I'm not sure where you go in the Stargate universe next though. Over the 10 seasons they defeated all the antagonists, demystified the Gate Builders (Ancients), and took some philosophical turns (destruction of the Asguard, Ascension, religious undertones with the Ori etc)
SG-1 was an epic show, but where would you take it next?
Universe was actually a good attempt to breakout of the Ancient Earth mythology and leave it all behind, but the last thing we want is another "Picard" or worse... ST:Discovery
Definitely hard to extend the original canon/continuity!
Our heroes eventually become very overpowered, with ~12y of shows resolving millions of years of space opera backstory to our protagonists' benefit, as they defeat the parasites-on-good-ol'-humans in not one, not two, but three galaxies. (Or is it 4?)
But it's such a rich mythology that if rebooted, with all the old stuff as inspiration, updated for modern sensibilities, they could have new really-fertile Cinematic Universe.
RDM's BSG was 10x better than the original, & now JMS is doing his own updated reboot of Babylon 5.
Amazon should find a bunch of people with love for, & credibility regarding, the original & have them brainstorm a giant new set of multi-year arcs, cleanup of old weaknesses or outdated elements, homages & new spins on the original core elements, etc.
They could kick off another 2 decades of gradually-unfolding, but well-adapted for the 2020s/2030s, universe- & multiverse- & metaverse-spanning sci-fi.
If anyone from the relevant Amazon/MGM group is reading this: I have some ideas!
My dream series is Make it so the gate, and galactic travel, and all alien high technology goes public. public disclosure fallowed by the immediate political ramification of all the governments of the world knowing about alien life and going to war with it in secret. weak governments would be toppled stronger ones would have regime changes. afterword the expansion and colonization of space and how that works out for different countries doing so differently along with how to the other inhabitant of the galaxy react when it goes from the 'those brave earth warriors that overthrew the oppressive false god of the goa'uld and saved us from forced conversion at gun point by the Ori" to "those bastard are now trying to colonized my planet." Plus the goa'uld never went away just are no longer the galaxy spanning power they were before. couldn't you see the likes of Baal taking over corporations in charge of colony projects. then there is Atlantis were things were it just kind of ended without any resolution to the goings on in Pegasus galaxy or what happens to the ori galaxy after their gods were all killed their priest lost power and the entire power structure that held their society together disappeared overnight leaving the most powerful space navy in the show with no one left in charge (might want to check up on them). then there is the asgaurd home galaxy (triangulum) that now is left without the asgaurd or replicator but what else was their they were in the habit of nurturing lesser species and they just handed earth the keys and told us to take of everything before they mass suicided again we might want to check on that. Oh and their are the Vanir (asgaurd splinter group form millennias ago ) we me in the last season of atlantis
ST:D was unwatchable from Season 1, Episode 2. It has almost nothing in common with the ST ethos except that it's set in space and some of the alien species and locales have the same names
I also think Picard was overly emotional right from the beginning.
These bastards just want to gut our favourite childhood TV memories
Season 1 was OK, nothing great just ok. Season 2 I struggled through it. Season 3 I watched the first episode and decided there is better entertainment to spend my time on.
This comes from someone who watched and loved every previous startrek TV.
It's looking like Picard S02 is going to be some moral lesson for Picard and his crew and I'm hating what that could mean for the story. The CGI has been pretty good so far though...
I miss shows that don't try to have big arc plots and huge setpieces that blow up the per-episode budget; but instead, are okay with being 24-episode seasons of comfy rubber-mask filmed-in-a-forest-in-Vancouver monster-of-the-week schlock. The 90s had so much of this: Stargate, X-Files, Buffy, etc. Why aren't we still making this? Do we just collectively feel like the world has "enough" of it?
Or, to put that another way: I don't need to go anywhere else in the Stargate universe. The place we started in is fine. I just want to watch a cast of hammy actors with excellent chemistry walk through a big puddle into novel science-fantasy situations.
We need a reboot with all the special effects possible today - for the newer generation. Folks could use the opportunity to tighten up some of the plot-lines too. And have public exposure of the gates - thanks to some whistleblower.
