Comcast, Paramount Eye Merger Because The Streaming Sector Is Completely Out of Ideas
from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept
We’ve been talking a lot about how as streaming subscription growth slows, streaming companies will begin doing whatever’s necessary to deliver Wall Street quarterly growth at any cost. Even if it cannibalizes longer term company health, customer satisfaction, and brand quality.
Just like the cable giants they disrupted, that generally means lots of prices hikes, weird new attempts to nickel-and-dime users (see: Amazon charging $3 extra to avoid ads that didn’t exist previously), more restrictions (see: password sharing crackdown), lower quality content, more layoffs, worse customer service, and eventually, new obnoxious fees.
But it also means a lot of pointless, counterproductive mergers, designed primarily to goose stock under the pretense that mindless consolidation is innovative. You saw the mess that mindset created with the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of mergers, and now — just as predicted — Comcast and Paramount are contemplating creating a Comcast/NBC/CBS/Paramount/Universal super union:
“Paramount has held recent talks with Comcast about joining forces in streaming through a partnership or joint venture, among several potential strategic options the entertainment company is pursuing, said people familiar with the situation.”
Paramount’s CEO has been talking about finding a merger partner for months after struggling to keep pace with Netflix. And Comcast’s Peacock, despite having 31 million streaming subscribers, lost $2.75 billion last year alone due to mismanagement and content costs. The big four (ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC) have also been pressuring the FCC to eliminate what’s left of media consolidation rules and let them merge.
These companies can’t grow subscribers easily because doing the kinds of things subscribers actually like (lower prices, greater convenience, fewer ads, better content, better customer service) would chip away at Wall Street’s desire for impossibly-unlimited quarterly growth.
So instead you get the financial equivalent of three card monte, where companies will mindlessly merge under the pretense that the consolidation creates vast and untold new synergies. But while the deals create a short term stock bump and tax breaks, it also saddles the companies with significant new debt and distraction, prompting even more price hikes, layoffs, and ever-sagging quality.
Most major media outlets — in many cases owned by the same billionaires that own streaming companies — often simply ignore the downsides of consolidation in coverage. They also adore hyping pre-merger hype, but rarely apply the same zeal to post merger layoffs, broken promises, or dysfunction.
That ensures, as we saw with the AT&T Time Warner Discovery mess, nobody learns anything from history or experience. This repeated enshittification process is just getting started in streaming, making it all but inevitable that once-innovative streaming companies look more and more like the despised cable giants they once disrupted. All in a never-ending quest for unlimited growth and unsustainable scale.
Filed Under: consolidation, mergers, streaming
Companies: comcast, paramount
Comments on “Comcast, Paramount Eye Merger Because The Streaming Sector Is Completely Out of Ideas”
i.e., NBC merging with CBS.
Here we are - again
Comcast is the reason I left cable TV to Dish.
Dish, however, became nearly as expensive as Comcast.
So, we left them recently.
Now, Paramont+ plus some streaming is all we want.
To add Comcast BACK is more than grating, the reason we left cable was Comcast.
Infinite quarterly growth is a disaster for any corporate in any industry.
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Ultimately, you’re supporting the same copyright cartel via different middlemen. I see no reason to expect things to be different, over the long term.
Personally, I say let those companies do what they want. Maybe it’ll increase the public’s animosity toward copyright, so as to speed its demise.
But important utilities like broadband and telephone access need to be left out of this mess. If such mergers go forward, governments should insist that Comcast get out of the local-network-access business. If they want, they can be one of many competing ISPs offering service on those wires.
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Infinite quarterly growth in a finite system is bad for civilization and the environment.
Roger
Curious what happens to sportsball TV deals when number of bidders shrink and Cable/streamer stockholders questioning if gazillion$ rights deal are worth it?
Not only will sportsball be losing 1 linear TV bidder with CBS & NBC merging, but what happens when Disney/Fox/WB Discovery finalize their sportsball streaming ménage à trois?
MLB may be in the best position. With the RSNs going broke it can roll all of the teams rights into MLB.TV. At least in my opinion, MLB.TV has the best technology
Re: what is the next big idea?
The next big idea will be something that disrupts Netflix all over again like Netflix disrupted other industries.
