home theater, cord cutting, video streaming, a/v tech, and more!

[AuthorTony]

Crap, I have Peacock and Prime too. I knew I was forgetting something.

[nocera]

Max is my most used. We also pay for Peacock and AppleTV+. We have… access to Netflix, Paramount+, Disney+, Prime, and Hulu. We get Showtime, Starz, and MGM+ through our cable.

[AuthorTony]

Looks like Prime is going to add commercials/ads to their programming. Or you can pay $3 a month for an "ad free experience."

[NTP66]

Prime has so little content that I don’t even think this matters.

[NTP66]

Gonna be pretty funny when I start pirating content I’m already getting for free thanks to my Prime membership. Definitely gonna torrent The Boys if it’s affected, which I assume it will be.

[tifosi77]

All the other major streamers have been offering ad-supported programming tiers for at least a year now, and the verdict is in: They make substantially more revenue off of ad-supported programming than subs from the premium-priced tier with no ads. (Per subscriber) That's why the cost of the ad-free tiers goes up at a higher rate.

Hulu generates somewhere close to $3 billion in ad sales annually.

[AuthorTony]

Yeah, I won't be surprised if the streamer make ad free programming prohibitively expensive in the coming years. Just like traditional TV, the ads are there the money is at.

[Pavel Bure]

Prime has so little content that I don’t even think this matters.

Prime is like an “oh yeah we have that” after thought. So much of it is just showing you movies that you have to buy/rent/subscribe to another service to get. It’s bad. Although The Boys is good.

[tifosi77]

C'mon. There's always Se2 of Rings Of Power.

[NTP66]

I may be the only person to be fine with Rings of Power. It entertained me.

Prime’s UX is total **** garbage.

[AuthorTony]

Streaming companies (aside from Netflix) lose billions in 2023. It's almost like fracturing the streaming market and every studio trying to have their own streaming service was a bad idea. Who would have thunk it...

The world’s largest traditional entertainment companies face a reckoning in 2024 after losing more than $5 billion in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.

Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount—US entertainment conglomerates that have been growing ever larger for decades—are facing pressure to shrink or sell legacy businesses, scale back production and slash costs following billions in losses from their digital platforms.

Shari Redstone, Paramount’s billionaire controlling shareholder, has effectively put the company on the block in recent weeks. She has held talks about selling the Hollywood studio to Skydance, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick, people familiar with the matter say.

Paramount chief executive Bob Bakish also discussed a possible combination over lunch with Warner CEO David Zaslav in mid-December. In both cases the discussions were said to be at an early stage and people familiar with the talks cautioned that a deal might not materialize.

Beyond their streaming losses, the traditional media groups are facing a weak advertising market, declining television revenues and higher production costs following the Hollywood strikes.

Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said Paramount’s deal discussions were a reflection of the “complete and utter panic” in the industry.

“TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing,” he said. “Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs.”

But as the traditional media owners struggle, Netflix, the tech group that pioneered the streaming model over a decade ago, has emerged as the winner of the battle to reshape video distribution.

“For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars,” analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. “Now, we are finally starting to feel the hangover and the weight of the unpaid bar bill.”

For companies that have been trying to compete with Netflix, Nathanson added, “the shakeout has begun.”

After a bumpy 2022, Netflix has set itself apart from rivals—most notably by being profitable. Earnings for its most recent quarter soared past Wall Street’s expectations as it added 9 million new subscribers—the strongest rise since early 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns led to a jump.

“Netflix has pulled away,” says John Martin, co-founder of Pugilist Capital and former chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. For its rivals, he said, the question is “how do you create a viable streaming service with a viable business model? Because they’re not working.”

The leading streaming services aggressively raised prices in 2023. Now, analysts, investors and executives predict that consolidation could be ahead next year as some of the smaller services combine or bow out of the streaming wars.

