My own viewing habits are probably nothing out of the ordinary:
When I used to commute to the office, I would often watch short bite videos on my phone. YouTube and Weather Channel (crazy Russian drivers, Chinese sinkholes eating buses) were my frequent picks. They were ad supported and free.
And at home, my habits were totally different. I'd watch ad-free services like Netflix and Prime that I paid for. I would sit down and watch things for an hour or an hour and a half (trying to limit the binge watching to a minimum, though it's always a temptation).
So those are two very different things: YouTube style (free, ad-supported, short, on the go) or Netflix style (paid, ad-free, long to very-long, at home). Quibi doesn't fit into either. It's closest to YouTube but would have to not charge money, and not bother with movies that really do want to be seen in longer than 10 minute chunks and at that point, you're right back to the cat videos and bus-eating sinkholes, and why should advertisers do a deal with you instead of YouTube which reaches billions of global viewers?
The fundamental problem here is, streaming is actually really crowded and competitive, with a few big players like Google, Netflix, Amazon and Disney hogging the audience and the advertisers. It's late for even big corporations like AT&T and Comcast to be trying to break in. Forget some start up, even with a billion or two. Apple is battling in this field, and their war chest is more like $100 billion. Two billion? Pfft!
I figure when Quibi goes bye-bi, the good stuff will be bought by Netflix and Amazon. And then I will eventually see 50 States of Fear. Until then, Netflix and Amazon themselves are producing enough to keep me occupied. Watching The Last Kingdom and Mrs. Maisel right now.
Quibi is what happens when rich, out of touch idiots launch businesses while living in a bubble where all they ever talk to is other rich, out of touch idiots.
Any average person would have immediately seen the flaw in the business model: if the appeal is an impulse viewing, then you have to have impulse pricing: free, ad-supported. YouTube already figured out this business model years ago. You wanna charge people money, you better be giving them Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, stuff like that. Expensive stuff.
And forget the ads, you can't charge money and show ads. People are catching onto what a lousy deal that is. Either charge money or show ads.
HBO Max is going to have an underwhelming launch because it's priced too high and doesn't have a single new show for launch that everyone is talking about now. They needed their own Mandalorian. Without it...ouch. If this was going to be a hit, you'd be seeing the chatter online about that show they needed that doesn't exist.
But even worse will be Peacock. Talk about nothing. Why are they even bothering?
Broadcasters and cable companies are on their way out. The silo streaming system is taking over because paying customers are rewarding it with their money. Well, rewarding the upper echelons that is. I don't expect many of the silos to remain standing.
Whatever is next, that's hard to say. My hunch is that Netflix will suddenly find out that Disney's model is even better than theirs, since Disney can deliver its brands on streaming, theaters, merchandise (a big moneymaker), theme parks etc. Obviously this is on hold now but it won't be on hold forever.
The other disrupter might be a true metaservice that offers customized payment plans that cut across services. That would require some big tech company with industry clout to pull off: Google, Apple or Amazon.
So, the next disrupter is the Disney style brand ecosystem with streaming as the nerve center; or the true metaservice. Flip a coin,
All the streaming platforms are trying to create "a good product" but the problem is, what people want is huge volumes of content (expensive) and big famous brands like Marvel and Star Wars (expensive, and there aren't many for sale anymore).
So the winners in the streaming wars will be Netflix, just because of their huge head start; Amazon, because they don't really need streaming to turn a profit for them; Disney with their huge brands; and then it's a battle between Apple with their massive war chest and AT&T with their big brands.
If Apple runs around buying up brands like James Bond and Star Trek, they might succeed. And they need AT&T to make some boneheaded mistakes.
Piracy will continue unabated, it really isn't a factor here.
People aren't going back to many subscriptions. They'll opt for 2 or 3 that have what they want and pirate or ignore the rest. This will hammer down the field to about 4 major platforms and the winners will eat the losers. AppleTV+ still has to prove itself. HBO Max may disappoint. Quibi, Peacock and CBS All Access won't survive.
Let's see if HBO Max is the wet fart of a launch I think it will be. With covid-19 giving AT&T a biggest captive audience than ever, it should blow the doors off but they've made some idiot moves that still make me wonder.
