Posted on 08/26/2026 7:40:56 AM PDT by sphinx
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird wrote in an op-ed for The Daily Wire that she is suing California for leading the charge in the lawsuit against the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger.
“California is once again trying to be the country’s regulator. And once again California is defying common sense to raise costs around the country,” Bird wrote.
Bird argues that “any Iowa family” would tell you the cost of streaming is too high and that there are “fewer quality shows” to choose from. She says these are symptoms of one company getting “too far in front,” and the competitors being “too small to catch up.”
“Netflix dominates the market for streaming,” Bird wrote. “Paramount+ and HBO Max together are smaller than Netflix, smaller than Disney, and smaller than Amazon. The merger could create a company to compete
(Excerpt) Read more at variety.com ...
Iowa AG Brenna Bird is right on all counts. The chokepoint in today's film and tv markets is distribution, not production. California had no problem with Netflix buying WBD. But lefties think Larry Ellison had cooties, so his son David must have cooties by proxy.
Stick it to California.
FYI.
I personally don’t want to see Netflix, Disney, Apple and Amazon achieve a distribution cartel that completely controls the movie and tv industry.
The best way to reduce streaming costs is to not subscribe at all.
Bravo!
There are perfectly great reasons to prevent monopolies.
“Two storied American companies are frozen,” she added. “Warner Bros. cannot confidently green-light a film, upgrade its technology, or sign a long-term contract without knowing whether it will exist as an independent company next year. Paramount cannot execute its plans without a merger either. Employees cannot plan careers. And a movie that does not get made this year may never get made at all. Financing expires, talent moves on, and production slates are abandoned. No court ruling in 2027 can go back and produce the film that was never shot. And no Iowan will ever get to see that movie either.”
I agree.
If you want to watch a movie, man up, buy a ticket, go watch it in the theater, buy physical media, or “buy a ticket” online and watch via PVOD.
Kill the streamers. They are engaged in a race to the bottom. The sooner the streaming model crashes and burns, the better.
And for those who have walked away from movies and tv entirely, great. There are lots of other ways to spend your downtime.
BUT ... note that the streamers are now taking over sports broadcasting, and chunks of this or that sport are being carved out for different streamers. We’re heading towards the point at which, to follow Team X over the course of a season, you’ll have to subscribe to multiple platforms. Oh, joy.
Freepers tend to be older, and there are some here who still watch linear tv. The streamers will continue to hollow that out as well, and everything worth watching will be pulled behind paywalls.
Last but not least ... this is a culture war question. You may be prepared to walk away and invest your free time in reading a book or cleaning out the garage. But the upcoming generation is screen addicted and watches more “content” than ever. It makes a difference WHO makes the content.
I don’t want to see three or four global conglomerates become the gatekeeper of everything that moves online, and as online platforms become the public forum, that is an important issue.
I could care, I suppose, but I abjured television watching almost forty years ago and my movie attendance slid over the following fifteen years or so to zero. I had walked out of too many movies that had appeared to be interesting in the reviews but had no intelligent content.
Ditto. As long as you have an internet connection virtually everything is available to stream free.
What’s the difference between 4 or 5? Of course back in the day they’re were 3. And actually Apple is a very tiny player, they spend a lot of money on shows, but they have a tiny subscriber base. Replace Apple with Google, with YouTube Google is a massive player.
How about doing something for streaming services that add commercials and special pricing for anything that is worth a shyt. Then there’s the premium pricing for 50 year old crappy scifi movies that have been free on tv for years.
Hold on, please be quiet….. is that the sound of Steam Escaping I hear?
That is the view of a modern day Luddite
First, not everything is available on free platforms. Some movies remain siloed behind paywalls. And some movies are simply withdrawn.
But my bigger complaint is that it takes time for movies to make it to Tubi or some other free platform. If you are content to wait a couple of years to see something, that won't bother you. But if most of the audience is conditioned to do this, it will destroy the independent studios and make it almost impossible for new entrants to find audiences. And the streamers say good riddance because they view theaters as competition.
The streamers live on subscription fees -- and at this point, they're spending big bucks on sports programming because people want to see games in real time.
The sense of urgency drives subscriptions, just as the need to see a movie while it was still in theaters used to drive the box office. The streamers now move all the movies and shows to a subscription based platform akin to an online library.
You might say, "That's fine, and it's convenient." But how can an independent studio or startup that doesn't own a big studio platform find an audience, recoup its production costs, and maybe even make a profit if it loses the box office? How can the indies even affordably advertise a new movie across multiple platforms?
The streamers are operating in a quantity over quality space in which box office is irrelevant. They throw up a blizzard of cheap content hoping that they can shotgun something at highly targeted audience segments. In that environment, cheap is best, and lowest common denominator films that play as well in China and three dozen other foreign markets as well as in the U.S. is the goal.
