Several years ago, Paramount was handing out free monthly trial codes for Paramount Plus every month.
Then, some time in 2020, they just ”forgot” to cut off my access after the trial ended.
I had free Paramount Plus from then until 2025, when they merged with Skydance.
The free subscription expired almost immediately after the merger was announced.
It’s evident to me now that they did this to boost their active subscriber numbers.
I’m sure a lot of people didn’t even realize this had happened to their accounts.
And those that had weren’t about to complain about it too loudly.
Presumably whoever is doing the acquisition would look at the financial numbers in addition to the subscriber numbers? Then they'll notice a discrepancy between subscriber count and how much $ is coming in, which makes this whole thing unravel. It's far more likely it's just run of the mill incompetence and/or change of leadership prompting an "efficiency" drive.
The issue is that "whoever" isn't a single homogeneous entity. I would presume that someone in the organization spotted the discrepancy. Having worked closely with (and sometimes for) large corporations, I cannot presume that C-Suite decision makers were sufficiently aware of the issue. Or perhaps they didn't weigh the issue properly. Or maybe they were consumed by a desire to complete the merger, no matter what. There are quite a few ways this could have gone, internally, and still arrived at this place.
A popular MMORPG went through a period of not enforcing rampant botting, gold farming, and similar activities which provided a substantial boost to their user numbers. A short time after the acquisition, they announced major initiatives to combat botting, bringing the user count back down.
It would depend on how they presented user numbers in the merger discussions I think basically. If they promised anything about how organic the users were or suggested they were well paying for revenue projection purposes?
Man... I am wondering how much of everything this is these days...
This is just one instance, but the propaganda effect I think is happening strong. I think probably all of public opinion is being manipulated like this...
Now the propaganda is that the anti data center movement is a fake campaign by China.
Which, sure, maybe it's amplified by them but go visit any of these cities public council meetings. People are legit mad about them. Energy prices are already through the roof, they are massive facilities that don't provide much local employment after being built (even the construction crews are contracted in from elsewhere), they get massive tax breaks in exchange for 1 time local development fees, get exempted from noise ordinances, pollution laws, and crammed down communities in backroom deals.
Not hard for foreign adversaries to escalate what's already a terrible deal for the citizens of most cities.
You're very correct. It's much, much easier to amplify sentiment that already exists, as opposed to attempting to manufacture sentiment from nothing at all. That's been true for as long as propaganda has existed, afaik.
I'm honestly, pretty convinced that it's the opposite. I mean, people are spooled up? But I think the sentiment is entirely generated beyond the normal complaints?
Like, yeah, people are annoyed, so like you say, foreign adversary just dumps targeted gasoline on the issue until people are rabid. Meanwhile, I don't see dick about the Epstein files, the ice raids, or literally crazy levels of authoritarianism in the general zeitgeist... It's like that other stuff piqued the interests of people for 20 minutes in March, then they stopped caring as soon as some people got fired at DHS.
You guys remember "No Kings?" When is the next one of those? When is the next of any kind of protest? Where is the awareness?
This seems very much in the wheelhouse of clandestine agencies like the CIA and the FSB. Use front companies to modify the perceptions of reality by doing things like shifting the Overton window of currently discussed topics, preparing custom datasets for future LLM training that bake in desired assumptions, manipulating or publishing public opinion polls and prediction markets.
Haha, you think the CIA and FSB loves doing this stuff? Companies love doing this kind of stuff way more than your government employee shmucks. It is way more prevalent in private sector than you could ever imagine
People just randomly get excited and make up shit online. See Median Strategies aka Rahil Prakash just making up polls and publishing them this month. Then declaring it was a social experiment and shutting down his website. After affecting prediction markets in some minor ways.
* So many people using the same nonsense talking points at the same time. Did they coincidentally make up the same lies? With no anchor in objective reality, why would they converge on the same talking points?
