by srameshc 16 hours ago
I never imagined that a service that ships DVD via mail would one day buy Warner Brothers. It is amazing how innovation and focus can change the game. Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.
Innovator's dilemma. Leadership won't invest in the up-and-coming product because they've got a $1 billion revenue target they need to hit this year.
Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma.
I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture.
> “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.”
https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-s...
Silo-ing is the biggest brake on human progress
Sony is still the 2nd largest music distributor and label in the world, behind Universal Music and ahead of Warner music.
My 65" Bravia is one of the best TV's in its class and runs Google TV (IMO a major leg up over the junky Tizen/WebOS offerings from competitors).
They make some of the best noise cancelling headphones money can buy. They have the PS5 and own a bunch of game studios to provide exclusive content for it.
They're doing just fine!
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label.
They still do all those things? And they're still successful in most of them? They haven't "failed" or "dropped the ball" based on any metric I can think of. I'm not sure what you're referring to here to be honest.
Right reading that, didn’t Sony produce KPOP demon hunters, which is now the most watched movie of all time?
Sony sold it to Netflix (after the pandemic but before it was finished) for a fixed price which locked in a small profit for Sony but got them NOTHING for it being the most watched movie of all time, and Netflix gets all of the sequels as well, so they can't get anything from theaters for those movies either.
Yeah lol, Sony still doing good in Music,Film etc
Sony just focus at their home market more
They purposefully stayed out of the money losing streaming wars and sell their content to the highest bidder
They have a streaming platform though! Sony Pictures Core. Seems half the comments in this submission is just straight up guessing and assuming whatever guesses they make are correct. Would take like 30 seconds to just fact-check what you're about to write.
It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.
That’s a completely different market. They are not trying to compete with Netflix and in fact have a deal with them that Netflix has first right of refusal to stream any Sony film
https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408
Sony created KPop Demon Hunters and sold the streaming rights to Netflix .
If you look at any of their popular back catalog TV content, it is all being streamed on other services.
> It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.
Then you might have to look a bit closer :) There are plans out there that give you a fixed monthly fee and stream all you want, so that effectively makes it a streaming service even by your definition.
Not saying they are trying to compete with Netflix, but they do have a streaming service.
You can’t watch the full catalog of movies they have for rent or purchase for one price.
You know you’re being pedantic.
Same is true for Amazon, you can't watch 100% of the content unless you "Buy"/Rent, so is Amazon Prime Video not a streaming service?
You know you're trying to be misleading, but not everyone falls for those sort of things.
Prime video is more than just prime content, they are more of a marketplace where you can watch competitors content as well. Like their web marketplace for tv and movies. That's why you can sign up for things like HBO and even Apple TV directly via Prime.
No you’re being pedantic. Compare Amazon Prime Video subscription content to Sony’s subscription content.
Is Amazon creating new content and giving other streaming services first dibs on it? Are they putting their back catalog content on other streaming services en masse?
Is Sony spending billions of dollars to produce content to go on their own streaming service like Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Peacock, HBO Max (for now)?
Heck is HBO releasing theatrical movies and giving first run streaming rights to other streaming services?
You’re not making serious arguments if you don’t see the difference between every other streaming service and what Sony is doing or seeing what companies with both streaming services and movie studios like Warner Bros, Disney, and Paramount are doing.
You're making this way more complicated than it is, no need to compare against others to understand if what Sony is doing is a streaming service or not.
So I guess back to basics:
> A streaming media service, also known as streaming service, is an online provider that allows users to watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet
Fairly simple, I think at least. So with that, is what Sony is doing a streaming service, regardless of what HBO/Amazon/their mother is doing? Yes, in my humble opinion, what Sony is offering lets users "watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet", so it is a streaming service.
I disagree it's pedantic, it's just understanding what terms mean, in this particular case, what "streaming service" means.
These are two businesses, both under the Sony name: content production and content distribution. Very likely they are two different divisions with different P&Ls.
Every “streaming service” is a distributor. Some of them are also content producers.
Content production is also a bizarre mini world of VC-type funding and shell/temporary production corporations. Some companies lean heavily into that, some do a more traditional in-house studio model, some do both.
They do but that is a digital store & rental service you cited, basically like iTunes. The streaming service they own is the entirely anime-focused Crunchyroll and it’s not managed specifically as an outlet for Sony Pictures because that’s not its core audience.
