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.
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”
He also really doesn't do much (almost any?) charity so far in his life. And he never had to split assets in a divorce. So he's like a dung beetle of money.
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.
Back when he was in competition with Gates for #1, I recall him changing his contract so he was getting paid in stock options instead of salary so he could get rich faster.
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.
In business, it's sometimes more about people's expectations for a company's future than their past performance.
We must never assume the market is rational, and enough people getting hyped at the same time can give a company enough short-term cash to make an unexpected move.
It's a combination of the over-valuation of Oracle - popping on the late stage of the AI bubble - and Ellison owning so much of Oracle.
Even after the recent drop, Oracle is trading for ~33 times last four quarters operating income. With their meh growth rate, fair value is closer to half that. Except we're in an AI bubble. Oracle is riding the tail of the AI bubble just as they popped to the moon toward the end of the dotcom bubble. Oracle will contract afterward accordingly. The stock probably won't see this era's highs again for another 20 years, if ever.
> 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.
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.
It is worth noting that the Netflix Prize winner's solution was never meaningfully used, because Netflix pivoted from ranking content based on what you tell them you like to ranking content based on clicks and minutes watched.
To say that "we have solved ranking" because Netflix decided to measure shallow metrics and addiction is... specious at best. Instead the tech industry (in all media domains, not just streaming video) replaced improving platforms and services in meaningful ways with surveillance and revenue extraction.
Exactly. Nothing is really preventing a $200/month aggregator beyond paying a bunch of lawyers and people not wanting to pay that. I know I'll live with some service fragmentation in exchange for not paying for a bunch of stuff I'll maybe watch once in a blue moon. And I'll probably buy some discs for things I really want to see.
Exclusive deals are preventing it. Media content is resistant to commodification, making it a durable value proposition, and this makes exclusive licensing deals highly desirable - lawyers hired by an upstart aren't going to make a dent in this.
Don't disagree. Just paying lawyers was sort of a facile dismissal on my part. In video content, there's a lot of history that makes it hard to get closer to the way things are in music. Though there are also monetary incentives and practicalities as well.
Ah yes, today where they optimized out the recommendation algo to the point I haven't found something recommended to be watch worthy in years. The only thing worse than the video streaming recommendations is what's become of Amazon/Audible's book recommendations (though Spotify is trying hard to enshitify their algos to catch up).
Sad that we can't have nice things, but capitalism must be fed and I guess good, targeted recommendation algorithms are anti-capital.
> 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.
Music publishing vs radio stations is a fascinating example - compulsory licensing, meaning radio stations are free to broadcast any music at all; even rules preventing radio stations and DJs from accepting payola from publishers to promote their records.
Like vertical integration isn't always bad 100% of the time, but this particular case of marrying distribution and production seems to serve minimal beneficial purpose and inevitably the main outcome is high levels of rents-collection and squeezing the people doing the actual creative work. There's pretty much nothing but up-side to forcing the two roles to remain separate.
It's probably got something to do with copyright. Like the way it interacts with markets makes this sort of arrangement net-harmful pretty much any time you see it.
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.
it is nice that if you pay enough you can avoid ads, but they are definitely coming to all the lower price tiers… and the premium tiers will of course get more expensive over time
Lots of things didn't have ads on the past (basic cable TV for example). Today the model has changed to being expensive and still collect data/push ads. This isn't a cable vs streaming thing, it's a then vs now thing.
True. People forget television itself is barely 100 years old. Business models don't grow on trees, they need to be invented and they evolve along with the technology.
Advertising was with us for centuries, but it took until last few decades for it to evolve into a social cancer it is today.
That was 80s Reagan/conservative American. Those folks weren't as greedy as modern day companies and they cared about their product/experience, whereas nowadays caring about that is outsourced (see the Mad Men mess) and greed is king.
It's wild to long for the day of 'caring', 'sane', Reagan era corporate 'governance'.
Look up "corporate raiders" if you think business people weren't greedy in the 80s, or the dissolution of Ma Bell, that used to rent you your phone. In fact, the 80s era cable TV also started the box rental racket. You could not choose to buy, you had to rent.
Regan's politics are completely orthogonal to IP content today.
There is a difference between a streaming platform and cable. Streaming platforms are on demand while cable is broadcast.
To have an ads/no ads option with cable, you need 2 distinct channels with different programming, as you need something fill what would be the ad breaks. With an on-demand platform, there is no fixed schedule, so you can insert ads at will without having to account for that.
So even if the market for no ads is small, it doesn't cost them much to provide that option, and they just have to price it above how much they get from ads to make a profit. Even the seldom used YouTube Premium is actually quite profitable for Google. Streaming platforms won't miss that opportunity.
As far as I can tell there isn't one. Even when you pay extra for no ads the interface itself is infested with them. A truly ad free amazon prime tier wouldn't constantly push shows and movies you that you have to pay for on top of the higher monthly fee you're already paying for or show ads for shows and movies on other platforms.
They're clever with that, by offering subscriptions to various producers and other streaming platforms within Amazon Prime video UI. The Amazon subscription is very cheap, but then you end up sub-subscribing to SkyShowtime and MGM and Apple Video to get access to your favorite space shows, and suddenly it's cable 2.0.
Wouldn't be so bad if the player didn't suck. You'd think video streaming chrome would be a solved problem by now, but it's not, and somehow we're regressing on this front.
Go to the Prime Video website, or check your settings in Prime Video on your device.
I have lived a video ad free life for decades. I am convinced video ads do bad things to our brains. In aggregate, beyond any individual impact they may or may not have.
Ad blockers, ad free YouTube, Kagi, … whatever it takes.
> Did people forget that on cable you could only watch what was being broadcast in that moment?
On-demand cable content existed and was significant at the tail end of the period when cable was still dominant, so it is probably lost of most people's baseline (at least, those that didn't either abandon it early or never had it at all) in comparing to cable.
Steaming is slowly going back to that too. Netflix got popular for letting people binge shows that released but increasingly they are putting out shows one episode a week so that they can keep the hype up over a longer period and better monitor/control social media.