* The sophistication of the talking points: IME they are often very well-crafted - seemingly professionally crafted - public communication. They effectively frame the debate, shift attention (often attacking the messenger), use powerful emotional impact to bypass reasoned discussion, and acheive the main goal of disinformation - paralyze discussion. Did people invest the time and effort to craft these talking points on their own, and do it so effectively?
You can see this in real time in our modern 'mainstream media', even MSNOW, the supposedly 'left-leaning' 'anti-foxnews' sounds more like a regan era republican than it's actual desired audience. If you turn on cnn it's just constantly drumbeating iran war/support for israel, etc.
If anything - I actually think we're at a spot where the mask is slipping a bit, because the US was slow to adapt its media distortion to the internet, and the financial interests in the US are stretching even farther away from general sentiment.
So the notice is because they've fumbled, and now are beating the drum extra hard to try to make up ground.
The older I get and the more old stuff I sieve through, the more I feel I grew up in an environment shaped by short-term persuasions, all added up like different archaeological layers. Every single ideal, value, word, and so on, just marketing that hit my parents, or propaganda that hit my grandparents. Which is why the Confucian rectification of names is appealing.
The opponents don't have to astro-turf. They can express their genuine feelings about the merger and the well known problems of media consolidation. Paramount has to astro-turf because there isn't any actual support for what they want outside of the small number of people who will make a ton of money in the deal.
This goes back far, and I’ve even seen what appear to be shills for random B-list celebrities. Add SEO business as usual, political campaigns, international influence and the SnR is just radio static.
I was literally just ranting about this yesterday regarding a reddit thread where the astroturfing was so obviojs and it is frustrating to see, because a large chunk of the population is in fact influenced by it.
One way to look at it: Why wouldn't they use this capability? (Moral qualms?)
Powerful interests, including corporations and foreign powers, have long worked effectively to frame public perceptions, even when their access to the members of the public was as limited as newspapers and a few broadcast TV stations, and filtered through editors. And they did it effectively.
Have they stopped for some reason?
And would they be less effective for some reason? The new tools - direct access to billions of individuals, wide bandwidth, no filters - should make them far more effective.
It's amazing to me that the fact of them doing it isn't well-known (there is plenty of research and evidence) and assumed, but still a question even on HN. Bring it up to most people and they will ostracize/ridicule you - an odd response which I can't explain well, given the evidence, likelihood, and very serious consequences which those same people are unhappy with.
Interestingly, over the last several years powerful interests have worked - successfully - to shut down research on this issue, including at places like Stanford and Harvard.
welcome to the post-truth world, where online manipulation are the "truths" like the world's greatest conman "posts," the (mal)intent seems intentional to me
> In reality, mergers like this — particularly when involving Warner Brothers — have a long history of resulting in mass layoffs, higher prices, and lower-quality product as the merged company tries to pay down debt from the deal.
This is wrong. There are mass layoffs because you don't need 2 HR departments, 2 Accounting departments, and so on. You can often do away with lots of sales & marketing too, in some industries.
These are called "cost synergies" in M&A, and are basically the only synergies someone will give you credit for in a deal.
Debt financing is not required for there to be cost synergies.
There shouldn't be "mass layoffs" for that reason. If they are both reasonably large companies, the size of the HR department depends on the number of employees. When you merge the companies, the number of employees initially stays the same, hence there is no HR to be fired. You might consolidate the HR departments, and this might lead to some roles becoming redundant, but not on a mass scale. Similarly for accounting, marketing, etc.
The fact is that there are no synergies for many companies, even companies operating in the same industry. The reason for promoting a merger between such companies is exactly that they will see reduced competition and hence greater profitability. The ideal merger is actually between companies making different products, where the one company can benefit from more vertical integration.
Which part exactly? Seems you just described why the layoffs happen? Two things can be true here, the new company can find cost savings by eliminating redundancies and have to cut deeper than desired to be able to service debt.
