> Who cares?
People who like movies, presumably
People who like movies, presumably
Here are a few positives:
Larger movie catalog all under one place, better value bundle due to fewer transaction costs in negotiation. Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.
More risky movies. If a company has more diversified income stream, it can take more risks on new and interesting movies.
More movies. Shared expenses and synergies can produce lower costs and increase supply.
More investment in technology. It makes sense for a larger company to invest more in technology since the business impact and throughput is larger (technology scales).
Less likely to go out of business. Larger and more diversified revenue stream means more long terms security.
Instead of a flippant one sentence snarky response, make the argument or don't comment at all.
Less competition.
Monopoly => lack of competition => enshittification and abuse.
> Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.
As much as I like Netflix, permanent ownership of movies and series on my side, after one time payment would be hugely desirable. Overall, I dont like this "you just rent catalogues you have no control over" development is all that great.
Warner Bros specifically, while still a very large studio, has been relatively generous with funding more risky movies, and there is a lot of warranted caution that this consolidation is going to result in streamlining everything into taking as few risks as possible and aiming for broadest appeal and highest possible gross margins, which is a terrible thing for anything that could be considered art.
Comedians for instance get 10 - 25m per special, they were getting a fraction of that before Netflix. They had to sign on shitty sitcoms to make any money
What are you talking about?
That is very much the point. The initial point of bigger company = worse movies.
Citation. This is not my observation.
The larger the corporation, the more risk adverse they are.
But sure, look at big tech with a money printing machine, insane margins and revenue. Amazon spends 90b a year on r&d (~14% of revenue). Meta is about 26% of revenue and so on.
That's risk as it's not tied to their core business and most if not all is punted away.
Can you give me a citation of a small company willing to punt 14-24% of their revenue on long term projects that may not bare any results?
Meta essentially replaced myspace, which basically went down hill after being bought out by a much larger company.
Meta created and support React which runs much of the internet. Pytorch, which runs most AI models. GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more that I can't remember.
What are you talking about?
An engineer who worked at Meta did some stuff on his personal Github and managed to get them to adopt it. They weren't being innovative, they got someone else to do the prototyping and then brought it in.
Much like the same conversation about other large organisations that buy to "innovate".
> ...Pytorch
Didn't they just hire some of the maintainers of Torch7, who had started on the rework of implementing lessons learnt and migration to Python? So you while you could say they "created PyTorch", it would be quite misleading.
R&D spend does not correlate with innovation or creativity. It’s surprising what gets counted as R&D in a big company.
Small companies have to have an innovative product in order to compete with the big fish who operate economies of scale.
R&D spend does correlate with innovation and creativity. It’s surprising what it takes to consider something as R&D in a big company.
as I said in another comment : These large firms do not take risk.
I can’t think of a single example where a super large company gets more willing to take risks when it gets larger. Theres probably a few exceptions but I can’t think of any.
your most laughable point is the one about risk : no one takes less risk than a huge conglomerate beholden to a board and shareholders.
real risk in cinema comes the cast and crew that decide to forego dinner in order to get their vision to the screen, and the arts are filled with such passionate examples.
Not everyone wants the 1500th star wars or marvel movie, even the fan bases for those releases are tired.