My money is on AI getting good enough to get into the hands of normal folks. Don’t like what Disney is doing with Star Wars or Game of Thrones’ final season? Show us your version.
Most of this will be trash of course but some will be good and others will be popular for being porny, satirical or pushing certain buttons. Big IP will be a huge part of this because everyone already has an opinion on it, for good or ill.
The companies can have lawyers monitor YouTube, where most of this stuff will end up, and take down offenders. Or companies can be smart and add their own mini-YouTubes to their own platforms, where playing with their own IP is sanctioned, so that Google doesn’t end up with all the revenue.
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But that will only make the enshittification cycle start all over again. As long as Wall Street continues to be allowed to run amok, enshittification will always happen.
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Netflix wasn’t even a big idea. It was just a DVD rental outlet, except using the postal system instead of physical stores. Then the idea was “let’s stream TV over the internet”, which iCraveTV had done without permission 8 years prior. (Let’s just not talk about RealMedia, except to say it was much earlier but absolutely terrible.)
In some sense, Netflix was kind of in the right place at the right time.
I don’t think a “big idea” can occur in an ecosystem now controlled by the copyright monopolists. They licensed their stuff to Netflix for a while because they couldn’t compete; but that time is over, Netflix has joined the MAFIAA, and all the streaming providers are “enshittifying” together. When have major media companies ever shown a willingness to “be smart”, as you say? They’re not gonna start a mini-Youtube. Maybe they’ll acquire one, and then miss the point by tightening the copyright rules.
Ideas?
Is this really a business that needs “ideas”?
Ideas are for the TV and film screenwriters to come up with. The broadcast and cable providers just need to get the resulting media to customers, such that a customer can watch what they want to watch, when they want to watch it.
I suppose there’s room for minor ideas in relation to interfaces and such, but one shouldn’t expect to see anything groundbreaking. What the users actually want, and the market will push companies toward, is basically “Popcorn Time” with streaming. They’re trying desperately to hold back that future; in other words, to block certain ideas. It’s no wonder they seem unimaginative. What they’ve created just fundamentally doesn’t make sense, as a way to “sell” things with zero marginal cost.
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The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised Planck against going into physics, saying, “In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck#Academic_career
Max Planck later contributed to much of modern day quantum mechanics.
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That was as short-sighted as those who said humans could never build a flying vehicle. But we’d seen flying animals, and we knew there were (and still are) many unknowns in physics—things people wanted to figure out.
The vast majority of businesspeople never come up with any big “ideas” to fundamentally transform the lives of their customers. They’ll maybe come up with a way to reduce costs, and make customers pay more anyway; or create new revenue streams, like those grocery-store loyalty cards that people tend to hate. While some people are obsessed with “innovation”, it only rarely benefits customers.
Look at the history of “big ideas” in film and TV. There was interactive video: Kinoautomat in 1967, and then in the 1990s there was big publicity for some interactive movie nobody remembers (it was “Mr. Payback”, and didn’t even make Wikipedia’s “interactive film” page); WebTV was pitching similar things for a while. We’ve occasionally had people proposing synchronized release of odors, or other physical effects, and apart from some theme park rides nobody much cared. 3D audio has had some success—my family had it for a while in the 1990s, but didn’t find it worthwhile to keep when we re-arranged the furniture, and I think most people don’t go to the trouble of configuring the extra speakers at home; it’s ubiquitous in theaters, though.
3D televisions and films were pushed heavily onto a public that did not want them. Curved TVs seem to similarly have been a fad. Virtual reality has a small following, but nothing compared to the hype; maybe it’ll still happen if the companies push hard enough, and do a good enough job, but the average viewer is hardly salivating for it.
That brings us back to the implied question: what do viewers want? They want enjoyable videos, all viewable at their leisure from one service that costs as little as possible—preferably nothing. As Karl says, it’s not profitable to give people what they want. (Except for enormous screens and higher resolutions, which people do seem eager to pay for.)
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“but one shouldn’t expect to see anything groundbreaking.”
I do expect ground breaking innovation, discovery and much more understanding of the reality we find ourselves in. How else are we as a society to advance?
Ok, yes there are those who despise advancements anywhere and yet they still seem to demand their cell phones work and their tv to make them happy. How do they think that will work?
