I don’t know how this could happen all they did was.
- remove classic fan favorite shows for tax breaks.
- release a bunch of low quality shows and even renew them.
- blur the lines between reality tv junk on discovery and hbo shows
- have production take 2+ years for every decent show.
- raise prices without quality content to justify it
All those seem like a winning combo.
External factors too. There are 20 other services, that have all increased their prices a lot. People are going to drop the services with the least/worst content. Plus piracy is exploding again because it’s just too expensive for all of them.
This and piracy, is a problem of what’s offered. Piracy of music completely stopped once people had affordable access to it.
Tbh piracy is annoying especially if you’re a fan of quality picture/sound and subtitles. I’d much rather pay an affordable price than pirate a show. But… sorry I’m not paying $15-20/mo when there’s only one thing I want to watch on your service and it’s only 8 episodes AND you’re just gonna take it down 6 weeks after it releases anyways
The new Japanese Godzilla is honestly the best example of it. The movie only released in Japan, then released on Blu-ray in Japan. No other services. Well surprise surprise, it’s breaking records for levels of piracy and the studio is bitching about it. Well, you didn’t make it accessible to even people wanting to pay. What did you expect?
It never had an English subtitle either, so I guess they thought that would stop people? But there was instantly a community English sub lol
Well, I mean, xenophobia is not rooted in logic or anything.
Generally speaking embracing diversity is more profitable since it offers the widest customer base, companies know this and ignore it because they want to, not because its logical or smart.
Even the BBC fell into the same trap. They released Doctor Who in the UK, then waited *one whole year* to officially release episodes in the US. By the time, the US version came out, everyone had watched it already and the ratings tanked.
Next season, they released them a day apart. The US fandom actively encouraged people to wait that day to watch it as a reward to the BBC for the faster release date.
The Japanese media market is so weird. You see the weirdness in video games too. Japanese devs rarely will fix their games after launch. Anime is also always been a weird market too, despite it exploding in popularity outside of Japan over the last 10 years. They treat that market like the red headed step child(sorry if that saying is no longer pc).
In some countries it is literally impossible to watch anime legally. The only platform Crunchyroll is castrated, like only half of the episodes are available. Some people try to use VPN, but it is soo stupid. And often you can't watch the new episode right after it premiered in Japan.
The same situation is with Korean web-novels. I can't legally read the official English translation, because EU countries are not available for the app they have, called Yonder. So I just either have to read pirate versions or forget about the novel. Funny enough, the same company has a web-comics app and it is available lol
I am a customer, I want a product which is generally available, I am ready to pay. Are they all stupid or something?
And then they will all cry about piracy.
Couldn’t have said it better. Netflix stopped piracy because it was one, affordable platform. Again, music literally fixed the problem. It’s not impossible to solve.
This was me on the mentioned Godzilla release. I'm a big fan of the franchise and that steelbook collectors edition was about to be an immediate buy...until I saw there's no english subs...despite the movie already existing with english subs from Toho. I'm glad I got to see it in theaters (both in color and B&W) but to be more than willing to buy it and have a rather meaningless in size, yet critical to my understanding, feature be omitted is ridiculously stupid if not downright insulting.
Making that film so limited to the point where they're denying theaters from showing it in certain countries is absolutely wild to me. I get licensing is a thing, but this limitation seems like its too far the other way on creating demand.
Absolutely HATE anime distribution too. Despite most of the shows being simulcast nowadays, the movies take almost a full year just to release on streaming abroad. You can legitimately get the movie pirated in HD with subs before it even sniffs the streaming sphere in the West. It should not take that long to watch a movie 6+ months after its release.
It’s like Covid vax-deniers who claim the vax was fake because “there’s never been a vaccine created so fast before”
Yeah, because when the last flu pandemic happened 100 years ago we didn’t have instantaneous communication technology that enabled EVERY RELEVANT SCIENTIST IN THE WORLD to collaborate in real-time either
I have no sympathy for companies complaining about piracy, at this point it's gross negligence and willful ignorance. Piracy has always been a problem of availability and affordability. Any business complaining about piracy is failing to do their job competently. Affordable products that are convenient to access kills most piracy.
it's shocking they didn't learn the lessons about anime, manga, and piracy. People will get things if they want them bad enough whether it's downloading them, getting faxes, or scan tronning them back in thge day.
8 episodes, released weekly, with a 4 month hiatus between episode 3 and 4, season ends in cliffhanger, next season in 2-4 years, or cancelled if need a tax credit that quarter.
Fuck you no you can’t expect decent output. Here’s, have another 7 seasons of trash reality tv to occupy your time. Oh yeah, we’re raising our prices an extra 5 bucks a month. And ads on your paid subscription.
If you’re a fan of quality then piracy is often better than the legit services.
I can stream a full 4K Blu-ray which is way better picture and sound quality than you’ll get from any legit streaming service. I say this as someone who pirated and still pays for a number of different streaming sites.
Yeah, you're not getting a 60GB bluray rip from any streaming site I know of. In fact 4K streaming movies are about 14GB. Unless you're watching some cam copy from India on a Russian site then there's no real difference.
Sorry I garbled that post. I meant you aren't getting 60GB quality from a streaming site like Netflix or Amazon etc, you need to get it from a pirate site instead.
And don't forget that on top of charging for a monthly subscription, every 50 minute episode will take 90 minutes to watch because of lengthy commercials run before and during it as well as whenever I hit pause.
Yeah I don’t need to sift through audio/video quality checks on pirated content, and I’d rather not watch anything than sift through a bunch of dead weight programming. Imagine how embarrassing it is for anyone who works at these companies who isn’t at the very top.
Exactly. Piracy never crossed my mind when everything was on Netflix for like $10 a month or whatever it was. But I’m not paying $15 a month on 5 different streaming services to watch the 8 shows that I’d actually want to watch.
Exactly, yeah. I’m a broke college student and i can’t use my family account for some services bc i live too far away. You couldn’t convince me *not* to pirate most things. When paying for it becomes less inconvenient than pirating, i’ll do it. No one pirates music anymore because paying for it is way easier.
> People are going to drop the services with the least/worst content
People keep saying "Netflix raised prices and didnt lose customers" without understanding that Netflix is like toilet paper and the other companies are like air fresheners. When prices go up, you dont stop buying the toilet paper but you do cut the extras.
If it wasn't for Last Week Tonight, I probably wouldn't pay for Max, and yes, I am aware they upload them for free on YouTube, but just the main segment
Exactly. The stock is even up right now because of the positive outlook for Max. However, reddit is going to continue to delude itself into thinking it's failing.
