Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers. But at least it wasn’t bought by Larry Ellison, as was considered very likely (assuming this merger gets approved, in the current administration you never know).
From a Hacker News perspective, I wonder what this means for engineers working on HBO Max. Netflix says they’re keeping the company separate but surely you’d be looking to move them to Netflix backend infrastructure at the very least.
> In June 2025, WBD announced plans to separate its Streaming & Studios and Global Networks divisions into two separate publicly traded companies. This separation is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026, prior to the closing of this transaction. The newly separated publicly traded company holding the Global Networks division, Discovery Global, will include premier entertainment, sports and news television brands around the world including CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as Discovery+ and Bleacher Report.
So no, I don't think this gets in the way of Ellison taking over the rest of TV news; if anything it seems like it smooths the path.
Off topic, but I am boggled that Larry Ellison came back to “richest man in the world” this year.
For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Microsoft breadth of products, Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, Amazon’s massive cloud dominance, the AI boom for nVidia…
Oracle?!
“On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$393 billion.
In June 2020, Ellison was reported to be the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $66.8 billion”
People don't seem to realize that Oracle is deep in the AI play, taking on a bunch of debt to make speculative leases and buildout of datacenters to rent to other players.
It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.
He still owns over 40% of Oracle, that's a much bigger equity stake than most founders, and most of these other trillion-dollar companies don't have founders in charge anymore.
Oracle is still the company that does database for everyone with money to spend, and the percentage of companies (and governments, and NGOs) that discover a meaningful percentage of their very purpose is "moving data around" only grows over time. Their market is essentially constrained to "entities that use computers and want to sort data," which may as well be unconstrained. And in spite of all the ways they can be criticized, they still compete at the top of their game; many cheaper or free alternatives are going to ask you to trade a lot of labor (and added risk of data loss and destruction).
In contrast, of the list of companies you highlighted,
- Apple makes hardware, which is lower margin
- Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) and unlike Oracle is struggling to define why they should be the best choice (ads in the OS?!).
- Meta doesn't actually have a monetization strategy beyond ads that is revenue-positive, and the reliability of ads turns out to be dicey (Google built their nest-egg on ads earlier than Facebook, and even Google has been thrashing about to find tent-poles besides ads; they see the risk). In spite of that, Zuck is currently above Ellison in the Fortune 2025 rankings.
- AI is ghost money (behind the scenes, a lot of companies paying themselves essentially)
- SpaceX is in a tiny market ultimately (each launch costs a fortune; a handful of customers want to put things in space)
- Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking.
- Amazon is... Actually wildly successful and Bezos is #3 on the Forbes ranking. I think the only reason Bezos might not be higher is he spends his money.
No, it's often the quiet ones nobody talks about that are the real leaders. Lions don't have to roar to be noticed.
Everyone else is too busy spending everything they have on GPUs, DRAM and power plants?
Joking. Honestly, the only thing that surprises me more than seeing Larry Ellison at the top of the list, is seeing Netflix buying Warner Bros, and not the other way around. Maybe I'm too old, but the very notion somehow does not compute.
> Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers
This is a very common narrative to this news. But coming into this news, I think the most common narrative against streaming was essentially "There is not enough consolidation." People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service, but then everyone pulled their content and have their own (Disney, Paramount, etc.)
I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content.
I don't want one company that owns everything, I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content (scifi/fantasy, stuff for kids, old movies, international, sports, etc.) regardless of what company made it.
I think you're right, but I've always been a bit skeptical of that vision -- it implicitly relies on the assumption that "THE streaming service" will choose to make as much content available as technically and legally possible; they're imagining something like "Spotify but for movies and TV shows". But I was always worried about "Apple's App Store but for movies and TV shows": one company with ultimate gatekeeper status over what you can and can't legally watch. (The movie and television business is not like the music business; the financial incentives don't, as far as I can tell, support the same kind of distribution models.)
I'm not particularly thrilled about this kind of consolidation, but given that Warner was going to be bought by somebody, Netflix may be one of the least worst outcomes.
The problem is content exclusivity. It would be great if all the content or at least most would be available on all platforms. At least eventually. That would be great for consumers. Mergers like this typically not.
> People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service
That was also before they started aggressively pushing their own content. For a while, it looked like Netflix was going to be the place you go to stream any movie that ever existed (which was pretty much what they were with mail-in DVDs before the streaming service came along). Now it seems like they don't really want to be in that business either.
Netflix was still competing with blu-ray/DVD/cable at that point.
"why should I watch TV on the fiddly computer when I can just pop a disc in?" or "why should I turn on Netflix when there's clearly stuff on cable TV?" -- that was Netflix's competition in those days. Because there was competition, they had to lower prices and improve service to win consumers.
Now, that competition is being destroyed. Rest assured, Netflix will use this market power to extract more from the consumer.
This is an absolutely wild (and incorrect) thing to assume. The problem of content lock-in is anti-competitive and it would be better solved without mergers
The assumption back then was that other companies would be making shows. Consolidating even more show production in one company is not something we should want.
I was happy when Netflix was a DVD service. Streaming turned everything to shit. Netflix in 2003-2008 was its golden era: any movie you could think of from the past century was available.
I will not lament the loss of visual mass media. I’ve already reduced my viewing to just Kanopy, but even they are reducing tickets.
Fortunately there are plenty of other fun and entertaining things to do than sit in front of a screen and drool at slop.
Unfortunately people will “suffer” with their first-world problems of not getting new Marvel movies every 8 months or Spider-Man reboots every 2 years, or having to pay $100+/month for drivel. Oh the humanity.
Netflix was great when it was the only streaming service because all the legacy media companies licensed shows for cheap. They basically considered it bonus income like syndicated television.
Most of Netflix’s content at that time was very popular but was basically just reruns. The Office, etc. It was a time when you’d be hard pressed to find any movie resembling a blockbuster, just bargain DVD bin type of stuff.
If all the streaming services consolidate there will be less reason than ever to put effort into content. As long as most people stay subscribed the less they spend on content the better.
With an à la carte landscape that we have now, streaming services all have to fight it out in open competition to keep their service on your monthly bill.
It might be less convenient but it is better for content than having a market with just one, two, or three players.
People want a single service to pay for that serves all content, not a single corporate entity creating the content the service provides access to. Like how people want a single payment method that works everywhere globally, not a single company that produces all products globally. Bizarre that you don't see a distinction between the two.
Consumers don't care so much about consolidation as they care about not getting ripped off. When Netflix and Hulu were the only streaming platforms you paid a pretty low price to get virtually everything you wanted. Now you pay more for a worse experience.
Netflix at least has technical chops. Other studios (looking at you, Paramount-) put out barely functional apps because they know consumers ultimately will pay for their content.
People were happy because they only needed one subscription and one app. Buying Warner Bros won't bring that back. If anything, it makes it less likely.
As a rule of thumb, consolidation is never good. There are exceptions where consolidated services can improve (eg arguably physical infrastructure, healthcare), but in general this will not benefit the consumer.
the POV really is: for every 19 people who will pay $14/mo for their preferred, unbundled service, there's 1 person who would happily pay $300/mo for a bundled service.
premium subs are for people who BUY subs not for people who WANT subs.
This particular one could be ok for them? A major cost for Netflix in the modern era is licensing contracts that never adjusted to the streaming world. As such, consumers may actually get access to some backlog of WB stuff that is otherwise not worth offering?
My guess is you are right for some properties that WB owns outright, but legacy IP that has rights shared, especially pre-streaming rights will still have a lot of barriers/untangling to do.
I think Netflix is the most well run media company today by a mile, but also on the spectrum of quality/art -vs- straight money/tech domination they fall into the latter category, and they are the among the least friendly to creators as far as contract/rights.
Maybe there are licensing restrictions or other things that prevent it, but wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app? Or at least make all HBO Max content also available in Netflix (and then eventually sunset HBO Max). That would make a Netflix subscription a much more compelling purchase for a ton of people.
Not attacking you in particular, but I've always hated how we talk about "licensing restrictions" as if they're some kind of vague law of nature, like gravity. Oh, Studio X can't do Y... Because Licensing. "Licenses" are entirely conjured up by humans, and if there was an actual desire by the people who make decisions to change something, those people would find a way to make the "licensing restrictions" disappear. Reality is, the people making these decisions don't want to change things, at least not enough to go through the effort of changing and renegotiating the licenses. It's not "licensing restrictions" that is stopping them.
Same always comes up when we talk about why doesn't Company X open source their 20 year old video game software? Someone always chimes in to say "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
That would be amazing if we could watch both Netflix and HBO Max content at the price of one subscription. At least for me, these two platforms covers 95% of my video content needs.
Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor. There's a lot of content licensed to Hulu that is not necessarily licensed to Disney Plus, though Disney Plus seems to be showing more Hulu content, but I assume it has to do with licensing.
> wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app
I currently pay $20 something for Netflix every month and $10 for HBO Max a couple of months through the year when I’m binging a show from HBO. I as a consumer would prefer to keep it that way. I absolutely do not have the appetite to pay $30+ a month if the two are combined.
My guess is that eventually they'll merge into a single platform, HBO max will die off, and netflix will just keep jacking up people's rates until they're well above what netflix and HBO Max cost separately today
They would never cannibalize an existing revenue stream, they'll keep them separate as long as it's profitable and maybe bundle for marketing (we're slowly rebuilding cable)
I'm actually looking forward to a bigger library on Netflix. Happy to pay a few more dollars per month for Netflix instead of managing ephemeral subscriptions to various streaming services.
Why is this a negative for consumers? Doesn't everyone complain how they have to subscribe to 5 different streaming services, and plenty of people have to pay for a service just to enjoy one or two series?
I don't think consolidation is necessarily bad. It makes sense from a cost perspective too. I guess they could just license out the content, but this will probably grow the catalog a lot.
The production side is the problem. Netflix churns out shovelware crap designed to be on in the background. Every once in a while they get lucky or stick their neck out to acquire something good, but the batting average is very low. HBO on the other hand has the highest batting average, and the brand actually still stands for quality.
Of course Netflix is saying all the right things now to keep anti-trust off their backs, but at some which culture do you think is going to win out?
Consolidation means that incumbents rely on fickle intrinsic motivation rather than competitive pressure to keep quality high and prices low. All too often, monopolies or oligopies become complacent and merely "extract rents".
It’s negative because under current market regulation and enforcement, big company buys small company and enshittifies every product.
What people want (presumably) is a market where you pay once and you access everything and the money get divided based on creators, distribution or whatever.
Under current market conditions, that will happen only in the limit where a single company owns everything.
The problem doesn't appear immediately; it appears over time where the market has been consolidated into only a couple companies and then they can raise prices as much as they want because there is no alternative. This is what cable was like for a long time. Part of subscription fatigue is the constantly raising prices of these services that used to be very cheap. Netflix having WB content isn't a bad thing, the problem is ownership because it will not be available elsewhere.
I don't know. I never really had a sensible option to watch Game of Thrones legally, it's a little late for that now but presumably this would mean it's on Netflix which would be significantly better for me. (I guess useful for House of the Dragon now). I don't think I care much about the upcoming Harry Potter show but if I did want to watch that, I'm not sure what my options would be, and Netflix seems better than me having to take out _another_ subscription.
Obviously having one monopoly streaming service would be bad, but in the meantime having more of them is also not great for consumers since they each charge a flat fee so you have to pay more to see shows from different studios. The ideal would be something more akin to music streaming where you can more or less pick a provider these days, but video streaming doesn't seem to be moving there in any hurry.
Far better for consumers to be able to binge Game of Thrones/Silicon Valley/whatever and cancel HBO Max than to have to pay twice as much for a subscription to both libraries to get either.
HuFlixPrime was my portmanteau of choice in 2010-ish but mainly because I felt the coming dawn of cable company style pricing encroaching; more and more folks adding multiple streaming services to get close to what cable packages could offer.
I still like the name.
Edit:
didn't Netflix have a feature called "Netflix Max" on the PS3 app? I remember it really liking it to find what to watch.
On the pure technical side of their streaming services, Netflix refuses to play ball with platform owners to integrate with services. Netflix on Apple TV has zero conceit for the platform. WB on the other hand is very typical of other streaming services. I wonder what will win out?
On the other hand, if we're not going to have a music situation where the vast majority of mainstream content is available on most of the major platforms, fragmentation is pretty consumer unfriendly.
Netflix is pretty much a studio at this point. Not sure that back-end infrastructure or client apps is really a differentiator for anyone. An individual may find that one service is "better" in whatever respect but it's really about exclusive content.
As a consumer I certainly hope that this means there's one less streaming service to deal with (though I'm no longer an HBO subscriber at the moment) so long as pricing doesn't go up too much.
They are not acquiring CNN. They are interested in hbomax and content IP. All the other news and talk shows will be spun off to a new company called discovery global which is to be sold off separately.
The exact same road that generally leads to the same sort of problematic consolidation?
At best, WBD could have gone bankrupt and a court order could require it to be sold as parts with no one studio getting a significant chunk, scattering WBD's IP moat across many competitors.
But most likely it just means someone like Netflix would have the chance to make a smaller offer for the same kind of deal on a WBD with a worse negotiating position. Same consequences, different day.
Good news is more Warner Bros content, bad news is, only 2 seasons worth per IP. Netflix drives me up a wall with how often they cancel interesting shows, reminds me of SyFy, you find something interesting and then they just cancel it. Sometimes people take a break from watching a show, but they always come back. At least end it cleanly damn it. It's why I don't bother with Netflix original shows unless they've got like four seasons.
Here in the EU it’s great news if this means HBO contents are coming on Netflix. WBD has had so fare the absolute worse policy for international rights distribution for their shows, with policies varying wildly from season to season.
What would be wrong with Larry buying it? He doesn't own a media empire, and would be incentivized to compete. Larry buying it seems like it would have been better from a consumer perspective
That would connect the companies. If they're keeping them separate it could be an anti-trust move or more that these companies are going to start trading studios which has been seen in other industries where they trade markets, like the food delivery company you've been ordering from for years has probably changed hands a few times during that time period and probably name too.
You could make the connection a formal one. Years back HBO’s streaming services were actually provided by MLB, they had a contract together. No reason the same couldn’t happen with Netflix and Warner. Could have happened pre-merger too but it wouldn’t have been in Netflix’s interest.
Don’t count the Ellisons out. Firstly, they control the White House. If the American government doesn’t give approval for this merger Netflix pays Warner Bros $5 billion and walks away. That leaves them open to a future Ellison takeover.
Second, even if the purchase goes through they can still get a win, just a smaller one. Their goals of creating a Fox News like media empire are still alive. CNN doesn’t fit with Netflix and will be spun out and when it is they can submit a bid for that company. The Ellisons will then control CBS and CNN.
Meanwhile, as Netflix customers we can all look forward to paying more, but without the quality content that’s HBO’s trademark. The theatre goers among us will have to accept fewer movies getting to the theatre and going straight to streaming instead. Creative folks will have one fewer major employer, giving them less bargaining power.
For voters, viewers and workers there was no winning no matter who made the winning bid.
I don't like this. Netflix rarely creates excellent content; instead, it frequently produces mediocre or worse content. Will the same happen for Warner? Are cinemas now second behind streaming?
Edit: I agree Netflix has good Originals. But most are from the early days when they favored quality over quantity. It is sad to see that they reversed that. They have much funding power and should give it to great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time instead of mediocrity.
Cinema is indeed second behind streaming. The theatrical window is now so short (~40) days that audiences are happy to wait for the increased benefits and reduced cost of watching at home.
This was inevitable. Technology was bound to catch up. Hollywood actually panicked in the 1960s. But those screens were tiny. Nobody wants to see the Godfather on a cheap 1974 Panasonic.
But TV today is at least 55 inch and in crisp 4k resolution. A modern TV is good enough for most content.
It is not Netflix that killed the movieplex. They were just the first to utilise the new tools. The movie theater became the steam locomotive.
I would disagree. I think what you see is the popular, but less well done material. Dept Q was an original 8-10 episode detective drama that was highly thought of. It received no press but it likely showed up on your carousel. Netflix knows eventually you will find it but not sure they can bring you everything.
> Frankenstein and Death by Lightning were two standout successes recently.
IMHO Frankenstein" was pretty terrible. The makeup was awful, the effects were cheap, the monster... wasn't a monster! The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
It's about all the other projects that would have had great quality but did not secure funding because Netflix prefers to fund mass-produced mediocrity.
In Germany we have a saying "Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn".
Netflix has always had one or three stand-out projects over a year, but is that what we want from studios? It is like the tech model: 1 big success for 10+ duds (the VC show) or another superhero installment (the Google/Meta cash cow movie).
In parallel, they're also starting to downgrade their quality. In the latest season of Stranger Things there's a wild amount of in-scene exposition, where the characters explain what's happening while it's happening. I did some digging and learned that they may be dumbing down their shows because they know users typically look at their phones while watching Netflix and users are more likely to drop off of a show if they don't know what's going on.
Frankenstein looks oddly cheap and fake with really bad lighting in many scenes. You can tell they used the volume virtual production to shoot scenes and it doesn't look great.
They have a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” Sure it has a lot of crap but they also have major hits like Squid Games, Stranger Things, (both became cultural phenomena) and Daredevil.
It feels like a race to the bottom. Movie and TV content quality has taken a nose dive in the past decade.
Yes, there are exceptions, but it’s hard to find these days.
Maybe it’s because producing movies/TV is so much easier and cheaper that there is now so much low quality noise, that it makes finding the high quality signal so difficult.
But it seems like you used to be able to go to the theater and you’d have to decide between several great options.
Now, I almost never care to go because it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.
the kind of person who watches a LOT of television and movies likes slop, it's not complicated.
still different than media people PAY for. for example substack sells empty opinions that agree with you. it is totally wrong to say that slop sells. it is merely the highest engagement for an audience that DOESN'T pay.
you could say, "engagement is the wrong metric," but if that were really true, tech jobs would contract like 50%. the alternative becomes, "would you like fries with that?"
i dont think this should matter, plenty of conglomerates have brands across quality levels.
think old navy, gap, banana republic.
the quality difference is important for the conglomerate same with netflix vs hbo, the corporate benefit is being able to save on costs around like amortizing the corporate side of things (accounting, marketing, real estate, research ect)
I just checked and I've rated 1,788 movies and 326 TV series so 2,114 titles total on IMDB.