We end up with generic slop. The people still trying to do good work lose their revenue streams; they'll get whatever the streamer will pay, and the streamers want cheap. Tentpoles get promoted. Existing IPs with huge legacy fanbases built back when the industry was still oriented to box office get mined for endless stupid remakes, sequels and spinoffs. Quality becomes a harder and harder sell.
Protecting CBS affiliates. She also sees Democrats want to give Netflix exclusivity on the Presidential Inauguration.
I'm not sure where you want to take that.
I've been on FR for a long time. There have always been many movie threads. Over the years, these have been dominated by freepers raining anathamas on Hollywood for assorted sins, with many insisting they haven't seen a movie in many years. That, of course, has never stopped a freeper from having a vehement opinion about something he claims not to have seen. This is par for the course, as it is against the rules to actually read an attached article before commenting.:)
A whole lotta people besides me have had steam boiling out of our ears for a long time. I was in the nuke Hollywood from orbit camp myself. Then, by complete surprise, I tripped over a very good, very underseen film that made me realize that I had a huge blindspot.
The question is how we can sustain or recreate an ecosystem that incentivizes great movies. Most movies won't reach that level, but we won't get any if the streaming race to the bottom continues. Then all our GOAT lists will simply end in [pick your date], and we'll add cinema to the dead art form list.
I no longer want to nuke Hollywood from orbit. For one thing, "Hollywood" has been busy nuking itself in recent years, and the State of California is finishing off the survivors. The film industry is fleeing California like rats from a sinking ship. And fwiw, the industry will be healthier when it is more decentralized; at least the toxic subcultures that have always flourished with overconcentration will be broken up.
I had my Road to Damascus moment, realized that a saving remnant was still trying to do good work, and that not everyone was high on coke and swinging from chandeliers, as some freeper once put it.
I changed my tune. I was still in favor of nuking Hollywood, but I wanted to at least send in an extraction team and get a few of the good ones out first.
I have become increasingly discriminating. I want to nuke the streamers and leave the indepedent producers and startups alive to experiment and find audiences the old fashioned way, but making movies people will actually want to buy a ticket to see.
I need a tactical nuke to do the job.
I am amazed at the number of movies that streamers have placed behind paywalls on their own platform despite that movie being available for free elsewhere.
Are they are counting on viewer laziness, or perhaps lack of knowledge of alternatives? Before I pay for anything via PVOD, I will check Letterboxd to see where it might be available free or for a lower price. (And I will pay an upcharge for better picture quality; SD might be free while HD or UHD requires a rental.) I have never subscribed to a streamer just to watch X. On a couple of occasions, I’ve waited until a streamer had five or six movies I actually wanted to watch, subscribed for a month, and then cancelled. That’s more movies than I usually want to watch, but I don’t want to pay a streamer any longer than necessary.
The streamers hate churn, but that’s a potential remedy. If everyone learned to watch whatever and quickly cancel, the streamers would realize they would make more money by putting movies in the theater, and streaming would collapse.
Their insurance policy right now is to buy up the sports programming. Fans feel a need to watch in real time. They will subscribe to do it. The streamer then has them at least for the duration of the season.
But on movies, I suspect that the streamers are just waiting for long term leases on movies to expire, and then the streamers will pull them from open access. Streaming is relatively new. But as time goes on, I see more and more stuff becoming harder to find and perhaps only available on one site. The rights to a movie ultimately belong to the studio that made it, although those rights are often sold (not leased) to someone else. Most of the big legacy studios either set up their own streaming platforms (e.g. Disney) or were bought up by Big Tech (Apple, Amazon, Comcast).
Netflix originally was just a distributor. It already ruled the rental market after it drove Blockbuster and other bricks and mortar rental operations out of business. As the first mover in streaming, it leased impressive numbers of good (and less than good) movies from the legacy studios. But as the big studios set up their own streaming platforms (or were acquired by bigger players), they started siloing their own movies.
Netflix suddenly found it more and more difficult to lease good movies. That’s when it tiptoed into production, where it quickly became a huge producer of notoriously mediocre generic slop. That’s why it wanted to acquire WBD: to get control of its legacy catalogue, and to acquire a traditional powerhouse production studio to up its game on production.
I have to admit, Tubi and Pluto have enough free streaming (and Brave chops ads out of Tubi nicely) that I have enough television and movie programming for quite sometime.
Lately, if I am waiting for something to process, I hop over for Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, Burns and Allen or Columbo.
“But how can an independent studio or startup that doesn’t own a big studio platform find an audience, recoup its production costs, and maybe even make a profit if it loses the box office? How can the indies even affordably advertise a new movie across multiple platforms?”
The Blue City Times is happy to announce a 10-movie pre-payment service with movies selected by our movie reviewer.
Your money will be refunded in full if you watch no more than two movies and are dissatisfied.
You don’t even have to live in Blue City to enjoy our plan and our carefully picked movies.
I don’t even know what it means and I guess since I’ve gotten along without it for A LOT OF YEARS, I can continue my movie/program watching without it...
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