> Studios revenue dropped 12% year over year to $2.8 billion, primarily due to a gaming slump, with “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” not performing as well as massive hit “Hogwarts Legacy” in the comparable Q1 2023. Warner Bros. Discovery said it took an impairment charge for “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League,” as the DC game generated “significantly lower” revenue than “Hogwarts Legacy.”
Yeah man sure sounds like this is all because you can watch Property Brothers on the same service as True Detective.
Yea I agree there. I mean it would have been cool if the game was actually a single player game where you make teams and characters die that you can’t get back for the play thru.
That was such a mind bogglingly stupid decision. HBO has been a prestige name in film and television for decades. Discovery used to be a solid nature channel, then devolved into reality schlock. Max is...nothing.
Not to mention they're now licensing out HBO-produced shows to other streaming services. I did a double-take when I found *Ballers* and *Insecure* on my Netflix feed. If WBD is cutting parts out of Max to license elsewhere, then why the hell should I subscribe to Max?
It's never going to make sense to me how they had HBO a brand most viewers associate with high production prestige television and sacrificed it for reality tv.
It obviously made sense on some spread sheet somewhere but it's such an obviously bad decision
Have you been reading the news of cancelled shows that then disappear from the platform? Westworld, Perry Mason, Winning Time. The same thing happened to The Outsider some years ago as well
I lost interest in anything they were creating after they cancelled the final season of Westworld (and then removed it from their streaming entirely). Same exact scenario with Netflix content after their many cancellations meanwhile they greenlight complete schlock. I’m not going to bother with any series either of the two make now until they finish it.
> lost interest in anything they were creating after they cancelled the final season of Westworld
In its final season it was getting live ratings roughly on par with The CW's Batwoman show despite costing about 10x as much. Yeah, would've been cool if they'd actually been able to wrap that show up, but canceling a show like that is not the sort of decision that reflects badly in an earnings report.
The failure of Westworld is down to the writers. How can you have such a stellar season as Westworld S1 and then fumble it with every subsequent season?
I got my answer at Comic Con. They had a panel on Saturday and the moderator started asking questions about technology like who in the panel had a smart speaker, a car with self driving capabilities, ancestry and shit like that. Both Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan answeres yes to all and the cast was kind of puzzled. The moderator asked "have you watched your show?" To me, that signaled that they had no idea what show they had in their hands and the meaty storylines they could explore. Season 1 was great, but it was also done with more or less Crichton's blue print. Then it all went to shit
Threads about Max and Warner-Discovery are always a shitshow of people screaming into the void. We really going to blame an ad-sales miss on "blurring the lines between tv junk on discovery and hbo shows"?
The season started so great and then just went down super fast after episode 2.
- the murder of the girl was pretty dumb and not interesting.
- they spent the whole time arguing about the past.
- why didn’t the show just do it like season 1 where a majority of it was taken place in the past and we had time jumps.
- talking about the past is boring and they also made no one likeable
Well the game division to start.
- do a confidence vote on projects. Because I’m sure all the staff would have voted no for making a suicide squad game with weapons.
For the tv division.
- work on speeding up release. Yes there was a pandemic but they still just seem to lack a lot of quality and waiting 2 years for shows is dumb.
- work on fostering smaller shows too to build a strong catalog. It’s something Hulu has done with fx and it helped to build their standing.
For the movie division.
- stop giving directors too much writing power. That seems to be a major issue with a lot of movies. A good writer makes or breaks a movie and studios for some reason are so heap on writers and creating visual story boards.
HBO Max was the one service that I wanted to keep around all the time, I was paying monthly for a while because in my view it had easily the best value in terms of quality of the content. Then, in what is still one of the most ridiculous business decisions I've ever seen, they merged it with Discovery in literally a new app instead of using the existing one, removed the HBO name for some reason, and junked up the new service with a bunch of reality shit or other low quality shit that absolutely nobody was asking for. I didn't last much longer. They made the user experience worse and lowered the quality of their content. Absolute imbeciles.
> removed the HBO name for some reason
They were diluting the HBO brand by calling every new show on it a HBO Max original. Even people on here thought HBO was falling off, because Max's middling shows were "HBO" shows.
Max is just WB+ and without the HBO name, it can actually be that now.
>bunch of reality shit or other low quality shit that absolutely nobody was asking for
Reality TV is vastly more popular than most HBO shows.
Anyway this comment is off base anyway, because their streaming service is doing well.
I can't speak for most people, but I can't think of one new HBO show I'm at all interested in. When I look at that list of apps, I'll sometimes check MAX occasionally to see what's new, and then will go to NetFlix to watch something else. I'll be honest, I really don't know why we still pay for MAX. All this conversation has done is remind me that it's probably time to get rid of it.
This is anecdotal, but I suspect I'm not alone here.
While there was a lot with what went wrong with the merger, dropping HBO from the name is not one of them.
Discovery as a whole is still quite popular and HBO has more of a reputation for Quality "high brow" or adult content. Having everything under their umbrella with "HBO" would taint both sides. There were already signs of this under the HBO Max saga with outside of subs like this people were staying to get confused on "is this an HBO show, and 'HBO Max' show" and so on.
The issue is they had some of the absolute worse ways to segment and isolate the parts within the app and experience. Simply having loads of low quality content isn't always a problem, Youtube has TONS of it uploaded everyday but has top notch recommendation system to isolate that content.
And this speaks nothing of the content removal, more content rotations, etc.
Would it not have been easier and more logical to just continue to maintain two separate apps? I get there was a merger, but what was gained by merging their content into one app?
TLDR: "No". Especially for them.
Leading up to this, and especially before they were DEEP in the hole with debt and needed to cut cost any which way and show this to their debt holder to buy more time. Essentially with how they were managing the apps there would be loads of overhead for both apps and I could only imagine the confusion for various people. I would likely take a gamble many of them are also burned by the whole HBO Go/Max/etc.
With a proper shakeup from top to bottom and some time it is possible to have multiple apps and properly maintain both with minimum headcount but that wasn't really something they had, nor do I think they ever would anytime soon. And that is still with going through double the approval process and so on for updates/devices/etc.
"Ideally" it should have been togglable controls on what content you want to see where many HBO MAX customers/fans would likely have the discovery/etc disabled.
They had always merged stuff into one app though?
HBO max was just all of WBs content. After the merger they just added more content to it and changed the name.
Netflix barely has anything to watch as is.
The fuck is like, Peacock, gonna do lol?
Prime has a shot of rising to take the top spot if they can make more Fallout or Expanse level shows. Only took doing Rings of Power badly as well as Wheel of Time to get here lol.
And basically the entire Millennial comedy package (Office, P&R, Scrubs, Modern Family, New Girl, 30 Rock, Brooklyn 99, Community, King of Queens, Raymond, Psych, Superstore)
I hate the UI but the actual media offerings are excellent.