Netflix also hides a ton of their content and aggressively pushes whatever is new because it makes it easier for them to get immediate metrics on how popular something is.
Right now, you're pretty much stuck watching whatever is being "streamed in that moment" as it is. For example, netflix added the austin powers movies in October, but by Dec 1 they were removed. You had a window of just 2 months to watch and if you missed them you're stuck waiting for them to "rerun" just like regular TV. I expect that trend to continue with shorter and shorter windows as Netflix pushes people to watch shows when they want you to watch them.
Certainly TiVo came in--as well as boxes from cable companies (though I only had TiVo). And, if you really want to go old school, you could program VCRs to record shows if you were off on vacation.
But there was a long period even after cable came in for more channels and potentially better reception when TV was largely on a set schedule.
Why is overlapping content an issue? Isn't that good?
Let's say I like Show A and Show B. Show A is available on Provider 1 and Provider 2, Show B is available at Provider 2 and Provider 3. Thanks to overlapping content, I can subscribe to Provider 2 and I can watch both of my favorite shows.
It depends on what you watch and how much you watch.
Cable in its heyday was expensive, even for a low tier package with CNN, TNT, MTV, Nickelodeon and other non-premium channels. Most people did not have premium channels like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc. Even Disney was a paid add-on in the early 90s. Adding or removing those channels at the minimum meant calling customer service and in certain eras of cable technology could even mean waiting on a tech visit to provision physical descrambling equipment. And obviously TV was linear, not on-demand.
If you watch a series or movie here and there, and aren't a big TV viewer, the streaming era is much, much cheaper with greater choice. You can often even access what you want to watch through a free trial, a single-month subscription, or a free service like Tubi or Pluto. Movie rental options are much better, more convenient, and cheaper (often even before adjusting for inflation) than Blockbuster, and you have access to much better information before you pull the trigger on renting a movie you haven't heard of before.
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.
You mean the "license while they feel like it" kind of purchase?
If I could pay for individual TV shows and actually own them I'd definitely prefer that over the disaster we have today. Buying a blue-ray and ripping it is not very practical and it's by design.
Netflix (notoriously) does not license most of their content this way. You can't rent/buy Stranger Things on Apple TV, no matter how much you're willing to pay. If Netflix acquires Warner Bros, I expect this restriction to extend to that content too over time.
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 agree with you that modern streaming service are a hassle, BUT - I'm old enough to remember Blockbuster, too. It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you drove to the video store, found a copy, paid $2 to rent it for 24 hours, tried to remember to rewind it and got it back to the store before it was late. Streaming services are _definitely_ more convenient.
Right now, you can pretty much rent any movie you want through Amazon Prime with not late fee or rewind penalty, but you have to pay a couple of (extra!) dollars to do it. This is, undebatably, a massive improvement over the way it used to be in every way, but it still bothers me even though I can't put my finger on exactly why.
An analyst friend of mine wrote that Napster was more about convenience than price (free). I disagreed with him at the time but, with the rise of various streaming services, I've come to view myself as at least partially wrong.
Maybe not the broke 20 year old per another comment. (Who doesn't have a lot of money anyway.) But a lot of people are happy and able to pay for a subscription that doesn't involve screwing around with a lot of dodgy stuff.
I thought this conclusion about Napster was and is widely considered as true and most important lesson of that time. Success of YouTube, Spotify, Netflix and Steam and the near-demise of piracy are usually attributed to that.
I'm talking from at least a decade ago. There was a pretty wide assumption (including from myself) that the main attraction of Napster was piracy; it certainly was mine at the time as I replaced a bunch of old vinyl. The expansion of music streaming services are certainly a pretty good indication that convenience of getting mainstream content at prices that people historically paid for vinyl/CDs works pretty well.
Watching specific stuff you want to see is 1000x easier today than it was in the 1990s, when cable ran this whole industry, and anything you wanted came bundled with 100 things you didn't want.
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.
Honestly the biggest problem was/is copyright law. Make everything older than 10-14 years public domain and streaming services would have endless amounts of content always available. Independently operated streaming sites would be all over the internet.
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.
I would be curious how the financial wires got crossed.
I would have assumed residuals were proportional to views, and views valued proportionally as contributing to subscription demand. And it would be a rare viewer to watch one show like that, over & over. I.e. only upside. Something went sideways.
Thats how it used to work in the movie theater/cable days. Then Netflix said "I will pay you a ton of money up front to own everything" Creatives said amazing! Then the "war" for creative talent started because of the fragmentation of services, so you got people saying I will pay you X + a royalty regardless because you are so sought after, which eventually, as you see here, priced them out of their own content.
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...)
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.
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.
Nah, there's no reason why trillion dollar companies should be allowed to pay anything to keep our shared culture locked up. Doing so only hinders innovation and the creation of new works. 14 years was long enough back when global distribution was unimaginable and any distribution at all was highly expensive.
Today you can instantly distribute media to the entire planet at near zero expense. If you can't make money after a decade you have only yourself or your product to blame. Also, it's not as if once something goes into the public domain all income stops either. With even a small amount of effort creators can continue to successfully package and sell their stuff to the fans even when it's avilable for free. It's worked on me several times in fact.
>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+).
You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean they weren't still in "growth" phase.
Their pricing, and their doubling down on account sharing policies over the last few years have shown that they are no longer in a growth phase.
I cancelled my Netflix account a few months ago because I had gotten the "You're not accessing this from your typical location" blocker. Even though I was trying to watch from my permanent residence and I was the account owner / payee.
The reason that happened was that my wife and I own two properties. We are happily married, not separated, but we just like our space... especially with two adult daughters who still live at home with one of their significant others also living in the house.
We are a single family "unit" but have two locations. Furthermore, my wife has sleeping issues and was using Netflix at night in order to fall asleep. To have to get me to check my email for an access code, was a total deal breaker since I would be fast asleep. So that cut her off from her typical usage of Netflix.
And the reason Netflix thought that I was accessing the service from a different location was that I hardly ever watched it. Every time I'd pull it up, I would spend more time scrolling for something to watch than actually watching anything.. and typically I'd just give up and go watch a 30m YouTube video instead.
