Comment on Pixar will undergo significant layoffs in 2024.

xyzzy@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Streaming is a bad business model. It’s all a shell game because it doesn’t work on its own. They’re all afraid to not have a streaming service because they don’t want to one service to emerge as the sole winner and dictate licensing terms to them.

It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma: the best business decision would be to stick with direct sales of physical media and digital downloads (which once upon a time made studios a lot of money), but they’re all forced through competition to choose streaming, which means they all lose money hand over first.

Most people don’t know that Netflix funded a lot of its original programming by taking on a lot of debt. The company currently has over $11 billion in outstanding debt, most of which comes due in 4 years.

Disney is buoyed by its parks and linear programming (network and cable TV), but the latter is constantly eroding.

Paramount is the same story, but without the parks.

Amazon of course has its retail shopping ads (sponsored products) and AWS. Prime Video as an “investment” is a drop in the bucket. And of course they recently raised prices and leaned more heavily into streaming ads to try to claw back losses.

And when faced with the choice of protecting this money-burning business or laying off workers, cutting costs, and so on, studios repeatedly choose the latter. No other option than protect the prestige business that so many executives have tied their reputation to…

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