Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27289924&p=2
(Sorry for the interruption. Comments like this will go away eventually.)
We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.
1- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....
They did not have to. They could have let market forces dictate how it played out.
But I guess Walmart is always available, or boutique stores if you don’t like big box.
Look at this list: https://www.contino.io/insights/whos-using-aws
Amazon, and their primary revenue stream (AWS) is *immune* to boycott because it's so diversified. The fact that a company is immune to boycott is alarming.
One answer to this is "club goods" [1]: bundle large collections of content together for a fixed price so that per-unit access is zero-cost, but every participant pays their share of the whole; this is the model of both cable packages and streaming services. It's hardly perfect (especially in that it centralizes both data and power), but it's arguably a better win-win than arbitrary unit prices.
I do think it's shady that vendors are allowed to sell content using "buy" and "ownership" metaphors of physical goods, when in fact it's a limited license that can change or disappear at any time. I'd love to see some regulation in this space, to the effect that content can only be labeled "buy"/"own"/etc if the content is DRM-free and carries a permissive license for backups, remixing, transforming, etc.
And of course, there's an excellent case for reforming copyright laws more generally, such that content that has already had plenty of time to recoup its costs enters the public domain. I think the original duration (14 years) struck a reasonable balance; and on a cultural level, there's a great deal of value in each generation having unlimited access to the previous (still-living) generation's culture, in addition to culture of dead antiquity.
And they will blame PLATFORM X (or just the ol'piratebay) for the losses of revenue, when in reality it's just a matter of people not being able to access content because everything has a paywall gate.
It's like they want to bring cable TV back to the internet, and you had massive bills just for channels subscriptions.
Basically, yes. More precisely we have a handful of companies who worked to "disrupt" the cable TV business only to realize that in fact, they could become the new cable TV.
None of that applies anymore. Content was always going to be owned and sold by someone. What other situation should we have expected?
You won't have to deal with the company that owned the wire or the satellite service, but you'll have to deal with one of the few companies that are purchasing IPs left and right (Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney).
In the end it's just different people controlling the distribution.
The difference was that the content owners still had the choice to have their content available in other media formats, now it's the distributors that own the content and will (probably) limit it to their distribution channels.
Nowadays it would be rather difficult to install a piracy app on your phone (not impossible, but definitely harder than simply downloading a binary from sourceforge). So you're left wish shady streaming sites who in my experience have terrible usability.
iPhones attractive a different sort of user who would probably prefer to keep paying .
Yes, at least a few of those 1500 major Hollywood studio movies are quite good.
Looking at the last few years of MGM's output, Creed and The Cabin in the Woods were both good. I didn't like Skyfall but mine seems to be a minority opinion, and AFAIK it's considered one of the best Bond movies by many people (for whatever that's worth). Stretching back closer to the 15-year mark... The Mist is pretty good. Casino Royale sneaks in right at the 15 year mark, and it's really well-regarded.
I don't watch that many movies anymore.
Like bundling stuff you would never subscribe to.
I'll start making the pitch deck and crunch some numbers for the boys upstairs.
"Subflix Prime TV+" sounds good to you?
I think it would be very challenging to set compulsory licensing rates for TV and Movies.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch an NBC show, you had to watch it on an NBC network. What is the difference?
At least nowadays you can just pay, watch, and cancel at your leisure with the click of a few buttons.
This is going to force subsidization of all entertainment. Then big tech will gobble it all up.
We're going to have a lot of Netflix Original-caliber shit that gets cancelled once viewership changes.
Point is content is more accessible and cheaper than it has ever been in history, and that is partially due to the elimination of middlemen like cable/satellite TV distributors.
But media is always going to have an owner, who is always going to be able to license it to whoever they want at whatever cost they want.
At a labor value of $50/hour, watching ten hours of content a week imposes an economic cost on the viewer of $825/month. By comparison subscribing to all the major streaming platforms would cost about $100/month. Let's not even get into issues of higher quality content and huge on-demand libraries. It's pretty clear ad-free streaming subscription is a massive improvement for consumers over "free" broadcast TV.
This is an opportunity cost but only if you have the stamina to be doing billable work during all that time instead of relaxing.
Commercial detection and skipping has worked well for me via MythTV for nearly twenty years at this point.
Seems like there’s a free startup idea in there somewhere. $100 worth of equipment and a webapp and now your parents can watch network TV, local news, sports, and weather without ads.
Subscriptions mean you have to pay a certain minimum amount, even if you want to watch just one episode of something. That's a much bigger burden than changing the channel.
Yes, in theory you can carefully manage things and cancel as soon as you've watched what you wanted, but in practice that effort is a cost too (like watching a commercial is a cost).
Two immediate examples I can think of:
“House MD” was produced by NBC/Universal but aired on FOX
“For All Mankind” was produced by Sony but currently airing on Apple TV+
If a different studio was selling to Apple/Amazon/etc then presumably they would have language that lets them sell to someone else if they did not end up distributing it.
From about 1970 to 93, antitrust regulations were put in place because only three networks could determine over 90% of broadcast media. A judge ended that rule under the rational that upstart networks like Fox and CW were now competitive. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/13/business/judge-rules-netw...
Critics said this would be bad because the networks would be incentivized to broadcast lucrative content over quality content, and subjectively I would say that is exactly what happened. But fortunately the Internet came along and made TV kind of moot… but anyway if you are of the opinion that radical centralization and corporate consolidation lead to crummy content, fewer opportunities for creators, and in a macro scale a widening wealth gap, this all just kinda sucks.
Yes, that’s the difference. There used to be a gatekeeper to reaching your audience, but now there is none. A kid can take their 4K phone and make their own TV show with their friends and distribute it worldwide, or a company can get a professional crew and spend a couple billion dollars and distribute it worldwide.
If the contention is that a few companies owning all the content will raise the prices, then that solution would be removing/reducing copyright protections, or compulsory licensing, but in the current environment, who owns what is mostly immaterial to customers.
Until Google or Facebook decide that your content is objectionable. Don't worry, punishment is instant and Court of Big Tech appeals process is even slower than actual due process [1].
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/05/fucking-facebook-4/#comment...
No one is entitled to someone else’s computing resources. But unless the ISP is blocking access to your computers or from you to the network, then the point is the barrier to distribution is at its lowest in any point in history.
Ideally, we’d have ipv6 and fiber connections to home so Google/Facebook would be irrelevant. But that is a governance issue, not a Google/Facebook issue.
Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.
The story depicts the machinations of a racist named Adam Cramer (Shatner), who arrives in the fictitious small Southern town of Caxton in order to incite white townspeople to racial violence against black townspeople and court-ordered school integration.
Also You Can't Take It With You. Now you've seen one Cary Grant and one Jimmy Stewart. To finish up you can get both of them with Catherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.
The Third Man is classic, classic noir. Between the on location shooting in Vienna, fantastic performances by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, and really distinctive cinematography, it's just stunning.
A Man Escaped. To quote Godard, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music". If you like simple, but beautiful films, watch Bresson. A Man Escaped makes all other prison break films, with their endless plot twists and convolutions, seem utterly pointless. Instead Bresson focuses on the character, the drama and the methodical process of breaking out.
Dead of Night
Modern times
The third man
I don't only watch a movie or a TV show for the intrinsic entertainment quality, I also do it so that I can talk about what I watch with others.
That artsy Swiss movie from 1929 is not as popular a theme as the latest episode of Ozark.
This was tougher growing up when kids all watched the same shows and talked about them, but with content so all over the place now that common thread seems to be mostly gone at school (outside of internet video stuff).
My girlfriend somehow grew up completely unaware of Star Trek, so I introduced her to The Next Generation last year and we've been watching it (rewatching in my case, but for the first time in over two decades) one episode a day.
It's so relaxing, in a way that almost no modern TV is. No end-of-episode cliffhangers or other mechanisms trying to make you binge-watch. We can just watch one episode to unwind, discuss it a bit if it's one of the better thought-provoking ones, and then go to bed.
> It's so relaxing, in a way that almost no modern TV is. No end-of-episode cliffhangers
That is not how I would describe Star Trek: the Next Generation. Every season ends with a cliffhanger.
> No end-of-episode cliffhangers or other mechanisms trying to make you binge-watch.
I'm talking about mechanisms that modern TV uses to trick people into watching a series many episodes at a time until they're too tired to go on. An end-of-season cliffhanger that was designed to ensure people would come back when the series returned next season after a long break from their weekly Star Trek watching habit is not at all the same thing. Nothing about TNG is attempting to make me, the viewer, binge-watch it.
In the case of me and my GF, since we know exactly when we are about to watch an end-of-season episode we just plan an extra hour for it that evening. That's it.
There are a handful of those in TNG. But only a handful.
Well, except for the season finale/openers from Season 3 on; but, yes, TV in general (even before streaming, DS9-VOY-ENT all show this trend within thr Trek franchise) has become less episodic since the TNG era.
Yeah (I think the actual intent was “less episodic”, and I’ve corrected it to that, but same thing.)
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/no-time-but-the-present-...
I've watched more black and white classics in the last 15 months than I have in the last 20 years. Particularly the old sci-fi, horror, and slapstick films. Harold Lloyd, The Three Stooges, and Chaplin. Plus all the old St Trinians, and Sherlock Holmes. Abbot and Costello and so on. So pleasant to watch.
Is that really your determining factor while deciding to watch a movie? It isn't mine. I watch a movie because its a good movie, I don't go searching for diversity, I like watching a movie because of its entertainment value. You should try it.
YouTube & others provide a large library for free (with ads). I assume most here are Amazon Prime members anyway, so that vast library is practically free. Apple TV always has some good $5 movies.
As I get older, the less I care about seeing the latest stuff - as there's always more I want to watch than I can get to.
(And if there really isn't enough for you to watch, you really need be doing something else.)
Same issue with sports streaming. Why pay six different services to watch a 720p legal stream when i can watch a stream from Russia in 1080p with questionable ads?
If they want to be consumer hostile, we should be hostile as well.
This is not a technical problem anymore. It's a business problem. The company who can make these nebulous "licensing problems" and "distribution rights issues" go away can make a fortune. I don't care that Company A can't distribute the digital version of Company B's product because Company C has the exclusive rights to it and Company D only has a license with Company A to distribute optical discs. That shouldn't be something the end user has to worry about or be limited by. These media execs are so smart, why can't they untangle this problem?
I'm not going to subscribe to a dozen different services each with their own bill, their own account, their own password, their own rules and terms. Easier to hoist the Jolly Roger and move on with my life.
For this, don’t expect to get this kind of service for 10 or 20 bucks a month; be prepared to shell out at least $100 or even more. Would you be willing to do that? How many people would be willing to do that?
I suspect that most people aren't actually complaining about fragmentation. They want one $15-20/month site that has everything.
What is and isn't legal is not an unchangeable property of the universe. These things can change. Piracy for personal use was (and still is) legal in many places before the RIAA/MPAA started exerting political pressure. Heck, piracy was the primary selling point of VHS recorders and tape decks. Only recently have we shifted to read-only media that's hard to copy.
It does feel like we're approaching a tipping point now in the other direction with all of these streaming fiefdoms.
My household has Netflix, Hulu, D+, and Prime streaming now - that's already too many and needs pairing IMO.
I'd argue that Sonarr, Radarr, etc, have made this process far easier and better than paying for it.
Fragmentation still hurts this to an extreme, and - worse - God-awful region locks. As a fan of obscure, cult and independent cinema in particular it’s a wasteland of titles strewn across 5 different services, and being Canadian, piracy is just a fact of life for us.
Nothing beats the convenience of typing in what you’re looking for and actually finding it right away. That pretty much defines convenience. It’s what I expect.
I don’t want to Google what platform my current obscure interest is on, only to maybe find out because I didn’t bother with Paramount+ I’m going to have to torrent it anyway. :P
It’s literally just one extra search to find what streaming platform it’s on - which is an inconvenience* - when I can just do a quick Torrent search, and have a nice high quality copy of pretty much whatever usually within (on my connection) about 5 minutes.
By the time I make my popcorn, the torrent is done, I stream it through my Plex on my Roku, and Plex even gets the metadata for me. It’s kinda scary how good it is.
