"Disney claims it needs to destroy the content to cut costs on platforms that aren’t making money, but experts say the company is overstating the value of its content — which could ultimately help the company pocket a higher tax break.
In May, Disney told regulators that it will incur $1.5 billion in losses as part of its content purge. Disney’s chief financial officer, Christine McCarthy, told investors Disney was making “excellent progress on our cost-cutting initiatives,” on its May earnings call, including “removing certain content from our streaming platforms.”
How can it be both?
They are portraying it as a loss in assets, while the other is a gain in revenue.
It’s still bullshit to portray it as an asset loss because it is not destroyed, but that appears to be what they are saying.
This is getting to be a trend.
Last year, Warner Bros and HBO Max undertook the first massive purge in the industry following the merger between the two companies, removing dozens of titles — reportedly to save on residuals and other costs. This spring, Paramount + also removed original content from their platform.
Looks like they’re trying to optimize offering as little content as possible while retaining as many subscribers as possible. I know the term is usually applied to platforms of a different nature, but it does feel like the usual march towards enshittification.
ah yes, because sailing the high seas was only a trend and had nothing to do with how much actual content netflix offered originally.
with less on netflix. the split to all these services. and themselves cutting their offerings. how the hell do they imagine people won’t look elsewhere?
talk about bad decision making process lol.
Last time I sailed was on Kazaa and she was young and shiny. I’ve been enjoying the quiet life on shore for the last two decades, quenching my thirst at the streamings. The times are changing though. I’m hearing the call of the sea.
The landscape changed a lot, there’s options now where you can create a better experience than the paid services (you may need to pay a little but for a debrid service though). These answers lay on Lemmy already…
Any links for stuff like that with a decent UX? Any support for casting to a TV would be especially wonderful without needing to hassle myself with a plex server but I’ll take anything to avoid these streaming platforms wars
Look for the stremio + torrentio + real debrid guide. Very easy. For next level pair it with a Trakt account to curate your own feed in Stremio and get personalized recommendations / have stuff marked as watched automatically.
Do I need to subscribe to real debris or are there other alternatives?
You could just ignore that part but then I’d advise having a VPN instead. Also performance is going to be much poorer.
There are other debrid services yeah, but you’ll also have to pay.
Good thing all this content will still exist on torrent sites. 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Get a decent vpn, a worthwhile adblocker and some reliable pirate sites.
I havent paid for a gd thing for over a year and I don’t plan to anytime soon.
This whole tax write-off thing definitely needs an overhaul imo.
For one thing as the article mentions it does seem extremely hard to value the worth of media assets like this. And I wouldn’t trust the companies looking for a write-off to give an average estimate, considering they have a clear conflict of interest.
But more importantly those assets still exist and it really is just a matter of giving or taking away access. I think if a society is giving these companies tax write-offs, it should get control over them in return.
However I am still not sure how one would best make them available after that, while still making sure creatives are still getting their fair share. Which would be a reason to not just straight up make them available for free.
Maybe there should be some sort of auction where anyone (except the company looking to write them off) can bid on them? And then possibly even make the write-off based on that?
