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Maybe (HBO) Max Just Isn’t Worth It
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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I just for the life of me cannot understand why all these companies thought it was a good idea to invest the time, money, resources, infrastructure, maintenance, and so many other things into developing their own service. Instead of just pawning off their content to some other sap who has to do all that shit for you. And making them pay you a pretty penny because you know they want your content. It's just such incredible short-sightedness from companies that are constantly just chasing the biggest dollar. Like if anyone thought about it for a minute, all these companies would see that it wasn't worth it to develop these services. They got scared cuz Netflix made some of its own good content. But realistically, if they just calm down they would have realized that Netflix can't make bangers forever. And they're still going to be invested in buying content from you. These big company should have gotten together and figured out how to reduce the price of cable so people fucking sign up for it and keep watching the mass amount of fucking ads.
"Man, selling books online is so much hassle, we'll let Amazon do it for us..."
Borders Books, 2001.
The difference is, Borders wasn't creating books. They were just the middleman. It would be more like if individual publishers decided to all start their own book stores to compete with Amazon.
To be fair, they also did a Borders Rewards program that didn't cost anything. They didn't change the prices of the books, but they gave them huge discounts. Which meant the 40-50% of can't from Borders cut. And they pushed them HARD. Everyone had coupons. It was thought that this would get them loyalty over Barnes and Noble. It took maybe a full quarter for them to realize and backtrack the huge discounts, but it was too late. People used them for the coupons, and then bought everything else online or at Barnes and Noble. It was a fast track to profit loss.
Source: I worked there before the Amazon partnership, and after the board admitted they needed to walk back the rewards.
Amateurs making key decisions.
At this point I guarantee it's going to turn back into cable where you're paying $100 a month (with commercials) for the 2-3 streaming services that survive streamageddon.
You're absolutely right.
Yep. Costs a bunch of money upfront and ongoing to operate a streaming service, and even more to make even just an alright one. Plus you split consumers which will naturally give you and competitors fewer subscribers over all. All of that just to get paid directly instead of just getting free money, even if less per-view.
much less per view. They tried this initially. Studios had stuff on Netflix remember? Back when netflix was worth subscribing to.
This was because netflix was just some free extra money on the side, kind of like selling a tv show to a foreign network. But then netflix ate into their actual money from network broadcast. So now they need to get serious and charge netflix a license fee for the show that reflects that.
They upped the license fees for the show and netflix just didn't pick them up. All your favourite shows dropped from netflix and the studios had to build their own services.
The studios did not have to build their own services. And a lot of them willingly pulled their shows from places like Netflix to build their own services. And there was enough players in the game at the time when Netflix began dropping a shows that someone else like prime or hulu was willing to spend a lot of money to pick them up.
From my point of view, even if overall it was potentially less money. That doesn't factor in just the cost of operating your own content. They have to hire a whole new division to develop the website and app and streaming service and pay all those people. Or they could have just sold it to someone else to do all that work. And said we know what we have. We know you want friends on your service. Lol.
And even on top of that studios had no idea how lucrative streaming services were going to be. So they should have just renegotiated better contracts for the content they were selling. A lot of them ended as it was which is when they got pulled from places like Netflix. And I absolutely guarantee you Netflix would have been able to pay way more for something like Parks and rec or the office if they wanted to. Because Netflix knows just a sheer numbers game on those types of shows.
they tried to, netflix chose not to take the deals. Netflix chose to invest their money in netflix content production instead of relying on third parties.
I know you want to frame this as netflix could be a provider and everything else just produce content for it - you need to understand that netflix chose not to invest in paying for third party content, favouring it's own shows. that was a netflix choice.
the prices that netflix used to pay for things like the office and parks and rec were not "can actually fund development" levels, it was "make some extra money after the costs were already paid by cable" levels
They saw Netflix was making a lot more money from their content and wanted s piecd of that pie. Now they’re slowly realizing it takes quite a while to get there.
Yeah but Netflix paid them for that content so it their fault they didn't ask for a "fair price" or something. Also I guess they wanted to fuck over the artists by fudging with streaming numbers and pay them nothing.
Netflix doesn't pay per stream.
They all hoped their own service would dominate and incorporate all competition.
Which is short-sighted.
I'm pretty sure that's how Hulu started. A joint venture through several companies to stream all their shows. Problem is once Disney got in everyone else tried to spin up their own and cash out of Hulu.
It'll be investing to see what alternatives crop up one piracy makes it's comeback.