these companies bulking up on product in order to be competitive. it s hugely expensive to provide one of these streaming services. amazon just paid $250 million, just for the rights to lord of the rings, before they even get to making it. and there are a few companies that may still be well looking for a dance party in order to do that. you mentioned at&t so the future for people is simply going to be a package of services, 10, 12 a month, whatever they happen to be, and they ll decide how many they want. each streaming service is trying to have some must-watch product, like the crown and things like that, that people will pay for, because they want that show so badly. but let me just say one other things. you mentioned at&t and verizon. because there s another thing that s been going on literally in the last few weeks that is equally important. which is that at&t, as we talked about, is divesting itself, infect, of its warner media assets, but we didn t get as much attention a
new frontier, man. it s exciting, consumers, i think, should be the ultimate beneficiaries here at the end of the day. how does this sit with cable companies, where you now see the verizons and the comcasts and so forth trying to figure out how to play in this market where, you know, my sons, they re not buying a verizon package. you know, they re going to grab a little hulu, get a little peacock, and they re going to they want the flexibility of, you know, picking and choosing from a menu of shows and programming that they want. they don t want to be told, here, you ve got to spend $400 a month for a package, 90% of the stuff you don t haven t want to watch. so how is that impacted by this amazon deal? that s a great question, michael. first, you saw it on the screen a minute ago, a graphic showing there have been not just these two big recent deals, but also, of course, disney buying fox.
ago that verizon is selling it aol and its yahoo! businesses, its content businesses, its version of trying to compete somehow with content and the result of that is that at&t and verizon are becoming infect, wireless companies with some landline telephones, still, but heavily wireless companies, and you ll see them push mump harder into broadband, not the content, but the delivery, providing an alternative to cable for people who want high-speed internet, which verizon and at&t are not that good at yet, but freed up from all of this content stuff, i think you ll see them focus on that, put capitol into that, and perhaps consumers ending up with a choice between a couple of robust broadband providers instead of just their cable company. interesting, steven. you look at that first graph you had, you can see how much room for growth there still is for streaming services, because they
verizons and others is that it s the type of regulation that is in place that the obama administration put in that they feel they didn t like. the self-is always in the details and it is hard for most people to understand. it is this idea that network providers like comcast and verizon and so on shouldn t be allowed to regulate how you use the internet or being able to access the kind of contempt you want. this has been broken down in washington, d.c. over the course of 15 years on how to do it. under barack obama, the fcc put forward rules that treated internet companies like utilities. and now that republicans control the fcc, the chairman has set his agency on the course to delete those rules. and for him, this is all about deregulation, we have seen this with the trump administration across the board, with climate change regulations and whatnot. now we re focused on net
believe there s a reasonable suspicion to believe that someone has tied into the terrorist act, you are not going to have the data. i m going to err on the side of safety. chattanooga and other places, we need more information to go after terrorists. the individual companies, the verizons, the at&t s. they re holding the data anyway. we need to clamp down on the nsa and any other agency under this administration. part of the problem is we can t trust the obama strais in many regards. when it comes to the use of this information, if we don t have providings like the patriot act, the private companies eventually aren t going to have to hold that data for an extended period. that s the essence of why the patriotic act is importance, and that s why places mrooik like france and other places around the world have been looking at going more aggressively than what we have done in the united states because they ve seen the