Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/13/netflix-why-att-bought-time-warner-and-comcast-and-disney-want-fox.html

by lxm • 8 years ago

178 248 8 years ago

cnbc.com

TACIXAT• 8 years ago

This post's title is a nightmare. Original from the article:

How Netflix sent the biggest media companies into a frenzy, and why Netflix thinks some are getting it wrong

MisterTea• 8 years ago

These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have.

We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch ghost in the shell. Not available on any of the major streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, Prime) but available on stars via prime. So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show? No thanks. Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner.

skinnymuch• 8 years ago

Lionsgate Starz isn’t a big company with a lot of products so paying extra to watch things for that channel will be a challenge no matter what. On the other hand, HBO seems to be doing well enough with their not so cheap stand alone offering.

Disney with Fox’s media would be a pretty big streaming provider and many people would likely get onto it. Good chance of it becoming a standard streaming service. So I don’t see how that specific merger is a bad idea in a battle against Netflix.

yebyen5• 8 years ago

If you're talking about HBO Go, I don't know how you gauge success, but if it's subscriber numbers I would take that with a grain of salt.

I am a Comcast subscriber, and like many Comcast subscribers I'm sure, I have one of their boxes in my house, with the most basic Cable TV package, because if I don't take it my cost goes up (I mean the overall price of the monthly billed amount from Comcast/Xfinity).

We get crappy quality SD letterbox channels including some local OTA channels that we can watch Jeopardy on, at lower quality than OTA whenever the antenna isn't doing the job.

Oh, and HBO/On-Demand is also included. That includes HBO Go (but not HBO Now.) I don't use either HBO service and I don't know how they are different, at the risk of adding anecdata to an otherwise solid argument...

Whether or not any of this works out to be a favorable deal for HBO, I can't say, but I hope this explains why I would say to take their digital subscriber numbers with a grain of salt. (On the other hand, I will actually pay for Showtime standalone when they have put out a new season of Homeland.)

scarface7415• 8 years ago

Even without Fox, Disney has the best chance of success even if it e dis up having a smaller library. Small kids will watch the same thing over and over again. If you have kids, being able to pay $10-$15 a month for all Disney content is a great deal.

rhino3694• 8 years ago

We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub.

So you want one company to control all media? Seems like a poor plan longterm.

Spivak• 8 years ago

Don't really care if it's a single company so long as they operate actually independently of content production and are only a distributor.

woolvalley• 8 years ago

There seems to be quite a few available for music. Using apple music, spotify, tidal or whatever else doesn't seem to have the exclusivity problems that TV equivalents have.

I can probably count the number of exclusive artists to each music provider on my hand.

drngdds• 8 years ago

There could be many such hubs. They don't have to control the content, just buy the (non-exclusive) right to distribute it.

rayiner6• 8 years ago

What you’re proposing would lead to a terrible market structure. It would eliminate the most important differentiating factor: content. Subscribing to multiple streaming services might be somewhat less convenient, but it also allows competition based on producing and distributing quality content.

shmerl10• 8 years ago

Subscribing to many services because each offers some exclusive stuff is inconvenient and taxes the user with the overhead of each service. People want to find more in their favorite stores.

If creators would have been independent of distributors, this wouldn't have been a problem to begin with. Each creator would distribute in each store. But all this integration causes exclusivity that only inconveniences the end user. Netflix isn't any better in this sense, since they have tons of exclusives too. Competition on exclusivity is not good in the end and only benefits the distributor.

In this sense, the idea above is spot on. How are these fragmented services (with DRM to boot) going to compete with torrents that offer everything without DRM through unified hubs? Film makers need to pull stuff together and fix it.

Thriptic4• 8 years ago

That would be true if each of these services had enough unique content to stand on it's own. Netflix does, Amazon does, and HBO does if you take their entire historical cannon into account. The rest of the services (Starz, Cinemax, Hulu, Showtime et al) have 1-2 great exclusives and a bunch of old so-so content.

