Amazon completes its $8.5B acquisition of MGM
techcrunch.com
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It's not even that those things are bad. I've watched and enjoyed some of them. It's just that I know where to get them and I've got enough of them right now.
It can then become a gateway for stories like sliders and less coherent. Similar to black mirror.
> LM: ...It is good to have friends, is it not, Mr. Garibaldi? Even if maybe only for a little while?
> MG: Even if only for a little while.
SG:Universe was more like the ST:DS9
I bailed after the second episode because of this. A character sacrificed himself by closing a door from the outside to stop an air leak, shortly after they discovered remote controlled flying robots. I figured if they were already making everyone into idiots to force conflict and crisis I was better off rewatching SG-1.
What I disliked about SG:A wasn't the setup or the actors (which had fun chemistry), but the antagonists/wraiths that I found completely uninteresting, and the droning problem-of-the-week episodes, with too little focus on developing the backstory of the city/ship/base itself.
SG1 was definitely a show of the 90s TV show archetype too, but atleast evolved into higher stakes, borrowed tech, Asgardians, etc.
Therefor I completely accept your opinion, and won't even attempt to convince you otherwise.
But on the other, ML-driven upscaling has improved so much that a model trained specifically on the full series – so that it inherently "knows" what various characters/sets/props should look like, at higher-resolutions, from other closer-in shots – might offer acceptable results.
Definitely worth a research project from a tech-smart outfit like Amazon.
I will say, they'll have to decide if they want it to be Stargate like showtime produced or like scifi did.
SG-1 was an epic show, but where would you take it next?
Universe was actually a good attempt to breakout of the Ancient Earth mythology and leave it all behind, but the last thing we want is another "Picard" or worse... ST:Discovery
Glad I'm not the only that's fed up with overly emotional therapy TV shows.
S2 on the other hand is very weird right now.
Std is getting unwatchable :-(
And I'm not sure if I will look back in 10 years and feel cringe on how I perceive std right now or if it is way over the top and not fitting.
There are now a lot of scenes which lost all sense of urgency because they have a small happy circle...
I also think Picard was overly emotional right from the beginning.
These bastards just want to gut our favourite childhood TV memories
This comes from someone who watched and loved every previous startrek TV.
I also heard that a new show would introduce the Stargate to the public with plenty of though experiments they could play out.
Stargate Atlantis also had plenty of new ideas.
I hope that it will not feel like std were technology looses it's fun due to it being so advanced that it doesn't matter anymore.
I'm being 50% sincere, but SG-2? (I know they were in the show sometimes, but hand-wave)
To me, the show was best with the Go'uld tie-ins with Ancient Earth mythology. Give me more of that, with that smooth, melodramatic pacing and I'm in.
Our heroes eventually become very overpowered, with ~12y of shows resolving millions of years of space opera backstory to our protagonists' benefit, as they defeat the parasites-on-good-ol'-humans in not one, not two, but three galaxies. (Or is it 4?)
But it's such a rich mythology that if rebooted, with all the old stuff as inspiration, updated for modern sensibilities, they could have new really-fertile Cinematic Universe.
RDM's BSG was 10x better than the original, & now JMS is doing his own updated reboot of Babylon 5.
Amazon should find a bunch of people with love for, & credibility regarding, the original & have them brainstorm a giant new set of multi-year arcs, cleanup of old weaknesses or outdated elements, homages & new spins on the original core elements, etc.
They could kick off another 2 decades of gradually-unfolding, but well-adapted for the 2020s/2030s, universe- & multiverse- & metaverse-spanning sci-fi.
If anyone from the relevant Amazon/MGM group is reading this: I have some ideas!
Or, to put that another way: I don't need to go anywhere else in the Stargate universe. The place we started in is fine. I just want to watch a cast of hammy actors with excellent chemistry walk through a big puddle into novel science-fantasy situations.
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmYqh8z4hoFhJPko6TvjBEWQqGZ...
MGM was founded by the owner of a movie theater chain (Loew's) to make blockbuster movies.
Tom and Jerry was also pretty awesome. Does nobody watch that anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_and_Jerry#Tom_and_Jerry's_...
I highly recommend them if you want to laugh hysterically.
(Note: I watched them a long time ago, and there is wee chance that I am remembering them differently.)
I am waiting for the Prime Video catalogue to include them!
Edit: I think this [1] is what I was thinking about.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
As growth moved more into just showing more ads and making them more similar to search results, power moved away from engineers.
(Tongue in cheek)
Tim Ferriss asked Eric Schmidt about it when he interviewed Eric, and Eric said that one concrete example was adding location sharing in Google Maps. Engineers wanted a way for people to set up a fake location to hide their real location for their own privacy, because not giving basic privacy rights to people is evil.
First Eric thought that it's just a feature with too much extra work, but later the lawyers at Google realized that it also makes the legal part of data handling and protecting data from governments much simpler, because it makes that location not personally identifiable information.
So yes, it may be profitable for small companies not to be evil, but for engineers who said them over and over, it doesn't mean don't be poor, it has nothing to do with money for them.
- Tax avoidance
- Regional censorship (eg. China)
- Antitrust
- Less privacy
- Copyright issues
- Labor practices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
All of these documented concerns relate to making more profit, not improving a product for the consumer.
It has to be particularly gregarious, or involve the EU, to get knocked down in this day and age.
That said, the EU apparently explicitly approve this particular merger. So that kind of invalidates the EU as an exception.