And talk about how inconvenient region locking is to the point where VPNs actually advertise* the ability to get around this inconvenience as a point of sale.
Piracy’s convenience and case for existence has only gotten seriously stronger as more and more competing streaming services open.
If there was a way to combine search results for services into one like overall UI that would then just direct you to the content even that would be better, but anecdotally most people I know are tired of the fragmentation issue.
You can do this for most items. For example, go to apple’s TV app or play store and purchase or rent the item.
Okay, so you're telling me if I boot up my Apple TV and type in 'The Simpsons', I'm going to immediately get a list of options to watch the Simpsons?
...
No, that won't work - in fact - this was actually my first overall point - the fragmentation issue.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on TPB, I'll get multiple options of quality vs. size, every episode ever, the movie; fullscreen vs. widescreen; etc.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on Apple TV+, I get...nothing.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on Netflix, I get...nothing.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on Amazon Prime, I get...nothing.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on Paramount+, I get...nothing.
So...unless you're subscribed to this one particular streaming service (Disney+), you can't watch one of the most popular shows on television, which often airs on many a channel up here in Canada.
If we're even lucky enough to get the content at all in Canada due to region restrictions.
That's...not convenient. I'm not sure what you meant by your comment, but the fact that you can't do what your comment says was kinda my overall point.
If I search for "Sesame Street" in the TV app, the first option is "Sesame Street" TV show, which then leads to the HBO Max app from where I can watch all of the episodes.
If I search for the "The Office", the first option is the US series, which I can purchase for $3 each episode, and the second option is the UK series, which then leads me to HBO Max.
If I search for "Jaws", the first option is the first Jaws movie from 1975, which then opens up in HBO Max. Note that Apple does not ask me to purchase the Jaws movie, and instead offers to play it in HBO Max, since apparently HBO Max is currently streaming it.
According to IMDB, the top Bollywood Hindi movie of 2019 are these: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls025693373/
If I search for the top 3, I come up with nothing. The 4th, "Gully Boy" returns with an option to play on Amazon Prime.
Overall, I think as someone who was looking to watch something in the Hollywood/American universe, life is easier than it has ever been. There is probably room for improvement, especially in international titles, but I'm sure that is in the works.
Practical example: "Mockingbird Lane" was released by NBC in 2012, they decided it was 'not worthy' and removed it from their streaming library.
Can you guess what's the only way to watch it now?
I do understand the concept of 'What NBC giveth, NBC taketh', but that doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
This is like complaining you have to pay for NBC to watch Friends when you'd much prefer to watch it on ABC so you can avoid paying for both.
Now they are on different platforms, because no good reason at all.
A copyright holder of a creative work should be able to set the price, but should not be able to use their monopolistic powers to control who pays the price. Let each channel decide if they want to buy a given show at a given price.
So why do we see wars for who gets to stream Friends/Seinfeld/The Office/etc now? The networks don't own that content, it was just physics?
> Let each channel decide if they want to buy a given show at a given price.
That's not how this works now, nor has it ever worked this way. If Network A is paying for the exclusive broadcast rights, then Network B doesn't also have an equal Right to also purchase the exclusive broadcast rights. This has always worked this way. If Disney produces Disney Mouse Club Cartoon it has no obligation to allow any network purchase the exclusive rights to broadcast that show because it already purchased them in the form of owning the original production, and therefore copyright, from its inception.
If enough people want bundled content and are willing to pay enough to make it happen, then content owners will sell it. If not, then the buyers and sellers do not agree on price.
I can't speak for the Android ecosystem, but the iOS ecosystem's Apple TV app (Netflix notwithstanding) aggregates channels into one nice experience, and the App Store makes these channels trivial to subscribe to and cancel, making it easy to decide month-to-month what I want to pay for.
For a few years there; it felt like I could watch ~anything i wanted on Netflix or Crunchyroll. Now it feels like I need 10 services. Maybe my viewing habits have changed; but I haven't started a torrent in a decade and I've been tempted recently.
All these stream platforms produce their own exclusive shows and chances are that you're only interested in one or two flag ship series and the occasional movie or so. I believe this will hurt hulu the most then hbo before the rest, because compared to netflix and disney they have less exclusive content. This leads to a downward spiral, where you need more exclusive content to attract users which leads to more fragmentation and eventually drives costs, which is bad for platforms with less (exclusive) content, because user may ditch first because of unattractive content/cost ratio...
Pirating is great if you're just interested in a particular new show but nothing else, for me that's HBO. What you're missing out on with pirating is discovering new shows/movies that you actually like just by browser the platform.
But still people insist that they must pirate because the "studios" for some amorphous reason related to preexisting hatred of corporations or whatever.
Some people would just prefer to not pay for shit I guess. I just wish they'd be more honest about it than the mental gymnastics used to defend piracy.
This is not a good faith reading or interpretation. The frustration is in the fragmentation; having to subscribe to multiple services to get the content you want because it's otherwise siloed.
Hitting that point - having to subscribe to 3 or more services to get a small subset of that service's offerings is driving people back to piracy.
You get ALL of their offerings.
The idea that you should pay less than $8 for Disney Plus because you only want to watch Mandalorian when you actually get access to literally dozens of extremely high quality titles is just fucking dumb.
The previous option was pay $14 per person to go to a theater and that's the only thing you get to watch. Or pay $120 a month for cable.
It's all just ludicrously deranged mental gymnastics to justify the fact you don't want to pay for anything.
Which you can do, that's fine, just be honest about it!
This is incredibly backwards. I want to pay for what I want. That's how it works with literally every other product on earth, including the movie theater you brought up. I don't have to spend $80 for 4 movies when I only want to watch one. I don't have to spend $20 on bananas, apples, grapes when I only want a mango.
That friend uses Kodi (and a NAS) now, but it's still a bit arduous to use for his family. She wants profiles, availability on any device over wifi and 4G and movies and series only.
Don't get me wrong I have Netflix and prime but Disney plus, hulu and hbo max are not available to me so I need to work around the stupid global restrictions.
As it stands today you can build your own version of this but if you want to stay 100% above board you get a crappier experience (don't get me started on the cluster-f around rights). It reminds me of the jokes back when DVDs were still a "thing" and you had to sit through ads and piracy warnings if you bought it legitimately but if you "stole" it you were able to jump right into the movie.
The best thing about Jellyfin is that it is free software: open source, permissive license, and no paid features (which alternatives like Plex have).
You can host Jellyfin on your own VPS, I host mine on a Hetzner VPS for just over 10 eur / month but that is very overkill, you can host one for far less. The only thing to keep in mind is that transcoding (streaming in a different resolution to the stored media) is quite computationally expensive so if lot's of people are transcoding at once you will need a good CPU.
Then any family member can just visit the IP address of the server in their web browser (or you can buy it a domain name). Jellyfin has a native iOS app they can use from their phones. For viewing it on TVs, there is an app for AppleTV which has Jellyfin support (cant remember the name right now but I can find it if you need it).
Forcing consumers to sign up to 10 platforms to watch 10 movies will no doubt lead to a shift back to torrents.
YouTube is pretty good in this regard, as it allows paying for renting a single movie for a weekend for a reasonable price.
And indeed, our process is: "Can we rent it? No, fine let's fine a pirated copy". Not going to get cable for one night to watch this one movie. Everybody's losing by hanging on those old outdated systems.
Maybe they'll make a comeback?
Consumers are willing to pay more for VOD because its easier. Having to return the disc is a pain in the ass.
What if I extend an HDMI cable from my DVD player to your TV?
My library manages to lend ebooks; they even have wait lists for them.
Those are made available in that format by the publisher. No equivalent for movies is available (as far as I am aware).
Also my understanding is that it was never entirely clear if lending ebooks like that in the US was legal or not. The publishers and lenders both carefully avoided the issue going to court IIUC. (Prior to the Internet Archive's actions, that is.)
AFAIK - only in the US though, there was much talk at launch of how they got special deals with the US postal service.
Whatever happened to those guys...? (https://dvd.netflix.com/)
Apparently they still do it - I thought it was phased-out for streaming years ago.
If you're basically just walking by the box anyway while doing something you'd be doing otherwise, sure it's cheaper to drop $2 for a disc.
If you have to make a deliberate trip, you've transportation & opportunity costs. 2 round trips to the box, just to get/return the disc, is 6 miles total (1.5 miles one-way by road & parking lot) for me; at >$3/gal gas (wear/maintenance not included) that's >$1.50 plus the $2 rental. Then there's the time spent getting the disc, as several people wait around for someone to fetch it; if we're already at cumulative $4 cost, I'll pay the extra $1 (<$0.25 each) just so the group can watch what we want right now with a mere wiggling my thumb and not wait around half an hour.
I'm an engineer. I explain things in excruciating detail. That's what I do.
Have you ever heard of the indie mubi?
Seriously.
I've stumbled across various streaming services that look like they have stuff I might like, but I really have more than I need already. And I always forget that because my wife pays for Prime, we have Amazon Prime streaming too.
My neighbor got busted a few years back by Xfinity, and it was a big deal.
It's my understanding that Xfinity sends a few warning notices, just a little slap on the wrist, before they end up terminating your account or something (though a quick cursory Google brings up a Reddit thread where someone claiming to have worked for Cumcrust said they never saw any accounts terminated for that). I know I received one letter like 7 years ago for downloading 'Christmas Vacation' and nothing else ever happened. Speaking from experience, if you use a VPN to torrent then they'll leave you alone.
I'd be curious how much - and what - your neighbor was doing to have made it a big deal, and what Xfinity's response/reaction was.
And/or only use private trackers. Stay away from the public ones.
Regardless, the end game of these streaming services is probably going to be consolidation or partners, if it makes since because the market is too diluted. We're coming off, wha, $60-100 a month cable bills? The streaming providers are still siphoning this value before we start seeing consolidation of the losers with the winners.
Depending upon how you allocate the cost of Amazon Prime though, I'm saving a lot compared to when I had cable--albeit at the cost of losing live TV.
I pay for Hulu because I'll pay just about anything to never see a commercial. When I do have time to watch something, I don't want to see commercials. If that means paying a bit extra to have another service, so be it.
In that light it makes perfect sense for Amazon to enhance their offering, as they are third or fourth in streaming.
There never seems to be something to watch consistently on Prime at least here in Europe.
But that being said they've definitely stepped up their Originals game lately. Last few shows we've watched on there are all excellent (Invincible, The Boys, Upload).
By the way, has anyone checked out the free movies on Youtube? There's some good 80s and 90s classics on there lately. Supposedly it's with ads, but I don't see too many when I watch, certainly less than Hulu.
If any one "stream everything" service popped up with every providers content, it would cost $200+ a month, and essentially a cable tv subscription all over again just without the cable box, and everyone would complain it's too expensive and go back to piracy.
I really wish we had the bandwidth we have now, back in the Napster-era.
Napster, and others forced, persuaded and cajoled the music industry to consolidate, whether they liked it or not, on Spotify, and iTunes.
If we'd had easy free sharing of movies, it's not hard to envisage something similar to what we see now in the music industry forced on the movie companies. Now it's honey pot torrents all over the place.
No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable/satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP/USD a month is utterly absurd.
Frankly, I'm glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country.
My mother recently gave me a sub-account to Netflix and while I was thrilled to rewatch some shows I liked (like the OA or good old star trek) I was quickly submerged by the sheer amount of YA novels adapted in TV shows or movies that are really mediocre. Now I see there's a lot of content on Netflix but I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe.
I'm with you on the old black/white movies.
I actually think Amazon got a great deal buying MGM.
If TCM was available, Nefflix should look into buying it. They have a great library of old movies.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/24/john-malone-sees-warnermedia...
I read it was more than that. Shows have to bring in more customers, keeping them hooked to a show (or the platform) is not enough now. They will more and more invest only in content that bring in more customers, not just keeping the ones they already have. I read that's why the OA got cancelled: it wouldn't bring in more views and the show would have been more expensive.
This is what machine learning, pattern recognition will get us.