I shouldn't have to pay for 5 additional instances of Netflix to get one instance of Netflix worth of quality content. You were late to market and lost, deal with it and list your content on Netflix or Amazon, band together to form a joint competitor, or service a niche market like what Crunchyroll did with anime.

mikeash2• 8 years ago

Music seems to have no trouble competing on quality content despite the nearly identical catalogs of the various streaming services. You just allocate subscription money based on plays (or whatever other metric approximates “how much the paying customers like this”) and it works fine.

sosborn• 8 years ago

Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set.

The other option is to just not watch it.

rayiner6• 8 years ago

The down voting you’re getting is emblematic of the entitlement mentality among tech folks when it comes to content. There is no right to consume entertainment someone else produced for free. If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.

rhizome• 8 years ago

The other option is to just not watch it.

Why wouldn't I take advantage of every possible opportunity and technology to participate in our shared culture?

tzs3• 8 years ago

Just the other day I had the urge to watch ghost in the shell. Not available on any of the major streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, Prime) but available on stars via prime ... Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner

Or you could have rented the Blu-ray at Redbox for $2 (or streamed it from Redbox for $5).

YokoZar2• 8 years ago

Or streamed it from Google Play for $2

bonyt• 8 years ago

I recently started collecting blu-rays. A lot of them are available for $5-6 and I like having a shelf and feeling some sense of ownership over them (bizzare DRM aside[1]). Best Buy has a bargain bin with some gems, Book-off in NYC has a nice wall of $4-10 used blu-rays too, and I’m sure other places do too.

[1]: With BD+, the disc maker adds artifacts into the bitstream, and then includes executable code for a VM that can look around, see if it is satisfied with its environment, and correct the artifacts. Seriously. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD%2B

Latteland• 8 years ago

Or signed up for a temporary membership to stars. That's my go to method of seeing things I want. It's gotten so that I have had so many temporary membership I have to keep track of them in a spreadsheet.

consumethreads2• 8 years ago

"We want an on-demand nexus."

up until a point ... HBO has been all about the entire pipeline from its inception because it feels (and has proven) that its content alone is good enough for it to be purchased a la carte.

Netflix and all others see this and say ... theres a business model here.

Fastforward 20 years, creating good content is cheaper. There are more film grad students to make the supply cheaper. Add to that the internet which allows you to be your own distributor. Basically its easier to be HBO today than when HBO started and you still get the added profits that HBO gets vs not generating your own content.

We want a hub but well take what we can get as long as the content is good. And we will get custom content because we have shown it pays. I guess we dont want the hub enough.

hakfoo• 8 years ago

"We want a hub but well take what we can get as long as the content is good."

I'm not sure. Convenience seems to trump content in a lot of markets. If you have a solid baseline level of content, the best experience wins.

In that regard, a fragmented market could cause the entire streaming model to-- well perhaps not collapse, but fail to flower fully.

Cable says "Yeah, you're spending $80 per month, but there's one consistent UI, one login, one bill."

Streaming with one service like pre-fragmentation Netflix, says "You're spending $10 per month, getting a modest content pool, and it's all still pretty easy to use."

But how will people respond to "You're spending $50 per month, get a fairly broad selection of content, but it's all scattered across a bunch of services which behave subtly differently and have to be managed independently?"

They might well respond by going back to the less-hassle cable option, or just shed services til they get to something that feels manageable-- one or two services, maybe paying for a month of something else to binge its signature show once a year. Netflix and HBO might kick out enough big draws to justify subscribing year-round, but will a low-budget or niche player?

always_good2• 8 years ago

We want an on-demand nexus.

Ah right, the utopia of extreme centralization I keep hearing HNers rave about.

phobosdeimos• 8 years ago

Technically pirates figured that one out a long time ago.

axaxs3• 8 years ago

Agreed. TV for me is a nicety, I enjoy it from time to time. I'm already a bit putoff from having both Netflix and Hulu, forgetting which show is on which, two apps, etc. I have a feeling we're heading towards each player making their own ecosystem, apps, monthly charges. If/when that happens, I'll either not watch TV at all, or use the 'free' options widely available. I want to give them money, but not if it makes my life more of a hassle.

giancarlostoro2• 8 years ago

forgetting which show is on which

On my Android TV device (Mi Box $60 at WalMart) if I search a show it aggregates results from all my apps so it doesn't even matter which app it's on I just click from the results and it opens what I want.

