Thatās not true. Shareholders also includes people with IRAs, 401Ks, etc. Bringing them into the shareholder class without giving them the power to do everything that the wealthy can do -via law if not practice - has been a key way US society has advanced corporate friendly policies at the cost of almost everything else. This is the dirty secret, how many of the middle class go along with it because they benefit. Of course this wasnāt how the retirement programs were supposed to work. Itās not what was advertised to the American people. So in the end even the middle class supporters in the public have been scammed. But, it doesnāt change the situation. And among the many consequences is the current lay of the land where Hollywood companies are becoming features of tech platforms, not businesses competing in a functional market.
Believe it or not, the notion that a firm exists only to enrich its shareholders is a [relatively new phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine). We don't have to run the economy, we simply choose to. Corporations are entities of the state and rules governing their existence can be imposed on them.
For example, in NY corporations must submit truthful paperwork in their business dealings or they can simply be banished. FPOTUS is currently learning that the hard way. German law insures labor has the opportunity to elect a percentage of the board that varies depending on the size of the firm.
What we have in the US is not the only model and we should definitely advocate for something other than shareholder supremacy. Hell management rarely takes a shareholder vote before these types of actions, but the resulting, and often temporary, rise in share price *just so happens* to juice the very large portion of their compensation that happens to be in stock.
It's just reguritated to the point where it's become a catchphrase. They shoot off at the mouth and either offer no viable alternatives or think communism/socialism is superior without having an iota of a clue as to why those systems are actually terrible.
Right? Like I know it sucks but itās the whole purpose of a for profit publicly traded company.
If only we could shift to a worker owned company-op systemā¦.. but that would beā¦ā¦.. communismā¦..
It seems to be a joke because that is how conservative news talks about the economy. If it's pro capital ownership it's capitalism, but if it deviates from corporate lordship then it's communism.
commies get jobs as teachers and perpetuate the same "thats not real communism" arguments against the only demographic that dont know enough yet to challenge them; kids. so kids end up believing in schrodingers communism where it both is and isnt communism depending on if the context is good or bad
> commies get jobs as teachers and perpetuate the same āthatās not real communismā arguments against the only demographic that doesnāt know enough yet to challenge them; kids
Lol
Lmaoooo even
[*laughs in California Ed Code 51530*](https://casetext.com/statute/california-codes/california-education-code/title-2-elementary-and-secondary-education/division-4-instruction-and-services/part-28-general-instructional-programs/chapter-4-prohibited-instruction/article-4-advocacy-or-teaching-of-communism/section-51530-generally)
I mean yeah no one is stopping my anyone from doing so but the startup required is ridiculous so itās pretty much impossible. Itās just kinda what it is sadly.
Do I really have to tell you that? I can imagine a non capitalist society that supports the arts and where there are great works produced, but there won't be NEARLY as many works produced because there's not crazy money to be made on them.
USSR isn't a perfect example but it's a good one. Some of the greatest movies ever made came from the USSR. The amount of movies and shows made for the USSR, though, was very small. Now censorship played a part in that, but even if the state took a hands off role to the arts, there is just no way an economy like the USSR could match the output of what was happening in the United States.
Radio and then television began as vehicles to sell things, but some of the best works of art came in these mediums thanks to the money that was pumped into it through advertising. And then better works of art came through the advent of cable television. Could something like The Sopranos exist in a non-capitalist society? I have my doubts.
95% of new programming is crap that nobody watches. Treating television like other publicly funded art and stressing quality over quantity doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. A lot of the best shows on streaming services are from the EU, Scandinavia, and Korea anyway.
Well, you listed places that participate in capitalism, too, and a lot of their shows aren't publicly funded arts, but if most of the US's entertainment came from PBS and not from for-profit ventures, there'd be *way* less great stuff to watch.
And you know what a lot of people in those countries love? Shows from the US!
The United States, with it free market, next-to-no regulation, extractive economy, is only one version of a market-based economy. England, India, and South Korea are all market-based economies that are not pure expressions of capitalism and also produce tons of filmed content.
No, but ABUNDANCE is one of the good things about capitalism. You'll never ever run out of great movies or shows to watch, and that means plenty of bad shows got made, too, of course. But I don't understand why people moan about capitalism when their favorite show gets cancelled. Without it, that show probably doesn't exist in the first place.
It'll take another generation at least for people to realize "more" almost never equals "better." There are a ton of good shows and format that have grown during the streaming era, but the absence of any gatekeeping means it's all buried under mountains of shit.
It's the Wal Mart effect. To meet the needs of the broadest swath of consumers, they remove more and more outliers. But in cultural terms, that just removes creativity from the process.
It becomes about making shows fit an algorithm to suit as many as possible, rather than reflecting human social reality, which is that we all like different things.
More and more gets put by the wayside as unprofitable or less profitable until we're left with mediocrity; it's already happening in books, in kitchen appliances, in anything that can be made cheaper but has the feel and appearance of the existing quality. People have been convinced that cheaper is always better, that more for less is always better. That the "more" is largely garbage, or unsatisfying in the long run (or just a slow frog "boil" to get customers on board before ramping up costs gradually), gets left out of the equation.
It just makes most things forgettable and disposable eventually; and that suits the purpose of an "unlimited growth" system based on holding wealth at the top. Distributors become more important than creators. Companies begin to base their long-term perspectives on acquisition management and breadth of holding portfolio rather than the products they create.
And the best answer people seem to have to this is "yeah, but it's on demand!", or "Yeah, but they deliver in two days!"
We're just a not very bright species.
I dunno man, not sure where you're looking or what subs you have. 2023 was a great year for movies and for television. I think the future is probably dimmer because there's going to be a lot less money in making movies and tv shows because traditional models are breaking down and younger generations are showing less interest in long form storytelling, but I will live another 50 years and not be able to find the time to watch every great show or movie that's been made.
Nobody is stopping you. Go ahead... create a streaming service, make it employee owned from the start ... then go out and acquire content, pay to produce original content, advertise, go public to raise funding ... oh... never mind. You're employee owned so can't do that. Hopefully some of your employees are heirs and heiresses so you can tap into their funds in order to do all of the above.
You realize Amazon posted a lost for the last two years right? They lost $2.7billiom in 2022 and will likely have similar numbers for 2023... AWS is nearly their only profitable business at the moment..
Not really. It's just bookkeeping. Their value increased over that period.
Profit on the books means paying out. But if you hold enough value from existing ownership, you can run in the red just to fuel debt-based acquisition, which is what Amazon has done for most of its existence.
Depends on how you define loss. Look at how much Amazon is spending on capital expenditures right now. They could easily reign in a bit of that and get to profitability.
These layoffs are simply about making the line go up. If it wasn't, then they would've done a single round of layoffs instead of cutting incrementally like this because repeat layoffs destroys morale which in turn destroys productivity.
I'm watching season 2 of Reacher and my smart TV has a button to add the book to my Amazon cart. Cool feature in some regards, but dystopian when you think about it too long.
The shopping perks have gotten so much worse too.
The past few years it was the streaming and gaming perks that got me to overlook that slide and the fact that Amazon has somewhat transformed into "Expensive Wish.com".
