• CmdrShepard
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    1 year ago

    How do you figure? I believe Netflix is the only service to actually make a profit off streaming and they have something like 250 million users. The rest of these companies are just dumping money into a bottomless pit and trying to outlast their competitors in the hopes of gaining enough marketshare.

    • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      The other services would be making profit if they weren’t in the “growth at all costs” phase. Every dollar they make gets reinvested.

      You think disneys back catalogue alone, which cost them nothing to stream to people, isn’t enough for them to make profit?

      • CmdrShepard
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        1 year ago

        Based on what? Expansion here isn’t comparable to something like a restaurant or retail store where they’re buying up real assets. These companies are dumping billions of dollars to create new content that could be entirely worthless and canceled after a season or two and even when they’ve ‘expanded’, they’re still on the hook to create more and more content for fear of becoming stale and irrelevant. At what point do they just decide to stop investing in the service because “now it’s time to profit?”

        Disney still has to pay to stream their own content as they have to pay residuals and the like. This is why HBO licensed out a bunch of their in-house content (like Westworld) to other services because it was more advantageous than streaming it on their own service.