The cost savings from consolidating things like HR, and the debt payments are different by orders of magnitude. The cost synergies will be a rounding error. Structural changes like stopping investment in the future, mass layoffs, and selling off assets (or rights to the assets) will be required.
Agreed. The synergies mentioned above are there but it’s not like one HR team can suddenly handle having twice number of employees and open reqs. HR and accounting tend to scale somewhat linearly to the size of the business. Not to mention that both those orgs have massive tasks to take on as a result of the merger so at least for the next year or two those efficiencies will be hard to realize.
In the case of media orgs like this those efficiencies are even less pronounced because it’s not like you can consolidate product lines.
Teaching someone to recognize astroturfing is about as evil as teaching them to recognize bad kerning (insert relevant xkcd). You’ll destroy their blissful ignorance forever.
Because 5 companies control 80% of movie box office in the US and that number is about to shrink to 4? Not only making the profits and doing massive layoffs, but deciding what content we can see?
When purchasing Paramount, David Ellison published a press release to the Jerusalem Press talking about how he supported the IDF financially. Actor Mark Ruffalo recently reminded people he said this, and Zionist organizations are denouncing him as an "anti-semite" for reminding people of this.
The Ellisons already control way too many media outlets and have started instituting censorship on TikTok. They are aggressively Zionist and I think it's bad for our nation (and the world) to have a pro-Israel media empire feeding propaganda to people. Look at what CBS has become, Bari Weiss is fully control of the agenda and stories coming out of it.
I can think of several reasons why an average person might be opposed to a merger (ex. less competition and the things that go along with that like higher prices and lower quality, and fear that products and services will be discontinued after the merge). But I'm struggling to come up with a good reason why you would support a merger.
> I'm struggling to come up with a good reason why you would support a merger
If I were a loyal Spirit Airlines customer, I’d have supported their proposed merger. Similarly, when an artist I love gets greenlit by a major studio, it’s news worth celebrating—they’re getting more resources at their disposal.
(To be clear, I think the Paramount merger is a travesty, but mostly due to corruption rather than anything intrinsic to Hollywood needing protecting.)
Agree. I'm also remembering the previous grocery store merger in the western US, where the regulators meddled and, while they did approve the merger, they forced a large number of stores to be sold off, but they were sold to a tiny, inexperienced operation who proceeded to go bankrupt within a year, so rather than an area having two "Albertson's" or whatever, all those areas then had one Albertson's and one vacant store. Anybody with sense could have seen that coming and if they didn't want to lose their convenient grocery store altogether, they might have been arguing to simply allow the full merger.
Why not just block that merger? Well, the "non-greed" case for mergers is often that while it may result in a dominant position in a narrowly-defined market ('supermarkets'), they are sometimes needed to preserve the existence of that category as an alternative to another giant that has expanded into a new market, in that case mainly Walmart and to some extent, Amazon, both of which can afford to subsidize something like Ritz Crackers with the profits from selling tires, lawn furniture, or AWS.
You could also consider the Sprint/T-Mobile merger in those terms: Both were circling the drain and really only competing for the most price-sensitive customers, as everyone knew both had inferior service to the other 2 networks. Either or both could have ultimately been liquidated, to the absolute glee of Verizon and AT&T. While it hurts emotionally to think of there being fewer players in that important and specific market of real MNOs, it's true that the MVNOs do seem to be thriving today and, for people who can do even basic research, you can get way better deals (in terms of value and price) on cell phone service today than you could 10 years ago thanks to them, even with fewer 'real' carriers.
Note: None of this is directly relevant to Paramount, which I don't think existentially needs the merger - from either side.
> The "non-greed" case for mergers is often that while it may result in a dominant position in a narrowly-defined market ('supermarkets'), they are sometimes needed to preserve the existence of that category as an alternative to another giant that has expanded into a new market, in that case mainly Walmart and to some extent, Amazon, both of which can afford to subsidize something like Ritz Crackers with the profits from selling tires, lawn furniture, or AWS.