AT&T and Comcast have the same problem: Netflix thwacked TV distribution upside the head, so that cable and broadcast as content distribution mediums are now finished. They are being replaced by streaming.
But streaming is not nearly as lucrative than broadcast and cable, so now AT&T and Comcast have to adjust to a new reality where they're just not going to be able to squeeze as much money out of customers as they did in the past.
In compensation, now they have a global audience they can reach directly, in theory. So they can't make as much per customer but there's a whole hell of a lot of new customers right?
Except that Netflix and Amazon got there first, and Disney is moving fast (and their real platform is Disney+Hulu so forget the excuse that Disney is just for kids; they could supplant Netflix as the dominant streamer globally).
Customers are already getting aggravated by "too many streaming services." They opt for 2 or 3 big ones (I just mentioned them 3 big ones) and then stop. They pirate or ignore what they can't get from those platforms. With some variation in what people want, I figure there's room for 4 majors but not too much more than that.
Which means if AT&T wants to carve out room at the table for HBO Max (its best shot), they need to shove AppleTV+ out of the way. And Comcast can just forget about it entirely. With HBO and DC to play with, AT&T has a decent shot but Comcast has nothing like that and they're behind all the other competitors. They won't catch up.
In a similar vein, the Chinese govt won't let Netflix or, probably competing streamers, into their country. So that's one less set of censorship laws for Netflix to worry about. Also a benefit: if Saudi Arabia etc wants to censor Netflix, it shouldn't impact the rest of us.
I live in SF, some of the stupid tech startup ideas here are just classic. One day I walked through my neighborhood and noticed some jackass had put up signs on garages advertising their service for people to "rent" the street space in front of the garage, I guess without bothering to ask the owner of the building or the person who parks in that garage. I wonder how many suckers paid up before that app was shut down and the perps fled the country.
They seem to be doing a good job of breaking themselves up. Comcast will lose out on the whole streaming-wars content production race and then 5G will hit its ISP business. By then, NBCUniversal will probably be bought by Apple. So it's not so much these companies get broken up, rather they get eaten up by bigger, smarter companies.
Re: Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
Try justwatch.com.
It doesn't subscribe to services for you but it lets you see where everything is.
What people seem to want is some kind of meta-service, one place to subscribe to stuff. Amazon is building that. You can subscribe to HBO and some other services via Amazon. Of course you'll pay full freight (after teaser deals expire).
What people really want are customized payment plans so they don't pay full freight to all services at once. For starters, Amazon could set up auto-churn so you can schedule the beginning and end dates of services across all the ones they offer. Same thing any of us can do, but easier.
The problem is: Amazon has to do deals with Disney, Netflix, Apple etc to be able to offer their services; and has to convince them that automated starting and stopping is in their interest. Which it isn't. The big services know they can get subscribers without offering such deals. They want the opposite, to keep subscribers coming back and not even looking at the competition.
Well it's out of their hands once they sign on the dotted line.
Disney should have made the jump to streaming years ago. It's been obvious for years that Netflix would destroy cable and broadcast. But corporations find it hard to shed a business that is making money today just because they know that it's going to crash and burn tomorrow and they need to put those resources towards planning for the future.
Disney jumped to streaming at pretty much the last possible moment but maybe they planned it that way. They're like a fighter pilot who knows his plane has been hit and is doomed. But it's still gliding along, looking from the outside like it could be salvaged. He'll wait till the last possible moment to eject just so he doesn't look like a panicky coward.
Disney has shareholders to answer to, and some of those shareholders even now are bitching about how Disney is undermining profitable businesses by plowing resources into this newfangled streaming jazz that cannibalizes cable and broadcast but isn't as profitable per person (and never will be, the days are gone when everyone had to subsidize ESPN with their cable subscription despite half of them not watching sports.)
Global streaming means no more licensors - why bother with middlemen when you go direct to the customer? But Disney isn't global yet, and the process of getting there will be messy.
"Eventually the industry needs to work in collaboration to make it easier to subscribe and unsubscribe from numerous services, track which services you're subscribed to, clearly notify users when content licenses expire, and make it easier to search across multiple platforms to find particularly content."
