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Comment by nateberkopec | Hacker News Reader

What's the reason for all the shorting on Fubo? You would think that a streaming business would be attracting far more long interest right now.

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Well let's see: they lost $250 million on revenue of only $61 million, their most recent quarter had their largest loss ever, their most recent year had their largest loss ever, there's no prospect that this business will ever turn a profit again. On paper it appears to be among the worst businesses of all time.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

So sounds like..an average multi-billion dollar silicon valley startup.

Streaming is a business like gyms. The more people use your product, the worse it is.

Everytime some one watches something, there goes some $ for the rights, and some $ for the bandwidth. If everyone has lots more time to watch your product, and they do, that's bad for your bottom line. And you can't charge more, because there's tons of options. And internet ad prices were trending down (not sure if that's still true), if Fubo is ad-supported (I can't keep track of all the services)

That's not really how streaming works. The streamers generally don't pay per stream, they pay a fixed cost for a fixed amount of time of unlimited streams. At the same time, if a user is streaming or not is negligible cost. They build the infrastructure assuming everyone will stream, because unlike a gym, most people drop the service if they don't use it.

what he's talking about is what happened with Netflix: once the media companies realized how much money Netflix was making they revoked their content (or upped the price) and created their own services.

I agree with OP, streaming is a terrible business and only sustainable if you create your own content. Which is exactly what every streaming service does nowadays

Parent is wrong indeed, but your reply also misses the point (sibling comment by ‘swang gets it right). For a streaming media provider, infrastructure costs are a rounding error compared to the fees to license the media for distribution (which can be negotiated any which way, so you can’t generalize the impact of service utilization by customers, although swang makes a good point about leverage).

i worked on a streaming product but not on the marketing/financial side but none of this sounds right at all. the biggest cost of a streaming service is paying for the channel rights (if doing live tv) and for the vod/streaming rights. nothing else has that big of an effect.

and having more customers gives you more leverage against the right holders since they themselves need eyeballs so they can tell their advertisers how many eyeballs are watching these streams. this allows them to charge advertisers way more.

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