So I was paying more, receiving less ... mostly had the account purely for my wife and daughters who watched it the most ... and then the final deal breaker was logistical barriers preventing me from being able to use what I'm paying for.
Agree, but I think they moved away from growth to this not because they lost investor money / vc demands but because they started losing a lot of licensing deals and content, and had to shift from redistribution to making more and more originals with capital investment cost and etc.
Slightly different reasons for enshitiffication - if Spotify lost half of their catalogue suddenly they might move in the same way I guess.
These content library contracts are only for a couple of years, and each time one lapses, some terms get negotiated. Nobody in the streaming industry is successful because they have a long term lock on someone else’s content. It’s all about eyeballs and margins.
Sure, that was very early though. You could argue that was crucial for establishing their brand, but the industry has caught up and doesn't do that very much now.
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
> 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.
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.
I think the main reason they aren't competing as much now is that blu ray players / computers with disc drives / consoles with disc drives are getting more scarce?
I don't even know where I would get a good blu ray drive. The videophile subreddits keep suggesting very specific models with flashed firmware, which is not exactly accomodating to the public.
The causality might be backwards there. Blu ray and other disk players are likely becoming scarce because people are using them less rather than people using them less because the devices are scarce.
What happened to Netflix DVD by mail was that Redbox ate its lunch, which ultimately was also a failing business model.
> Netflix is still "competing" with discs at this point
An increasing number of shows are never getting released on physical media to prevent this. The only thing streaming services are competing with in any meaningful way is piracy and I'm guessing piracy is going to get more and more popular the more greed/enshittification keeps making streaming platforms worse
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.
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.
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.
This. I loved the DVD service and I don't think I was alone. Younger folks didn't perhaps use it as much as some, but for those who don't have the best internet speed or service, they were great.
Even when I had good service/speeds the DVD service was amazing because it had way more options than streaming does even now, including some pretty hard to find DVDs, and you got the extra features! It was also nice to regularly get something in my mailbox besides spam...
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
And this is precisely because Netflix doesn't have to hit the jackpot with each new movie. They just have to keep people hooked on that subscription. It's one of the few times where the subscription model works best.
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.
I mean, I'm not going to try and defend them from never having made bad calls. But, I'm not clear that they are any worse at this than other media companies?
To wit, finding a show that was canceled the month it was released probably isn't that hard? Same for shows that had trouble keeping cadence. Especially during COVID.
Do we have data that shows they are worse?
(Also, I think it is perfectly valid to object to this acquisition on other merits. I just would love some old backlogged cartoons to get wider distribution.)
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.
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.
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.
Copyright has never been about benefitting consumers. Or artists, for that matter.
It was invented to protect publishers (printing press operators). That continues to be who benefits from copyright. It's why Disney is behind all the massive expansion of copyright terms in the last hundred years.
> 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.
Disobeying unjust laws is a moral imperative. Working around laws that hurt society is good for society. Changing laws that aren't benefiting society is the sign of a functioning government.
We can change the laws. Radio stations don't have "licensing issues" with playing songs.
From another angle, if copyright were more like it was originally in the US, every single show I watched as a kid would be in the public domain, since I haven't been a kid for 28 years.
Radio is a lot simpler. Used to work in that realm back in the Napster and Kazaa days.
You have a broadcast station. You know that estimated 30k people are listening. You sell those numbers to advertisers. Now you play a song 1x, you record that fact. At the end of the month, you tally up 30k users for that artist and you cut a check to ASCAP or BMI. Thats it. You just keep track of how many plays and your audience size, and send checks monthly itemized.
They were downloading pirate Britney Spears over Napster and playing it on air. And since 100% royalties are paid for, was actually legal. Not a lawyer, but they evidently checked and was fine.
I'd like something similar for video. Grab shows however, and put together the biggest streaming library of EVERYTHING, and cut royalty checks for rights holders. But nope, can't do that. Companies are too greedy.
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.
Much like local control of zoning, that is an principle that many folks take on faith as being "good" despite all the actual outcomes.
In collaborative productions it is almost never the "individual" artist anyway: it's whatever giant conglomerate bought whatever giant conglomerate that paid everyone involves as little as the union would let them get away with.
Yea, what I mean by "people who make decisions" is everybody involved: studios, distributors, rights holders, and the maze of middlemen who have inserted themselves into the business: If all of them decided that more money could be made, if not for those pesky licenses, the "licensing problems" would immediately disappear.
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.
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.
"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.
The cable thing in US is something Im struggling to wrap my mind around. I can’t imagine someone deliberately paying so much money for such a bad content.
The only explanation I can think of is that most of the subscribers are elderly folks who signed up long time ago and didn’t bother to look into current bills.
Internet/TV bills can be negotiated, but it is usually something you have to do annually and most people, rightly so, hate it. The companies make it hard to do, so most people would rather pay an extra $5-10 rather than spending an hour or two on the phone. After 5-10 years, those fee bumps really add up.
The only way to keep Internet/TV costs low is to threaten to cancel or switch every year, and actually be willing to do it. For some that isn't an option because there is only 1 provider, and others I've talked to hate that idea because you have to learn a new channel lineup. It's amazing how much people will pay to not be slightly inconvenienced.
Live sports and public television was kind of the last bastion in my mind, but the former is piecemeal being acquired by streaming the platforms and the latter is largely being put on the internet for free.
Your last point is the stronger one. Live events, including sports, are a heavy driver of these subscriptions.
Another is broadband deployment. Choice is low in many parts of the country, and bundled service offerings are frequently priced near the "internet only" offerings to nudge customers into a "might as well" posture.
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.
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.
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.
The irony is that a lot of people complained loudly about the cable bundle then complained loudly about streaming service fragmentation even when it at least offered a choice to cut their monthly bill.
There was a brief happy period where you could ditch cable ($100/month or whatever), subscribe to ~2-3 streaming services (~2-3x $20/month), save a decent amount and still have a good selection of content. And bonus, you didn't have any ads.
Then the fragmentation got worse, as all the legacy media companies rolled out their own platforms, and it suddenly became ~5x$20/month to get the same content. And ads got added back into the mix, even after subscription fees.
