Comment by afavour

This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. It was great and we got things like the Netflix Prize and all sorts of content ranking improvements, better CDN platforms, lower latency and less buffering, more content upgraded to HD and 4K. Plus some annoying but clearly effective practices like auto-play of trailers and unrelated shows.

Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.

> 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

This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.

> 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.

Exactly the correct solution.

We did something similar with movie theaters and film studios for decades, up until a couple years ago. Same sort of problem, same solution should work.

This feels very much like "United Stats vs Paramount Pictures: The Sequel"[1].

Vertical integration was the key problem back then. Major studios owned major cinema chains. They made it hard for independent cinemas to show the films people wanted, and they made it very hard for independent filmmakers to get their films shown anywhere. It was highly anti-competitive.

I wouldn't expect the U.S. government to step in this time around though. It's very clear that competition and benefiting consumers are no longer priorities.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

This should really be the end goal. We are worse off than cable right now with all these streaming services and worse , overlapping content.

This is how it was with cable, and it was actually better for the content providers. They made shows and got fat checks from the cable companies every year.

Then they all copied Netflix, because the stockmarket was rewarding it, and had to start dealing with billing, customer retention, technology platforms, advertising platforms. And they all lost a ton of money a doing it.

>>> 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.

This sounds fine in theory, but how would it work if the content were continuously changing? For example, the final straw that made my cut the cord of cable-tv was getting locked into a 3yr plan for cable TV only to get the Disney channel for the kids -- only to learn that Verizon/Disney had a fight and I lost the channel. https://deadline.com/2018/12/disney-warns-verizon-fios-custo...

Now, i'm still locked into the 3yr plan with Verizon but dont have the content I wanted. I know people complain about paying $10 or $15 for a streaming service, but imagine paying $100 for cable TV and being locked into a 3yr contract. I'd much, much rather have a la carte services I can pick and choose and cancel as desired.

However, if you're talking about the Amazon Prime TV model, then I'd totally agree with you. I think that is the ideal model -- Prime is a nominal cost (for now) and you can add/remove channels as you wish.

You can today no? You can buy or rent a single movie / tv series from apple tv, amazon etc. problem is most people don't want to buy each thing they want to watch.

This would be ideal. The cable model was inherently flawed; it was just a series of local monopolies that poisoned it. Give consumers a choice. But considering everyone operates like Disney anymore and is highly protective of its IP I doubt this world will ever exist without direct government intervention.

This is how cable worked, no? And how streaming has been working. And it MIGHT be getting things cheaper, maybe? I guess?

But watching specific stuff you want is hell. The cognitive load of searching a bunch of services, or finding a site that tells you where to watch, then it’s not in that same service in your country, you might have to pay extra, or sign up for another streaming service or… Holy cow, it’s a terrible experience.

I’m not saying I have a better idea, or that it couldn’t be worse. But it’s terrible.

I wish that'd happen, but instead what we have is that everybody is making terrible new content, and getting any of the old content is a nightmare too because there are 28 or so subscriptions needed, which are constantly increasing prices (yeah, they are supposed to be competing, but somehow...) and constantly shuffling their lists, so you can just lose access to a series in the middle of a rewatch. I hope eventually it will organize into something resembling normalcy, but it's not happening so far... There's of course other solution (ahoy, matey!) but I'd rather just pay reasonable sum for a subscription. I know Netflix buying everything is not a solution either, but so far it's only getting worse.

I want more than two parties competing to run the democracy, also.

The things you want arn't going to happen under the current operating procedures of the United States of America.

I hope that's clear.

I'm more for requiring licensing to anyone and everyone for the same price, including yourself. No more exclusives. Streaming platforms compete on cost, features and availability of niche content. Even further, choosing to not license content to anyone creates an implicit license for everyone. No more lost content. But I don't think any countries are looking at legislation like this, with entertainment way down on everyone's agenda.

I'm still upset with how quickly shows get cancelled nowadays, like the axed Altered Carbon and The Expanse and the endings of neither felt satisfying and the final seasons - rushed.

Whatever set of circumstances leads to that, it would be nice not to have that. Somehow it feels like a huge org owning both the content creation as well as distribution leads to that.

Mostly agree, but I’d advocate for a carve-out for DropoutTV; maybe; exempt if (1) only hosting your own content and (2) that content can be licensed by other services?

I agree that separation of concerns might bring better content but I can't afford buying multiple services in hopes of catching what I want.

(Actually, I can afford it but I'm ... frugal.)

You can have one middle man platform to stream everything but competition to get good movies to that platform, it's a shame that we have so many platforms now

I want all the movies for free without pirating

We could deliver to consumers over some sort of "cable". But what would we call it?

