Streaming Services: Their flawed business model and how they destroy Cinema

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All right, as my long time listeners know, I’ve an affinity for film and books and pop culture and whatnot. And I try to bring it into the programs here. We kind of use them as examples and whatnot. However, you know, I’m here to tell you, I haven’t been to the movies. The last movie I went to was, was it last summer? Last summer, was it Top Gun Maverick? Haven’t been back.

haven’t been back to the movie theaters. And I know that they’re adding all sorts of amenities. You can get wine and beer and food and whatnot. Still, still, you can’t drag me back in. I mean, it’s gonna, I think, the Oppenheimer movie, I won’t be able to wait for that one. I think I’m gonna have to go see that one. And I’m kind of the same way when James Bond films

come out as well. But that was the story today. She’s talking about the legacy media companies and how awful 2023 has been. I laughed. You had the idiots over at Warner Brothers and the folks that run DC Comics. The Flash is the greatest superhero movie of all time. Yeah, did you see the box office this week? Tanked. When it come in third or fourth and it’s second weekend? Wasn’t that good?

Well, not good. Anyway, again, we want to talk about their streaming services. The streaming wars. Again, got Netflix, Disney, Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount Global. Netflix has done a good job in regards to dealing with all of the illegal users of its platform. I had no problem with that at all. What they’re doing, I think it’s great. Again, they’re doing fairly well.

Stock has done okay. But you take a look at Disney, okay? They laid off people, their CFO just stepped down. Company’s having to pull programming from its services. It can’t make anything decent anymore. And again, it’s because they’re stupid. They’re stupid. They pander to the minority opinions.

of people in this country. Wanna call it the woke mob, whatever it may be. It is what it is. They pander to that and they continue to get punched in the face with one bad movie after another, yet they keep making them. There was, again, I’ll sub-reference, like I always like to do the Simpsons episode way back when Lisa Simpson is doing a science experiment, or science experiment is a, I think it’s a hamster smarter than my brother.

and she hooked electrodes up to a cupcake and the mouse would go to the, excuse me, the hamster would go eat the cupcake, get zapped and not do it again. Yet her brother kept trying to take the cupcake even though he kept getting zapped by it. Yeah, this is how dumb they are. I just wanna know who in the world thought the concept of elemental was gonna be a big winner? Who?

how do these people have jobs? And it’s extraordinary to me. Warner Brothers Discovery laying off more employees. They’ve already cut thousands of jobs. They just fired Chris Licht from CNN. They didn’t like his interview that he did there. What was it? It’s in the Atlantic or Vanity Fair? I don’t know, I don’t know. But again, CNN is an absolute disaster also. Again.

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Zazlov actually had an emergency call with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson to convey his commitment to classic movies as he lays off employees at TCM.

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I’m gonna be honest with you. I think about this too. And the funny thing is that, yeah, I have, I subscribe to some of these services, I do. I keep going back to the same things. Can you give me something new and interesting? I mean, you guys, that void of ideas. I mean, and again, you’re not thinking. Well, you know, I just watched.

Again, they told you, I had to see it on the big screen. I’m sure it’s better at the big screen. I’m sure this movie’s gonna be, oh, I was talking about, what was it? The new Avatar, Way of Water. Oh man, you know, the sound systems and the screen. The freaking movie’s three hours and 20 minutes long. Three hours and 20 minutes long. Now, for someone like myself that’s kind of like OCD when it comes to movies a little bit, you know.

Obsessive compulsive, I’ve got to see the entire thing. I do, for whatever reason, I got like photographic memories. I don’t like to miss anything. I can’t sit for three hours and 20 minutes, man. I’m 52 years old. I got to take a leak. I don’t want to have to go on a no water diet for the 12 hours before I go to see a movie. I want to sit back. I want to have my diet coke if they’re.

serving wine or maybe I’d like to have one. I don’t know, you might wanna throw in a mission in there, you know, intermission some point in time. They do it, Broadway shows. You guys can’t do it in a three hour, 20 minute movie? Cut us some slack? So I don’t go.

I don’t go, I just watched it. Just watch it while, you know, I multitask. I’m on a treadmill. Most of the, so I wait for it to come out, you know, on one of the services and I watch it then and while I’m working out, it is what it is. But yeah, I mean, I’m going back to the older stuff now. Rewatch, I’m on one of my watch, you know what I’m saying? Rocky 2.

I’m on the treadmill. I just haven’t seen it in a long period of time. But there’s nothing out there. Nothing, I mean there’s nothing and I talk to people all the time about this. Nothing really grabbing our attention. There’s a show or two. There’s a show or two and you know you’re almost like you share it with your friends when you find one. I happen to like this one on Hulu called The Bear because it’s about the restaurant business which I love. But you know, oh yeah, that’s the one because you got all of this crap.

You’ve got to wade through mountains of crap to try to find something halfway decent. And you see what these people are getting paid and the production, I’m like, you can’t do better than this? Again, you take a look at the business model in of itself. Okay? And I can go back, you can go back.

Let’s look at the US Postal Service as a business. When email was first coming around with America Online, you got mail, you got mail. Someone, the Postal Service should have known, which, you know, the tide’s changing here. Which direction is this gonna go? I remember actually some of the Wizards of Smart were actually considering back then and actually, you know, charging for email because they didn’t want to hurt the…

the post office. I’m like, uh-uh. I said that, you know, that Pandora’s box has been open. Same thing, you start giving away free content newspapers. We’re gonna give our content for free.

Again, some have turned back. I have to pay for certain publications, and even those, I mean, the frickin’ Wall Street Journal. I mean, I’m so aggravated with all of the advertisements that are on the Wall Street that are poppin’ up in my face all the time. And again, to all of you people that are advertising in that manner, I would be a potential customer for maybe some of the stuff that you’re sellin’. But you frickin’ aggravate me. You piss me off. So I’m not gonna buy your shit.

Okay, annoying people is probably not a good way to get people to buy your stuff. Just saying. Now, you’ve got all of these services out there. And all these services out there, no commercials. Commercial free, which I purchase. I pay the extra. I’d rather not watch the commercials. Um, again, how do, uh, how, I’ve talked about this before. How does.

How does Mercedes-Benz advertise? What are their options now as far as television is concerned? They’re not gonna advertise on these commercial streamers, commercial free streamers. They can’t. Oh yeah, but we have our model. We have our model, but we have commercials. Okay. Do you think that those are gonna be the people that are gonna be buying Mercedes-Benz’s? Probably not. So sports is the option.

And that’s why, again, they’re trying to, a lot of these networks are trying to figure out, the streamers trying to figure out their way via sports. Apple buying Major League Soccer, as that continues to increase in popularity. That’s going to be basically the only way to do it. That’s the power of the NFL at this point in time. But again, they’ve got issues. And, you know, they talk about consolidation in banking.

consolidation here, but again, there are interfaces that they use. I’ve got Max’s service. They just went from HBO Max, now it’s just Max. Still a pain in the butt to navigate. They haven’t figured it out yet. They haven’t. You gotta wade through. I mean, we thought it was bad when we had cable and yeah, click, click. Yeah, we’re basically back at square one. It’s the same thing. We’re click, except there’s more.

bullcrap that you have to click through. Anyway, not a good model these guys came up with by any stretch. Anyway, watchdog on wallstreet.com.