These days, I actively switch platforms every few months. It's a bit annoying, but beats the old cable days.
My biggest complaint today is the fragmentation across some sports. Take pro cycling (TDf, etc) - it's split across 3-4 platforms in the US. So, I need to get FloSports, Peacock, and a few others. I wish I could either get individual events OR a bundle that included everything. Oh well, I'll pay for a few and pirate the Sky or continental feeds for the rest.
When Netflix started losing shows did they lower their price to allow users to sign up for competing services? The price just went up for everyone in reality.
No but there's very little I deeply care about watching, including live TV. I definitely pay less for video content than I was paying 5 years or so ago. Netflix has been on my bubble for a while. We'll see what happens with this news.
And I already have Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ through other bundles I have for other reasons. We'll see.
I don’t see how this is ironic at all. Doesn’t this just make sense that people are complaining about the same business model? Or are you saying people should be more grateful we don’t have to watch ads anymore?
Still, the real issue is one that both cable and streaming services don't solve.
People don't want to pay for what they don't watch. Both streaming and cable have the price of everything they own and produce built into the price. When you subscribe to either, you're subsidizing a bunch of stuff you don't care about.
People don't want to pay $20 a month to watch stranger things in oreer to subsidize a bunch of stuff they don't watch. It was the same with cable. Netflix is just one giant cable bundle, it always has been.
I'm regularly a bit surprised at how many people don't even consider purchasing a la carte content or Blu Rays. For films it's often a pretty reasonable option for occasional viewing.
> 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.
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.
>> Netflix will, presuming this deal completes, be the owner of CNN/TNT/Discovery at al.
^^This isn’t accurate based on the multiple articles I’ve read, including this OP article. The entities they are acquiring are clearly laid out. Your statement is complete speculation at best, and plainly false and at odds with the current facts we know about the deal.
> 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 transaction is expected to close after the previously announced separation of WBD’s Global Networks division, Discovery Global, into a new publicly-traded company, which is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026.
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.
It also underlines in the US that sports is probably the last interest in linear programming. It would be interesting to get a picture of how many US customers will pay for ESPN in a Disney+ bundle but not Linear Hulu. I'm sure Disney will be tracking it, and probably made a smart move making the more interesting bundle the one with ESPN but not Linear Hulu.
There's a huge interest in sports in the US (and elsewhere). And broadcast rights reflect that. But there are also a bunch of people who would happily take a discount on all their other video to not include sports.
And sports coverage is very regional. Disney plus shows African football matches in S. Africa but in the US, I wouldn’t be surprised if it focused only on US football and US college teams.
In the US, ESPN somewhat built its reputation on having some of "all" sports, in part because when the channel started it was much easier/cheaper to fill 24 hours a day on cable with imports and non-traditional sports.
That still seems to mostly apply. In the US on Disney+ the US sports are often front and center, sure, but you can still scroll the list and get European football matches and some Aussie Rules Rugby and Cricket all kinds of things that people don't necessarily think US sports fans would watch. I think part of what ESPN realized, too, is that even regional sports can have global appeal with the right marketing or the fact that not much else is being played in that moment.
ESPN is also still often the home in the US of things like the Scripps National Spelling Bee and various Poker and Chess championships. This was famously mocked in the comedy movie Dodgeball with that movie's climactic Dodgeball championship happening on ESPN Ocho, the fictional 8th cable channel for US ESPN (which had 3 channels at the time). That joke has come full circle in interesting ways as ESPN has roughly 7 cable channels today and intentionally uses the "ESPN Ocho" branding for weirder/smaller audience championships even though the number of people that still remember the comedy movie Dodgeball is shrinking and people don't remember why it was a joke.
I don't have cable or Disney+ any longer but, as someone who played rugby in school and still have an occasional interest, I find it's difficult to find in the US on TV.
I dunno about that. They introduced the ad supported tier as a way to reach consumers at a lower price point and apparently it’s been very successful. I don’t think they want to lose those customers by jacking up prices now.
Netflix has raised prices about 25% at the premium tier since they released the ad-free version in 2022. The with-ads plan has also seen increases since launch.
Their prices have been inching up. I pay for the lowest non-ad tier, and it's $17.99/mo. If I wanted 4K & HDR, it's up to $24.99/mo. At $7.99/mo for the ad-supported tier, they could easily bump that to $9.99/mo if it included HBO/Hulu/ESPN.
I suspect you are right, but I’m not alone in walking away from this trend.
They lost me as a longtime customer after too many price hikes and low programming quality.
Netflix shows are “have it on in the background” quality whereas HBO has released some of the best TV of all time. This merger has enshittification written all over it.
I agree, but HBO has also gone downhill as they lost talent to other services. Currently the streamer with the highest consistent quality is Apple, which is pretty unexpected.
Apple has the benefit of the original Netflix exclusives model (and the original TV primetime distribution model) that they don't operate their own studios and instead can pick and choose from the cream of the crop of the more expensive projects from the others. (Severance is from Ben Stiller's Red Hour mini-studio, Ted Lasso and Shrinking are from WB Television, Slow Horses and Pluribus are from Sony Television, Foundation and Murderbot are from Skydance/Paramount Television, and so forth.)
I'm sure Apple is contributing significantly to many of those shows' budgets and helping them all reach similar quality bars, but Apple is also certainly benefiting from spreading that budget across multiple studios and not putting all their risk in (micro-)managing their own studio. Whereas a lot of the "streamer X has gone downhill" seems to be directly related to being able to source projects only from sibliing studios creating very simple monocultures of every project feeling the same and risking that bad or unlucky projects tainting other projects in that monoculture stew.
Very hit or miss though. And withs some exceptions like Slow Horses, their productions feel overly produced, oiled by agency crossover and 360 package deals, i.e., manufactured from script to screen. Even Pluribus has that smug sanitized gloss.
Honestly, in these days when pretty much everything is sourced from individual production companies and showrunners, it becomes pretty clear that while some studios have their own brands/budgets/priorities/execs/etc. there's no magic formula to getting it all right. It's been tried before and will be tried again.
