Amazon Cuts Jobs in Prime Video and MGM Studios | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Cuts Jobs in Prime Video and MGM Studios

cnbc.com

81 pointsIndoCanada45 comments

This + the lack of Stargate news beyond second hand reports from enthusiast YouTube channels is concerning. It seems like all the streaming giants are simultaneously discovering this stuff is expensive to make and not rent out to others for syndication.

Bring back Stargate!!

Kree!

The article doesn't mention that they just added ads to Prime Video with the justification of spending more money on developing content.

When have big corporations NOT talked out of both sides of their mouths, though?

When they talk out of their butts which is frequently mistaken for both sides of their mouths.

Companies only have a single mouth but essentially infinite assholes.

Only shareholders matter, public only matters when it significantly impacts revenue or shareholders.

Sadly, I keep Prime for the free shipping, the video was a nice ad-on, so I can only be so upset, but it does reduce value of the membership. I still find it offensive to pay to watch ads, I don't care if that was the cable model for years, we finally got away from it and I don't want to go back, no more than I want to go back to listening to the radio or buying whole albums to consume music.

I'm getting closer to investing in a nicer media center setup and buying/ripping content I own. Especially since, I've gone Gen Z and find most of my evening viewing to be on various YT channels. If I'm going to spend 22 minutes to watch mindless, low production value, mildly amusing drivel, I'd rather it be by an individual content creator than another semi-reality competition show which seems to be most of what's on streaming platforms these days. I'll watch the odd series/show but I find myself getting bored and not finishing them.

The ads were supposed to start at the end of January, but yesterday I was watching a PBS Masterpiece show in 2 parts, and when it went from part 1 to part 2, it showed an ad for a sporting event on Prime. I could pause the ad but couldn't skip it & had to sit through the whole thing.

As a Prime member, I usually just buy whatever I need when I need it. But now, I think I will leave things in my cart until I get to the free shipping threshold, just to see how often I actually need free Prime shipping. Then I can figure out if it's worth it to keep Prime just for the shipping benefit, because the ads are going to keep me away from Prime Video.

Content (even the garbage that most of it is) is expensive, don't expect more, quality content, they're just making you pay for more of the existing costs.

Interestingly prime video had technically always had ads. An ad for other prime video content always plays before the start of anything

Yeah but those aren't reeeeeeaaally ads they're just "promotions" (according to the Amazon lawyers).

They somehow spent $300m on Citadel, one of the very worst shows I've ever seen, and then somehow renewed it despite it getting roundly panned. Weirdly it's got a 6.2 on Amazon owned IMDb despite the vast majority of the user reviews giving it a 1 or a 2.

I always assume the vast majority of show-related decisions (not just at Amazon, but everywhere) are made by executives who base their decisions on C-suite politics.

I had hopes it would be a good series, but (spoiler alert) it isn't.

It seems they relied too much on "data" from other series and got it all wrong. Has elements of Homeland and the most cliche conspiracy theories, but not in a good way.

I'm surprised you made it far enough to see those faults. I didn't make it past the first episode thanks to the abysmal green screening into a set that could have been built for $10k.

I don't judge you - it was a struggle to keep going a couple episodes tbh.

The only metric that matters and one streamers keep tight lipped about, is how many people viewed the show. Reports are that Citadel had very strong viewership numbers.

Does it increase the counter when you start streaming or when you finish the episode? That's the real question.

(obviously they have more complex reporting than $viewer++)

The Netflix numbers were based on hours viewed per season globally. It was not broken out per episode or anything more granular. Would be curious to know exactly how they count everything and make sure that views don't get lost.

> The only metric that matters and one streamers keep tight lipped about, is how many people viewed the show.

I believe the new WGA contract is forcing them to release numbers now. NFLX just did a big dump a few weeks ago.

The metrics they really care about are growth and retention. Viewership is only an imperfect proxy for those. Conceivably millions of people turn on a highly hyped program but end up hating it, don't recommend it, and cancel their subs. So it really does matter if people aren't happy with the content they consume.

We are going to see more of this across the entertainment industry. We had a 3-5 year window of VC funded profitless content explosion. Now we are slowly regressing to the trend of low production cost content that has been churned out by ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX/big cable channels for years.

It makes sense in a way as there was a brief moment where despite all the proliferation of streaming services, we were still paying less than peak cable days. So less dollars going on on the income side, against more dollars going out on the cost side.

