Comment by smallerfish
3 hours ago
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.
This makes zero sense.
Can you name another scenario where consolidation helped the consumer? Where a sweet spot involved more consolidation?
Did Breyer’s ice cream get better when it was purchased by Unilever?
Did your local grocery store chain get better after it was acquired by Kroger or Albertsons?
Did the smartphone market get better when Microsoft acquired Nokia and HP acquired Palm?
What about Hashicorp? Sun Microsystems? Dark Sky? Red Hat? Slack? Nest? Any of these product markets get better post-consolidation?
I struggle to think of a single example of a product category that got better with industry consolidation.
It's bad for everyone. Fewer buyers = less content made and lower budgets, fewer voices being heard.