Ah, but then is the argument that we should allow a merger among smaller players because it prevents a narrowly-defined market from being entirely consumed by larger, broader businesses; or should we argue that the larger, broader businesses that can exert influence over large swaths of the market prevent the existence of a competitive marketplace?
> less places for that artist to shop their film means less of a chance their film gets made
When a small studio gets bought by a bigger one, it typically results in more production from the small studio. That’s good if you like their content. They Donny have to waste time shopping films, they’ve already been allocated a budget.
>When a small studio gets bought by a bigger one, it typically results in more production from the small studio
No, you get the small studio forced to produce more, when that is not how art is made. Eventually you milk it dry and it sucks for everyone except the people who walked away with more money from owning things.
Bungie being pushed to produce more didn't make more genre defining games. Same for id.
In fact, thanks to the stupidity of Xbox and Sony, we have very clear evidence very recently that allowing big studios to buy and run small artists is a great way to pump out low quality slop that doesn't even do well financially.
A lot of Xbox gamers were excited for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard back then, presumably because they figured they'd get console exclusives and day one access on Game Pass.
Some seem to believe that their favorite IP would get new productions in the merged company but I wonder if those posts were part of the astroturf campaign.
I forgot i don't live in the us. So in Latin America people just call it a day and survive and try to get another job, they don't even know companies lay off or move operations during mergers
Hollywood is its own worst enemy. The number of giant scandals and last-minute game changes are innumerable. As is widely documented, the extensive and stable assets of Hollywood studios are not being used on the best of days.
Humans have been concerned with monopolization and fair competition since at least Ancient Rome. Entire civilizations routinely revolt when the means of production and distribution are centralized to such an extent that both consumers and small businesses feel the pain.
Something rubs people the wrong way when Crassus became the richest man in the Roman world after buying up all the fire fighting companies, then using that to extort homeowners to sell at a deep discount when they were on fire. That was followed by many reforms that led to a public firefighters.
It was just over 100 years ago when the US went through its Trust Busting era breaking up the oil, steel, and rail. Ordinary people cared a lot about that. Enough to change the course of presidential elections.
Edit: Also, have you ever complained about how all the TV shows and movies these days seem to be the same? Just endless franchises and remakes and product placement and lowest common denominator slop? Well, a good part of that is due to media consolidation, which makes it harder for smaller independent TV and movie studios to compete. The soon-to-be four companies in America that control 80% of mass media are basically hedge funds.
In general, they do not care about particular mergers. US laws regarding unfair competition happened because of abuse by big trusts 100+ years ago, Standard Oil in particular, and the result was a regulatory/legal approval framework. It really shouldn't _matter_ what the public thinks about particular mergers in terms of whether they are approved, but mostly lawsuits to block mergers are brought by states, and in this case, the astroturf campaign was targeted at the California AG, who is an elected official and answers to the public.
Several years ago, Paramount was handing out free monthly trial codes for Paramount Plus every month. Then, some time in 2020, they just ”forgot” to cut off my access after the trial ended. I had free Paramount Plus from then until 2025, when they merged with Skydance. The free subscription expired almost immediately after the merger was announced.
It’s evident to me now that they did this to boost their active subscriber numbers. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t even realize this had happened to their accounts. And those that had weren’t about to complain about it too loudly.
Presumably whoever is doing the acquisition would look at the financial numbers in addition to the subscriber numbers? Then they'll notice a discrepancy between subscriber count and how much $ is coming in, which makes this whole thing unravel. It's far more likely it's just run of the mill incompetence and/or change of leadership prompting an "efficiency" drive.
The issue is that "whoever" isn't a single homogeneous entity. I would presume that someone in the organization spotted the discrepancy. Having worked closely with (and sometimes for) large corporations, I cannot presume that C-Suite decision makers were sufficiently aware of the issue. Or perhaps they didn't weigh the issue properly. Or maybe they were consumed by a desire to complete the merger, no matter what. There are quite a few ways this could have gone, internally, and still arrived at this place.