We will likely see the streamers continue to raise prices, add ads, and also consolidate...

You can make great TV shows on a budget, but the problem is they would actually have to focus on story writing and the plot instead spending millions to replicate the CGI generated trash content that passes for Hollywood movies these days

This is why I think maybe NFLX wins in the mid term .. they have perfected the art of churning out mid content with no name actors.

Meanwhile the newer streamers are all licensing expensive / paying big name actors / etc to try to create prestige content no one actually pays a premium to watch.

Oof... I guess NFLX knows their business better than anybody, but I'm one of those that killed my sub a year back due to this.

It seems there are quite a few of us, but we may be less in number than those who are just looking for any random thing that 'fits' them according to an algorithm, quality be damned.

All this said... what did they pay Will Smith again for that horrible sci-fi schlock? I see it's $20M, and supposedly it was going to be $35M for the aborted sequel.

I think NFLX tried the big budget all-star thing and gave up on it earlier than the rest. That Will Smith sci-fi thing was 7 years ago.

None of the rest took note of that..

As noted above though, the sequel was in the works and he was slated to be paid nearly double for that effort.

This is a fairly isolated case though.

I think there's a significant number of people cancelling

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38846097

Nonetheless, NFLX is the only streamer actually making money. The rest are losing money to the tune of Billions per year.

I don't know if I'm the only one who finds it odd to see people use stock market identifiers instead of company names in normal conversation, but seeing NFLX instead of Netflix made me think the NFL [1] had expanded their own streaming game and was getting into content creation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League

...or small market "prestige" products with once-were actors

CGI is definitely not the problem. That is such a ridiculous claim.

It can be.

It seems that everyone wanted to be Game of Thrones, with huge budgets on sets, CGI, etc. That also means less episodes per season.

Some of the best episodes of Star Trek (all of the series) were just the actors in the usual sets with minimal special effects. The new Star Trek shows are all big bombastic productions with large budgets. The writing on Discovery was poor. The writing on Strange New Worlds is pretty good, but the limited amount of episodes is a bummer. They could spend 40% as much per episode, set aside some extra for more writers, have more episodes, and everyone would love it even more - in my opinion.

All you need is good acting and writing. The rest is just support.

>> It seems that everyone wanted to be Game of Thrones

When what they didn't realize is to be GoT you need to be HBO, and to be HBO you need to adopt a business model that will never match hockey stick VC-funded growth.

Malthus' modern media

Does anyone have a good explanation to why they continue to produce trash that costs hundreds of millions of dollars? Aren't they just flushing money down the toilet? I'm sure writing a good story is hard, but it's not like it's that hard to tell whether an existing story is good or not, but apparently no one at these studios can do that.

I think the entertainment industry hit a bubble of sorts tbh, a lot of writers given free reign to do whatever with no oversight. You can write for a show that is largely panned and still get a second season. There's something else going on that I can't quite explain. But it seems producing things that audiences actually want to watch, or follows basic good writing standards, seems secondary to other concerns.

The only millenials who can afford to successfully pursue influential roles in content production are those with inherited wealth, which is a very small few. Talent is simply not very helpful these days, compared with class signifiers like which art school one attended. As a result, people capble of recognizing talent are punished for doing so. Such an equation will always produce bad, decadent art.

I just tried to watch season 2 of Reacher - the one with the steroid bodybuilder guy.

A good story may be hard but a bad story as bad as what I tried watching is not easy either. I am waiting to find out if this whole show was written by a ChatGPT instance fed cliches.

So Amazon-owned Twitch makes huge job cuts, they cut jobs in Prime video, introduce ads for prime video users, all within the last few weeks? Is something wrong with Amazon's financials that they're taking more drastic measures?

Probably trying to juice operating margins to distract from the capex they are doing that might not pay off for a while (in warehouses etc).

They have been lighting hundreds of millions on fire producing content that isn't good that people don't watch, because they have ideologues running the asylum with no controls, who don't produce good content nor have good taste nor pick material that is popular but rather checks political boxes and makes their Hollywood friends happy[0]. This isn't sustainable, and frankly it is surprising it has gone on this long.

[0] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ins...

[1] https://archive.is/f3YPu [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38846097]

While at the same time adding ads / $2.99 per month additional fee for video.

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