I agree with this take. Netflix has some good originals, but it's not in the same category as HBO/WB. Most (not all) of their series feel cheap, shallow, unoriginal. The quality and hit rate just aren't the same.
I have 459 titles on my IMDB watchlist and a tiny percentage of it is available on Netflix (if at all), but this is anecdotal and might have to do something to where I live.
I don't want you to think I'm picking on you; but, I've been thinking about the MBA-bullshittism "consolidation" for a while. It's really a euphemism for "trust formation", right? It seems like we fought tooth-and-nail just 100 years ago to set up real antitrust laws, with real teeth... and now every industry is "consolidated". What's going on in health and seed and cars makes me seethe.
Warner Bros has had their best summer in years (Sinners, Superman, etc). HBO still makes highly regarded prestige TV series (The Last Of Us, Task, etc). This is just false.
Apple is at least trying to fill their old niche. It seems quite telling that the only company truing to do the whole “prestige TV” thing is a kind of side-project for a hardware company. At least nobody can buy them, though.
The Crown, Stranger Things, Unbelievable, Russian Doll (wow, just wow), Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, GLOW, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Ozark, Nobody Wants This, Altered Carbon, Dirk Gently, Mindhunters, The Queen's Gambit, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. And that's my taste, there's more not to my taste like Squid Game, Wednesday, Bridgerton, etc. And not including the films, documentaries, shorts, etc. they done like Love, Death and Robots.
The majority of that list is quite old. Have you seen what they're doing now? Not saying every single thing they make anymore is bad, but the average quality is far lower than it used to be.
imo, that's the worst thing about Netflix. its not that they don't produce good series, its that when they do they have a high peobability of getting cancelled.
Of course Jessica Jones is on Disney+ now. I think most of those others are still on Netflix, but it is a bit of a problem for them - when they don't own the content they eventually lose the ability to stream it, especially as the content owners have entered the streaming space too.
I got netflix a looooong time ago when they still had good movies on there and weren't cycling. It kept getting worse and worse. Then I got rid of it a few years back.
Nearly everything on there sucks now. It's all campy politically-undertoned garbage and not anything I would consider fun to watch or a great way to waste my time. The first squid games was neat. A novel concept and interesting. Then Netflix did what they do best and netflix-ify it into a political message rather than a horror film. The latest Ed Gein show had the potential to be amazing but ended up falling into the same campy, political, director had too much creative liberty trash.
They are a tired company that has strayed from their roots. The Warner Bros acquisition makes complete sense because the entire media entertainment apparatus is capable of only producing:
1. Remakes of movies that are themselves remakes
2. An hour and a half movie where they try to inject The Message into as many frames as possible
3. A campy nearly serious movie that needs stupid jokes injected for the squirrel-brained morons that pay for it.
The entertainment industry is in a financial nosedive because no one wants this garbage anymore.
>it frequently produces mediocre or worse content. Will the same happen for Warner?
HBO hasn't produced good content in years at this point. Since before the last season or two of Game of Thrones, I should think. The other brands in Warner didn't even really have that much prestige.
It is probably not just a Netflix issue. But it is also quite a philosophical question as to who is to blame. The consumers who watch and pay, or the ones who fund the mediocrity.
It is definitely sad to see Netflix turn from their early phase, where they valued quality over quantity, and since have reversed that.
I just want to see more great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time.
How are Netflix created contents profitable? I guess Netflix pays shows based on user time spent, and a Netflix show is profitable if users spend time on it, and not on other shows?
I actually think that’s the opposite of Netflix. TV shows rarely make it past a second season, as soon as there’s even a mild drop in viewing figures they drop a property like a hot potato.
In 2009 a Turner Broadcasting executive stood in front of employees and said they are not worried about Online streaming because it only covered 15 minutes of watching time among consumers. TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, HBO, Time Inc were all under the same ownership umbrella along with the entire MGM catalog Ted Turner had acquired at the cost of losing control of his company. There were executives who knew what they were doing but some were performative - using buzz words and bravado to hide that they had no idea. Many were trying to extract as much as possible from both ends - 50% of revenue from consumers and 50% from advertisers. Even when those two were in direct conflict with each-other’s interests. They believed content was king and so they invested in content, instead of distribution. They hoarded their back catalog for years.
In the mean time Netflix started with 3 CDs per month plans and when they began streaming on 2007 we didn’t use it at start because we assumed that it would cut out of the 3 movies allotment. So we were scared to use it for a while. Yet we used it regularly - because unlike the cable service, streaming didn’t have ads. And ads were massive massive abuse and waste of time for consumers. You can benchmark the level of abuse by the types of ads in the super bowl: Alcohol, crypto, gambling, cars…
The reality is that cable was a paid premium service, unlike broadcast TV, which was free and littered with ads. Mix the two and you lose the golden goose.
That said, the bravado of that executive stuck with me since then.
Everything is now re-consolidated under different media companies now. Instead of Ted Turner we have Larry Ellison, and Netflix, and Disney.
So I think the biggest question is, what form of entertainment will eventually supplant streaming services? Whatever it is (or will be) will almost certainly be disregarded by most people.
AI generated by demand, most likely. Or AI generated by indie creators who have a vision but not a budget, and are provided with a platform to create content easily.
> The reality is that cable was a paid premium service, unlike broadcast TV, which was free and littered with ads.
The reality is, most cable channels had ads from day one. Less ads than most broadcast stations (which made up most of the channels you had on cable at the start anyways) but still a lot of the first cable-only channels had ads from the start. WTBS had ads on cable in 1976. MSG/USA had ads on cable starting in 1977. CNN had ads on day one in 1980. MTV had ads on day one in 1981.
Tales as old as time, especially in tech: rich monopolistic incumbents not seeing the writing on the wall of a new paradigm shift; seemingly invincible execs brazenly displaying their (incorrect) hot-takes; and the inevitable enshittification of the new paradigm as it turns from revolutionary movement to ruling-class incentives.
I cancelled all my content subscriptions and I'm back to torrenting. I barely watch anything made my Netflix regardless. I think either Dark or the 3rd season of Stranger Things was the last time. Snyder's SciFi movie wasn't much good either. By now the streaming services are en route to become as terrible as whatever they were set out to replace. Once one of them started heavily advertising their own productions everywhere inside their apps I would've cancelled any remaining subscription at the latest.
I torrent too, but I think it makes sense to buy/rent or sub to a service in many cases. Companies look at views and revenue to decide what content to actually make. So, especially for ongoing series that I'm enjoying I want them to keep renewing it.
I subscribe to ad-free versions of services so I don't really run into ads a lot unless I'm trying to watch something live on TV.
Irrelevant to me. The amount of TV shows I enjoyed that got canned after S01 has burnt me so much that I wait until I know if there's a sensible finale at the end or if it ends on a cliffhanger that'll never be resolved before I even dive into a new show.
> I torrent too, but I think it makes sense to buy/rent or sub to a service in many cases. Companies look at views and revenue to decide what content to actually make. So, especially for ongoing series that I'm enjoying I want them to keep renewing it.
I wonder if any of them track torrent metrics for this reason.
I also collect discarded physical media, there's still lots of people who want to get rid of their collections for nothing because of "Dude, there's streaming now, duh."
It’s better than ever with stuff like jellyfin/plex and all the sonarr/radarr… apps. I’ve been running bitmagnet too which has been great for actually finding torrents.
In a society that’s built on the foundations of perpetual profit growth it is. Sometimes you just can’t innovate, so instead of improving the product you cut the costs and enshittify. We’re in an enshittification regime right now.
Why are there alternating cycles of innovation and enshittification? I think it’s because investors are always trying to pull forward profit, but because they only have a 10 year horizon on investment strategy they tend to create cycles that are around that same period. If there was less investment, the innovation would be slower but the reactionary enshittification would be lessened too.
What's funny is that Onion article uses "a blockbuster $112 billion deal" because in 1998 a figure that high was so preposterous it helped with the parody. They'd need to add a few zeros today.
I never imagined that a service that ships DVD via mail would one day buy Warner Brothers. It is amazing how innovation and focus can change the game. Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label.
They still do all those things? And they're still successful in most of them? They haven't "failed" or "dropped the ball" based on any metric I can think of. I'm not sure what you're referring to here to be honest.
Companies didn't, leadership did. For a big, fat check. And they're happily retired now, sitting in their expensive villas with millions on their balance.
They couldn't care less about your happy childhood memories that the content produced by their predecessors engraved in your mind.
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
I think what history shows us is that the modern monopolies managed to destroy antitrust to the point where nobody will ever do to them what they did to others.
People said that a generation ago as well, and the one before that. Yeah monopolies make it hard, but every one of them eventually crumbles to the next wave of innovation.
They have to as a stop gap before going on generating full feature film on demand. Those streaming service are all struggling to have an attractive enough catalog for an extended period of time for a lot of folks with their shitty pricing policies.
Not sure how many of you have WBD shares with its rather tumultuous past (spin off from ATT, the Bill Hwang mess), but if you've picked up shares on the cheap in the past few years sub $10, congratulations.
"Under the terms of the agreement, each WBD shareholder will receive $23.25 in cash and $4.501 in shares of Netflix common stock for each share of WBD common stock outstanding at the closing of the transaction. "
Note: this is after completion of the current splitting of WBD; as you'd expect Netflix wants the catalog and production but they're not taking the sports and some other pieces. The left over / newly revived Discovery Global will likely be a hollowed-out shell of less desirable properties saddled with a bunch of debt.
I thought someone really had to break some threshold so they wouldn't close the deal unless they got another .001. Like maybe some bonus depended upon some target value.
Thing is that Netflix didn't really succeed at that goal. HBO was and still is the gold standard for premium cable content. Netflix instead decided to go for the bottom 70% of the market, and the quality of their shows reflects that.
In fact the very reason for this purchase is that they desperately need help on the creative side.
Netflix is what it is today because all the studios trying to compete with their tech was an even bigger disaster than Netflix competing on content.
I don't think the Netflix vs HBO comparison is fair.
HBO was always one channel in a home. They produced a limited amount of high-quality content. You watch it a few times a week and network TV reality shows or whatever other trash the rest of the week.
Netflix wanted/wants to be the only channel in cord-cutting and cord-never homes. When that's your goal you have to produce mostly crap and some good stuff.
The "Max" fiasco was pretty much the strangest branding mistake ever. Not just an obvious mistake but it was honestly kind of a mystery that anyone would even be tempted to do that.
It's always great to read about how the people the own the means of distribution aquire also the means of production, trying to create a meta-monopoly. /sarcasm
I'm rooting for someone on the regulary side disliking all the crap that Netflix produces, and just shuts the whole thing down. Those 5 billion they'd have to pay for a breakup fee in that case would have me feeling better that I couldn't cancel their service, since my family pesters me to keep it.
If this goes like all the other media mergers this year, the only regulatory scrutiny will involve Netflix allowing the executive branch to install a censor / ombudsman that has final say on their news and documentary content.
The legal definition of monopoly in some jurisdictions means anyone with a large enough of a market share able to influence pricing, etc in a market. A market share as low as 25% can be called a monopoly. Does HBO+Netflix have a 25% share of the streaming market? I've no idea, but possibly.
Technically, you're right. I feel like there needs to be new terms to describe though the staleness of the industry. "Oligopoly" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
This deal is an indicator of huge changes in global film & TV production.
Hollywood's struggles amplified after the writer's strike with a perfect storm of issues around unionisation, technology, fragmenting audiences, new formats, asset liabilities and enormous competition to the east.
Now LA soundstages are empty while production centres in Europe, UK, India, China, Nigeria are booming and vast new studios cropping up in the Middle East.
Proposed tariffs will do little to stem this tide as the money has moved on already.
In addition, traditional production methods are unsustainable and decision-making is opaque in an era where sustainability, transparency and democratisation are taking over.
The main benefit to Netflix is of course the IP, but the traditional studio assets of WB have their days numbered.
Heard of one production needing to do a one day reshoot on something. Something that could easily have been done in LA. It was cheaper to fly everyone out to some European country for 3 days and do the pickups.
The business side of Hollywood has been imploding for the past few years. It just costs too much to film there vs other places. Tariffs will not change that. The tax incentives are gone and the must have on set is too high.
Not sure how netflix is going to digest that pill they just swallowed. 83 billion is a lot. Is is about 3x their total gross per year. I do not think they can raise prices too much with out shedding subscribers. WB has already taken out AOL, ATT (recovering), and Discovery. Netflix could be next.
The deal also spins out the linear TV into a different company. Can that company survive? Its going to be tough going. Havent looked but I would bet a good portion of the debt they took on to do the divestiture from AT&T is being pumped into that company.
You know that meme of Jack Sparrow riding a sinking ship to shore?
That's how I imagined WBD. David Zaslav gets to transition from the leader of a reality show slophouse to one of the biggest power players in Hollywood, and all be has to do is let the slophouse sink and declare himself captain of the next ship.
The value of the back catalog is still substantial for years to come. But you are right about the landscape changing dramatically for new productions.
Hollywood was premised on economies of scale. Concentrate a lot of talent in one place and then put infrastructure in place for block buster productions to happen (studios, tech, money).
That's being disrupted by several things:
- LA and the US are no longer cheap places to be. A lot of blockbuster content is filmed outside the US at this point. Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. LA and Hollywood are still important but mainly because that's where the money is. It's not necessarily where the money is being spent.
- Independent content producers self publishing content on platforms like Youtube and growing audiences rivaling those of popular TV shows.
- AI is starting to drive down the cost of special effects, digital processing, etc. And it's probably also going to erode the value of needing actors at all for especially a lot of the less glamorous roles (think all the extras in big movie productions). This is a sensitive topic in particularly Hollywood. But not enough to delay the inevitable by very long.
All this is driving down the cost of creating decent quality things that people still want to pay for. That's a critical distinction. There's a lot of ad sponsored stuff that people don't really pay for as well. To make money, you need quality. AI is working its way up the chain here, with increasingly better stuff. But most of it is still pretty low value.
But things like soap operas, third rate series that Netflix bulk purchases from places like South Korea, etc. are all fair game for AI.
Netflix adding the WB back catalog is a great move for them. Their own back catalog isn't strong enough to keep people and expanding with newly created production it is a very slow and expensive process. And they've had some flops and cost control issues. There just isn't enough there to keep me permanently. I tend to sign up for just a few months and then cancel. I'm probably going to cancel soon again. HBO did not actually offer their streaming services in Germany until recently. And I was considering trying that for a while. Now I might not have to.
Consolidations like this were bound to happen. In the mid 2010s we had a good thing, only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show. Then every studio got greedy and spawned their own platform, forcing netflix to produce their own shows.
Now you have 20 tv networks all with their own subscription and all losing money.
This is the issue with content production being owned by the distributors too. It's too profitable to own the vertical because each piece of content is an effective monopoly, because to participate in culture requires watching it (piracy notwithstanding). Therefore, the "fix" is to regulate this monopoly - by making sure that monopoly cannot exist without cost. One "simple" way is, imho, to make content production and ownership of distribution strictly prohibited in the same entity, and to also enforce mechanical licensing of content (such that you cannot have content exclusives in the distribution platforms).
Movie theatres have similar restrictions with film studios in the past - to prevent this very monopoly. It's high time we brought it back.
Yeah the best way to fix this would be to enforce the separation of distribution and production via the Paramount Decree. Separate content production from the streaming service itself. Get rid of the vertical integration plaguing the industry and we'll get better content since quality will be the territory on which studios have to compete with each other again.
House of Cards is the original Netflix Original, and it came out in 2013. Prime started competing with Netflix the same year.
But the other platforms - Disney+ (2019), Apple TV (2016/2019), HBO Max (2020), Peacock (2020), Paramount+/CBS All Access (2021 / 2014) - are all later.
>Consolidations like this were bound to happen. In the mid 2010s we had a good thing, only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show.
This has been the narrative about the state of streaming services for years now. People upset that content is too fragmented across services. Now we get some significant consolidation and people are upset. They just ignore that angle and find a different one to gripe about.
>only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show
doesn't this move reduce the number of streaming services by one? we'll see how the details turn out, but if I was paying for netflix and hbo max, now I only need to pay for netflix
Yes but it doesnt increase the amount of shows or movies on any of them. This new amount of content will just feed into the rotating library, not create one big library of content always available. So in fact you are loosing providers and loosing content at the same time, yet prices will still keep going up...
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
I feel like when I was growing up, I learned about how monopolization was bad for society when it came to industries like steel and rail. but for some reason in the 21st century we've decided that maybe corporations are somehow... better citizens or something? despite the evidence?
Obviously, the reason it's gotten this bad is that lobbying is legal and private campaign funding is mandatory. Thanks again, citizens united!
This was a very foolish choice on Netflix's part. Most if the iconic IP from WB/HBO has gone down hill in a dramatic fashion over the last decade.
Game of Thrones was good for a few seasons, but half way through the fans started dropping almost as quickly as main characters. DC movies have had very few genuine successes, even if they've technically turned a profit.
Putting all that content up on Netflix would be unlikely to pull in that many more subscriptions, and would require dropping the existing streaming service(s) and agreements to allow for exclusivity.
This doesn't bring significant talent or IP to Netflix, it's just an attempt to grab market share. I doubt they'll try to move anything out of WB/HBO's existing streaming platforms or agreements. This just looks like an attempt to increase profits by simply buying a profitable company and letting them mostly continue to function with minimal changes.
In other word, this probably isn't the worst acquisition possible for consumers, but it certainly won't improve life for anyone to let it happen, and it does consolidate market share and control when it comes to media. This probably won't be hugely evil, but it won't be good either.
Don't forget that WB also managed to burn Christopher Nolan after over a decade and lost one of the best (and most profitable) directors to have ever lived.
Personally I just hope Netflix takes interest in the UCI mountain bike racing and does a better job with it.
> Combination Will Offer More Choice and Greater Value for Consumers, Create More Opportunities for the Creative Community and Generate Shareholder Value
No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"? I know corporate double-speak is already out of control and I know they're writing whatever they can do avoid regulators who surely are looking into the acquisition, but surely these executives cannot believe acquisitions lead to more choice, right?
I guess you are in the US. For you, WB content was already available.
But you see, they never bothered to make that content available for most of the rest of the world. Netflix, on the other hand, is available most anywhere. This is exactly what it says on the can - more choice and greater value for me.