Let the market figure it out. There has never been an easier time to make content and there has never been an easier time to distribute content.

HBO owns Westworld and stopped streaming it to avoid paying residuals.

I think ideally you'd have 2-3 streaming services that all have all the content without exclusives? (So the spotify of movies and tv, the tidal of movies and tv, the bandcamp of movies and tv...)

[dead]

Like we had for music on the radio, compulsory licensing

We could do that by limiting copyright to just 10-14 years. All platforms could have all that content forever without paying a dime. New stuff and exclusives would still be a draw to attract people to one platform or another.

It would be great for consumers if it was just free

>Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars.

Netflix went public in 2002. It was +8 years later that the streaming-only service was launched in 2010. The digital streaming wasn't "subsidized by VC".

Netflix had more content from everybody back then because the other studios licensed their content for cheap prices to Netflix. But those studios then realized that Netflix was growing rapidly on the backs of their content. Once those multi-year contracts expired, studios like Disney didn't renew with Netflix and instead, started their own platform (e.g. Disney+).

As a consumer, I feel that consolidation is wonderful because it is one less account and password and charge on my credit card that I have to think about.

That only happened because the content libraries decided to exit the music streaming game.

It also helped that the largest player in the music content library game (Sony) was not really as adept at software as Comcast, Disney, and NBCU were.

So does that mean if I ever create a video I just allow anyone to have it?

Netflix is still "competing" with discs at this point, although I would accept that discs aren't exactly winning. Most of the content I watch comes from blu-rays, and with a few exceptions (The Americans, grr), most of the things I want to watch have been released on disc. In fact, there is a small community of film enthusiasts who continue to purchase media outright, e.g., https://www.blu-ray.com.

I started using Netflix in 2001 as a DVD subscriber. It was wonderful for nearly 20 years. I ended up canceling before the service officially ended because it was clear that the writing was on the wall and the service was going downhill fast. You used to be able to get nearly any movie or TV series, domestic or foreign. It's a lot more work to find good stuff now, even with streaming in the mix.

We could get back to that world with anti-trust enforcement and mandatory licensing, while still keeping whatever positive effects competition has had on content production (which I think are debatable at best: it seems like no one outside of low-budget stuff like Dropout is making anything interesting in the US right now.)

Netflix may have the technical ability, but they don't deliver. Their UI just gets worse and worse in terms of usability and they keep cutting features on top of steadfastly refusing to provide features people have been asking for since they started steaming movies.

Basically every streaming app is minimally functional and obnoxious in their own ways. netflix isn't the worst of them, but it's no exception and getting worse all the time.

>you paid a pretty low price to get virtually everything you wanted

Depends what you wanted.

Both a deep back catalog of TV and film more generally were always pretty lacking on all-you-could-eat streaming services. Frankly, my biggest complaint with Netflix is that they basically drove local video rental out of business and then shut their own rental down.

As a rule of thumb maybe, but in this case it might well.

for me it is pirating everything since since the video stores closed down and never giving any money to any of these companies

>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.

Plus a cable TV subscription in many/most cases.

Netflix really struggles to make quality content. If we could somehow divorce the studios from the platforms, that would be ideal. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

In their books (e.g. "No Rules Rules" Netflix seems extremely attractive to creators because they pay top dollar, as a general policy, and have the internal decision-making processes that support making bold bets on art without committees that push "safer" creative choices.

Totally fair. The rights around a lot of media is a giant mess. Is why songs used on some movies are not the same as the ones that were used in theaters. And is just baffling for people from the outside to consider.

Netflix is a terrible media company. They don't invest in their library and are happy to cancel shows without concluding them screwing the creators and the fans. They canceled a show within the same month it released!

If a show does somehow get more than one season they can also be painfully slow. Stranger things took a 9 years to drop just 5 seasons. The Witcher was 6 years for just 4 seasons.

Licensing being a giant mess for media is not exactly news? Netflix reportedly got some really good deals early on, but of the kind that nobody was willing to do again.

They didn't have the luxury of first sale to protect their market, though. Which is a very sharp contrast to how they ran the DVD side of things.

So, it isn't that they were wasting money on licensing. Licensing kept getting more and more expensive. Not fully for nefarious reasons, but that doesn't change that it was so.

Speaking as someone who once worked at a company where these were real issues that came up - it's very often the case that intermediate parties in the contracts have dissolved.

Renegotiating the contracts would require lengthy and expensive processes of discovering the proper parties to actually negotiate with in the first place.

