Streaming services are continuing to dominate my news feed with their flashy new ideas and what that means for their competitors. I found a video that was particularly interesting because it highlights the facts and leaves opinion out of it. The rest of the article is a good read, but it doesn’t really pertain to today’s news on Netflix. It is a firsthand recollection of when the first CEO of Netflix and his partner almost sold to Amazon. Scroll down to the bottom to watch the video, although the boxing analogy is cheesy, it broke down why new streaming services can hurt Netflix, but also how they could completely crash and burn on their own terms. The narrator shares both sides and does not gives the viewer an idea of how he feels about the matter. Like we learned in the course material, news isn’t about showcasing each side of the story, often there aren’t two sides and it should just be reported how it happens.
Sam Reynolds wrote an article titled “We Aren’t in a Streaming Bubble, But Netflix is Still Overvalued”, which the title alone gives way to me believing it is more opinion than news. The first paragraph shares some statistics about each companies proposed spending for the streaming services, but the news statements were soon trampled by the opinion of an interviewee, Brian Friedman. With each question, he takes those statistics shown at the beginning and skews them, sharing his ideas on how it doesn’t add up or why those numbers are wrong. This is a recent headline, which makes me understand how easy it is to confuse news with opinion for those who are not media literate.
Another news article regarding the situation with Disney+ does a decent job of leaving opinion out of their writing, although there are hints of it. This is on the Forbes website so it highlights some of the expected growth and decline. I noticed that they used a pie chart, and while it was 2D instead of the misleading 3D, the information presented on it was confusing. It had countries mixed in with companies in reference to subscribers, so I wasn’t sure the message they were trying to send.
The last source I discovered falls into the analysis category. It gives us a lot of information about Disney+ and what users can expect, but it doesn’t really give us new information that we can’t find elsewhere. It takes the information already announced from Disney and explains it more in depth, making it easy to understand and easy to see how it will change user’s streaming habits.
I saw a lot of the same information being repeated by newer articles and blogs. This reminds me of the course material on news reports being focused around crime because of the ratings. Just because there is a new topic going around, does not mean it needs continuous coverage if there is nothing new to report on it. After reading these four different online articles, I do not feel I learned a lot about Netflix or Disney, but was reading the same material multiple ways.
