Once a fan favorite, Max shed 700,000 subscribers in the past three months, even as it made money. That might work for Warner Bros. Discovery, but what about viewers?

Maybe (HBO) Max Just Isn’t Worth It::Warner Bros. Discovery’s latest earnings call reveals Max shed 700,000 subscribers in the past three months, even as it made money. That might work for Wall Street, but what about viewers?

  • OscarRobin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    151·
    1 year ago

    Yep. Costs a bunch of money upfront and ongoing to operate a streaming service, and even more to make even just an alright one. Plus you split consumers which will naturally give you and competitors fewer subscribers over all. All of that just to get paid directly instead of just getting free money, even if less per-view.

    • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      1 year ago

      much less per view. They tried this initially. Studios had stuff on Netflix remember? Back when netflix was worth subscribing to.

      This was because netflix was just some free extra money on the side, kind of like selling a tv show to a foreign network. But then netflix ate into their actual money from network broadcast. So now they need to get serious and charge netflix a license fee for the show that reflects that.

      They upped the license fees for the show and netflix just didn’t pick them up. All your favourite shows dropped from netflix and the studios had to build their own services.

      • ArtificialLink@yall.theatl.socialEnglish
        71·
        1 year ago

        The studios did not have to build their own services. And a lot of them willingly pulled their shows from places like Netflix to build their own services. And there was enough players in the game at the time when Netflix began dropping a shows that someone else like prime or hulu was willing to spend a lot of money to pick them up.

        From my point of view, even if overall it was potentially less money. That doesn’t factor in just the cost of operating your own content. They have to hire a whole new division to develop the website and app and streaming service and pay all those people. Or they could have just sold it to someone else to do all that work. And said we know what we have. We know you want friends on your service. Lol.

        And even on top of that studios had no idea how lucrative streaming services were going to be. So they should have just renegotiated better contracts for the content they were selling. A lot of them ended as it was which is when they got pulled from places like Netflix. And I absolutely guarantee you Netflix would have been able to pay way more for something like Parks and rec or the office if they wanted to. Because Netflix knows just a sheer numbers game on those types of shows.

        • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
          51·
          1 year ago

          Or they could have just sold it to someone else to do all that work

          they tried to, netflix chose not to take the deals. Netflix chose to invest their money in netflix content production instead of relying on third parties.

          I know you want to frame this as netflix could be a provider and everything else just produce content for it - you need to understand that netflix chose not to invest in paying for third party content, favouring it’s own shows. that was a netflix choice.

          the prices that netflix used to pay for things like the office and parks and rec were not “can actually fund development” levels, it was “make some extra money after the costs were already paid by cable” levels