Although the contracts that were already executed can be relied upon, it truly is a can of worms to open, because it's not "Renegotiate with Studio X", it's "Renegotiate with the parent company of the defunct parent company of the company who merged with Y and created a new subsidiary Z" and so on and so forth, and then you have to relicense music, and, if need be, translations.

Then repeat that for each different region you need to relicense in because the licenses can be different for different regions.

The cost of negotiation would be greater than the losses to piracy tbh.

I'm with you in spirit, but I think you are underestimating how wide and complex the dependency trees can be in content licensing. And simplifying those licensing structures often mean removing control from individual artists, which we tend to consider a Bad Thing.

> 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.

Which is a perfectly sensible reason for a business decision.

> "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.

So laws should just be ignored? Issues created by human social constructs are very real.

The issue is that Netflix doesn't control those restrictions, the content creators (well, rights holders) do, and their incentives don't always align.

Licensing is really complicated and requires lot of paper work. The best example is the music soundtracks of old TV series. They even get substituted if they don't get the proper license to stream them. So some old show get new soundtrack or background music and they don't feel the same.

The discovery+ app is still operating in some regions because of licensing 3.5 years since all the discovery content got integrated into hbo-max.

I quit my 50% discount after realizing that if I don't watch it anyways.

Funny thing though. When I cancelled my subscription, they offered me 50% off for a month or something like that.

Oh no I am reminded of my dead physical Rolling Stone lifetime subscription!

"The price of one subscription" being the price of Netflix plus the price of HBO. Streaming is turning back into cable where everything is trapped in one bill, no matter how expensive and uninteresting some part of that bill is.

Having Discovery's awful content push out quality HBO content was already a major blow.

Yeah but there is 0 chance that the cost would remain similar to what it is now

> Netflix and HBO Max content at the price of one subscription

Yes, the price of one subscription. I think some cable packages in the US are $200 per month?

well, you'd get it at price of twice of current subscription

> Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor.

Only in the US. Everywhere else Hulu has always been integrated into Disney+).

Part of that is because Disney didn’t outright own Hulu until recently. It was a joint ownership.

I assume it has as much to do with the fact that Disney and Comcast didn't settle on terms of sale for Comcast's minority stake in Hulu until June of this year.

Everything about these big moves in the streaming space is basically to re-create the "good old days" of cable subscriptions and pay-per-view.

I think we can expect HBO streaming to continue as a premium subscription for movies and high-production-value shows. That would let everything else to land on Netflix with no conflict.

I can imagine an internal analysis that says:

Move show X, Y, and Z from Netflix to HBO Max because those profiles are likely to add the second subscription.

---

Piracy seems like the only thing that keeps prices/practices in check.

Yeah, I can easily see something like 2 separate at $20/month vs 1 super at $35/month (make-believe figures).

Assuming all WB and Netflix customers move to the super platform, that's a loss for Netflix (assuming the super platform doesn't significantly reduce their costs).

And the $35 might be more than some set of current Netflix subscribers want to pay, so they drop the service, so an even bigger potential loss.

Certainly, I have no desire to subsidize sports fans via a higher Netflix super package.

And their service is trash, technically speaking. I sometimes sit down with a burrito and pick a show and wonder if I’m going to finish the burrito before the show actually starts playing. It’s embarrassing. There’s a lot to hate about Netflix but they are highly competent when it comes to the perf of the UI and the streaming.

No, that was going to happen next year, but it never did and this deal has been agreed for the whole company.

WB pitched that to make it easier for them to be acquired by shunting all the debt to the channels entity - but it was unlikely the debt owners were ever going to go for that as presented, there would have been quite a significant chance of the channels group going under and them losing all the money.

But ultimately it turned out that enough entities were willing to bid now, before that split, that there was no point continuing to work out how to do it. Netflix will, presuming this deal completes, be the owner of CNN/TNT/Discovery at al.

Now, I am very sure they will look to sell several parts of those off - there is absolutely no way Netflix leadership wants to continue to own TNT - but that will have to come later.

If they like money, they'll just roll HBO into Netflix and raise prices. I really doubt Disney's complex bundling/pricing scheme is helping their bottom line.

Well all the content costs don't change, and they can combine CDN servers anywhere it makes sense regardless of whether it's one service or two. So revenue and margin numbers should track pretty tightly.

Yeah to be honest i see approaching 45-50/mo coming at some point in the next few years easily.

> They all had their chance. They blew it.

This is so silly. It's like saying "Sweet manufacturers all had the chance to sell the same sweets, and they blew it. So I just nick most sweets." Just say "I don't like paying for things and can get away with this, and my ethics only work in public or when I'm forced to obey them." And then we're done.

Or...don't pirate and rotate streaming services. Just because a new show drops doesn't mean you need to watch it next week

The comment you're replying to said "legally".

