theweek.com: On Monday, the Department asked a court to jettison a series of decrees dating back nearly 70 years. These "Paramount decrees" arose from a Supreme Court case in 1948, in which Paramount Pictures was the main plaintiff. The decision forced the big Hollywood studios to give up anti-competitive practices that dictated terms to the theater chains, or owned them outright. A series of subsequent agreements with the Justice Department solidified the new rules for the film market.
3 comments:
This article has a lot of interesting points and fails to come to a conclusion of any sort. It also doesn’t really analyze anything but rather states a series of facts. It makes the article feel odd, but I really like it. It really allows me to take in the info and come to my own conclusion about what is going on. I find particularly interesting, the information regarding Disney and the block bookings. This was all stuff I was not aware about on top of the fact I didn’t know about these decrees in the first place, but it all makes sense. We have a no monopoly rule because it has the potential to be detrimental to our economy and thus our lives and could especially violate our constitution. However, the world with conjunction to technology has really expanded and this is especially true with regards to these decrees. Having a theatre won’t monopolize the way it could have when the decrees were made and that is because of streaming services. If a movie were to come out nowadays, people already wait for it to come to Netflix or amazon to stream from their home but they could also just pay for it like paying for a ticket to do the same thing if companies are willing and this in essence takes care of what those decrees seem to have been accomplishing.
This article brings up some very interesting points about streaming services. I think an additional point that could be added to the plethora of information provided her is how streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have affected the audiences at movie theatre venues. I would be interested in seeing the numbers of that data.
I disagree with you Nicolaus: I think this author is very clearly pro-Paramount decree and dislikes how streaming services have started to undermine the work these decrees do to eliminate vertical integration and monopolizing the movie industry. The author even says “Delrahim's logic is, frankly, perverse,” which is a very pointed stance. And they have a point. Streaming services like Netflix have built an empire of films and shows that no other service has available because the service themselves also produce that content. It does basically sections of the film and TV industry to mostly just a few companies. It brings up a very good question about if legislature needs to expand to encompass these services under a law like the Paramount decrees. I agree that there is a lot of information provided here that allows you to make your own decision about this topic, but the author leans a very specific direction.
This article really opened my eyes on the way current streaming services are operating. I always kind of knew in the back of my head that the centralization of streaming services was never going to be a good idea, but now I fear that if the film industry antitrust rules are struck down, we may enter an all new era of anti-consumer behaviour from the entertainment industry. It was particularly interesting to learn about the practice of vertical integration of the movie supply chain in the film industry of yore, because that seems to be the direction the streaming industry is heading in. Netflix keeps ramping up its own production of original content that is only available on it's platform, and now with the other major players like Disney and Hulu ramping up their own streaming platforms and original series, the outlook of decentralized production and distribution seems to be growing worse and worse every day.
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