There was a reading of an AI-generated script with 4 cast members, but I haven't heard anything (or been able to find anything) about an actual reunion.
Ah, I didn't realize that's what the reunion was. I never got a chance to see (or I guess hear) it. I just assumed it was on a random streaming service.
The movie was always a favorite of mine, and I think Shanks did a servicable job after Spader (even though no one could replace Russell). I would love a reboot of SG1 that isn't shackled by the budget of a 1997 genre TV-show. The spin-offs got gradually further away from what I liked about the initial premise, even if I understand what others might like about them.
I've always had a soft spot for ancient-tech-scifi a la Mass Effect/Expanse/Horizon/Raised By Wolves, and of course StarGate. In that regard Atlantis should be right up my alley as I like most fictional Atlantis-depictions.
What I disliked about SG:A wasn't the setup or the actors (which had fun chemistry), but the antagonists/wraiths that I found completely uninteresting, and the droning problem-of-the-week episodes, with too little focus on developing the backstory of the city/ship/base itself.
SG1 was definitely a show of the 90s TV show archetype too, but atleast evolved into higher stakes, borrowed tech, Asgardians, etc.
IMHO, SG:U committed the twin sins of {unrelated teenage romance} + {idiot of the day causing plot crisis}. The previous series typically felt more coherent in terms of plot.
I bailed after the second episode because of this. A character sacrificed himself by closing a door from the outside to stop an air leak, shortly after they discovered remote controlled flying robots. I figured if they were already making everyone into idiots to force conflict and crisis I was better off rewatching SG-1.
This is my biggest concern with anybody (not just Amazon) trying to extend Stargate SG-1. I want more Stargate. Not a sudden dystopian nightmare, or dour bleak exploration of this or that, or gutting Stargate to write some other show wearing Stargate on the outside (e.g., "It's Game of Thrones, but Stargate!").
It's not even that those things are bad. I've watched and enjoyed some of them. It's just that I know where to get them and I've got enough of them right now.
This is the main reason I’ve been watching Star Trek TNG recently. If anyone could recommend some vaguely optimistic sci-fi books that would be amazing.
On the one hand, the original recordings & models might not be sufficient for a true 'remaster' from original sources.
But on the other, ML-driven upscaling has improved so much that a model trained specifically on the full series – so that it inherently "knows" what various characters/sets/props should look like, at higher-resolutions, from other closer-in shots – might offer acceptable results.
Definitely worth a research project from a tech-smart outfit like Amazon.
I'm not expecting 4K, the originals are on film and never released in Blu-ray quality. AFAIK the existing Blu-ray release is just upscaled and cleaned version of the old DVD release. So I'm sure a new well made scan from original film stock would give us a fine enough HD option.
But what is evil, really? When financial success is equated with virtue, as is far too often the case nowadays (especially in the US), then "don't be evil" means "don't be poor" and they certainly try to abide by that.
Definitely not. When Google was small and growing like crazy the engineers had enough leverage that Eric Schmidt realized that giving them freedom and power to keep them was the best way to grow the company.
As growth moved more into just showing more ads and making them more similar to search results, power moved away from engineers.
Not sure why you say "definitely not" here when it's not clear we're disagreeing. How does the purported power shift you mention even relate to a rationalization that Google decision makers could have used at any time to convince themselves that they're still living the motto? Are you suggesting that "don't be evil" was only for engineers, not management? I can kinda-sorta see how your comment makes sense in that context, but it's still a bit orthogonal.
I'm saying definately not for "don't be evil" means "don't be poor".
Tim Ferriss asked Eric Schmidt about it when he interviewed Eric, and Eric said that one concrete example was adding location sharing in Google Maps. Engineers wanted a way for people to set up a fake location to hide their real location for their own privacy, because not giving basic privacy rights to people is evil.
First Eric thought that it's just a feature with too much extra work, but later the lawyers at Google realized that it also makes the legal part of data handling and protecting data from governments much simpler, because it makes that location not personally identifiable information.
So yes, it may be profitable for small companies not to be evil, but for engineers who said them over and over, it doesn't mean don't be poor, it has nothing to do with money for them.