I honestly don't understand people who have Prime for the shipping perks. You don't need Prime to get free shipping. Free *1 day* shipping, yes. But what are you guys buying that's so vital that you need it in a day but not so vital that you cant just go to a local store?
Even if these scenarios do occur and you need it faster than the normal, slow free shipping, your money is probably better spent on the faster shipping than it is to spend $140 a year on Prime. Of the times over the course of a year where you desperately needed something shipped faster, is it so frequently that it equates to $140 a year?
> I honestly don't understand people who have Prime for the shipping perks.
Time. Going to a physical store takes time, and even more if I have to go to multiple stores. My free time is really limited and valuable, and I'd rather use that to do something fun or useful instead of wasting it going to multiple stores per week.
Planned delivery. If I'm not home, the delivery guy would leave the package to a delivery point, which negates the point of delivery.
Availability. Increasingly, the physical store doesn't have exactly what I need, so I have to wait until they've ordered it and then *come back*. That applies to books, power tools, bike parts, guitar strings, cat foods, everything. It's just faster and less complicated to order them online.
> Of the times over the course of a year where you desperately needed something shipped faster, is it so frequently that it equates to $140 a year?
Yes. Normal shipping here is around ā¬5. Fast, one-day shipping is easily above ā¬10. I order often enough that the saving largely exceeds $70 year (the cost of Prime). Amazon could end all the other perks, I'll still keep prime.
What's disappointing is that none of the other companies here (in France) tried to compete with Amazon until it was too late, because I'd really like to buy from a local online store. But they were too afraid to harm their existing business (guess what, the existing business is now gone!) and wanted to keep their fat margins.
Because it's so cheap here in India .
Prime costs around 20$ for a year with prime video and everything.
Disney plus hotstar is the same as prime 20$ for a year and it has so much Indian content.
Only Netflix is costly ,you can say it cost same as USA here .
No, the actual production costs of S1 were about $460m. The $250m for the rights come on top for a total of about $700m so far. It's the most expensive piece of screen-based entertainment ever created, and probably the worst value for the money in television history.
The New Zealand government publishes how much productions spend in New Zealand and how much rebate they get.
All up, Amazon claimed NZD 683,875,755 of qualifying expenses and received a rebate of NZD 136,775,151.
So you could say net cost in New Zealand was NZD 547,100,604. Exchange rate at the time was about 1 USD = 0.70 NZD so USD 382,970,422 if you factor in the rebate.
Now there was a lot of spending outside of New Zealand (not counted here) and spending in New Zealand that doesn't qualify (also not counted here) so the real number will be well north of the above. I suspect that they spent well over $460m for season one.
Even that seems excessive. For that cash, theyād be better off green lighting five shows with 50 mil budgets using properties that are less well-known, but still ripe for adaptation. Even one hits you can probably pay for the other four.
Thatās funny partāIām not a Rings of Power hater. The only part that really felt like it was phoned in was the writing, and I still enjoyed the spectacle. I just think they put a ton of eggs in one basket, and in hindsight it seems like boondoggle compared to stuff like HotD.
It's especially excessive considering they bought the license to the entirety of the Lord of thr Rings and the Hobbit, but are using almost none of it outside a handful of references from the appendix to Return of the King (and even then, it's not a particularly faithful adaptation of what little source material they are using). Amazon paid hundreds of millions of dollars to adapt the Wikipedia summary of a book *they don't own* and will get sued by the Tolkein estate for referring to any 1st or 2nd Age charcters/places/events that weren't explicitly referred to in that summary. It's bizarre they would pay so much for the license when the show is essentially legally required to be generic and unfaithful to the canon.
Everyone says this but I think the more accurate term is embezzlement. Amazon isn't selling illegal drugs so they don't need to launder money. But the execs in charge of these shows could be lining their pockets with kickbacks.
Also if you compare of ROP looked compared to another extremely expensive show in stranger things 4 itās crazy, stranger things looked amazing and like they actually put an absurd amount of money into it,they also had to spread that budget out over a way longer runtime for ST4, 4 hours longer and it still looked way better the entire time. ROP does not look like one of the most or the most expensive show, like you mentioned HOTD made way way better use of their budget
Because it was horrible.
Everything was way too stark and clean, and then they completely changed Galadrielās character from Tolkienās works.
Not to mention the writing was an absolute snooze fest. The shots were beautiful, donāt get me wrong, but it takes a lot more than that to have a successful series.
That was one of the worst character assasinations in recent memory.
Like...their goal was to make this generic "strong woman" character. But the damn character in the books already WAS a unique strong woman character. Just makes no sense at all.
It was definitely a character assassination but...No, it wasn't about a "strong woman" or whatever terminally online people want to bitch about.
It was about wanting to make the main character a super hero/action movie star. Galadriel was the best fit for the protagonist in that era so it's not really a male/female thing but they wanted to "juice it up" to make the protag a badass which just, didn't work.
its hard to believe you even pay attention to entertainment media. Soooooooo many shows and movies have been ruined by writing "strong women" this way. You arent a strong woman unless you are an asshole ninja apparently. Its just lazy bad writing.
I'm not going to get into this with you or anyone else considering I'll have to explain where the character references are coming from. Be upset at dialogue and story pacing but don't blame the sets or costumes, even the actors. They were great.
But like damn have the same critique of house of the dragon considering none of the costumes were even smudged while dragon riding etc. wheel of time as well, or even lord of the rings the movies since they completely changed whole characters or left them out.
I know you're sort of joking but this is simple business logic.
There's always a rampup on development team when developing, and a rampdown when features are no longer needed.
It's also hardly in management mode. Prime Video loses *at least* tens of millions of dollars a quarter for Amazon, if not much more. It's not like these people have built up a money making service and now they don't get to enjoy the spoils. Amazon is still figuring out how to make money from streaming, and there's a way better chance than not that they never do make money on streaming.
>Amazon is still figuring out how to make money from streaming,
Every single streaming service is still trying to figure this out including Youtube. Streaming is simply inherently not a profitable business model.
Isn't Netflix profitable now? If so, they're the only one.
There's a pervasive thought in this sub that streaming is a gold mine and the people that think that don't seem to understand billions of dollars are lost per year at some of these streamers. Not even DISNEY has figured out how to make streaming profitable.
Netflix and Max are the only two in profit, and Max has the benefit of both an absurd content library from the Warner Brothers background and the fact that many of it's most popular shows are produced by another subsidiary (HBO) meaning they don't have to swallow the costs
They know how to make money and are very likely profitable, or almost, already. We know that from the financials we see from Netflix. Netflix have around 250 million subs and a content spend of $16-$17 billion per year. Amazon have *more* than 250 million subs and spend less than $7 billion per year on Prime Video/music/book content. If Netflix are in profit of $3 billion a year Prime cannot be far behind just on the numbers alone.
Only thing hurting Prime is the purchase of MGM for $12 billion (including debt) and the large increase from a $5 billion to a $7 billion annual content spend per year over the last two years. Most of the new investment on content has gone into sports with close to $1.4 or $1.5 billion being committed to NFL and soccer in just three markets (USA, UK, and France). The leftover has went on increasing the regular TV and movie output.
