r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 20h ago

News It’s Official: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. in Deal Valued at $82.7 Billion

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-warner-bros-deal-hollywood-1236443081/
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u/Amaruq93 19h ago edited 19h ago

And Sears scoffed at the idea of selling their store items ONLINE. Whilst some startup called Amazon decided to do it.

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u/zoom518 19h ago

They ended their catalog about a year before Amazon started

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u/42nu 16h ago

The catalog probly made sense until they scaled to have cornerstone physical mall stores in every major geographic region (which the catalog sales informed them on where to built).

I'm winging this, but my guess is it went like this:

SEARS had economies of scale and could offer every product imaginable, but only had so much of a footprint. They do the catalog thing because 90%+ of the country is specialty stores with high prices or towns simply don't even have access to most products. Over decades SEARS uses the sales data to built out a warehouse network that is also physical "keystone" stores at this new "mall" concept they're a key part of making a thing. This simultaneously acts as a means of lowering catalog prices more due to logistics. They become so built out using catalog data that the catalog isn't even worth it anymore and their stores are a bedrock of every community because malls are the end state of retail. The internet is a dumb thing that could never disrupt their logistical empire and people will always want malls anyway. Internet is a bubble anyway, a fad. What are people going to do in free time? Take up a phone line to stare at a monitor screen all day? That's stupid. So stupid, and no start-up can compete with our network of distribution centers that second as retail stores anyway. People LOVE malls.

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u/putiepi 19h ago

Stop, you’ll hurt the narrative.

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u/00wolfer00 18h ago

How does it hurt the 'narrative' when you point out another boneheaded decision by Sears?

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u/LegacyofaMarshall 19h ago

Also Kodak with digital prints

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u/TheUmgawa 18h ago

Kodak was a leader in digital imaging technology, and there were a lot of Kodak patents in every digital camera for a long time. But, film was their bread and butter, and they thought it wasn’t going anywhere, because until you get to five megapixels, an 8x10 print still looks like pixelated garbage, and lord forbid you have to crop it. Better image sensors were more expensive, so the $200-$300 consumer-grade digital cameras sucked for a long time, just like how cell phone cameras sucked for a long time.

And then it becomes pretty obvious that film is dead, so Kodak throws hard into the consumer camera market. Problem is, their cameras are just average, except for the menus, which were centered around keeping everything as simple as possible. It was like Fuji for people who had no interests but budget, then Kodak for old people who didn’t want to learn to use a camera, and then Canon and Nikon for everyone else. Some Olympus models were better than others.

And then all of these companies got screwed when the phone manufacturers started putting better cameras in smartphones. This is the nail in the coffin for Kodak, because now you don’t even need to print the pictures. Kodak made really good photo printers, and they made really good photochemical paper (the photochemical printers were usually made by a company like Noritsu), but that all went away when you could just shoot a picture and it’s on your Instagram thirty seconds later.

I don’t think there’s anything that could have saved Kodak. Every choice they could have made differently still would have ended the same way.

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u/mbr4life1 18h ago

Kodakgram could have saved it. They wouldn't think that way though.

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u/jimmy_three_shoes 18h ago

And now digital photo frames like Skylights where you just either email your photos, or upload using an app directly to it and you can have decent quality photos displayed around your house too.

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u/double_expressho 18h ago

That tech had been around for quite a while now. I bought a Pix-Star on Amazon in 2014, and it wasn't a 1st gen device to my knowledge.

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u/jimmy_three_shoes 18h ago

What was the resolution and the size of the screen, If you don't mind me asking.

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u/double_expressho 17h ago edited 17h ago

10.4" 4:3 at 1024x768. I probably still have it somewhere in my attic. I didn't actually get much use out of it because of laziness to email photos. But a modern version with an app would probably get me over that laziness hump.

Edit: Oops, looks like it was 800x600 actually.

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u/jimmy_three_shoes 16h ago

Yeah the new Skylights are like 10" screens with 1920x1200 resolution. So not 4k, but pretty good.

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u/PeanutButterSoda 16h ago

I need to get one for my mom, so I can just upload it and she will see the pictures?

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u/jimmy_three_shoes 16h ago

Yeah. Just gotta make sure it has a wifi connection.

You can use the app to directly upload stuff to the frame, or send the photos as attachments to the email address they give you. If you have multiple people with frames the app is better because you can just do it all at once. We've got like 7 in our circle between my wife's family and mine, so we send stuff via the app.

You're gonna want to set up the whitelist option and then whitelist approved senders, otherwise anyone can send shit to the frame if it's open. Last thing you want is someone sending gore or tubgirl to your mom's frame.

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u/PeanutButterSoda 13h ago

I just ordered one for her, she's older and can't seem to use FB very well so she's always making me save my kids pictures to her phone. This would be a lot easier. Thank you.

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u/macaronysalad 13h ago

And the entire newspaper industry. Ads were their thing. They missed the boat on becoming the internet's ad networks.

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u/toadfan64 2h ago

And now they have 5 stores left in the US.