I’m pretty sure I would riot if they raise prices more. I’m not paying $30 to one streaming service. Criterion and Kanopy are working great for me as is.
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.
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 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.
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.
I agree overall, but it is a lot different when each further thievery requires no additional work (since you're not streaming from them). It'd be more like paying someone each time you walk in your door, for the lifetime of the door. In this case they can also take the door off anytime they want, put ads on it, or do pretty much whatever they want.
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.
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..
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).
A big part of the reason I keep my Paramount+ subscription month-to-month despite mostly just watching Star Trek on it is that they sold me a pretty good annual plan discount.
Annual plans are a big factor in the stickiness of Amazon's efforts. Especially with Amazon's dark patterns around trying to make people forget they pay it (and making it hard to cancel).
It is curious there aren't more explorations in increasing stickiness. Though admittedly cable's biggest trick (long term contracts) is maybe thankfully out of reach for most of the streamers.
Bundles, where they exist, are a big stickiness factor. Especially during COVID, getting stuff delivered to my door before I'd have gotten around to the hassle of going to the store, was a big factor in making Prime more useful to me than it already was.
Apple is less pronounced but I'm very much in the Apple ecosystem so TV+ isn't really a big adder.
>Though admittedly cable's biggest trick (long term contracts) is maybe thankfully out of reach for most of the streamers.
Yeah. You make too much of an on/off ramp for just a streaming service and that's a hard pass for me.
As you say, most users probably don't bother stopping/starting subscriptions. Besides, if they make it harder to cancel some users might not subscribe in the first place in fear of being locked in.
They're probably making more with users saying "I'll subscribe now but cancel when I'm done watching this show" then don't bother cancelling.
As much as people complain, maybe if I was still 22 and dirt broke, I'd do something like that, but more likely I just wouldn't watch TV. I didnt own a TV back then and it was fine. Now, sure, I don't exactly like being nickle and dimed from a pure intellectual perspective, but these streaming services are what? Like $15 a month a pop? That's 1/40 the cost of groceries. It's annoying but makes no difference and isn't anywhere near worth the hassle of starting and stopping. If it was a $120 a month gym subscription or the old cable bundles I used to pay $200 for, then it's getting to the point that it's worth caring about.
The stickiness is probably just that. Even as they raise prices, it's still less than we're paying for pretty much anything else. Gas, electricity, food, housing. Cut Netlix and well great, I just reduced my monthly spend from $5000 to $4980. Really making a dent there. I can retire comfortably now. It's almost as patronizing as the old avocado toast thing. Avocado toast might be overpriced and nowhere near worth it, but it isn't the reason anyone is broke.
I do keep a vague eye on subscriptions/credit cards/etc. that I'm really not getting value out of over the course of months.
But, yes, if you're either poor or optimizing points on an airline or whatever is sort of a hobby, then sure. But otherwise, it's just not very interesting to many of us and involves mental overhead we can just live without.
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.
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.
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.
Its subjective, and full of nuance, but I do feel that Netflix has its own style that is very different to HBO's style. Consider the witcher vs game of thrones or black mirror pre-netflix vs post netflix. Its not black and white though, as Netflix animations (Castlevania, Pluto etc.) are amazing TV, but personally I would much rather watch a HBO show than a Netflix one - especially if its a fantasy/science fiction one where Netflix's style isn't one I find appealing.
The problem is all the crap kills the prestige. HBO remains what HBO is because they don't put out 600 other shows besides Game of Thrones that are utter garbage.
Netflix is the Walmart of entertainment at this point. Yeah you can find basically anything there- and VERY occasionally, you'll find something damn good- but you're wading through a sea of mediocre shit to do so.
And like, personally I unsubbed forever ago because I'm not interested in subsidizing all the garbage to get the occasional Frankenstein. Meanwhile I've maintained an HBO subscription for that entire time.
Obviously I am but one data point here and I know my opinion is in the minority, but yeah. I don't pay attention much to Netflix.
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.
Lol I wrote Avengers instead of Defenders, not sure why the downvote, but it was a really good series of shows, it was highly recommended on Netflix at the time any time a new season came out. Disney just wanted to pull it into Disney Plus that much is obvious considering they've only just started to do that, with the same cast.
Not only this, but there's also Stranger Things, which imho had too many long breaks between seasons. Black Mirror was another one that was really popular. Squid Game as well.
Narcos is another and one of my personal favorite shows of all time, really captures a lot of details that I had no idea about as known by the DEA agents who went after some of the biggest drug lords of our time.
They also fund and produce some of the best high quality documentary series.
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?
"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.
I think your comment is proving the point. Trying to make shows appeal to all kinds of services is not exactly an approach to making high quality shows. Masses tend to converge to mediocrity. If you consider it an art form then it really needs to come from the production side and not the consumption.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I don't find Netflix "live action" movies to be super violent and there are a lot of non-violent shows. Its animations can be quite violent though (and those are good quality). From the little I know, it, like every other big platform, does shy away from sex. This has been a theme for decades - its ok to be violent but sex is a no no.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
55” TV’s have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement especially when put in a normal living space.
The issue IMO is so few movies are worth any extra effort to see. Steam a new marvel movie and you can pause half way through when you’re a little bored and do something else.
Movie theaters still win on a couple fronts, but not by enough to overcome the downsides like the “person behind you chewing popcorn with their mouth open” factor. Also, movies are getting long enough to really need an intermission or two. Legs need stretching, bladders need emptying. If Hollywood and the theaters won’t provide that, at least at home I can use the pause button. I’m looking for a pleasant evening, not a simulation of what it’s like to be on a three hour flight.
55” TVs have been available for decades but not affordable. I purchased a 60” plasma TV about 2 decades ago but it cost about $2500 dollars. Now I can pick up a 55” 4K TV from Best Buy for $220.
The widespread affordability of large screen TVs has absolutely eroded the value of a movie theater.
A 55” Rear-projection television was way less than a 60” plasma TV back then. Like you I went a little upmarket but from what I recall budget 1080i options were well under a grand.