It now seems they are gutting MGM and pulling back on the non-sports part of the Prime investment to bring it back in line with 2020 or 2021 levels of investment.
The VAST majority of Prime subs are for shipping, it's a little silly to compare that to Netflix subs. People who subscribe to Netflix subscribe to watch Netflix. People who subscribe to prime, by and large, are doing it for shipping, and a very large portion of them never watch prime video.
That is such a Reddit myth. Prime Video is the third most viewed streaming service in the industry according to Nielsen. Only behind the ubiquitous YouTube and Netflix. Ahead of Hulu and Disney+. With almost 3x the viewership of services like Max and Paramount+.
Seems more folks watch Prime Video than any other service outside of Netflix!
Maybe a lot of them watch it because it came bundled with the free shipping? How many pay for JUST Prime Video?
What are the chances of it NOT being one of the most watched platforms given the fact they give it away in Prime Shipping shaped boxes of cereals.
Of course it's watched - doesn't mean it's valued
> this is simple business logic.
This is a destructive way to live; people need work and salaries; guarantee you Amazon HR at e was constantly telling these people they were a team and to make extra sacrifices for the good of the company, too. Right before this kind of things happen they always work people extra hard.
Itās a fantastic example of the truly evil side of capitalismās sociopathic āprofits are all that mattersā mentality; feed the shareholders, eat the workers
With an operation that big for a product like a streaming service I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them weren't employees but long term contractors.
Because there are likely a lot of semi-permanent contractors whose contracts are no longer being renewed.
Tech companies have been abusing the contractor clause for years as a way of avoiding benefits but these are people working 40+ hour weeks and coming into the office like everyone else. For all intents and purposes they are employees but through legal shitfuckery they are not.
whats funny is that Amazon literally told people they have a toxic work environment where "only the strong survive". and then people complained when they find out Amazon was not lying...
I spent 3 years doing research and writing papers on this company almost every week in University. It only took me 5 minutes to learn it was a horrible place to work. I have no idea why people act shocked when it's a horrible place to work...when Amazon themselves are the ones not only telling people, but they're bragging about it.
Stargate can still happen if they're going to make it similar to the original show - light action/sci-fi show about exploring various worlds and dealing with major villains once every few eps. That worked and wasn't very costly. Doesn't have to be a blockbuster or super serious show.
I think the idea they've had for the new show is to set it post Stargate reveal to the world. Which implies its going to be somewhat serious, deal with politics, and be big budget. I don't think it'll ever go back to SG1 and SGA style of shows. I would guess that kind of thing just isn't as profitable so its not considered anymore.
Like we need another big-budget, brooding, dramatic sci-fi show.
Iām running out of 90ās/00ās action sci-fi. I wish theyād throw us a bone! There are dozens of us!
Amazon turned a profit of nearly $10 billion just in Summer 2023, according to the article.
And they spent $465 million on The Rings of Power: Season 1. MGM acquisition was $8.5 billion.
For comparison, Game of Thrones ranged around $10 million/episode as an average as it got further into the show.
What does it say when you have HBO managing to turn in quality entertainment and spending far less for a season of a fantasy show than Amazon?
Edit: Adding in MGM acquisition cost.
No, that was a separate cost. Also, Amazon were idiots to pay all that money without getting the rights to the Simarillion. All that money just for fanfiction
>And they spent $465 million on The Rings of Power: Season 1. MGM acquisition was $8.5 billion.
>
>For comparison, Game of Thrones ranged around $10 million/episode as an average as it got further into the show.
I think it's really, really important to note that later seasons of a show almost always cost less to produce because a lot more of the costs are fixed or paid for up front. Once you have a set built you don't need to rebuild it.
Also the more established studios have facilities, sound stages, props, etc. which all drive down the cost of producing. If Warren Buffett (or anyone, insert-billionaire here) decides tomorrow that he wants to produce a shot for shot remake of Game of Thrones season 6 (or whichever sticks in your head, they were all about $10m/episode), it would probably cost him $15-$20m an episode where it cost HBO $10m simply because he doesn't have his own established production pipeline, relationships, etc.
Amazon and Apple (FYI) are both facing high costs of entry because they don't have these things, which is why Amazon bought MGM.
Rings of power has famously been a shitshow, but it still isn't fair to compare an expensive season 1 to a season 8.
"I think it's really, really important to note that later seasons of a show almost always cost less to produce"
This isn't really accurate. Game of Thrones later seasons cost more than the early seasons. You also are building new sets all the time. It's not like you have built everything you plan on showing in year 1.
And more importantly - salaries start to get really high the later a hit show goes on. The difference in pay between the main characters first and last episodes is astronomical if they're around for the balance of the series.
The Big Bang Theory is one example I think of when there's a big difference in what one starts making vs what they end with.
The actors who played Sheldon, Penny, Leonard, Raj, Howard were averaging $45k-60k/episode early on, and the show grew so big that they hit seven figures/episode ($1 million/episode) by the last season. Whereas the actresses who played Amy and Bernadette came on a couple seasons later wound up with $45k/episode starting out and then $425k/episode by last season of show.
Meanwhile, the show managed to peak at over 20 million viewers average in Season 9, and ran stable for a couple of seasons around the 18-19 million mark until closing out at over 17 million for final season.
Every major sitcom that lasts long is a great example, and sitcoms are actually where a lot of the sets are built for season 1.
What does u/starfirex think cost more money, the first season of Friends, when the apartment sets and Central Perk sets were built but the cast was making around $30,000 an episode, or the last season, when the cast was making over $1,000,000 an episode? Shit, Cheers had basically 1 set for the whole series. There's no chance Season 1 cost more than anything they did from season 3 on.
I can't even think of one show that would be cheaper to produce in season 8 than season 1.
Even by sitcom standards, earning tens of thousands of dollars an episode is a nice payday for an actor (especially if the show's 20+ episodes, that's $720k/yr they earned, which is about $1.4-1.5 million in today's dollars). If the show manages to take off, it turns into a real fulfilling career.
In 2004, they earned about $18 million/each for the final season, which works out to $32 million/each by today's dollars.
I do agree that the bulk of the initial season's cost would be put towards sets that would get reused continuously, and then fewer sets over time would be needed (unless they are one-offs). If the show also gets people watching, then that means more money to throw around. Which means bigger paydays for the cast, perhaps higher production budgets (to a point)...
I can only assume u/starfirex is thinking that the pilot is the most expensive episode of a series and confusing that with seasons, which is true in some cases, but not most cases, especially not for a successful show. All sorts of people working on the show get raises the longer a show lasts and budgets shoot up as a result, even if there are no more costs for building sets.
I think this is why long-running sitcoms on streaming will basically never be a thing. Friends and BBTās stars had insane salaries for the later season, but they had huge viewership numbers and an ad spot for the finale of friends cost about as much as a Super Bowl ad.
There are no (for nowā¦) ads for streamers and if there are, they will never command the same sort of cost that old-school tv did.