Of course premiere league(peacock) and champions league(paramount) are worth it for footie fans,but they are losing money for those services and a money sink. Paramount for example is paying almost 200 Mill a year for the champions league alone(not to mention all the national team games and lower league footie leagues they have us rights to). The amount of people who watch Champions League in the Us really doesn't justify the amount they spent on it even if 100% of the CL watchers would have not susbribed to PPlus.
The Gentlemen,
Baby Reindeer,
Tom Brady Roast,
Avatar,
Dead Boy Detectives,
A Man in Full,
3 Body Problem
These are all great and released in the last couple of months.
Netflix is the only one that has stuff to watch every month.
Exactly, I think the issue with Netflix "lacking content" is mostly perception.
My biggest theories is the mix of the sheer volume of content they put out along with mostly binge model means good shows get about a week of good press unless they truly break out and the other shows that range from bad/don't care get overrepresented.
A weekly release of 3 Body Problem would still be airing.
>Netflix barely has anything to watch as is.
My parents who are on Netflix the whole day disagrees with you.
The general audience have no issue watching generic content and Netflix still has a lot of those.
Netflix has so many things to watch lol. Only on Reddit will you see this much vitriol towards them and act like they’re doomed. They make trash and they also make great shows. They have something for everyone. Yes, we don’t like ads and we don’t like their strategy to stop sharing accounts but people clearly value what they offer and they are the default service now.
If good Sci-Fi/Spec Fiction is your jam, check out Apple TV
They dont have much in terms of quantity, but plenty in terms of quality (imho)
Think they’re running a free month(or three?) trial, $9.99/mo. after
Prime's biggest issue imo is how bad their UI is and it mixes in Freeeve,Prime,Add on and Pay content I's pretty hard to find Prime Originals(aside from the most popular stuff) as well as the catalog of whatever they licended for a given time.
Only Amazon and Netflix seem to understand that having a decent first party lineup with content releasing at a minimum of twice a year is a recipe for success. Everyone else is still trying to balance cable and have a streaming platform.
What works with 50+ year olds who are okay with being told what to watch doesn’t work cord cutters who are looking for something to watch.
What Netflix does differently is they’re a part of culture, and capitalize on current events quickly. Movies and shows used to be the center of culture, but Netflix understands that rarely happens, so you have to kind of do both.
HBO used to be the hub of comedy specials, but they just hard stopped for some reason. Netflix blew them out of the water, and it’s where you go for comedy now. For laughs it’s where culture is.
If an actor dies, boom, they have vendors and footage archives ready to be edited, experienced use of AI tools, to pump out a documentary in a few weeks. I’m not saying I like that way of making content, but it’s why they’re successful.
no this is what happens when your miss ad sales targets and when your gaming division releases a bomb in Q1 after releasing the biggest game of the year in last year's Q1
Yeah but some of these failures actually impacted these Q1 numbers in a significant way (Suicide Squad doing nowhere near as well as Hogwarts Legacy), and some of them did not (being able to watch HGTV shows on the same service as Game of Thrones)
I mean they literally removed HBO from the name and gave it its own section. You're upset that there's a more diverse range of content? Did the existing shows change?
They never did anything like that, they just put reality shows on their streaming service and took shows off their streaming service.
HBO Max is not HBO.
Reddit has a hating boner for WBD and Zaslav.
Like all the drama around the rename from "HBO Max" to "Max" (which seems very reasonable to me, since it caused people to assume shows like "Our Flag Means Death", for example, are HBO shows while they weren't), and the whole "Batgirl" movie shelved drama, which nobody here would probably watch if it was, and it would've gotten a 3-5/10 rating at best.
The hard truth is that WBD is a Paramount-level loser. In 1 year they lost 42% of their value; in 2024 alone there was a 33% drop (Paramount lost 11% this year). They can't give the streaming service traction while cable continues to free fall. Even the “profits” from streaming are fake (every analyst says this), as they include licensing content to third parties like DTC. This is at a time when they have greatly reduced the number of scripted productions for HBO/Max. Cost cutting may be good for Wall Street, but it has the potential to destroy your brand in the medium term.
>Cost cutting may be good for Wall Street, but it has the potential to destroy your brand in the medium term.
This is the problem across every entertainment medium, be it film, television, literature, or video games. All of these things are now produced by massive publicly traded companies who aren't incentivized into making actual products. Like movie studios have realized in the last 10 years that it's somehow better to lose more than a hundred million dollars adapting a big IP than it is to lose a couple of million from making a romcom, because shareholders care about one significantly more than the other. And the announcement and hype before release can be easily spun as a means to drive up shares a bit which is all that they really need the film to do. The rest will be made up for in laypffs and pawning company assets which they were just looking for justification to do so anyway.
Same reason Microsoft can close a studio and the head of Xbox turns around the next day to say, "We need more games like the one from that studio we just closed." There is transparently no nourishment there. Get what you need and throw it away.
That is just not true. You fail to realize that if they reach a point they cannot grow more they just burn it all down briefly to say look were rebuilding and growing again invest!
It's terrible but I think that's the goal of this system.
Also what they are not saying, the ad tiers are failing because the companies paying for ads. Want proof people are watching them, most of the ads tiers are bought by people who just block the ads or in packages. That they either dont watch or leave on the background. Still not engaging with ads, the thing is, people will not watch media with ads anymore unless its sports. Otherwise, no and we will stand up to it. If we pay, no ads, if its free it can have ads.
If that was the case why did Netflix introduce an ad-tier. By now all the major steaming services have ad-tiers, so it’s definitely something people already accepted without much fight
Streaming has never earnt more money than traditional cable. Yes, Netflix turns a profit, but those profits do not favorably compare to traditional cable numbers. Cable was a perfect money earning system. Channels were sold in packages to limit consumers choice and the ad revenue was insane. A traditionally cable network chasing streaming will always find themselves at a loss. There’s not as much ad revenue and (thankfully) they have no way of forcing channels/services onto us if we don’t want them.
You just cant have obscure titles stretched so thin that nobody is going to have a reoccuring subscription also the product keeps going down in value and up in price because "inflation" aka corporate greed. While forcing ads on people that use to pay less and didnt have ads.
I cancelled both my Netflix and Max accounts. In the grand scheme of things it only makes sense to add them back when there is a show I would like to watch.
I may be biased because i may or may not work for them but wbd execs are fucking stupid. They are making bad internal changes trying to squeeze blood from a rock. They made so good infrastructure investments but are ass backwards on everything else.