Disclaimer: Not affiliated with anything I just mentioned just a happy customer.

scarface7415• 8 years ago

Apple has been selling TV shows by the episode since 2005.

Karishma1234• 8 years ago

Well the ATT and other behemoths are set for a massive failure. Their core business has been navigating regulatory mazes while trying to seek near monopoly and push expensive and crappy subscriptions down the throats of old and gullible people.

With each passing Year Netflix and Hulu are adding more and more original content which is becoming part of pop-culture. Within 5 years most of the cool things we want to watch would be from Netflix and Hulu and everything else would come from torrents or youtube.

Dinosaurs are dying and we should cheer.

paul7986• 8 years ago

Hulu is owned by Fox, Comcast, Warner and Disney.

heroprotagonist• 8 years ago

Once that torrent download becomes 'Miscellaneous data' charged per gigabyte due to loss of net neutrality, won't that encourage you through their preferred channel?

Personally, I'll start reading books more but I imagine 90% of my country won't. They'll go through the service that has a deal with their ISP.

The scarier part being that regardless of whether I go through the recommended source or disregard the content altogether, it's an impact on the information and ideas I consume.

SllX• 8 years ago

You have it backwards: a la carte is exactly what people want. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t pay for so many different subscriptions.

lgregg3• 8 years ago

We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub.

That is close to existing, it'd be nice if the top players agreed to open their APIs so you could integrate it into a unified TV external like Chromecast or Firestick. Or, to go further, a unified platform that can process subscriptions and PPV across each library.

$100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have.

Amen, we cut the cord officially on Friday. We went to $67 (including modem rental) per month plus about $25 dollars in streaming services and $40 for YT TV per month. That's still $35 dollars cheaper than what we were paying for Comcast TV and once we buy a compatible modem then we'll drop our internet to about $55 per month. We also have renters, so we loop them into YTTV for them to watch to their heart's desire for an extra $5 on their rent per month.

Ghost in the Shell

Respect just got done rewatching an episode of the TV show.

JimmyAustin• 8 years ago

The on-demand nexus already works on Apple TV. Say "I want to watch Billions" into the remote and it shows you all the services you can watch it on, then tap through to actually watching it.

Now if only it existed on other platforms.

virusduck2• 8 years ago

$12/mo on modem rental??!! A cable modem only costs like $30--I can't believe that's what they're charging for rental.

macspoofing3• 8 years ago

I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have.

No. That's not the correct way to think about this. You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise. You will see multiple streaming services. You will see bills in the same ballpark as those of cable/satellite ... because that's about the sweet spot for people willing to spend monthly for media content.

We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub.

You won't get it. Nobody is going to let anyone control all media distribution.

So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show?

Yeah. Or you can just pass on that single show.

Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner.

Age of piracy is going to end as well. And by the way, you are free to go and buy dinner and read a book. Nobody needs to watch the latest season of GoT - its not a human right. Talk about entitled!

DrJaws• 8 years ago

some poeple will just go back to p2p and there is nothing they can do.

paulie_a• 8 years ago

Then fuck it, I will pay for some cheap streaming services and pirate the rest.. And pirating content is not going to end ever. If anything it has become easier to do. And lately easier to do than use the legitimate streaming service. I've actually was trying to watch a movie through a paid service this weekend and basically said "fuck it" watched it on a copyright infringing service within 45 seconds.

I honestly no longer care about copyright or piracy. I simply will do whatever is easiest. The greed of the entertainment industry has made me not give a shit.

SimbaOnSteroids• 8 years ago

Age of piracy is going to end as well.

I don't know how to break this to you but as long as there are more than one country there's going to be one that will not hunt down the privateers of the other.

You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise.

Then so do my sails

Talk about entitled!

