Netflix spent $15bn on content last year. The BBC's total content budget was $3bn.
US content budgets were always bigger (bigger market!) but they've exploded in recent years. And in the past they sold the output to UK broadcasters, but now they go direct
Netflix and Amazon are now spending as much on original content as any of the traditional US media companies. And going direct.
On some measures Netflix is spending more on content than ALL broadcasters in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined.
That is one reason for charts like this. 16-24 year olds in the UK probably now spend more time watching Netflix than *all* live TV. I love the BBC, but this raises a lot of big questions.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
A meta-observation: almost all the tech people I follow that hate Facebook and think it's absolute evil also think it did the right thing in Australia (barring it screw-up in blocking news that's not news.)
)This is a useful litmus test - does someone endorse a terrible, incoherent and irrational law, that undermines the whole basis of the web, because today it’s being aimed at people they hate?)
Three principles 1: don’t endorse a terrible law because it hurts people you hate and helps people you like
Yes. Stands on principle. "You can't make people pay you to link to you" is about as basic a principle of the web as you can possibly get. FB could have copied Google, fudged a 'news showcase' and bunged the newspapers $50-100m. That would be the pragmatic path
Google has now signalled that every newspaper on earth should try to squeeze a payout from them, while FB has taken a huge PR hit in saying no, links are free.
Meanwhile, anyone anywhere on earth who is thinking of a new social app will now start from the presumption that they should not under any circumstances let people share links to news. (What - you thought this was just about 'big tech'?)
I will wait for UK lawyers to explain implications of the Uber judgment. But as far as I can tell, the question was "when you drive for Uber, are you working for Uber or for the passenger?" Seem pretty clear you're working for Uber, IMO. supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-201…
(Also part of the judgement: "you can't get out of that with a click-though document making drivers agree they're not working for you if really, they are")
Three options
1: Uber makes drivers workers - can it still make money?
2: Uber changes the model to fit. That necessarily means less ability to sanction bad passengers or bad drivers. That looks more like a minicab
3: Uber pulls out and we revert to the minicab model
The interesting question about Facebook/ Google/ Australia is not simply that this is a staggeringly stupid law. Rather - how far do other governments decide it’s a good idea to make linking cost money, and how much of a mess and distraction does that create?
I would put this law in the same category as California’s AB5, which tried to categorise Uber drivers as employees and accidentally banned all freelance work - so obviously bad that it can’t stand. But bad ideas can still do a lot of damage.
So far, everyone has done the wrong thing. The Australian government took a terrible idea and wrote an confused law full of impossibilities. Google gave in to extortion - Facebook wanted to show what taxing links would actually mean but probably overshot. But what next?
Paying for news. If you want new taxes on the internet, and to subsidise news, do that. But you should be honest and debate it on that basis, instead of basing it on entirely imaginary, Alice-in-Wonderland theories of internet economics.” ben-evans.com/benedictevans/…
There is an extraordinary kind of wilful blindness in the novel competition theory that's deployed here. "Let's ask the hypothetical - if Google and Facebook had less market power- would they pay to link?” You don't need a hypothetical - you can just LOOK AT THE ENTIRE INTERNET
No-one pays to link. No-one has ever paid to link. This was nothing to do with market power.
The honest argument would be 'we could never charge for links because the intent was too decentralised, but now there is someone big enough that we can try to make them pay'