Warner, home to HBO and the Warner Bros movie studio, has made a small profit at its US streaming services this year, in part by raising prices, aggressively culling some series and licensing others to Netflix. However, this has come at a price: Warner lost more than 2 million streaming subscribers in its two most recent quarters.

The company, which merged with rival Discovery last year, has long been rumored as a potential takeover candidate, with Comcast seen as the most likely buyer. But Zaslav in November hinted that his group wanted to be an acquirer instead of a target.

“There are a lot of . . . excess players in the market. So, this will give us a chance not only to fight to grow in the next year, but to have the kind of balance sheet and the kind of stability . . . that we could be really opportunistic over the next 12 to 24 months,” he said on an earnings call.

The terms of the Warner-Discovery merger barred the group from dealmaking for two years. That period expires on April 8.

Disney, the largest traditional media company, is in the midst of a gutting restructuring that has featured 7,000 job cuts and attacks from activist investors. It lost more than $1.6 billion from its streaming businesses in the first nine months of 2023, during which its Disney+ service gained 8 million subscribers. The company says it will turn a profit in streaming in late 2024.

Bob Iger, Disney chief executive, this year openly pondered whether some of its assets still fit within the company, prompting speculation that he was considering disposals. But no deals emerged, leading some investors to conclude there is little appetite among private equity or tech companies for acquiring legacy businesses.

Paramount’s shares have risen almost 40 percent since early November as sale speculation mounted. The stock rose sharply after the Skydance talks were reported, but both Paramount and Warner shares fell after news of their discussions came to light.

Analysts said the two companies’ high debt levels were an immediate concern for investors. “We suspect investors will focus on pro forma leverage above all else,” Citi analysts wrote in a note last week. They estimated that an all-stock combination of Warner and Paramount could yield at least $1 billion of synergies.

But Greenfield said merging two companies with lossmaking streaming services and large portfolios of declining television assets was not the answer to their problems.

“The right answer should be, let’s stop trying to be in the streaming business,” he said. “The answer is, let’s get smaller and focused and stop trying to be a huge company. Let’s dramatically shrink.”

[dodint]

All I ever had wanted was cable with ala carte channel selection. They bent over backwards to block that and now we have....this.

[NTP66]

All I ever had wanted was cable with ala carte channel selection. They bent over backwards to block that and now we have....this.

Same. It’s why I have zero reservations about simply torrenting what I want.

[faftorial]

All I ever had wanted was cable with ala carte channel selection. They bent over backwards to block that and now we have....this.

Same. It’s why I have zero reservations about simply torrenting what I want.

But only public domain titles, right?

[NTP66]

Of course. I wouldn’t steal a car…

[nocera]

This is still better than cable.

[NTP66]

No it’s not.

[nocera]

Of course it is. You can choose what you want to sub to when you want to sub to it and there are no contracts. Plus it’s cheaper.

[tifosi77]

The only thing that's worse than cable is app hopping, and at that it's the absolute barest of inconveniences.

This is like Louis CK's dude sitting in a chair in the sky dodinting about the WiFi being out.

[Pavel Bure]

Of course. I wouldn’t steal a car…

Me either but I’d for sure download one.

[Nuge]

Of course it is. You can choose what you want to sub to when you want to sub to it and there are no contracts. Plus it’s cheaper.

Yup there’s no way this is worse.

[Nuge]

Of course. I wouldn’t steal a car…

Just 3d print one

[NTP66]

Of course it is. You can choose what you want to sub to when you want to sub to it and there are no contracts. Plus it’s cheaper.

Maybe for you. I prefer having all of my content in one place, and when I wanted to subscribe to HBO, which I did back then, it was added to my cable package and cancelled once Dexter's season was over. And I never paid outrageous rates for cable. Any contract I had, usually with Comcast, was changed with a single phone call.

[nocera]

Apple’s TV app does a decent job of aggregating all content from streaming apps. Netflix is still holding out though. Still, current streaming IS the a la carte option that we all wished cable was.

[dodint]

It is not.