America's Road to Fame

Chapter 243 PayPal?

After Chen William was responsible for repaying all the debts of [-]th Century MGM, this huge film company has also started to go on the road, traveling lightly. So far, it seems that the start is still very good.

At present, "Invincible Hulk" has also been filmed, and it will be released after "Iron Man" is drawn, but this step Hulk independent film will still be distributed by Universal Pictures, but after signing a contract with them to withdraw the distribution rights After the agreement, the distribution of subsequent Hulk independent films has been attributed to Twentieth Century MGM Pictures.

The next MCU film to come, will be Iron Man 2, a sequel already in the pipeline, buoyed by the box office success of the first.

"Regarding movies, I think the influence of the Internet on audiences is growing. I have noticed that after a new movie is released, audiences have begun to use the information on those movie rating websites to determine whether the movie is worth watching. , there is a website worthy of attention, and that is Rotten Tomatoes, which has created a relatively new way of scoring freshness, which has won the love of many viewers."

Hearing what Bramo Norwood said, William Chen did not expect that the CEO is still very keen on the Internetization of entertainment, and he agreed very much: "Yes, this is a trend, so you think we should Buy it?"

"Yes, this website used to belong to News Corporation. At the beginning of the year, it was acquired by Flixster. Flixster is a social networking site based on movies. It highlights the reputation of a movie among the public. After the acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes Movie Network, it With more than 25 movie data, 23 billion user comments, 50 professional movie reviews, and more than 20000 trailers and video content, it has threatened the status of IMDB, the world's largest movie database."

"However, in the current economic crisis, Flixster hopes to continue to develop, but financing has become a problem, so I don't think it will be very difficult to acquire this website, and $5000 million is enough to win."

William Chen nodded and said, "This is a small matter, you can decide it."

"I'm going to buy it in the name of The New York Times Group, so that the public won't have any concerns that the films produced by our film company will receive preferential treatment on Rotten Tomatoes."

Bramo Norwood's considerations are quite reasonable, and he continued to say: "As I mentioned to you last time, regarding the acquisition of the music record market, we have already contacted Warner Records and EMI Records respectively. After that, the other party didn't have much resistance to being acquired, but the combined debts of the two record companies reached nearly 20 billion U.S. dollars. If an acquisition is made, Goldman Sachs estimates that Warner Music needs about 30 billion U.S. dollars, EMI $25 billion."

"Let's do it like this. I am also very optimistic about the future of the music industry. Entertainment will never be out of date, but it needs to adapt to the times."

"Speaking of which, boss, before you asked me to investigate the current online music platform, I found a company with great potential..."

He was talking about Spotify, a Swedish company that launched in Stockholm in October 2008 and provides users with music streaming content.At present, this company can be said to be the music platform with the most complete copyright. Spotify provides music including Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music and EMI. Protected music.

Through understanding, Spotify was originally an idea generated by Daniel Eck and Martin Lorenz in 2006. At that time, the very popular P2P music sharing service Napster, because it provided pirated music, was a large-scale copyright infringement, Just been "hunted" to extinction by the Recording Industry Association of America.

At this time, the entire music industry was struggling. Under the impact of the Internet, sales of physical media such as CDs had been declining, and record companies had no way to save the decline.

By the time Spotify officially launched in Sweden in 2008, global music industry revenue had fallen to $169 billion, and the steady decline shows no sign of slowing down.With sales dwindling and ways to save the day dwindling, Spotify's founders managed to convince the Big Four and several smaller labels to agree to supply Spotify with their entire catalog, in the U.S. Limited use abroad.

And they are very smart, making the four major record companies become shareholders of Spotify is almost a way of giving away for nothing. Each record company can get 2% of Spotify shares for about 5 US dollars.

In this way, Spotify has successfully obtained a lot of genuine authorizations, and has started to develop rapidly. It is now the world's top music streaming platform.

Spotify does not provide downloads, all listening is in the form of streaming media, and their unique technology allows the sound quality to be presented more perfectly, no wonder it is loved by users.

Just like Chen William in the film and television industry through Netflix’s network channels, music content also needs similar channels. From this point of view, Spotify is also a very good acquisition target, and this company is not large. The acquisition can be won for less than 1 million US dollars, so Chen William immediately agreed to this acquisition.

These are small things, and the purchase price does not exceed 1 million US dollars, but after hearing these, William Chen suddenly had an idea.

Now, I don’t think about the situation in his previous life and later, mobile payment is not so convenient yet, and William Chen’s investment, whether it is the subscription of the "American Headlines" APP, or the payment of Zoom, Netflix and Spotify in the future, is of great importance. There are not too few scenarios that require mobile payment by mobile phone.

Of course, you can use third-party payment, such as PayPal, but as very important payment data, it is better to keep it in your own hands.

For example, in Huaguo, Alipay will be built into the HOLA APP, so why not launch a payment application outside of Huaguo?Or buy one?
At that time, it can be integrated into many of his own apps, including HOLA, Twitter, and Reddit, which is really very important for William Chen's Internet + entertainment strategy.

However, promoting mobile payment in the United States is not as easy as it is in China, because the United States has its own national conditions, and the interests of various credit card companies are too great, and the use of credit cards is very convenient and popular for shopping. Therefore, if you start from scratch, it is really not easy to handle so many banks.

Then the simplest way to answer is naturally to acquire a ready-made payment company. In this case, the first thing that comes to mind is of course PayPal.

PayPal was acquired by eBay for $2002 billion in 15, and at that time eBay did not pay cash, but acquired PayPal through shares.

It is not impossible to take PayPal from eBay now, because eBay has been far behind Amazon in recent years, and its development is not good.It's just that the purchase price, William Chen estimated that it wouldn't be too little, probably close to [-] billion.

Thinking of this, he directly sent a message to Nielsen, asking him to investigate the situation of PayPal in detail and analyze the feasibility of acquiring the payment company from eBay.

William Chen himself left Los Angeles and went to the headquarters of Meta Technology Corporation in Silicon Valley.

Meta Technology's headquarters is already quite large. After the company was established, it bought a ten-storey building in Silicon Valley and moved most of its companies there.

And through Erica, Chen William also knows that the company and Silicon Valley have also confirmed that they will get a plot near Mountain View to build Meta Technology's headquarters park. The design of the park has been completed, covering an area of With an area of ​​280 million square feet and an estimated total cost of around US$7 million, it will include three office buildings, an artificial intelligence research and development center, a cloud computing research center and a big data center.

Of course, this cost does not include the equipment purchase cost of the research center and the big data center. If all of them are added together, it may exceed 15 billion US dollars.

But these are also necessary. In the Internet industry, data is a strategic weapon. Therefore, in the future, not only here, but also in more places around the world, they will build big data centers one after another to ensure the global operations of their various companies.

(End of this chapter)