A popular MMORPG went through a period of not enforcing rampant botting, gold farming, and similar activities which provided a substantial boost to their user numbers. A short time after the acquisition, they announced major initiatives to combat botting, bringing the user count back down.
IANAL, but couldn't this be fraud?
It would depend on how they presented user numbers in the merger discussions I think basically. If they promised anything about how organic the users were or suggested they were well paying for revenue projection purposes?
Man... I am wondering how much of everything this is these days...
This is just one instance, but the propaganda effect I think is happening strong. I think probably all of public opinion is being manipulated like this...
Does anyone remember the FTC "comments" about net neutrality? And how completely made up it all was?
It must be that everything is like this nowadays.
https://ktul.com/news/local/data-center-scandal-who-sent-fak... - Naturally, data center projects are also getting in on this made up fun.
Now the propaganda is that the anti data center movement is a fake campaign by China.
Which, sure, maybe it's amplified by them but go visit any of these cities public council meetings. People are legit mad about them. Energy prices are already through the roof, they are massive facilities that don't provide much local employment after being built (even the construction crews are contracted in from elsewhere), they get massive tax breaks in exchange for 1 time local development fees, get exempted from noise ordinances, pollution laws, and crammed down communities in backroom deals.
Not hard for foreign adversaries to escalate what's already a terrible deal for the citizens of most cities.
You're very correct. It's much, much easier to amplify sentiment that already exists, as opposed to attempting to manufacture sentiment from nothing at all. That's been true for as long as propaganda has existed, afaik.
I'm honestly, pretty convinced that it's the opposite. I mean, people are spooled up? But I think the sentiment is entirely generated beyond the normal complaints?
Like, yeah, people are annoyed, so like you say, foreign adversary just dumps targeted gasoline on the issue until people are rabid. Meanwhile, I don't see dick about the Epstein files, the ice raids, or literally crazy levels of authoritarianism in the general zeitgeist... It's like that other stuff piqued the interests of people for 20 minutes in March, then they stopped caring as soon as some people got fired at DHS.
You guys remember "No Kings?" When is the next one of those? When is the next of any kind of protest? Where is the awareness?
I've long thought _everything_ is already like this.
This seems very much in the wheelhouse of clandestine agencies like the CIA and the FSB. Use front companies to modify the perceptions of reality by doing things like shifting the Overton window of currently discussed topics, preparing custom datasets for future LLM training that bake in desired assumptions, manipulating or publishing public opinion polls and prediction markets.
Haha, you think the CIA and FSB loves doing this stuff? Companies love doing this kind of stuff way more than your government employee shmucks. It is way more prevalent in private sector than you could ever imagine
It's both.
People just randomly get excited and make up shit online. See Median Strategies aka Rahil Prakash just making up polls and publishing them this month. Then declaring it was a social experiment and shutting down his website. After affecting prediction markets in some minor ways.
How does that theory explain,
* So many people using the same nonsense talking points at the same time. Did they coincidentally make up the same lies? With no anchor in objective reality, why would they converge on the same talking points?
* The sophistication of the talking points: IME they are often very well-crafted - seemingly professionally crafted - public communication. They effectively frame the debate, shift attention (often attacking the messenger), use powerful emotional impact to bypass reasoned discussion, and acheive the main goal of disinformation - paralyze discussion. Did people invest the time and effort to craft these talking points on their own, and do it so effectively?
You can see this in real time in our modern 'mainstream media', even MSNOW, the supposedly 'left-leaning' 'anti-foxnews' sounds more like a regan era republican than it's actual desired audience. If you turn on cnn it's just constantly drumbeating iran war/support for israel, etc.
Hardly need to add "Modern" on this statement. Hell - Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is nearly 40 years old at this point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent)
If anything - I actually think we're at a spot where the mask is slipping a bit, because the US was slow to adapt its media distortion to the internet, and the financial interests in the US are stretching even farther away from general sentiment.
