Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Yet Netflix STILL doesn't make money.
Amazon has AWS profits, their entire retail and video can now be a hobby for Amazon!
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Really?
Amazon doesn't make money?
That tired myth again?
Netflix doesn't make money?
Look it up:
How much was Amazon worth in 1995? How much is it worth today?
($900B to over a trillion, depending on the day.)
How many buildings, acres of land, factories, and patents does it own today that it didn't in 1995 and how much are they worth?
Yeah, that money grew on trees, right? The billions they spend making award-winning movies and series is just being flushed down a toilet? Or loaded into one of Bezos rockets and blasted into orbit?
Amazon is a money mint, generating oodles of free cash flow to pay employees, buildings, computers, and buying valuable assets the world over. They just spend it as fast as they can and turn cash into assets.
And Netflix has a $150M subscribers paying on average $12 a month. Even factoring in customer churning they are grossing billions a year. And promptly spending it on infrastructure and content. Again, Netflix is worth over a hndred billion is assets. That's not made up Enron money. It's real world value of the movies and series they own, the buildings and data centers they own tge worod over, and the patents and technology they've developed.
Video and streaming are trendy because there is money to be made in that business. Money spent on streaming content is being put to work making even more money.
As of last May, 60% of the US population pays for streaming video.
(Books? about a quarter of the population read at least one book last year. And that includes students and technical workers who are *forced* to read.)
And that 60% of streamers was before Disney+ launched and signed up 15M subscribers in 5 days. Not only is tbere lots of money in streaming, it is *predictable* subscription money, not hit-or-miss bestseller of the week money.
A better example is HBO which also has $150M subscribers, mostly on cable, witg 30M on HBO NOW streaming, and is evolving into HBOMAX streaming with double the original content and a massive on-demand library of everything Warner, Turner, and (classic) MGM. Among others. For tge same price as HBO on cable. Why? Because of the $15 a month the subscribers pay, Warner only sees $9. The other $6 goes to the cablecos.
Warner is looking to convert the majority of those customers to streaming offering more content, more flexibikity and making an extra 40%. To do that they will spend $2-4billion. Each year. Of course, an extra $6 a month times (just) 100million subscribers switched to streaming will move over $7B in added revenue each year over what HBO is already making.
Even at ViacomCBS current level of 20-30 subscribers at HBOMAX/Disney+ prices brings in more net in one year than S&S might bring in over a decade or two.
So yeah, ViacomCBS is going trendy.
And kicking themselves for not doing it in 2011 when Netflix started spending big and Amazon started making its own movies and series. Instead, they are desperately trying to raise money to get into the game before one of the really big players buy *them*. Because they do have a lot of movies and series in their catalog. They just haven't been monetizing it. So tgey are IP-rich and cash poor.
It's all about making big money over decades, not dribbles.
Big isn't what it used to be.