What's written on the can reads "please don't sue us, we're not a monopoly, and we will not gouge users".
On the other hand Netflix will make its subscribers fund everything without reducing their income, and will not give these subscribers at least half of that content, because, why not?
I am not, and WB was available via local options here (Southern European country).
For me who isn't a Netflix customer (the group which is larger than the group of people who have Netflix, obviously), the choice gets less.
And obviously anti-trust regulation doesn't care about the amount of choices for Netflix customers specifically, it cares about amount of choices for consumers at large, which will decrease with this change.
I think it's unlikely to change because most likely the content was not available for legal reasons, not technical. That's why for example when they re-release some shows they have to switch out to completely different music – the rights were not cleared in the first place and it'd be a huge hassle to go back and negotiate with every rightholder
Netflix acquiring WB’s content will not necessarily lead to all of it being available for streaming to you in any given country. Content licensing is complicated, to put it mildly.
I don’t know what do you mean by “most of the rest of the world” but it’s widely available in the American continent and Europe coverage will be almost complete in the next month(s):
Netflix buying WB doesn't mean that licensing immediately becomes available worldwide.
Netflix can provide its own content everywhere around the globe because they are the sole owner of it. The distribution rights to WB properties outside of the US will belong to completely different legal entities (even if those entities have WB in them).
There should be never any talk about "Shareholder Value". Shareholders do not create content, they do not subscribe at scale. Once your customer is no longer the focus, it's downhill from there, and it's been downhill for a WHILE.
I killed my Netflix sub over a year ago and I never even think about it. It's all dull, empty-calorie background TV.
The sad part is how the iconic HBO brand, already beaten by WBD into a pulp, is just going to merge with this average-ness and fade. End of an era, indeed.
So when they say "Consumers", it should really have been "Netflix Customers", as for everyone else there is less choice, only already paying Netflix users get more content.
Now they don't have to go negotiate for every WB content item. As it stands, subscribers might or might not get WB things, same as all the other IP holders that are playing hard to get. Otherwise, they might have to contract some seasons of a show from one holder and some from another, and maybe not at all sometimes.
Maybe they mean more content will be produced, which I believe. But I'd also argue that we really don't need more content on Netflix, we need higher quality. Netflix is drowning in a sea of mediocrity to the point where I have almost given up on investing in a new show because almost all of them reek of lazy writing and good-enough-but-not-outstanding direction. There are exceptions, but they are damn hard to find.
> No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"?
This is performative marketing for the regulators to allow the merger. No one (including the regulators) believes this, and it won't come to pass. ("More choice" won't, I mean, the merger will and a lot of regulators and politicians involved will end up with new cars, boats, and kids' college tuitions paid.)
Adding Warner Bros. catalog will naturally lead to more titles to choose from for Netflix users. The choice of streaming services will be slimmer though. It will be interesting to see how regulators see it.
Does anyone who's participated in M&A know how they come up with a breakup fee? I believe this one is $5 Billion (per Bloomberg), and Adobe <-> Figma was $1 Billion.
Interested to understand the modeling that goes into it.
Based on some experience, it's like a bond to appear in court. The number is mostly an arbitrary calculation designed to discourage you from not following through.
Like everything else it's just a negotiated figure. Arguments to and fro would include the likelihood of breakup (such as regulatory risk, unforeseen events), how disruptive the whole process is and also simply how desperate the buyer or seller is.
There's no modeling, it's a punishment or incentive. The intention is to inflict financial pain.
There’s a rough baseline of “cost to be acquired” and you start there, and do some doubling or other increases.
Basically, being acquired is a pain in the assets and you want it to be worth your while to pursue it, even if it falls through, otherwise the board is looking at getting replaced.
The reaction here is interesting. I thought this is what people wanted, a consolidation of all the streaming services into one so you did not have to subscribe to 10 different ones. I personally think it's a bad idea, but people need to figure out exactly what they want.
This should never have been allowed to happen by the regulators, but in this administration there are no checks, it’s a free for all and Netflix knows it. It saw the opportunity and went for it
The cycling fans among us were quite bashed around over the past few years getting access to cycling coverage in Europe. The were the glory years where GCN Plus was extremely cheap (it was too cheap) and the coverage was ad-free and excellent. Then we got bashed around to Eurosport which was fine, more expensive but still ad-free. Then we got moved to Discovery+. They weaseled out of their ad-free coverage for a bunch of races and jacked up the price because they bundled the cycling in with football and we suffered a price hike from $3-5 per month to $30+ a month, yes a 1000% hike, over the past 5 years.
Totally. It's miserable. We are watching cycling through HBO max at the moment, where it is still affordable. We get on TNT for the TdF because Rob Hatch. Surely it will go down the drain even further when the Ellisons get it.
Considering the words they're using across the announcement, it seems they're well aware what this will trigger, everything seems carefully chosen so someone can later point at this announcement and say "See, we think this will add MORE user choice, not less, which is good for competition!".
This is going to be an off the wall statement given this audience, but WWE signed an exclusive deal with NetFlix for 10 years I think in an effort to counter their main competitor AEW, which signed a deal with HBO Max shortly before that. Now they'll both potentially be on the same platform, which WWE will hate as it will be interesting in having two competitive pro wrestling promotions on the same platform.
WWE dont have the clout they used to. I remember when they were the number 1 viewed website on the internet. Nowadays the MMA & UFC is much more valuable.
I loved Netflix when they had the DVD service and the recommendation competition because it actually suggested shows I would enjoy.
Once they started producing their own stuff, recommendations no longer worked: they just promoted whatever crap they produced themselves. And with that, trying to find a show I wanted to watch became so much effort that I canceled altogether. Same goes for all the other streaming services.
When all is said and done there’s going to be a few players left and they’re all going to be American by the current looks of things. You could argue movies were already like this, but for television that’s quite the change as most countries had many television production companies and stations.
Now it seems like they’ll be a few global media companies and maybe some local production houses that have to sell their stuff to these guys or setup their own services like the BBC does with iPlayer in the UK, with somewhat limited success compared to these giants.
They won't be American. The balance of power has already shifted east. There are now more productions, more money and more facilities east of Madrid than west of it.
Look I get how Ne Zha 2 was a big success and showed signs of good production quality, but lets be honest: The movie was boring. I'm sure the mostly Chinese audience that sat with me in the theater enjoyed it but I fell asleep halfway in.
The "east" has more work to do to capture that magic that the western imperial order (Hollywood) has wrought upon the world.
I will continue to watch and observe how things play out.
So the companies in charge of distributing the content are American-based multinationals; production leaks out of the US toward prettier places and more amicable laborers; if you’re American and want to tag along—in or behind the scenes—you’re going to need a passport or a visa.
2023: "A Party in Cannes Announces a New Hollywood Power Player". Something like ~300 attendees, probably $10 million. Zaslav and Graydon Carter co-hosted. There were rumored to be thousands of bottles of Dom champagne, which is probably inexpensive in bulk.
On one hand it is good that the maybe the streaming will be split into less subscriptions, but on other hand, I think the only way forward is to simply prohibit exclusive streaming rights. I.e. any movie streaming rights should be sold to anyone who wants to buy them for the same price. That is only way to enable competition in streaming.
It’s not my business: could someone shed light on how this would better serve their respective customers, versus keeping them separate.
Or in other words “what will be possible by this merger that isn’t possible now?”
At this rate Netflix isn’t building a streaming service, it’s building a monopoly starter pack. Give it a few more acquisitions and the “Are you still watching?” prompt will legally qualify as a government notice.
This entire Warner Bros saga has just been insanely pathetically sad to watch, because it demonstrates that WB has completely lost touch with reality and that the C-suites at the top have zero innovation or anything else to give at this point. The company has gone through so many megamergers and acquisitions which just added more and more debt to the company that at this point it wouldn't surprise me if Netflix just declares bankruptcy with it or something, because it's a completely lost cause. Of course, the people responsible for this won't learn a thing (even though they're making the exact mistakes of the Cable industry they replaced), and will continue doing the same thing over and over again, because, clearly, learning from mistakes is just not possible for these people.
I hope that this means that the Netflix app on AppleTV will finally become a “first class citizen.”
The Netflix app has always been treated badly by Apple. No idea why, but it means that I can’t have Netflix content in the “What’s Next” queue (among other things, like Netflix actors’ work not showing up in show information).
that is _purely_ netflix's decision; they have decided not to integrate. in fact, earlier this year netflix accidentally rolled out their internal version which has full integration with the APIs and then said "oopsie" and removed it again.
Yep. The APIs have always been publicly available for streaming services to use, Netflix just refuses to use them.
The reason is pretty obvious. Netflix would rather have users open their app directly so there’s opportunity to shove things in their faces, collect data from their browsing, and ideally become positioned as the user’s “main” streaming app. The user having a hub app and treating Netflix as one of several services directly opposes their aims.
The situation shares a lot of similarities with Spotify, which also refuses to take advantage of native APIs for the same reasons. Though in their case, there’s an added layer of irony with how they make all a big ruckus about how Apple needs to open their platforms up only for them to pretend APIs don’t exist after Apple adds them. As an example Apple had to hardcode a hack into HomePods to enable Spotify to work with them; where most services (Pandora, Tidal, etc) hook the official HomePod streaming APIs which pull directly from the service to the device, for Spotify Apple has to automatically AirPlay Spotify playing on the user’s phone to the HomePod. It’s ridiculous.
Netflix seems to hate theatrical releases, so I hope this doesn't affect any small cinemas that want to screen older WB titles. I know when Disney bought Fox, it got a bit harder to book films.
Those acquisition numbers will just keep becoming larger and larger until one day, when I'm old enough, someone will just acquire the only other player left in the field and Earth will be one single megacorporation.
AOL-Time-Warner-Pepsico-Viacom-Halliburton-Skynet-Toyota-Trader-Joe's but I guess it's AOL-Time-Netflix-Pepsico-Viacom-Halliburton-Skynet-Toyota-Trader-Joe's now.
Hopefully I'll finally get to see Chernobyl and Game of Thrones. It's virtually impossible outside of US or Europe to legally stream so many movies and series.
I didn't really understand why they'd want this, but I think now its strategic protection from someone else consolidating with them. One company with that huge of a library could put a lot of pressure on them by withholding content and with their competing unified streaming service.
Love the difference in the two connotations here that leads to the confusion. "Netflix just bought HBO (a moment ago)" vs "Netflix just bought HBO (previously)".
I was in one seminar, and someone asked a question about future to Harish Mehta (one of the founder of NASSCOM), and he said that big companies will become bigger for at least next 10 years.
If someone wants "film school" you can do a lot worse than ticking off the film from the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" [1].
It may take you the next decade to complete. There are some real oddballs in there that lean toward "art film" (but what do you expect from Andy Warhol). A lot of "foreign" films (foreign for this U.S. viewer). In short a lot of surprises.
Definitely feel like a student of film now (for whatever that's worth).
So WB buys/merges w/ discovery to break it back off as part of a merger. Seems sort of silly. Curious if this means pretty much all WB/Disc/HBO content will end up on Netflix.
I'm a fan. Injecting a huge catalog into Netflix is a win for consumers who want just one subscription. And injecting studio talent into Netflix (assuming the merge gives WB creatives influence) can only help.
HBO's tech sucks. Apple is (in my experience) hard to get running in the Android ecosystem. Most of the other options are too narrow in catalog, or ad ridden.
Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
Netflix have never been a streaming service to put loads of good content on their service and keep it there. I would imagine they will use this injection of content to drip feed and slowly rotate movie franchises in order to keep users interested.
> Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
Correct, but the current market is not working. 15+ streaming services is terrible for consumers. Catalogs are compromised. Bigger services can push prices up because they have more stuff. Clearly if there are too few players then there's less competition and no price pressure, but there's a sweet spot between what exists today and that.
The gov will block this for the wrong reasons(they want Ellison to win this) but here’s hoping this and Paramount both get blocked, this level of concentration is not good.
Commenters here seem to be missing the larger David vs. Goliath story...
Netflix was a silicon valley start-up with a tech founder (Reed) who teamed up with an LA movie buff (Ted). They tried to solve a problem: it was too hard to watch movies at home, and Hollywood seemed to hate new tech. The movie industry titans alternated between fighting Netflix and making deals. They fought Netflix's ability to bulk purchase and rent out DVDs. Later, they lobbed insults even while taking Netflix's money for content licensing. Here's Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, in 2010:
"It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so." [1]
Remember: this was the same movie industry that gave us the MPAA and the DMCA. They were trying to ensure the internet, and new tech in general, had zero impact on them. Streaming movies and TV probably wouldn't exist if Netflix had not forced the issue.
Netflix buying HBO is significant, but also just another chapter in this story of Netflix's internet distribution model out-competing the Hollywood incumbents. Even now in 2025, at least 12 years after it was perfectly clear that streaming direct to the consumer would be the future, the industry is still struggling to turn the corner. Instead, they're selling themselves to Netflix.
I was at Netflix 2009-2019. It was shocking how easily our little "Albanian army" overthrew the empire. Our opponents barely fought back, and when they did, they were often incompetent with tech. To me, this is a story about how competent tech carried the day.
Netflix has been rapidly buying and building studio capacity for a decade now. Adding the WB studio production capacity is a huge win for Netflix. It makes those studios more productive: each day of content production is now worth more when distributed via Netflix's global platform.
Same with WB and HBO catalog and IP: it's worth more when its available to Netflix's approx 300 million members. Netflix can make new TV and films based on that IP, and it will be worth more than if it was only on HBO's platforms.
"Priced in" I guess. I mean look at Warner Bros stock, steadily climbing the last couple months until it hit basically exactly the price shareholders will get in exchange for their shares as part of this deal.
Whenever one of my friends says they're thinking about getting into daytrading, all I can think is good luck beating the funds... they either can predict the future or just write it themselves.
Almost definitely not this FTC. And I'm not sure the FTC would in general considering there is a plethora of mainstream streaming providers outside of just Netflix and HBO Max.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Disney all have their hands in that bag. Not to mention all the old cable providers are practically streaming services now too. I don't even use my spectrum cable box, I use the Roku app to watch live TV and access all their on demand library
As someone who has recently begun exploring physical media, I find this quite disappointing. The volume on 4K Blu-Rays is often low, prices are high, and Netflix isn't doing much to support physical media.
When you're just unwinding in front of a 65-inch screen, you might not notice the quality loss from compression. However, if you're actively watching on a 110-inch projector with an excellent sound system, every little detail becomes clear.
And that doesn't even address the most frustrating part: owning less and less.
I mean, no one needs to become a physical distributor, but it's disheartening that we lack consumer-friendly ownership of entertainment media when it comes to movies. I would love to see something like Bandcamp, but specifically for studios to release their movies to.
> When you're just unwinding in front of a 65-inch screen, you might not notice the quality loss from compression.
this has little to do with the resolution, though. maybe 4k just gets the benefit of being compressed with better codecs.
for me at least, watching shows/movies at typical viewing distance, a well-encoded 4k->1080p mkv is only very slightly less sharp and is vastly smaller to store on the media server.
I'm curious, because I've had an interest in physical media, especially videogames, but what I keep coming back to is, "why would I bother when I can just pirate it?"
What's the attraction to the physical media given the availability of these versions online?
Pirating doesn't help sustain the very thing being pirated, if you want a tangible rather than moralistic reason.
4K (Ultra HD) Blu-Ray is likely the last physical home video media generation to be produced. Disney has pulled physical out of the Asian market, Best Buy stopped releasing any physical media beside games, Target stopped selling them beside certain DVDs.
If you want any chance of actually having high quality releases continue it needs to be supported. An issue though is certain less mainstream releases in Ultra HD Blu-Ray can be rather pricey (if they get a release at all). However I still buy those I'm interested in since I don't want lower quality streaming-tier video to be the only option available in the future, apart from concerns about the volatile nature of online-only libraries (various of which have been wholly removed in the past when licensing/ownership changes).
don't be discouraged. 4k/UHD BR is still alive and well, even though it never can beat price of comparatively worse streaming versions. I just bought a relatively expensive UHD player and there are a lot of movies, and what I've noticed there are also boutique offerings and remasters going on in the market which I haven't noticed before. Going forward though, I'm not sure if there will be future for releases of new movies outside of big productions.
There are a whole bunch of choice quotes from 1984 that apply to this situation, but my favorite is still this one: “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
That's the exact opposite of Netflix most recent history, Westworld was an expensive production and viewing numbers on HBO were declining as seasons went on. Even relatively inexpensive looking Netflix shows got cancelled, i.e. GLOW, I Am Not Okay with This, Santa Clarita Diet, never mind shows that were less expensive than Westworld that had poor Netflix viewer metrics like The Residence, The OA, probably lots more I am leaving out. Early years maybe, like when they kept Orange is the New Black and House of Cards going to completion or resurrected Arrested Development.
> Netflix expects to maintain Warner Bros.’ current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films.
If Netflix is committing to releasing WB films in theaters, I wonder if they’ll also release shows under the WB/HBO label in the traditional weekly format. With the staggering amount of content that just exists and continues to grow, the “release everything at once and make people binge” model has had zero appeal to me. And seems quite detrimental to how the shows are paced — they seem heavily incentivized to end each episode with a cheap cliffhanger
Whole deal sounds Looney Tunes to me. Though Warner does have a substantial catalog, I dumped Netflix because I wasn't impressed with their offerings. After Paramount took all its toys home with them leaving the platform without Star Trek, I had little reason to stay. I'm not a big TV or film buff anyway.
I haven't been a Netflix user for years, the quality of their stuff went past a level I was no longer comfortable supporting. It became a platform that is designed to keep you watching (literally anything) as opposed to a platform to find interesting/relevant entertainment. So much low quality, low effort content. Wonder which of AI wrong-but-instant answers or Netflix' empty entertainment will contribute more to genpop enshitification.
Exactly. Netflix is doing a total opposite of HBO content. Also HBO has been great at localization for european regions (subs, local content) unlike Netflix which cannot be bothered to even make subtitles for markets they sell to.
IMO,Netflix wants to acquire their main competitor in europe.
In terms of people who actually like movies and music it’s not a great time.
Unfortunately it’s pretty clear that the true business model of music and content streamers is about “putting something on in the background” and not actually about the quality level of the content.