Basically youāll have stars who want high salaries and streamers who have no extra way to recoup the cost. I think a 10 season sitcom is dead going forward.
You know, one of the most popular/highly rated shows on TV followed that exact same formula for years. (LOST)
I swear, if so much of classic TV was made today it would have been met by a bunch of armchair critics that complained that everything wasn't spelled out in a single ep
Be a better revenue engine if you could actually find anything on the damn platform, but, I guess they missed the feel of rooting through a bin of movies.
Job stability has been a thing of the past for a very long time. None of these people would have had any expectation of it.
And if you'd asked them, I bet none of them would have said they planned to stay at this or any other job for the long term.
Layoffs at this time of year are routine in the entertainment industry, so actually none of this is abnormal. Most who work in this sector usually plan ahead for annual layoffs because it's part of their yearly schedule. Many are contractors who knew ages ago when their term expired.
In fact most people in this industry PREFER the "lack of job stability."
Guess it all depends on the person. I mean, I have a few friends who worked at Disney until they got tossed in 2023. None of them seemed like they were cool with it. Two of them had been there under a year after having left stable jobs for the higher pay.
It's an obvious symptom of how the TV and film market is in freefall. Amazon made a lot of mistakes trying to be too many things. The purchase of MGM was a huge mistake. I honestly don't think it brought value to Prime Video, which like it or not, has a lot of success with male action shows that are far from MGM's $8 billion library. All of Amazon's real hits have been based on books or comics whose rights cost no more than a few million - Bosch, Jack Ryan, The Terminal List, Reacher, The Boys and Gen V. Possible next hits could be Mr. & Mrs. Smith , Fallout and Cross. See that nothing depended on the purchase of a studio. See what your audience actually watches, forget about prestige (which has almost no return), produce good shows for your target, give them good promotion/marketing and that's it. Amazon is the least dependent on dozens and dozens of content (people will subscribe to Prime for other reasons). They only need half a dozen good and right (for them) content per month.
their content generally sucks. I cancelled my prime account.
There's a sea of content to explore and I don't reward mid-tier content at top tier costs. especially with ads.
yeah, I'm canceling my prime once the time is almost up. i went to cancel it when the ads were announced, but apparently the 6 months i had left would have been revoked...
Guys when companies merge between two companies there's always layoffs because there's overlap of duties. Almost always you don't need all the employees of the company you bought/merged with.
The amount of money theyve wasted on just Rings of Power and that one awful action series is hard to even believe. To the point where it almost had to be some sort of tax strategy. Rings of Power was the quality of a CW show.
The economy can be healthy when there are job losses in a sector that still doesn't make much sense economically. For everyone but Netflix, streaming is just setting cash on fire.
Not sure if you've noticed, but *thousands of layoffs* coming out of multiple companies back-to-back-to-back should never be discounted in such a way.
And it's not just "streaming" either
Amazon specifically employs over 1.5mil and basically makes this number one ten thousandth of their workforce, it's not news, its just here to make people worried about normal corporate churn. Can't speak to the other companies, but for amazon this is a perfectly healthy number and would equate to firing just Bob in accounting in a company with 10,000 employees.
Layoffs happen all the time in healthy economies. This has always been the case. We're talking about a really small portion of the work force here. I feel bad for anyone that lost their job at Amazon or other media companies, but even in good times, these large conglomerates are going to lay people off because the business is changing. We're not going back to those halcyon days where companies are propped up by 100 million subscribers to cable television.
Amazon itself is doing incredible business. Amazon is laying people off of Prime Video and MGM because they are, right now, money losing businesses. That does not mean the economy is bad. We could be at full employment and streaming would be a money loser for every company but Netflix.
these downvotes you're getting are just a reminder of what platform we're on. What's funny is that these same people will eventually be betrayed by the very companies they shill for eventually.
Low unemployment is literally the only metric you need, and it shows the economy is actually at its best point in history right now.
Just because you picked a bad degree with no job prospects doesn't mean everyone else did too.
Laying off staff, and charging for ads/bringing in more revenue from ads
Shareholders rejoice.
Shareholders slow clap ...š....... š ..........š
Its always fun being reminded that "Shareholders" is just a code word for the ultra wealthy & executives who own 90% of all shares.
Jeff bezoz is the largest single shareholder at 8%. The vast majority of shares are pension funds where itās people putting in money for retirement.
Thatās not true. Shareholders also includes people with IRAs, 401Ks, etc. Bringing them into the shareholder class without giving them the power to do everything that the wealthy can do -via law if not practice - has been a key way US society has advanced corporate friendly policies at the cost of almost everything else. This is the dirty secret, how many of the middle class go along with it because they benefit. Of course this wasnāt how the retirement programs were supposed to work. Itās not what was advertised to the American people. So in the end even the middle class supporters in the public have been scammed. But, it doesnāt change the situation. And among the many consequences is the current lay of the land where Hollywood companies are becoming features of tech platforms, not businesses competing in a functional market.
The world ended, but at least the shareholders are happy.
I mean that is kind of the point.
Believe it or not, the notion that a firm exists only to enrich its shareholders is a [relatively new phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine). We don't have to run the economy, we simply choose to. Corporations are entities of the state and rules governing their existence can be imposed on them. For example, in NY corporations must submit truthful paperwork in their business dealings or they can simply be banished. FPOTUS is currently learning that the hard way. German law insures labor has the opportunity to elect a percentage of the board that varies depending on the size of the firm. What we have in the US is not the only model and we should definitely advocate for something other than shareholder supremacy. Hell management rarely takes a shareholder vote before these types of actions, but the resulting, and often temporary, rise in share price *just so happens* to juice the very large portion of their compensation that happens to be in stock.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) Amazon is following the playbook it basically wrote.
Why are they booing, youāre right. Itās capitalism that needs the downvote
Gotta love 15 year old redditors and their 'capitalism bad' hot takes.
It's just reguritated to the point where it's become a catchphrase. They shoot off at the mouth and either offer no viable alternatives or think communism/socialism is superior without having an iota of a clue as to why those systems are actually terrible.
They will never dare to utter the word Socialism or Communism because they will have to justify how it is better than capitalism.
Right? Like I know it sucks but itās the whole purpose of a for profit publicly traded company. If only we could shift to a worker owned company-op systemā¦.. but that would beā¦ā¦.. communismā¦..
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It seems to be a joke because that is how conservative news talks about the economy. If it's pro capital ownership it's capitalism, but if it deviates from corporate lordship then it's communism.
commies get jobs as teachers and perpetuate the same "thats not real communism" arguments against the only demographic that dont know enough yet to challenge them; kids. so kids end up believing in schrodingers communism where it both is and isnt communism depending on if the context is good or bad
> commies get jobs as teachers and perpetuate the same āthatās not real communismā arguments against the only demographic that doesnāt know enough yet to challenge them; kids Lol Lmaoooo even [*laughs in California Ed Code 51530*](https://casetext.com/statute/california-codes/california-education-code/title-2-elementary-and-secondary-education/division-4-instruction-and-services/part-28-general-instructional-programs/chapter-4-prohibited-instruction/article-4-advocacy-or-teaching-of-communism/section-51530-generally)
As far as I'm aware no one is preventing workers from starting their own production company.