Yeah until Netflix adds tiered pricing for content and you end up paying more than what Netflix + HBO Max together would have cost because Netflix is the only game in town for that content..

I think like all media consolidation this will send a lot of people back to the seven seas..

Which is why it won't happen, what would the revenue benefit of that be?

In the medium term you'll get a D+/Hulu-esque split with maybe a discounted bundle of Netflix and HBO Max together - the evidence is pretty strong that bundles reduce churn.

If they ever do go to one library, it'll be because Netflix feel they are able to push prices to the same level as both services combined.

I'm actually a little surprised that, some discounts for annual subscriptions notwithstanding, the streaming services haven't done more to discourage short-term jump on/jump off subscriptions.

But they have the data and I don't. I assume there's enough stickiness and inertia that most people are not canceling and restarting services all the time. I know I don't. I just decide I don't care enough about most content (and don't really watch much video or binge watch anyway).

The Crown is absolutely a prestige TV show. Stranger Things is also high quality and high budget. You could probably include Bridgerton in there too, it's not my kind of show but I can still recognize that it's a well put together one.

> produce something as high-quality as GoT

Netflix is a different creature because of streaming and time shifting.

They don't care about people watching a pilot episode or people binge watching last 3 seasons when a show takes off.

The quality metric therefore is all over the place, it is a mildly moderated popularity contest.

If people watch "Love is Blind", you'll get more of those.

On the other hand, this means they can take a slightly bigger risk than a TV network with ADs, because you're likely to switch to a different Netflix show that you like and continue to pay for it, than switch to a different channel which pays a different TV network.

As long as something sticks the revenue numbers stay, the ROI can be shaky.

Black Mirror Bandersnatch for example was impossible to do on TV, but Netflix could do it.

Also if GoT was Netflix, they'd have cancelled it on Season 6 & we'd be lamenting the loss of what wonders it'd have gotten to by Season 9.

Until Disney killed it because "they didn't like the numbers" the Avengers series, including Dare Devil, Luke Cage, etc were highly regarded by all my friends at the time. I don't know why Disney screwed that up colossally outside of wanting the show within Disney Plus.

Let's be honest, all the netflix plans will have ads just like they do now. They might not interrupt your show while you're in the middle of it, but you'll get ads no matter what. Ads as soon as the credits roll, a barrage of full screen ads if you pause a show for more than 10 seconds, full screen ads the moment you open the app, etc.

There's still the one layer that comes with Dolby Atmos and access to the WB back catalogue

Netflix Plus (Netflix+) which is a side subscription to all of that which lets you syncopate different playback screens to one account, or some other esoteric value add which muddies the waters

"Maxflix" sounds like a name for a pornstudio but it is i guess better than the alternative of "NetB.O."

MaxNet if you want to go final form Fortune 100

And then to X

then to NetMax

look up the parent tree... There was this statement:

> 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.

The HBO Max service has something like 128M subscribers. This is < half of the 301M subscribers Netflix has, but is still a large number.

Certainly there's going to be some duplication, but it would be unwise to suddenly disrupt the delivery vehicles that you have 128M paying customers using in favor of a different delivery vehicle.

So, you should expect all the various HBO Max clients in existence to continue working for at least 5 years after the acquisition closes, if not longer.

Suddenly turning that off and saying "go use the Netflix app" wouldn't be good.

In any case, moving all the WB content onto the Netflix CDN and making it available on all the Netflix clients is "product integration", not "infrastructure integration". You are likely to see that very quickly. Weeks to months after the acquisition closes.

But, getting rid of all the HBO Max client software that talks to the HBO Max Servers running in whatever data center or cloud WB is using, and downloading video from whatever CDN WB has, and all the associated infra stuff, that's infra integration and it won't happen for a while. I think that will take 5-10 years.

"Something good" is subjective and your opinion. They make a lot of shows to appeal to all kinds of different audiences. I'm not sure why you'd conclude they would 'drag down' the quality.

This year Netflix and HBO both tied for most Emmy awards, at 30 each. Netflix is usually in the top few slots for both nominations and wins.

> The exact same road that generally leads to the same sort of problematic consolidation?

But more drawn out. This way, creatives, consumers will get a reinvigorated outlet, rather than seeing it spiraling downward.

Technically Skydance is led David Ellison, Larry's son.

Though, he's a trustfund kid and you can make a case that Larry owns it indirectly. (But if you want to make that case then it implies that Larry owns two media empires given his daughter Megan Ellison owns slightly less successful Skydance rival Annapurna.)

That’s David Ellison, not Larry. (Same family, though.)