I’d understand the concern if Amazon was buying Walmart or Ebay, but for MGM you’ll have to further explain your understanding of antitrust laws.
Ideally, a consumer would be able to choose all combinations of which shows they watch on which streaming services on which devices. But when electronics companies start buying up content producers and offering their own streaming services, you start running into situations where only certain streaming services offer certain content. That benefits the streaming services like Amazon here, but not consumers.
We should be particularly worried about this when it comes to media because media is one of the primary ways that culture propagates itself today. When you let a handful of trillion-dollar companies own the majority of stories that people listen to help build their understanding of the world, you put a ton of control in the hands of people who really shouldn't have it.
Okay, sure. But how does this relate to antitrust laws? The purpose was never to ban everything that might be even vaguely anticompetitive.
The purpose of the Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.
One of the authors of the Act says:
... [a person] who merely by superior skill and intelligence...got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could was not a monopolist...(but was if) it involved something like the use of means which made it impossible for other persons to engage in fair competition."
The Clayton Act directly says:
No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition...
A monopoly isn't required, simply a lessening of competition.
Amazon buying MGM means that MGM films are very unlikely to be available on other streaming services, which certainly lessens competition.
Not substantially, that’s the important detail.
Netflix and Amazon keep trying to manufacture their own cash cow, Game-of-Thrones level show but refuse to invest both the money and (slightly more so) due diligence that HBO does.
Tales from The Loop was unique and dream-like. I liked it for being so original.
Wheel of Time bloopers made me feel like it was "manufactured TV". So, didn’t watch it.
I hated Amazon for killing Mozart in The Jungle.
My wife has worked her way through most of the series and says it gets better.
It'll be interesting to see if, ten years from now, Amazon is any more successful. So far, it's not been clear that this kind of integration is, in fact, a net benefit for the acquirers, and it certainly doesn't benefit consumers.
What's fascinating is that the traditional industrial conglomerate has been declining for decades now, with the most notable recent breakup being GE. Meanwhile, tech companies are going the other way:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/11/23/1057446470/the...
I think it's a wide open question as to whether the conglomerate is, in fact, an economically efficient entity, or if in the long run, Amazon, too, will break up.
I'd argue the only reason modern tech conglomerates exist and succeed is because antitrust regulators have failed to recognize the impact they've had in destroying a competition.
As a result, these modern conglomerates aren't making money via the standard argument: increased efficiencies, market diversification, etc. Rather, they're profitable because they're leveraging their horizontal and vertical integration to monopolize whole industries.
If world governments return to a more forceful anti-trust regime, I suspect we'll find these tech conglomerates will die off just like their ancestor industrial conglomerates have been.
https://investors.mgmresorts.com/investors/news-releases/pre...
I wonder how a tech-enhanced Amazon Mandalay Bay would fare against the Black Hat crowd.
Kirk Kerkorian was a Vegas developer who bought MGM in 1969, and use its films to theme the MGM Grand hotel. (He also bought United Artists, founded by Charlie Chaplin and friends as a contemporary of Metro, Goldwyn, and Meyer.) Kirk sold the film studio to Ted Turner in 1986, spinning off the hotel-casino business as MGM Grand.
Another team gates to the Destiny.
Also we learn from episode 1 that wormhole travel is better than sex ;)
(Not him specifically, but a bald man described as an "Internet mogul" who is "the richest person on Earth" with "tentacles in every aspect of daily life", and is now "building his own private space program".)
MGM does also hold other libraries like post-1952 United Artists films and Orion pictures films as well though.
It's literally eating the world. Everything will just be Amazon at some point.
It is almost there. When AWS has a blip most of the popular apps/products stop working, including my Roomba
The app stops working yes but there’s a button on the machine you can press to start a job.
It’s the same deal with my Anova sous vide circulator, my Nest etc. Their apps requires cloud access yes. But all of them can function without it.
source: Roomba 675 / Anova / Nest owner.
justify it how ever you want, same result
My wife had to flee Russia at 14 because a rival oligarch decided to try and force her father to sign over his business. 3 employees of theirs, including her personal driver, were shot and killed as part of an intimidation campaign.
Really, fuck you. This doesn’t happen in America, there is no equivalency here.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/amazon-wins-e...
>One complaint of industrial policy in European antitrust came from no less than the then President of the United States. President Obama suggested that some European antitrust enforcement targeting U.S. tech companies might be essentially an element of European industrial policy. President Obama explained in an interview with Kara Swisher: “We have owned the Internet. Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it, in ways [that inefficient European competitors] can’t compete [with]. And often- times what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is designed to carve out their commercial interests.”59
[...]
>They note that the European case law more readily accepts refusals to supply and refusals to deal than U.S. case law (although the duty is not broad). Something Gifford and Kudrle fail to mention, however, is that, importantly, in addition to the limits on the European case law, the Guidance Paper also shows deep reluctance to create blanket obligations for rivals. The context for refusals to deal is different in Europe where, unlike the United States, there is a history of state-owned enterprises. In what is per- haps still the leading economic policy book of European competition law, the most recent former chief economist of DG Competition, in his prior academic writing, also shows great reluctance to undertake an aggressive ap- proach with regard to refusals to deal.
Source: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
The reason we hear more about their enforcement actions is because big tech is mostly American. The US also has a much less arbitrary and more transparent process, where the main focus is economical costs to the customer is the main concern. Not so much for for the black box that is the european DG. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, europe has no reason to want itself dominated by big American tech corporations. But I think some perspective is needed, and I think the paper I linked shows the pros and cons of both approaches pretty well.