Thus you get inoffensive cheap netflix series and AI generated chill beats to study to, and no one really notices as long as it’s above a certain quality threshold.
And this isn’t exactly Netflix’s problem- they know what their users want. When you’re cooking dinner it doesn’t make much difference to you if it’s a Judd Apatow romantic comedy and one that’s some Hallmark knockoff romcom bullshit.
I’m not really sure how to solve the problem of this very siloed video content landscape. No one wants to subscribe to 4 streaming services.
I would think the original netflix model of being mailed bluray discs might be viable, but without independent studios like Warner around, why would anyone produce physical media?
My blood always boils a little whenever I read about Netflix's "Not second-screen enough" business model.
What shitty point we've enshittified to, where we prioritise passive slop consumption over active enriching one.
All of this is a result of the algorithmic media addiction people have been engineered into, in my opinion. Every moment you're not consuming something is a moment you're wasting, and a moment you have to spend alone with your thoughts (which is too terrfying for people now apparently).
A proper solution to current video content landscape used to be piracy - Netflix literally succeded early on in streaming because they were more convenient than pirating stuff. But with these Media Moguls lobbying hard to crack down on piracy (at the risk of privacy), it does look pretty bleak.
Its been going around in cicles between "WB is fine, just rejected 2 other offers, whats the worst that could happen" and "Netflix buy out any day now WB is in the toilet"
I realize this is about money, and it's 2025 right now, and I'm probably just old, but what will happen to quality? I actually laughed, twice, because they did this, twice:
> Beloved franchises, shows and movies such as [list of some of the greatest classics of all time] will join Netflix’s extensive portfolio including [list of laughable junk], creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences worldwide.
And then just a few lines later (and I won't snarkily shorten this one):
> By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies—from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends—with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we'll be able to do that even better.
Like did I really just see Citizen Kane in the same sentence as KPop Demon Hunters? Might as well add Ow, My Balls to the list, that's how jarring the contrast was for me.
I found out that there's a backlog of content going back over 100 years (a lot of it at the public library) and have been happily consuming that for about 6 or 7 years now.
(I still have about 4 decades to go to catch up with today—which will probably take me another 3 years or so).
That's my thinking. I get the argument for "reduced competition" but Netflix and HBO aren't competitors. They are just two companies in the same line of business, but with different production lines.
I do wonder what it will do for their sports deals. HBO have had the rights to a lot of sports, including Tour de France and the olympics and is the only way to get EuroSport, as well as a number of TV channels, including some country specific ones.
You don't see reduced competiton? HBO Max and Netflix are director competitors, post acqusition Netflix no longer had to compete hard with shows like Succession. The expanded catalog makes it even harder for smaller streamers to compete.
On sports rights Netflix no longer has to bid and compete with HBO, and same story having a bigger live sport inventory.
This is not unlike consolidation of food distributors where the end up wielding strong pricing power, farmers have fewer options to sell to and restaurants have few options to buy from. The middleman profits.
This may be a hot take but maybe some consolidation in this streaming industry is beneficial, might save some people searching for content they want to see only to find they have to pay for another streaming service because right holders decided to launch their own streaming app.
Netflix prices will probably increase though, and they will probably ruin a lot of golden IP like always, so there's that to complain about.
Pretty soon all media will be owned by 4 tech billionaires. They have done so well with preserving a free and open internet I cannot see why people are concerned they are gobbling up all the alternative legacy communications platforms.
Netflix’s content selection has always felt weaker than traditional studios. Sometimes it even looks like filmmakers take Netflix’s massive budgets but don’t give them the same level of serious, polished work they deliver elsewhere.
So, if Netflix ends up managing Warner Bros or HBO, it’s hard not to worry. HBO and Warner Bros are known for premium, high-caliber content, and Netflix’s track record suggests the overall quality could easily take a hit.
Nice of them to start the conversations with a probably lie, that it will be less expensive for consumes because they can now bundle HBO/Netflix. Except this has never been true for more than enough time that for people to forget and past the time to change it, if at all. It will be less selection and cost more, like the usual.
The sad thing is the WB Studio had a successful year and is healthy.
It's all the other idiotic stuff that's been attached to WB over the years that has broken the business. Time Warner AoL Discovery... is a poster child for what goes wrong when merger after merger happens.
A restructured WB Studio + HBO might be a good business.
The US government made it illegal for movie studios to own movie theaters to prevent studios from only showing movies in theaters they own. Similar laws need to be passed to force streaming content to be shown on all services.
WB was another legacy media empire being run by a megalomaniac hell-bent on destroying their legacy.
I wouldn't normally support this kind of move, but unlike the Skydance deal, Netflix is actually a real company that, like, makes use of IPs and publishes back catalogues.
Things like Looney Tunes will now be in the hands of someone who doesn't hate Looney Tunes.
Three wishes - looney tunes and animatics full and uncensored. Don't update them for modern sensibilities. No new looney tunes content unless made by very talented people that love the old ones.
Supergirl and The Batman 2 are releasing relatively soon so I don’t think that will be affected much by all this. Same with Clayface since that just entered post production. It’s the movies coming after (Superman 2, Batman movie thats not tied to “The Batman”) that will be affected by all this.
My opinion of James Gunn has changed recently (especially after the ending of Peacemaker S2) but I still think he’s the best person possible to be in charge of live action DC. I really hope he keeps some form of control but I doubt it…
Oh cool, knock-on price hikes across not just the streaming industry, but all the other industries that decided they needed to bundle streaming subscriptions with their products.
Can't wait to pay even more for my cell bill because they give me "free" Netflix!
> You'll care when there will be no physical media
Physical media is on the way out for the most part, where it isn't already gone, and Netflix & co are the reason, not piracy.
> and you're left with compressed shit shown down your throat.
WRT “compressed shit”: the quality of ahem copies is often no worse than you'd get from an official streamed source. For those that have 4K-capable eyes it is often better as it JustWorks™ without quality dipping out due to bandwidth issues at the streamer, your ISP, or somewhere between, or for local playback needing a long fight to convince your Sony TV to accept that Sony media player connected via a Sony brand cable is legit.
I actually pay for a couple of streaming services (though Prime largely begrudgingly as it got rolled into the delivery service I use), but still get media from ahem other sources because the playback UX is often preferable.
Or if by “compressed shit” you are referring to the intellectual quality of the content not the technical merits of the medium, if it all turns to mush I'll just watch even less than I already do the same way I practically never game these days (though that is due to both content quality and technical matters). I've got other hobbies competing for my attention, I can just live without TV if TV quality falls further.
Whether or not this deal gets regulatory approval depends entirely on whether or not Reed Hastings sufficiently kisses the ring when it comes to Donald Trump.
I'm personally against this. We've had too much consolidation. It's subscribers who will pay for this with hiked subscription fees.
Any pretense of government regulation is basically gone. Everything is for sale. What determines outcomes is corruption and loyalty. This is really no different to the Russian oligarchs under Putin. The SEC, FTC and DOJ are a joke, just tools to punish ideological foes and people who don't pay up.
All these companies are a consequence will become more ideologically conservative and that's a real problem for media companies because conservatives can't produce good content. Good content challenges the status quo and asks questions, two things conservatives simply don't tolerate. This will do nothing good for HBO.
Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers. But at least it wasn’t bought by Larry Ellison, as was considered very likely (assuming this merger gets approved, in the current administration you never know).
From a Hacker News perspective, I wonder what this means for engineers working on HBO Max. Netflix says they’re keeping the company separate but surely you’d be looking to move them to Netflix backend infrastructure at the very least.
> In June 2025, WBD announced plans to separate its Streaming & Studios and Global Networks divisions into two separate publicly traded companies. This separation is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026, prior to the closing of this transaction. The newly separated publicly traded company holding the Global Networks division, Discovery Global, will include premier entertainment, sports and news television brands around the world including CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as Discovery+ and Bleacher Report.
So no, I don't think this gets in the way of Ellison taking over the rest of TV news; if anything it seems like it smooths the path.
Off topic, but I am boggled that Larry Ellison came back to “richest man in the world” this year.
For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Microsoft breadth of products, Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, Amazon’s massive cloud dominance, the AI boom for nVidia…
Oracle?!
“On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$393 billion.
In June 2020, Ellison was reported to be the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $66.8 billion”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
People don't seem to realize that Oracle is deep in the AI play, taking on a bunch of debt to make speculative leases and buildout of datacenters to rent to other players.
It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.
He still owns over 40% of Oracle, that's a much bigger equity stake than most founders, and most of these other trillion-dollar companies don't have founders in charge anymore.
In addition to Oracle, he owns 1.5% of Tesla and 77% of Skydance/Paramount but those are <10% of the value of his Oracle stake.
Oracle is still the company that does database for everyone with money to spend, and the percentage of companies (and governments, and NGOs) that discover a meaningful percentage of their very purpose is "moving data around" only grows over time. Their market is essentially constrained to "entities that use computers and want to sort data," which may as well be unconstrained. And in spite of all the ways they can be criticized, they still compete at the top of their game; many cheaper or free alternatives are going to ask you to trade a lot of labor (and added risk of data loss and destruction).
In contrast, of the list of companies you highlighted,
- Apple makes hardware, which is lower margin
- Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) and unlike Oracle is struggling to define why they should be the best choice (ads in the OS?!).
- Meta doesn't actually have a monetization strategy beyond ads that is revenue-positive, and the reliability of ads turns out to be dicey (Google built their nest-egg on ads earlier than Facebook, and even Google has been thrashing about to find tent-poles besides ads; they see the risk). In spite of that, Zuck is currently above Ellison in the Fortune 2025 rankings.
- AI is ghost money (behind the scenes, a lot of companies paying themselves essentially)
- SpaceX is in a tiny market ultimately (each launch costs a fortune; a handful of customers want to put things in space)
- Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking.
- Amazon is... Actually wildly successful and Bezos is #3 on the Forbes ranking. I think the only reason Bezos might not be higher is he spends his money.
No, it's often the quiet ones nobody talks about that are the real leaders. Lions don't have to roar to be noticed.
Everyone else is too busy spending everything they have on GPUs, DRAM and power plants?
Joking. Honestly, the only thing that surprises me more than seeing Larry Ellison at the top of the list, is seeing Netflix buying Warner Bros, and not the other way around. Maybe I'm too old, but the very notion somehow does not compute.
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> Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers
This is a very common narrative to this news. But coming into this news, I think the most common narrative against streaming was essentially "There is not enough consolidation." People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service, but then everyone pulled their content and have their own (Disney, Paramount, etc.)
I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content.
I don't want one company that owns everything, I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content (scifi/fantasy, stuff for kids, old movies, international, sports, etc.) regardless of what company made it.
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I think you're right, but I've always been a bit skeptical of that vision -- it implicitly relies on the assumption that "THE streaming service" will choose to make as much content available as technically and legally possible; they're imagining something like "Spotify but for movies and TV shows". But I was always worried about "Apple's App Store but for movies and TV shows": one company with ultimate gatekeeper status over what you can and can't legally watch. (The movie and television business is not like the music business; the financial incentives don't, as far as I can tell, support the same kind of distribution models.)
I'm not particularly thrilled about this kind of consolidation, but given that Warner was going to be bought by somebody, Netflix may be one of the least worst outcomes.
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The problem is content exclusivity. It would be great if all the content or at least most would be available on all platforms. At least eventually. That would be great for consumers. Mergers like this typically not.
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Netflix was also still in the “grow users at all cost” phase. They have since moved to “grow revenue at all costs.”
Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars. Until they inevitably start turning the screws.
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> People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service
That was also before they started aggressively pushing their own content. For a while, it looked like Netflix was going to be the place you go to stream any movie that ever existed (which was pretty much what they were with mail-in DVDs before the streaming service came along). Now it seems like they don't really want to be in that business either.
Netflix was still competing with blu-ray/DVD/cable at that point.
"why should I watch TV on the fiddly computer when I can just pop a disc in?" or "why should I turn on Netflix when there's clearly stuff on cable TV?" -- that was Netflix's competition in those days. Because there was competition, they had to lower prices and improve service to win consumers.
Now, that competition is being destroyed. Rest assured, Netflix will use this market power to extract more from the consumer.
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> There is not enough consolidation
This is an absolutely wild (and incorrect) thing to assume. The problem of content lock-in is anti-competitive and it would be better solved without mergers
We just need to end all exclusives.
Make it like music streaming, where all services have the same catalog so you can choose on price, features, etc.
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The assumption back then was that other companies would be making shows. Consolidating even more show production in one company is not something we should want.
People were happy when Netflix was cheaper that total sum of what they were paying on cable.
Lower prices is the last thing we'd expect from that deal.
I was happy when Netflix was a DVD service. Streaming turned everything to shit. Netflix in 2003-2008 was its golden era: any movie you could think of from the past century was available.
I will not lament the loss of visual mass media. I’ve already reduced my viewing to just Kanopy, but even they are reducing tickets.
Fortunately there are plenty of other fun and entertaining things to do than sit in front of a screen and drool at slop.
Unfortunately people will “suffer” with their first-world problems of not getting new Marvel movies every 8 months or Spider-Man reboots every 2 years, or having to pay $100+/month for drivel. Oh the humanity.
I am happy to stream surf. Spend a month on amc+, the next month on paramount+, the next in Hulu. It keeps them wanting me back. Competition is good
This idea doesn’t mean those people are correct.
Netflix was great when it was the only streaming service because all the legacy media companies licensed shows for cheap. They basically considered it bonus income like syndicated television.
Most of Netflix’s content at that time was very popular but was basically just reruns. The Office, etc. It was a time when you’d be hard pressed to find any movie resembling a blockbuster, just bargain DVD bin type of stuff.
If all the streaming services consolidate there will be less reason than ever to put effort into content. As long as most people stay subscribed the less they spend on content the better.
With an à la carte landscape that we have now, streaming services all have to fight it out in open competition to keep their service on your monthly bill.
It might be less convenient but it is better for content than having a market with just one, two, or three players.
People want a single service to pay for that serves all content, not a single corporate entity creating the content the service provides access to. Like how people want a single payment method that works everywhere globally, not a single company that produces all products globally. Bizarre that you don't see a distinction between the two.
I mean... did we really expect the content owners to roll over and let the streaming platforms capture the potential profits?
Consumers don't care so much about consolidation as they care about not getting ripped off. When Netflix and Hulu were the only streaming platforms you paid a pretty low price to get virtually everything you wanted. Now you pay more for a worse experience.
Netflix at least has technical chops. Other studios (looking at you, Paramount-) put out barely functional apps because they know consumers ultimately will pay for their content.
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People were happy because they only needed one subscription and one app. Buying Warner Bros won't bring that back. If anything, it makes it less likely.
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As a rule of thumb, consolidation is never good. There are exceptions where consolidated services can improve (eg arguably physical infrastructure, healthcare), but in general this will not benefit the consumer.
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the POV really is: for every 19 people who will pay $14/mo for their preferred, unbundled service, there's 1 person who would happily pay $300/mo for a bundled service.
premium subs are for people who BUY subs not for people who WANT subs.
This particular one could be ok for them? A major cost for Netflix in the modern era is licensing contracts that never adjusted to the streaming world. As such, consumers may actually get access to some backlog of WB stuff that is otherwise not worth offering?
My guess is you are right for some properties that WB owns outright, but legacy IP that has rights shared, especially pre-streaming rights will still have a lot of barriers/untangling to do.
I think Netflix is the most well run media company today by a mile, but also on the spectrum of quality/art -vs- straight money/tech domination they fall into the latter category, and they are the among the least friendly to creators as far as contract/rights.
We will see.
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Maybe there are licensing restrictions or other things that prevent it, but wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app? Or at least make all HBO Max content also available in Netflix (and then eventually sunset HBO Max). That would make a Netflix subscription a much more compelling purchase for a ton of people.
Not attacking you in particular, but I've always hated how we talk about "licensing restrictions" as if they're some kind of vague law of nature, like gravity. Oh, Studio X can't do Y... Because Licensing. "Licenses" are entirely conjured up by humans, and if there was an actual desire by the people who make decisions to change something, those people would find a way to make the "licensing restrictions" disappear. Reality is, the people making these decisions don't want to change things, at least not enough to go through the effort of changing and renegotiating the licenses. It's not "licensing restrictions" that is stopping them.
Same always comes up when we talk about why doesn't Company X open source their 20 year old video game software? Someone always chimes in to say "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
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That would be amazing if we could watch both Netflix and HBO Max content at the price of one subscription. At least for me, these two platforms covers 95% of my video content needs.
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Easy way to get rid of the few remaining "lifetime 50% discount" HBO Max subscriptions.
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Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor. There's a lot of content licensed to Hulu that is not necessarily licensed to Disney Plus, though Disney Plus seems to be showing more Hulu content, but I assume it has to do with licensing.
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They might make less money with one super subscription than two separate ones.
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> wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app
I currently pay $20 something for Netflix every month and $10 for HBO Max a couple of months through the year when I’m binging a show from HBO. I as a consumer would prefer to keep it that way. I absolutely do not have the appetite to pay $30+ a month if the two are combined.
The thing is, HBO _the brand_ is the valuable thing.
Maybe we could come up with another ludicrous suite of names for HBO/HBO Go/HBO Max once it's merged with Netflix.
> Netflix says they’re keeping the company separate
For a while... Eventually, you can expect that functions will be streamlined, compacted, and impacted
What happens to HBO Max? Will you be able to watch all that with a regular Netflix subscription? Seems the business doesn't make sense unless
Also: is Netflix going to take the theatrical and traditional TV businesses seriously at all?
I imagine it’ll end up looking very much like the Disney + Hulu + ESPN bundle. Minor savings but still more expensive than an individual subscription.
> traditional TV business
This was actually excluded from the deal. CNN, TNT, Discovery and the rest are being spun off into their own company. Presumably to wither and die.
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Your model might be too simplistic.
It’s more like Net Margin (Netflix + HBO) > Net Margin (Netflix | separate HBO)
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> Also: is Netflix going to take the theatrical
Hopefully? I don't have time for yet another 10 episode limited series (best case) that could have been a 2 hour movie.
> and traditional TV businesses seriously at all.
Do you mean the stuff that occasionally interrupts the regular pharmaceutical ads?