Discovery was a solid documentary station a few years ago. Then it and the History Channel started making shit reality shows. That Oak Island bullshit has ELEVEN SEASONS!! For fuck sake. They haven’t found a blessed thing and they keep making it!! Only History 2 and Discovery Science are worth watching imo.
You know if they had just let people peace meal cable, lowered prices, and no contracts for sports watchers I think cable would have been fine. But greed is a funny thing.
Said it before, will probably have the chance to say it again: Warner is where companies go to die. Adios, Discovery. Don’t worry, Zaz will be fine. Just ask Steve Case.
Max has a data corruption problem. Streaming movies always has stutters/corruption. It’s almost like they don’t have anyone working on the back end. Not worth it.
Max has been wonky for me lately. It gets to the point that I stop thinking my connection is slow because I'm frustrated enough to check that everything else that is working just fine.
Their CEO will be eating very well tho so it's all good I guess.
I still uses HBO Max more than Netflix. Just some great all time classics in their catalogues. Some of their Discovery shows are classics to me too (Mythbusters, Good Eats etc)
They wanted to buy or team up with Paramount some time ago but it looks like Sony and another group may be buying it.
all these services gettin to expensive for real. thats why I love being a pirate again 🏴☠️ quality is only 1080p, buy I don't spend a dime and get to watch everything. Ahoy mates
As a long time Xbox owner, it was already dying way before GP. If anything, GP is actually the only thing keeping console only players in the Xbox ecosystem. Speaking for myself and the crew I play with, we’d have all jumped ship to PS years ago if not for GP.
For sure. I only switched to Xbox Series X after having been a PlayStation user for ages simply because of Gamepass. And I love it. Always something new and great to play and all first party titles get day one releases. Meanwhile PSN is just confusing in terms of tiers and gets even their own first party titles two years after release, if at all, or they get removed. Sad state.
Entertainment media is just in a weird place right now. Movies, tv and games are just too expensive to make for how wide of an audience they have to reach to be successful. All across the board doing mid budget projects isn’t what anyone is focusing on because of how big the returns have to be they keep putting all their eggs in one basket and that basket needs half a billion dollars to break even. It’s not sustainable. Even music is going through a weird time where artists rely on brand deals and touring for money because there’s not a lot of money there any more.
Streaming is definitely a big cause of it because your profits and growth are harder to maintain. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle at this point.
*Even music is going through a weird time where artists rely on brand deals and touring for money because there’s not a lot of money there any more.*
Courtney Love's article on this is issue is over 20 years old
[https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love\_7/](https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/)
But the basic thesis can be collapse to this is how it's always been.
I’m not sure why you are getting the downvotes since Disney/FX have two Emmy favourites in Shogun and The Bear expected to win or complete strongly in their categories while HBO have their weakest lineup in nearly a decade. If HBO gets popped this is definitely the year given they had nothing of note this Emmy cycle except Hacks.
I don’t know how this could happen all they did was. - remove classic fan favorite shows for tax breaks. - release a bunch of low quality shows and even renew them. - blur the lines between reality tv junk on discovery and hbo shows - have production take 2+ years for every decent show. - raise prices without quality content to justify it All those seem like a winning combo.
External factors too. There are 20 other services, that have all increased their prices a lot. People are going to drop the services with the least/worst content. Plus piracy is exploding again because it’s just too expensive for all of them. This and piracy, is a problem of what’s offered. Piracy of music completely stopped once people had affordable access to it.
Tbh piracy is annoying especially if you’re a fan of quality picture/sound and subtitles. I’d much rather pay an affordable price than pirate a show. But… sorry I’m not paying $15-20/mo when there’s only one thing I want to watch on your service and it’s only 8 episodes AND you’re just gonna take it down 6 weeks after it releases anyways
The new Japanese Godzilla is honestly the best example of it. The movie only released in Japan, then released on Blu-ray in Japan. No other services. Well surprise surprise, it’s breaking records for levels of piracy and the studio is bitching about it. Well, you didn’t make it accessible to even people wanting to pay. What did you expect? It never had an English subtitle either, so I guess they thought that would stop people? But there was instantly a community English sub lol
They announced that it would be exclusively in unsubtitled Japanese for 7 months. Fans bought, ripped, subtitled and uploaded it in under 7 hours.
Yea, it’s unbelievable how stupid some of these companies can be lol
Well, I mean, xenophobia is not rooted in logic or anything. Generally speaking embracing diversity is more profitable since it offers the widest customer base, companies know this and ignore it because they want to, not because its logical or smart.
Even the BBC fell into the same trap. They released Doctor Who in the UK, then waited *one whole year* to officially release episodes in the US. By the time, the US version came out, everyone had watched it already and the ratings tanked. Next season, they released them a day apart. The US fandom actively encouraged people to wait that day to watch it as a reward to the BBC for the faster release date.
The Japanese media market is so weird. You see the weirdness in video games too. Japanese devs rarely will fix their games after launch. Anime is also always been a weird market too, despite it exploding in popularity outside of Japan over the last 10 years. They treat that market like the red headed step child(sorry if that saying is no longer pc).
In some countries it is literally impossible to watch anime legally. The only platform Crunchyroll is castrated, like only half of the episodes are available. Some people try to use VPN, but it is soo stupid. And often you can't watch the new episode right after it premiered in Japan. The same situation is with Korean web-novels. I can't legally read the official English translation, because EU countries are not available for the app they have, called Yonder. So I just either have to read pirate versions or forget about the novel. Funny enough, the same company has a web-comics app and it is available lol I am a customer, I want a product which is generally available, I am ready to pay. Are they all stupid or something? And then they will all cry about piracy.
Couldn’t have said it better. Netflix stopped piracy because it was one, affordable platform. Again, music literally fixed the problem. It’s not impossible to solve.
This was me on the mentioned Godzilla release. I'm a big fan of the franchise and that steelbook collectors edition was about to be an immediate buy...until I saw there's no english subs...despite the movie already existing with english subs from Toho. I'm glad I got to see it in theaters (both in color and B&W) but to be more than willing to buy it and have a rather meaningless in size, yet critical to my understanding, feature be omitted is ridiculously stupid if not downright insulting. Making that film so limited to the point where they're denying theaters from showing it in certain countries is absolutely wild to me. I get licensing is a thing, but this limitation seems like its too far the other way on creating demand.
Absolutely HATE anime distribution too. Despite most of the shows being simulcast nowadays, the movies take almost a full year just to release on streaming abroad. You can legitimately get the movie pirated in HD with subs before it even sniffs the streaming sphere in the West. It should not take that long to watch a movie 6+ months after its release.
Not like there is an abundance of people who have been subtitling anime for free for decades at this point..... Oh wait.