Not really, I'm willing to pay you something for it, just not the scalpers price you want me to pay to test the waters. If a show is really good I buy it on blueray because I value the show and want more of it/want to reward the quality of the show. If studios weren't greedy and produced objectively garbage content I would buy a product on faith but in a world where there are how many Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I'll be more skeptical.

im3w1l• 8 years ago

Careful what you wish for, because that hub will be censored and the useful idiots will scream that it's not censorship if it's not the government.

I'd much rather a very very fragmented space with lots of diverse productions and perspectives.

tootie• 8 years ago

Rent it. Usually $4 on Amazon or Google or Vudu.

JohnJamesRambo• 8 years ago

How noble of you to steal what you didn’t want to pay for to fulfill your urge. Do you try this at the grocery store also when you get frustrated by the prices charged by the people that created the items?

IntelMiner• 8 years ago

Piracy is not the same as theft. Please do not conflate the two

bookbinder• 8 years ago

People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it anyway (for decades) and continue to do so. Now we're being asked to buy a bunch of streaming services and we'll bitch and moan, but ultimately we'll pay because every major platform will have at least one show that justifies their existence.

I associate CBS with bland procedural crime dramas and awful three-camera sitcoms. CBS All Access would have been doomed without Star Trek: Discovery. Admittedly, the show isn't particularly good, but I'm a trekkie so it doesn't matter. On the plus side, I discovered The Good Fight (a surprising smart, entertaining and well written show) so I now I have a legitimate reason to give a damn about All Access.

And then Apple will offer their own gateway drug (Lord of the Rings?) and Disney (...well they could just offer their back catalogue alone and still be a major player) and so on.

adjkant2• 8 years ago

continue to do so

What are the numbers on that? My impression was that cable is declining fast.

daveFNbuck• 8 years ago

I've paid for 2 months of CBS All Access, once at the end of each season of The Good Fight. That one show only gets me to pay a bit less than $1/month.

Comedy Central doesn't have a streaming service, so I have to pay for shows individually on Amazon. That also ends up being a lot cheaper than CBS All Access, and it cuts me off from learning about their other shows. I think all the Comedy Central shows I used to watch have been cancelled, so they won't be getting any of my money going forward unless I somehow learn about their new shows. That's a lot easier to do if my existing services start recommending Comedy Central shows to me.

MikusR• 8 years ago

Lord of the Rings is Amazon

pwinnski• 8 years ago

People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it anyway (for decades)...

In the absence of alternatives, it seemed like what entertainment cost. The alternatives for free or cheap are enough that many, many, many people are opting out.

...and continue to do so.

Evidence[0] suggests otherwise.

Leaving evidence aside, I think that each service will likely have something to attract some number of subscribers, yes. Amazon is doing LotR, Disney wants a piece, CBS has Star Trek, etc. I don't think it follows that a large number of people are going to subscribe to more than one or two on an ongoing basis. People subscribe to CBS All-Access for one month, perhaps a trial month, and binge all of ST:D, then cancel. They already have a subscription to Amazon Prime for non-TV reasons. Maybe they share subscriptions with friends, or maybe they turn to piracy, or maybe they just shrug and go back to watching Netflix and YouTube, which is enough. Most people never had all the available channels, including premium channels, anyway. Going without a show or two isn't a problem for most people when the marginal cost is so high.

[0] https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cord-cutting-2017-high-cos...

EADGBE2• 8 years ago

I associate CBS with bland procedural crime dramas and awful three-camera sitcoms.

The Good Fight is really good, now I'm going back to watch the predecessor.

s2g2• 8 years ago

I won't pay for Star Trek Discovery because it's on CBS all access. It's just not worth it.

Amazon/Netflix/Hulu/HBO are worth it. thats what, about 50 a month? not bad. Even so I still end up on youtube a lot of the time.

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

The idea you'd be able to see everything you want for $9/month when the going rate was $100/month is and remains an utter fantasy. There is no way, shape, or form where the industry is going to suddenly operate on 90% less income.