My guess is that eventually they'll merge into a single platform, HBO max will die off, and netflix will just keep jacking up people's rates until they're well above what netflix and HBO Max cost separately today
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They would never cannibalize an existing revenue stream, they'll keep them separate as long as it's profitable and maybe bundle for marketing (we're slowly rebuilding cable)
I'm actually looking forward to a bigger library on Netflix. Happy to pay a few more dollars per month for Netflix instead of managing ephemeral subscriptions to various streaming services.
Why is this a negative for consumers? Doesn't everyone complain how they have to subscribe to 5 different streaming services, and plenty of people have to pay for a service just to enjoy one or two series?
I don't think consolidation is necessarily bad. It makes sense from a cost perspective too. I guess they could just license out the content, but this will probably grow the catalog a lot.
The production side is the problem. Netflix churns out shovelware crap designed to be on in the background. Every once in a while they get lucky or stick their neck out to acquire something good, but the batting average is very low. HBO on the other hand has the highest batting average, and the brand actually still stands for quality.
Of course Netflix is saying all the right things now to keep anti-trust off their backs, but at some which culture do you think is going to win out?
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Consolidation means that incumbents rely on fickle intrinsic motivation rather than competitive pressure to keep quality high and prices low. All too often, monopolies or oligopies become complacent and merely "extract rents".
It’s negative because under current market regulation and enforcement, big company buys small company and enshittifies every product.
What people want (presumably) is a market where you pay once and you access everything and the money get divided based on creators, distribution or whatever.
Under current market conditions, that will happen only in the limit where a single company owns everything.
Number goes up, content goes down.
The problem doesn't appear immediately; it appears over time where the market has been consolidated into only a couple companies and then they can raise prices as much as they want because there is no alternative. This is what cable was like for a long time. Part of subscription fatigue is the constantly raising prices of these services that used to be very cheap. Netflix having WB content isn't a bad thing, the problem is ownership because it will not be available elsewhere.
I don't know. I never really had a sensible option to watch Game of Thrones legally, it's a little late for that now but presumably this would mean it's on Netflix which would be significantly better for me. (I guess useful for House of the Dragon now). I don't think I care much about the upcoming Harry Potter show but if I did want to watch that, I'm not sure what my options would be, and Netflix seems better than me having to take out _another_ subscription.
Obviously having one monopoly streaming service would be bad, but in the meantime having more of them is also not great for consumers since they each charge a flat fee so you have to pay more to see shows from different studios. The ideal would be something more akin to music streaming where you can more or less pick a provider these days, but video streaming doesn't seem to be moving there in any hurry.
Just have one subscription at a time and then pirate the rest of it.
They all had their chance. They blew it.
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Far better for consumers to be able to binge Game of Thrones/Silicon Valley/whatever and cancel HBO Max than to have to pay twice as much for a subscription to both libraries to get either.
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lol at the idea that Netflix would ever produce something as high-quality as GoT or HotD. Those days will soon be over.
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Surely the move now would be to rename the app to Netlfix Max
To keep it more in line with other brands:
- Netflix Max: basic subscription with ads, no 4K
- Netflix Max Ultra: basic subscription with ads, but with 4K
- Netflix Pro Max: standard subscription without ads, no 4K
- Netflix Pro Max Ultra: standard subscription without ads, with 4K
You can add a Mobile VIP package for one extra viewer outside your house, but only for Pro plans.
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HuFlixPrime was my portmanteau of choice in 2010-ish but mainly because I felt the coming dawn of cable company style pricing encroaching; more and more folks adding multiple streaming services to get close to what cable packages could offer.
I still like the name.
Edit: didn't Netflix have a feature called "Netflix Max" on the PS3 app? I remember it really liking it to find what to watch.
If we're doing suggestions, I vote for "Maxflix"
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And then to Max
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On the pure technical side of their streaming services, Netflix refuses to play ball with platform owners to integrate with services. Netflix on Apple TV has zero conceit for the platform. WB on the other hand is very typical of other streaming services. I wonder what will win out?
If the provider isn’t huge, they obey the house rules, and those rules will probably lead to better results than their silly ideas.
If the provider is big and experienced, they negotiate to get to do what they want, and they have their own opinions that work.
The acquirer wins.
It's probably a mixed bag.
On the one hand, competition good I guess?
On the other hand, if we're not going to have a music situation where the vast majority of mainstream content is available on most of the major platforms, fragmentation is pretty consumer unfriendly.
Netflix is pretty much a studio at this point. Not sure that back-end infrastructure or client apps is really a differentiator for anyone. An individual may find that one service is "better" in whatever respect but it's really about exclusive content.
As a consumer I certainly hope that this means there's one less streaming service to deal with (though I'm no longer an HBO subscriber at the moment) so long as pricing doesn't go up too much.
If it turns out that Netflix is more interested in Warner Brothers' IP than in things like CNN, they'll just sell those less-interesting pieces off.
Quite possibly (and quite unfortunately) to the Ellisons.
They are not acquiring CNN. They are interested in hbomax and content IP. All the other news and talk shows will be spun off to a new company called discovery global which is to be sold off separately.
> Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers.
WBD was on an increasingly unprofitable path, and we know where that road leads.
The exact same road that generally leads to the same sort of problematic consolidation?
At best, WBD could have gone bankrupt and a court order could require it to be sold as parts with no one studio getting a significant chunk, scattering WBD's IP moat across many competitors.
But most likely it just means someone like Netflix would have the chance to make a smaller offer for the same kind of deal on a WBD with a worse negotiating position. Same consequences, different day.
> But at least it wasn’t bought by Larry Ellison
There are already noises about FCC or DOJ leaning on things in order to 'correct' that.
Hm… I don’t know, I can at least cancel my separate HBO Max subscription on Prime Video now (since I already paid for Netflix).
I think it's extremely unlikely that they combine the two services in the next five to ten years.
They will probably do a Disney+/Hulu bundle at some point.
I am paying for both the services right now. I dont mind consolidating that payment and hopefully pay a slightly lower price.
That is not how the world works, be it the past present or future.
> Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers.
I tend to see much more discussion about how the main downside is for sellers of content. Why is this bad for consumers?
Good news is more Warner Bros content, bad news is, only 2 seasons worth per IP. Netflix drives me up a wall with how often they cancel interesting shows, reminds me of SyFy, you find something interesting and then they just cancel it. Sometimes people take a break from watching a show, but they always come back. At least end it cleanly damn it. It's why I don't bother with Netflix original shows unless they've got like four seasons.
David Ellison, not Larry. (David is Larry’s son and CEO of Paramount Skydance.)
HBO Max will need a new logo.
Here in the EU it’s great news if this means HBO contents are coming on Netflix. WBD has had so fare the absolute worse policy for international rights distribution for their shows, with policies varying wildly from season to season.
What would be wrong with Larry buying it? He doesn't own a media empire, and would be incentivized to compete. Larry buying it seems like it would have been better from a consumer perspective
> He doesn't own a media empire
He just bought Paramount?
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That would connect the companies. If they're keeping them separate it could be an anti-trust move or more that these companies are going to start trading studios which has been seen in other industries where they trade markets, like the food delivery company you've been ordering from for years has probably changed hands a few times during that time period and probably name too.
You could make the connection a formal one. Years back HBO’s streaming services were actually provided by MLB, they had a contract together. No reason the same couldn’t happen with Netflix and Warner. Could have happened pre-merger too but it wouldn’t have been in Netflix’s interest.
FreeBSD to the moon!
Don’t count the Ellisons out. Firstly, they control the White House. If the American government doesn’t give approval for this merger Netflix pays Warner Bros $5 billion and walks away. That leaves them open to a future Ellison takeover.
Second, even if the purchase goes through they can still get a win, just a smaller one. Their goals of creating a Fox News like media empire are still alive. CNN doesn’t fit with Netflix and will be spun out and when it is they can submit a bid for that company. The Ellisons will then control CBS and CNN.
Meanwhile, as Netflix customers we can all look forward to paying more, but without the quality content that’s HBO’s trademark. The theatre goers among us will have to accept fewer movies getting to the theatre and going straight to streaming instead. Creative folks will have one fewer major employer, giving them less bargaining power.
For voters, viewers and workers there was no winning no matter who made the winning bid.
As a Canadian many people here say, “At least we aren’t American” as cope for the rot and corruption of our country.
It’s a very toxic way to view things.
I don't like this. Netflix rarely creates excellent content; instead, it frequently produces mediocre or worse content. Will the same happen for Warner? Are cinemas now second behind streaming?
Edit: I agree Netflix has good Originals. But most are from the early days when they favored quality over quantity. It is sad to see that they reversed that. They have much funding power and should give it to great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time instead of mediocrity.
Cinema is indeed second behind streaming. The theatrical window is now so short (~40) days that audiences are happy to wait for the increased benefits and reduced cost of watching at home.
This was inevitable. Technology was bound to catch up. Hollywood actually panicked in the 1960s. But those screens were tiny. Nobody wants to see the Godfather on a cheap 1974 Panasonic.
But TV today is at least 55 inch and in crisp 4k resolution. A modern TV is good enough for most content.
It is not Netflix that killed the movieplex. They were just the first to utilise the new tools. The movie theater became the steam locomotive.
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Good. Movie theaters have been anti-consumer for decades. Time for them to reap what they sowed.
It’s only older contracts and studio holdovers that are preventing simultaneous release (which has already been done at times).
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I would disagree. I think what you see is the popular, but less well done material. Dept Q was an original 8-10 episode detective drama that was highly thought of. It received no press but it likely showed up on your carousel. Netflix knows eventually you will find it but not sure they can bring you everything.
There is nothing original in Dept Q. It's British adaptation of Danish book and TV show.
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They're starting to up their quality. Frankenstein and Death by Lightning were two standout successes recently.
That said, I'm more uncomfortable with the continued consolidation of media ownership and more outsize influence of FAANG tech over media.
> Frankenstein and Death by Lightning were two standout successes recently.
IMHO Frankenstein" was pretty terrible. The makeup was awful, the effects were cheap, the monster... wasn't a monster! The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
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It's about all the other projects that would have had great quality but did not secure funding because Netflix prefers to fund mass-produced mediocrity. In Germany we have a saying "Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn".
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Netflix has always had one or three stand-out projects over a year, but is that what we want from studios? It is like the tech model: 1 big success for 10+ duds (the VC show) or another superhero installment (the Google/Meta cash cow movie).
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In parallel, they're also starting to downgrade their quality. In the latest season of Stranger Things there's a wild amount of in-scene exposition, where the characters explain what's happening while it's happening. I did some digging and learned that they may be dumbing down their shows because they know users typically look at their phones while watching Netflix and users are more likely to drop off of a show if they don't know what's going on.
See here: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...
Edit: I did really enjoy Frankenstein.
Frankenstein looks oddly cheap and fake with really bad lighting in many scenes. You can tell they used the volume virtual production to shoot scenes and it doesn't look great.
They have a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” Sure it has a lot of crap but they also have major hits like Squid Games, Stranger Things, (both became cultural phenomena) and Daredevil.
Warner makes a lot of crap too. They both make what sells.
This was clear many years ago when I opened up the HBO app and saw the full screen background ad for Fboy Island.
> Are cinemas now second behind streaming?
It feels like a race to the bottom. Movie and TV content quality has taken a nose dive in the past decade.
Yes, there are exceptions, but it’s hard to find these days.
Maybe it’s because producing movies/TV is so much easier and cheaper that there is now so much low quality noise, that it makes finding the high quality signal so difficult.
But it seems like you used to be able to go to the theater and you’d have to decide between several great options.
Now, I almost never care to go because it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.
the kind of person who watches a LOT of television and movies likes slop, it's not complicated.
still different than media people PAY for. for example substack sells empty opinions that agree with you. it is totally wrong to say that slop sells. it is merely the highest engagement for an audience that DOESN'T pay.
you could say, "engagement is the wrong metric," but if that were really true, tech jobs would contract like 50%. the alternative becomes, "would you like fries with that?"
i dont think this should matter, plenty of conglomerates have brands across quality levels.
think old navy, gap, banana republic.
the quality difference is important for the conglomerate same with netflix vs hbo, the corporate benefit is being able to save on costs around like amortizing the corporate side of things (accounting, marketing, real estate, research ect)
The cinemas not already dead are dying.
Cinemas were a way to share the cost of technology to show high quality movies among hundreds of people.
Most people now has that tech at home, so there is no need for cinemas anymore.
I went to my local cinema a few times before it closed last year. There were never more than 3 spectators.
They're fourth now. Video games are first, then books, streaming, then cinema, and music after that. If I'm not mistaken.
> Netflix rarely creates excellent content; instead, it frequently produces mediocre or worse content.
I'm really concerned about them ruining the Magic Mike franchise.
Lots of good lesser-known stuff on Netflix if you wade through the crap:
* The Devil's Plan
* Alice in Borderlands
* Extraordinary Attorney Woo
* Brassic
* Back to Life
* Intelligence
* Black Doves
* Top Boy
* Mo
* The Breakthrough
* Borgen
* Love Death & Robots
* Scavenger's Reign
As well as well-known stuff like Stranger Things and Squid Game as a sibling comment mentioned.
[Edit: replies point out some of these are bought rather than produced but I think it still counts for overall quality]
> Scavenger's Reign
Oddly enough, this was originally an HBO Max production.
IMO their only truly noteworthy production is BoJack Horseman.
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Some foreign series gems also like The Asset, Mercy for None.
And some newer ones, American Primeval and the Beast in Me.
They licensed Brassic, it was filmed for Sky One, not Netflix.
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I just checked and I've rated 1,788 movies and 326 TV series so 2,114 titles total on IMDB.
I agree with this take. Netflix has some good originals, but it's not in the same category as HBO/WB. Most (not all) of their series feel cheap, shallow, unoriginal. The quality and hit rate just aren't the same.
Netflix also created "Netflix lightning" where there are zero shadows to make lighting scenes faster but is really ugly.
Honestly speaking Netflix has good catalog, much more comparable to Hollywood. Take the latest Frankenstein for example.
Don't look at only series. They also have recipes repurposed. But they acquire good titles and also produce some good ones.
I have 459 titles on my IMDB watchlist and a tiny percentage of it is available on Netflix (if at all), but this is anecdotal and might have to do something to where I live.
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Is it actually worse than the status quo though? I'm not so sure.
I hate this era of consolidation but Warner and HBO have already degraded, so this may be the least bad outcome here.
I don't want you to think I'm picking on you; but, I've been thinking about the MBA-bullshittism "consolidation" for a while. It's really a euphemism for "trust formation", right? It seems like we fought tooth-and-nail just 100 years ago to set up real antitrust laws, with real teeth... and now every industry is "consolidated". What's going on in health and seed and cars makes me seethe.
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Warner Bros has had their best summer in years (Sinners, Superman, etc). HBO still makes highly regarded prestige TV series (The Last Of Us, Task, etc). This is just false.
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Yeah, HBO has moved decidedly down market.
Apple is at least trying to fill their old niche. It seems quite telling that the only company truing to do the whole “prestige TV” thing is a kind of side-project for a hardware company. At least nobody can buy them, though.
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Seriously?
The Crown, Stranger Things, Unbelievable, Russian Doll (wow, just wow), Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, GLOW, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Ozark, Nobody Wants This, Altered Carbon, Dirk Gently, Mindhunters, The Queen's Gambit, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. And that's my taste, there's more not to my taste like Squid Game, Wednesday, Bridgerton, etc. And not including the films, documentaries, shorts, etc. they done like Love, Death and Robots.
The majority of that list is quite old. Have you seen what they're doing now? Not saying every single thing they make anymore is bad, but the average quality is far lower than it used to be.
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Interesting that most of the shows you like are +- 10 years old. From the early Netflix days.
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a lot of these projects were cancelled though.
imo, that's the worst thing about Netflix. its not that they don't produce good series, its that when they do they have a high peobability of getting cancelled.
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Of course Jessica Jones is on Disney+ now. I think most of those others are still on Netflix, but it is a bit of a problem for them - when they don't own the content they eventually lose the ability to stream it, especially as the content owners have entered the streaming space too.
The first season of Altered Carbon was great. It's a shame that they never made a second season. ;-)
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I watched half of those and I haven't had Netflix in 5 years. it's not worth it anymore.
Pretty subject to personal taste. Half of that list is garbage IMHO
I got netflix a looooong time ago when they still had good movies on there and weren't cycling. It kept getting worse and worse. Then I got rid of it a few years back.
Nearly everything on there sucks now. It's all campy politically-undertoned garbage and not anything I would consider fun to watch or a great way to waste my time. The first squid games was neat. A novel concept and interesting. Then Netflix did what they do best and netflix-ify it into a political message rather than a horror film. The latest Ed Gein show had the potential to be amazing but ended up falling into the same campy, political, director had too much creative liberty trash.
They are a tired company that has strayed from their roots. The Warner Bros acquisition makes complete sense because the entire media entertainment apparatus is capable of only producing:
1. Remakes of movies that are themselves remakes
2. An hour and a half movie where they try to inject The Message into as many frames as possible
3. A campy nearly serious movie that needs stupid jokes injected for the squirrel-brained morons that pay for it.
The entertainment industry is in a financial nosedive because no one wants this garbage anymore.
>it frequently produces mediocre or worse content. Will the same happen for Warner?
HBO hasn't produced good content in years at this point. Since before the last season or two of Game of Thrones, I should think. The other brands in Warner didn't even really have that much prestige.
Succession, Hacks, The Last of Us, White Lotus and Euphoria have all been recent buzzy TV hits for HBO post Game of Thrones
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It is probably not just a Netflix issue. But it is also quite a philosophical question as to who is to blame. The consumers who watch and pay, or the ones who fund the mediocrity.
It is definitely sad to see Netflix turn from their early phase, where they valued quality over quantity, and since have reversed that.
I just want to see more great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time.
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This is Succession erasure.
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> I don’t like this
please stop them.
Netflix is `while profitable(): make_sequel()` which _always_ ends with shitty content and incomplete stories.
How are Netflix created contents profitable? I guess Netflix pays shows based on user time spent, and a Netflix show is profitable if users spend time on it, and not on other shows?
All TV series on Netflix end in S01. Even if they don't, it's a new show with same characters but lousy writing. Looking at
* The CIA laywer who doesn't know about green passport
* FUBAR
* The Diplomat
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What you're describing is more of an American television problem.