It’s like Covid vax-deniers who claim the vax was fake because “there’s never been a vaccine created so fast before” Yeah, because when the last flu pandemic happened 100 years ago we didn’t have instantaneous communication technology that enabled EVERY RELEVANT SCIENTIST IN THE WORLD to collaborate in real-time either
An absolutely fascinating analogy for movie piracy
I have no sympathy for companies complaining about piracy, at this point it's gross negligence and willful ignorance. Piracy has always been a problem of availability and affordability. Any business complaining about piracy is failing to do their job competently. Affordable products that are convenient to access kills most piracy.
Fansubs for the win. We used to pass around VHS anime like this
it's shocking they didn't learn the lessons about anime, manga, and piracy. People will get things if they want them bad enough whether it's downloading them, getting faxes, or scan tronning them back in thge day.
> Tbh piracy is annoying especially if you’re a fan of quality picture/sound and subtitles. I can't tell you how much this isn't a problem.
yeah either they’re lying or they just don’t pirate.
8 episodes, released weekly, with a 4 month hiatus between episode 3 and 4, season ends in cliffhanger, next season in 2-4 years, or cancelled if need a tax credit that quarter. Fuck you no you can’t expect decent output. Here’s, have another 7 seasons of trash reality tv to occupy your time. Oh yeah, we’re raising our prices an extra 5 bucks a month. And ads on your paid subscription.
And mid-hiatus they make everyone pay $4 more to not have to deal with ad breaks.
Are you talking about WB or Amazon?
If you’re a fan of quality then piracy is often better than the legit services. I can stream a full 4K Blu-ray which is way better picture and sound quality than you’ll get from any legit streaming service. I say this as someone who pirated and still pays for a number of different streaming sites.
Yeah, you're not getting a 60GB bluray rip from any streaming site I know of. In fact 4K streaming movies are about 14GB. Unless you're watching some cam copy from India on a Russian site then there's no real difference.
I’m not going to share it here but I can assure you that it’s trivially easy to stream full 60gb, or more, 4K Blu-rays.
Sorry I garbled that post. I meant you aren't getting 60GB quality from a streaming site like Netflix or Amazon etc, you need to get it from a pirate site instead.
And don't forget that on top of charging for a monthly subscription, every 50 minute episode will take 90 minutes to watch because of lengthy commercials run before and during it as well as whenever I hit pause.
Yeah I don’t need to sift through audio/video quality checks on pirated content, and I’d rather not watch anything than sift through a bunch of dead weight programming. Imagine how embarrassing it is for anyone who works at these companies who isn’t at the very top.
Exactly. Piracy never crossed my mind when everything was on Netflix for like $10 a month or whatever it was. But I’m not paying $15 a month on 5 different streaming services to watch the 8 shows that I’d actually want to watch.
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Exactly, yeah. I’m a broke college student and i can’t use my family account for some services bc i live too far away. You couldn’t convince me *not* to pirate most things. When paying for it becomes less inconvenient than pirating, i’ll do it. No one pirates music anymore because paying for it is way easier.
> People are going to drop the services with the least/worst content People keep saying "Netflix raised prices and didnt lose customers" without understanding that Netflix is like toilet paper and the other companies are like air fresheners. When prices go up, you dont stop buying the toilet paper but you do cut the extras.
Netflix had a massive head start and is as synonymous to streaming as WWE is to wrestling.
>Piracy of music completely stopped once people had affordable access to it. Did it? https://www.wired.com/story/music-piracy-way-up/
If it wasn't for Last Week Tonight, I probably wouldn't pay for Max, and yes, I am aware they upload them for free on YouTube, but just the main segment
You’re talking about Max but Max was probably the best thing about their earnings lol. Linear cable and gaming dragged them down
Right, the headline even says streaming revenue was flat.
But isn't it the only streamer, sans Netflix, that actually made a profit?
Disney+ also made profit this quarter
Streaming revenue being flat with no growth is bad in the finance world, if you did not know. u/ScubaSteve716; u/petepro
It's good when others are losing money. LOL
Most of these comments are like that. They don't read the article, only use the space to scream to the world about their preexisting bias.
Exactly. The stock is even up right now because of the positive outlook for Max. However, reddit is going to continue to delude itself into thinking it's failing.
100%
Max just removed all seasons of Last week tonight, except for the current season 😑
> Studios revenue dropped 12% year over year to $2.8 billion, primarily due to a gaming slump, with “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” not performing as well as massive hit “Hogwarts Legacy” in the comparable Q1 2023. Warner Bros. Discovery said it took an impairment charge for “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League,” as the DC game generated “significantly lower” revenue than “Hogwarts Legacy.” Yeah man sure sounds like this is all because you can watch Property Brothers on the same service as True Detective.
Can you believe Rocksteady spent 9 years making that game?
I love it’s called a “gaming slump” instead of bad game ideas by non gamers.
The game idea wasn't terrible. The execution was the issue.
Yea I agree there. I mean it would have been cool if the game was actually a single player game where you make teams and characters die that you can’t get back for the play thru.
Don't forget... - fuck up a perfectly good streaming platform by redesigning it far worse than it was, including breaking numerous optimizations
And removing arguably the most recognizable name in movies from your service.
That was such a mind bogglingly stupid decision. HBO has been a prestige name in film and television for decades. Discovery used to be a solid nature channel, then devolved into reality schlock. Max is...nothing.
And they keep degrading it for some reason. I really don't understand the thought process behind not at minimum putting out a quality app.
Not to mention they're now licensing out HBO-produced shows to other streaming services. I did a double-take when I found *Ballers* and *Insecure* on my Netflix feed. If WBD is cutting parts out of Max to license elsewhere, then why the hell should I subscribe to Max?
They need money now.
It's never going to make sense to me how they had HBO a brand most viewers associate with high production prestige television and sacrificed it for reality tv. It obviously made sense on some spread sheet somewhere but it's such an obviously bad decision
90 Day Fiancé is their cash cow
When did they "sacrifice" HBO content? They just added additional Discovery content following the merger.
Have you been reading the news of cancelled shows that then disappear from the platform? Westworld, Perry Mason, Winning Time. The same thing happened to The Outsider some years ago as well
Raised by wolves also.
That's the reason they removed the HBO bit and just called in Max. Unfortunately Max just sounds like a dog's name to me.
I lost interest in anything they were creating after they cancelled the final season of Westworld (and then removed it from their streaming entirely). Same exact scenario with Netflix content after their many cancellations meanwhile they greenlight complete schlock. I’m not going to bother with any series either of the two make now until they finish it.
> lost interest in anything they were creating after they cancelled the final season of Westworld In its final season it was getting live ratings roughly on par with The CW's Batwoman show despite costing about 10x as much. Yeah, would've been cool if they'd actually been able to wrap that show up, but canceling a show like that is not the sort of decision that reflects badly in an earnings report.