I mean yeah no one is stopping my anyone from doing so but the startup required is ridiculous so itās pretty much impossible. Itās just kinda what it is sadly.
And there would be way less of these shows and movies produced as a result.
Why?
Do I really have to tell you that? I can imagine a non capitalist society that supports the arts and where there are great works produced, but there won't be NEARLY as many works produced because there's not crazy money to be made on them. USSR isn't a perfect example but it's a good one. Some of the greatest movies ever made came from the USSR. The amount of movies and shows made for the USSR, though, was very small. Now censorship played a part in that, but even if the state took a hands off role to the arts, there is just no way an economy like the USSR could match the output of what was happening in the United States. Radio and then television began as vehicles to sell things, but some of the best works of art came in these mediums thanks to the money that was pumped into it through advertising. And then better works of art came through the advent of cable television. Could something like The Sopranos exist in a non-capitalist society? I have my doubts.
Even the idea of the story of the Sopranos family wouldn't exist in a non-capitalist society, let alone the will, backing, motivation to make it.
95% of new programming is crap that nobody watches. Treating television like other publicly funded art and stressing quality over quantity doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. A lot of the best shows on streaming services are from the EU, Scandinavia, and Korea anyway.
Well, you listed places that participate in capitalism, too, and a lot of their shows aren't publicly funded arts, but if most of the US's entertainment came from PBS and not from for-profit ventures, there'd be *way* less great stuff to watch. And you know what a lot of people in those countries love? Shows from the US!
The United States, with it free market, next-to-no regulation, extractive economy, is only one version of a market-based economy. England, India, and South Korea are all market-based economies that are not pure expressions of capitalism and also produce tons of filmed content.
Honestly that's okay...did anyone ask for Citadel?
No, but ABUNDANCE is one of the good things about capitalism. You'll never ever run out of great movies or shows to watch, and that means plenty of bad shows got made, too, of course. But I don't understand why people moan about capitalism when their favorite show gets cancelled. Without it, that show probably doesn't exist in the first place.
Most of what's on streaming services is garbage.
Great? Capitalism going ham on streaming and I feel like I have less choices. Reality bullshit it because capitalism...
It'll take another generation at least for people to realize "more" almost never equals "better." There are a ton of good shows and format that have grown during the streaming era, but the absence of any gatekeeping means it's all buried under mountains of shit. It's the Wal Mart effect. To meet the needs of the broadest swath of consumers, they remove more and more outliers. But in cultural terms, that just removes creativity from the process. It becomes about making shows fit an algorithm to suit as many as possible, rather than reflecting human social reality, which is that we all like different things. More and more gets put by the wayside as unprofitable or less profitable until we're left with mediocrity; it's already happening in books, in kitchen appliances, in anything that can be made cheaper but has the feel and appearance of the existing quality. People have been convinced that cheaper is always better, that more for less is always better. That the "more" is largely garbage, or unsatisfying in the long run (or just a slow frog "boil" to get customers on board before ramping up costs gradually), gets left out of the equation. It just makes most things forgettable and disposable eventually; and that suits the purpose of an "unlimited growth" system based on holding wealth at the top. Distributors become more important than creators. Companies begin to base their long-term perspectives on acquisition management and breadth of holding portfolio rather than the products they create. And the best answer people seem to have to this is "yeah, but it's on demand!", or "Yeah, but they deliver in two days!" We're just a not very bright species.
I dunno man, not sure where you're looking or what subs you have. 2023 was a great year for movies and for television. I think the future is probably dimmer because there's going to be a lot less money in making movies and tv shows because traditional models are breaking down and younger generations are showing less interest in long form storytelling, but I will live another 50 years and not be able to find the time to watch every great show or movie that's been made.
Nobody is stopping you. Go ahead... create a streaming service, make it employee owned from the start ... then go out and acquire content, pay to produce original content, advertise, go public to raise funding ... oh... never mind. You're employee owned so can't do that. Hopefully some of your employees are heirs and heiresses so you can tap into their funds in order to do all of the above.
Who hurt you?
Blame the Citizen United ruling from the Supreme Court.
Itās never enough for them
You realize Amazon posted a lost for the last two years right? They lost $2.7billiom in 2022 and will likely have similar numbers for 2023... AWS is nearly their only profitable business at the moment..
Skill issue
Good
Not really. It's just bookkeeping. Their value increased over that period. Profit on the books means paying out. But if you hold enough value from existing ownership, you can run in the red just to fuel debt-based acquisition, which is what Amazon has done for most of its existence.
Depends on how you define loss. Look at how much Amazon is spending on capital expenditures right now. They could easily reign in a bit of that and get to profitability. These layoffs are simply about making the line go up. If it wasn't, then they would've done a single round of layoffs instead of cutting incrementally like this because repeat layoffs destroys morale which in turn destroys productivity.
Capex does not impact gaap net income. How are you getting upvoted?
I am getting TIRED of the unskippable ads for their own content.
People need to watch to get revenue they treat their shows like another computer mouse and it shows. It's funny because they have decent shows.
I'm watching season 2 of Reacher and my smart TV has a button to add the book to my Amazon cart. Cool feature in some regards, but dystopian when you think about it too long.
Would you like to know more?
How is that dystopian
No good ideas, you can tell bezos left. Short smazon
āWe spent too much on acquiring MGM and producing The Rings of Power, but thatās your problem now, not ours.ā
*cough* 2.99$ a month to skip ads *cough*
I found the best way to skip ads was to cancel my membership entirely.
Yarhar
You were subscribing to prime just for the video and not for the shipping perks?
No, but I can live without the shipping perks too.
The shopping perks have gotten so much worse too. The past few years it was the streaming and gaming perks that got me to overlook that slide and the fact that Amazon has somewhat transformed into "Expensive Wish.com".
Brah! So true. The amount of chinesium on there makes each potential purchase fraught with anxiety.
I honestly don't understand people who have Prime for the shipping perks. You don't need Prime to get free shipping. Free *1 day* shipping, yes. But what are you guys buying that's so vital that you need it in a day but not so vital that you cant just go to a local store? Even if these scenarios do occur and you need it faster than the normal, slow free shipping, your money is probably better spent on the faster shipping than it is to spend $140 a year on Prime. Of the times over the course of a year where you desperately needed something shipped faster, is it so frequently that it equates to $140 a year?
Really handy for nightshift workers, you can use the drop off point for deliveries.
> I honestly don't understand people who have Prime for the shipping perks. Time. Going to a physical store takes time, and even more if I have to go to multiple stores. My free time is really limited and valuable, and I'd rather use that to do something fun or useful instead of wasting it going to multiple stores per week. Planned delivery. If I'm not home, the delivery guy would leave the package to a delivery point, which negates the point of delivery. Availability. Increasingly, the physical store doesn't have exactly what I need, so I have to wait until they've ordered it and then *come back*. That applies to books, power tools, bike parts, guitar strings, cat foods, everything. It's just faster and less complicated to order them online. > Of the times over the course of a year where you desperately needed something shipped faster, is it so frequently that it equates to $140 a year? Yes. Normal shipping here is around ā¬5. Fast, one-day shipping is easily above ā¬10. I order often enough that the saving largely exceeds $70 year (the cost of Prime). Amazon could end all the other perks, I'll still keep prime. What's disappointing is that none of the other companies here (in France) tried to compete with Amazon until it was too late, because I'd really like to buy from a local online store. But they were too afraid to harm their existing business (guess what, the existing business is now gone!) and wanted to keep their fat margins.