So the notice is because they've fumbled, and now are beating the drum extra hard to try to make up ground.
A classic Yes, Prime Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
The older I get and the more old stuff I sieve through, the more I feel I grew up in an environment shaped by short-term persuasions, all added up like different archaeological layers. Every single ideal, value, word, and so on, just marketing that hit my parents, or propaganda that hit my grandparents. Which is why the Confucian rectification of names is appealing.
What is "Confucian rectification of names"? Thank you.
Absolutely, billions (or trillions) of dollars of value and the future of the parties and our trade relations are at stake.
For Paramount, I'd imagine they have no choice but to do this. It would be naive to think its opponents aren't astro-turfing the other side.
The opponents don't have to astro-turf. They can express their genuine feelings about the merger and the well known problems of media consolidation. Paramount has to astro-turf because there isn't any actual support for what they want outside of the small number of people who will make a ton of money in the deal.
The thing about saying "everyone does it" to justify yourself is that eventually you start believing it.
This goes back far, and I’ve even seen what appear to be shills for random B-list celebrities. Add SEO business as usual, political campaigns, international influence and the SnR is just radio static.
With the shoehorning of certain topics into absolutely every conversation on every platform... agree.
I was literally just ranting about this yesterday regarding a reddit thread where the astroturfing was so obviojs and it is frustrating to see, because a large chunk of the population is in fact influenced by it.
isn't reddit mostly astroturf? Try to get a conflicting opinion on anything political.
One way to look at it: Why wouldn't they use this capability? (Moral qualms?)
Powerful interests, including corporations and foreign powers, have long worked effectively to frame public perceptions, even when their access to the members of the public was as limited as newspapers and a few broadcast TV stations, and filtered through editors. And they did it effectively.
Have they stopped for some reason?
And would they be less effective for some reason? The new tools - direct access to billions of individuals, wide bandwidth, no filters - should make them far more effective.
It's amazing to me that the fact of them doing it isn't well-known (there is plenty of research and evidence) and assumed, but still a question even on HN. Bring it up to most people and they will ostracize/ridicule you - an odd response which I can't explain well, given the evidence, likelihood, and very serious consequences which those same people are unhappy with.
Interestingly, over the last several years powerful interests have worked - successfully - to shut down research on this issue, including at places like Stanford and Harvard.
welcome to the post-truth world, where online manipulation are the "truths" like the world's greatest conman "posts," the (mal)intent seems intentional to me
https://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-lar...
> In reality, mergers like this — particularly when involving Warner Brothers — have a long history of resulting in mass layoffs, higher prices, and lower-quality product as the merged company tries to pay down debt from the deal.
This is wrong. There are mass layoffs because you don't need 2 HR departments, 2 Accounting departments, and so on. You can often do away with lots of sales & marketing too, in some industries.
These are called "cost synergies" in M&A, and are basically the only synergies someone will give you credit for in a deal.
Debt financing is not required for there to be cost synergies.
There shouldn't be "mass layoffs" for that reason. If they are both reasonably large companies, the size of the HR department depends on the number of employees. When you merge the companies, the number of employees initially stays the same, hence there is no HR to be fired. You might consolidate the HR departments, and this might lead to some roles becoming redundant, but not on a mass scale. Similarly for accounting, marketing, etc.
The fact is that there are no synergies for many companies, even companies operating in the same industry. The reason for promoting a merger between such companies is exactly that they will see reduced competition and hence greater profitability. The ideal merger is actually between companies making different products, where the one company can benefit from more vertical integration.
This is wrong
Which part exactly? Seems you just described why the layoffs happen? Two things can be true here, the new company can find cost savings by eliminating redundancies and have to cut deeper than desired to be able to service debt.
The cost savings from consolidating things like HR, and the debt payments are different by orders of magnitude. The cost synergies will be a rounding error. Structural changes like stopping investment in the future, mass layoffs, and selling off assets (or rights to the assets) will be required.
