[scarface74]

I real wish that HN wannabe lawyers would stop throwing *poly words around with no legal justification.

In the streaming space in the US there is: Netflix, Disney+, AppleTV, Amazon Prime Video, HBO/Discovery, Paramount Plus, Peacock, STARZ, and a few other players. There is no “opoly” in streaming video.

[eskaytwo]

That’s still a small number of players dominating the market. That’s the definition of an Oligopoly, and the Disney/HBO offerings very much fall into that.

They certainly have the ability to uniformly raise prices (tacit collusion) with no viable competition to enter the market and fill the gap (as even the vast sums others have thrown into it have shown how hard it is to produce good original content).

This is probably due to the characteristic that producing goods (decent original content) in this market is a big barrier to entry - which naturally leads to a small number of players. Natural monopolies and oligopolies are common - but do require closer regulatory attention to ensure desirable consumer outcomes than just letting the free market decide.

It may not entirely fit all definitions, but the general economic theory and applications/implications are relevant to consider this market.

The original post that you questioned was related to vertical integration - you could effectively find and replace it to “so you’re saying producers of operating systems shouldn’t be able to make their own web browser?”

[scarface74]

> That’s still a small number of players dominating the market. That’s the definition of an Oligopoly, and the Disney/HBO offerings very much fall into that.

The market is “content”. Netflix competes with YouTube content producers, TikTok and it even said that one of its biggest competitors is Fortnite.

> This is probably due to the characteristic that producing goods (decent original content)

This goes back to YouTube. You and I may not think that YouTubers and TikTokkers are producing “decent original content”. But there is a generation that spends hours on both.

Besides that, there were over 550 original series being produced last year (https://collider.com/too-many-tv-shows-550-series-2021/). Competition is much fiercer for your attention than it was when you only had the three major networks producing content and everyone else buying rights to show reruns.

There are bidding wars between all of the streaming services for new content from producers. Competition is more fierce than ever.

The price of streaming before was never sustainable. Netflix was borrowing billions a year for years to produce and obtain content. Disney+ was never going to be profitable selling its service at the introductory price. It’s not “collusion”. Every company has to turn a profit eventually.

Yes I realize that Netflix was “profitable” by GAAP standards. But it was getting deeper in debt every year.

[dmitriid]

> Netflix competes with YouTube content producers, TikTok and it even said that one of its biggest competitors is Fortnite.

It competes with these for screen time, not for content.

Meanwhile Disney owns how much content (movies, series and related IP)?

[scarface74]

Very little as a percentage of all the professional content that’s in the world.

And the value of IP without execution capability is overrated. Warner also has iconic content. But Disney has been able to make successful movies out of its 3rd tier IP while Warner has struggled with its first tier.

Sony isn’t doing too well with most of its Marvel content except Spider-Man and that’s produced by Disney.

[bryanrasmussen]

>The original post that you questioned was related to vertical integration - you could effectively find and replace it to “so you’re saying producers of operating systems shouldn’t be able to make their own web browser?”

I think time has shown MS was correct in making their own browser, but of course incorrect in all the corrupt tactics they used to make their browser succeed over Netscape's.

[scarface74]

This is severe rose colored glasses. Netscape was always a horrible application and crash prone on every operating system it ran on. There were geek wars back in the day bragging about how well our operating systems handle Netscape crashes - classic MacOS failed miserably.

IE was a much better browser. Especially the Mac version that when it was introduced, was the most CSS compliant browser that existed.

Netscape starting over from scratch was cited as “Things you should never do” in an article written by Joel Spolsky (StackOverflow cofounder) two decades ago.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...