I watched one show in Amazon prime. One shocking thing I noted besides repetitive plots every few episodes, is that one character say something and after few minutes or next episode another character spoke exactly same sentence in different situation. And it happened so many times I thought I knew what is about to be said.
You are right of course. I said that in half-jest. It is like at work where every product/project is working on something next generation. Irritates the hell out of me. So in morning meetings I so often ask "Are we fixing it now or it will be part of our next gen product?"
(see Avatar is Dances with Wolves with Blue Aliens)
i.e., if you're lucky enough to have more than one alternative (if any).
Virtually all places have "specials" on the first year of service, wherein the price will increase 50% or even 100% after the first year, which will almost always put you well into the $100+ range.
If the prices get too high I call them up and cancel. At that time, they try to keep me as a subscriber by giving me lower rates. If they don't have any available I ask when their new packages are coming out and call back a day after that time.
Comcast hides their real rates as well as they can but in some places they are required to publish them. In my rural area (where they are the only real option):
$139.99 gets you "Select+ Includes Limited Basic, Expanded Basic, Digital Preferred Tier and HD programming for primary outlet, 20 Hour DVR Service, and Blast! Internet"
You can't buy ALL the channels as s bundle but the top tier bundle is $189.99/mo (plus fees)
The prices don't sum reasonably at all and it's not really feasible to calculate a price for TV without internet (and its very difficult to order such a thing)
Source: https://comcaststore.s3.amazonaws.com/prod/wk/urc/585bc33c5b...
Yes, I've lived in places where there is one cable company and they abuse their monopoly position with predatory pricing like this. When you're a new customer, they offer you a deal at maybe ~$60/mo and then over the course of a couple years raise the price to over $120/mo, with price increases every year or two after that, as well.
Being able to buy and cancel on demand streaming for $15 or less per month is a massive improvement over the previous situation.
It has never been easier, cheaper, and more convenient to consume basically all content and yet people still find ways to complain.
Hi we've noticed you used to pay us $200 for internet and tv but now pay $100 to use and $50 for streaming services. How would you instead like to pay us 200 for internet and 220 if you want TV too. our $20 tv addon is cheaper than netflix because its subsidized by the monopoly rent we are charging you on internet access! Also we have noticed that despite bandwidth being cheaper than ever we can also discourage your netflix use by also charging extra for using "too much" data.
1. "Basic" bundle, $60 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you ESPN, Food Network, SciFi, Cartoon Network, USA
2. "Complete" bundle, $100 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you BBC, a bunch of foreign language channels, Starz, and a few more.
You could also add HBO to either plan for $15 a month. I think they may have had a few other premium channel options as well, but I never paid that close of attention.
We cut the cable because the price had crept up from about $50/month total to almost $100/month over the course of a few years. It was just unsustainable. Now we pay about $40/month for streaming services, and the streaming services don't have ads.
Please note that that was only a channel (or two). You still had to tune to watch the movie/show you wanted! For the same price today (not even adjusted for inflation), you can watch any of this content on demand, on any device, but it has waaay more content available.
Yet. IIRC, when cable started, it didn't have ads either. It was its selling point.
Advertising is a cancer on society that infects and poisons every communication medium available. It has already metastasized to streaming platforms, though it's not conspicuous yet. You don't have to watch interstitial ads between episodes of your favorite show on Netflix, but if that show is a modern production, it's likely overflowing with product placement ads. When that and other means of making easy money get used up, you can be sure that overt ads will follow.
"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." And that's a salient argument in favor of torching the whole advertising industry to the ground.
I head this from a Xfinity employee.
My mom showed me her bill and it was $240 month, for basics channels, internet, hbo, and one other lousy feature she doesn't use.
I trying to get it down, but their contracts have early termination fees in the contract.
They offer reasonable packed rates only to new customers. They know most people won't take back their equipment, and go a few days without service, in order to save $100 plus a month. I don't know how they legally get away with their business practices.
She has bern a faithful customer since 1972.
She is in Marin County, USA.
If anyone knows of a different company please give me some advice.
(I looked into AT&T, but they have almost the same business model as Comcast.)
I switched back to cable TV a few years ago. It's just cheaper for me now. The price of streaming has risen, and the price of cable has fallen.
Content will be made, it just won't be the same content.
Production budgets expand to consume available resources, but there is a very non-obvious relationship with quality.
Even if that is true, I am pretty sure it is specific to US only. I dont believe any other place in the world are paying that much for monthly TV content, where Free ( paid by Tax or not ) OTA TV are the norm, and paid are mostly for Live Sports Content.
In US it seems you need "Cable" for everything.
Amazon did not take over online shopping because it had the lowest prices at any cost. It grew dominant because it was the everything store and any higher prices they charged were not higher enough to make it worth the time to comparison-shop or look for specialty retailers.
And your argument assumes that the shows you want are clustered into one of the providers. But what if you like one show from Netflix, one from Hulu, one from HBOMax, etc. You still have to pay for all the shows you don't care about from each of those providers. The different streaming services is roughly equivalent to the different channel bundles that cable companies offered before.
Sure, the streaming situation isn't any worse than cable was, but it could still be a lot better. Imagine if streaming services had to compete on the quality of the service itself instead of the content available on the network. If you are ok with ads if you get a lower price, use one service. If you are willing to pay more for 4K content for everything, use a different service, etc.
Also, the free-to-air reception in some parts of the UK is still so poor, you need cable or satellite to watch any TV at all.
My experience has been that old (black and white or otherwise) movies are hard to find now. Especially if you just want to watch it once and don't want to buy an old DVD or VHS.
https://www.filmstories.co.uk/features/talking-pictures-tv-t...
I can't fathom how someone can pay to streaming sites month after month unless they have quite a lot of stuff they want to watch.
A lot of people just can't be bothered tracking their usage over time of a bunch of services and keeping track of what lives where. I don't have a lot of services so it's not worth optimizing to save $10/month or something like that.
When we’re done talking about the quantity of movies, let’s talk about quality.
If an awesome movie goes to the cinema, like Twilight, you’ll be able to watch Werewolf on Netflix. With abysmal plot and acting. If you type Mission Impossible, you’ll certainly get Suits.
The search is so abysmal, always suggesting the same 40 series on and on, that people exchange numeric codes which allow them to discover new categories (but half the titles will be already seen). A/B testing probably shows that after seeing a title for 6 weeks and dodging it, you end up watching it, because, there’s only that.
It’s not that I don’t want to pay $40 a month for 4 services, it’s that even at that price, I still can’t watch the quality movies.
And let’s not even start with ideology-pushing in movies.
I don't do that with Discovery, Picard, Wandavision, etc, because they are available.
Then they completely cocked up Lower Decks and wouldn't take my money. Bittorrent to the rescue.
There is always competition.
Right, the copyright holders effectively get to dictate the price and prevent redistribution (how does someone resell their digital [non-physical] copy to me without running afoul of DMCA and the like?). It's not a normal market, and the MPAA and similar organizations have lobbied to dictate the market rules to funnel as much money as possible to them.
For example, copyright terms these days are absurdly long--70 years beyond the lifetime of the original author.
For example all Apple TV shows are full of Apple product placement every minute or so.
It's not something new, Disney creates most of their characters with merchandising in mind. Look at baby Yoda.
But it also goes deeper, when it aims to spread ideologies and behaviors.
Now that a James Bond villain write the show, I wonder who the bad guy will be.
They may try for that, but recent star wars is a merchandising disaster. Baby Yoda is the only real success with Cara Dune coming in second before they nuked that.
The laws take time, need to be tested in courts and are generally not as effective.
If you're constantly under threat of losing your entire income stream and there's nothing you can do to prevent that (because the only way to prevent piracy of digital content is to ban the internet) it's a pretty decent motivator to do the right thing.
Everyone could have stolen cable back in the day and caused a decrease in cable prices and increase in customer experience. They didn't.
No it isn't. It's a workaround. This is an 8 billion dollar deal, there would have to be an impossible amount of piracy for it to count as "competition." This is precisely the reason why government regulation here is correct, as consumers, we don't have a lever long enough to have any real impact on the core problem.
And we're just one side of the deal. These types of distribution setups are not just bad for consumers, but for actors, directors, producers and anyone who makes a living on any part of these productions.
The knee jerk responses to avoid meaningful government regulation are always baffling to me.
Amazon shouldn't be ten companies in one.
Google shouldn't be able to set web and mobile standards, then reap ad monies by forcing everyone to accept their anticompetitive changes.
Apple shouldn't be the sole guardian of iPlatform. You can't have a protection racket on 50% of all commerce (phones >> gaming consoles) and enforce what gets put on the device.
These companies don't have moats the size of an ocean. They have moats the size of a Schwarzschild radius, and they're sucking up everything in their path. Google, in particular, is being lazy as fuck because they don't have to actually do anything anymore.
Microsoft is literally the only tech giant behaving correctly, and it's probably because they got slapped with antitrust in the 2000s.
Competition is supposed to be good for the economy. These companies should have to try harder. The minute they no longer face existential risks, they become destructive.
Apparently, it's some kind of alias "feature" they added to Windows at some point. What legitimate reason is there for that if not to try and trick people into thinking they need to download the Microsoft Store version of Python (which probably includes analytics/telemetry not in a standard Python distribution)?
Google, Apple, etc are all shameless, anti-competitive monopolists. Anyone can see that because they make no attempts to hide what they're doing. Microsoft's intentions are exactly the same, but they're a lot sneakier about it because they've already been burned in the past for their bad behavior.
People who think the new Microsoft is different! because they released a free text editor and other open source projects are naive. Microsoft wants to lock you into their platforms and technologies like Apple, and wants to collect and monetize your personal data like Google.
The only way to get it to use my installed version was to disable that alias feature in the Windows 10 settings app.
Try it yourself.
It's a loophole so they don't have to ship Windows with a version of Python and then have to support it for how long that version of Windows will be supported. So instead the user gets it from the store (and it's upgraded via the store).
Same thing they did for years "Add or Remove features" where, to enable certain things they wouldn't bloat the base OS and made them optional download.
Are there any Windows 10 features that require Python?
Yes and no, it's frequently used as an intro language. I could see advanced users being annoyed by this but I'm not certain they are the target demographic.
(ETA: The other reason Microsoft is less than willing to include scripting languages out of the box is past bad experiences with WScript. Doing it a shortcut to the Store install actually is a decent compromise from the malware we'd possibly see if Python scripts worked out of the box in fresh Windows installs.)
Ask Slack if they agree. Microsoft used the dominance of Office to take over that market by bundling Teams.
The companies I worked at that had slack licenses still had teams using what they considered to be the best product. Slack, Hipchat (remember them?), and Zoom.
There's also more to it than 'bundling.' Trusting your chat communications to the same company doing your email is a more compelling story than sending it to Slack, Discord, or Zoom. There are a lot of companies that still don't trust 'the cloud' and then you've got governments all over the world and all of their regulations that may block the use of something else.
Their monopoly lawsuit behavior was different — the bundling of windows with forced IE was problematic (largely because windows was everything, and also IE being largely unrelated to the rest of the OS) but much more problematic was their OEM strategies, to enforce and maintain windows as the dominant OS.
Microsoft still hasn’t shut down Lynx yet.
Even companies that were all-in on Google for email, calendar, and documents went with (for example) Slack for chat and Zoom for meetings. Google has had multiple products in both categories for years! And yet somehow could not put together a compelling package the way Microsoft did with O365 + Teams seemingly overnight.
But from my perspective they acquire because they can't innovate internally.
Somehow this concept might be easier to explain by looking at the analogies from the military world. Of course the world would be a better place if we all destroyed all of our nuclear weapons. Does that mean that the US should lead by example and destroy all of our weapons first with no assurances that others will do the same? Of course not. We do this step by step, and only as much as we can trust and enforce through bilateral agreements. Well, military power is intrinsically linked to economic power, so it should be clear that we wouldn't want to cap our economic power by implementing rules that others don't have to follow. Of course, two notable exceptions are environmental concerns, and in the future likely also mental health concerns. But you can't just go crazy with imposing unreasonable limitations in those two areas (eg: requesting that every factory is only powered by renewable energy, while allowing Chinese companies to use whatever energy they want). The same thinking should apply to any limitations we want to invoke on protecting our mental health - we have to approach this step by step, rather than killing our domestic companies and handing over the market share to the foreign ones.
