(06-24-2017 01:53 AM)AllTideUp Wrote: I thought this was interesting.
From Awful Announcing....
Amazon will charge six times what cable companies charge for ads
It will be interesting if they can pull this off. Obviously, the NFL product will help them sell this figure. I doubt they could do quite the same with any and all other content.
Of course, part of what's interesting is that Amazon can offer a direct opportunity to purchase the product that's being advertised. That's something traditional TV networks could never match.
I'm not sure this model will work. The unsung reason behind cord cutting is entirely other than what most folks think and say it is. It's not because a bunch of folks are tired of paying for something they don't watch. It's because a bunch of people are cutting corners everywhere because housing, or rentals cost more. Food costs a lot more. Transportation purchased or rented costs more. And wages are stagnant or flat.
Two businesses I grew up with have practically dried up, hunting and fishing. The reason is corporations have bought up large tracts of land and the leases to hunt that land were either revoked or the price of them went sky high. The private land I grew up with is all but gone except for the few families wealthy enough to hang onto theirs. Most of the land was parsed between heirs who immediately sold it for money to cover their life styles or debts.
Fishing died because most lakes, many of which were built with public funds, were privatized and the wealthy outlawed fishing cabins and developed the properties around the lakes just as they would their homes in cities they were trying to escape on the weekends. Pleasure boats replaced bass boats and were left in the water at the dock out back year round to leak fuel into the water. Pesticides and herbicides ran off of the sculpted backyards and into the water killing all of the insects and plant life at the shorelines where the fry once sheltered themselves from the larger fish. No fry, no fish. No fish and reason to go fishing. The other thing that destroyed it was that the public lakes turned into private developments also removed most of the public boat ramps that granted the very citizens who funded the lakes through their tax dollars access. Then the homeowners associations passed regulations with regard to how close you could fish to somebody's back yard or dock. Cutting out access to the bedding areas for spawning fish cut out most of the access to the few fish that remained.
So hunting was priced out of existence by large corporations and lack of land in private hands and fishing was destroyed by development.
Now how does this have anything to do with Amazon? People once went to college sporting events because they lived close by and they were affordable entertainment. The same developers that bought up the hunting land and ruined the public lakes have exploited the game day experience and the same people who rushed to buy or lease lake land only to replicate the tedious and impractical homes they had in the cities at their weekend getaways also thronged to the university towns to be seen at football games. Their interest drove up the prices, and the developers came in bought and built around that until the costs are now too prohibitive for most young families. If the kids don't grow up with the experience they won't perpetuate it. When boys and girls quit hunting and fishing with their father's on the weekends they quit hunting and fishing period.
Nowadays finding a kid who knows how to track, shoot, or fish, or even wants to go into the woods or onto the lake is extremely difficult. This generation is flocking to electronics for their escape. Virtual has replaced reality. They'd rather play a video game than participate in sports. Because of this two things are happening. First the cost of interactive gaming and electronics is going up and up. The devices remain reasonable but the access and the taxing of the access has yet to see its limits. And second, because they don't play sports growing up, and haven't been raised going to the live social events, they are neither interested in the games, or the social events surrounding them. And third, because of remote interaction the need for warm bodied employees is going down and labor is getting cheaper. The latter means the new generation who is paying more for housing, food, healthcare and healthcare insurance has less and less disposable income. The decline in participation, interaction, and attendance related to sports events married to inflation in the basic cost of living and coupled with flat to declining income levels is what led to cord cutting.
People aren't shutting off ESPN and FOX because of subscription fees. They are shutting it off foremost because they can't afford another monthly charge and secondly because they aren't interested. I might add most of the young folks today don't have the attention span of gnats and can't put their devices down long enough to make a new friend or speak with an old one.
So Amazon is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The market they seek may look lucrative today but the technology they are driving is making that buying public more and more obsolete. Pretty soon their development will have killed the spawning area of the very schools of fish they troll for a living.
I call that poetic justice, and an American tragedy.
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Amazon rolling out plans on how to make money streaming
