抢夺观众眼球的“战争”将以眼泪告终

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{"url":"https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ftlabs-audio-rss-bucket.prod/24be6faa-dae2-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17.mp3","text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":12.481371,"text":"Tech and media giants are going to war, pouring billions into competing streaming services. "},{"start":18.982921,"text":"Apple and Disney are both about to enter the market, taking on established players such as Netflix and Amazon."}],[{"start":25.231424,"text":"Next year will see even more new entrants. "},{"start":27.980528,"text":"In the clamour and confusion, viewers may rue the day their traditional television and cable packages were “unbundled”."}],[{"start":35.227134,"text":"The spending is immense. "},{"start":38.176114,"text":"Apple has committed more than $6bn for original content, including movies and series such as The Morning Show, starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell. "},{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":50.168796,"text":"In this expensive pivot to video, the iPhone maker is racing to catch up with Netflix, which already spends $15bn a year on content, including the $500m it just dropped on Seinfeld, a 30-year-old sitcom."}],[{"start":64.9243,"text":"Some investors are already concerned. "},{"start":68.418057,"text":"Netflix has been playing this game for 12 years and secured an impressive slice of the world’s population — but still fails to generate positive free cash flow. "},{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":77.673312,"text":"Now the market leader is losing some of its best content, as new rivals such as Disney hoard it for their own services. "},{"start":84.674472,"text":"Meanwhile, Apple can afford to outspend anyone and undercut them on price; the Apple TV Plus service is only $4.99 a month. "},{"start":94.424822,"text":"Everyone has the potential to lose lots of money."}],[{"start":98.418917,"text":"The most obvious investor backlash in the sector is at AT&T, where Elliott Management has taken a stake in the venerable telecoms group and told it to stop wasting money on deals in a vain effort to rejuvenate itself. "},{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":113.176743,"text":"Included in AT&T’s $80bn takeover of TimeWarner last year was HBO, which is, inevitably, launching its own new streaming service next year."}],[{"start":123.679107,"text":"But even the sceptics might not be worrying enough. "},{"start":127.673185,"text":"The danger is not only that the competing efforts cancel each other out. "},{"start":132.677387,"text":"It is that younger audiences have zero interest in the stars from the 1990s, whom executives are so keen to sign up."}],[{"start":140.176837,"text":"Many younger viewers barely care about premium content at all. "},{"start":144.681786,"text":"Instead they are fixated on short clips of home-made material consumed on the likes of YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok."}],[{"start":151.932095,"text":"Netflix boasts 152m subscribers. "},{"start":155.930971,"text":"On YouTube a single personality, <ft-content type=\"http://www.ft.com/ontology/content/Article\" url=\"http://api.ft.com/content/1d8a2cc0-f510-11e6-95ee-f14e55513608\">PewDiePie</ft-content>, has 101m subscribers for his cheap and controversial content."}],[{"start":165.427364,"text":"Some think this is a passing fad. "},{"start":168.096915,"text":"Even Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, a beneficiary of the boom in user-generated content, is betting on its decline."}],[{"start":176.096244,"text":"He said this week that “some of the content that people are consuming today on social media may actually be less interesting than more premium content going forward”."}],[{"start":185.348369,"text":"But he also thought we would all be wearing computerised glasses by now."}],[{"start":190.5979,"text":"Equally short-sighted is Twitter, which acquired Vine, an early leader in short user-generated videos, in 2012. "},{"start":198.850455,"text":"As then-chief financial officer Anthony Noto put it with breathless enthusiasm: “It’s a great experience . . . It really hits a younger demographic. "},{"start":210.356705,"text":"And we couldn’t be more happy to have that brand, that asset and that user experience in video.”"},{"start":null,"text":" "}],[{"start":214.096782,"text":"Four years after the acquisition, Twitter shut it down in a cost drive."}],[{"start":218.855463,"text":"This all plays into the hands of China’s ByteDance, which owns TikTok, and Alphabet in the US, which owns YouTube. "},{"start":227.099622,"text":"The two user-generated content kings can sit back and watch their premium rivals torch money in a vain effort to win the streaming wars. "},{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":"tom.braithwaite@ft.com"}],[{"start":null,"text":"This article has been changed to remove an incorrect reference to YouTube. "},{"start":null,"text":"Although more of YouTube’s premium content has been made free, it retains a subscription service. "},{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}]]}

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抢夺观众眼球的“战争”将以眼泪告终

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抢夺观众眼球的“战争”将以眼泪告终

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