It’s “shakeout” time as losses of Netflix rivals top $5 billion
arstechnica.com
Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers.

The world’s largest traditional entertainment companies face a reckoning in 2024 after losing more than $5 billion in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.

Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount—US entertainment conglomerates that have been growing ever larger for decades—are facing pressure to shrink or sell legacy businesses, scale back production and slash costs following billions in losses from their digital platforms.

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“TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing,” he said. “Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs.”

  • EmpathicVagrant
    280·
    10 months ago

    Netflix is the only one still making money, the other streaming companies are going to compensate by selling//merging instead of changing their pricing and business model to adapt to (lack of) demand for their overpriced nonsense.

    • pflanzenregal
      110·
      10 months ago

      Ohh, rivals is a noun here, I read it as a verb 😅 Thank you!

      • hansl
        90·
        10 months ago

        That’s called a garden path sentence, and I as an ESL love those.

        Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

      • AngryCommieKender
        30·
        10 months ago10 months ago

        Totally understandable. I’m fluent in English and had to read the headline a couple of times to realize that distinction to get it to make sense.

        Capitalization of “rivals” could have helped with clarity, but I don’t know how to tell the headline writer that

      • Lesrid
        10·
        10 months ago

        The titler could have used an apostrophe to show that the rivals belong to Netflix

    • Socsa
      50·
      10 months ago10 months ago

      The irony is that they were actually making money licensing their content, and that consolidation also largely kept consumers happy, but then they got greedy. I really hope some white collars actually bleed for this, but I’m sure these idiots will just blame bad tech like usual.