Vertical integration is still anti-competitive in the general sense of making a market less efficient and reducing consumer agency (which is two ways of saying the same thing).
Ideally, a consumer would be able to choose all combinations of which shows they watch on which streaming services on which devices. But when electronics companies start buying up content producers and offering their own streaming services, you start running into situations where only certain streaming services offer certain content. That benefits the streaming services like Amazon here, but not consumers.
We should be particularly worried about this when it comes to media because media is one of the primary ways that culture propagates itself today. When you let a handful of trillion-dollar companies own the majority of stories that people listen to help build their understanding of the world, you put a ton of control in the hands of people who really shouldn't have it.
> Vertical integration is still anti-competitive in the general sense of making a market less efficient and reducing consumer agency (which is two ways of saying the same thing).
Okay, sure. But how does this relate to antitrust laws? The purpose was never to ban everything that might be even vaguely anticompetitive.
The Supreme Court in 1993 described the Sherman Act as:
The purpose of the Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.
One of the authors of the Act says:
... [a person] who merely by superior skill and intelligence...got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could was not a monopolist...(but was if) it involved something like the use of means which made it impossible for other persons to engage in fair competition."
The Clayton Act directly says:
No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition...
A monopoly isn't required, simply a lessening of competition.
Amazon buying MGM means that MGM films are very unlikely to be available on other streaming services, which certainly lessens competition.
It would be a concern in a world that said it was illegal to own a streaming service and content. The government would have to force divestiture of all content libraries from all the conglomerates.
To my understanding, the EU can prevent the merger of the subsidiaries of the companies that are based out of the EU, which effectively craters multinational company merges.
That said, the EU apparently explicitly approve this particular merger. So that kind of invalidates the EU as an exception.
Current anti-trust laws are a poor fit. Congress really needs a trust-busting 2.0 movement or they're always going to be able to weasle their way through the court system until they get lucky with some judge or outspend the opposition on lawyers.
Note to self: a bunch of pretty 20-somethings can't save your script if the audience is given little reason to care about anyone on screen.
Netflix and Amazon keep trying to manufacture their own cash cow, Game-of-Thrones level show but refuse to invest both the money and (slightly more so) due diligence that HBO does.
I've read the first couple and it's p good mystery literature. It's not "growth" reading, more like fun reading. I'm enjoying the 90s throwbacks too, without cellphones etc.
My wife has worked her way through most of the series and says it gets better.
I find it interesting that Amazon is pursuing vertical integration while elsewhere in the media industry we see companies like AT&T doing the exact opposite.
It'll be interesting to see if, ten years from now, Amazon is any more successful. So far, it's not been clear that this kind of integration is, in fact, a net benefit for the acquirers, and it certainly doesn't benefit consumers.
To be fair, Amazon is integrating everything they can everywhere in the business forever. I think in Bezos’ mindset end game is one MegaAmazon owning entire planet. Like Universal Paperclips.
Sure, it's a modern conglomerate. That's nothing new. Conglomerates have been around for literally a hundred-plus years.
What's fascinating is that the traditional industrial conglomerate has been declining for decades now, with the most notable recent breakup being GE. Meanwhile, tech companies are going the other way:
I think it's a wide open question as to whether the conglomerate is, in fact, an economically efficient entity, or if in the long run, Amazon, too, will break up.
I'd argue the only reason modern tech conglomerates exist and succeed is because antitrust regulators have failed to recognize the impact they've had in destroying a competition.
As a result, these modern conglomerates aren't making money via the standard argument: increased efficiencies, market diversification, etc. Rather, they're profitable because they're leveraging their horizontal and vertical integration to monopolize whole industries.
If world governments return to a more forceful anti-trust regime, I suspect we'll find these tech conglomerates will die off just like their ancestor industrial conglomerates have been.
Americans maybe aren’t used to thinking in terms of conglomerates because there are only a handful of visible ones here but conglomerates are pretty common all over Asia where a single company has holding in a diverse number of industries (eg Samsung cars, Hyundai real estate etc). There are structural reasons for the existence of conglomerates outside of diversification and expansion into adjacent markets. I think your last statement is debatable (that it doesn’t benefit consumers). It really depends — we assume that conglomerate companies will bulldoze the competition with impunity because they’re cross subsidized but in real life this isn’t always true especially if one takes a global view instead of a domestic one.
