It’s “shakeout” time as losses of Netflix rivals top $5 billion
arstechnica.com
Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers.

The world’s largest traditional entertainment companies face a reckoning in 2024 after losing more than $5 billion in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.

Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount—US entertainment conglomerates that have been growing ever larger for decades—are facing pressure to shrink or sell legacy businesses, scale back production and slash costs following billions in losses from their digital platforms.

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“TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing,” he said. “Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs.”

  • @[email protected]English
    98•6 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      22•6 months ago

      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•6 months ago

        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]
        3•6 months ago

        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.

      • @[email protected]
        3•6 months ago

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

        • @[email protected]
          7•6 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)

      • Aniki 🌱🌿English
        1•6 months ago

        Do you have any real numbers to back any of that nice little theory up or is it all just pulled from your ass?