Ironically, when you ask for one big hub, you're asking for a traditional cable subscription: Comcast will give you most of the channels out there (often, throwing HBO in for free), and due to the APIs the major ISPs and channels are on board with, you can either watch them on Comcast's site or the individual channel websites. Oh, and Comcast boxes now integrate your Netflix subscription too.

Cable packages when bundled with Internet service are often pretty price-competitive for what they offer. I recently left Comcast, but picked up their competitors' cable package for the same reasons: It's a pretty inclusive streaming package for a good price.

felipemnoa• 8 years ago

>The idea you'd be able to see everything you want for $9/month when the going rate was $100/month is and remains an utter fantasy. There is no way, shape, or form where the industry is going to suddenly operate on 90% less income.

Reminds me of at&t. They made boatloads of money at one time until they didn't. I'm sure they didn't like it when suddenly their main product, long distance calls, became dirt cheap. I still remember paying huge amounts of money in late 1990s to make calls from NYC to Buffalo. The whole thing was such a big racket.

I for one will not shed a single tear if these companies go out of business. Some other companies will take their place.

rileyphone• 8 years ago

The fact is the reason anyone pays for content online is because the cost to access it is less than the cost to download and manage it as well as the possible cost of acquiring it is less than the cost of accessing it, which goes down the more content can be accessed. Every monthly subscription has an additional cost of maintaining beyond it's numenary value which quickly bring them above just torrenting the content. Ultimately the content is just constant information, which is pretty cheap on the internet.

petre• 8 years ago

They will bundle Internet subscriptions with cable plans. UPC already does that.

chrismcb• 8 years ago

Instead of stealing" it, you could have just rented it. There was a time if you wanted to watch a show you went down and rented it.

NicoJuicy• 8 years ago

Well, except if your kids want it. Disney is probably in a good position there

SomewhatLikely• 8 years ago

We have the nexus for music and I assume for books, not sure why video is still a hold out except I believe music and books are more regulated.

Benji_San• 8 years ago

I would be OK with occasionally paying for other streaming services than Netflix if they actually worked, I.e. better than torrents and preferably on Netflix's level.

The other services available in the Nordics are not even close with some "not working at all" and some have shitty/exclusive device support. Subtitle/language options tend to be abysmal and Netflix, which isn't very good on this front, seems to be the winner there too.

I'm more or less still waiting for Steam for films and TV series where I could just download the video file with whatever audio/language track I want. Providing a Netflix quality streaming service seems to be ridiculously non-trivial so it would be great if less complex and better working solutions were offered until the streaming platforms are figured out. Until that happens torrents offer a vastly superior way to watch content that is not on Netflix.

empath75• 8 years ago

If those company think it’s about content libraries they’re going to lose.

All those companies think: we own a lot of media, we can just build a streaming media platform. And I think they’re way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has.

Netflix has an engineering team and a development and deployment process that has some production studios attached to it.

Disney can probably copy what Netflix has today, but by the time they’ve done that, Netflix will have updated their platform hundreds of time, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to build an engineering team that can keep up.

chiefalchemist2• 8 years ago

Yes. But Devil's Advocate here...

Aside from stack, whatelse does Netflix have going for it? Pre-internet Blockbuster had an overpowering / dominate "stack" and that was their downfall.

If VR is the next progression in home entertainment, who is best poised for that? Who has the tech + creativity DNA?

AnthonyMouse2• 8 years ago

Pre-internet Blockbuster had an overpowering / dominate "stack" and that was their downfall.

That is because the internet replaced them. Streaming is a direct replacement for video rentals. It's the exact same movie but you don't have to drive to the video store to get it. The industry itself doesn't go away. There isn't any apparent new distribution method that will do to the internet what the internet did to brick and mortar stores.

VR is a completely different industry, more related to video games than film, and from a distribution standpoint is nothing new. VR isn't going to cause people to download games from some hypothetical new non-internet distribution network.

compcoffee• 8 years ago

If those company think it’s about content libraries they’re going to lose.

As long as your platform meets some bare minimum standard of reliability (and every service I use seems to be able to) then content is the only thing that matters.