What matters is the premium over a normal TV and how long it lasts. Spending an extra few hundred for something that lasts 5+ years wasn’t going to break most families budgets. As demonstrated by just how many of those TV’s where sold.
Rear projection TVs always looked like garbage. They were just the best option at the time. There’s a reason no one sells them anymore.
> What matters is the premium over a normal TV and how long it lasts.
I think what matters for this conversation is how close the experience is to a theater. Rear projection 1080i is pretty far.
> Spending an extra few hundred for something that lasts 5+ years wasn’t going to break most families budgets. As demonstrated by just how many of those TV’s where sold.
Do you have some stats for how many were sold? Because I have hunch that sales of large screen TVs had absolutely skyrocketed over the past 20 years.
I had an awesome 1080p rear projection DLP TV in a dark room. A brighter screen works better in a bright room, but you really want a dark room for an optimal experience anyway.
The technology got quite good but inherently took up more space and eventually couldn’t compete on price. Though that also means you’re sitting closer to the screen which made replacement flatscreens in the same space look smaller.
> Screen size makes little difference for an individual they can just sit closer
This is silly. Most people don’t want to sit in a chair 3 feet from their TV to make it fill more of their visual area. A large number of people are also not watching movies individually. I watch TV with my family far more than I watch alone.
Tell that to every streaming on their tablets sitting on their stomachs. People even watch movies on their phones but they aren’t holding them 15’ away.
No one says the experience of watching on their tablet matches the experience of watching a movie in the theater.
But this isn’t the point. TVs are furniture. People generally have a spot where the TV naturally fits in the room regardless of its size. No one buys a TV and then arranges the rest of their furniture to sit close enough to fill their visual space. If the couch is 8 feet from the TV, it’s 8 feet from the TV.
I do. I’ve researched the optimal distance for a smallish tv screen (which fits between the studio monitor stand). I move the tv closer when watching a film, it stands on hacked together wooden box like thing which has some yoga tools and film magazines in it - it has wheels. Crazy stuff.
There is a flipchart like drawing of my daughter covering the tv normally which we flip when watching films.
People watching their tablet on a couch in from of a 55+” TV with a surround sound speaker system says on some level it’s a better experience. I’ve seen plenty of people do this to say it’s common behavior.
> No one buys a TV and then arranges the rest of their furniture to sit close enough to fill their visual space. If the couch is 8 feet from the TV, it’s 8 feet from the TV.
It’s common on open floor plans / large rooms for a couch to end up in a completely arbitrary distance from a TV rather than next to a wall. Further setting up the TV on the width vs length vs diagonal of a room commonly provides two or more options for viewing distance.
> People watching their tablet on a couch in from of a 55+” TV with a surround sound speaker system says on some level it’s a better experience.
It’s a more private/personal experience. Turning on the TV means everyone watches.
> It’s common on open floor plans / large rooms for a couch to end up in a completely arbitrary distance from a TV rather than next to a wall. Further setting up the TV on the width vs length vs diagonal of a room commonly provides two or more options for viewing distance.
You’re essentially arguing that people can arrange their furniture for the best viewing experience. Which is true, but also not what people actually do.
The set of people willing to arrange their furniture for the best movie watching experience in their home are the least likely to buy a small TV.
People still do this while home alone, you’re attacking a straw man.
> least likely to buy a small TV.
People can only buy what actually exists. My point was large TV’s “have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement” people owning them still went to the moves.
> People still do this while home alone, you’re attacking a straw man.
Maybe? You’re making blind assertions with no data. I have no idea how frequently the average person sits in front of their 60” TV by themselves and watches a movie on their tablet. My guess is not very often but again, I have no data on this.
> My point was large TV’s “have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement” people owning them still went to the moves.
And we come back to the beginning where your assertion is true but also misleading.
Most people have a large tv in their homes today. Most people did not have this two decades ago, despite then being available.
The stats agree. TV sizes have grown significantly.
> Maybe? You’re making blind assertions with no data.
I’ve seen or talked to more than five people doing it (IE called them, showed up at their house, etc) and even more people mentioned doing the same when I asked. That’s plenty of examples to say it’s fairly common behavior even if I can’t give you exact percentages.
Convince vs using the TV remove was mentioned, but if it’s not worth using the remote it’s definitely not worth going to the moves.
Living rooms are not that big to start with. I don't think you actually asked anyone's opinion on this! :D
Small TVs are not comfortable to watch. No one I know is okay with getting a smaller TV and moving their sofa closer. That sounds ridiculous. If there's any comfort to this capatilistic economy, it is the availability of technology at throw away prices. Most people would rather spend on a TV than save the money.
As for the theatre being obsolete, I do agree with you, atleast to some extent. I think everyone is right here. All factors combined is what makes going to the theatre not worth the effort for most of the movies. It's just another nice thing, not what it used to be.
Also, the generational difference too. I think teen and adolescents have a lot of ways to entertain themselves. The craze for movies isn't the same as it used to be. And we grew old(er). With age, I've grown to be very picky with movies.
Yeah, these things take a long time to shake out. We still have cable subscriptions because older people watch TV that way, but no one would tell you that linear television is thriving. We're only now seeing sports start to somewhat move to streaming services, when the writing's on the wall for a while.
And would you entertain the idea that few movies are worth seeing because going to the movie theatre is a hard sell for audiences, and studios produce movies that try and adapt to that reality?
My wife and I used to be avid theater goers. We used to watch at least five movies a year in the theaters; more if you count the times we went individually. Almost all of the theaters we visited were high-end lounge-style movie houses. Think "Alamo Drafthouse," which is a poster child for the downfall of theaters I'm about to describe.
We're the perfect demo for the movie theaters: free time and disposable income. Yet, we've only seen two movies in the theaters this year, and not for lack of trying.
Theaters are in a kind-of death spiral. they're losing revenue to streaming, so they can't invest in making an experience that attracts people to the theater, which leads to them losing more revenue to streaming, etc. Companies circling the drain are perfect targets for M&A and enshittification in the name of growth.
This is exactly what's happening to high-end theaters: Moviehouse and Eatery (a small chain of high-end theaters) selling to Cinépolis, Alamo Drafthouse selling to Private Equity, IPIC starting to raise red flags, and probably more.
