Hollywood accounting makes it very hard to trust tales of "losses".

The money has just been siphoned away to a tax haven somewhere through overpaying for e.g. renting a property or licensing some IP. The money wasn't really "lost", it was just not taxed.

Are you certain of this?

I know Hollywood Accounting is a thing for movie production, but I haven't heard any evidence that it's being used for streaming services.

If nothing else, I'd expect a risk of this being treated as securities fraud if streaming service P&L is broken out in public-company reports.

I'll believe the poor rich people who are struggling to buy their third yacht when they open up their accounts books and show where all the money comes from and where it goes to. As long as they keep it secret, I'll assume it's because they don't like paying taxes.

This article[0] indicates that Disney removed shows to write them off.

[0]: https://gizmodo.com/disney-streaming-cuts-tax-writeoffs-1850...

> Hollywood accounting makes it very hard to trust tales of "losses".

Hollywood accounting applies to individual titles.

It doesn't apply to entire services - why would you tell your shareholders that you are making a loss to depress the stock price?

This applies to individual titles, but the not the service as a whole. The streamers are all losing money as seen in their earnings reports.

Apparently Paramount+ failed so spectacularly that it ended up dragging the company down financially, and now they're cancelling Star Trek shows.

They keep chasing the Paramount channel and it keeps failing. You'd think sooner or later they would accept they do best in syndication.