Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Content accumulates. Intellectual property rules.

I wasn't planning on doing another post on the value of television content libraries this soon -- lots of other stuff going on -- but the news forced my hand. 

From The Wall Street Journal. [emphasis added. And if you haven't done so already, check out Monday's post before reading further.]

Amazon.com Inc.’s desire to acquire the fabled MGM movie and television studio in a deal valued at $9 billion with debt is the latest sign that the e-commerce giant is renewing its emphasis on entertainment and seizing an opportunity to jump up in weight class.

...

In MGM, Amazon would gain control of a vast movie and television library including the “James Bond” and “Rocky” franchises. Other MGM properties include “The Pink Panther” and “Robocop.” Amazon is likely to try to create new content from the material, analysts and industry executives said.

Still, Amazon will have to invest yet again to develop and generate successful new franchises out of the intellectual property it may acquire.

Not all MGM content would immediately surface on Amazon’s Prime Video platform. MGM has licensing deals throughout the industry that lock up much of their content for several years. Such agreements would at least, though, serve as revenue generators for Amazon.


A lot of the analysis in this article (particularly around the Netflix comparison) is bad, sometimes crossing the line into factually questionable, but it does suggest that journalists and analysts are finally starting to think seriously about content libraries. (Perhaps they actually did learn something from Quibi.)

We'll come back to this (and how so many people are still getting the Netflix business model so wrong).

No comments:

Post a Comment