Sony Pictures for its part does quite well for itself not being tied to a specific vertically-owned streaming service, and given the number of those already out there which will eventually consolidate, they’re probably all the better for it.
I'm sure everybody with a Bravia TV is super excited. If you have a streaming service no one knows or cares about do you even have a streaming service?
Or anyone who plays online with a PS4 or PS5, which correct me if I'm wrong, probably is more people than the people with Bravia TVs.
Yeah and how many of those are subscribing to Sony’s streaming service where they don’t even put their releases on during the initial streaming release window and don’t have any of their popular backlog content?
There isn’t an iOS app or a Roku app. Even AppleTV+ is on Roku. This isn’t a serious streaming service.
My point is that it's included...
Sony bought Crunchyroll + Funimation but I have to admit that I'm sick of normie anime like Bleach and I crave the kind of things that you find on HDIVE like Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World. [1]
[1] If the Anime News Network finishes reviewing it doesn't make the cut
> how did these companies drop the ball so bad
Companies didn't, leadership did. For a big, fat check. And they're happily retired now, sitting in their expensive villas with millions on their balance.
They couldn't care less about your happy childhood memories that the content produced by their predecessors engraved in your mind.
I remember Sony.
Sony Rootkit, Sony BetaMax, Sony MiniDisc, Sony ATRAC, Sony Memory Stick [Select / PRO / Duo / PRO Duo / PRO-HG Duo / M2 / XC / PRO-HG Duo HX / WTF], Sony UMD, Sony Elcaset, Sony SDDS, Sony VAIO, Sony Walkman, Sony Discman, [...]
At least they had some lasting success with their Umatic video tape cartridge, and with the CD that they co-developed with Philips. Their Trinitron tubes were unique and generally quite good -- and they lasted as long in the market as any other CRT did, I suppose. And their various iterations of PlayStation console have all been popular despite being Sony products.
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers.
The answer to that one is simple: they were bad at software.
Apple and then Android killed the market for all those hardware devices and physical media.
Maybe but they were still good enough to in house a whole bunch of dev - console OS, games, mobile OS, various forms of content distribution...
If everybody is dropping the ball, my first guess is that catching it is actually legitimately difficult.
Sony still makes TV they get to sell to the highest bidder! They get to sell to Apple TV or Netflix.
Not recurring revenue but they have their thing set up
>They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
Maybe it's better now, but looking at the PS3-era PSN, that expertise had negative value.
It’s exactly the reason why. They focused on proprietary formats/devices to lock consumers in
Hindsight is 20/20 and the Innovator's Dilemma is very real.
And no OS. That certainly helped Apple.
Sony has crunchyroll
They didn't fumble around as much, also Sony still has leverage a lot on Japan Industry
Well, AOL did ship 1 billion CDs over its heyday and they acquired Warner Brothers in 2000…
> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
I think what history shows us is that the modern monopolies managed to destroy antitrust to the point where nobody will ever do to them what they did to others.
People said that a generation ago as well, and the one before that. Yeah monopolies make it hard, but every one of them eventually crumbles to the next wave of innovation.
“””innovation”””
So innovative, the toilets have cameras in them now! I love the future.
I disagree. I strongly recommend this talk by Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
Yup. Can't redirect the ocean. So-to-speak.
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
Is that a financialised version of piggybacking?
> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
Netflix got it's start shipping CDs, which was only possible due to the first-sale doctrine. The rights landscape hasn't adjusted for the new technologies. How could an new player disrupt a streaming world when everything is so locked down?
It's less "innovation and focus" and more "wealth consolidation and monopolization".
Considering WB was once the champion of that format too. Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format.
> Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format
and neither do consumers. video over the internet is the future that Netflix saw 20 years ago, when others didn't, except YouTube.
That's absolutely not the case. Demand for physical media not only continues to exist but it's growing as streaming services prove undependable at keeping shows available, and are willing to censor/edit shows at a whim.
For most things in the world there’s some demand, but that doesn’t mean it is a big business.
I buy vinyl but mostly listen to music on Tidal. People buy cassettes and CDs, but that’s, for all intents and purposes, a dead business.
The physical medium is not the content.
They have to as a stop gap before going on generating full feature film on demand. Those streaming service are all struggling to have an attractive enough catalog for an extended period of time for a lot of folks with their shitty pricing policies.