The Simpsons, The Office, Game of Thrones, etc. all managed to go on too long without the help of Netflix.
I actually think that’s the opposite of Netflix. TV shows rarely make it past a second season, as soon as there’s even a mild drop in viewing figures they drop a property like a hot potato.
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You're describing the entertainment business.
They are agile
In 2009 a Turner Broadcasting executive stood in front of employees and said they are not worried about Online streaming because it only covered 15 minutes of watching time among consumers. TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, HBO, Time Inc were all under the same ownership umbrella along with the entire MGM catalog Ted Turner had acquired at the cost of losing control of his company. There were executives who knew what they were doing but some were performative - using buzz words and bravado to hide that they had no idea. Many were trying to extract as much as possible from both ends - 50% of revenue from consumers and 50% from advertisers. Even when those two were in direct conflict with each-other’s interests. They believed content was king and so they invested in content, instead of distribution. They hoarded their back catalog for years.
In the mean time Netflix started with 3 CDs per month plans and when they began streaming on 2007 we didn’t use it at start because we assumed that it would cut out of the 3 movies allotment. So we were scared to use it for a while. Yet we used it regularly - because unlike the cable service, streaming didn’t have ads. And ads were massive massive abuse and waste of time for consumers. You can benchmark the level of abuse by the types of ads in the super bowl: Alcohol, crypto, gambling, cars…
The reality is that cable was a paid premium service, unlike broadcast TV, which was free and littered with ads. Mix the two and you lose the golden goose.
That said, the bravado of that executive stuck with me since then.
Everything is now re-consolidated under different media companies now. Instead of Ted Turner we have Larry Ellison, and Netflix, and Disney.
So I think the biggest question is, what form of entertainment will eventually supplant streaming services? Whatever it is (or will be) will almost certainly be disregarded by most people.
AI generated by demand, most likely. Or AI generated by indie creators who have a vision but not a budget, and are provided with a platform to create content easily.
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Youtube, TikTok, Sora...
The branding debacle around HBO streaming service was malpractice
HBO Go and HBO Now - simultaneously, for some reason
Then HBO Max
Then Max
Now back to HBO Max
How many committee meetings did it take to get this strategy?
It's frankly amazing WB Studio and HBO quality has survived this insanity.
Time-Warner and its incarnations is whatever the opposite of synergy is (the parts are worse because of the whole)
And netflix has ads now.
> The reality is that cable was a paid premium service, unlike broadcast TV, which was free and littered with ads.
The reality is, most cable channels had ads from day one. Less ads than most broadcast stations (which made up most of the channels you had on cable at the start anyways) but still a lot of the first cable-only channels had ads from the start. WTBS had ads on cable in 1976. MSG/USA had ads on cable starting in 1977. CNN had ads on day one in 1980. MTV had ads on day one in 1981.
Yeah the allure of cable was always that you got more (boutique) options. Like an entire channel dedicated to cartoons, e.g
I dont think I have ever seen a completely ad free cable channel?
Tales as old as time, especially in tech: rich monopolistic incumbents not seeing the writing on the wall of a new paradigm shift; seemingly invincible execs brazenly displaying their (incorrect) hot-takes; and the inevitable enshittification of the new paradigm as it turns from revolutionary movement to ruling-class incentives.
I cancelled all my content subscriptions and I'm back to torrenting. I barely watch anything made my Netflix regardless. I think either Dark or the 3rd season of Stranger Things was the last time. Snyder's SciFi movie wasn't much good either. By now the streaming services are en route to become as terrible as whatever they were set out to replace. Once one of them started heavily advertising their own productions everywhere inside their apps I would've cancelled any remaining subscription at the latest.
I torrent too, but I think it makes sense to buy/rent or sub to a service in many cases. Companies look at views and revenue to decide what content to actually make. So, especially for ongoing series that I'm enjoying I want them to keep renewing it.
I subscribe to ad-free versions of services so I don't really run into ads a lot unless I'm trying to watch something live on TV.
Irrelevant to me. The amount of TV shows I enjoyed that got canned after S01 has burnt me so much that I wait until I know if there's a sensible finale at the end or if it ends on a cliffhanger that'll never be resolved before I even dive into a new show.
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>Companies look at views and revenue to decide what content to actually make.
Social discourse is also heavily weighted
> I torrent too, but I think it makes sense to buy/rent or sub to a service in many cases. Companies look at views and revenue to decide what content to actually make. So, especially for ongoing series that I'm enjoying I want them to keep renewing it.
I wonder if any of them track torrent metrics for this reason.
I also collect discarded physical media, there's still lots of people who want to get rid of their collections for nothing because of "Dude, there's streaming now, duh."
It’s better than ever with stuff like jellyfin/plex and all the sonarr/radarr… apps. I’ve been running bitmagnet too which has been great for actually finding torrents.
> back to torrenting
lots of people have, and we've come now full circle. I wonder if it was inevitable.
In a society that’s built on the foundations of perpetual profit growth it is. Sometimes you just can’t innovate, so instead of improving the product you cut the costs and enshittify. We’re in an enshittification regime right now.
Why are there alternating cycles of innovation and enshittification? I think it’s because investors are always trying to pull forward profit, but because they only have a 10 year horizon on investment strategy they tend to create cycles that are around that same period. If there was less investment, the innovation would be slower but the reactionary enshittification would be lessened too.
I'm almost back there at this point given how annoying streaming services are getting.
https://theonion.com/just-six-corporations-remain-1819564741...
What's funny is that Onion article uses "a blockbuster $112 billion deal" because in 1998 a figure that high was so preposterous it helped with the parody. They'd need to add a few zeros today.
“Dr. Evil, this is 1969, that kind of money doesn’t even exist! It’s like saying you want a gajillion bajillion dollars!”
> Bill Clinton, chief executive of U.S. Government, a division of MCI-WorldCom, praised Monday’s merger as “an excellent move.”
Lockheed-Northrop-Boeing-Pepsico is an excellent joke all on its own damn.
> Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars. Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.
Also a pretty subtle one, this article was written after Boeing and McConnell Douglas merged a year prior.
Remember, that's just a subsidiairy of the Sheinhardt Wig Company.
I never imagined that a service that ships DVD via mail would one day buy Warner Brothers. It is amazing how innovation and focus can change the game. Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.
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> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label.
They still do all those things? And they're still successful in most of them? They haven't "failed" or "dropped the ball" based on any metric I can think of. I'm not sure what you're referring to here to be honest.
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> how did these companies drop the ball so bad
Companies didn't, leadership did. For a big, fat check. And they're happily retired now, sitting in their expensive villas with millions on their balance.
They couldn't care less about your happy childhood memories that the content produced by their predecessors engraved in your mind.
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers.
The answer to that one is simple: they were bad at software.
Apple and then Android killed the market for all those hardware devices and physical media.
If everybody is dropping the ball, my first guess is that catching it is actually legitimately difficult.
>They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
Maybe it's better now, but looking at the PS3-era PSN, that expertise had negative value.
It’s exactly the reason why. They focused on proprietary formats/devices to lock consumers in
Hindsight is 20/20 and the Innovator's Dilemma is very real.
And no OS. That certainly helped Apple.
Sony has crunchyroll
They didn't fumble around as much, also Sony still has leverage a lot on Japan Industry
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
Well, AOL did ship 1 billion CDs over its heyday and they acquired Warner Brothers in 2000…
> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
I think what history shows us is that the modern monopolies managed to destroy antitrust to the point where nobody will ever do to them what they did to others.
People said that a generation ago as well, and the one before that. Yeah monopolies make it hard, but every one of them eventually crumbles to the next wave of innovation.
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> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
Is that a financialised version of piggybacking?
They have to as a stop gap before going on generating full feature film on demand. Those streaming service are all struggling to have an attractive enough catalog for an extended period of time for a lot of folks with their shitty pricing policies.
Considering WB was once the champion of that format too. Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format.
> Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format
and neither do consumers. video over the internet is the future that Netflix saw 20 years ago, when others didn't, except YouTube.
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Not sure how many of you have WBD shares with its rather tumultuous past (spin off from ATT, the Bill Hwang mess), but if you've picked up shares on the cheap in the past few years sub $10, congratulations.
"Under the terms of the agreement, each WBD shareholder will receive $23.25 in cash and $4.501 in shares of Netflix common stock for each share of WBD common stock outstanding at the closing of the transaction. "
Note: this is after completion of the current splitting of WBD; as you'd expect Netflix wants the catalog and production but they're not taking the sports and some other pieces. The left over / newly revived Discovery Global will likely be a hollowed-out shell of less desirable properties saddled with a bunch of debt.
That's $4.50 superscript 1
I thought someone really had to break some threshold so they wouldn't close the deal unless they got another .001. Like maybe some bonus depended upon some target value.
WBD price at this moment is just $25.28. I think there are some complicated conditions associated with the terms.
The exchanges are also closed.
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“The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” - Ted Sarandos in 2013
Seems Netflix won that race.
Thing is that Netflix didn't really succeed at that goal. HBO was and still is the gold standard for premium cable content. Netflix instead decided to go for the bottom 70% of the market, and the quality of their shows reflects that.
In fact the very reason for this purchase is that they desperately need help on the creative side.
Netflix is what it is today because all the studios trying to compete with their tech was an even bigger disaster than Netflix competing on content.
I don't think the Netflix vs HBO comparison is fair.
HBO was always one channel in a home. They produced a limited amount of high-quality content. You watch it a few times a week and network TV reality shows or whatever other trash the rest of the week.
Netflix wanted/wants to be the only channel in cord-cutting and cord-never homes. When that's your goal you have to produce mostly crap and some good stuff.
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I'm not sure how you quantify "premium cable content" but Netflix has certainly made great strides in that market.
Why would anyone want to be old HBO? Writing good scripts is hard and not rewarded.
The rewards aren’t necessarily monetary.
After that complete fumble of HBO becoming "Max" they were at their last legs
The "Max" fiasco was pretty much the strangest branding mistake ever. Not just an obvious mistake but it was honestly kind of a mystery that anyone would even be tempted to do that.
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As I was reading the announcement, that quote popped into my head. I came here to say exactly that.
It's always great to read about how the people the own the means of distribution aquire also the means of production, trying to create a meta-monopoly. /sarcasm
I'm rooting for someone on the regulary side disliking all the crap that Netflix produces, and just shuts the whole thing down. Those 5 billion they'd have to pay for a breakup fee in that case would have me feeling better that I couldn't cancel their service, since my family pesters me to keep it.
If this goes like all the other media mergers this year, the only regulatory scrutiny will involve Netflix allowing the executive branch to install a censor / ombudsman that has final say on their news and documentary content.
There is no “monopoly” on either content distribution or creation. Amazon and Apple are both trillion dollar companies that have streaming services.
Then there is Disney, Comcast (Peacock), Paramount, STARZ (standalone company), and AMC
The legal definition of monopoly in some jurisdictions means anyone with a large enough of a market share able to influence pricing, etc in a market. A market share as low as 25% can be called a monopoly. Does HBO+Netflix have a 25% share of the streaming market? I've no idea, but possibly.
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Technically, you're right. I feel like there needs to be new terms to describe though the staleness of the industry. "Oligopoly" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
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IMO I think we are going to see Paramount, STARZ and AMC bought up soon. I don't think they can compete with Disney, Comcast or Netflix in size.
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> would have me feeling better that I couldn't cancel their service, since my family pesters me to keep it.
Sounds like they're still creating popular content.
Netflix has had a large production studio outside Madrid for several years already.
> Netflix has had a large production studio outside Madrid for several years already.
One of several around the world. Albuquerque, Fort Monmouth (New Jersey), Shepperton (UK), etc.
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This deal is an indicator of huge changes in global film & TV production.
Hollywood's struggles amplified after the writer's strike with a perfect storm of issues around unionisation, technology, fragmenting audiences, new formats, asset liabilities and enormous competition to the east.
Now LA soundstages are empty while production centres in Europe, UK, India, China, Nigeria are booming and vast new studios cropping up in the Middle East.
Proposed tariffs will do little to stem this tide as the money has moved on already.
In addition, traditional production methods are unsustainable and decision-making is opaque in an era where sustainability, transparency and democratisation are taking over.
The main benefit to Netflix is of course the IP, but the traditional studio assets of WB have their days numbered.
Heard of one production needing to do a one day reshoot on something. Something that could easily have been done in LA. It was cheaper to fly everyone out to some European country for 3 days and do the pickups.
The business side of Hollywood has been imploding for the past few years. It just costs too much to film there vs other places. Tariffs will not change that. The tax incentives are gone and the must have on set is too high.
Not sure how netflix is going to digest that pill they just swallowed. 83 billion is a lot. Is is about 3x their total gross per year. I do not think they can raise prices too much with out shedding subscribers. WB has already taken out AOL, ATT (recovering), and Discovery. Netflix could be next.
The deal also spins out the linear TV into a different company. Can that company survive? Its going to be tough going. Havent looked but I would bet a good portion of the debt they took on to do the divestiture from AT&T is being pumped into that company.
You know that meme of Jack Sparrow riding a sinking ship to shore?
That's how I imagined WBD. David Zaslav gets to transition from the leader of a reality show slophouse to one of the biggest power players in Hollywood, and all be has to do is let the slophouse sink and declare himself captain of the next ship.
The value of the back catalog is still substantial for years to come. But you are right about the landscape changing dramatically for new productions.
Hollywood was premised on economies of scale. Concentrate a lot of talent in one place and then put infrastructure in place for block buster productions to happen (studios, tech, money).
That's being disrupted by several things:
- LA and the US are no longer cheap places to be. A lot of blockbuster content is filmed outside the US at this point. Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. LA and Hollywood are still important but mainly because that's where the money is. It's not necessarily where the money is being spent.
- Independent content producers self publishing content on platforms like Youtube and growing audiences rivaling those of popular TV shows.
- AI is starting to drive down the cost of special effects, digital processing, etc. And it's probably also going to erode the value of needing actors at all for especially a lot of the less glamorous roles (think all the extras in big movie productions). This is a sensitive topic in particularly Hollywood. But not enough to delay the inevitable by very long.
All this is driving down the cost of creating decent quality things that people still want to pay for. That's a critical distinction. There's a lot of ad sponsored stuff that people don't really pay for as well. To make money, you need quality. AI is working its way up the chain here, with increasingly better stuff. But most of it is still pretty low value.
But things like soap operas, third rate series that Netflix bulk purchases from places like South Korea, etc. are all fair game for AI.
Netflix adding the WB back catalog is a great move for them. Their own back catalog isn't strong enough to keep people and expanding with newly created production it is a very slow and expensive process. And they've had some flops and cost control issues. There just isn't enough there to keep me permanently. I tend to sign up for just a few months and then cancel. I'm probably going to cancel soon again. HBO did not actually offer their streaming services in Germany until recently. And I was considering trying that for a while. Now I might not have to.
Hollywood was dying long before the strike.
Consolidations like this were bound to happen. In the mid 2010s we had a good thing, only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show. Then every studio got greedy and spawned their own platform, forcing netflix to produce their own shows.
Now you have 20 tv networks all with their own subscription and all losing money.
It's a repeat of how cable networks were.
This is the issue with content production being owned by the distributors too. It's too profitable to own the vertical because each piece of content is an effective monopoly, because to participate in culture requires watching it (piracy notwithstanding). Therefore, the "fix" is to regulate this monopoly - by making sure that monopoly cannot exist without cost. One "simple" way is, imho, to make content production and ownership of distribution strictly prohibited in the same entity, and to also enforce mechanical licensing of content (such that you cannot have content exclusives in the distribution platforms).
Movie theatres have similar restrictions with film studios in the past - to prevent this very monopoly. It's high time we brought it back.
Yeah the best way to fix this would be to enforce the separation of distribution and production via the Paramount Decree. Separate content production from the streaming service itself. Get rid of the vertical integration plaguing the industry and we'll get better content since quality will be the territory on which studios have to compete with each other again.
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Daniel Ek got it right, you can all but eradicate piracy with good service. The inverse holds true as well
House of Cards is the original Netflix Original, and it came out in 2013. Prime started competing with Netflix the same year.
But the other platforms - Disney+ (2019), Apple TV (2016/2019), HBO Max (2020), Peacock (2020), Paramount+/CBS All Access (2021 / 2014) - are all later.
HBO has been around for way longer... HBO Go started in 2010.
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>Consolidations like this were bound to happen. In the mid 2010s we had a good thing, only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show.
This has been the narrative about the state of streaming services for years now. People upset that content is too fragmented across services. Now we get some significant consolidation and people are upset. They just ignore that angle and find a different one to gripe about.
I think this is great.
>only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show
doesn't this move reduce the number of streaming services by one? we'll see how the details turn out, but if I was paying for netflix and hbo max, now I only need to pay for netflix
Yes but it doesnt increase the amount of shows or movies on any of them. This new amount of content will just feed into the rotating library, not create one big library of content always available. So in fact you are loosing providers and loosing content at the same time, yet prices will still keep going up...
Just download it as you would download a car if you could.
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
I feel like when I was growing up, I learned about how monopolization was bad for society when it came to industries like steel and rail. but for some reason in the 21st century we've decided that maybe corporations are somehow... better citizens or something? despite the evidence?
Obviously, the reason it's gotten this bad is that lobbying is legal and private campaign funding is mandatory. Thanks again, citizens united!
This was a very foolish choice on Netflix's part. Most if the iconic IP from WB/HBO has gone down hill in a dramatic fashion over the last decade.
Game of Thrones was good for a few seasons, but half way through the fans started dropping almost as quickly as main characters. DC movies have had very few genuine successes, even if they've technically turned a profit.
Putting all that content up on Netflix would be unlikely to pull in that many more subscriptions, and would require dropping the existing streaming service(s) and agreements to allow for exclusivity.
This doesn't bring significant talent or IP to Netflix, it's just an attempt to grab market share. I doubt they'll try to move anything out of WB/HBO's existing streaming platforms or agreements. This just looks like an attempt to increase profits by simply buying a profitable company and letting them mostly continue to function with minimal changes.
In other word, this probably isn't the worst acquisition possible for consumers, but it certainly won't improve life for anyone to let it happen, and it does consolidate market share and control when it comes to media. This probably won't be hugely evil, but it won't be good either.
Don't forget that WB also managed to burn Christopher Nolan after over a decade and lost one of the best (and most profitable) directors to have ever lived.
