New streaming services are costing their parent companies billions of dollars, according to media mogul Barry Diller.
A year ago, Diller warned of the consolidation of power by Netflix and Amazon. This week he told CNBC that Disney is best positioned to compete with these companies, but spoke of the “insane” cost of launching a new streaming service. “These losses by definition have to be in the billions,” he said. “There is no way around it.”
Diller suggested a more positive outlook for NBCUniversal’s ad-supported service: “It’s much less risky. It’s much more conservative, but it’s ad-supported and so it doesn’t have to really compete in trying to grab subscribers away in a rich subscriber market.” He added that Apple should “get back to fixing the iPhone.”
Netflix and Amazon are here to stay, concluded Diller, marking the end of a century of media domination by “essentially six companies… They want to get [control] back. I don’t think they will ever get it back.”