Agreed. The synergies mentioned above are there but it’s not like one HR team can suddenly handle having twice number of employees and open reqs. HR and accounting tend to scale somewhat linearly to the size of the business. Not to mention that both those orgs have massive tasks to take on as a result of the merger so at least for the next year or two those efficiencies will be hard to realize.
In the case of media orgs like this those efficiencies are even less pronounced because it’s not like you can consolidate product lines.
The higher prices is also wrong, adjusted for inflation. And the lower-quality products is subjective at best.
I really hate when authors undermine their own (often valid) points.
Original article (linked in the submitted article): https://theintercept.com/2026/08/21/paramount-merger-warner-...
Oh, to be a corporate puppet [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmuEIRY9VUg
This should be illegal. Propaganda shouldn't be so pedestrian.
The need to focus on making movies not money.
Stop Operation Mockingbird
Teaching someone to recognize astroturfing is about as evil as teaching them to recognize bad kerning (insert relevant xkcd). You’ll destroy their blissful ignorance forever.
> Paramount’s also been caught using an “astroturf” — or fake grass roots organization
... except the article presents no evidence the organisation is fake.
Um, the organization is real. The "grass roots" part of it is clearly fake.
Why, what the hell is the point? Why would the average person care about a merger?
Because 5 companies control 80% of movie box office in the US and that number is about to shrink to 4? Not only making the profits and doing massive layoffs, but deciding what content we can see?
When purchasing Paramount, David Ellison published a press release to the Jerusalem Press talking about how he supported the IDF financially. Actor Mark Ruffalo recently reminded people he said this, and Zionist organizations are denouncing him as an "anti-semite" for reminding people of this.
The Ellisons already control way too many media outlets and have started instituting censorship on TikTok. They are aggressively Zionist and I think it's bad for our nation (and the world) to have a pro-Israel media empire feeding propaganda to people. Look at what CBS has become, Bari Weiss is fully control of the agenda and stories coming out of it.
I can think of several reasons why an average person might be opposed to a merger (ex. less competition and the things that go along with that like higher prices and lower quality, and fear that products and services will be discontinued after the merge). But I'm struggling to come up with a good reason why you would support a merger.
> I'm struggling to come up with a good reason why you would support a merger
If I were a loyal Spirit Airlines customer, I’d have supported their proposed merger. Similarly, when an artist I love gets greenlit by a major studio, it’s news worth celebrating—they’re getting more resources at their disposal.
(To be clear, I think the Paramount merger is a travesty, but mostly due to corruption rather than anything intrinsic to Hollywood needing protecting.)
Agree. I'm also remembering the previous grocery store merger in the western US, where the regulators meddled and, while they did approve the merger, they forced a large number of stores to be sold off, but they were sold to a tiny, inexperienced operation who proceeded to go bankrupt within a year, so rather than an area having two "Albertson's" or whatever, all those areas then had one Albertson's and one vacant store. Anybody with sense could have seen that coming and if they didn't want to lose their convenient grocery store altogether, they might have been arguing to simply allow the full merger.
Why not just block that merger? Well, the "non-greed" case for mergers is often that while it may result in a dominant position in a narrowly-defined market ('supermarkets'), they are sometimes needed to preserve the existence of that category as an alternative to another giant that has expanded into a new market, in that case mainly Walmart and to some extent, Amazon, both of which can afford to subsidize something like Ritz Crackers with the profits from selling tires, lawn furniture, or AWS.
You could also consider the Sprint/T-Mobile merger in those terms: Both were circling the drain and really only competing for the most price-sensitive customers, as everyone knew both had inferior service to the other 2 networks. Either or both could have ultimately been liquidated, to the absolute glee of Verizon and AT&T. While it hurts emotionally to think of there being fewer players in that important and specific market of real MNOs, it's true that the MVNOs do seem to be thriving today and, for people who can do even basic research, you can get way better deals (in terms of value and price) on cell phone service today than you could 10 years ago thanks to them, even with fewer 'real' carriers.