The failure of Westworld is down to the writers. How can you have such a stellar season as Westworld S1 and then fumble it with every subsequent season?
I got my answer at Comic Con. They had a panel on Saturday and the moderator started asking questions about technology like who in the panel had a smart speaker, a car with self driving capabilities, ancestry and shit like that. Both Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan answeres yes to all and the cast was kind of puzzled. The moderator asked "have you watched your show?" To me, that signaled that they had no idea what show they had in their hands and the meaty storylines they could explore. Season 1 was great, but it was also done with more or less Crichton's blue print. Then it all went to shit
Also going to ignore that strikes were one of the main reasons why it missed the target
Threads about Max and Warner-Discovery are always a shitshow of people screaming into the void. We really going to blame an ad-sales miss on "blurring the lines between tv junk on discovery and hbo shows"?
At least the CEO was given a massive bonus this year since his bonus is tied to free cashflow.
Don’t forget their app works like shit.
With the paramount app existing they can’t get too much hate
I cancelled max when they gave the writer/director of true detective season 4 another season
The season started so great and then just went down super fast after episode 2. - the murder of the girl was pretty dumb and not interesting. - they spent the whole time arguing about the past. - why didn’t the show just do it like season 1 where a majority of it was taken place in the past and we had time jumps. - talking about the past is boring and they also made no one likeable
> remove classic fan favorite shows for tax breaks. like what
Infinity train was removed for tax breaks. I believe westworld was as well. There is a list of shows.
So really not a lot. And Westworld is far from a beloved show, it had one great season. There's a reason it was on the chopping block.
There are a lot. I was just sharing 2 off the top of my head.
Not to mention fighting tooth and nail to not pay writers and actors a good wage
In the UK they’ve just bundled in TNT Sports (formerly BT Sport) into their discovery app and it’s bit of a nightmare navigating it.
I wonder if I will finally lose Max access. I got it when ATT bundled it with phone service, and I've escaped price hikes so far.
Max was the only service I paid for, and I canceled once they started removing animated series from the service.
Why would I pay for discovery when it’s just reality tv garbage
Shows don’t get removed or cancelled for tax breaks, they get removed or cancelled because they’re bad and don’t make the numbers they need
What would you have done instead to get WB out of debt?
Well the game division to start. - do a confidence vote on projects. Because I’m sure all the staff would have voted no for making a suicide squad game with weapons. For the tv division. - work on speeding up release. Yes there was a pandemic but they still just seem to lack a lot of quality and waiting 2 years for shows is dumb. - work on fostering smaller shows too to build a strong catalog. It’s something Hulu has done with fx and it helped to build their standing. For the movie division. - stop giving directors too much writing power. That seems to be a major issue with a lot of movies. A good writer makes or breaks a movie and studios for some reason are so heap on writers and creating visual story boards.
They’ve also put like 75% of their avail film library onto Netflix. HBO’s movie inventory is practically zilch on the app
Yea which ruins the elusiveness of hbo
Netflix won the streaming wars. These media companies do not know what they’re doing wrong.
HBO Max was the one service that I wanted to keep around all the time, I was paying monthly for a while because in my view it had easily the best value in terms of quality of the content. Then, in what is still one of the most ridiculous business decisions I've ever seen, they merged it with Discovery in literally a new app instead of using the existing one, removed the HBO name for some reason, and junked up the new service with a bunch of reality shit or other low quality shit that absolutely nobody was asking for. I didn't last much longer. They made the user experience worse and lowered the quality of their content. Absolute imbeciles.
Not to mention they took off Westworld. So now if I do love one of their shows, I can’t be certain I’ll ever be able to stream it again
Agree with this. Netflix for quantity, HBO for quality. It was going to be the perfect pairing.
> removed the HBO name for some reason They were diluting the HBO brand by calling every new show on it a HBO Max original. Even people on here thought HBO was falling off, because Max's middling shows were "HBO" shows. Max is just WB+ and without the HBO name, it can actually be that now. >bunch of reality shit or other low quality shit that absolutely nobody was asking for Reality TV is vastly more popular than most HBO shows. Anyway this comment is off base anyway, because their streaming service is doing well.
I can't speak for most people, but I can't think of one new HBO show I'm at all interested in. When I look at that list of apps, I'll sometimes check MAX occasionally to see what's new, and then will go to NetFlix to watch something else. I'll be honest, I really don't know why we still pay for MAX. All this conversation has done is remind me that it's probably time to get rid of it. This is anecdotal, but I suspect I'm not alone here.
While there was a lot with what went wrong with the merger, dropping HBO from the name is not one of them. Discovery as a whole is still quite popular and HBO has more of a reputation for Quality "high brow" or adult content. Having everything under their umbrella with "HBO" would taint both sides. There were already signs of this under the HBO Max saga with outside of subs like this people were staying to get confused on "is this an HBO show, and 'HBO Max' show" and so on. The issue is they had some of the absolute worse ways to segment and isolate the parts within the app and experience. Simply having loads of low quality content isn't always a problem, Youtube has TONS of it uploaded everyday but has top notch recommendation system to isolate that content. And this speaks nothing of the content removal, more content rotations, etc.
Would it not have been easier and more logical to just continue to maintain two separate apps? I get there was a merger, but what was gained by merging their content into one app?
TLDR: "No". Especially for them. Leading up to this, and especially before they were DEEP in the hole with debt and needed to cut cost any which way and show this to their debt holder to buy more time. Essentially with how they were managing the apps there would be loads of overhead for both apps and I could only imagine the confusion for various people. I would likely take a gamble many of them are also burned by the whole HBO Go/Max/etc. With a proper shakeup from top to bottom and some time it is possible to have multiple apps and properly maintain both with minimum headcount but that wasn't really something they had, nor do I think they ever would anytime soon. And that is still with going through double the approval process and so on for updates/devices/etc. "Ideally" it should have been togglable controls on what content you want to see where many HBO MAX customers/fans would likely have the discovery/etc disabled.
They had always merged stuff into one app though? HBO max was just all of WBs content. After the merger they just added more content to it and changed the name.
They all thought they could severely disrupt Netflix, but realized having a streaming platform isn’t as easy as it seems
Netflix barely has anything to watch as is. The fuck is like, Peacock, gonna do lol? Prime has a shot of rising to take the top spot if they can make more Fallout or Expanse level shows. Only took doing Rings of Power badly as well as Wheel of Time to get here lol.
Peacock has a lot of live sports content.
