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rockemsockemlast Monday at 6:54 PM1 replyview on HN

Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this.

I doubt it though


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echelonlast Monday at 7:14 PM

There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents.

Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop.

It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector.

Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's Game of Thrones production costs using unrelated business units, market those movies and shows for free in the Amazon app, on their website, emblazoned on their delivery vehicles and on every item of packaging. Other companies have to pay hundreds of millions to match this. There is eyeball opportunity cost for consumers, and Amazon is flooding the zone with their free wares. This is a markedly unfair advantage.

Amazon moves US union jobs overseas and trains up low cost crews in Eastern Europe. They buy up once successful studios on the cheap because they all tried to catch up with the stupid steaming game.

Theatrical box office receipts are the biggest revenue driver for studios by a wide margin. Individually, studios could have countered Netflix and Disney by pulling licensing. Amazon in the mix threatened this, because they had existing content licenses and also controlled home media releases. The studios felt cornered by tech giants basically salting the earth. They had to give up healthy Box Office proceeds and exclusivity to chase streaming and defend their access to eyeballs as best they could.

You've heard of Disney eating the mid market film? Amazon ate everything. It left no oxygen in the fish bowl.

Amazon's entertainment business needs to be spun off.

All of that can be true and completely unrelated to Roomba. Nothing should have prevented their purchase of iRobot. That was insanity.

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