Basically audiences want quality ad-free TV for cheap and I don’t think there’s a viable way to do that. Esp now that there’s so much competition, these streaming companies need to make hit show after hit show and that’s not easy to do.
1 Like
Seems like a problem for Disney if making a half billy on a $200 million movie doesn’t financially move the needle
Disney and Comcast should combine Hulu, Peacock, Paramount Plus, Disney Plus and whatever other dogshit half-assed streaming services they’re operating into one service that basically everyone would subscribe to. If we get the streams down to Netflix, Warner/HBO and Disney/NBC/Paramount, that seems way more sustainable.
so now we’ve come full circle and reinvented cable!
4 Likes
Or, and just hear me out on this, get everyone to subscribe to 10 different services that they’ll be too lazy to cancel and never use.
1 Like
And they can have tiers of content within each streaming service the way cable is. And they will figure out sports streaming so that you have to subscribe to all of them to watch the NFL.
Probably the most sustained part of the streaming model will be that some people will pay a hefty monthly fee to have ad free TV. That wasn’t an option before but it has some commercial viability now.
The scam index economic indicator seems to be going up. Canceled sling last month and switched to YouTube tv. Sling just billed me as if I’d never canceled.
Added wife to my T-Mobile plan with same phone and service. Bill somehow tripled.
The golden age of Netflix basically gave people one service for quality ad-free TV at a reasonable price. It’s very difficult to now ask people to watch ads or accept lower-quality shows or to pay for three different platforms. The game is a lot harder now and customers aren’t easily satisfied.
1 Like
Verizon sent me a random text message in July saying “thanks for updating your preferences to paper billing”. Hadn’t changed plans or phones or had any interaction with Verizon outside of my monthly autopay. Ignored it at the time until my bill went up by $10/month and I realized it’s because I’m not getting the paperless discount anymore (also I’ve been on paperless everything for so long I assumed that’s what it said without reading it carefully). I had to sit through a 45 minute phone call to fix it.
1 Like
And my dinosaur DVR chugs on, fast-forwarding through ads like a champ.
Doing this investing only in publicly traded stocks is absolutely insane.
https://twitter.com/f_compounders/status/1594952812286603264?s=46&t=8k03DMDZTF8LXrpX7NTAEQ
2 Likes
Yeah the headline makes it sound like he went from 70K to 264M in 10 years, but he actually did it in 33 years. Still incredible, obviously, but not quite as batshit crazy. Counting annual contributions averaging $6K and not counting the tax hit, it’s a little better than 21% annualized growth.
The S&P with dividends and $6K a year contribution would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $70K → $18M (that’s using the S&P’s annualized growth but as if it was perfectly consistent, for simplicity’s sake).
He basically doubled the S&P’s annual returns, and compounding over time that’s a big fucking deal.
I’d be very curious to see his growth by year. Beating the S&P by that much with less to invest doesn’t shock me. Beating it by that much while investing 10’s of millions is pretty insane.
There is a 1,000 monkeys typing on 1,000 typewriters aspect to this. We are now at the point where millions of Americans are retiring each year and many of them have spent their whole careers saving in 401(k) plans or IRAs and picking individual stocks and an investment strategy. Some of them are going to have high sustained returns through pure luck and there will be a few outliers that somehow average 20% per year over the decades. There will also be tons and tons and tons of them that averaged about half the return on the index and absolutely no one will write an article about them. Although if you ask those individuals about their investment decisions they’ll have some great stories about a couple of stocks they picked that did great.
4 Likes
401k’s shouldn’t even allow individual stock picks.
1 Like
Many of them don’t but it’s up to the plan sponsor. Some of them have a brokerage account option in their 401(k) and some don’t. The trend has definitely been away from this, I would say the majority of plan participants in the US don’t have a brokerage account option and many of them are defaulted into a simple and appropriate target date fund based on their age. But in the 1980s and 1990s (when a lot of current retirees were getting started) stock picking was very popular and honestly not that bad considering the alternative at that time was an actively managed mutual fund with a high annual fees and transaction fees and front end loads and back end loads. It was a great time to be a mutual fund company.
2 Likes
This seems off by like a factor of 10. How are you calculating it?
Yeah this seems way off.