> or are you just shifting the balance of power from US companies to Chinese companies?
That's not going to happen. The biggest Chinese companies only exist because of stolen technology. This is a well documented fact. Tencent for example has this business model:
1) Identify trending games from competitors outside of China
2) Clone those games and release them internationally
3) Petition the Chinese government to block the game they cloned in China
Maybe in the short term they'll see some growth, but in the long-term innovation will always prevail.
If anything, breaking up these monopolies will lead to more innovation as the smart people working at Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will no longer be tied by the "golden handcuffs" and will be driven to build and experiment with new ideas and technologies, instead of spending their days working on ads or other money printing businesses that provide little value to society.
> If anything, breaking up these monopolies will lead to more innovation
Yes, let’s violate a company’s right to exist and conduct business just because we don’t like ads, or have preferences for how the run things. If you’re so concerned that they are not doing the right thing, then you go out and do it.
It is not really a right, so much as a practical privilege we have set up. As such they should be open to whatever democratic will of the people. If the people arbitrarily decide they can only have so much power or size, then so be it.
The entity sure, but beyond the entity you have a group of people who have created something and want to sell it to you. If the Democratic will of the people said that we should jail them for creating shows we don’t like, I’m sure you’d object. Just because the people will it doesn’t mean it is correct.
People have a right to get together and create things and sell them to you under a contract. You have the right to accept or refuse. That simple.
Our society is regulation drunk.
An almost definitional characteristic of company v. group as you describe.
So, yes, people may decide that we no longer want a certain type of companies. Heck, let's take it a step further - people may also decide that we want everyone to get a million dollars, no questions asked. But people are smarter than that, which is why we still have democracies.
[1] https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power...
The need of the society is to defend property rights and sustain the rule of law. Economic growth is good, but you can’t make it the top of your list. Besides, we are already awash in too much regulation as it is, we should be heading the other direction towards more liberty. I’m not saying there’s never a time for regulation, just that we are waaaay past the point of reason in many areas.
We may disagree on which is the cart and which is the horse. I think that in general you need a moral people who will enforce the rule of law to get economic growth, so the rule of law is the horse. And the horse’s horse is the morality of the people, something Weimar Germany was certainly lacking. Get those in order first and I think prosperity will follow. Try to put prosperity first, then it won’t matter what rule of law you have b/c the most important thing is to make money.
As a practical matter it may be bad policy. But, right it is not.
We can debate the origination of their know how just like we can debate the origination of Covid. But at the end of the day what matters are the results, and China demonstrated with Covid how much more successfully they were in execution than we were. That same scenario is being replayed in board rooms across the globe - the Chinese people are hungrier, work harder, and get results more quickly. Granted, there are still gaps in some areas, but the margins are shrinking every day.
> Maybe in the short term they'll see some growth, but in the long-term innovation will always prevail.
You are somehow implying that the Chinese people are fundamentally bad at innovation. That's neighboring on being a racist statement that you should take a moment to reflect on. Just like innovation is not limited to the Bay Area, it's not limited to the US either. The Bay Area did in fact produce a disproportional amount of breakthrough ideas in the past 50 years, but not because their residents are somehow genetically more superior to other parts of the country (and ironically, you might be surprised to find out just how many Chinese workers stand behind so many of those Bay Area companies). It happened because the infrastructure for ideas was there (lack of enforcement of non competes, high risk tolerance of financial backers, previous waves of successful founders sharing their know-how with young founders and pouring money into new startups, etc). The pandemic has removed the need for in-person meetings for fundraising, and suddenly we're seeing an even more pronounced decentralization of the Bay Area, which should prove that innovation is not tied by city, county, or country borders - it's tied by regulatory, educational, and financial constraints, all of which are rapidly improving in China.
Once this current wave of Chinese mega-successful companies cashes out, the next wave will be even stronger. It's only a matter of time until a suitable ecosystem forms in China that will give their people the right ingredients to kick our ass in innovation, on top of all the other things they are already kicking our ass in.
Those are your words, not mine.
I never said that Chinese people can’t innovate. My point was that Chinese companies don’t innovate, and if you wanted to have an adult discussion about it, I would’ve been happy to clarify for you why I believe that.
But I’m not going to entertain a discussion with someone that tries to support their argument by putting words in my mouth and suggesting I’m racist. A discussion with someone like that will go nowhere productive.
But you have to admit there's something about our folks being a bit too comfortable with the notion that the Chinese people won't catch up with us because we innovate and they don't. I see people justifying their beliefs in one of these two ways:
1. Focusing on barriers that supposedly exist in China today and will continue to exist forever. Something like: "their government will always force them to do things in a certain way", or "the lack of regulatory framework invites bad behavior and doesn't instill the discipline required to be creative," etc.
2. Focusing on the idea of American Exceptionalism - essentially, it doesn't matter what China does now or in the future, we're always going to be a few steps ahead because of the most unusual events that have led to the formation of our country, our political system, our culture and values, and our inherent will to be the global leaders and ambassadors.
I would be curious to hear what your thoughts are. In my mind, as I laid out above, innovation is not a privilege bestowed upon any one location or nationality, but instead a byproduct of regulatory, educational, and financial ingredients all coming together and unblocking barriers to creativity. All of those elements are changing in China very rapidly, and all of them are moving in the "right" direction.
So for your statement "Maybe in the short term they'll see some growth, but in the long-term innovation will always prevail" to ring true to me, I would have to be convinced that we somehow have a defensible advantage in one of those three elements, and that this barrier will stand the test of time. Because I think we're both agreeing on the notion that there's nothing fundamentally special about us and our raw capabilities compared to theirs.
Anti-trust is good, and keeps them in check.
I remember Verizon controlling what OS version was installed and what firmware and what updates were even supported by them.
Remember when Cell Service providers charged us PER SMS text?
I do.
Compared to Amazon, Google, & Apple, Microsoft's is incredibly litigious when it comes to licensing their products. It can seem baffling that most other tech company grants access to what you are licensed to use but Microsoft, perhaps deliberately, makes their licensing confusing and imprecise. Since not everything that requires a license is enforced via software, you can pretty easily be breaking their licensing rules.
Additionally, Microsoft products are deeply entrenched business best practices and auditor requirements:
Use Windows? Pay for it. Need centralized antivirus for your organization? Pay for it. Need to enforce MFA for Windows accounts? Pay extra for it. Use Linux? Aren't you glad that Windows Defender supports it? And yea pay more for it.
Meanwhile Office 365 is a mess compared to AWS. Maybe Azure is better but it's still obvious that Microsoft uses its dominance in the OS space to pander more products to service its own OS which means they have no incentive to actually make Windows easy to manage.
Microsoft buying up the good will of developers is just an extra twist of the knife.
Sure, but it's a trivially easy workaround.
Our focus of attention on matters of regulation ought to be in those areas where working around the problem is not nearly as dead simple as a torrent client, a NAS, and a Plex server.
I'm a computer geek, and I'm LONG past the point where setting up safe VMs and signing up to half a dozen services like newsgroup server and directories and search engines and what nots, download software with impossible names like sabnzbd (I'm waiting up for somebody to scream how nobody uses sabnzbd anymore, it's been replaced by jidwiaj and iqerqip, which are super easy, and that just proves my point:P), setup my own webservers that talk to themselves internally so my downloader would work with my cataloguer that would work with the sorter that talks to the video player, figuring out a VPN to keep me somewhat safe while introducing a whole 'nother threat vector... gawd I get a headache just thinking about it. And I end up paying the same as I would for 2-4 monthly legit services. And then my wife wants to watch this movie that's just come out and I download eight versions of it but four are fake and two have hieroglyphic subtitles in three languages baked into video stream and take up half the screen. And then it stops half way through. And then I'm on a business trip (remember those? hah!) and my family wants to watch something and now I have to spend 47 minutes on the phone trying to guide her on how to do that before we all quit in frustration.
My few friends who still do that try to get me back on board, and their "quick & easy explanation on how to do it because it's so easy now" is still three pages long, while skipping 70% of crucial steps & detail.
Just, NO. Whoever thinks piracy is "trivially easy" has a very specific mindset (Hey, it's OK, I used to as well...!), and lacks empathy for those with different mindset/circumstances/skills/priorities... who happen to make up the clear majority of public.
I have been using that same setup for… 10+ years? With BiglyBT replacing Vuze after Vuze was purchased and turned in to garbage.
I say this as someone who's setup sonarr, radarr, bazaar, nzbget, usenet priorities, indexers, ombi, etc, which eliminates most maintenance and labor. Stuff can still break, quotas run out, and I want market options.
If I could pay to watch British panel shows, and everything else I want to watch from where I reside, I would do so.
At what point does the daily time savings from having a unified view into all the world’s media outweigh the initial time cost of setting it up? It surely varies by person. Personally, spending one day setting up a media server is a far better experience than spending 5 minutes every #%$!ng night searching for some show on all these platforms and still not finding it.
Where is it complex? Most VPN providers these days provide a one-click solution to connect your devices to a VPN.
This eliminates exposing your IP from torrents and the file being downloaded.
For a site like HN, I'm really surprised at this discussion.
You don't need that. At least, I don't.
> a torrent client
All good operating systems (i.e. Linux) come with one. Though obviously most non-technical people don't use Linux.
> a browser
Pretty much standard on everything.
> an internet connection
Which they would be using anyway for streaming services.
> Most tv's nowadays are smart enough
Aaagh! Don't use "smart" TVs!
This response is the perfect example exactly what the OP was talking about.
Smart TVs are great. Click a button, see the show you want.
Like, what even is all that other stuff?
And it doesn't even require a desktop / laptop. It's possible to use your seedbox to torrent, then download it to your phone, and then cast it from your phone.
The one thing I do have to futz with are subtitles. It's usually easy, but fails every now and then.
2. Pay $5-$10/month for a seedbox that pre-hosts rTorrent. Zero configuration. It will give you a web address, you visit it, and boom, torrent client.
Wait, should I pay for it in Bitcoin? I mean, you can. But you don't have to. It literally doesn't matter. No one gets caught doing it this way, unless you're a real Whale.
3. Go to {any-number-of-piracy-websites-even-that-one-everyone-knows-about-yeah-it-still-exists-and-its-fine}.com
4. Download torrent -> Upload into your rTorrent
You can, alternatively, skip all of that, pay for NordVPN or whatever, and just use your favorite local torrent client. Same thing.
A whole 3 pages, to be sure. I've got friends who wouldn't know a Mac from a PC, and they still pirate all the latest movies. Its startlingly easy. Experientially, there's near-zero risk of getting caught. It hasn't changed even a millimeter in a decade. Its the same process we all used back in middle school (or, you know, wherever you were ten years ago). Its just gotten cheaper, and also less interesting because of the Golden Days of streaming, but I think it'll come back if streaming continues splintering as it has.
1. Download Popcorn Time.
2. Watch pirated content.
Then as a computer geek you don't seem to be aware about the modern tools to do that.
My whole point is that Netflix is fire and forget. Piracy is not only a complex install and a security threat, you also have the cognitive and time load of keeping up, learning about and reinstalling / reconfiguring new stuff all the time... I deal with sysadmin all day at work, at home, sometimes I just want to watch stuff - and certainly my family does.
Some people get pleasure out of mowing the lawn, some people get pleasure of endlessly reconfiguring their home lab - I was one of those for 25 years, but! It's crucial to recognize that's a minority.
I've read all the comments, and they're helpful, illuminating, insightful, and I've learned a lot (genuinely).
But overall they did not change and rather enforced my perspective:
1. the "Easy, out of the box, set-it-and-forget-it, everybody knows this" method to safely and easily to this seems to still change every 6-12 months, and still doesn't compare to convenience of just pushing a button on Netflix.
2. Paying for VPNs or Seedboxes etc easily equals the cost of a "just works" streaming service, while incurring new and exciting security & privacy threat vectors.