Note: None of this is directly relevant to Paramount, which I don't think existentially needs the merger - from either side.
> The "non-greed" case for mergers is often that while it may result in a dominant position in a narrowly-defined market ('supermarkets'), they are sometimes needed to preserve the existence of that category as an alternative to another giant that has expanded into a new market, in that case mainly Walmart and to some extent, Amazon, both of which can afford to subsidize something like Ritz Crackers with the profits from selling tires, lawn furniture, or AWS.
Ah, but then is the argument that we should allow a merger among smaller players because it prevents a narrowly-defined market from being entirely consumed by larger, broader businesses; or should we argue that the larger, broader businesses that can exert influence over large swaths of the market prevent the existence of a competitive marketplace?
less places for that artist to shop their film means less of a chance their film gets made. How is that good for you or them?
> less places for that artist to shop their film means less of a chance their film gets made
When a small studio gets bought by a bigger one, it typically results in more production from the small studio. That’s good if you like their content. They Donny have to waste time shopping films, they’ve already been allocated a budget.
>When a small studio gets bought by a bigger one, it typically results in more production from the small studio
No, you get the small studio forced to produce more, when that is not how art is made. Eventually you milk it dry and it sucks for everyone except the people who walked away with more money from owning things.
Bungie being pushed to produce more didn't make more genre defining games. Same for id.
In fact, thanks to the stupidity of Xbox and Sony, we have very clear evidence very recently that allowing big studios to buy and run small artists is a great way to pump out low quality slop that doesn't even do well financially.
A lot of Xbox gamers were excited for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard back then, presumably because they figured they'd get console exclusives and day one access on Game Pass.
I imagine those people are quiet about it now.
Some seem to believe that their favorite IP would get new productions in the merged company but I wonder if those posts were part of the astroturf campaign.
They are threatening to move out of state if the laws are fairly enforced. This concerns workers in the film industry, and people in LA generally.
I forgot i don't live in the us. So in Latin America people just call it a day and survive and try to get another job, they don't even know companies lay off or move operations during mergers
Hollywood is its own worst enemy. The number of giant scandals and last-minute game changes are innumerable. As is widely documented, the extensive and stable assets of Hollywood studios are not being used on the best of days.
Cry no tears for these leaders.
I don't think the poster was crying for those leaders
Correct. The industry employs many many middle and lower income people in LA.
Humans have been concerned with monopolization and fair competition since at least Ancient Rome. Entire civilizations routinely revolt when the means of production and distribution are centralized to such an extent that both consumers and small businesses feel the pain.
Something rubs people the wrong way when Crassus became the richest man in the Roman world after buying up all the fire fighting companies, then using that to extort homeowners to sell at a deep discount when they were on fire. That was followed by many reforms that led to a public firefighters.
It was just over 100 years ago when the US went through its Trust Busting era breaking up the oil, steel, and rail. Ordinary people cared a lot about that. Enough to change the course of presidential elections.
Edit: Also, have you ever complained about how all the TV shows and movies these days seem to be the same? Just endless franchises and remakes and product placement and lowest common denominator slop? Well, a good part of that is due to media consolidation, which makes it harder for smaller independent TV and movie studios to compete. The soon-to-be four companies in America that control 80% of mass media are basically hedge funds.
And why would they care what the average person thinks about a merger?
They (Ellison) don’t. They want to pressure state law enforcement to give them a pass.
In general, they do not care about particular mergers. US laws regarding unfair competition happened because of abuse by big trusts 100+ years ago, Standard Oil in particular, and the result was a regulatory/legal approval framework. It really shouldn't _matter_ what the public thinks about particular mergers in terms of whether they are approved, but mostly lawsuits to block mergers are brought by states, and in this case, the astroturf campaign was targeted at the California AG, who is an elected official and answers to the public.