[boynamedsue]

"No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore."

Is that really true? No one makes money selling music, apps, or books on iTunes? Netflix doesn't make money selling a media consumption service? HBO doesn't make money selling premium content?

Those are all examples of media. And they're all capable of making money for their creators and distributors.

[baddox]

The next two sentences are

> That market is quickly and brutally dying. The media market is now so efficient that all profit is completely sucked out of the equation by the time you get to the consumption delivery system, to the point that it is barely possible to break even.

I don't think he's claiming that copyright owners can't make money selling copyrighted material. It sounds like he's claiming that the delivery networks can't make money.

[Turing_Machine]

If that's actually what he means, it's a feature, not a bug.

[csours]

Unless you're trying to be a delivery network.

[Aldo_MX]

Delivery networks are not profitable anymore, but if you control the avenue, you can promote and distribute your own content for almost nothing and you can profit from it.

[danhak]

And Netflix is not a delivery network?

[cwyers]

They don't really want to be anymore, which is why they're spending so much money on original programming.

[Crito]

Even HBO pads out their scheduling with content produced by other companies. I do not see a future where the bulk of Netflix's streamed content is produced by Netflix.

[waterlesscloud]

Amazon is also at least nominally getting into entertainment production, though so far they're doing a pretty clumsy job of it.

[cwyers]

Amazon does a clumsy job at a lot of things. It's incredible. Their shipping and logistics? Top notch. Their server operations, including AWS? Very good. Their website UI? Pants. Utterly pants. Using the Prime Instant website to watch video and using Netflix to watch video is like the difference between night and day. Netflix is well-organized, provides helpful recommendations, and has meaningful categories. Amazon, meanwhile, uses the exact same UI for buying books as it does for browsing streaming movies. And it uses that same UI for office supplies, groceries, clothes and caskets. (Okay, maybe not caskets.) And it's a mediocre UI for all of them.

EDIT: I checked, you can totally buy caskets on Amazon. Wow.

[mcphage]

Is pants good? Or bad? Or... what?

[seanmcdirmid]

Is Netflix making money yet or are they taking losses to grow?

[adventured]

Netflix was profitable for 2011, 2012, 2013.

They generated $231m in net income the last four quarters (while simultaneously dramatically expanding their expenditures on content acquisition and production).

[ianferrel]

Netflix has been profitable since 2003.

[staunch]

International video game revenue is estimated to be $81.5B in 2014.[49] This is more than double the revenue of the international film industry in 2013.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry#Economics