I think this comes from strictly looking at the world in left/right terms. Texas is a pretty libertarian state. This is probably the entire reason the founders ensconced the states into the union the way they did.
This country is a _spectrum_ of ideas. It's not bipolar. Only the moneyed interests behind political parties want you to think this way.
I guess I just don't understand people who face what should be welcome political surprise with extreme and hyperbolic negativity. It's a feature of this forum which honestly bothers me. It's entirely unproductive and strikes me as a bad faith effort to avoid giving credit to "the other side" even when they're enacting a policy which benefits us all.
I was the original commenter you replied to, and I should say I am not negative at all. In fact it’s just extreme skepticism, it’s different. Given the track record and history of the state I still fully expect this to be a met grab opportunity and will be extremely happy and give credit and praise if they actually end up doing anything. My comment is only skepticism but I guess it’s a close cousin of negativity with a nuance
The comment I replied to said Texas has a liberterian streak. There is nothing libertarian about denying free speech, putting religion up in schools, not selling alcohol because of religion, etc.
But if someone want to praise a state that goes out of its way to tell other people how to live because of religion and say they are “libertarian” because they sue a TV manufacturer, I don’t think that tips the scales
Why would one expect privacy with a vpn? That too a free one? With the web all traffic is encrypted point to point, which means individual sites could compromise your privacy but there is no single funnel to lose all your data. VPN is exactly that! All data goes through a single funnel and they can target anything they want
How bad were they doing? I thought this is a good time to be in robotics and was actually thinking roomba could be the big beneficiary in the new AI personal robot craze. Very surprising to see they filed for bankruptcy, could they have not just raised private equity with some ai buzzwords?
Why? If they want to even embed copilot, they could have atleast been strategic about it!! Copilot has this image that has something to do with coding, average person doesn’t care be bit about it and see ut as an invasive pest
Because wallstreet just needs to see that AI adoption number go up. No one really cares about if it's accidental clicks, or hell just mandatory running in the background. We just need that number to go up, and next quarter it has to go up even more.
> Copilot has this image that has something to do with coding
To the audience of this site, yeah. But "copilot" is Microsoft trying to brand "an agent/assistant". They use it across their entire product line; copilot is in office so you can ask for help with spreadsheet formulas and in outlook so you can ask for help with summary/triage... and it's in VSCode/GH.
Microsoft saw the way the USB people absolutely screwed up the marketing/branding around different generations and speeds and capabilities and said "I bet the same strategy will work spectacularly well for us" and thus _everything_ became copilot.
I still think that most people don't know what it is. There's so much shit getting installed on peoples TVs / PCs / Phones that they didn't ask for, I think that they just ignore it like they do SPAM.
Back when IE was king, nobody even knew what the hell Internet Explorer was. They just clicked the blue E thing to get to Google.
This should never have been allowed to happen by the regulators, but in this administration there are no checks, it’s a free for all and Netflix knows it. It saw the opportunity and went for it
Wow if Netflix buys hbo there isn’t really anything more left in the market to compete with them. On the plus side users don’t have to worry about paying for multiple services.
It will be Netflix and Disney as the prominent players with Apple and Amazon representing the high end prestige TV and lowest common denominator content, respectively.
Except there's still Paramount, Disney and Hulu, and even if you get them all, there's no guarantee you can stream what you want to watch due to some bullshit regional distribution rights restrictions, which makes no sense in the digital era...
HBO is destination television - it's the taste that Netflix lacks and so desperately needs.
WB and HBO together have the franchises that Netflix has been trying to build. DC, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings (film + game rights - tv rights), West World, The Matrix, Mad Max, King Kong, all of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.
What does Paramount or Hulu have? It's a lot of fluff on the same or even lower caliber than Netflix.
Amazon gives some good stuff away for "free". Apple has good shows, too.
Disney? Meh - they've got Andor and that's really it.
If whomever buys HBO also also buys A24, it's over. That's all I need.