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I’m talking about ground-breaking innovation in the field of delivering videos to people. Since the days of Citizen Kane, what’s really changed? Shorter cuts, more audio channels, higher resolutions, color… maybe different snacks in theaters… and we don’t have to install giant antennas to watch TV anymore, but that’s been a mixed bag (cf. Comcast).
A science fiction fan might’ve expected movies and TV to have been replaced by holo-decks or direct brain stimulation by now. But they’ve hardly changed at all; it’s been a series of incremental and largely predictable improvements. Home video and sites like Youtube were probably the most significant ones.
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YouTube and other platforms democratized the ability of an ordinary person with no connection to the entertainment industry to make their living by being an entertainer. It’s massively altered how people watch television in that I no longer subscribe to cable, haven’t for years, and watch far less television from the old school players and way more from content creators online. I’d consider that a a massive shift in viewing habits because I know I’m not the only person this has happened to and the younger you go the less you watch old school television shows and instead watch content created by people who work for themselves instead of the networks of film studios. It’s not as flashy as holodeck viewing or having shows transmitted to your brain but it massively altered how people watch shows and what shows can be created.
Also as a queer femme guy I never saw myself positively represented, or for that matter represented at all, in a positive light on television as kid in the 70’s. Today that’s definitely not the case. That’s also a massive shift in how entertainment works but if you’ve always been represented by such a system, of course, you won’t see these changes as dramatic ones massively impacting society.
So that’s one massive change in how content is delivered and another massive change in how content is created and who it is created for that you’ve blown off as nothing new happening in the industry because you’re looking for a flashy jet pack and not something practical like velcro.
Wallstreet has gone Insane
I think its fun to note that industrys are not allowed to simply mature past the growth phase anymore. Google kills projects that don’t make an arbitary amount of money even when they are growing money makers.
Now Streaming, which could settle down into a few models that are profitable, choose instead to double down on all you can eat AND cancel shows after 1-2 seasons and wont even try to pay anyone on the show well.
Thank you great “Shareholder Value” gods!
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” industrys are not allowed to simply mature past the growth phase anymore.”
I’m not sure they ever did this. Trying to find at least one example where a large publicly traded corporation was able to accomplish such a task.
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A lot of your legacy firms like IBM, Ford, GM, some could argue airlines, etc don’t innovate much anymore. Their stock price is reflected in the fact they mostly just make slight updates and sometimes adopt new tech often made by someone else. Compared to say Tesla that for a while was bigger then the entire auto sector.
Often times MBA types are told to sell cash cows (sections of a firm that are in maintenance mode) in order to chase growth in other areas of the firm. This is likely why you don’t see it often.
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Airlines? They’re more innovative than ever. It used to be that they’d just buy planes and fly routes between major cities, at rates set by governments. Usually a country had one airline or maybe a few. A more boring business could hardly have been imagined.
Now they’ve got all kinds of loyalty programs, different ways to nickel-and-dime people (luggage, change fees, etc.), dynamic pricing that lets them advertise $5 tickets. All kinds of creative agreements by which they can avoid owning planes. Airlines are created or go bankrupt frequently. Everything’s changing, all the time.
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Not sure I would refer to those items as being innovative.
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Why not? The financial people are inventing things that have never been seen before, that change the customer experience in major ways.
Was there a time when airlines were innovative in a way the customers liked? In my view, it was the aircraft manufacturers that were usefully innovative, never the airlines.
'Any number of companies in an industry higher than zero is competitive.'
No worries, I’m sure the FCC that is awesome at regulating the ISP industry to keep the companies in check will look at such a super-merger and pause almost two whole seconds before getting out the ‘APPROVED’ rubber stamp.
(That the pause will solely be the result of forgetting where they put the stamp is of course irrelevant.)
Enshittified Apps
I’d like the FCC and the FTC to start looking at how enshittified the streaming app space is.
CW, MGM, SyFy, and others have tried to add on ads, and half the time it just stops the streaming app and you have to go through motions to get the movie or episode restarted.
Paramount+ has, for months running, had issues wherein the voiceoever mode is on, with no way to turn it off. (I had to resort to casting from my computer to my Nvidia Shield Pro, which, ironically, in effect obviated the need for the Shield device for streaming.)