Personally I just hope Netflix takes interest in the UCI mountain bike racing and does a better job with it.
Yes, they really killed MTB. If only Re Bull TV would buy the Discovery/Eurosport part. Or GCN!
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I don’t know what you remember, but that didn’t happen to GoT. It was highly watched through the end, with increasing viewership every season.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F1...
> Combination Will Offer More Choice and Greater Value for Consumers, Create More Opportunities for the Creative Community and Generate Shareholder Value
No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"? I know corporate double-speak is already out of control and I know they're writing whatever they can do avoid regulators who surely are looking into the acquisition, but surely these executives cannot believe acquisitions lead to more choice, right?
I guess you are in the US. For you, WB content was already available. But you see, they never bothered to make that content available for most of the rest of the world. Netflix, on the other hand, is available most anywhere. This is exactly what it says on the can - more choice and greater value for me.
What's written on the can reads "please don't sue us, we're not a monopoly, and we will not gouge users".
On the other hand Netflix will make its subscribers fund everything without reducing their income, and will not give these subscribers at least half of that content, because, why not?
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Your Netflix bill is about to skyrocket and there's no guarantee you'll have access to those titles.
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> I guess you are in the US.
I am not, and WB was available via local options here (Southern European country).
For me who isn't a Netflix customer (the group which is larger than the group of people who have Netflix, obviously), the choice gets less.
And obviously anti-trust regulation doesn't care about the amount of choices for Netflix customers specifically, it cares about amount of choices for consumers at large, which will decrease with this change.
I think it's unlikely to change because most likely the content was not available for legal reasons, not technical. That's why for example when they re-release some shows they have to switch out to completely different music – the rights were not cleared in the first place and it'd be a huge hassle to go back and negotiate with every rightholder
Netflix acquiring WB’s content will not necessarily lead to all of it being available for streaming to you in any given country. Content licensing is complicated, to put it mildly.
I don’t know what do you mean by “most of the rest of the world” but it’s widely available in the American continent and Europe coverage will be almost complete in the next month(s):
https://press.wbd.com/us/media-release/hbo-max/hbo-max-nears...
> more choice and greater value for me
That will exactly follow Netflix's price hikes.
As in "value for money", they silenced the latter part :D
But Netflix content breadth and quality varies a lot from country to country. There's not one Netflix.
Netflix buying WB doesn't mean that licensing immediately becomes available worldwide.
Netflix can provide its own content everywhere around the globe because they are the sole owner of it. The distribution rights to WB properties outside of the US will belong to completely different legal entities (even if those entities have WB in them).
There should be never any talk about "Shareholder Value". Shareholders do not create content, they do not subscribe at scale. Once your customer is no longer the focus, it's downhill from there, and it's been downhill for a WHILE.
I killed my Netflix sub over a year ago and I never even think about it. It's all dull, empty-calorie background TV.
The sad part is how the iconic HBO brand, already beaten by WBD into a pulp, is just going to merge with this average-ness and fade. End of an era, indeed.
I think that wording is targeted at anti-trust regulators.
More choice as in more content available to choose from on Netflix?
So when they say "Consumers", it should really have been "Netflix Customers", as for everyone else there is less choice, only already paying Netflix users get more content.
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I think it will.
Now they don't have to go negotiate for every WB content item. As it stands, subscribers might or might not get WB things, same as all the other IP holders that are playing hard to get. Otherwise, they might have to contract some seasons of a show from one holder and some from another, and maybe not at all sometimes.
Maybe they mean more content will be produced, which I believe. But I'd also argue that we really don't need more content on Netflix, we need higher quality. Netflix is drowning in a sea of mediocrity to the point where I have almost given up on investing in a new show because almost all of them reek of lazy writing and good-enough-but-not-outstanding direction. There are exceptions, but they are damn hard to find.
More choice as in “more revenue streams from which to create shareholder value.”
> No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"?
This is performative marketing for the regulators to allow the merger. No one (including the regulators) believes this, and it won't come to pass. ("More choice" won't, I mean, the merger will and a lot of regulators and politicians involved will end up with new cars, boats, and kids' college tuitions paid.)
Adding Warner Bros. catalog will naturally lead to more titles to choose from for Netflix users. The choice of streaming services will be slimmer though. It will be interesting to see how regulators see it.
More choice for users of Netflix
That is, maybe, until they gate keep the WB content beyond additional premiums.
Does anyone who's participated in M&A know how they come up with a breakup fee? I believe this one is $5 Billion (per Bloomberg), and Adobe <-> Figma was $1 Billion.
Interested to understand the modeling that goes into it.
Based on some experience, it's like a bond to appear in court. The number is mostly an arbitrary calculation designed to discourage you from not following through.
Like everything else it's just a negotiated figure. Arguments to and fro would include the likelihood of breakup (such as regulatory risk, unforeseen events), how disruptive the whole process is and also simply how desperate the buyer or seller is.
There's no modeling, it's a punishment or incentive. The intention is to inflict financial pain.
There’s a rough baseline of “cost to be acquired” and you start there, and do some doubling or other increases.
Basically, being acquired is a pain in the assets and you want it to be worth your while to pursue it, even if it falls through, otherwise the board is looking at getting replaced.
The reaction here is interesting. I thought this is what people wanted, a consolidation of all the streaming services into one so you did not have to subscribe to 10 different ones. I personally think it's a bad idea, but people need to figure out exactly what they want.
You're almost making it sound like billionaires are fulfilling the people's wishes instead of their own.
This should never have been allowed to happen by the regulators, but in this administration there are no checks, it’s a free for all and Netflix knows it. It saw the opportunity and went for it
The cycling fans among us were quite bashed around over the past few years getting access to cycling coverage in Europe. The were the glory years where GCN Plus was extremely cheap (it was too cheap) and the coverage was ad-free and excellent. Then we got bashed around to Eurosport which was fine, more expensive but still ad-free. Then we got moved to Discovery+. They weaseled out of their ad-free coverage for a bunch of races and jacked up the price because they bundled the cycling in with football and we suffered a price hike from $3-5 per month to $30+ a month, yes a 1000% hike, over the past 5 years.
Totally. It's miserable. We are watching cycling through HBO max at the moment, where it is still affordable. We get on TNT for the TdF because Rob Hatch. Surely it will go down the drain even further when the Ellisons get it.
I wonder if an antitrust suit will be filed, this seems like a pretty significant acquisition.
With the current administration, anything can be legal.
Besides, they still have plans to spin off the cable networks, so this would mostly concern the streaming assets, movie studio, and the IP.
The merger needs to be accepted by other markets, too. No offense but I find it quite amusing how Americans keep forgetting about that.
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Considering the words they're using across the announcement, it seems they're well aware what this will trigger, everything seems carefully chosen so someone can later point at this announcement and say "See, we think this will add MORE user choice, not less, which is good for competition!".
It will lead to more choice ... in videos to watch. It will reduce choice in where to watch them or who to pay for the pleasure.
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Every major merger announcement includes this obvious lie.
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How is this any bigger than Disney and all the media channels they own?
It isn’t. They should have been stopped, too.
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This is going to be an off the wall statement given this audience, but WWE signed an exclusive deal with NetFlix for 10 years I think in an effort to counter their main competitor AEW, which signed a deal with HBO Max shortly before that. Now they'll both potentially be on the same platform, which WWE will hate as it will be interesting in having two competitive pro wrestling promotions on the same platform.
I'm pretty sure WWE would have an exclusivity clause that would prevent another pro-wrestling program on Netflix. But who knows!
WWE dont have the clout they used to. I remember when they were the number 1 viewed website on the internet. Nowadays the MMA & UFC is much more valuable.
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I loved Netflix when they had the DVD service and the recommendation competition because it actually suggested shows I would enjoy.
Once they started producing their own stuff, recommendations no longer worked: they just promoted whatever crap they produced themselves. And with that, trying to find a show I wanted to watch became so much effort that I canceled altogether. Same goes for all the other streaming services.
We’re witnessing the globalization of television.
When all is said and done there’s going to be a few players left and they’re all going to be American by the current looks of things. You could argue movies were already like this, but for television that’s quite the change as most countries had many television production companies and stations.
Now it seems like they’ll be a few global media companies and maybe some local production houses that have to sell their stuff to these guys or setup their own services like the BBC does with iPlayer in the UK, with somewhat limited success compared to these giants.
They won't be American. The balance of power has already shifted east. There are now more productions, more money and more facilities east of Madrid than west of it.
> The balance of power has already shifted east. There are now more productions, more money and more facilities east of Madrid than west of it.
This is wild fantasy.
the global power centers of TV distribution, monetization, and intellectual property ownership remain overwhelmingly American.
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Look I get how Ne Zha 2 was a big success and showed signs of good production quality, but lets be honest: The movie was boring. I'm sure the mostly Chinese audience that sat with me in the theater enjoyed it but I fell asleep halfway in.
The "east" has more work to do to capture that magic that the western imperial order (Hollywood) has wrought upon the world.
I will continue to watch and observe how things play out.
So the companies in charge of distributing the content are American-based multinationals; production leaks out of the US toward prettier places and more amicable laborers; if you’re American and want to tag along—in or behind the scenes—you’re going to need a passport or a visa.
Or something like that?
Why on earth would Madrid be the dividing line between east and west?
I haven't heard of any of them, which I am open to being because of my own ignorance. Can you give some examples?
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Buy those blu-rays while you still can (:
Plenty of blu-rays thrive in the high seas.
If they stop making them its gonna be hard to rip them.
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Yarr
Yeah, as a physical media collector, this is pretty devastating.
I wonder what the US administration will demand from Netflix for approving this.
equity stake obviously
With this buy Netflix becomes as big as Disney (Disney+Hulu) by market share.
Unwelcome consolidation in the long term.
They got it for cheap. AOL paid $165 billion for Time Warner in 2000. Is Netflix the next AOL?
Fortunately, the Warner sister, Dot, will remain independent.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/netflixs-warner-purc...
2023: "A Party in Cannes Announces a New Hollywood Power Player". Something like ~300 attendees, probably $10 million. Zaslav and Graydon Carter co-hosted. There were rumored to be thousands of bottles of Dom champagne, which is probably inexpensive in bulk.
https://archive.is/ITc2a
Is it strange that NFLX is down on this news? I would have thought this is a big win for them, as they are consolidating power?
On one hand it is good that the maybe the streaming will be split into less subscriptions, but on other hand, I think the only way forward is to simply prohibit exclusive streaming rights. I.e. any movie streaming rights should be sold to anyone who wants to buy them for the same price. That is only way to enable competition in streaming.
I… actually like this idea. Similar to the Robinson Patman Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act
It’s not my business: could someone shed light on how this would better serve their respective customers, versus keeping them separate. Or in other words “what will be possible by this merger that isn’t possible now?”
At this rate Netflix isn’t building a streaming service, it’s building a monopoly starter pack. Give it a few more acquisitions and the “Are you still watching?” prompt will legally qualify as a government notice.
LLM ahhhh comment
This entire Warner Bros saga has just been insanely pathetically sad to watch, because it demonstrates that WB has completely lost touch with reality and that the C-suites at the top have zero innovation or anything else to give at this point. The company has gone through so many megamergers and acquisitions which just added more and more debt to the company that at this point it wouldn't surprise me if Netflix just declares bankruptcy with it or something, because it's a completely lost cause. Of course, the people responsible for this won't learn a thing (even though they're making the exact mistakes of the Cable industry they replaced), and will continue doing the same thing over and over again, because, clearly, learning from mistakes is just not possible for these people.
I hope that this means that the Netflix app on AppleTV will finally become a “first class citizen.”
The Netflix app has always been treated badly by Apple. No idea why, but it means that I can’t have Netflix content in the “What’s Next” queue (among other things, like Netflix actors’ work not showing up in show information).
that is _purely_ netflix's decision; they have decided not to integrate. in fact, earlier this year netflix accidentally rolled out their internal version which has full integration with the APIs and then said "oopsie" and removed it again.
Yep. The APIs have always been publicly available for streaming services to use, Netflix just refuses to use them.
The reason is pretty obvious. Netflix would rather have users open their app directly so there’s opportunity to shove things in their faces, collect data from their browsing, and ideally become positioned as the user’s “main” streaming app. The user having a hub app and treating Netflix as one of several services directly opposes their aims.
The situation shares a lot of similarities with Spotify, which also refuses to take advantage of native APIs for the same reasons. Though in their case, there’s an added layer of irony with how they make all a big ruckus about how Apple needs to open their platforms up only for them to pretend APIs don’t exist after Apple adds them. As an example Apple had to hardcode a hack into HomePods to enable Spotify to work with them; where most services (Pandora, Tidal, etc) hook the official HomePod streaming APIs which pull directly from the service to the device, for Spotify Apple has to automatically AirPlay Spotify playing on the user’s phone to the HomePod. It’s ridiculous.
This is on Netflix not Apple. They enabled it this by accident and reverted it back https://www.theverge.com/news/613307/netflix-apple-tv-app-su...
Wow that is quite anti-consumer! Surely a monopoly on streaming will help them realize this. /s
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Oh you think Apple is treating Netflix bad? No no no.
Netflix refuses to play game, because they want to keep their data to themselves. Apple would LOVE Netflix to integrate into the app.
And quite rightly so. Why would Netflix let Apple list all their content in an Apple branded interface as if it were their own?
Ah. That makes sense.
Thanks for the elucidation.
If that's the case, then we'll probably lose another app or two.
:'(
Netflix seems to hate theatrical releases, so I hope this doesn't affect any small cinemas that want to screen older WB titles. I know when Disney bought Fox, it got a bit harder to book films.
Those acquisition numbers will just keep becoming larger and larger until one day, when I'm old enough, someone will just acquire the only other player left in the field and Earth will be one single megacorporation.
AOL-Time-Warner-Pepsico-Viacom-Halliburton-Skynet-Toyota-Trader-Joe's but I guess it's AOL-Time-Netflix-Pepsico-Viacom-Halliburton-Skynet-Toyota-Trader-Joe's now.
I look forward to all my favorite shows on HBO max ending a season with a cliffhanger and then getting canceled regardless of their popularity
Wow the up and comer swallows an extremely established brand
Hopefully I'll finally get to see Chernobyl and Game of Thrones. It's virtually impossible outside of US or Europe to legally stream so many movies and series.
When you literally cant do something legally, theres always somewhere greyer/blacker to move to!
Smart move to sell before GenAI takes over the entire industry.
What is going to happen to all WB/HBO tech? Netflix is obviously not interested in their apps or infra, and that probably means a big layoff soon.
A merger like this takes 1+ year to get approved, and only then the companies can start acting together.
So, layoffs not soonest than in 18 months.
I didn't really understand why they'd want this, but I think now its strategic protection from someone else consolidating with them. One company with that huge of a library could put a lot of pressure on them by withholding content and with their competing unified streaming service.
Didn't they just buy HBO? Nice shopping spree!
HBO is part of Warner Bros.
Love the difference in the two connotations here that leads to the confusion. "Netflix just bought HBO (a moment ago)" vs "Netflix just bought HBO (previously)".
Remember when the saying was that Netflix was trying to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix? That turned out weird
I was in one seminar, and someone asked a question about future to Harish Mehta (one of the founder of NASSCOM), and he said that big companies will become bigger for at least next 10 years.
Placidly uncaring since long ago I stopped consuming media from either party.
If someone wants "film school" you can do a lot worse than ticking off the film from the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" [1].
It may take you the next decade to complete. There are some real oddballs in there that lean toward "art film" (but what do you expect from Andy Warhol). A lot of "foreign" films (foreign for this U.S. viewer). In short a lot of surprises.
Definitely feel like a student of film now (for whatever that's worth).
[1] https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List
Placidly uncaring since long ago as I stopped consuming media full stop.
Exclusively consuming social media like HN for your media sounds way worse than Game of Thrones, The Other Two, Emily in Paris or even Love is Blind
I'm excited about getting access to the whole WB catalogue?
Well, for sure the price will go up too.
I was working at HBO when Ted Sarandos said, "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”
I knew then how that would play out, although I didn’t have this exact outcome on my bingo card.
So WB buys/merges w/ discovery to break it back off as part of a merger. Seems sort of silly. Curious if this means pretty much all WB/Disc/HBO content will end up on Netflix.
Well, at least it wasn't Larry Ellison.
$82.7BILLION
no wonder my subscription keeps going up
I wonder when the ads will come. There probably already is a enshittification roadmap that they’re working against.
Netflix added ad-supported plans in 2022.
Netflix already has a cheap subscription with ads.
I'm a fan. Injecting a huge catalog into Netflix is a win for consumers who want just one subscription. And injecting studio talent into Netflix (assuming the merge gives WB creatives influence) can only help.
HBO's tech sucks. Apple is (in my experience) hard to get running in the Android ecosystem. Most of the other options are too narrow in catalog, or ad ridden.
Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
Netflix have never been a streaming service to put loads of good content on their service and keep it there. I would imagine they will use this injection of content to drip feed and slowly rotate movie franchises in order to keep users interested.
> Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
this is not how markets usually work.
Correct, but the current market is not working. 15+ streaming services is terrible for consumers. Catalogs are compromised. Bigger services can push prices up because they have more stuff. Clearly if there are too few players then there's less competition and no price pressure, but there's a sweet spot between what exists today and that.
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It's bad for everyone. Fewer buyers = less content made and lower budgets, fewer voices being heard.
The gov will block this for the wrong reasons(they want Ellison to win this) but here’s hoping this and Paramount both get blocked, this level of concentration is not good.
Memories of AOL-TimeWarner...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarnerMedia#AOL-Time_Warner_me...
Seems like:
- Netflix gets the movies and contents (HBO, WB) for its streaming service
- The rest (news, reality TV) will be spun off (Discovery Global)
Nearly every media journalist in Hollywood considers this to be the worst outcome for Hollywood.
Commenters here seem to be missing the larger David vs. Goliath story...
Netflix was a silicon valley start-up with a tech founder (Reed) who teamed up with an LA movie buff (Ted). They tried to solve a problem: it was too hard to watch movies at home, and Hollywood seemed to hate new tech. The movie industry titans alternated between fighting Netflix and making deals. They fought Netflix's ability to bulk purchase and rent out DVDs. Later, they lobbed insults even while taking Netflix's money for content licensing. Here's Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, in 2010:
"It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so." [1]
Remember: this was the same movie industry that gave us the MPAA and the DMCA. They were trying to ensure the internet, and new tech in general, had zero impact on them. Streaming movies and TV probably wouldn't exist if Netflix had not forced the issue.