The industry will work on that collaboration through mergers & acquisitions. Independent corporations don't cooperate with others; they are set up to continually try to kill and eat competitors. Fox and Hulu now cooperate nicely with Disney because Disney killed and ate them.
More mergers are on the way. Apple is probably going to buy MGM soon and somebody is going to buy ViacomCBS. This whole industry will probably crunch down to four or so global behemoths, so the confusing and annoying range of competitors will become more tolerable.
As for finding where content is, try this: justwatch.com
In my neighborhood, there seems to be two types of people: old folks who have been here forever and presumably have rent control; and Millennials who work in tech or finance and probably are living 6 to an apartment, where they only go to sleep after either hitting the bars or the gyms or the restaurants that seem to be the only places still in business after Amazon has closed everything else.
Who lost money: the creator of content that tends to get pirated. The corporations who sell content can tell when Show or Movie X makes more than Show or Movie Y. Then they make more of X and less of Y. If you are a content creator who tends to make Y, then you are shit out of luck.
The complication is, maybe Y is less popular because it appeals to those who pirate and don't pay, while X is the reverse. Or maybe there are other economic, social or taste trends in the mix. You can't untangle it, you can only say: stuff that is pirated and not paid for will go away; stuff that is paid for (regardless of whether it is alos pirated) will stick around and we'll get more of it.
It doesn't matter if Game of Thrones is pirated up the wazoo, as long as it also has a very healthy paid audience, to fund those multi-billion dollar production costs. Stuff that gets pirated a lot also tends to get paid for a lot, suggesting that piracy is just an unimportant aftereffect of an otherwise perfectly robust economic system.
So ultimately piracy does not matter. The thing that matters is: if somebody is willing to pay for X, and how much they are willing to pay.
Corporations route around piracy for example by making movies that really need to be seen on a huge movie theater screen with booming sound systems, and are based on huge brands that generate social hoopla. That's how we end up with movie theater industry that is all about Avengers: Endgame and similar franchise blockbusters. The fact that you can't actually pirate the prime experience of Avengers: Endgame (unless you sneak into a theater by the back door I guess) isn't a coincidence.
The more pirate-able movie types that don't depend on the theatrical experience for their appeal, are going extinct or being driven to streaming, where cheapness and convenience are the innoculation against piracy. I get Netflix for $9/month and there's too much to watch. Why the hell would I bother with piracy to save such a trivial amount? Just a clean, convenient interface and reliable service is worth that small sum.
Corporations are good at stuff like that so no reason to fret. It's not like piracy is shutting off the creation of content. Just the reverse - there's more than ever, too much for any sane person to consume, regardless of whether you pay for it. It's time, not money, that is the gating factor now. Tell me when someone figures out how to pirate time.
On the post: Quibi Is What Happens When Hollywood Overvalues Content And Undervalues Community
Re: Short Content - Do Users Want It?
My own viewing habits are probably nothing out of the ordinary:
When I used to commute to the office, I would often watch short bite videos on my phone. YouTube and Weather Channel (crazy Russian drivers, Chinese sinkholes eating buses) were my frequent picks. They were ad supported and free.
And at home, my habits were totally different. I'd watch ad-free services like Netflix and Prime that I paid for. I would sit down and watch things for an hour or an hour and a half (trying to limit the binge watching to a minimum, though it's always a temptation).
So those are two very different things: YouTube style (free, ad-supported, short, on the go) or Netflix style (paid, ad-free, long to very-long, at home). Quibi doesn't fit into either. It's closest to YouTube but would have to not charge money, and not bother with movies that really do want to be seen in longer than 10 minute chunks and at that point, you're right back to the cat videos and bus-eating sinkholes, and why should advertisers do a deal with you instead of YouTube which reaches billions of global viewers?
The fundamental problem here is, streaming is actually really crowded and competitive, with a few big players like Google, Netflix, Amazon and Disney hogging the audience and the advertisers. It's late for even big corporations like AT&T and Comcast to be trying to break in. Forget some start up, even with a billion or two. Apple is battling in this field, and their war chest is more like $100 billion. Two billion? Pfft!
On the post: Quibi Is What Happens When Hollywood Overvalues Content And Undervalues Community
Re: So-so Content
I figure when Quibi goes bye-bi, the good stuff will be bought by Netflix and Amazon. And then I will eventually see 50 States of Fear. Until then, Netflix and Amazon themselves are producing enough to keep me occupied. Watching The Last Kingdom and Mrs. Maisel right now.