3. Most importantly, they don't take into account on what I will put forward is the actual mainstream public scenario: family that just wants to watch stuff . Between spouse who cannot be bothered with three remotes and two computer keyboards and six devices and 7 steps to watch something they could otherwise just stream on their phone, parent-in-law who wants to watch NBA/NHS/Soccer/Whatever reliably and in real time with no interruptions, kids who want to watch Paw Patrol safely now now now, all of this at the same time and all of them expecting six nines reliability and utter convenience across all their devices all the time always.
I'm off that particular wagon train, and if that makes me less of a computer geek, then so be it :-)
Piracy can have many reasons behind it, including just not wanting to pay for things in general. And it’s easy for companies to dismiss as just an expense to manage, like shoplifting (“loss”) in the retail channel.
At several points the studios had the upper hand which meant that actors would only appear in a single studio's films. When more regulation freed actors from those types of contracts then celebrity actors were the major selling point. And for a while individual directors had a lot of power including final cut privileges which is why older in the 80s often had a theatrical release and a directors cut.
It seems that overall we are moving back towards studio control as single companies once again control production and distribution. For the most part this has worked out OK since most of these companies (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) were actually competing with the 'legacy' studios. However, now that major consolidation has taken place including the growth of Disney, etc; we are likely to see the industry and content itself shift to meet their interests. You can already see that, outside of small players and foreign sources, most studios focus on single annual big budget films marketed to an international audience (read: US & China). Just look at the top 20 films from 2015 vs 1995 vs 1985.
[2015] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls073655785/ [1995] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls057887703/ [1985] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls057991323/
That's similar to saying that stealing candy bars is a meaninful consumer response to high prices at convenience stores.
DMCA/etc vastly favors content owners who also lobby hard to maintain their ownership by extending copyright and similar protections.
Anti-competitive behavior must be countered but unless it's well funded and focused will end up like the IRS and DMCA today, going after small fish due to lack of resources to challenge those that can afford to fight like players as big as Amazon and MGM.
There's nothing stopping production companies from producing content, if it's compelling enough they'll still be able to license it out to the big players.
When everything's online the primary drawcard to different video subscriptions is exclusive content, which the giants are funding the production of themselves. Can't see how you could impose a law banning them from producing their own content, if they did and all content is licensed to everyone, there will be nothing distinguishing the different services.
How do you see this playing out when there have been so many big investments by traditional players to put forward new streaming services?
The major players went from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and have now added Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Paramount+, with more on the way.
Untangling all the licensing deals is quite confusing as well and starts to get into the innards of production. I always associate Friends and Seinfeld with NBC, yet they aren't on Peacock, they're on HBO Max and Hulu, respectively. That and content shifting from one platform to another constantly, makes the web even more confusing and it's hard to determine which services you really want.
Now you can search for what you want to watch, follow the prompts, and it shows you the price, and you agree or disagree. And then you cancel if you do not want it anymore. Some of the purchasing flows can surely use more work, but it’s leagues better than it used to be.
But it's definitely still structured to kinda slightly force your hand towards a subscribtion, and then towards maybe forgetting to cancel it in a couple weeks etc.
The major players I expect to be around after the streaming wars ends is: Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple. I expect most of the other platforms are going to end up as premium channels that you can subscribe to and watch on the other platforms, which you can do already in AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime.
HBO and Hulu will be around as long as they have exclusive content they can't stream on other platforms. I don't expect HBO's content & licensing strategy of limiting it to higher margin cable services will last. In Australia you can only watch HBO through Foxtel which I'll never do, basically anything that's not accessible from Netflix, Prime, Disney+ or AppleTV+ doesn't exist for us.
If the platforms were banned from producing their own content I expect it would dramatically favor platform owners like AppleTV+ where most iOS users would use to watch their content on as they can do now. Owning the UX would make them like Amazon.com storefront for 3rd party sellers, giving them unilateral power over the discovery of content, e.g. over time they could favor their own content, which is behavior I'd expect from Amazon, for Apple I think they'd be happy to just own the streaming platform as another lock-in & drawcard for iOS users.
Pricing and UX?
But even though some companies are incapable of making good UIs, UX isn’t much of a moat.
At the same time, differentiation through pricing leads to races to the bottom and unsustainable / worthless markets (and, in our case, probably diminishing content quality).
Major personal gripes:
1. No watch history. Have to visit the web, dig into account settings to view it, having to click through 5 items at a time!
2. Content added to your list is displayed randomly, not by date added. No option to sort with various standard parameters such as aforementioned date added, popularity, year released, genre, etc.
3. Licensed content disappearing with not so much as a "we know you saved this to watch at some point but it's no longer available". Instead you're left second guessing yourself as to whether you suffer from dementia or not. (I get the business aspect of this, but still!)
4. Suggests content you've already watched and/or rated multiple times. At times recommends said show or movie immediately after watching/rating it.
5. Originals have trailers. Other content sometimes has trailers but most licensed content does not despite said trailers being available elsewhere for free. Most (all?) content used to show trailers but that's recently changed. (My guess is trailers convert better so you're more likely to watch original content)
6. No ratings history. Tangential to #1 I guess.
7. Can't click through to 'Coming Soon' titles to explore synopsis, trailers, cast, etc. Even for shows with prior seasons available; have to first search to access. To exasperate frustration, releasing soon titles are shown in searches where you can't do anything besides stare at a thumbnail.
Pretty sure I have other issues with their UX but these are the most irritating.
Broke up recently. What do I do with my former girlfriend’s profile?
Delete it and make her loose her watchlist and where she was in some shows?
Keep it and get that awkward moment when I invite someone over and we want to watch something?
Give her my account and lose my profile?
Ridiculous
We will complain about it, mock it, but rare are those willing to pay more for it (or even merely change products), unless the advantage is significant (ie Netflix vs P2P & streaming websites)
Regarding Netflix, honestly, their UX is a mess.
I've no skin in the game, really, except that I do love film and I hope good films are increasingly made.
It's not as if those films or productions are requisite viewing. It's casual entertainment or philosophy. I'm not sure what the pressing concern there is.
Amazon, however, is a different beast and should probably be broken up to some degree for other reasons—not this one.
It's definitely a streaming service arms race, though.
The funniest thing of course is I bet the studios would make more money than trying to charge me $4.99 to rent movies and absurd sums to "buy" them...
Last night was one of those nights. We settled in a bit early for TV (minor celebration) and decided we had time to re-watch a movie, and our kid-still-at-home would join us. But we couldn't get it and ended up watching some junk (background while we talked mainly) and, of course, losing the kid's interest.
The alternative was to try to call CS and spend perhaps an hour troubleshooting.
If, however, we owned our own physical copy we could have watched it.
My evening, crippled by tech failures of the vendor, and no recourse for compensation for loss of use or our time.
Sounds like you need to go and produce some content and distribute it this way to show the world the way to englightenment. Please come back and post a Show HN on how well it worked out for you.
It's like...$1 for a DRM-free song right now, and tbh that's not unfair.
Even if I could buy movies DRM-free right now for $10, older movies for $5, that'd be fair; I think. :)
That was actually the situation early on with videotape. The price of the tapes was set at something like $100 to make more money (indirectly) by renting because the rental stores had to pay a much higher price.
Over time, tapes started also being "priced to buy" (often things like Disney animation that kids would want to watch over and over again). Eventually, I think pretty much everything became priced to buy.
Are we not currently living in a content golden age? Is there any measure of quality and quantity now vs the past? It feels like there's a new amazing mini series and movie and show every week.
This is a massive opportunity for someone to do what iTunes did to music and what Spotify did after. It just might end up being Amazon...
Really? Have you enjoyed the drek that has been released over the past decade? HBO started the bucking of the system, F/X and A&E followed. But since they were cable ops, I guess they get a pass? When Netflix started producing and pushed everyone's game, content started getting so much more interesting. Obviously, Amazon/Apple followed. I'm waiting for Google to get involved so we can have a full FAANG entertainment.
All of the Paramounts/WBs want to do is take the one franchise and squeeze every drop from it with endless sequels to the point I have completely lost any interest in explosions, cars, and super heroes.
I have a Roku and Samsung SmartOS TV. The only independent playback experiences that come close to Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount+ in my limited experience are Plex, Apple TV, and for legacy stuff, TiVo.
I'll take this weird world of locked-in distribution channels for a few years while innovation progresses, and hope Plex and Apple TV win once innovation stops.
If there was some kind of anti-trust to go on with streaming sources it might be more likely to be about something like Amazon only having its content on Fire devices or forcing Roku to only have Amazon content and not Netflix or something.
On the contrary: stop trying to use the law for everything!
Such strategy works a million times better than the horror of copyright law.
The companies should be free to do it, and it's awful that someone wants to involve the force of the state to stop them from doing so, instead of seeing it as a way to get rid of the burden of copyright law to society.
too bad it's not about making better stuff but more profit.
it's like the market has been distorted out of its ability to better reward better stuff.
Why though? I wasn’t aware these laws exist(ed). Why are they needed?
Seriously though, who cares? It's just mindless time wasting entertainment. It's an art form who's time is rapidly passing.
Let's get back to doing things together, like live music, any kind of hobby, just anything other than watching moving pictures.
[1] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0415312612?psc=1&ref=ppx_po...
EDIT: one of the Amazon reviews gave a very good summary of the above point:
One of the more interesting conclusions is that the old movie studio system understood implicitly that this business was unpredictable. Until the antitrust laws were used to break them up, the studios contracted stars, script writers, directors, distribution networks and movie theaters in order to own the entire stream of revenues all their movies would generate.
This way the old studio bosses could diversify their risk in what was essentially a portfolio of movies. They knew that they could not predict which of their films would be a hit so they insisted on owning them all and on managing costs so that the hits would pay for the turkeys, while leaving shareholders with a healthy return.
At the same time, movie theatres ceased to be these lavish 'palaces'. So what 'going to the movies' meant shifted in consumers' minds. Film productions also shrunk in size and scale so there is that. I would assume the business side actually deteriorated while cultural relevance rose. Probably not everyone on the consumer side was happy with all of that.
If we're talking about that studio era though, these portfolios of movies being managed from the top definitely made films bland and predictable. But then on the other hand they also forced the talent to hone skill through repetition. So you had some specific aspects of the films being executed on a high polished level like the noir cinematography. I'm feeling/seeing something similar going on right now with the VOD offering. Even though it's all really well produced and shot and put together, I just sense everyone is following the same seemingly risque but safe playbook optimized for social media marketing.
Seen in another way, the internet aspect of these distribution systems really can make all of the above completely irrelevant too. I find my satisfaction with MUBI and weird niche shit on YouTube. A piece of my money still goes toward partially paying for the very same infrastructure. As someone else mentioned here already - I'm not physically limited from seeking what I want to find online, and it's all there side by side for me to view. This was not at all the case in the 1950's.
In my mind one thing is certain, and this is just my take - I don't really want to watch a James Bond that has been developed by a goofy logistics e-commerce corporate giant. I just really don't see it.
Interesting. I was entirely unaware of that history. I was always impressed by Michael Ovitz's bundling play at CAA. Seems like he in fact "just" rebundled what he could at the agency level.
Currently the best catalog is with illegal streaming services and BitTorrent VOD and (for the cost of VPN).
Netflix, Apple TV, etc are broadcasters and crunchyroll is thematic.
Today, you can get Peacock and Paramount+ and Disney+, etc on virtually any device. Even Apple, who has been historically resistant to distribution on other devices has Apple+ on Roku and Amazon devices
Because antitrust favors impact on consumers, I doubt we’ll see any substantial legislation is this space.
I do have my hopes on some sort of anti-trust regulation, but it's not going to be focused on film - it's going to be all about software and gaming.
Forcing this would also have many downsides:
- if you make content that others don't want to distribute, are you not allowed to distribute it yourself? Freedom to publish whatever you want feels very valuable for society, IMHO.
- costs for consumers might rise because you now have two sets of costs priced in, instead of one set of costs.
- It's harder to launch new companies. If content providers don't want to work with you as a distributor when you're small, it's hard to get off the ground. If distributors don't want to work with you because your content is unproven, it's hard to get off the ground. Etc.
