Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about $9B

Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about... by ghaff on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @12:40PM (#27197265)

At one level, it would be nice if all the subscription streaming services, a la carte content, and live TV could be accessed from a single subscription portal. But I suspect that most people wouldn't be willing to pay the $200 (or whatever) per month that such a service would probably cost. (And that's not an outlandish number; that's only about 2x what cable costs in a lot of places in the US.)

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Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about... by bhupy on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @12:47PM (#27197417)

That's not the point that I'm making. You're absolutely right that nobody would ever pay $200 or whatever per month for such a service, but that's because nobody would ever consumer $200 worth of TV series on any given month. It's just not humanly feasible.

The average human being consumes 2-3 TV shows at most on any given month. In the absolute worst case, that extends to 2-3 separate streaming subscriptions. The only thing that changes over the course of the year is which 3 TV shows one is watching (and therefore which underlying streaming service they care about).

The future isn't a $200 bundle of every streaming service available on-demand; the future is an LRU cache that automatically unsubscribes you from a streaming service if you haven't watched a show on it in the last month, and then re-subscribes you the moment you do. Given the current price of streaming services, it probably works out closer to (at most) $45/month, on average.

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Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about... by com2kid on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @01:27PM (#27198066)

FWIW I know multiple people with a $200 a month cable TV bill. Per box rental, multiple TVs, and a sports or premium channel package, the bill is easily at $200.

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Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about... by usrusr on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @01:59PM (#27198541)

> the future is an LRU cache that automatically unsubscribes you from a streaming service if you haven't watched a show on it in the last month

The future is rolling window two years subscription or something along those lines, because someone will inevitably build that LRU and it will be quite poplar for all seven weeks of operation.

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Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about... by ghaff on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @12:59PM (#27197597)

That's probably about the right dollar figure for most people depending upon how you count Amazon Prime and how much a la carte movie purchasing/renting they do. Though I'd add that, if they also have to pay for live TV (for example, if they can't get it over the air) for sports, etc., that brings the total to probably more than $100.

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