[johnnyanmac]

>it’s baked into all showbiz to try and get as much of the audience hooked on the same thing at the same time by design.

Yes, and that's why a la carte streaming of pretty much any media was a mistake. It's an open secret that none of them are profitable. But everyone was chasing that 2010's ZIRP with no plan whatsoever on how to actually recoup those costs. crashed the market before it really began. So the only answer was to enshittify the service once they had the numbers but not the money.

That's why I really hope games resist this model. It's the exact same honeytrap.

[lotsofpulp]

> It's an open secret that none of them are profitable

Netflix is:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...

Disney is also profitable:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...

Apple and Amazon don’t really need to be “profitable”, because the purpose is selling Apple One and Prime bundles.

Warner Bros Discovery could have been profitable too, if ATT had not loaded it up with massive debt by overpaying for it.

[johnnyanmac]

Is netflix profitable from income gained, or from expenses "saved"? As Zazlov has shown, you can "make money" if you simply slash a bunch of contracts, layoff employees, and writeoff stuff for tax instead of releasing products. That's pretty much what all companies have done for the past two years

It's not profitable in a way that can work for a decade. It's like cutting off your arm and saying you "lost weight".

[lotsofpulp]

> Is netflix profitable from income gained, or from expenses "saved"

Profit = revenue minus expenses, so not sure what this could even mean. It is a function of both variables.

> As Zazlov has shown, you can "make money" if you simply slash a bunch of contracts, layoff employees, and writeoff stuff for tax instead of releasing products.

WBD has yet to show a profit since Zaslav got involved. He has personally lost a ton of wealth due to declining prices of the equity. But, of course, WBD is not a simple case of a media business not being able to sell media, it is a complicated due to the extreme debt it has, which doesn’t say anything about streaming businesses in general.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBD/warner-bros-di...

> It's not profitable in a way that can work for a decade. It's like cutting off your arm and saying you "lost weight".

Back to Netflix, their financial trends show a very successful business. Just check their growth in revenue, profit, and profit margins, for 10+ years.