- I don't see the sets of costs argument - any price is made up of infinite sub-costs. You buy a carton of milk, it came from a distributor who bought it from a wholesaler, who got it from a carton plant and so on and so forth. At each step of the way someone verified the quality to ensure reputation. In a vertical corp quality control can be difficult.
- The opposite - easier to launch new companies. This is already how it is in places like Europe. No problem to sign 'distribution' deals, and no problem in seeking 'distributors' if you have the content. What's more a ton of other types of incentives make it easier to start new efforts.
I don't think you understand that mostly, this is how it all already works, by itself. That's the whole point of a 'free market'. Until Amazon rolls into town and starts buying everybody up and integrating it all into something else.
We have those laws for cars and beer and they are considered ongoing disasters. Why are films different?
https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...
Or the TV business throughout all of TV history. You know, if you want to see an HBO show, you can only watch it on HBO. If you want to watch _new+ episodes of Seinfeld, you have to watch it on NBC.
If you think to today's U.S. government would willingly choose to fight the U.S. vs Paramount battle again, you'll probably be disappointed. They're far more likely to close libraries.
My impression buying a historical piece of the entertainment industries is a lot like buying a company with large patent portfolio. No one knows whether the buyer is going to use the pieces "offensively" to cut off the rights of others or "defensively", to get leverage for cross licenses and so-forth.
Why? We’re not talking about food, water or the environment. There is where laws should be enacted or enforced.
This is a classic 'culture is not important, doesn't matter' line of thinking. Cultural products influence people a great deal. Especially when they are young.
If monopoly power is influencing culture, the way it can with any industry by incentivizing low-quality or bad pricing, then it should be to some extent over-seen.
Culture is important and so is entertainment but the later is not always the former, and none is vital. There’s plenty of unmonopolized cultural options and one could even argue that much more benefiting than big blockbusters, it’s like worrying that pizza hut would monopolize the pizza market and losing nutritional values in the community.
It’s an interesting phenomenon, not necessarily something to be “worried” about.
If a problem is worth the Jeff/Andy's personal attention, it's worth spending $8bn on.
I'm a broken record but, current equity prices and financial climate generally makes massive consolidation very likely. Antitrust, or fear of is the only restraint... and it is not very restraining.
Unless Apple & Google are going to start issuing dividends/buybacks on an epic scale (doesn't seem likely), they have no way to put cash they have to work (besides vanguard/bitcoin). Google would need to do 10 Waymos (in for about $20bn so far) simultaneously, to invest what they need to invest on internal projects, but even their one Waymo is dubious. Acquisition is the only remaining option.
Consider that these companies can currently afford to buy whole industries outright, perhaps without involving a bank. Does Waymo need a friend? Why not buy it Ford & GM? Anything outside the S&P 10 is a snack. They literally have cash enough for both lying around... and these deals are never all cash.
5 more years on the current trajectory, and the VOC/EIC days will look quaint.
They could also, in theory, build schools in central africa. They could even pay their taxes. I think acquisitions are more likely though.
Greed is a very human emotion, corporations are like very powerful sociopaths. No-emotion machines that optimize for a single end goal (shareholder money) within the given ruleset: the law.
(Or more realistically whatever they can get away with while still turning profit, ie profit is greater than whatever the repercussions cost).
As parent said, corporations are restricted only by the market and by the legal system, so it’s up to the voters to implement effective taxes and rules as needed
The actual people have no say whatsoever.
Because that's what this Princeton study found: https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem
We live in a plutarchy disguised as a constitutional democracy sold to its employee-citizens as a democracy.
My coworked compared it to the Dogecoin marketcap of $44b... kinda puts things in perspective.
You might as well calculate the market cap of baseball cards.
It's just not the right way to measure the worth of a crypto.
Put another way, if Doge owners decided to collectively sell it would be worth 0.
Sure companies valuation are backed by revenue and profit numbers unlike crypto.
However the multiples both these companies trade at along with the way Amazon treats "profit" their dividend habits means no buyer can actually recoup the investment by means of profits generated in a reasonable investment window.
The only way to make actual money with these stock is to sell it even higher not that different from crypto.
Look at last 2 years of the stock market even ignoring GME/AMC there seem to very little correlation with the actual numbers for these companies.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/tech-giants-have-ramped-up-...
Apple recently $77B in buybacks, Alphabet $8.5B, Facebook $3.9B
The Alphabet & FB buybacks represent about 5% of those companies' cash reserves... not enough to change anything. Apple have $200bn, though I'm not sure if this is net or gross of the buyback.
I think of these buybacks more as supporting evidence to what I said previously. There is a hell of a lot of "what are you going to do with all this cash" pressure on these companies.
That said $77bn (I've seen $90bn reported) is a truly stupendous sum. Has there ever been a buyback at this scale?
https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/...
At $77B, that buyback program amounts to a $300m bid for Apple stock every trading day....much to the delight of executives whose compensation is tied to share price performance.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/apple-ceo-tim-cook-receives-...
That $77B that is now returned to shareholders can be spent on whatever those shareholders want. It isn't really Apple's money to begin with... kind of the issue with being a public company. Unless of course its shareholders would look at that investment as sound, which might be a stretch given Apple's lack of background in any of those fields (maybe carbon capture given they have a great understanding of their supply chain and could already be thinking of ways to reduce their energy impact)
Well, 85% of the $77 billion, anyway.
Apple and its shareholders are the same entity when discussing “whose” money it is. If shareholders want it used to do buybacks, they vote for company leadership to do that. If they want dividends, they vote for company leadership to do that. If they want to invest in travel to Mars, they vote for leadership to do that.
Saying Apple’s money belongs to shareholders is a meaningless statement. It belongs to the collection of shareholders as a whole, who have opted to elect in leaders to decide how to spend it.
Only if there is an option to do that.
I'm perplexed how the final price isn't a lot higher due to a potential bidding war between all the streaming giants. Even Netflix would benefit - if anything to force competitors to pay more.
There’s not much “forward looking” IP of value tied to MGM except the Bond franchise, and it sounds like the Broccoli’s aren’t giving up control of that in this deal.
It took several deals for Disney to line up MCU fully. They spent a lot on Pixar, star wars and MCU , fox acquisitions to become the force they are today.
Without these acquisitions, Disney would also be largely a back catalog like MGM being sold today .
The theory is that sum of the properties are worth more than each individually.
In real business culture, there is an imputis (especially for tech companies) to "maKe money work." If their best investment is other companies' bonds, they should (again, in theory) just return cash to investors who can buy the bonds themselves.
More importantly, The ability to reinvest profitably is a sign of horizon, at least traditionally.
I stress "in theory," because theory is a long way from practice when it comes to modern tech giants. The theory is financial theory... how companies are financed. In theory, equity investment is a way of financing companies. Google and Facebook did not need to be financed by the time they became publicly traded. They never had debt. Software companies don't require capital investment to expand, like a theoretical "firm" does. In practice, public markets have no role in financing companies per se, they're only there to provide liquidity.
This is what they're effectively doing, in practice. AAPL has conducted ~$500B in share buybacks since the commencement of their buyback program in 2013. Their current cash and cash equivalents sits at ~$200B.
So, one could say that of the $700B AAPl could have returned to shareholders, it returned $500B (or most of it).
Nothing is really returned to shareholders. Shareholders own that money (as they own all Apple's assets) before the buyback. After the buyback, they no longer own the money... but share value has (in theory) not changed because it now represents a larger portion of this smaller asset.
Was there another offer for slightly less than $8.45B? What kind of thinking would lead them to that figure, rather than a different one?
Apple could have built the most incredible semiconductor mega-hub in the world with the money it spent on dividends and buybacks in the past decade.
In-house R&D is still a thing. Capital expenditure is still a thing. Pay raises for rank-and-file staff are still a thing. Please don't suggest that acquisitions, buybacks, and dividends are the only ways for Apple and Google to put their free cash flow to work.
Not to mention that both companies carry debt.
Meanwhile, besides search, most of their big successes were acquisitions: adwords, youtube, android, docs... all acquisitions at core. All extremely cheap, in retrospect.
Tesla joining the elite "tech company" ranks has made for some good juxtaposition. They are a "textbook" company, because the textbook more or less assumes that firm = manufacturing. The way they were financed (pre-insanity equity markets), the way they consume capital, etc. Apple, Alphabet, FB, etc aren't like this.
^if
I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Hopefully any future Stargate revival will have the budget and writing it deserves. I would spend $20/month for the rest of my life to get a season of high budget Stargate with decent writing each year. I'm sure there is a million other fans are willing and able to pay a similar amount.
Also strongly recommend binging the first season in particular; they did a very good job of conveying the feeling of humans blundering about not really knowing what they are doing in the big new universe, and it really comes across when watched relatively quickly on top of each other. It is reasonable that as the seasons rolled on and they got their bearings this toned down in favor of other plot lines, but I think this is one of the more unusual tones in sci fi that a show managed to successfully convey. Enterprise really whiffed on this, in my opinion. (They should have had a first season more like SG-1's first season and saved the "temporal cold war" plot arc for later. Or perhaps even not at all. That would have been OK too. There are a couple of episodes that convey this sense but not enough to hold the tone IMHO.)
Also, if you are starting out, I kinda recommend the Stargate movie first... it isn't strictly speaking necessary but it will contextualize some things, even though it's only sorta half in the continuity with SG-1. But I will say that if you kinda dislike it, continue on to SG-1 anyhow. In my opinion it's a big step up in a lot of ways.
It sets up the stories to come, even if some of it borderline contradicts SG-1. The characters that go from the movie to the TV show are much more likable in the TV show.
If you watch the first and last season of SG1, the writing has its footing nailed down immediately. Not many shows find their footing so effortlessly.
I don't have a source handy, but I recall reading about that many years ago.
Thanks for pointing this out. Watched the movie as a kid, didn’t like it, and thus never even bothered to check out the tv series.
(Also as mentioned elsewhere in the thread the third episode is pretty weak.)
(Some versions may have a quite literally gratuitous nudity scene in the first episode. Apparently Showtime demanded one, but a bit bizarrely, left them alone after that and that's the last such thing in the series. I suppose in this era of Game of Thrones this will seem less bizarre than it may have at the time, but it is worth pointing out this is a one-off. So if that happens to be the only reason you like SG-1's first episode, you can stop. :) )
But then I watched Deep Space Nine, and wow. I got hooked. I "only" watched about 80 episodes that are the plot arc + a few outstanding solos, but still. The quality of the acting, the more "on the nose" social messaging, the darker side of the Federation, the racial struggles between the crew - if I hear anyone make fun of DS9, I send them on their way (which doesn't happen much like it did in the 00's).
I have some friends who liked SG-1 as kids, maybe I should take the time to watch it. But it can't be better than Battlestar Galactica :)
One thing I've never enjoyed about Star Trek is how the Enterprise/DS9/Voyager and its crew are the ones that always save the day/week/universe.
I've never watched Stargate, but I do know that occasionally the show shows other exploration teams enter/exit the gate. Does the franchise go further than that, and implicitly/explicitly state that the Stargate team that the show focuses on is just one of many doing comparably cool things?
Where it feels more believable/acceptable than Star Trek is:
- SG-1 being special is at least somewhat justified. It's the first team Stargate Command sent through the gate (after the events of the original movie), so they got to be the first to make new friends and enemies.
- The show constantly reminds you about existence of increasing amount of other teams, through namedropping, discussing them, showing them, or showing multi-team missions. While SG-1 may be the tip of the spear, you know that SG-2 through SG-whocankeeptrack are following close behind.
- Unlike in Star Trek, in Stargate, humans start having no idea what they're doing. Quite often, it's them who need to be saved by more powerful forces, whether aliens or institutions.
Stargate: Atlantis starts with a focus on wider cast - so the gate missions are more fluid, you don't care much about who's assigned to which gate team on any given day. The whole ensemble of characters work similarly to a Star Trek series crew. But it makes sense for the same reason most of ST:Voyager made sense: Atlantis expedition is very far away from Earth, alone and with (at least initially) no backup.
While TNG is idealistic and more or less wholesome, SG1 definitely lines up with DS9 in that it's more real/gritty yet still has all the hope, fun, morals, ethics, etc.