And I think they’re way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has.

I think you are way overestimating the complexity. Sure, it's not something two guys are going to produce in their bedroom, but video delivery is a solved problem.

waffle_ss2• 8 years ago

Nobody in here seems to appreciate the networking complexity that Netflix deals with - they are 37% of North America's internet traffic! At that point the network isn't an abstraction that "just works" like most web apps; you have to be aware of physical and business realities that dictate traffic (e.g. negotiate peering agreements, deploy caching/CDN boxes to network POPs, etc.).

coralreef• 8 years ago

Getting the engineering to scale fast would be difficult, but IMO isn't a fundamental issue. Streaming video is basically a solved problem and is not where the money is.

People subscribe for the content, not the technology. HBO isn't a tech first company but is probably doing a disproportionate amount of subscriptions thanks to Game of Thrones.

Agathos• 8 years ago

And does HBO still lease that technology from MLB Advanced Media? Strange to think a leader in this technology is spun off from a sport that took off back when "streaming" meant "watching the guy update the box score outside the telegraph office."

chii4• 8 years ago

People do subscribe for the content, but the tech still has to work well for people to continue subscribing. If the stream stutter or otherwise fail constantly, the user experience is gonna drive customers away. Tech is a functional requirement, not a feature.

kgwgk• 8 years ago

Disney does realtime streaming already. What does Netflix have that they would have problems to “copy”?

Edit: the question was obviously in the context of the parent comment talking about “the technology stack and processes“. Regarding the market share advantage, it’s debatable if each user is worth over $1000.

Rjevski2• 8 years ago

Marketshare?

People are happy to pay a single Netflix subscription, and many people already have one.

People would be less happy to shell out for yet another subscription, especially for a single kind of content (unless you watch Disney all day, it doesn't make sense to subscribe).

zimmerfrei• 8 years ago

> Disney can probably copy what Netflix has today, but by the time they’ve done that, Netflix will have updated their platform hundreds of time

Last year Disney acquired BAMTech (a spun of MLB Media) - though less known, their technical chops when it comes to video streaming are already in Netflix territory.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-strea...

darethas• 8 years ago

Yeah the MLB media team really knows what they are doing. The MLB has long had the best tech out of the big 5 sports leagues in the US

sib2• 8 years ago

While Netflix does have great technology and a lot of expertise in this area, Disney now effectively owns BAMtech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMTech), once known as MLB Advanced Media. That's the organization that built the streaming platform for Major League Baseball and supports many other sports leagues' and content providers' streaming efforts. They're actually pretty good at streaming.

AnAfrican2• 8 years ago

If those company think it’s about content libraries they’re going to lose. All those companies think: we own a lot of media, we can just build a streaming media platform.

I agree with your conclusion but it's not the technology that will kill Disney and the likes. It's the myriad compromises they'll make about the content.

bootlooped2• 8 years ago

I think maybe the title could use some punctuation or reworking

Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner...

Ok, yes, they bought Time Warner

Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast...

They bought Comcast too?

Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney...

And Disney!?

Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney want Fox

AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast; Disney want Fox?

reubenmorais• 8 years ago

"Want" disambiguates to plural subject, so it can only be "Comcast and Disney want Fox".

wging• 8 years ago

It's a subtle nuance that people often get wrong, though -- or they may be speaking in a dialect like British English, where 'want' (plural subject) is used for corporate entities. (I admit the latter is unlikely for an American publication.)

adrianmonk• 8 years ago

You're absolutely right, but that still leaves it a garden path sentence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence) and thus a poor title.

The measure of good writing isn't that it's possible to parse unambiguously with sufficient dedication. Good writing gets the idea across without placing any undue burden on the reader.

(And it's easily fixed by adding a second "why": "Netflix is why AT&T bought Time Warner and why Comcast and Disney want Fox".)

always_good2• 8 years ago

But Disney can be plural the same way some people will write sentences like "Radiohead are awesome".

