
Comcast's NBCUniversal buys DreamWorks Animation in $3.8B deal - smaili
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-nbcuniversal-buys-dreamworks--20160428-story.html
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searine
The writing on the wall is that DreamWorks is dead, which is not surprising
considering the several high-profile flops of the last three years.

This is basically a wholesale buyout of DreamWorks IP which will be given to
Illumination to turn into more Minions movies.

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JTon
What flops are you referring to? I only know Dreamworks by their feature
films, and why they all didn't review highly, they all made money [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DreamWorks_Animation#Feature_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DreamWorks_Animation#Feature_films)

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searine
>They all made money

This is hollywood. Take the budget, double it, and add 50 million dollars and
then you have an accurate idea of the true budget. To be "profitable" the
reported boxoffice needs to be at least 3X the budget. For example, Sherman
and Mr.Peabody had a budget of "150 million", made 300 million, but dreamworks
still lost 57 million making the movie.

Known flops of the last two years are : Home, Penguins of Madagascar, Sherman
and Mr. Peabody, Turbo, Rise of the Guardians.

Only The Croods and HTTYD were profitable.

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rjett
See Hollywood Accounting:
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/HollywoodA...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/HollywoodAccounting)

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cookiecaper
Which, to be clear, is about studios making it _appear_ that they never make a
profit so that they can minimize their payout in bonuses, royalties, and
taxes.

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jonnathanson
One particularly famous example: "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"
earned $940M at the worldwide box office, yet Warner Brothers reported the
film at a $167M loss on paper.

Link with an itemized, Hollywood Accounting-style breakdown:

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml)

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joering2
Serious question: how this can be legal?

If I have to explain myself to IRS why I bought 1TB drive instead of 500GB
because in their opinion I did not have enough to backup, hence supposedly I
attempted to defraud IRS on extra $6.00 of tax, why can they get away with
hundreds of millions or even few billions?

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dceddia
Serious question: did that thing with the hard drive actually happen to you?

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maxerickson
Comcast, Charter and the satellite companies are already getting in knife
fights over content. I think I'm more and more in favor of some hostile rules
like requiring major content distributors like the cable companies to offer $0
licensing of their owned content to their competitors.

(such a rule would obviously need some mechanism to see through obfuscating
ownership structures)

The premise is that rather than building up content in order to benefit their
customers, they are building up content because they can leverage it to
extract rent.

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dimino
You would legally force a private company to share its property with others?

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yarou
Comcast is publicly traded. And it behaves closer to a utility more than
anything else.

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adventured
The parent comment likely meant private as in non-government (I doubt they
were unaware Comcast is publicly traded). Being traded on a stock index has
nothing to do with that, you're still wholly owned by private shareholders.

Property rights don't vaporize just because you do an IPO. By current law
Comcast is _not_ in fact a utility - they offer a utility product that is
regulated by the FCC, there's a critical difference between those two
concepts.

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maxerickson
I'm proposing regulating the meaningful operator of the ISP business and
saying that they are not allowed to set a price for customers of their content
business. If they want to sell off the content business, I expect they would
still get the market price for their property.

The point is to enjoin the cable company from leveraging content to make
competitive offerings less attractive.

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dimino
This has nothing to do with the ISP arm of Comcast, and everything to do with
you wanting content without paying for it.

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maxerickson
I really don't understand how you got that idea. I really don't.

I just don't want a corporate entity that owns an ISP to be allowed to own
content production companies. You're riding a ballistic missile (rather than
making a leap) to get to me wanting to get content without paying for it.

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dimino
And I don't want the next two Avatar movies to get made, but I'm not the one
advocating we get the US government to enforce such a thing.

It makes _zero_ sense for the US government to get involved in this deal.

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maxerickson
If Comcast wants to give up limited liability, then fine, they can do whatever
they want. An implicit part of my argument is that the government is already
involved, there are plenty of regulations that Comcast benefits from.

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dimino
So you're saying that since Comcast is governed by some laws that benefit it,
we have to now create new laws that hurt it to offset the benefits?

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maxerickson
I'm not saying that we have to, I'm saying that I think it would be a good
idea.

We live in a business first world. I want to live in a business, maybe? world.

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dimino
That's a world which robs people and businesses of their property rights,
without _very_ careful thought.

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arca_vorago
Where are all the anti-trust anti-monopoly laws at? Anyone can see simply that
the .01% are using their wealth to merger and acquisition their way into
permanent power bases, and it's a dangerous, free-market undermining activity.
We are going to regret not pushing back on this and similar amalgamations.

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JustSomeNobody
Why is this getting so many down votes?

At the very least, we need to break Comcast into content producer and content
distributor (ISP).

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nitrogen
Absolutely. Vertical integration can be a great way for businesses and
consumers to save money on overhead, but it doesn't work like that for natural
monopolies, and should not be tolerates for businesses that are gatekeepers to
our intellectual interaction with the world (news, educational media,
Internet)

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mjevans
Gatekeepers to /common culture/.

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samfisher83
We basically have two super huge media companies now: Comcast and Disney they
just keep buying up properties.

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adventured
Viacom, Comcast, Disney, CBS, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Twenty-First Century
Fox, Google, Verizon, AT&T.

Those are all massive media companies, we very clearly do not just have two.
Apple is by far the world's largest media company. Amazon is a $300 billion,
hyper aggressive corporation that is doing everything it can to become a big
player in content. Amazon even has its own infrastructure play in AWS, which
is responsible for delivering all of that content (ten years from now, will
people be arguing AWS is a utility as it becomes as big as a major cable
company?). Netflix is a fast growing $40 billion corporation.

AT&T and Verizon are as much media companies these days as Comcast is. Verizon
purchased AOL and would seemingly like to buy Yahoo. Both AT&T and Verizon are
as big and powerful as Comcast is.

Even Google continues to push further into that field. After all, how are they
not partially a media / content company, given they control the world's most
used app store (reaching a billion people), and have competing products in
content delivery (video, music). Google even has a direct competitor to
Comcast in Google Fiber.

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skykooler
You could argue that, with Youtube, Google has more media content than the
other ten combined.

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bsimpson
Does Jeffrey own so much DreamWorks that this doesn't need stockholder
approval? What about the federal government? I'm not used to large
acquisitions going from rumors to completed in 12 hours.

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maxerickson
It says in the article that it is pending a regulatory review.

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bsimpson
Interesting. I didn't see that language this morning.

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voodootrucker
Content creators merging with content distributors creates the kind of
perverse incentive that the FCC/DoJ should cite to prevent these kinds of
mergers.

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coroutines
I kind of worry about service providers also being content producers while
simultaneously coercing consumers into agreeing to contracts with binding
arbitration.

Judge, jury, and executioner?

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superkamiguru
Kinda makes sense. They already were using some of their licenses in the
Universal theme parks

