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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I am keeping an eye on Netflix and Amazon who are creating more and more content. They are looking to cut out the "middle" as it were and while their successes are a bit hit or miss, my assumption is that they will eventually figure out how to get the best production companies on board and completely take people like Disney and Viacom/CBS out of the picture. Can't do it for pre-existing content but they can for new content going forward.

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> my assumption is that they will eventually figure out how to get the best production companies on board and completely take people like Disney...

Disney is big - on the film side there's Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures and Blue Sky Studios

On the TV side, ABC, 20th Century Fox Television, FX Networks, ESPN, and others

I'm not saying Netflix and Amazon won't be able to produce more and more. But completely taking out Disney seems like a whole 'nuther ballgame

I'd be curious to hear more of your reasoning

I wonder if there would be a case for anti-monopoly action against Disney et al, if the US was into doing that kind of thing. If media libraries were split up they wouldn't be able to charge as much for the whole package. It would allow more nuanced negotiations between distributors and the studios.

But that's what's happened, and the result is FAR worse.

Instead of everything being on one app, now it feels like you "need" about 9 different services.

You can't. Because first they don't have monopoly on anything. Making the argument that only Disney can make Star Wars would be like arguing that only Tom Hanks can be Tom Hanks.

Second, even if you could prove they are a monopoly 'to big' you would still need to prove that there is actual harm to consumers. If the Disney streaming service is reasonably priced its not clear how you would prove that.

What would really make far more sense is simply to reduce Copyright laws back to former levels so that things get to be public domain.

Monopoly is a high bar to reach and antitrust cases don't always have to reach that bar to be viable. There's historically a lot of discretionary space in antitrust law just based on the political climate of the time, which generally deals with the calculus of determining if there is harm to consumers.

It's typical for harm to be argued along just one metric, prices for any particular individual, but I tend to think that's a mistake.

So disclaimer, other than being on one TV show[1], I've got very little experience with the business of setting up, selling, and marketing episodic content. I've read about it, I've read articles on Netflix's strategy, I've read articles on Amazon's strategies, and occasionally invested in companies that were in this space (not currently however). But with that out of the way.

My reasoning is looking at the "long" game here. For example, back in the 80s a production company would "pitch a series" to a "network". The network was a company that paid for the production and in return retained rights on the resulting show which it either aired, syndicated, or resold via other channels (essentially in perpetuity given modern copyright law). As new distribution companies have been built they have started getting their own series and having their own content.

Perhaps one of the better examples of this would be Sterling Manhattan Cable. The company got the idea for the "green channel" where they would license movies from movie studios and show them uncut and unedited to home audiences. With the financial backing of Time Life Inc they managed to launch their service which they called "Home Box Office" (aka HBO). The story of how HBO came to be, how Time Life bought them and then bought Warner and became the gorilla TimeWarner has a lot of parallels to the Netflix story, except that while HBO had to fight to get onto the cables in peoples houses, Netflix gets there for "free" because Internet. If you ever wondered what the Net Neutrality fight was REALLY about it is pretty clear what its about if you read how being able to control HBO's ability to get to customers was the tool that media companies used to get leverage over them, and then has the tables turned the tool that TimeWarner turned around and has been trying to use against streaming companies.

So what happens if there isn't this stranglehold on the "last mile" between users and the conglomerater? What happens to HBO in an alternate universe where they don't need other cable companies to "like" them to grow their customer base? I think that is the world that Amazon and Netflix live in today.

Both Amazon and Netflix have been able to develop relationships directly with production companies without having to be consumed by one of the big players. Over time their content libraries grow, and their audiences grow, and they become the 'first' place a show runs, rather than the second or third. They are starting to win Oscars and Emmys for their content so their production values are coming up to speed and they can be considered "serious" players.

A couple of things I'm looking for; The first is which one will be the first to launch a "news" channel. Amazon owns the Washington Post so they have some idea of what that might take. As I understand it, news shows (aka talking about what is happening outside, no need to get creative) are the most profitable parts of many networks. A news show might add the additional working capital to make the dependency on subscriber numbers a bit easier to manage. The second will be exclusive production contracts. When a production company like Bad Robot, or Fuzzy Door Productions signs an exclusive distribution arrangement with Netflix or Amazon, that will signal that these "channels" if you can call them that go from being "some people have them" to "everyone has them."

Then all you need is time. Old stuff sticks around but it gets easier and easier to produce new and "better" stuff. CGI has cut costs significantly according to Variety and so maybe the old guard loses out.

That's all I got :-)

[1] Robotica

I won't be surprised if Facebook launches a news & opinion channel / outlet in the next few years.

One small but I think important correction. Bezos owns the Post, not Amazon. It’s not a direct subsidiary relationship where the leaders of the Post report to the leaders of Amazon and news content could get immediately integrated.

The pre-existing content is the problem. How many people would subscribe to Amazon and Netflix if the only content available was produced by Amazon and Netflix?

In some ways the video/DVD business was better for consumers, because once you've bought the DVD you won't have to go pay more money next year to be allowed to watch it again. The problem is very few people can afford all the DVDs they might ever want to watch.

I think this is actually a good point as to why streaming works so well. How often do people rewatch the same movies / tv shows? I know in my case those are in the single digits.

There's also the convenience factor. You're over at a friend's house and decide to watch a movie? Better hope you grabbed the dvd with you or that he has one. Just discovered something you wanted to see? Have to wait a day or two or drive to the store to get it. Oh, not what you expected and get bored after ten minutes? Tough, you won't get your money back.

There’s always outliers.

You’d be shocked to find out how many times I’ve watched Deep Space Nine since I subscribed to Netflix two years ago.

It’s great because most of the episodes are utter garbage, but..

At least $3 of the AU$15 per month I pay could go directly to Andrew Jordt Robinson and the writers for their outstanding work on Elim Garak.

3 whole dollars? But I'm just a humble tailor. :)

That tickled me, thank you 8)

now with streaming, I almost never rewatch things. but when I had a collection of DVDs (VHSs before that) I rewatched all the time.

I think you could solve a lot of this problem by coming up with a legal framework for a digital first sale doctrine. If I buy a movie digitally, I need a way to legally sell it or, critically, rent it to someone else. Make that happen, and all of these digital rental services will suddenly increase their catalog a hundredfold. Netflix would do it overnight, since they already have a massive DVD warehouse and they'd just need to stop shipping the DVDs.

I don't think that matters. Like really, at all. I think the first thing you'd have to come up with is a service that sells drm free, so people can actually get what they paid money for. When I "buy" digitally from either amazon or google, there's no way I'll ever see an mkv file or anything like that. When "buying" video digitally, I don't ever get the feeling that the stuff is really "mine". When I buy from bandcamp, I can download a flac and archive it. That music is mine. When I get it from google, I can view it from their website. That movie is not mine.

And let's not pretend that sales would go down. Music is sold like this for a long time, just like copying without permission unfortunately didn't kill Hollywood all this time.

I think this also depends on your viewing habits. I very rarely rewatch movies/TV shows. So I could never really justify to outright buy DVDs.

There's the reverse also, content companies introducing their own streaming.

At some point does this just result in streaming from the content producers directly regardless of how that came to be in any given case?

It is interesting that streaming content economically is pretty hard at scale. That was a big moat for Netflix for a long time, but every year it gets filled in a little more as other companies figure it out.

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