What the media universe currently looks like | Hacker News Reader

What the media universe currently looks like

recode.net

29 pointseplanit13 comments

"What the American Big Media market looks like".

FTFY. America ain't the friggin' Universe. Just a quick reminder that there's a whole world East of New York, West of LA, South of El Paso. A World where we don't give a damn about the "World Series", for example.

Netflix, Amazon etc are still major players in the rest of the western world. They do make deals with China, even if they don't have the same power as they do in the provinces of the american empire. Granted, they may be less important in the developing and third world, but those are in turn much less important globally, economically and culturally.

Like it or not, what happens in the US is usually much more important for your local market than what some local player decides.

And North of ... ?

Or did you forget about that part of the world.

This comment raises an interesting question I've seen from time to time. Is HN, run by an American company, an American publication? And therefore headlines default to an American context?

Surely there are e.g. Chinese news aggregators like HN out there. When they run articles like this, are those headlines titled "What the Chinese media universe currently looks like"? Or do they assume a Chinese context, because they are written in Chinese? Are there commenters on the Chinese HN calling out headlines for not contextualizing the article in global terms properly?

I think this raises some interesting thoughts about the issues that arise when your nation's native tongue is also the international lingua franca. Everyone can read your media, and it maybe changes expectations about default scope/context.

Insecure much?

If you read this article (by one of those companies "east of New York"), then 1,000,000,000 people will be watching the final season of Game of Thrones. [0]

So yeah, the world does does give a damn... hundreds of millions of them.

[0] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6895775/Game-Throne...

Nah, why insecure? Just pointing out that for the most part this article was talking in universal terms while describing a strictly American market. The international players mentioned export their cultural products, of course, but the interactions described were strictly American. It’s a typical U.S. bias which can be a bit annoying to witness outside of the U.S. bubble. Not a single time the adjective American was used to describe the distinctively local market the article was analyzing.

A large number (possibly all, but I didn't check) of those companies are global. Here are a few examples of how revenue breaks down for some (randomly chosen big) movies from some of the firms on the list.

AT&T owns Warner Bros, and makes things like Harry Potter. Picking one of the movies, I see that the US box office is only about 1/4 of the worldwide gross. [0]. Not to mention that AT&T is itself a global firm for upwards of a century.

Disney owns Marvel, which made Avengers Infinity War. A whopping 2/3 of that revenue came from outside the US [1].

Comcast owns Universal, which made Jurassic World. That movie had 61% of its revenue from outside the US [2].

CBS owns Paramount, which made Titanic. More than 2/3 of that revenue came from outside the US [3]. Of course, that was a massive movie - what about something like Shrek the 3rd? Interestingly, roughly 60% of that revenue came from outside the use as well [4]. Take a look at What Women Want, almost 20 years ago, and 1/2 of that revenue came from overseas [5].

Netflix is in over 190 countries, with more than 70 million subscribers outside the US. This is even more impressive when you realize that Netflix was US-only as recently as 2010 [6].

Obviously I could go on, but I think I made my point - US media companies dominate the globe for movies. I could also nitpick and note that they left off video games entirely, even though they are bigger than some of the companies on this list. But no matter how I slice it, it is not a local market, and hasn't been for years. Hence my strong disagreement with your position.

[0] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=harrypotter72.htm

[1] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=marvel0518.htm

[2] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=jurassicpark4.htm

[3] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=titanic.htm

[4] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=shrek3.htm

[5] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=whatwomenwant.htm

[6] - https://hbr.org/2018/10/how-netflix-expanded-to-190-countrie...

This is a very interesting podcast from The Daily on Rupert Murdoch [1]. Fascinating history.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/podcasts/the-daily/rupert...

CBS is owned by National Amusements, noticed that's missing from the chart.

Might want to make sure the HN submission title matches that of the article: "Here’s who owns everything in Big Media today".

Maybe I'm blind or it's not rendering correctly, but, where is Amazon and Apple in this universe?

Is "Big" Media actually a popular term? Or was the word Big just injected so that people wouldn't associate the article with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?

I guess there is some irony involved, as part of what this article's doing is pointing out how small even the biggest "Big Media" is: compared to the average SV unicorn all of Big Media is basically a lifestyle business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com