On the post: Quibi Is What Happens When Hollywood Overvalues Content And Undervalues Community
and the next disaster up is HBO Max
Quibi is what happens when rich, out of touch idiots launch businesses while living in a bubble where all they ever talk to is other rich, out of touch idiots.
Any average person would have immediately seen the flaw in the business model: if the appeal is an impulse viewing, then you have to have impulse pricing: free, ad-supported. YouTube already figured out this business model years ago. You wanna charge people money, you better be giving them Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, stuff like that. Expensive stuff.
And forget the ads, you can't charge money and show ads. People are catching onto what a lousy deal that is. Either charge money or show ads.
HBO Max is going to have an underwhelming launch because it's priced too high and doesn't have a single new show for launch that everyone is talking about now. They needed their own Mandalorian. Without it...ouch. If this was going to be a hit, you'd be seeing the chatter online about that show they needed that doesn't exist.
But even worse will be Peacock. Talk about nothing. Why are they even bothering?
On the post: Piracy Sees 'Unprecedented' Pandemic Bounce, But So Does All Media Consumption
Re: Re: 'Next to study: The rise of cabin fever.'
Broadcasters and cable companies are on their way out. The silo streaming system is taking over because paying customers are rewarding it with their money. Well, rewarding the upper echelons that is. I don't expect many of the silos to remain standing.
Whatever is next, that's hard to say. My hunch is that Netflix will suddenly find out that Disney's model is even better than theirs, since Disney can deliver its brands on streaming, theaters, merchandise (a big moneymaker), theme parks etc. Obviously this is on hold now but it won't be on hold forever.
The other disrupter might be a true metaservice that offers customized payment plans that cut across services. That would require some big tech company with industry clout to pull off: Google, Apple or Amazon.
So, the next disrupter is the Disney style brand ecosystem with streaming as the nerve center; or the true metaservice. Flip a coin,
On the post: Piracy Sees 'Unprecedented' Pandemic Bounce, But So Does All Media Consumption
Re: Re:
All the streaming platforms are trying to create "a good product" but the problem is, what people want is huge volumes of content (expensive) and big famous brands like Marvel and Star Wars (expensive, and there aren't many for sale anymore).
So the winners in the streaming wars will be Netflix, just because of their huge head start; Amazon, because they don't really need streaming to turn a profit for them; Disney with their huge brands; and then it's a battle between Apple with their massive war chest and AT&T with their big brands.
If Apple runs around buying up brands like James Bond and Star Trek, they might succeed. And they need AT&T to make some boneheaded mistakes.
Piracy will continue unabated, it really isn't a factor here.
On the post: Piracy Sees 'Unprecedented' Pandemic Bounce, But So Does All Media Consumption
this again
People aren't going back to many subscriptions. They'll opt for 2 or 3 that have what they want and pirate or ignore the rest. This will hammer down the field to about 4 major platforms and the winners will eat the losers. AppleTV+ still has to prove itself. HBO Max may disappoint. Quibi, Peacock and CBS All Access won't survive.
On the post: Jack Daniels Gets Chewed Up In Trademark Case Over 'Bad Spaniels' Doggy Chew Toy
Re: Another homage?
Oooh boy. Jack Daniels takes on God. That I would love to see.
On the post: AT&T CEO Nabbed Record $32 Million Compensation In 2019, Despite Rampant Bumbling, Layoffs
Re: Re: Makes sense
AT&T is actually known for being a dog of a stock. https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/T
The current management isn't helping things of course.
On the post: AT&T CEO Nabbed Record $32 Million Compensation In 2019, Despite Rampant Bumbling, Layoffs
HBO Max or HBO Sux?
Let's see if HBO Max is the wet fart of a launch I think it will be. With covid-19 giving AT&T a biggest captive audience than ever, it should blow the doors off but they've made some idiot moves that still make me wonder.
On the post: AT&T Can't Get Out Of Its Own Way As It Tries To 'Disrupt' Traditional TV
AT&T is in trouble
AT&T and Comcast have the same problem: Netflix thwacked TV distribution upside the head, so that cable and broadcast as content distribution mediums are now finished. They are being replaced by streaming.