The end result is always the same: endless ads appear where mostly-ad-free prerolls used to be, food and drink prices go up while quality goes down, service gets worse as staff are asked to do more for effectively-less pay, and previously-super comfortable lie-flat lounge seating gets more and more decrepit, all while increasing ticket prices!
All of this is even more insulting when the movies you pay to see are distributed by Netflix or Apple and are all but guaranteed to end up on their platforms in mere weeks, sometimes with better post-production.
We used to happily pay $100+ for a night out at the movies seven years ago. Our experiences have gotten costlier and more disappointing, however. Families deciding to drop $1500 on a 100" TV with an Atmos soundbar and relegating the theaters to the past makes total sense to me. It's sad --- theaters are a social experience and have given me so many great memories --- but it was all but an eventuality the minute streaming on Netflix went live.
Probably many underestimate the importance of the sound.
A home theater arguably is as much about the subwoofer and surround speakers as it is about the screen.
Especially the subwoofer has a big impact. When you feel the sound it's literally impactful. At other times, it really helps immerse yourself in the scene, even if it's not a typical bass sound, but like background noise in a busy city street.
The properly configured subwoofer makes you feel like you're there, while it just falls flat on a regular speaker.
That said, the fewest people have a home theater setup, so it's probably irrelevant to why people stopped going to the cinema.
For many of the families I know it's less about the quality of movies than the cost and effort of going to the movies.
Going to the movies costs an extra hour for the round-trip to the theater, ~$40 for adult tickets, ~$60 for the kids (2h babysitter or movie tickets), ~$20 for concessions. Whereas watching at home on our 75" TV with homemade popcorn costs a tiny fraction of that, even including electricity and popcorn kernels and the amortized cost of the TV.
As nice as it can be to see a good movie in a theater, it's typically not so much better than watching at home that it's worth an extra hour and more than a hundred dollars.
Well, I'd say that the standard movie format just isn't what people want anymore.
The problem movies have is they have a relatively short amount of time to deliver a complete story. 90 to 120 minutes just isn't a lot of time to be compelling. That's why some of the best movies are split into parts.
Consider Andor as an example. It's some of the best media ever made (IMO) and it simply would not work in the movie format. What makes Andor work is the excellent character development and the time spent building and shaping the universe under a fascist government.
Andor had no length constraints per episode. That allowed it to tell complete satisfying stories with the promise that you'll get more in the next episode.
Telling a detailed story is different than telling a compelling story.
Andor isn’t as compelling as the original movie or significantly longer than the Harry Potter series of movies. Babylon 5 is probably the poster child for a long running space opera series with a planned story arch, but they added plenty of filler because you don’t actually need that much time.
If anything movies tend to be better than TV shows because of the time constraints rather than the budget.
Eh, the current 10-hour seasons are the worst of both worlds.
Telling a story in a "tight 90" means making very deliberate choices about what to include, what not to, and how to make scenes do double duty. Having 23 episodes a season lets you slow down, spend time with the characters that's not all focused on the season plot, it lets you have B-stories in every episode. A 10-hour season doesn't get to do that, but it doesn't enforce the same discipline as 90-120 minutes.
Compare Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to Star Trek: Discovery or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I greatly enjoy SNW, but the characters and their relationships with each other are in no way as substantial as in DS9 (or even TNG, which was much less character-focused than DS9).
I remember being amazed when the Michael Keaton’s Batman movie was released on VHS in the same year as the theatrical release. I had never seen a movie come out for home use that fast.
Disagree, I'd gladly go and watch movies in a cinema, the experience cannot be replicated at home, at least not unless you're very rich.. a 55" tv and a soundbar just doesn't do it.
For me, the price is killing it (80% of the reason) and bad movies (20%)... two tickets, drinks, popcorn/nachos/candy/something, and we're in the 50eur+ range. Then add the messy audiences, ads, trailer#1, more ads, trailer #2, another ad for some reason, and it's been 20 mintues of technially all ads for something that i paid money for. Then the movie is a total disappoint. I'm not into superheroes nor into pedro pascal, so most of the movies are out before i even buy the ticket and the rest are somehow... just 'bad'. Watching a bad movie at home is ok... you fall asleep, press stop, it doesn't matter... whatching a bad movie at an artsy film festival is also ok.. it was low budget, the ticket was 4 euros, no popcorn, had beer before you enter, so you can fall asleep in the cinema and hope not to snore. But 50 euros and all the ads for a bad movie is just too much.
Great home theater sound systems with subwoofers are cheap and readily available now. They make the home movie-watching experience dramatically better than it used to be.
I was flabbergasted to find that there are 100" TVs available for sub-$1500. Only a few years ago, they were five figures, minimum. Combined with a decent audio set-up, you really can have 90% of the theater experience at home.
Movie theaters can compete by installing LED screens. My company has a movie screen sized LED screen and it looks so much better than modern digital projectors.
I believe the Academy Awards and a few other things too also influence this. The rules to be eligible still very much favor legacy studios IIRC. But, with this that may change? Hard to say. I know that quite a few Netflix movies have had theatrical runs at random mom and pop theaters in Cali so they could meet eligibility requirements for the various awards.
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.
Fair. Everything is an adaption of some IP somewhere. I think the most interesting job now is cranking out self published books hoping to get adapted, but not well known to US audiences and was highly rated by critics was my point
> 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.
> The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
This is a misconception on a similar level to thinking the monster's name is Frankenstein: "As depicted by Shelley, the creature is a sensitive, emotional person whose only aim is to share his life with another sentient being like himself."
I disagree that it's a misconception. Yes, the premise is that the true 'monster' was the creator, but the monster itself is intentionally grotesque and disfigured to teach us the beauty on the inside lesson.
He is unsettling but definitely not simply grotesque and disfigured:
> His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
Thanks for stating the obvious and I assure you I know the story well. In order for the entire premise to work, there needs to be this conflict or tension between the perception of the "monster" and the true reality of his humanity. This movie failed at effectively portraying this conflict by humanizing the monster too much. Just my 2 cents.
