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What do my streaming choices say about me?

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If we are what we watch, then this column was written by Jerry Seinfeld, or maybe Tony Soprano. Or a combination of the two, although I’m not sure Tony Seinfeld sounds menacing enough to cut it in the New Jersey mob.

People have always perceived social cachet in their cultural choices. So what do your viewing and subscription habits say about you? To be clear, we are talking about mainstream channels here. You know what your OnlyFans sub says.

So who are you? Are you a Paramount Plus type? Or maybe a Disney devotee. Perhaps you’ve kept that Sky subscription because you are only on season 13 of Grey’s Anatomy and still have another 700 episodes to get through.

There is no longer the same unified community of television that existed when there were only a handful of channels. You could once be confident that almost everyone like you watched the same shows and understood the same references. This is why a generation of Gen X or boomer men will offer entire renditions of Python sketches the moment a keyword is uttered. Anyone foolish enough to observe that they did not expect the Spanish Inquisition will immediately deserve to be tortured with the reminder that its main weapons are surprise and fear, oh and ruthless efficiency — see what I mean?

Today word of mouth, or word of TikTok, is even more essential. But how many streaming services are you prepared to pay for? It is fairly easy to join up and cancel once you’ve watched the show that interests you. But it is also fairly easy to forget to cancel.

So what do your choices say about you? Netflix says relatively little except that for some reason you carry on paying even though you sit there night after night complaining that there is never anything you want to watch, aside from reruns and the movies of Jason Statham.

An Amazon Prime subscription probably means you paid for the free priority postage so thought you might as well take a look. You also like being able to watch only one leg of European football matches.

Disney+ means you have small children or essentially still are a small child. Adults with Disney+ and no children are obsessed with spin-offs from the superhero series or Star Wars. You are absurdly excited by the new Avengers movie. Alternatively you once nicked a password from a friend to watch the Beatles documentary and have hung on to it, telling people you only keep it so you can watch The Bear.

A commitment to Paramount Plus means you are a sucker for soap operas about grizzled, old, salt of the earth no-nonsense ranchers. Or perhaps oilmen who are fighting back against bureaucrats, regulators, lawyers and environmentalists who are threatening their way of life — and whose wives spend all day shopping and glamming up for when they get home. Maybe that’s slightly unfair. There are also series about good old salt of the earth gangsters whose way of life is threatened too. Paramount Plus is a channel for men who miss westerns. It is essentially the GB News of light entertainment, the channel for everyone thinking of voting Reform at the next election and who suspects that Jeremy Clarkson is secretly a bit of a leftie.

Now TV is for people who did not want to shell out for a Sky subscription and haven’t realised it would have in fact been cheaper to have done so.

You got Apple TV+ during the pandemic and are prevented from cancelling by the fact that its four good shows are evenly distributed throughout the year.

Discovery Plus has a bit of everything you like, especially cycling, but not enough to justify a subscription so it’s primarily for those who don’t care how much they are spending. Channel 4’s is the saddest service since it exists solely for those who want to rewatch programmes from when Channel 4 was still good.

ITVX is primarily for those who feel short-changed by only two hours of Love Island content. As for iPlayer, well, it’s the BBC and you’ve probably paid for it anyway so you might as well give it a quick skim, if only to annoy The Telegraph.

Oh, and if you actually watch any of these on your TV, I regret to inform you that you are no longer young.

Email Robert at magazineletters@ft.com

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Mergers & Acquisitions

Amazon’s annual deal fest is no longer all about the bargains

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Amazon Prime Day is often referred to as Black Friday in July. For good reasons. What started out as a one-day event back in 2015 for shoppers to snag discounts on big-ticket items has morphed into an annual extravaganza that is widely copied by other retailers.

Last year’s Prime Day generated about $13.4bn in gross merchandise value over a 48-hour period, according to Bank of America. That’s a 10 per cent increase on 2023 and represents about 6 per cent of Amazon’s online store sales in 2024.

This time round, Prime Day arrived amid concerns that sales would not match the spectacular highs of past years. Consumers are decidedly more cautious. Sellers, facing tariffs, have less reason to offer large discounts. And competition from other retailers — namely Walmart — has increased.

Direct comparison is made trickier this year because Prime Day stretches out over four days instead of two. But in any case, zooming in on sales misses the point. Amazon Prime, and the annual deal bonanza that celebrates it, isn’t just a way of shifting goods, so much as a means of feeding the enormous Amazon ecosystem.

First, the sales themselves have a relatively modest impact on the company’s bottom line. Amazon’s ecommerce business may be massive, with revenue accounting for about 39 per cent of the company’s total last year. But operating profit margins — at 5.4 per cent, Bank of America estimates — are slim.