And the evolution of the replicants... that was a complicated adversary.
Also, golfing through the Stargate.
Hammond: "Colonel, the United States is not in the business of interfering in other people's affairs."
O'Neill: (incredulous pause) "Since when?"
And who can forget Carter beating the crap out of a Mongol warlord to prove women are equals?
I remember being struck by a scene that was (I believe?) pretty early in the series where Sam's about to fight some guy hand to hand; Jack protests this (but not in a way that makes it clear whether he thinks a woman shouldn't do it or if he's just unsure of her fighting skill), but once getting told what level she had trained to he immediately backs off.
It gave me (who was at most 13 years old I think) the impression of what good respect between the sexes should look like.
I could also be mis-remembering this because it's been a really long time though.
Good show.
I envy you, I wish I could forget everything about the show, so that I could experience it fresh again. Having watched it end-to-end 3+ times over the past decade, it's burned hard into my brain.
It does have its dumb moments though. Basically anything involving real-world weapons or explosives. There were also a few weak seasons in the middle, and it’s pretty obvious the main cast started phoning it in around season 5. But on the whole I agree, it’s one of the best Sci Fi shows ever made and absolutely belongs with the best of Trek.
That one surprised me (positively) when I noticed it. Particularly when I binge-watched it end-to-end and saw how the cellphones evolve across the show.
> Basically anything involving real-world weapons or explosives
You're telling me that P90 is not the weapon to save the galaxy?
Except for that season where the prop shop couldn’t find P90 ammo, so they switched to an AR pistol.
General Hammond: How long will it take to fix the Stargate?
Technician: It'll be about 24 hours sir
Hammond: You have 12 hours
Technician. Sir, that's not how this works... it'll take about 24 hours
Hammond: Oh, okay then
>Carter: We just passed -40 degrees > >Jackson: Farenheit or Celsius? > >Mitchell: At that temperature they're the same
SG-1 was my therapy during my worst years. I don't think I'd have gone through that period as well as I did, if it weren't for the mix of laughter and seriousness every episode of this show offered.
And what I love about it, SG-1 pulls it off. It's a serious show that's also very genre-savvy and full of quality gags. I haven't seen any other media product, sci-fi or otherwise, that managed to get this mix of opposites to work.
(It's all nicely balanced, except that one time in Season 7 where you thought you're watching a joke episode, until the sudden change of tone punches you in the head, and you're left emotionally spinning and wondering what the hell did just happen. The two-parter I'm referring to, "Heroes", is a masterpiece. This kind of thing works only once - and fortunately, the producers were smart enough to not try it again.)
EDIT: VAGUE REFERENCES TO SPOILERS BELOW
Like the rocks falling was filmed in such a way as to be the least emotionally impactful to the viewer. I don't think they could have done anything more than they did to make it un-emotional. It is incredibly bizarre.
Season 4 follows book 4, whereas previous seasons split the books in a non-typical fashion: e.g., S02E05 ("Home") was the end of book 1. Book 4 is also part of the second kind-of-trilogy and so is a bit slower paced, because it set ups the next two books.
This isn't really Amazon's fault: it's from the original content.
I had to stop reading halfway through book 5 because I couldn’t take the heavy use of cliched language and tropes. The books are a great story at the macro level, but the writing is pretty terrible, especially as the series goes on.
That's perhaps because it's the first, and to date the most detailed, exploration of the aliens and their technology, which to me is the most interesting part (after Earth-Mars politics).
But then, I'm the weird guy who thinks character development is overrated, and reads sci-fi for the ideas.
There are some cliches and flaws, of course. My least favorite part is probably how non-permanent deaths were, they really overdid the whole thing with characters dying and coming back to life, or being cloned.
I'm surprised that Stargate has had some sort of franchise curse where other media never succeed. They had two more shows in the franchise (I'm in the minority that loved Universe, and I think Atlantis was for the most part bad), but never a movie aside from the one that started the franchise, never a game that succeeded (most attempts failed to even ship).
As for franchising into other media... there's a brand new tabletop role-playing game that'll be launching later this year. I wonder how the Amazon deal will affect it.
Ooh, I _really_ enjoyed SGU. Granted, it was the kind of show that I had to try watching once, give up on, then rewatch years later during to really appreciate. It's fairly different from SG1 and SGA, but in my (humble) opinion, it's really good and I'm sad that it ended so quickly. It reminds me a bit of Lost In Space (the movie, not the relatively new tv series- I've only seen half the pilot so I can't make a comparison) but in the Stargate universe.
Universe was really cool. They made some critical mistakes early that made it hard to see where the show could go, but the last season was so good and setup some cool stuff just to never get the opportunity to explain it. Rush getting control of Destiny so early really messed up the pacing of the show imo, but I would have loved to see the show continue.
Universe was great in my book. Detractors say it's like Stargate trying to be Battlestar Galactica, but BSG is easily my favorite sci-fi show so I actually liked that. Universe did make some mistakes early on, but the second season was great, I enjoyed Dr Rush as a very non-Stargate style main character, and I enjoyed how Universe had a completely different take on aliens, keeping them mysterious.
Ultimately that's one show though. Amazon have spent BIG on some of their series. The Grand Tour had an enormous, enormous budget compared to Top Gear. They are spending Game of Thrones money on Wheel of Time.
I was less thrilled with Atlantis, and thought Universe was completely horrible. Let's not even acknowledge the existence of "Origins".
I do hope Amazon will be good stewards of the franchise going forward. I don't want them to make new content only for it to be dark, gritty, drama-heavy, and politicised the way much of modern "entertainment" has become.
Maybe we'll even get a few good Stargate video games out of this! So many lost opportunities on the gaming front - an MMO was in the works, but never got released.
This part is a real nugget.
3 this year https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-takes-3-golden-globes-i...
a few more in the past with Fleabag and others
Or will Amazon shoot the scene multiple times, with different items?
So person wears an unbranded product or no product even, and then post production adds whatever logos or products it needs to for various markets.
`I do get the argument that Prime Video is a waste of money for Amazon; Brad Stone notes in his new book Amazon Unbound that “there was little evidence of a connection between viewing and purchasing behavior” and that “any correlation was also obfuscated by the fact that Prime was growing rapidly on its own.”`
Is that nugget actually true or is Bezos just obsessed with the glamor of Hollywood?
But if the plan is to make Prime more popular there seem to be many, many simpler and probably cheaper ways to do that. It's as if McDonalds started a movie studio in order to sell Movie + Big Mac bundles.
Small steps yet, but they could be getting there.
- a limited edition gaming console in partnership with Cooler Master (with integrated chicken heater): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KFConsole
- a Lifetime mini-movie starring Christian Slater as Colonel Sanders in “A Recipe for Seduction”: https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/kfc-colonel-sanders-mario-l...
- a dating sim video game, “I Love You Colonel Sanders”: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colone...
- a 96 page romance novel, “Tender Wings of Desire”: https://time.com/4770024/kfc-romance-novel-mothers-day/
I'd trust the words of someone who actually has access to Amazon's financials over the word of a blogger on the outside.
2. You would blindly trust the words of someone who has to justify spending billions of dollars to shareholders?
> Is that nugget actually true or is Bezos just obsessed with the glamor of Hollywood?
Could it be more an idea of goodwill[0] ("the intangible value attributable solely to the efforts of or reputation of an owner of the business")? What I mean to say is, having Golden Globes or running a valued streaming service, even if it's not directly correlated with increased retail sales, makes customers generally regard Amazon more highly, more chic?
For all of its faults (and I am very critical of the company), I don't know anyone who derides the company in the same manner that Walmart is derided[1], for example.
If not for Prime Video I'd probably not be a member, and without that fast free shipping, would probably buy more from elsewhere.
All of that said, I generally don't like Prime Video so don't think it's worth much as a standalone.
There's an argument that progressive political comedy shows are actually detrimental because they give the viewer the feeling of having "solved" the problems presented by the mere act of watching. Instead of facing the problem directly and trying to do something about it, we consume the problem as entertainment in a small neat (time)box and can then just go on ignoring it.
There have been recent findings that support for BLM and its causes among "white allies" drastically rose throughout the protests but is now as low or even lower than before (and also corporations not following through with their promises of donating money towards relevant causes because it is no longer profitable for them to signal support). This would fit the same model: most white people who supported BLM only developed an awareness for the problems due to the protests and then supported the protests (and hashtag campaigns) but as soon as the protests were over and minimal reforms (including non-reforms that actually did the opposite, e.g. police funding bills) the problem was "solved" in their mind and they abandoned the movement and maybe even felt personally attacked by anyone claiming nothing had changed fundamentally.
Basically we all see ourselves as the main character and don't think boring (i.e. systemic) problems will affect us. I'm not going to die from COVID like the rest because I'm special -- I'll die in an important way when it's narratively convenient, not like an extra killed off in act one to establish the stakes. Evil mega corps won't creep up on me, they'll introduce themselves spectacularly in a way that directly challenges me personally in a way that still allows me to defeat them and complete my hero's journey.
The thing is I just feel helpless to do much about it. I can shop locally, but that feels pretty insignificant. Lately it's not even useful to vote any particular way (in the US), since it seems bigcorps have essentially captured both major parties.
We understand individual problems ("I have cancer", "I lost my job", "My car broke down") intuitively. Systemic problems (pandemics, climate change, capitalism) not so much. Plus we've spent over a century increasingly framing every systemic problem as an individual problem and training us to think only of individual solutions ("boycott Amazon", "buy organic", "take shorter showers" -- note how many of these are explicitly about individual consumption rather than active collaboration).
You can get standalone Amazon Prime Video membership — buuut it's about the same price as complete Amazon Prime membership! So you might as well get the complete membership and get all the perks you might want in the future.
And bam, you're now in the Amazon Prime universe. One day you'll be comparison shopping for a specific pair of shoes you like online, and you'll see that Amazon has the lowest (or one of the lowest) prices plus free one- or two-day shipping, and hey, you've got that Prime membership from back when you wanted to watch Amazon Prime Video. Deal sealed.
It lowers the barriers for every Amazon Prime-connected entry point.
OT: how the heck does MA actually work?
Suppose I buy a movie from Apple that came from a studio that supports MA. It almost immediately shows up in my Amazon Prime Video library, my Fandango library, and others. I then stream it using the Fandango app on my TV.
Does it stream from Fandango's servers? If so, who pays for that bandwidth?. Fandango accounts are free, so I've not paid them any money. Do they just eat it, assuming it will balance out due to people who bought from Fandango streaming on other services? Or does MA tell Fandango that I bought the movie from Apple and Fandango periodically bills Apple for Apple store movies played via Fandango?
Or does it stream from some common CDN that keeps track of all this and bills each seller for their share of bandwidth?
Or does some magic happen so that even though I'm playing the movie in the Fandango app, it is actually streaming from Apple servers?
You might be overestimating the costs here: it’s a fraction of a penny per GB to deliver.
> Or does some magic happen so that even though I'm playing the movie in the Fandango app, it is actually streaming from Apple servers?
It’s directly from Fandango - there is a shared revenue model + Fandango treats the MA content just as they would any third party content. They acquire source material and ingest it into their catalog as they would from any other studio.
Bandwidth is a nearly zero cost for a lot of the companies streaming the video on MA anyways. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all don't care meaningfully about bandwidth cost anymore, especially for prerecorded content they can CDN all over the place. The biggest value to a streaming provider participating in MA is user acquisition: People might redeem their existing collection on MA, and then buy new titles on their platform.
MGM's home ent catalogue isn't that big tbh but maybe.
> Does it stream from Fandango's servers? If so, who pays for that bandwidth?. Fandango accounts are free, so I've not paid them any money. Do they just eat it, assuming it will balance out due to people who bought from Fandango streaming on other services? Or does MA tell Fandango that I bought the movie from Apple and Fandango periodically bills Apple for Apple store movies played via Fandango?
It streams from Fandango and Fandango eat it, in the hope that if you're using their services you're more likely to buy from them.
There is a correlation to increasing tv watching and decreased social club engagement. By social clubs I mean bowling clubs, skating clubs, 4H clubs, knitting clubs, quilting clubs, book clubs, etc. Whatever other clubs people used to do back in the pre modern television era.