It's ambiguous. There's no reason not to punctuate here.

adenadel• 8 years ago

AT&T bought Time Warner. Comcast and Disney both want Fox?

iOShosts• 8 years ago

Not that the Fox News outlet is the only thing that Fox does, but I for one would prefer cartoon substitutions for the human hosts on Fox News. At least it would equalize the current hosts with their true reality.

undersuit2• 8 years ago

Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox.

The comma after the 'and' in English lists allows us to apply 'why' to both "AT&T bought Time Warner" and "Comcast and Disney want Fox"

stingraycharles• 8 years ago

This is called the Oxford comma, if I’m not mistaken.

digi_owl• 8 years ago

A large part of the initial appeal of Netflix, in particular for foreigners, was that they seemed to house digitized versions of straight-to-VHS movies that never left USA.

But after the initial raving success, the big studios have been clamping down on giving blanket access to their back catalog of obscurities. Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.

Rjevski2• 8 years ago

Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.

Is this profitable in the age of The Pirate Bay or illegal streaming?

I'd argue easy legal access & better discoverability would more than make up for the cut taken by middlemen like Netflix.

ascagnel_2• 8 years ago

Netflix got the rights to stream the entirety of Starz's cable library for peanuts back in 2007 or 2008 -- that deal put them on the map since they got some high-quality content for basically nothing. The movie and TV distributors learned from the record labels -- they're deathly afraid of how iTunes basically took over the market, and will go out of their way to make sure the system stays as decentralized as possible.

black6• 8 years ago

Verizon wanted to divest itself of HuffPo almost immediately. The service provider(s) who ignore content and focus on the network infrastructure (Internet pipes, if you will) and practice(s) “net neutrality” as fundamental to the business model will come out on top. The vertical integration of service providers and content producers will only end poorly.

sureaboutthis• 8 years ago

It's interesting it took ATT and Disney this long to figure out that this is a thing.

noitsnot• 8 years ago

Netflix's profit has only started to grow big enough in the past few years to even become a blip on those massive companies radar.

r00fus3• 8 years ago

They were hoping Netflix would die or be acquired and lose it's edge.

It's possible they did know but couldn't replicate what Netflix has done with any reliability or profitability. Innovators dilemma.

makecheck2• 8 years ago

Companies focus on buying content while ignoring the quality of the broadcast experience. I am tired of competitors that skimp on this.

Netflix doesn’t shove ads in your face, works on every platform and almost never has mysterious transmission failures. And now they have excellent content too. They have figured out so much more than some of the last-century providers.

majani• 8 years ago

and yet they still make mind boggling losses with no end in sight. I think in the next 10 years Netflix will serve as a reality check that shows why content creators have had to resort to their ugly business practices.

goodmattg• 8 years ago

"no end in sight" is false. It took ~5 seconds to Google this.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/netflix-will-be-cash-flow-p...

adjkant2• 8 years ago

Hulu is the worst goddamn experience, not even just because of ads, but the entire platform is so buggy and fragile. The Netflix playback experience is somehow still highly underrated. Amazon got the playback experience right pretty quick as well - I really want to know what is stopping Hulu.

chii4• 8 years ago

I suspect that both Netflix and Prime are run like an engineering company, while Hulu is run like a media/marketing company.

wvenable• 8 years ago

Amazon prime shows ads for other prime shows occasionally and it just pisses me off. I'm seeing less of them, so maybe they got the message.

Prime is also very much a superficial copy of the Netflix interface.

typetehcodez• 8 years ago

This reason alone (the ads to other Prime shows) is why I cancelled my Prime subscription and also was the final nail in the coffin on why I stopped using amazon all together. Amazon started to piss me off when they turned my amazon kindle, and the later my amazon app on my android phone into advertisement space.

r00fus3• 8 years ago

Prime Video is just a teaser for Amazon Video. I can't let my kids use it because they'll either buy or complain about not being able to buy the non-free stuff.