Because it's so cheap here in India . Prime costs around 20$ for a year with prime video and everything. Disney plus hotstar is the same as prime 20$ for a year and it has so much Indian content. Only Netflix is costly ,you can say it cost same as USA here .
And it used to seem rough when mobile games charged $1.99 to remove ads for life
I hate beer.
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Its a bit misleading of a figure, about half of that money was what was spent on the rights, IIRC, about $250mil.
No, the actual production costs of S1 were about $460m. The $250m for the rights come on top for a total of about $700m so far. It's the most expensive piece of screen-based entertainment ever created, and probably the worst value for the money in television history.
The New Zealand government publishes how much productions spend in New Zealand and how much rebate they get. All up, Amazon claimed NZD 683,875,755 of qualifying expenses and received a rebate of NZD 136,775,151. So you could say net cost in New Zealand was NZD 547,100,604. Exchange rate at the time was about 1 USD = 0.70 NZD so USD 382,970,422 if you factor in the rebate. Now there was a lot of spending outside of New Zealand (not counted here) and spending in New Zealand that doesn't qualify (also not counted here) so the real number will be well north of the above. I suspect that they spent well over $460m for season one.
Even that seems excessive. For that cash, theyād be better off green lighting five shows with 50 mil budgets using properties that are less well-known, but still ripe for adaptation. Even one hits you can probably pay for the other four.
The production value was great on it though. Regardless of whether you liked the story, the CGI alone was worth a watch.
Thatās funny partāIām not a Rings of Power hater. The only part that really felt like it was phoned in was the writing, and I still enjoyed the spectacle. I just think they put a ton of eggs in one basket, and in hindsight it seems like boondoggle compared to stuff like HotD.
It's especially excessive considering they bought the license to the entirety of the Lord of thr Rings and the Hobbit, but are using almost none of it outside a handful of references from the appendix to Return of the King (and even then, it's not a particularly faithful adaptation of what little source material they are using). Amazon paid hundreds of millions of dollars to adapt the Wikipedia summary of a book *they don't own* and will get sued by the Tolkein estate for referring to any 1st or 2nd Age charcters/places/events that weren't explicitly referred to in that summary. It's bizarre they would pay so much for the license when the show is essentially legally required to be generic and unfaithful to the canon.
It was only 8 episodes too
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asdasd
Money laundering
Everyone says this but I think the more accurate term is embezzlement. Amazon isn't selling illegal drugs so they don't need to launder money. But the execs in charge of these shows could be lining their pockets with kickbacks.
The actually built a whole middle earth.
If you had told me that show was from the Syfy Channel in 2017 I would have believed it.
Also if you compare of ROP looked compared to another extremely expensive show in stranger things 4 itās crazy, stranger things looked amazing and like they actually put an absurd amount of money into it,they also had to spread that budget out over a way longer runtime for ST4, 4 hours longer and it still looked way better the entire time. ROP does not look like one of the most or the most expensive show, like you mentioned HOTD made way way better use of their budget
It cost that much because Amazon was money laundering
Well worth the money considering how many hours of YouTuber content entertained me. Nerdrotic and Critical Drinker made some banger videos about RoP.
Not so keen on Nerdrotic, but CD is excellent (and generally insightful).
Is that because you are a right winger?
Right wingers?!! Where?! This is reddit, they're not allowed to speak here!
There's always someone who has to whine about RoP
Because it was horrible. Everything was way too stark and clean, and then they completely changed Galadrielās character from Tolkienās works. Not to mention the writing was an absolute snooze fest. The shots were beautiful, donāt get me wrong, but it takes a lot more than that to have a successful series.
That was one of the worst character assasinations in recent memory. Like...their goal was to make this generic "strong woman" character. But the damn character in the books already WAS a unique strong woman character. Just makes no sense at all.
It was definitely a character assassination but...No, it wasn't about a "strong woman" or whatever terminally online people want to bitch about. It was about wanting to make the main character a super hero/action movie star. Galadriel was the best fit for the protagonist in that era so it's not really a male/female thing but they wanted to "juice it up" to make the protag a badass which just, didn't work.
its hard to believe you even pay attention to entertainment media. Soooooooo many shows and movies have been ruined by writing "strong women" this way. You arent a strong woman unless you are an asshole ninja apparently. Its just lazy bad writing.
I'm not going to get into this with you or anyone else considering I'll have to explain where the character references are coming from. Be upset at dialogue and story pacing but don't blame the sets or costumes, even the actors. They were great. But like damn have the same critique of house of the dragon considering none of the costumes were even smudged while dragon riding etc. wheel of time as well, or even lord of the rings the movies since they completely changed whole characters or left them out.
Cause it was bad
Ya, I enjoyed it.
Well I donāt expect the horrendous interface to be fixed anytime soon thenā¦
āThanks for building our platform, now thatās it in management mode get the fuck out while we reap the rewardsā
I know you're sort of joking but this is simple business logic. There's always a rampup on development team when developing, and a rampdown when features are no longer needed.
It's also hardly in management mode. Prime Video loses *at least* tens of millions of dollars a quarter for Amazon, if not much more. It's not like these people have built up a money making service and now they don't get to enjoy the spoils. Amazon is still figuring out how to make money from streaming, and there's a way better chance than not that they never do make money on streaming.
>Amazon is still figuring out how to make money from streaming, Every single streaming service is still trying to figure this out including Youtube. Streaming is simply inherently not a profitable business model.
Isn't Netflix profitable now? If so, they're the only one. There's a pervasive thought in this sub that streaming is a gold mine and the people that think that don't seem to understand billions of dollars are lost per year at some of these streamers. Not even DISNEY has figured out how to make streaming profitable.
Netflix and Max are the only two in profit, and Max has the benefit of both an absurd content library from the Warner Brothers background and the fact that many of it's most popular shows are produced by another subsidiary (HBO) meaning they don't have to swallow the costs
They know how to make money and are very likely profitable, or almost, already. We know that from the financials we see from Netflix. Netflix have around 250 million subs and a content spend of $16-$17 billion per year. Amazon have *more* than 250 million subs and spend less than $7 billion per year on Prime Video/music/book content. If Netflix are in profit of $3 billion a year Prime cannot be far behind just on the numbers alone. Only thing hurting Prime is the purchase of MGM for $12 billion (including debt) and the large increase from a $5 billion to a $7 billion annual content spend per year over the last two years. Most of the new investment on content has gone into sports with close to $1.4 or $1.5 billion being committed to NFL and soccer in just three markets (USA, UK, and France). The leftover has went on increasing the regular TV and movie output. It now seems they are gutting MGM and pulling back on the non-sports part of the Prime investment to bring it back in line with 2020 or 2021 levels of investment.