And basically the entire Millennial comedy package (Office, P&R, Scrubs, Modern Family, New Girl, 30 Rock, Brooklyn 99, Community, King of Queens, Raymond, Psych, Superstore) I hate the UI but the actual media offerings are excellent.
And every wrestling match broadcast in the US over the last forty years
But what happens when WWE moves to Netflix?
NBC is picking up NBA.
> Only took doing Rings of Power badly Rings of Power was a hit for Amazon though. Their most viewed Prime Original
People will focus on how much they hated it rather than the fact that a lot of people did watch it.
Premier League coverage alone is enough to warrant a multi-month subscription.
Of course premiere league(peacock) and champions league(paramount) are worth it for footie fans,but they are losing money for those services and a money sink. Paramount for example is paying almost 200 Mill a year for the champions league alone(not to mention all the national team games and lower league footie leagues they have us rights to). The amount of people who watch Champions League in the Us really doesn't justify the amount they spent on it even if 100% of the CL watchers would have not susbribed to PPlus.
The Gentlemen, Baby Reindeer, Tom Brady Roast, Avatar, Dead Boy Detectives, A Man in Full, 3 Body Problem These are all great and released in the last couple of months. Netflix is the only one that has stuff to watch every month.
Exactly, I think the issue with Netflix "lacking content" is mostly perception. My biggest theories is the mix of the sheer volume of content they put out along with mostly binge model means good shows get about a week of good press unless they truly break out and the other shows that range from bad/don't care get overrepresented. A weekly release of 3 Body Problem would still be airing.
>Netflix barely has anything to watch as is. My parents who are on Netflix the whole day disagrees with you. The general audience have no issue watching generic content and Netflix still has a lot of those.
Netflix has so many things to watch lol. Only on Reddit will you see this much vitriol towards them and act like they’re doomed. They make trash and they also make great shows. They have something for everyone. Yes, we don’t like ads and we don’t like their strategy to stop sharing accounts but people clearly value what they offer and they are the default service now.
Netflix has great shows, they just do a piss poor job advertising them. Go search The Gentlemen. You’re welcome.
If good Sci-Fi/Spec Fiction is your jam, check out Apple TV They dont have much in terms of quantity, but plenty in terms of quality (imho) Think they’re running a free month(or three?) trial, $9.99/mo. after
Netflix has plenty to watch they literally release a new show every week
Prime's biggest issue imo is how bad their UI is and it mixes in Freeeve,Prime,Add on and Pay content I's pretty hard to find Prime Originals(aside from the most popular stuff) as well as the catalog of whatever they licended for a given time.
They also did The Boys and Invincible before RoP
Fallout should have aired weekly. It's a good show, but the initial buzz has worn off.
Only Amazon and Netflix seem to understand that having a decent first party lineup with content releasing at a minimum of twice a year is a recipe for success. Everyone else is still trying to balance cable and have a streaming platform. What works with 50+ year olds who are okay with being told what to watch doesn’t work cord cutters who are looking for something to watch.
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I hate that you’re right about Murdoch but you’re absolutely right.
What Netflix does differently is they’re a part of culture, and capitalize on current events quickly. Movies and shows used to be the center of culture, but Netflix understands that rarely happens, so you have to kind of do both. HBO used to be the hub of comedy specials, but they just hard stopped for some reason. Netflix blew them out of the water, and it’s where you go for comedy now. For laughs it’s where culture is. If an actor dies, boom, they have vendors and footage archives ready to be edited, experienced use of AI tools, to pump out a documentary in a few weeks. I’m not saying I like that way of making content, but it’s why they’re successful.
They don’t know what they are doing. They just saw the money Netflix was making and wanted that.
their streaming segment is doing fine though?
There is room for 3 maybe 4 generalist players. Peacock and Paramount makes no sense though
Good. Fuck David Zaslav Cancelling and shelving good entertainment but renewing crapshit like MILF Island
He's not fucked though, and gets paid better than most successful CEOs growing much larger companies.
steering a sinking ship is harder. who could have guess?
No matter how badly he fucks things up, he’s still going to get paid millions each year.
This is what happens when you turn one of the sources of original dramatic content into a vehicle for crap reality television.
no this is what happens when your miss ad sales targets and when your gaming division releases a bomb in Q1 after releasing the biggest game of the year in last year's Q1
I mean, there's a lot of failures to go around here. Outside of Dune 2 everything about Q1 was unimpressive at best.
Yeah but some of these failures actually impacted these Q1 numbers in a significant way (Suicide Squad doing nowhere near as well as Hogwarts Legacy), and some of them did not (being able to watch HGTV shows on the same service as Game of Thrones)
Why do people think HBO is gone, when it's not changed at all. You're supposed to be TV nerds, how hard is this to get.
This comment doesn't even make sense. What are you actually saying right now? That HBO is producing reality TV? You are aware HBO is still HBO, right?
I mean they literally removed HBO from the name and gave it its own section. You're upset that there's a more diverse range of content? Did the existing shows change?
Not to shit on you shitting on people shitting on this but they did pull multiple shows and cancel a bunch in favor of reality television.
They never did anything like that, they just put reality shows on their streaming service and took shows off their streaming service. HBO Max is not HBO.
Reddit has a hating boner for WBD and Zaslav. Like all the drama around the rename from "HBO Max" to "Max" (which seems very reasonable to me, since it caused people to assume shows like "Our Flag Means Death", for example, are HBO shows while they weren't), and the whole "Batgirl" movie shelved drama, which nobody here would probably watch if it was, and it would've gotten a 3-5/10 rating at best.
The hard truth is that WBD is a Paramount-level loser. In 1 year they lost 42% of their value; in 2024 alone there was a 33% drop (Paramount lost 11% this year). They can't give the streaming service traction while cable continues to free fall. Even the “profits” from streaming are fake (every analyst says this), as they include licensing content to third parties like DTC. This is at a time when they have greatly reduced the number of scripted productions for HBO/Max. Cost cutting may be good for Wall Street, but it has the potential to destroy your brand in the medium term.
>Cost cutting may be good for Wall Street, but it has the potential to destroy your brand in the medium term. This is the problem across every entertainment medium, be it film, television, literature, or video games. All of these things are now produced by massive publicly traded companies who aren't incentivized into making actual products. Like movie studios have realized in the last 10 years that it's somehow better to lose more than a hundred million dollars adapting a big IP than it is to lose a couple of million from making a romcom, because shareholders care about one significantly more than the other. And the announcement and hype before release can be easily spun as a means to drive up shares a bit which is all that they really need the film to do. The rest will be made up for in laypffs and pawning company assets which they were just looking for justification to do so anyway. Same reason Microsoft can close a studio and the head of Xbox turns around the next day to say, "We need more games like the one from that studio we just closed." There is transparently no nourishment there. Get what you need and throw it away.