Paramoiunt+ also can’t always remember where you are, episode-wise, in a series. Or that you already watched an episode. Or insists you have to watch the entirety of the credits before you can watch the next episode.
And even before ads were brought in, Paramount+ insisted you had to see previews of shows, even if you were already watching it and had seen the episode the preview was for. Multiple times.
NetFlix has such a convoluted interface that in order to leave its app, you have to scroll a bajillion times before you can exit the app. (Fortunately, the Nvidia shield devices have a button on their remotes. I don’t know it’s oficial Nvidia name, but I call it my For Fuck’s Sake Get Me The Hell Out Of This App (FFSGMTHOOTA, which is like the sound I make after a few moments with the various apps and have become flustergated with it).
AppleTV probably has the best interface, but you can’t turn off auto-start of the next episode, or series, or thing in your watch list.
They all need to put your watch list at the top of the main page. And they all need to allow you to customize your viewing experience.
Yeah, they enshittified it. It took them what, 3 years, maybe 4?
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yeah, I came here to say this too – that we need to ad to the list of “things subscribers actually like”: mproving app functionality like searchability, ability to turn on/off autoplay and minimizing the last ten second new of shows into a tiny bix to jump to a “
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oops, hit post too fast!
into a tiny box, just to show a preview screen for the next episode, being able to see your watch lists easier, being able to see when shows are going to be cancelled/removed soon and see what new shows are coming better, turn off auto -pkay of video previews when you login, actually remember what episodes you’ve watched for each show properly, having proper apps for Roku and other streaming devices, etc. etc.
like there are so many ways that these companies could fix these types of issues, which would make people more likely to stay signed up! but instead they just pretend thier products are perfect as they are, and nickel and dime us instead!
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Pretty much all of that stuff will just cost the streaming company money, without bringing in much money. ‘Cause you’re gonna subscribe with or without that, right? No competitor is much better than another.
The problem with search boxes, apart from being difficult to use via a TV remote, is that people will search for good things—that is, things that are probably not cheap for the operator to license. Similarly for removal: if they’re removing something because the per-view costs are too high, do they really want a flood of last-minute viewing?
That’s why Netflix, years ago, started showing things that are “recommended” (by them) or “popular” rather than “highly rated” (which used to be an option).
Why should they care whether the products are perfect for you? They like collecting your nickels and dimes. Evidently, you keep providing them.
Their only real incentive is to not be too much worse than a competitor. If their enshittification is roughly synchronized (by “watching market trends” or some shit like that—not collusion, which would be illegal), there’s no real problem (for them).
Yeap, that’s capitalism. Competition gets us all the good stuff that those other political economies could never dream of.
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Is it the competition derived from the economic system or is it the ability to think freely?
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Which is funny since one of the thing the near unchecked capitalism in the US detests is competition, with it being undermined and attacked left and right my companies that are allowed to run amok and squash any pesky threats to their profits.
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Yup. Too bad actual competition in this field is illegal due to copyright law. Those of us who’ve decided to go with the illicit competitors anyway speak pretty highly of them.
Isn’t the free market awesome?
This is a great idea for theme parks
Imagine if Comcast and Paramount merged. Would we finally get a Star Trek attraction or land at Universal Studios?
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We had Star Trek attractions 30 years ago at Paramount theme parks, and Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas operated from early 1998 to late 2008. What you’re talking about would just be the revival and relocation of an old idea—not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that.
the right idea: give up
Paramount+ and Peacock are #6 and #7 in a field that will support 4-5 major competitors. It’s simply overbuilt.
I saw this over a decade ago when I dumped cable TV for Netflix, and suddenly paid less than a tenth of what I’d been paying before, ad-free too. Now multiply me by millions. A lot of money has been yanked out of the entertainment ecosystem.
And that’s what’s behind a lot of the chaos in streaming: strikes, companies with wretched earnings (Warners today), M&A talk. The industry needs to be radically slimmed down to match demand. I’m only surprised it’s taken this long.
Thank you
Thank you for resisting what’s apparently a nearly impossible-to-resist urge to use the term “brunchlords.”
Once was cute; twice was pushing it. Using it in all your articles is tiresome.