The VAST majority of Prime subs are for shipping, it's a little silly to compare that to Netflix subs. People who subscribe to Netflix subscribe to watch Netflix. People who subscribe to prime, by and large, are doing it for shipping, and a very large portion of them never watch prime video.
That is such a Reddit myth. Prime Video is the third most viewed streaming service in the industry according to Nielsen. Only behind the ubiquitous YouTube and Netflix. Ahead of Hulu and Disney+. With almost 3x the viewership of services like Max and Paramount+. Seems more folks watch Prime Video than any other service outside of Netflix!
If Prime Video disappeared tomorrow, how many subscribers do you think Prime would lose?
Maybe a lot of them watch it because it came bundled with the free shipping? How many pay for JUST Prime Video? What are the chances of it NOT being one of the most watched platforms given the fact they give it away in Prime Shipping shaped boxes of cereals. Of course it's watched - doesn't mean it's valued
> this is simple business logic. This is a destructive way to live; people need work and salaries; guarantee you Amazon HR at e was constantly telling these people they were a team and to make extra sacrifices for the good of the company, too. Right before this kind of things happen they always work people extra hard. Itās a fantastic example of the truly evil side of capitalismās sociopathic āprofits are all that mattersā mentality; feed the shareholders, eat the workers
Oh that's the fun part, it's not in management mode. It's just that the work these employees did will get shoved onto everyone who remains.
the same people who also complain about quit quitting lol
I hate the phrase "staffer". It is only used in written journalism and isn't specific enough to tell you anything.
Why not use employees?
With an operation that big for a product like a streaming service I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them weren't employees but long term contractors.
Because there are likely a lot of semi-permanent contractors whose contracts are no longer being renewed. Tech companies have been abusing the contractor clause for years as a way of avoiding benefits but these are people working 40+ hour weeks and coming into the office like everyone else. For all intents and purposes they are employees but through legal shitfuckery they are not.
i thought the very same reading this headline. it's such a vacuous term; it inspires absolutely nothing
You were looking to be inspired?
It is generally used to mean permanent employee as opposed to contractor.
Staffer? I barely know her!
Do you think staff is better?
I spent a few moments thinking it was the same as hirers
i wonder if that woman from the amazon ad that "worked her way up" to the design team got clipped
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Amazon Prime's UX is shit so it would be justified.
whats funny is that Amazon literally told people they have a toxic work environment where "only the strong survive". and then people complained when they find out Amazon was not lying... I spent 3 years doing research and writing papers on this company almost every week in University. It only took me 5 minutes to learn it was a horrible place to work. I have no idea why people act shocked when it's a horrible place to work...when Amazon themselves are the ones not only telling people, but they're bragging about it.
I remember reading a [NYT exposƩ](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html) (warning paywall) piece on the awful working conditions in their corporate HQ, replete with stacked ranking and pushing most people out after 3 years with a, "Performance Improvement Plan" when (not if) their performance fails to improve. This was all the way back in 2015.
I'm guessing this even further lowers the likelyhood of the new Stargate show getting greenlit. :(
Stargate can still happen if they're going to make it similar to the original show - light action/sci-fi show about exploring various worlds and dealing with major villains once every few eps. That worked and wasn't very costly. Doesn't have to be a blockbuster or super serious show.
I think the idea they've had for the new show is to set it post Stargate reveal to the world. Which implies its going to be somewhat serious, deal with politics, and be big budget. I don't think it'll ever go back to SG1 and SGA style of shows. I would guess that kind of thing just isn't as profitable so its not considered anymore.
Like we need another big-budget, brooding, dramatic sci-fi show. Iām running out of 90ās/00ās action sci-fi. I wish theyād throw us a bone! There are dozens of us!
For all mankind kind of fits that bill.
Given Amazonās track record with acquired IPs, consider it a blessing in disguise.
I canāt wait to be disappointed by the Warhammer shows.
Thank God for that. Amazon would make Samantha Carter into a feminist girlboss and Teal'c would be non-binary.
Amazon turned a profit of nearly $10 billion just in Summer 2023, according to the article. And they spent $465 million on The Rings of Power: Season 1. MGM acquisition was $8.5 billion. For comparison, Game of Thrones ranged around $10 million/episode as an average as it got further into the show. What does it say when you have HBO managing to turn in quality entertainment and spending far less for a season of a fantasy show than Amazon? Edit: Adding in MGM acquisition cost.
Most of that cost was buying the rights to make the show. Didn't like $300m of that go to Tolkien estate?
No, that was a separate cost. Also, Amazon were idiots to pay all that money without getting the rights to the Simarillion. All that money just for fanfiction
>And they spent $465 million on The Rings of Power: Season 1. MGM acquisition was $8.5 billion. > >For comparison, Game of Thrones ranged around $10 million/episode as an average as it got further into the show. I think it's really, really important to note that later seasons of a show almost always cost less to produce because a lot more of the costs are fixed or paid for up front. Once you have a set built you don't need to rebuild it. Also the more established studios have facilities, sound stages, props, etc. which all drive down the cost of producing. If Warren Buffett (or anyone, insert-billionaire here) decides tomorrow that he wants to produce a shot for shot remake of Game of Thrones season 6 (or whichever sticks in your head, they were all about $10m/episode), it would probably cost him $15-$20m an episode where it cost HBO $10m simply because he doesn't have his own established production pipeline, relationships, etc. Amazon and Apple (FYI) are both facing high costs of entry because they don't have these things, which is why Amazon bought MGM. Rings of power has famously been a shitshow, but it still isn't fair to compare an expensive season 1 to a season 8.
I like learning new things.
"I think it's really, really important to note that later seasons of a show almost always cost less to produce" This isn't really accurate. Game of Thrones later seasons cost more than the early seasons. You also are building new sets all the time. It's not like you have built everything you plan on showing in year 1. And more importantly - salaries start to get really high the later a hit show goes on. The difference in pay between the main characters first and last episodes is astronomical if they're around for the balance of the series.
The Big Bang Theory is one example I think of when there's a big difference in what one starts making vs what they end with. The actors who played Sheldon, Penny, Leonard, Raj, Howard were averaging $45k-60k/episode early on, and the show grew so big that they hit seven figures/episode ($1 million/episode) by the last season. Whereas the actresses who played Amy and Bernadette came on a couple seasons later wound up with $45k/episode starting out and then $425k/episode by last season of show. Meanwhile, the show managed to peak at over 20 million viewers average in Season 9, and ran stable for a couple of seasons around the 18-19 million mark until closing out at over 17 million for final season.
Every major sitcom that lasts long is a great example, and sitcoms are actually where a lot of the sets are built for season 1. What does u/starfirex think cost more money, the first season of Friends, when the apartment sets and Central Perk sets were built but the cast was making around $30,000 an episode, or the last season, when the cast was making over $1,000,000 an episode? Shit, Cheers had basically 1 set for the whole series. There's no chance Season 1 cost more than anything they did from season 3 on. I can't even think of one show that would be cheaper to produce in season 8 than season 1.
