It feels like Disney is becoming too powerful. I am surprised regulators didn't look harder at the Fox deal.
"anti-trust theory, on both the diagnosis side and the remedy side, seems to be flummoxed when faced by products that are free or as cheap as possible, and that do not rely on familiar kinds of restrictive practices (the tying of Standard Oil) for their market power. The US in particular has tended to focus exclusively on price, where the EU has looked much more at competition, but neither has a good account of what exactly is wrong with Amazon"
I think this is salient...what is Disney doing (so far) to BLOCK competition?
2. I remember seeing an article on here recently that talked about how it is difficult to write down Amazon's exact offenses when their pricing algorithm is a secret.
Fortunately the wheels are starting to turn to improve the situation— Lina Khan’s article in the Yale Law Journal about Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior has been an earthquake in the law world and we may be in the early stages of shaking off the Bork madness.
Thanks for the tip, I hadn't seen it anywhere yet.
This article describes the requirements for The Last Jedi, but my understanding is that this is pretty close to the requirements for any Marvel/StarWars/Disney film at this point.
https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-requirements-to-show-...
I can kind of see demanding that kind of coverage for the first week, but for a second week you're just robbing from competing films and the theaters themselves.
Which is absolutely the point
What if Disney was a private collector and bought up all the words art, and sealed it away, or charged admission at a single museum.
People would (and will) make new movies, new art. I have a hard time seeing the justification for an overarching central control (if there even is one) policing who can own what and how much.
When laws (eg, Copyright) allow consolidation like this, the laws are probably going to hurt consumers.
We should seriously consider changing Copyright.
If they provide all the museum security, fine. But in the real world Disney relies on the US legal system to protect their collection.
That's not the question, is it? Take any monopoly from history and examine individual purchases, and they can usually be reduced to a question like yours that seems benign.
Murder isn't the act of firing a gun, it's the act of firing a gun at someone with the intent to kill them.
Do you have a source for this? It seems like supply is increasing at an almost exponential rate, so I'd be surprised if content prices are increasing on a per-unit basis.
Paying out more money for licensing when they don't own the content is like paying rent; it doesn't net you any money in the future, and the market (and your own strength in it) determines your negotiating position, so you may have to pay more to keep showing it later.
Streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon realized this and began producing original content years ago, with costs going toward longer term profits, reduced licensing costs, and increased subscribers of exclusive content. Over 85% of Netflix's new spend in 2018 was on original content, and that year it produced more movies than all major movie studios combined. Not only is licensing content expensive, but an exclusive license is prohibitively expensive; generating the content yourself and keeping it exclusive is a way to attract subscribers and not lose as much cash, and retain have a long-term investment.
This year, Netflix is estimated to spend 15 billion on original content alone. In 2018, Netflix spent 15 billion on content (ballooning up from the 8 billion it estimated before that year began). Compare to 2016 when it spent over 5 billion on content, and 2012 when it spent just 2 billion. Each year they've spent more on content, in part because the licensing is getting more expensive, and in part to produce such a big corpus of original content. But at the same time, its content library has shrank by more than half. They offset this loss of content by leaning on their recommendation algorithm to maximize the content viewed by users.
Compare to HBO, which generally has had marginal increases in content licensing fees. It does this by making nearly all of its TV programming original, and licensing films. Netflix is essentially following HBO's model, but more so.
As even more evidence, Comcast and Disney are moving toward original and exclusive content. Disney is buying Comcast's stake in Hulu, after it recently bought FOX's rights. And NBC plans to put out its own streaming service, where it will probably keep its own content exclusively after 2024.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/20/netflix-inc-conten... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062515/how-n... https://www.forbes.com/sites/danafeldman/2018/07/09/netflixs... https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/disney-full-control-hu...