Netflix buying HBO is significant, but also just another chapter in this story of Netflix's internet distribution model out-competing the Hollywood incumbents. Even now in 2025, at least 12 years after it was perfectly clear that streaming direct to the consumer would be the future, the industry is still struggling to turn the corner. Instead, they're selling themselves to Netflix.
I was at Netflix 2009-2019. It was shocking how easily our little "Albanian army" overthrew the empire. Our opponents barely fought back, and when they did, they were often incompetent with tech. To me, this is a story about how competent tech carried the day.
Netflix has been rapidly buying and building studio capacity for a decade now. Adding the WB studio production capacity is a huge win for Netflix. It makes those studios more productive: each day of content production is now worth more when distributed via Netflix's global platform.
Same with WB and HBO catalog and IP: it's worth more when its available to Netflix's approx 300 million members. Netflix can make new TV and films based on that IP, and it will be worth more than if it was only on HBO's platforms.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13bewkes.h...
Definitely the least bad outcome, but how much of this catalogue is going to completely drown in the horrid UI of Netflix's apps.
Sometimes it feels like Netflix has too much in its catalogue without any good tools to sort through and filter it.
I doubt that's an accident. They don't want you discover content you like, they want you to watch what they've put on your home screen.
It’s interesting that the stock market has no reaction to this news, after hours.
As of writing this, Netflix is -0.6%
"Priced in" I guess. I mean look at Warner Bros stock, steadily climbing the last couple months until it hit basically exactly the price shareholders will get in exchange for their shares as part of this deal.
Whenever one of my friends says they're thinking about getting into daytrading, all I can think is good luck beating the funds... they either can predict the future or just write it themselves.
You subscription is about to go up.
I'm going to start looking into alternative solutions ;)
Anyone have a solid alternative solution for local streaming?
I am still shocked not to see the opposite order -- but those days are long gone.
How the mighty have fallen.
For cinema, I guess that's all folks.
Surely the FTC will take issue with Netflix acquiring HBO Max?
Almost definitely not this FTC. And I'm not sure the FTC would in general considering there is a plethora of mainstream streaming providers outside of just Netflix and HBO Max.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Disney all have their hands in that bag. Not to mention all the old cable providers are practically streaming services now too. I don't even use my spectrum cable box, I use the Roku app to watch live TV and access all their on demand library
Until Netflix pays Trump personally $15M like Paramount did
Does this mean that now I can watch Bugs Bunny on Netflix?
Seems like it. I guess it also means Bugs Bunny t-shirts will be licensed by Netflix.
They could also do crossover merch, putting Bugs Bunny on a Squid Game jacket: https://www.netflix.shop/en-pe/collections/squid-game/produc...
They'll have to step up their game in plush, this to me looks like it's from CafePress: https://www.netflix.shop/en-pe/collections/squid-game/produc...
I was always wondering why Netflix didn't do some acquisitions for backlogs with how much they spend making mediocre to terrible movies and tv shows.
That was... kind of expected. But the web of cross-interests in the content industry just got another trans-dimensional knot in its topology...
Definitely not great, but at least that means Ellison won't amass even more media control (for now). That is maybe the silver lining.
The Ellison trying to buy WB was the younger one.
Not as absurd as back when AOL bought them, but just barely so. I think I'll have an extra frothy latte for breakfast today.
I wonder what this means for DC Comics and the current crop of DC films. Will Netflix prefer to start with a clean slate?
This should be an illegal aquisition
As someone who has recently begun exploring physical media, I find this quite disappointing. The volume on 4K Blu-Rays is often low, prices are high, and Netflix isn't doing much to support physical media.
When you're just unwinding in front of a 65-inch screen, you might not notice the quality loss from compression. However, if you're actively watching on a 110-inch projector with an excellent sound system, every little detail becomes clear.
And that doesn't even address the most frustrating part: owning less and less.
I mean, no one needs to become a physical distributor, but it's disheartening that we lack consumer-friendly ownership of entertainment media when it comes to movies. I would love to see something like Bandcamp, but specifically for studios to release their movies to.
> When you're just unwinding in front of a 65-inch screen, you might not notice the quality loss from compression.
this has little to do with the resolution, though. maybe 4k just gets the benefit of being compressed with better codecs.
for me at least, watching shows/movies at typical viewing distance, a well-encoded 4k->1080p mkv is only very slightly less sharp and is vastly smaller to store on the media server.
I'm curious, because I've had an interest in physical media, especially videogames, but what I keep coming back to is, "why would I bother when I can just pirate it?"
What's the attraction to the physical media given the availability of these versions online?
Pirating doesn't help sustain the very thing being pirated, if you want a tangible rather than moralistic reason.
4K (Ultra HD) Blu-Ray is likely the last physical home video media generation to be produced. Disney has pulled physical out of the Asian market, Best Buy stopped releasing any physical media beside games, Target stopped selling them beside certain DVDs.
If you want any chance of actually having high quality releases continue it needs to be supported. An issue though is certain less mainstream releases in Ultra HD Blu-Ray can be rather pricey (if they get a release at all). However I still buy those I'm interested in since I don't want lower quality streaming-tier video to be the only option available in the future, apart from concerns about the volatile nature of online-only libraries (various of which have been wholly removed in the past when licensing/ownership changes).
> What's the attraction to the physical media given the availability of these versions online?
Where do you think they've got the version that circulates the net?
don't be discouraged. 4k/UHD BR is still alive and well, even though it never can beat price of comparatively worse streaming versions. I just bought a relatively expensive UHD player and there are a lot of movies, and what I've noticed there are also boutique offerings and remasters going on in the market which I haven't noticed before. Going forward though, I'm not sure if there will be future for releases of new movies outside of big productions.
I can hardly blame a company for not supporting a product almost nobody wants to go back to.
There are a whole bunch of choice quotes from 1984 that apply to this situation, but my favorite is still this one: “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
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> I can hardly blame a company for not supporting a product almost nobody wants to go back to.
But that logic we should keep only insta, tiktok and youtube shorts.
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Just buy, buy, buy up the competition. Hope someone stops the big fish before it's the only one left.
Teen shows with 30 year olds by the fourth season... so that Steve Buscemi bit in 30 Rock will now be the norm.
Please Netflix, green light Westworld season 5
That's the exact opposite of Netflix most recent history, Westworld was an expensive production and viewing numbers on HBO were declining as seasons went on. Even relatively inexpensive looking Netflix shows got cancelled, i.e. GLOW, I Am Not Okay with This, Santa Clarita Diet, never mind shows that were less expensive than Westworld that had poor Netflix viewer metrics like The Residence, The OA, probably lots more I am leaving out. Early years maybe, like when they kept Orange is the New Black and House of Cards going to completion or resurrected Arrested Development.
> Netflix expects to maintain Warner Bros.’ current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films.
If Netflix is committing to releasing WB films in theaters, I wonder if they’ll also release shows under the WB/HBO label in the traditional weekly format. With the staggering amount of content that just exists and continues to grow, the “release everything at once and make people binge” model has had zero appeal to me. And seems quite detrimental to how the shows are paced — they seem heavily incentivized to end each episode with a cheap cliffhanger
Netflix was the worst option, except for all the others who were bidding.
Whole deal sounds Looney Tunes to me. Though Warner does have a substantial catalog, I dumped Netflix because I wasn't impressed with their offerings. After Paramount took all its toys home with them leaving the platform without Star Trek, I had little reason to stay. I'm not a big TV or film buff anyway.
Is this as big as I think it is?
Ads. This is how you get ads in streaming services.
Both Netflix and HBO already have ads.
Interesting, that will bring a big production house capabilities within Netflix itself
Unfortunately, Netflix thus far seems to lack the creative vision to fully utilize any size of production house (barring rare exceptions).
Netflix is already the sole client of a huge studio outside Madrid.
Aaah the race to the bottom accelerates.
I haven't been a Netflix user for years, the quality of their stuff went past a level I was no longer comfortable supporting. It became a platform that is designed to keep you watching (literally anything) as opposed to a platform to find interesting/relevant entertainment. So much low quality, low effort content. Wonder which of AI wrong-but-instant answers or Netflix' empty entertainment will contribute more to genpop enshitification.
Exactly. Netflix is doing a total opposite of HBO content. Also HBO has been great at localization for european regions (subs, local content) unlike Netflix which cannot be bothered to even make subtitles for markets they sell to.
IMO,Netflix wants to acquire their main competitor in europe.
In terms of people who actually like movies and music it’s not a great time.
Unfortunately it’s pretty clear that the true business model of music and content streamers is about “putting something on in the background” and not actually about the quality level of the content.
Thus you get inoffensive cheap netflix series and AI generated chill beats to study to, and no one really notices as long as it’s above a certain quality threshold.
And this isn’t exactly Netflix’s problem- they know what their users want. When you’re cooking dinner it doesn’t make much difference to you if it’s a Judd Apatow romantic comedy and one that’s some Hallmark knockoff romcom bullshit.
I’m not really sure how to solve the problem of this very siloed video content landscape. No one wants to subscribe to 4 streaming services.
I would think the original netflix model of being mailed bluray discs might be viable, but without independent studios like Warner around, why would anyone produce physical media?
My blood always boils a little whenever I read about Netflix's "Not second-screen enough" business model.
What shitty point we've enshittified to, where we prioritise passive slop consumption over active enriching one.
All of this is a result of the algorithmic media addiction people have been engineered into, in my opinion. Every moment you're not consuming something is a moment you're wasting, and a moment you have to spend alone with your thoughts (which is too terrfying for people now apparently).
A proper solution to current video content landscape used to be piracy - Netflix literally succeded early on in streaming because they were more convenient than pirating stuff. But with these Media Moguls lobbying hard to crack down on piracy (at the risk of privacy), it does look pretty bleak.
It would just get ripped and put on pirate streaming sites.
This seems like a chicken and egg downward spiral with consumers pirating and studios producing slop.
This wasn’t on my radar at all. Was this kept quiet or did I just not hear about it?
It's been talked about for like a month now
Its been going around in cicles between "WB is fine, just rejected 2 other offers, whats the worst that could happen" and "Netflix buy out any day now WB is in the toilet"
I realize this is about money, and it's 2025 right now, and I'm probably just old, but what will happen to quality? I actually laughed, twice, because they did this, twice:
> Beloved franchises, shows and movies such as [list of some of the greatest classics of all time] will join Netflix’s extensive portfolio including [list of laughable junk], creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences worldwide.
And then just a few lines later (and I won't snarkily shorten this one):
> By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies—from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends—with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we'll be able to do that even better.
Like did I really just see Citizen Kane in the same sentence as KPop Demon Hunters? Might as well add Ow, My Balls to the list, that's how jarring the contrast was for me.
Oh sweet, two of my subscriptions now reduced to one. Right?
Neutral here: I subscribe to neither.
I found out that there's a backlog of content going back over 100 years (a lot of it at the public library) and have been happily consuming that for about 6 or 7 years now.
(I still have about 4 decades to go to catch up with today—which will probably take me another 3 years or so).
That's my thinking. I get the argument for "reduced competition" but Netflix and HBO aren't competitors. They are just two companies in the same line of business, but with different production lines.
I do wonder what it will do for their sports deals. HBO have had the rights to a lot of sports, including Tour de France and the olympics and is the only way to get EuroSport, as well as a number of TV channels, including some country specific ones.
You don't see reduced competiton? HBO Max and Netflix are director competitors, post acqusition Netflix no longer had to compete hard with shows like Succession. The expanded catalog makes it even harder for smaller streamers to compete.
On sports rights Netflix no longer has to bid and compete with HBO, and same story having a bigger live sport inventory.
This is not unlike consolidation of food distributors where the end up wielding strong pricing power, farmers have fewer options to sell to and restaurants have few options to buy from. The middleman profits.
But yeah Netflix will probably spin off Cable
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This may be a hot take but maybe some consolidation in this streaming industry is beneficial, might save some people searching for content they want to see only to find they have to pay for another streaming service because right holders decided to launch their own streaming app.
Netflix prices will probably increase though, and they will probably ruin a lot of golden IP like always, so there's that to complain about.
> from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends
Holy crap did they actually put Citizen Kane and Friends in the same sentence?
What happens to my hbo max susbcription?
Pretty soon all media will be owned by 4 tech billionaires. They have done so well with preserving a free and open internet I cannot see why people are concerned they are gobbling up all the alternative legacy communications platforms.
Better netflix than than Ellison
So they can raise the prices again in a few months?
Netflix’s content selection has always felt weaker than traditional studios. Sometimes it even looks like filmmakers take Netflix’s massive budgets but don’t give them the same level of serious, polished work they deliver elsewhere.
So, if Netflix ends up managing Warner Bros or HBO, it’s hard not to worry. HBO and Warner Bros are known for premium, high-caliber content, and Netflix’s track record suggests the overall quality could easily take a hit.
Nice of them to start the conversations with a probably lie, that it will be less expensive for consumes because they can now bundle HBO/Netflix. Except this has never been true for more than enough time that for people to forget and past the time to change it, if at all. It will be less selection and cost more, like the usual.
They made the comment and CBC reported on it https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/us-netflix-warner-bros...
So, the big news has arrived finally
Where's Brendan Carr when you need him?
The sad thing is the WB Studio had a successful year and is healthy.
It's all the other idiotic stuff that's been attached to WB over the years that has broken the business. Time Warner AoL Discovery... is a poster child for what goes wrong when merger after merger happens.
A restructured WB Studio + HBO might be a good business.
Paramount can’t be happy
F...k , more forced inclusion on theaters now...
Paramount being the spurned suitor. David Ellison doesn't sound happy.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/par...
Netflix thwarting David Ellison and his push to pro-Israel-ify everything.
The US government made it illegal for movie studios to own movie theaters to prevent studios from only showing movies in theaters they own. Similar laws need to be passed to force streaming content to be shown on all services.
WB was another legacy media empire being run by a megalomaniac hell-bent on destroying their legacy.
I wouldn't normally support this kind of move, but unlike the Skydance deal, Netflix is actually a real company that, like, makes use of IPs and publishes back catalogues.
Things like Looney Tunes will now be in the hands of someone who doesn't hate Looney Tunes.
"Who acquires Warner Bros. Wtf" - comments heard over my shoulder as I mention the title of this post.
Three wishes - looney tunes and animatics full and uncensored. Don't update them for modern sensibilities. No new looney tunes content unless made by very talented people that love the old ones.
Netflix acquires Warner Bros and uncensored Looney Tunes and uncensored Tom & Jerry were never seen again.
Too big to fail?
John Oliver is a really happy man today
Where's the antitrust enforcement? This seems blatantly illegal.
I think the way they’ll justify it is by framing it as Disney’s empire versus a combined Netflix + Warner Bros empire.
Netflix is buying WB for "friends". That show will be on air for another 50 years.
welp, at least we got 2 or 3 good DC movies before now. It was great while it lasted. I'm so tired of living in hell
Supergirl and The Batman 2 are releasing relatively soon so I don’t think that will be affected much by all this. Same with Clayface since that just entered post production. It’s the movies coming after (Superman 2, Batman movie thats not tied to “The Batman”) that will be affected by all this.
My opinion of James Gunn has changed recently (especially after the ending of Peacemaker S2) but I still think he’s the best person possible to be in charge of live action DC. I really hope he keeps some form of control but I doubt it…
its wabbit season I guess
Oh cool, knock-on price hikes across not just the streaming industry, but all the other industries that decided they needed to bundle streaming subscriptions with their products.
Can't wait to pay even more for my cell bill because they give me "free" Netflix!
Couldn't care less, sailing the high sea is peaceful!
You'll care when there will be no physical media and you're left with compressed shit shown down your throat.
> You'll care when there will be no physical media
Physical media is on the way out for the most part, where it isn't already gone, and Netflix & co are the reason, not piracy.
> and you're left with compressed shit shown down your throat.
WRT “compressed shit”: the quality of ahem copies is often no worse than you'd get from an official streamed source. For those that have 4K-capable eyes it is often better as it JustWorks™ without quality dipping out due to bandwidth issues at the streamer, your ISP, or somewhere between, or for local playback needing a long fight to convince your Sony TV to accept that Sony media player connected via a Sony brand cable is legit.
I actually pay for a couple of streaming services (though Prime largely begrudgingly as it got rolled into the delivery service I use), but still get media from ahem other sources because the playback UX is often preferable.
Or if by “compressed shit” you are referring to the intellectual quality of the content not the technical merits of the medium, if it all turns to mush I'll just watch even less than I already do the same way I practically never game these days (though that is due to both content quality and technical matters). I've got other hobbies competing for my attention, I can just live without TV if TV quality falls further.
That doesn't stop an entire studio's worth of output becoming dumbed down to second screen content like Stranger Things.
What a weird thing to say
...and the global oligopoly grows ever smaller.
E N S H I T T I F I C A T I O N
Hey America, you're the problem.
and Warner Brothers owns HBO? So potentially, could we get all HBO shows on Netflix?
tech company buying warner bros, what could go wrong?
Bring back Silicon Valley?
...If they pay a large enough bribe.
and here begins the downfall of Warner Bros.
This sucks, now HBO content will disappear from being searchable in Apple TV.
This is terrible news. Expect enslopification of some of your favorite IPs. Christ.
Another dying industry acquiring another dying industry. Reminds me of Oracle buying Sun Microsystems.
Whether or not this deal gets regulatory approval depends entirely on whether or not Reed Hastings sufficiently kisses the ring when it comes to Donald Trump.
I'm personally against this. We've had too much consolidation. It's subscribers who will pay for this with hiked subscription fees.
Any pretense of government regulation is basically gone. Everything is for sale. What determines outcomes is corruption and loyalty. This is really no different to the Russian oligarchs under Putin. The SEC, FTC and DOJ are a joke, just tools to punish ideological foes and people who don't pay up.
All these companies are a consequence will become more ideologically conservative and that's a real problem for media companies because conservatives can't produce good content. Good content challenges the status quo and asks questions, two things conservatives simply don't tolerate. This will do nothing good for HBO.
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