Consolidations like this were bound to happen. In the mid 2010s we had a good thing, only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show. Then every studio got greedy and spawned their own platform, forcing netflix to produce their own shows.
Now you have 20 tv networks all with their own subscription and all losing money.
This is the issue with content production being owned by the distributors too. It's too profitable to own the vertical because each piece of content is an effective monopoly, because to participate in culture requires watching it (piracy notwithstanding). Therefore, the "fix" is to regulate this monopoly - by making sure that monopoly cannot exist without cost. One "simple" way is, imho, to make content production and ownership of distribution strictly prohibited in the same entity, and to also enforce mechanical licensing of content (such that you cannot have content exclusives in the distribution platforms).
Movie theatres have similar restrictions with film studios in the past - to prevent this very monopoly. It's high time we brought it back.
Yeah the best way to fix this would be to enforce the separation of distribution and production via the Paramount Decree. Separate content production from the streaming service itself. Get rid of the vertical integration plaguing the industry and we'll get better content since quality will be the territory on which studios have to compete with each other again.
>Consolidations like this were bound to happen. In the mid 2010s we had a good thing, only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show.
This has been the narrative about the state of streaming services for years now. People upset that content is too fragmented across services. Now we get some significant consolidation and people are upset. They just ignore that angle and find a different one to gripe about.
House of Cards is the original Netflix Original, and it came out in 2013. Prime started competing with Netflix the same year.
But the other platforms - Disney+ (2019), Apple TV (2016/2019), HBO Max (2020), Peacock (2020), Paramount+/CBS All Access (2021 / 2014) - are all later.
>only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show
doesn't this move reduce the number of streaming services by one? we'll see how the details turn out, but if I was paying for netflix and hbo max, now I only need to pay for netflix
Yes but it doesnt increase the amount of shows or movies on any of them. This new amount of content will just feed into the rotating library, not create one big library of content always available. So in fact you are loosing providers and loosing content at the same time, yet prices will still keep going up...
How do LLMs help with clicks and attention minutes? Why do they spend $100+B a year in AI capex, more than Google and Microsoft that actually rent AI compute to clients? What are they going to do with all that compute? It’s all so confusing
Browse TikTok and you already see AI generated videos popping up. Could well be that the platforms with the most captivating content will not be a "social" network but one consisting of some tailor made feed for you. That could undermine the business model of the existing social networks - unless they just fill it with AI generated content themselves. In other words: Facebook should really invest in good video generating models to keep their platforms ahead.
It might be just me, but in my opinion facebook platforms are way past the "content from your friends phase", but is full of cheap peddled viral content.
If that content becomes even cheaper, of higher quality and highly tailored to you, that is probably worth a lot of money, or at least worth not losing your entire company by a new competitor
But practically speaking, is Meta going to be generating text or video content itself? Are they going to offer some kind of creator tools so you can use it to create video as a user and they need the compute for that? Do they even have a video generation model?
The future is here folks, join us as we build this giant slop machine in order to sell new socks to boomers.
For all of your questions Meta would need a huge research/GPU investment, so that still holds.
In any case if I have to guess, we will see shallow things like the Sora app, a video generation tiktok social network and deeper integration like fake influencers, content generation that fits your preferences and ad publishers preferences
a more evil incarnation of this might be a social network where you aren't sure who is real and who isn't. This will probably be a natural evolution of the need to bootstrap a social network with people and replacing these with LLMs
Oxy actually means sharp or acidic in greek. Oxygen was wrongly named like that (acid former) because it was thought to be the element to give acids their sourness but later many acids without oxygen were discovered. The key turned out to be hydrogen not oxygen
Now you have 20 tv networks all with their own subscription and all losing money.
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