But streaming is not nearly as lucrative than broadcast and cable, so now AT&T and Comcast have to adjust to a new reality where they're just not going to be able to squeeze as much money out of customers as they did in the past.
In compensation, now they have a global audience they can reach directly, in theory. So they can't make as much per customer but there's a whole hell of a lot of new customers right?
Except that Netflix and Amazon got there first, and Disney is moving fast (and their real platform is Disney+Hulu so forget the excuse that Disney is just for kids; they could supplant Netflix as the dominant streamer globally).
Customers are already getting aggravated by "too many streaming services." They opt for 2 or 3 big ones (I just mentioned them 3 big ones) and then stop. They pirate or ignore what they can't get from those platforms. With some variation in what people want, I figure there's room for 4 majors but not too much more than that.
Which means if AT&T wants to carve out room at the table for HBO Max (its best shot), they need to shove AppleTV+ out of the way. And Comcast can just forget about it entirely. With HBO and DC to play with, AT&T has a decent shot but Comcast has nothing like that and they're behind all the other competitors. They won't catch up.
On the post: I Wish More Countries 'Stole' Our Movies
silver lining
In a similar vein, the Chinese govt won't let Netflix or, probably competing streamers, into their country. So that's one less set of censorship laws for Netflix to worry about. Also a benefit: if Saudi Arabia etc wants to censor Netflix, it shouldn't impact the rest of us.
On the post: The Next Risk In Buying An IOT Product Is Having It Bricked By A Patent Dispute
yeah sure
Fine by me. Most things don't need to be on the internet, so get a "dumb" version and be happy.
Bicycles, toasters, washers, dryers, stoves, refrigerators etc - they need electrical power (in some cases) but internet? Pfft.
Keep the internet to the computers, phones, smart TVs that have a legit reason to need them.
On the post: Driver Stranded After 'Smart' Rental Car Can't Phone Home
this seems familiar...
I live in SF, some of the stupid tech startup ideas here are just classic. One day I walked through my neighborhood and noticed some jackass had put up signs on garages advertising their service for people to "rent" the street space in front of the garage, I guess without bothering to ask the owner of the building or the person who parks in that garage. I wonder how many suckers paid up before that app was shut down and the perps fled the country.
On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With...More Price Hikes
Re: Seriously though...
They seem to be doing a good job of breaking themselves up. Comcast will lose out on the whole streaming-wars content production race and then 5G will hit its ISP business. By then, NBCUniversal will probably be bought by Apple. So it's not so much these companies get broken up, rather they get eaten up by bigger, smarter companies.
On the post: Disney+ Titles Disappear Without Warning, Bringing Confusion To The Streaming Wars
Re: Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
Try justwatch.com.
It doesn't subscribe to services for you but it lets you see where everything is.
What people seem to want is some kind of meta-service, one place to subscribe to stuff. Amazon is building that. You can subscribe to HBO and some other services via Amazon. Of course you'll pay full freight (after teaser deals expire).
What people really want are customized payment plans so they don't pay full freight to all services at once. For starters, Amazon could set up auto-churn so you can schedule the beginning and end dates of services across all the ones they offer. Same thing any of us can do, but easier.
The problem is: Amazon has to do deals with Disney, Netflix, Apple etc to be able to offer their services; and has to convince them that automated starting and stopping is in their interest. Which it isn't. The big services know they can get subscribers without offering such deals. They want the opposite, to keep subscribers coming back and not even looking at the competition.
On the post: Disney+ Titles Disappear Without Warning, Bringing Confusion To The Streaming Wars
Re: Re: The answer I was looking for
Well it's out of their hands once they sign on the dotted line.
Disney should have made the jump to streaming years ago. It's been obvious for years that Netflix would destroy cable and broadcast. But corporations find it hard to shed a business that is making money today just because they know that it's going to crash and burn tomorrow and they need to put those resources towards planning for the future.
Disney jumped to streaming at pretty much the last possible moment but maybe they planned it that way. They're like a fighter pilot who knows his plane has been hit and is doomed. But it's still gliding along, looking from the outside like it could be salvaged. He'll wait till the last possible moment to eject just so he doesn't look like a panicky coward.