It's a mess for that reason alone.

makecheck2• 8 years ago

Pre-ads on services also don’t play well at all with failures. Even a short crappy promo for 15 seconds gets old if it keeps replaying the crappy promo every time my actual show fails to play. So the experience goes: $ad, $error, $same_ad, $same_error, and before you know it you’re muttering about how much you’re over-paying.

p2t2p• 8 years ago

I'm a simple man: if I the music isn't on Spotify or Bandcamp I'm gonna torrent it. If the movie/show isn't on Netflix, I'm gonna torrent it. I'm not buying any dodgy channel subscriptions full of crap.

mywittyname• 8 years ago

This is my view (except I don't pirate the content). In my eyes, content creators know that these services exist, and how many people use them. So if they make a decision to cut out a large portion of the market, then I guess it's not important for them to be enjoyed by everyone.

I don't want to manage and pay for dozens of services. I use iTunes/Spotify, Netflix/Prime, and Steam/GoG. Any new service is going to need to displace one of those. This probably means being 10x better at 1/10th of the price.

Bud• 8 years ago

This re-written headline could really use some punctuation for clarity, moderators.

dang• 8 years ago

It's the HTML doc title as well as the URL slug, so not technically rewritten, but let's have a disambiguating comma.

mjfern• 8 years ago

I teach a startup course at a public university. We had a class on disruption, where we specifically talked about Netflix. I polled my students and asked how many have cable or satellite. A single hand went up, out of over 30 students. I then asked how many had Netflix. Every hand went up. AT&T can buy Time Warner and Comcast can buy NBC and Fox. It's not going to matter. Millennials and Gen Z aren't going to pay for bundled linear content via cable and satellite with heavy amounts of advertising. The model is in process of being disrupted. Within a decade or so, I bet traditional cable and satellite goes the way of AOL and landlines.

Tiktaalik• 8 years ago

I wonder if this market segment will evolve to be similar to the games industry, where market leadership shifts along with customers interests.

In the games industry a few big exclusives can shift fortunes significantly. The Playstation 4's significant success has come at the expense of the Xbox, and a driving factor of this success has been a superior exclusive content library.

lev99• 8 years ago

Why does cable TV cost money? Wouldn't the advertising cover the distribution/production costs?

chii4• 8 years ago

If they can charge for it, they are going to charge for it. Since there's no competition, there's no pressure to not charge the highest price.

Now that Netflix or other streaming services threaten this business model, the old guard is scrambling to get back to the same business model.

coretx• 8 years ago

Loads of comments regarding what "I" want or someone else wants. I think it's irrelevant and perhaps even dangerous to have the focal point on such popularities because the matter at hand is far more simple. Copyright grants a distribution monopoly >> Monopolists makes money monopolists style >> Internet breaks the distribution monopoly >> And now: copyright distribution monopolist buys ISP's ( distributors ) in order to regain control of the market. This is not about you, me, "people", it's simply business.

fenwick67• 8 years ago

The rhetoric by these gaint media companies about how "we're merging so we can compete with Netflix" is a con.

They say "we have to get more vertically integrated like Netflix to survive", but Time Warner Cable is already as vertical as Netflix! They have their own production and distribution already, and Netflix isn't an ISP.

inanutshellus2• 8 years ago

With ISPs becoming content companies, and with Net Neutrality dead they can charge companies like Netflix higher data rates....

Seems like Netflix needs to buy an ISP.

inanutshellus2• 8 years ago

... or stop allowing these mega-mega-mega-mega mergers :)

TooBrokeToBeg• 8 years ago

Netflix isn't that good, with such a crappy lineup and limited old mainstream movies. It's just cheap. Our household and people at work (california) struggle to justify paying for it.

richardthered• 8 years ago

The two main pricing models, today, are: 1) fixed monthly fee for one providers' content (e.g. Netflix) 2) pay-by-the-drink (e.g. $3.99 for this episode)

I spend a lot less on pay-by-the-drink services than I do on recurring subscriptions. Cognitively, every time I initiate a purchase, I pause, and decide whether I want to spend the money. With a subscription service, I only have to make that choice once.

What about a recurring 'credit' service? e.g. sign up for a $30/month recurring service, and you get 50 credits to watch content from a variety of providers?

Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

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