The real money is therefore in driving customers to all its other businesses. These include Prime membership sign-ups, which give more than 300mn subscribers access to deals others don’t get, plus free shipping and other benefits, in return for an annual fee.

More members mean more spending on Amazon’s marketplace and greater consumption of its services and contents such as video streaming, music and AI-powered assistant Alexa.

Advertising — which Bank of America assigns a chunky 55 per cent profit margin — also gets a boost as brands and third party vendors vie for visibility on one of the biggest sales days of the year. It’s a virtuous circle. The more shoppers Amazon can get on its website, the more data it has to take to advertisers to help them create targeted ads.

Prime Day also tends to attract new third-party sellers, a group that already accounts for 60 per cent of Amazon’s retail sales. Fees collected for services like storing inventory and handling logistics for orders have become Amazon’s second biggest business, generating over $156bn in revenue last year.

The real crown jewel now is Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud business, which makes up nearly 60 per cent of last year’s operating profit. Put its $126bn of estimated revenue this year on the same 11-times multiple as rival Microsoft, and it’s worth $1.4tn, or over 57 per cent of Amazon’s entire enterprise value. Prime Day may be good business, but it’s no longer the main event.

pan.yuk@ft.com



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Google to agree cloud discount as US government squeezes Big Tech

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Google will heavily discount cloud computing services for the US government, as the Trump administration pressures technology groups to slash prices on long-standing, lucrative contracts.

The agreement comes after Oracle last week cut a deal with the government, including a 75 per cent discount on some software contracts for a limited period and “substantial discounts” on its wider cloud computing contracts.

Google’s cloud contract is likely “to land in a similar spot”, according to a senior official at the General Services Administration (GSA), which is renegotiating the contracts. A deal is expected to be finalised within weeks.

Equivalent discounts from Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are expected to follow soon, they said, but those talks are less advanced than with Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

“Every single of those companies is totally bought in, they understand the mission,” the senior official said. “We will get there with all four players.”

Together the four companies account for the bulk of the government’s annual spend on cloud services, which currently exceeds $20bn a year.

President Donald Trump’s administration has been attempting to slash the cost of IT procurement as part of a government-wide effort championed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), previously run by Elon Musk.

The tech giants are keen to avoid a repeat of the adversarial relationship they had with Trump during his first term, which saw AWS lose a lucrative defence contract.

Amazon claimed the move was retaliation for critical coverage of the administration in the Washington Post, owned by the company’s founder Jeff Bezos.

The push by the GSA, which co-ordinates US government procurement, follows similar efforts by the Trump administration to reduce the amount spent on consulting groups such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte.

The senior official said the GSA would also be renegotiating agreements with ridesharing companies that have contracts with the federal government.

Google agreed to give the US government a 71 per cent “temporary price reduction” on some Workspace contracts in April, until the end of September. The company declined to comment on the pending cloud deal.

Microsoft declined to comment. Amazon and Oracle did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for GSA declined to comment on the ongoing negotiations.

The agency’s cost-saving effort, spearheaded by acting administrator Stephen Ehikian and Federal Acquisition Service commissioner Josh Gruenbaum, follows a series of executive orders signed by Trump that mandate the government to save money in federal procurement.

In the past few months, the GSA had reached deals with Adobe and Salesforce. The latter company cut the price it charged the government to use the messaging service Slack by 90 per cent until the end of November.

Big Tech leaders including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai have courted Trump — appearing prominently at his inauguration and ending corporate diversity programmes.

Bezos has also worked to rebuild his relationship with the president — whom he previously criticised as a “threat to democracy”.

During Trump’s first term, in 2019, the $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (Jedi) cloud project was awarded to Microsoft instead of Amazon. AWS alleged in a lawsuit that Trump “used his power to ‘screw Amazon’” due to a “highly public personal vendetta” against Bezos and the Washington Post.

Ultimately, Jedi was cancelled under Joe Biden and replaced with a $9bn contract that was awarded to Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle.

Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, has formed a close alliance with Trump. Oracle is involved in talks to split viral video app TikTok’s US business from its Chinese parent ByteDance, and is part of a $100bn US data centre infrastructure project alongside OpenAI.



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Big Pharma markets left on a ‘patent cliff’-hanger

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India is set to reach a record year in initial public offerings and Big Pharma is facing a wave of patent expiration dates. Plus, Meta goes to trial over who to hold accountable for corporate scandals.

Mentioned in this podcast:

India on track for record IPO year

The looming ‘patent cliff’ facing Big Pharma

Today’s FT News Briefing was produced by Sonja Hutson, Katya Kumcova, Henry Larson and Marc Filippino. Additional help from Kelly Garry, and Michael Lello. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forhecz. Our intern is Michaela Seah. The show’s theme song is by Metaphor Music.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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