Disney has shareholders to answer to, and some of those shareholders even now are bitching about how Disney is undermining profitable businesses by plowing resources into this newfangled streaming jazz that cannibalizes cable and broadcast but isn't as profitable per person (and never will be, the days are gone when everyone had to subsidize ESPN with their cable subscription despite half of them not watching sports.)
On the post: Disney+ Titles Disappear Without Warning, Bringing Confusion To The Streaming Wars
just things settling into place
This is just part of the process of Disney wrangling back their licenses from their licensors.
http://www.darkhorizons.com/disney-rep-explains-rotating-film-slate/
Global streaming means no more licensors - why bother with middlemen when you go direct to the customer? But Disney isn't global yet, and the process of getting there will be messy.
"Eventually the industry needs to work in collaboration to make it easier to subscribe and unsubscribe from numerous services, track which services you're subscribed to, clearly notify users when content licenses expire, and make it easier to search across multiple platforms to find particularly content."
The industry will work on that collaboration through mergers & acquisitions. Independent corporations don't cooperate with others; they are set up to continually try to kill and eat competitors. Fox and Hulu now cooperate nicely with Disney because Disney killed and ate them.
More mergers are on the way. Apple is probably going to buy MGM soon and somebody is going to buy ViacomCBS. This whole industry will probably crunch down to four or so global behemoths, so the confusing and annoying range of competitors will become more tolerable.
As for finding where content is, try this: justwatch.com
On the post: Court Blocks Maine Attempt To Force Cable Providers To Sell Individual TV Channels
this is ridiculous
By the time they settle this, the cable industry will be dead, killed off by streaming. it only has a few years left now.
On the post: NYTimes Predicted San Francisco Would 'Drown In Millionaires' Post IPO Boom; Now Whines That It Never Happened
Re: trust funds and rent control
In my neighborhood, there seems to be two types of people: old folks who have been here forever and presumably have rent control; and Millennials who work in tech or finance and probably are living 6 to an apartment, where they only go to sleep after either hitting the bars or the gyms or the restaurants that seem to be the only places still in business after Amazon has closed everything else.
On the post: Teespring Takes Down Our Copying Is Not Theft Gear, Refuses To Say Why
piracy doesn't matter
Who lost money: the creator of content that tends to get pirated. The corporations who sell content can tell when Show or Movie X makes more than Show or Movie Y. Then they make more of X and less of Y. If you are a content creator who tends to make Y, then you are shit out of luck.
The complication is, maybe Y is less popular because it appeals to those who pirate and don't pay, while X is the reverse. Or maybe there are other economic, social or taste trends in the mix. You can't untangle it, you can only say: stuff that is pirated and not paid for will go away; stuff that is paid for (regardless of whether it is alos pirated) will stick around and we'll get more of it.
It doesn't matter if Game of Thrones is pirated up the wazoo, as long as it also has a very healthy paid audience, to fund those multi-billion dollar production costs. Stuff that gets pirated a lot also tends to get paid for a lot, suggesting that piracy is just an unimportant aftereffect of an otherwise perfectly robust economic system.
So ultimately piracy does not matter. The thing that matters is: if somebody is willing to pay for X, and how much they are willing to pay.
Corporations route around piracy for example by making movies that really need to be seen on a huge movie theater screen with booming sound systems, and are based on huge brands that generate social hoopla. That's how we end up with movie theater industry that is all about Avengers: Endgame and similar franchise blockbusters. The fact that you can't actually pirate the prime experience of Avengers: Endgame (unless you sneak into a theater by the back door I guess) isn't a coincidence.
The more pirate-able movie types that don't depend on the theatrical experience for their appeal, are going extinct or being driven to streaming, where cheapness and convenience are the innoculation against piracy. I get Netflix for $9/month and there's too much to watch. Why the hell would I bother with piracy to save such a trivial amount? Just a clean, convenient interface and reliable service is worth that small sum.
Corporations are good at stuff like that so no reason to fret. It's not like piracy is shutting off the creation of content. Just the reverse - there's more than ever, too much for any sane person to consume, regardless of whether you pay for it. It's time, not money, that is the gating factor now. Tell me when someone figures out how to pirate time.
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