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sytelus | 1 year ago

These studios used to make ton of money because only a few are in town. Now, every teenager is his/her own studio and content pool is so vast that their revues must shrink. They have nowhere to run. I think their end state is to publish on YouTube/Netflix and continue living at fraction of revenue that they are used to. That's what they should prepare for and plan for. Their existence and importance was supported by scarcity imposed by cable network and they need to understand that. But instead they live in fantasy of becoming next Netflix and burn in billions of dollars in debt.

discuss

RobertRies|1 year ago

This is compelling and I think many elements of the spirit of this are true. The only thing I would add is that it will be interesting to see if professional, medium/high budget, polished, "produced" content will remain a stable and significant niche that is distinct from user-generated content. And does the high-production-value content directly compete with low-production value user-created content? And what percentage of a user's consumption it will represent in the future? And does the pool of available time for an individual consumer grow to accommodate both? To put it another way, on some level, all content competes for our time, so it's all in competition. On a different level, a Twitch livestream or TikTok feels like an entirely different category of media from a scripted, high-production-value TV series or movie, and I want both in the world.

While traditional publishers may be losing % of daily media consumption - especially in younger age brackets - it's unclear to me where this trend asymptotes. My intuition is that most people will spend some time on "reels" or livestreams (or whatever), some time on blockbuster movies, some on Broadway plays, and some time on scripted produced "TV style" content. Some will expand their denominator of total time to accommodate additional media sources, others will pick one over the other.

It seems there will be a degree of loss of market share as you allude to, but it's unclear how dramatic it will be and where it stabilizes.

One thing is absolutely 100% for sure though in my opinion: media preservation should be deeply prioritized, and this news seems like a blow to that.

soco|1 year ago

Yesterday was MTV News deleting their archive, right? But on your points: brace yourselves for AI-generated content, with increasing technical quality and probably also increasing entertainment quality. That will be The Flood and might wipe out the small human creators by their lack of discoverability, and replace the studios output because hey AI is cheaper than employing real humans. So what do we do then??? Also no archives because shareholder value (I think I use this term already too much)...

unknown|1 year ago

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araes|1 year ago

I think their numbers are BS, just like Hollywood's numbers have always been BS. Remember when Lord of the Rings lost money for New Line somehow?

Paramount's supposedly got 71,000,000 subscribers. At ~$10/month, they're making something like $8,500,000,000 / yr in subscriber fees. You gotta be daft to lose money on that.

At like a $1,000,000 / episode (last numbers I heard, might be old) that's 8,500 episodes of television a year. Pretty sure they didn't make anywhere near that much content last year. Seems like mostly all they're doing is taking away content and then charging you for it again. Disney already plays this game pretty extensively.

lotsofpulp|1 year ago

No need to speculate, Paramount’s financials are public. And terrible.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PARA/paramount-glo...

-2.8% annual return since Jan 2006, 4.25% annual return since Jun 2009, and their 5 and 10 year annual returns are way worse (dqdyj total return calculator doesn’t even provide a percentage return).

Meanwhile, SP500 is returning 10%+ per year.

reddalo|1 year ago

I think you're right. People never had all the content we can access today. So the real competitors of those few big providers are now the millions of people creating new content every day on social media, YouTube, etc.

nunez|1 year ago

Just like the legacy airlines before route deregulation

rolandog|1 year ago

> But instead they live in fantasy of becoming next Netflix and burn in billions of dollars in debt.

Hell, even ~15+ years ago I knew not to fall for cargo-culting arguments of "come work for us; when we're as valuable as Facebook the stock we'll pay you with will make you a billionaire". Yeah, ... sorry, not moving to Silicon Valley and try to haggle for coffee with imaginary invaluable stocks.

So, I can't believe that ... for all their money's worth, these companies can only come up with "when we have as much users as Netflix, we'll be billionaires".