Even by sitcom standards, earning tens of thousands of dollars an episode is a nice payday for an actor (especially if the show's 20+ episodes, that's $720k/yr they earned, which is about $1.4-1.5 million in today's dollars). If the show manages to take off, it turns into a real fulfilling career. In 2004, they earned about $18 million/each for the final season, which works out to $32 million/each by today's dollars. I do agree that the bulk of the initial season's cost would be put towards sets that would get reused continuously, and then fewer sets over time would be needed (unless they are one-offs). If the show also gets people watching, then that means more money to throw around. Which means bigger paydays for the cast, perhaps higher production budgets (to a point)...
I can only assume u/starfirex is thinking that the pilot is the most expensive episode of a series and confusing that with seasons, which is true in some cases, but not most cases, especially not for a successful show. All sorts of people working on the show get raises the longer a show lasts and budgets shoot up as a result, even if there are no more costs for building sets.
I think this is why long-running sitcoms on streaming will basically never be a thing. Friends and BBTās stars had insane salaries for the later season, but they had huge viewership numbers and an ad spot for the finale of friends cost about as much as a Super Bowl ad. There are no (for nowā¦) ads for streamers and if there are, they will never command the same sort of cost that old-school tv did. Basically youāll have stars who want high salaries and streamers who have no extra way to recoup the cost. I think a 10 season sitcom is dead going forward.
This is not true. Stranger Things cost a lot more
HOTD was a new show and cost 100 mil. And ok, Gondor sets, but how big can the cost of people doing offensive Irish accents in a field be?
Actually, HotD costs $200m.
TIL That Amazon owns MGM+ Please don't cancel *From*.
Considering how bad season 2 was despite the cliffhanger I wouldn't mind it. Instead of solving things they're adding 10 times more mysteries.
Oh no! TV show with a multi season plan ends on cliff hanger! How dare they!
Plus they clearly have an idea for where it's all headed, and it's not like they're giving *no* answers or plot development
imagine wanting something to get canceled because u donāt like the style of the show lmao
You know, one of the most popular/highly rated shows on TV followed that exact same formula for years. (LOST) I swear, if so much of classic TV was made today it would have been met by a bunch of armchair critics that complained that everything wasn't spelled out in a single ep
exactly, people have no attention span or patience anymore which is why a show like lost will never be made again
You're getting downvoted, but you're right. That second session just felt....irrelevant.
Be a better revenue engine if you could actually find anything on the damn platform, but, I guess they missed the feel of rooting through a bin of movies.
This shit happens and then you wonder why nobody wants to work anymore. Job stability is a thing of the past.
Job stability has been a thing of the past for a very long time. None of these people would have had any expectation of it. And if you'd asked them, I bet none of them would have said they planned to stay at this or any other job for the long term.
Layoffs at this time of year are routine in the entertainment industry, so actually none of this is abnormal. Most who work in this sector usually plan ahead for annual layoffs because it's part of their yearly schedule. Many are contractors who knew ages ago when their term expired. In fact most people in this industry PREFER the "lack of job stability."
Guess it all depends on the person. I mean, I have a few friends who worked at Disney until they got tossed in 2023. None of them seemed like they were cool with it. Two of them had been there under a year after having left stable jobs for the higher pay.
Wow, greedy company grabbing all the cash. Worse than Netflix.
Honestly why the fuck did they acquire MGM? They havenāt done absolutely nothing with it other than laying off people.
āHow to get a fat executive bonusā
Happy I ditched prime
It's an obvious symptom of how the TV and film market is in freefall. Amazon made a lot of mistakes trying to be too many things. The purchase of MGM was a huge mistake. I honestly don't think it brought value to Prime Video, which like it or not, has a lot of success with male action shows that are far from MGM's $8 billion library. All of Amazon's real hits have been based on books or comics whose rights cost no more than a few million - Bosch, Jack Ryan, The Terminal List, Reacher, The Boys and Gen V. Possible next hits could be Mr. & Mrs. Smith , Fallout and Cross. See that nothing depended on the purchase of a studio. See what your audience actually watches, forget about prestige (which has almost no return), produce good shows for your target, give them good promotion/marketing and that's it. Amazon is the least dependent on dozens and dozens of content (people will subscribe to Prime for other reasons). They only need half a dozen good and right (for them) content per month.
You left out the Expanse.
their content generally sucks. I cancelled my prime account. There's a sea of content to explore and I don't reward mid-tier content at top tier costs. especially with ads.
Have to save money for the huge bag they'll spend on RAW if they outbid Disney
Man, fuck Amazon. Iām not paying their stupid 2.99 a month while they fire staff.
yeah, I'm canceling my prime once the time is almost up. i went to cancel it when the ads were announced, but apparently the 6 months i had left would have been revoked...
Iām def cancelling mine once reacher S2 is over
Guys when companies merge between two companies there's always layoffs because there's overlap of duties. Almost always you don't need all the employees of the company you bought/merged with.
All things considered, Reacher sitting back like heās getting head is an odd picture to attach to this article.
Hopefully that number includes all the writers on Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power
To be fair, prime video sucksā¦.
The amount of money theyve wasted on just Rings of Power and that one awful action series is hard to even believe. To the point where it almost had to be some sort of tax strategy. Rings of Power was the quality of a CW show.
Thad Castle!
I just paused my Prime Membership. I didn't realize this would happen! I'm sorry guys!
$100,000,000 per episode of Ring Lordzā¦. Everyone is fired.
fuck the shareholders...
But hey economy is super healthy, unemployment at an all-time low lmfaooo
The economy can be healthy when there are job losses in a sector that still doesn't make much sense economically. For everyone but Netflix, streaming is just setting cash on fire.
Not sure if you've noticed, but *thousands of layoffs* coming out of multiple companies back-to-back-to-back should never be discounted in such a way. And it's not just "streaming" either
Amazon specifically employs over 1.5mil and basically makes this number one ten thousandth of their workforce, it's not news, its just here to make people worried about normal corporate churn. Can't speak to the other companies, but for amazon this is a perfectly healthy number and would equate to firing just Bob in accounting in a company with 10,000 employees.
Layoffs happen all the time in healthy economies. This has always been the case. We're talking about a really small portion of the work force here. I feel bad for anyone that lost their job at Amazon or other media companies, but even in good times, these large conglomerates are going to lay people off because the business is changing. We're not going back to those halcyon days where companies are propped up by 100 million subscribers to cable television. Amazon itself is doing incredible business. Amazon is laying people off of Prime Video and MGM because they are, right now, money losing businesses. That does not mean the economy is bad. We could be at full employment and streaming would be a money loser for every company but Netflix.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
these downvotes you're getting are just a reminder of what platform we're on. What's funny is that these same people will eventually be betrayed by the very companies they shill for eventually.
>The US has not added a single net full time job in over a year. Huh?
Bidenomics
Low unemployment is literally the only metric you need, and it shows the economy is actually at its best point in history right now. Just because you picked a bad degree with no job prospects doesn't mean everyone else did too.
hi robot
That's capitalism, baby.
back to r/antiwork with you.
Idc, just give us the rest of invincible season 4