Amazon's (AMZN -1.64%) recent acquisition of MGM has given the company even more content to compete with all the major streaming services. In this video clip from "The M&A Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on March 18, Fool.com contributors Travis Hoium and Jason Hall discuss the megadeal and what it means for the industry.
10 stocks we like better than Amazon
When our award-winning analyst team has a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*
They just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Amazon wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.
*Stock Advisor returns as of March 3, 2022
Travis Hoium: The next thing we wanted to talk about is Amazon closed on their acquisition of MGM Studios, $8.5 billion deal. I just wanted to say some of the franchises that this brings into the fold, the James Bond franchise, Rocky, Handmaid's Tale, Legally Blonde, Robocop. I think maybe they bring back Robocop.
Jason Hall: That's singling out my youth here, buddy.
Hoium: Yeah, I know. It's an interesting studio. I didn't realize Survivor was under MGM's umbrella. This is a studio, this is another acquisition for Amazon trying to play with Apple (AAPL 1.27%), Netflix (NFLX -3.92%), and Disney (DIS 0.18%). They seem like the big players here in a streaming service, and they're really bulking that up.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar strategy with what Disney has recently done with some of the content that came from Netflix and is now on Disney+ because there is a lot of this content. MGM is a studio and at least until now, has been selling content or leasing content to other streaming services, and that will probably, maybe not end, but it will probably slow down as Amazon tries to pull all that stuff into the Amazon video catalog. That's really the play here, is they're trying to bolster that catalog.
I think if you watch Amazon Prime Video, which I'm not a subscriber to anymore, but this brings up a lot of interesting content into the mix there, and that was really to me the weakness there, because this was a service that one of the reasons we got rid of them as my son would get into the catalog, and you never knew what he would find, there is some very bizarre stuff.
Hall: Yeah.
Hoium: This is like bringing a little bit more quality to the mix.
Hall: Absolutely, and I think this isn't directly relational quote, but it talks about the idea of owning the content versus licensing the content, and how licensing is getting harder and harder. Bob Iger, the long-term, longtime CEO of Disney. This is a quote from an interview he did. I think it might have been this year or late last year talking about Netflix.
Let's see if I can find the exact quote here. He gave a lot of comments to it, and then his last sentence was, "I woke up one day and thought were basically selling nuclear weapons technology to a third world country, and now they're using it against us." This is Disney talking about Netflix and goes on to say, "that's literally what I said, so we decided at the time that we would stop licensing to Netflix and do it ourselves." We're seeing a ton of this, and this MGM move is Amazon doing the same thing.