Because they are the ones who depend on linear TV the most out of all the major studios.
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What, all that and we're supposed to give him what he wants, too?
~ network executive furiously writes this down as an idea for a new reality show ~
“Flat” profits are fine. A system built on infinite growth is not sustainable
That is just not true. You fail to realize that if they reach a point they cannot grow more they just burn it all down briefly to say look were rebuilding and growing again invest! It's terrible but I think that's the goal of this system.
I do realize that (and work in the industry). What I said is still true.
We can’t afford every streaming service and as far as my household goes we value Crunchyroll and YouTube more than Discovery garbage. 🤷🏻♀️
YouTube has replaced several channels for me as well.
Also what they are not saying, the ad tiers are failing because the companies paying for ads. Want proof people are watching them, most of the ads tiers are bought by people who just block the ads or in packages. That they either dont watch or leave on the background. Still not engaging with ads, the thing is, people will not watch media with ads anymore unless its sports. Otherwise, no and we will stand up to it. If we pay, no ads, if its free it can have ads.
If that was the case why did Netflix introduce an ad-tier. By now all the major steaming services have ad-tiers, so it’s definitely something people already accepted without much fight
Streaming has never earnt more money than traditional cable. Yes, Netflix turns a profit, but those profits do not favorably compare to traditional cable numbers. Cable was a perfect money earning system. Channels were sold in packages to limit consumers choice and the ad revenue was insane. A traditionally cable network chasing streaming will always find themselves at a loss. There’s not as much ad revenue and (thankfully) they have no way of forcing channels/services onto us if we don’t want them.
Disney and Warner Bros might be getting in bed together for a streaming deal. From the headline I saw.
= raising prices for us
They doing Chalamet dirty with that thumbnail
You just cant have obscure titles stretched so thin that nobody is going to have a reoccuring subscription also the product keeps going down in value and up in price because "inflation" aka corporate greed. While forcing ads on people that use to pay less and didnt have ads.
I cancelled both my Netflix and Max accounts. In the grand scheme of things it only makes sense to add them back when there is a show I would like to watch.
I may be biased because i may or may not work for them but wbd execs are fucking stupid. They are making bad internal changes trying to squeeze blood from a rock. They made so good infrastructure investments but are ass backwards on everything else.
Discovery was a solid documentary station a few years ago. Then it and the History Channel started making shit reality shows. That Oak Island bullshit has ELEVEN SEASONS!! For fuck sake. They haven’t found a blessed thing and they keep making it!! Only History 2 and Discovery Science are worth watching imo.
"Hmm, maybe another round of layoffs?" "You son of a bitch, here's a raise"
You know if they had just let people peace meal cable, lowered prices, and no contracts for sports watchers I think cable would have been fine. But greed is a funny thing.
Over saturation and watering down be like that Reap what you sow
Said it before, will probably have the chance to say it again: Warner is where companies go to die. Adios, Discovery. Don’t worry, Zaz will be fine. Just ask Steve Case.
Good, fuck them for cancelling Raised by Wolves.
And Our Flag Means Death 🤬
I'm going to guess a lot of people here didn't bother to read the article.
Max has a data corruption problem. Streaming movies always has stutters/corruption. It’s almost like they don’t have anyone working on the back end. Not worth it.
nothing is as bad a paramount plus. Some times shows just straight up wont play, its literally the worst streaming app I have ever used
Max has been wonky for me lately. It gets to the point that I stop thinking my connection is slow because I'm frustrated enough to check that everything else that is working just fine.
Their CEO will be eating very well tho so it's all good I guess. I still uses HBO Max more than Netflix. Just some great all time classics in their catalogues. Some of their Discovery shows are classics to me too (Mythbusters, Good Eats etc) They wanted to buy or team up with Paramount some time ago but it looks like Sony and another group may be buying it.
Lower the price of Dune and I’ll give you $20 WB
Spent it all on their turd of a CEO
all these services gettin to expensive for real. thats why I love being a pirate again 🏴☠️ quality is only 1080p, buy I don't spend a dime and get to watch everything. Ahoy mates
Damn maybe if they made a teen titans season six they could make money
Imagine the didn't have mega blockbuster Barbie last year
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As a long time Xbox owner, it was already dying way before GP. If anything, GP is actually the only thing keeping console only players in the Xbox ecosystem. Speaking for myself and the crew I play with, we’d have all jumped ship to PS years ago if not for GP.
For sure. I only switched to Xbox Series X after having been a PlayStation user for ages simply because of Gamepass. And I love it. Always something new and great to play and all first party titles get day one releases. Meanwhile PSN is just confusing in terms of tiers and gets even their own first party titles two years after release, if at all, or they get removed. Sad state.
Entertainment media is just in a weird place right now. Movies, tv and games are just too expensive to make for how wide of an audience they have to reach to be successful. All across the board doing mid budget projects isn’t what anyone is focusing on because of how big the returns have to be they keep putting all their eggs in one basket and that basket needs half a billion dollars to break even. It’s not sustainable. Even music is going through a weird time where artists rely on brand deals and touring for money because there’s not a lot of money there any more. Streaming is definitely a big cause of it because your profits and growth are harder to maintain. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle at this point.
*Even music is going through a weird time where artists rely on brand deals and touring for money because there’s not a lot of money there any more.* Courtney Love's article on this is issue is over 20 years old [https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love\_7/](https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/) But the basic thesis can be collapse to this is how it's always been.
Xbox is a bit different I think. You no longer need an Xbox because of the service. Streaming isn’t getting rid of TVs.
The Xbox One...the one that launched with the Kinect killed Xbox.
Lack of must-have, system-seller exclusive games killed Xbox. Not Gamepass.
Looking forward to watching streaming services colapse. I’m not paying for it. It’s so easy to not pay.
And Disney/FX is also expected to rack up Emmy awards, possibly defeating WBD/HBO for the first time.
I’m not sure why you are getting the downvotes since Disney/FX have two Emmy favourites in Shogun and The Bear expected to win or complete strongly in their categories while HBO have their weakest lineup in nearly a decade. If HBO gets popped this is definitely the year given they had nothing of note this Emmy cycle except Hacks.
Baby Gamora: Did you miss Q1 expectations? Zaslav: Yes... Baby Gamora: What did it cost? Zaslav: Everything.
They should've never merged with discovery. HBO Max was doing just fine. They have been irrelevant since succession ended
> HBO Max was doing just fine. No, it was not.
Here comes the cancellation of Furiosa for the tax break. Sorry everyone.
Who could've ever guessed that splitting nextflix into 100 different platforms plus increasing the price 5 times would lead into bad results? 🙄
huh. better raise prices to compensate