[bluedevil2k]

The only 2 companies that made money during the “streaming wars” were Netflix, which had the infrastructure in place already and didn’t need to build anything from scratch, and Sony, which decided not to build any streaming service and just license all its content out. Seems WBD is following the lead of a winner.

* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...

[enragedcacti]

Is it really following the lead of a winner if you started by building your own failing streaming service, then buying another streaming service and merging them, and only then starting to license out content?

[com2kid]

Warner Bros didn't buy out Discovery, other way around really. In return for taking on loads of debt, Discovery got ownership of WB.

HBO Max was an incredibly lean org, around 200-300 engineers at launch, 1/10th the size of its competitors but we launched a similar scaled service (tens of millions of domestic users, followed up by international launches one after another).

IMHO once COVID ended and HBO Max just became a streaming destination instead of having movies "launched" on it, they'd be just fine in terms of profit (and indeed iirc the successor Max service is profitable). First releasing big block busters doesn't drive enough user growth to pay for the movie, but if you have an existing content pipeline then having a streaming service as another delivery platform becomes reasonable.

[enragedcacti]

Agreed on all counts, Discovery is the company I was referring to and Discovery+ was the 'failing' platform, not HBO Max. Though to be fair my recollection was hazy and the story around Discovery+ is not that simple given that it has stuck around post merge and is profitable according to Zaslav. I don't really trust his definition of profitable given his general love for accounting fuckery but the fact that its running is something.

As an aside, props to the team. It's been a while but I remember being pleasantly surprised after getting shuffled over from HBO GO. It's even more impressive to know it was such a small team compared to other services.

[jandrese]

Max has gone to crap since the merger though. They cancelled a lot of the quality content and added a bunch of cheap and awful crap like reality shows to the service. It's like someone bought a Rolls Royce and riced it out.

[lotsofpulp]

It was ATT that fired all the old HBO bosses that curated for quality. They just dumped their failed experiment onto Discovery to squeeze out whatever was left.

[mason55]

Sure - that's why Sony is the winner. Other companies tried other things and lost. Now they see what the winner did and they're following their lead.

When WB started all this it wasn't clear what the winning strategy was going to be. Now that it is clearer, they're just following.

[guyzero]

Sony built Crackle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackle_(service) but it's failed at this point.

[827a]

Much like Spotify; it took them many, many years to achieve only a 7% profit margin. Meanwhile, UMG runs at 16%.

The only company that actually makes good money from being a content middleman is, somehow, YouTube. I don't know how they do it. YouTube is among the greatest businesses in human history.

[hirako2000]

How they did it: economy of scale, and mingling businesses.

Google had the infrastructure, expertise, experience, and an army of top tier coders to execute on any engineering challenger, all of that even before it acquired YouTube.

Google is mainly an ads business. An expertise edge not only in engineering at large scale, but also in the delivery of web ads. And, given their ads business perform on profiling people, YouTube consumption habits feed the rest of the beast.

If these didn't skip your kind, yet still wondering how did they do it, the following were crucial to make Google unique in their ability to succeed with YouTube (and the rest)

- An engineering first company. They hire wagons of product people and managers, but when things don't turn out positive they switch back to their roots. As an anecdote, on day the CEO felt things were going south. Fired all (probably just most) managers and tasked engineers to figure things out.

- A coherent vision. Google doesn't jump on where's the hype. Their position in A.I recently perhaps couldn't resist the pressure. It sticks to the core competencies while building experimental products on green fields that fit in growing the core business.

- Long term. Clearly Google has so far resisted to make a quick buck. The no evil slogan is gone, but the spirit remain in building long term value. That kept them from tarnishing their reputation while reaping the amounts of profits once everyone could only swear by their products (mail, drive, YouTube, of course search, Android thriving as now the only remaining competitor to iOS, if any other company had acquired Android in that shape when Google swooped it, it would have given up on it seeing how long the road was about to take to make it a viable mobile consumer product)

How did they do it? Google is in the top 5 of all companies that have ever existed. Takes more than a genius and plenty of humbleness to achieve this feat.

[yurishimo]

Because YouTube has found a way to monetize the work of it's content creators. Online influencers are incentivized to make videos to get paid and YouTube has reduced their costs enough to make it worthwhile.

In addition to that, whenever users are just starting out, their videos still get ad rolls but the creator doesn't get any money. That's millions of new videos every day that Youtube can monetize until those creators are eligible to collect the checks for themself (if ever).

Also, YouTube does aggressive caching of very old videos that have very few views. You might need to wait 10 seconds for YT to fetch the video from cold storage before watching, but in the grand scheme of things, it's worth it to them.

[jshen]

Disney has been profitable lately.

Also odd to say that Netflix had the infrastructure already. They built it from scratch.

[bluedevil2k]

I meant they had the infrastructure already when the streaming wars started roughly around Covid.

[jonny_eh]

Also YouTube has been somewhat profitable.

[jshen]

Yeah, never understood why YouTube isn't included in these lists.

[jonny_eh]

It's only the largest streaming platform. I think people just take it for granted. Like indoor plumbing.