Being a part of these clubs connects you with your local city. It encourages real social relationships. If the club membership is diverse, you are exposed to people of different backgrounds, experiences, and races, which decreases racism and xenophobia.
All of this will increase the amount of trust we have for random humans. And that correlates strongly to how well government is working for us.
This could also be fueling why the US has so much hostility in politics now. What if we were in clubs with people of different political viewpoints? You like these people, and you disagree politically. I think that would change things.
So please, do your part and stop watching so much bullshit on television. Sure, a few good movies and shows every once in a while is understandable. But really do you need to watch all these new TV series and every single made-for-netflix movie??
I feel it didn't used to be like that; there was a brief period of limited TV choices where it seemed to increase the bonds - it was a shared experience, and unlike most shared experiences which you have with couple of people physically present, it was shared with any number of friends colleagues and strangers. "Did you see the movie last night" or "Did you catch Ed Sullivan" show, do even "Remember the Friends episode where...". It was a common cultural reference point.
Now of course there's so much content we are more divergent and everybody watches their own TV show or Movie or Youtube channel or TikTok etc.
I was addicted really to consumption. I stopped creating. Now I'm trying to make more time for it. The other night I fell asleep on the couch before midnight with my guitar in my hand and my fingers forming a chord, rather than being wired and awake on reddit until I look and notice it's 2am again. Still, the sting of knowing I squandered probably 10 years of youth just consuming junk is a lot to bear.
It's depressing knowing some very smart people are out there striving as hard as they can to get me and others away from looking inwardly and creating, or at least investing focus in one's own life and building yourself up, and instead hooked on the teet of endless content. It's like the end game with this endless consumption is The Matrix, where most of humanity is just plugged into the machine sitting there, thoughtless, sucking on the feeding tube and fueling the robots until they eventually die and are replaced by another warm body.
I'd suggest that you not beat yourself up over the past, and always, always keep in mind the Creative Gap:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/02/22/ira-glass-on-the-se...
Indeed, why is this so central to our lives? Why isn't a different kind of shared activity more sought-after?
Your point about the sheer variety is also relevant -- there's just too many echo chambers of consumption for everyone now.
Overall, the creative force has nary a chance to flourish in such environs.
I'm not praising that app at all btw, that's just why I think the award for worst app goes to CBC gem on the Fire stick. It shows you which episodes you watched. Past tense. To watch the next one you have to search for the show again and navigate to the episode. Why on earth would anyone want that?!
For this reason I only watch Amazon originals on Prime, since I know they’ll be available.
On top of that they are a major Broadband provider. If they started losing full SKY TV subscriptions I think their other business areas will make up for it. I would never get SKY TV...but I've paid for their broadband + pay £30 a month for sports via NowTV.
I only really need a fast internet connection but I can only get that if I bundle it with TV + Phone. Regardless of how much of a 'cable-cutter' I am, it is only financially worth getting internet-only, if I go for lower speeds.
Definitely something I thing the EU competition/anti-trust teams should be looking into.
Many classic and new films, updating all the time - and I’ve had none of the streaming problems that some AppStore reviews have mentioned. Also supports new independent film-makers (which piracy sadly does not do).
Thoroughly recommended.
With that mentality in mind, coordinating effective boycots of services is impossible. Governments need to step up and enforce a certain balance between capitalism and socialism. On one end of the spectrum you get monopolies and on the otherside you mob-rule and staterun monopolies.
Why has this not happened yet? Is the out of power party afraid the in power party will get credit? (This has been discussed when both parties were in power)
If the government can't get something with this kind of support done, I fear the road we are headed down .
They also operate several internet-connected regions (GovCloud) that have the special racist hiring policies required to fulfill US govt hosting regulations.
That ship has probably already sailed.
In other words, it seems like some businesses have been able to find a diamond//golden goose so much so that they are able to support different businesses. These other businesses will not have had the same success if they didn't have a cashcow behind their back.
Could you articulate why Amazon should be broken up? Most of the arguments I've seen boil down to "It's so big" and not really "It's effectively dominated x market and there is no competition there" or even "they are harming competition by pre-installing free software that I can't uninstall"
1. They have the size and market control to crush and/or acquire all competitors e.g. diapers.com https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/amazon-em...
2. They purport to operate a neutral marketplace where they aren't responsible for the end product while also controlling what products you see and what company you will buy from and choose the ones that give them the best margin. The huge problem of counterfeit and faulty products on Amazon directly harms the consumer and because of (1) there isn't a general market remedy.
3. They leverage their position as market maker to figure out what products to manufacture and undercut innovative companies with their massive scale. In the short term this is a net benefit to consumers who get a cheaper product but it creates a mess of bad incentives down the line.
I don't think that is true for all competitors, but it definitely is for many competitors. It's a good point if they are using that power, which I think they are, especially in particular industries. Same applies to Facebook, Apple, and many other companies as well.
>2. They purport to operate a neutral marketplace where they aren't responsible for the end product while also controlling what products you see and what company you will buy from and choose the ones that give them the best margin. The huge problem of counterfeit and faulty products on Amazon directly harms the consumer and because of (1) there isn't a general market remedy.
That's two different things, isn't it? Counterfeit products are a problem and a non-neutral market is a different problem. I think the non-neutral market bit is already covered by existing regulations, isn't it? Shouldn't we simply apply the rules we have?
>3. They leverage their position as market maker to figure out what products to manufacture and undercut innovative companies with their massive scale. In the short term this is a net benefit to consumers who get a cheaper product but it creates a mess of bad incentives down the line.
This one I've seen before but not as an argument to break them up - it's an interesting argument to me because I think a lot of companies engage in these practices. Grocery stores classically would release basic cheerios for example and undercut the price of the brand
Video on subject: https://youtu.be/EYPs-ya_GDA?t=128
Amazon often enough dominates local labor markets - they strategically set up their fulfillment centers in places that have high unemployment, so that employees have no practical (!) alternative than to accept the exploitative working conditions that Amazon offers.
Regarding marketplaces: in accessible online shopping, Amazon and eBay are a de-facto duopoly for the vendors. Get booted off of either and watch your business go dry in a matter of days.
> "they are harming competition by pre-installing free software that I can't uninstall"
That one was literally used as a justification for the IE de-bundling many years ago.
Yeah, that's what I was referencing by using it - that said my phone comes bundled with trash that I can't uninstall
>Regarding marketplaces: in accessible online shopping, Amazon and eBay are a de-facto duopoly for the vendors. Get booted off of either and watch your business go dry in a matter of days.
Their marketplace does seem to be pretty powerful, but I've seen a lot of vendors do well with a standalone site + Instagram/Facebook ads and marketplace so I'm not sure it's really a duopoly for all vendors. If you are only in one market and that market bans you your business will go dry immediately either way.
>Amazon often enough dominates local labor markets - they strategically set up their fulfillment centers in places that have high unemployment, so that employees have no practical (!) alternative than to accept the exploitative working conditions that Amazon offers.
This one I don't think works - it can apply to any employer that moves into a high unemployment area and I think that's something we want to encourage companies to do
So while Amazon is great for consumers, it is terrible for producers. And you have to remember - if you have a job you are a producer too. For now you are getting cheaper and more convenient service, but soon you will be struggling to find a job if this continues.
Is the appetite really there for anyone other then perhaps Facebook?
I don't get this sentiment, what exactly do you think will be the benefits of doing this? It's a drastic action, you don't just break up multi billion companies in an afternoon, so you better come up with some very good concrete points on why this is necessary. Not just vague statements about improving competition.
Also you know what a huge role Silicon Valley companies play for the U.S. internationally? And you want to cripple them?
I don't understand how here on HN, where the majority is in the tech industry, the people are begging for government intervention and regulations. Be careful what you ask for, I'd rather have them stay out of the industry, thanks.
Regulatory capture, and campaign finance laws. Until we fix the latter, we can't fix the former.
Is it though? Where's the polling data suggesting a majority of people back splitting up Amazon or Google?
https://www.vox.com/2021/1/26/22241053/antitrust-google-face...
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/ibd-tipp-poll-majo...
https://apnews.com/press-release/pr-newswire/virus-outbreak-...
The camera fades to the control room. A ragged Dr Jackson with a headset is arguing with someone. The room is abuzz with many others doing the same.
This is the moment the audience first can see the logo on his shirt. "Amazon Galactic"
Atlantis has become the Amazon headquarters for the Milky Way. Daniel Jackson is just one of many customer service representatives. The Jaffa were retrained to do deliveries across the Galaxy.
The Goa'uld are long gone.
OR ARE THEY?
Camera pans to Jeff Bezos. His eyes glow just as the camera fades to black.
Babylon 5, Stargate: Universe, Colony, Aftermath, Continuum may seem have something in common with these roughly.
My memory also isn't very active. I would immediately recall the show you would name but I can't just list them. I have even forgotten about existence of the Westworld show although I enjoyed it and can probably tell what's next at any given moment of it.
I wonder what Las Vegas would look like if tech companies started buying / building hotels in Vegas
At one point MGM owned almost 1 third - half the strip (ish) - recently they've been selling off properties which is a shame, MGM properties are my preferred resorts.
Maybe Amazon can breath some life into Excalibur or Luxor but it sounds like those are not part of the deal
That raises an interesting question - how would non-tech companies compete online? Shouldn't tech companies be an effective monopoly in tech?
Do mining companies have a monopoly on the mining industry?
Edit: comment was edited a bit. Before it mentioned the names are similar but unrelated.
It's a Wall-E reference
If they continue to treat their streaming arms as another business and not PR, it is a great move.
A side effect of this expansion is lack of attention to their existing lines of businesses. For instance, Amazon retail UX and website has largely remained unchanged for like well over a decade and in fact gotten worse as they cram more and more things to sell within a screen.
Same with AWS, quite a lot of highly asked features haven't been implemented for years now, and AWS console is showing its age.
I have a feeling those Alexa* devices will not age well.
Amazon has plenty of problems, but they're not Google; products stay supported for a long time. My three Echo devices are 5, 4, and 3 years old, and of them all work perfectly fine.
Interestingly enough, Prime Video is bundled with my Amazon Prime subscription so it's the one video service that I don't actually rotate.
I know Bezos has stated in the past (can't find it though) that he believe Video will be the next growth engine, much like how AWS has been said engine over the last few years.
Their Music service is similar. As a Prime member, you have access to a portion of their music catalog. If you want access to everything, you have to pay for it.
Or a show based on Pohl's Heechee series, which has all the same pleasure points.
Now more Bob and Doug McKenzie I would be down with that.
* Amazon Lumberyard (the game engine) is a difficult to work with mess that their own devs apparently hate
* Amazon Luna has a tiny library of games, and actually requires two subscriptions to play them all (Luna+ and Ubisoft+)
* The most successful piece of entertainment Amazon Game Studios has produced is this fascinating article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...
dang, since there are a lot of comments in this thread, you tell us about the next page link, thanks a lot... why don't you tell us about the flag link?
Still, efforts by Amazon to profit off MGM's library won’t be easy, or cheap.
In many cases, MGM’s content is tied up in multi-year deals with television networks, the former Amazon executives said. Amazon cannot air MGM’s reality show “The Voice,” for instance, which contractually is in the hands of NBC.
Bringing a new installment of the James Bond saga to Prime viewers may be a particularly difficult task, the sources said. The terms under which MGM acquired the franchise leave control in the hands of the Broccoli family, the Bond films’ producers.
WaPo is a product you pay for...Are you being forced to subscribe to the washington post?
Between The Expanse and Stargate, Amazon Prime could be a sci-fi power house!
Probably won’t happen though...
As in companies with a trillion dollar market cap? I hadn't heard that slang before -- I like it.
Good book.. there are a class of people worth trillions of dollars and he explores all kinds of weird things that could happen. Like trillie teenagers launching themselves into space on joy riding rockets illegally.
That's just one tiny little aspect of the story.
Interestingly, there are some guys powerful enough to push that kind of legislation... I don't like Musk but sometimes I'd really love to leave for Mars :-)