As well, AT&T has to finance its dubious, late-to-the-game plan to launch a WarnerMedia streaming service and its plan to massively bulk up HBO programming. The closures won’t free up much, but hey, every million dollars saved counts for something, right?
But whatever savings the lumbering phone company extracts, it also is demonstrating the numbing downside of corporate gigantism: a downsizing of entertainment options.
Mostly it’ll just be late to the game, trying to catch up with Netflix, Apple, Disney, Hulu, Facebook, Google and so many others, as well as all those small fry out there still providing interesting programming for a clearly defined audience.
One promise of the streaming revolution was access to a vast shelf of content, some of which was sure to appeal to you. Unsurprisingly, when a large and ancient, highly regulated utility takes over an entertainment company with a number of quirky little units in various corners, it has no idea what to do with those.
We’re all the poorer for it.
And with some headwinds starting to hit the economy (higher interest rates, a suddenly sullen stock market, a China trade war), I don’t think this is going to get better soon. Are these closures an early indicator of some larger reckoning for, especially, smaller digital services?
More consolidation is inevitable. Rich Hull, CEO of the streaming service Pongalo, told me he fully expects a consolidation over the next couple of years in Spanish-language content sector where Pongalo operates.
And at this month’s NAB NY conference, Sinclair Broadcast Group CEO Christopher Shipley called the streaming-video sector “a sea of blood” because big companies are turning it into “a negative-margin business.”
That means, if you’re Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Google (and probably AT&T and Comcast), you can lose money on billions of dollars worth of original content, as long that brings in more customers buy phones or phone service, or a bunch of other stuff, or pay for a fast internet connection and other services.
But building more giant services, as all the big boys are doing, isn’t leaving much room for the interesting, quirky, innovative units like FilmStruck, DramaFever, and Super Deluxe. Can’t we get more out endless choice than this? Can’t we get some vision and voice? A man can dream, even if AT&T can’t.
Bumped this from another thread. OP by @VSk37po-1anj