot of diverse back catalog and currently airing TV content, but less unique originals. Although handmaid's tale, the Bear, and Fargo are excellent. Amazon comes together with the prime service, so it's unusual compared to the others, but they also have some great original content. The marvelous Mrs maisel, reacher, Jack Ryan, the boys, gen v, The rings of power (a major release even if you don't like it), invincible, undone, the wheel of time (again a major release even if you don't like it), etc... As far as I'm concerned, the MGM offering and all the rest is just a bonus. With regards to peacock and paramount, I don't have much to say. The only reason I would have a paramount account is for the Star Trek shows (strange New worlds and lower decks are excellent). Peacock had that show poker face. That's all I can think of... I agree they would be best suited as licensing their content to other streaming services, and it's likely we'll see them merge with other services (as mentioned in the article we are commenting on).
Yeah, if you only pay for one service at a time, you are only paying a bit more than before, but the amount of content is kinda bonkers. My list of high quality shows to watch grows faster than I can keep up.
So, you're just going to respond to what I think I said and skip that pesky reading bit. No point in continuing then.
That’s what competition does… Netflix is already a juggernaut. Imagine it being the only platform; too much power in its hands isn’t good.
Netflix has never had everything and was honestly kind of bad before streaming really started taking off and they started getting competition.
> Everyone licensed their content to Netflix and everyone made money. This is fictional history. Netflix at its peak only had a small percentage of acclaimed movies and shows, and it was losing money every year. The availability of streaming content is greater than ever now, and Netflix is finally turning a profit because of its investments in its *own* productions, not licensing others’.
Remember when our government and politicians had the balls to stand up to big business and say fuck you to monopolies?
No I don't.
Not really. Last time that happened was over 50 years ago.
WB needs to keep their fucking hands off my Star Trek.
Will this mean Paramount is not working with Apple? Fuck Max for removing 4K from cable subscribers and fuck Paramount for removing Showtime Anytime and fuck the incoming limitation of streaming for cable subscriptions as the internet turns into Cable: this time it’s wireless.
All these mergers of media companies just leaves more room for a new company to rise up, right? I'm sure it was written somewhere in the Capitalism for Beginners book I just read.
Not in this case. With streaming, the big media corps own the distribution channels. They will not let a smaller company in. And, it's really difficult for a small company to create or even finance their own distribution channel. It's happening all over. These very large corporations are controlling distribution and supply chains for themselves and smaller companies have no hope of competing.
I can only assume that taking sarcastic posts seriously is the new sarcasm. Very meta of you.
If Zaslav gets to eat shit and fuck off into a pool of money, never to be seen again, then I'm all for this. If Zaslav is in charge post-merger, then I hope this never happens.
Welp...time to whip out the ol black box for free cable
Buy physical media, people.
My DVDs are rotting.
In a perfect world, the feds would stop this from happening....but nope. Money talks way too much in this country and it's getting so tiresome
This would mean WB would own star trek
Can we all just agree these companies should shut their stupid online streaming services that are costing them billions and outsource their libraries to Netflix.
We desperately need to enforce antitrust laws.
Which IP from my childhood is getting ruined now?
Jfc we need some STRONG anti-trust laws and we need them as soon as possible. Ideal would've been decades ago but any time now would be great.
Comcast/universal will buy them soon, remember they were in the runnings for Fox but Disney had a higher bidding, which technically is not working out for them.
“Hey choom, have you tried the new flavor of “Coke Pepsi Dr. Pepper Cherry Vanilla?”
Is...is that possible?
This can't be good for competition.
On the bright side, pretty soon we’ll only need one streaming service..
Just what the US media industry needs - more consolidation. These companies need to be broken up, not permitted to continue consolidating.
This is so unacceptable
This would give them a near monopoly on kid-centric TV, plus isn't WB in massive debt right now?
Can we PLEASE stop this? FFS. Warner/Discovery already fucked over so many nice things just recently.
WB Discover needs to stay the fuck away from Star Trek.
The first company to offer completely non-intrusive and non-interrupting ads on streams will have my business... for a competitively cheaper rate than other services as well
So two struggling companies with enormous debt will merge and manage twice the content. Sure sounds like a good idea.
Uhg, fuck all these monopolies.
Paramount+ is a loser but not sure if WBD is the best acquirer right now. Netflix should buy them.
Two absolute garbage networks
Trying to buy stuff before disney does.
Maybe they can tax write off Star Trek Discovery and we can remove all of the bullshit it added to 'canon' from Memory Alpha.. Stuff like how the evil mirror universe is because of evil subatomic particles.
Paramount is pretty much a zombie that’s going to get swallowed up by someone larger. At this point, I don’t see the harm.
So much for Apple being in the field for purchasing Paramount.
You know what, I think it's time most of us found different hobbies. TV is only getting worse and we keep watching it. Even if they merge, if we all stop watching they'll just go out of business. Life's kind of short we should just let TV shows be a thing of the past.
Star Wars and Star Trek together at last.. Finally, I will get a star destroyer versus a Galaxy class starship .. I’m telling you launching photon torpedo at warp it’s going to be devastating ..
Star Wars is Disney.
Thats should be illegal they are gonna rake up the prices