MGM is first and foremost a film studio. Metro, Goldwyn, and Meyer were film producers in the 1910s who merged to form MGM in 1924.
Kirk Kerkorian was a Vegas developer who bought MGM in 1969, and use its films to theme the MGM Grand hotel. (He also bought United Artists, founded by Charlie Chaplin and friends as a contemporary of Metro, Goldwyn, and Meyer.) Kirk sold the film studio to Ted Turner in 1986, spinning off the hotel-casino business as MGM Grand.
Nah, Netflix will make another show where all the depth of their characters is solely which letter of the Alphabet gang they align with. This is Terry. Ze’s a bad ass cause ze’s non-binary-bi.
Oh yeah that would be amazing. Stargate sort of like Sliders really enjoyed a huge universe of possibilities because they can literally go anywhere. Would love to see it revisited with Amazon's budget!
I'm pretty sure that Amazon bought MGM to prevent Bezos from being the next James Bond villain.
(Not him specifically, but a bald man described as an "Internet mogul" who is "the richest person on Earth" with "tentacles in every aspect of daily life", and is now "building his own private space program".)
It'll be amazing to have all those old, great movies freely available on streaming. Half the reason I have HBO Go is for TCM, and I assume that will be moving to Prime soon.
The pre-1986 MGM library is owned by Warner Bros. via its purchase of Turner Entertainment, not MGM itself thanks to some interesting financial manoeuvres by Ted Turner in the mid-80s. So old MGM films are probably staying on TCM.
MGM does also hold other libraries like post-1952 United Artists films and Orion pictures films as well though.
That's just one way to use the Roomba, I don't think it's "supposed" to be anything. Most have an app that lets you press a button to start it, presumably that app and the base station all connect through AWS
If it's just a more convenient way to push a button on the Roomba (or avoid waiting for the timer) than the statement that a bunch of products stopped working was pretty misleading.
My point was that the EU commission has a much better reputation than the American one for actually caring about anticompetitive behavior, and even they said that Amazon can buy MGM unconditionally.
I'm not sure that's true. While they have been very good at using antitrust as a leverage for trade disputes... they have been more or less toothless against european conglomerates. They seem to care a lot less about the type of anti competitive behavior that (partly or fully) state owned corporations and large conglomerates would be more likely to indulge in.
>One complaint of industrial policy in European antitrust came from no
less than the then President of the United States. President Obama suggested
that some European antitrust enforcement targeting U.S. tech companies
might be essentially an element of European industrial policy. President
Obama explained in an interview with Kara Swisher: “We have owned the
Internet. Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it, in ways
[that inefficient European competitors] can’t compete [with]. And often-
times what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is
designed to carve out their commercial interests.”59
[...]
>They note that the European case law more readily accepts refusals to supply
and refusals to deal than U.S. case law (although the duty is not broad).
Something Gifford and Kudrle fail to mention, however, is that, importantly,
in addition to the limits on the European case law, the Guidance Paper also
shows deep reluctance to create blanket obligations for rivals.
The context for refusals to deal is different in Europe where, unlike the
United States, there is a history of state-owned enterprises. In what is per-
haps still the leading economic policy book of European competition law,
the most recent former chief economist of DG Competition, in his prior
academic writing, also shows great reluctance to undertake an aggressive ap-
proach with regard to refusals to deal.
The reason we hear more about their enforcement actions is because big tech is mostly American. The US also has a much less arbitrary and more transparent process, where the main focus is economical costs to the customer is the main concern. Not so much for for the black box that is the european DG. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, europe has no reason to want itself dominated by big American tech corporations. But I think some perspective is needed, and I think the paper I linked shows the pros and cons of both approaches pretty well.
You have no fucking idea what you are talking about.
My wife had to flee Russia at 14 because a rival oligarch decided to try and force her father to sign over his business. 3 employees of theirs, including her personal driver, were shot and killed as part of an intimidation campaign.
Really, fuck you. This doesn’t happen in America, there is no equivalency here.