Westworld... the show you can't watch on HBO anymore. Taste? Like what they just did to one of the best shows ever, Mad Men? HBO today (Or Max, or HBO Max, or whatever their branding of the day is) is not the HBO it was before David Zaslav got his hands on it.
ESPN comes with your Disney+ which also gives you Hulu
Peacock says they have sports, but then doesn't actually show all of the matches and instead tries to prop up USA and Telemundo numbers. Many times I have to watch a match in a language I'm not fluent even though I'm paying for Peacock specifically as they have the rights. Can't watch USA as I cut the cord years ago, so I'm left with hoping I can find the right spot for my OTA antenna to be able to tune in.
Sheridan is staying with Paramount until 2029, and the shows he made for them will remain theirs. So, Sheridan will be still be elevating paramount subscriptions long into the future.
> Disney? Meh - they've got Andor and that's really it.
I like this post about how The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Mad Max and Harry Potter are all valuable IP written by somebody that appears to have never heard of Marvel comics, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Simpsons, any Pixar film, Avatar, The X-Files, or The Bachelor.
> And Netflix has 13,000 employees, while Disney has 233,000.
And Disney is significantly more than just a single streaming service struggling to get content.
Their Direct-to-Consumer business (aka Netflix equivalent) posted a net profit increase 9.5x year on year (from 143 million to 1.3 billion) and has more than half the number of Netflix subscribers (196 million vs. 300+ million) in significantly shorter time than Netflix. https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/the-walt-disney-company-rep...
Operating profit, not net profit. Net income (or profit or earnings) can only be calculated for the whole business.
> has more than half the number of Netflix subscribers (196 million vs. 300+ million) in significantly shorter time than Netflix.
I don’t find this impressive. Streaming has been the future for over a decade, and Disney has long had more, and more popular content than Netflix. So why is it taking them so long to catch up to Netflix? They should have surpassed Netflix a long time ago.
> Streaming has been the future for over a decade, and Disney has long had more, and more popular content than Netflix. So why is it taking them so long to catch up to Netflix?
Netflix started streaming 18 years ago. Disney+ appeared 6 years ago, and Disney didn't acquire Hulu (as part of 20th Century Fox) until 2019. Also, Disney+ appeared in the era of multiple streaming services, and IIRC didn't pull their content from Netflix until sometime after they launched Disney+. Netflix also didn't lose content from other big content distributors like WB until later.
To compare: in near-absence of any competition it took Netflix until 2021 (10 years) to reach 200 million subscribers. There's Hulu that was launched in 2007, but they were nearly absent outside of the US.
So Disney has streaming competition on all fronts, has gone through price increases etc., and still grows their streaming service.
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Netflix buying WB is not really a desperation move, but it is a question of survival. Netflix has very little content of its own, and has trouble licensing relevant content from studios that are now its direct rivals: Disney, WB, Paramount etc.
They were all happily presented on Netflix, and then pulled nearly all their content to launch their own streaming platforms.
Netflix has survived by dumping enormous amounts of money into producing their own content, and licensing foreign content. But that is clearly not enough to maintain momentum, or to keep subscribers interested in the service. With WB they get their hands on a lot of IP that they can inject back into the service.
Netflix could have built many franchises by now but instead burns them all in season 1 or season 2 and makes slop on purpose (i.e. explain what you are doing while you are doing it for the people not watching directly, etc). They also just had the most successful franchise launch of all time -- Kpop demon hunters. The brand is apparently worth about 10 billion right now, and they bought the film and the rights from Sony for <20 million.
If they purchase HBO, I assume HBO will regress to the baseline that is Netflix content, not the other way around.
So next time I ask ChatGPT if why the samsung washing machine is so bad , it may come back and say “actually Samsung makes the best washing machines in the market with a market leading warranty and customer service. You are lucky they are making them and that you can buy them” or something like that?
On a serious note, their chat is a very valuable service for advertisers, will immediately command top dollar. They could even hide the ads as responses too. We will see how they implement ads
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