Ah, I understand what you mean. I don't think the viewer necessarily needs to experience the dissonance personally for the premise to work. That said, I agree that it could have afforded being less black and white, it at times felt like a children's movie with how plainly the message is communicated.
Completely agree. The movie ruined Dr. Frankenstein's motives by adding his benefactor, and ruined his monster by removing the inner rage he felt and expressed towards the world the shunned him. A very, very odd decision by GDT. Similar to Spike Lee remaking High & Low, but removing the critique of capitalism and the complicity of the wealthy so he could make Denzel the true protagonist.
The creature was always supposed to be a mix of sympathetic and monstrous. He becomes a monster by turning himself implacably toward revenge, but we can sympathize with him for what sets him on that path. The entire premise rests more on Victor being a monster. I thought the movie handled both of those fairly well. There's really no living director who gets the Gothic sensibility quite as well as del Toro.
>His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
As I said, the contrast between "pretty" or "human" traits vs "monster" just wasn't there.
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".
> 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).
> If WB was any good, would they have been snatched up by Netflix?
Yes because the situation of WB has nothing to do with their performance.
In 1990s they merged with TIME publishing right before the internet killed all magazines. In 2000s with AOL right before th dot com bubble. In 2010s with AT&T who realised they needed a shit ton of money to roll out 5G so they took a massive loan and charged it to Warner debt.
So WARNER keeps performing and the business side keeps adding debt from horrible decisions
Honestly Warner would have been fine if they hadn't been saddled with the debt that AT&T used to buy them. It wasn't an issue of Warner's business performance.
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.
I think such is the reality of serving a large customer base on something subjective like movies and TV. Most people would find most content not that appealing, and a small subset they like. The problem is everyone's small subject are different.
It's like having a restaurant that serves 300 million people. You can try to offer every type of food there is, but most people may not like most of them. Which is fine, as long as you have something they like.
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.
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)
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.
> it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.
This was probably always true, with some randomly amazing years every now and again, like 1972 (The Godfather, Cabaret, Deliverance, What's Up Doc?,...).
IMDB listing shows 470 films released US in 1972. Google says there are ~3,900 IMDB entries for 1972 (why the 4X discrepancy?). The hit ratio was veeeery small even in killer years.
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?"
Same with Extraordinary Attorney Woo and a lot of "originals" on netflix. They'll just buy the rights to air something and then slap their name on it like they made it. That said, I actually appreciate them looking for good media produced overseas and buying up the rights to those shows to bring them to the US. It's a good thing (although it'd be nice if put some effort in making sure there are always quality subs) but it can cause some people to think netflix is producing more good shows than they actually are.
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.
Netflix outside of the US is a very different experience.
In the US, it's mostly their own productions and older content they explicitly acquired, but elsewhere, especially in markets that don't have a local HBO or Disney streaming service, they have incredible backlogs.
I remember finding basically everything I could wish for on there when traveling in SE Asia almost a decade ago, compared to a still decent offering in Western Europe, and mostly cobwebs in the US.
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.
If you listed the best movies or books or plays or albums or video games you could think of, they would tend to be older too. 99% of stuff is kinda crap, always.
> The majority of that list is quite old. Have you seen what they're doing now?
Adolescence (which won big at the Emmy's this year), Stranger Things, The Beast in Me, Last Samurai Standing, A Man on the Inside, The Gentlemen, Absentia, Baby Reindeer, Ripley, Arcane, Squid Game, Dynamite Kiss, Delhi Crime, etc.
You mention Arcane, and that reminds me that Netflix's support of animation is really undervalued. LD&R has been mentioned, but they also helped bankroll a ton of marquee projects from Science Saru (Devilman Crybaby, DanDaDan), Orange (Beastars, Trigun Stampede), and Trigger (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Delicious in Dungeon). They picked up Pantheon and Scavenger's Reign. They've got another season of Blue Eye Samurai coming. Oh, and K-Pop Demon Hunters.
If you care about animation as either a visual or storytelling medium, Netflix has made a lot of the best movies and series of the past few years possible or accessible. (Having to pirate Pantheon S2 because it was initially only released in Australia was not fun.)
The Pitt, The Penguin, Hacks, White Lotus, The Rehearsal, The Last of Us, The Chair Company--all shows off the top of my head that debuted or aired a season in 2025. A few of which won several Emmys, and all of which are critically acclaimed.
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.
I feel like people who say this never watched a lot of TV before Netflix. Every popular show overstays its welcome and gets cancelled once people get bored. That's just how TV works. Netflix isn't even the worst offender.
I would rather a show go on too long and let me decide when to stop watching, like how my Simpsons DVD rips are only seasons 1 through 10 (including season 11 holdovers, so my set ends on Sneed lol)
Netflix doesn't wait for people to get bored. It canceled Kaos the same month they released it! It had good reviews and a lot of binges but that didn't save it from the axe.
Dead Boy Detectives was canceled less than 5 months after it was released.
With so much competing for our time there's no way everyone is going to jump on every show immediately after it gets released and watch it several times over so whatever bullshit metrics netflix is using look impressive enough for them to give the show's fans a satisfying conclusion.
If you watched TV before netflix you might remember that sometimes it took two or more entire seasons before a show became popular. Some extremely popular and successful shows were like that and would never have happened if netflix had put them out.
If you unsubscribe for more than a year then Netflix will delete your profile data entirely and discoverability gets so much worse. I signed up for a month to watch Star Trek: Prodigy S2 right when it dropped and was so offput by the "vanilla" recommendations of a fresh profile I really didn't see any point but to cancel it as soon as I finished that one exact show I knew I cared to watch and could find only with the search feature despite it being a new release.
Discoverability is getting worse too. Netflix's position is that consumers hate having choices and that their customers just want netflix to choose what they're going to watch for them. That was the goal behind their last UI change which was supposed to guess at "your moods and interests in the moment" and only show you a small number of things netflix thinks you want.
In an impressive bit of gaslighting they actually said "With bigger boxes, we’re showing more information up front to help you make a better decision," because nothing gives you 'more information' like giving you barely any information on the screen at all. They also spent a fortune infesting their product with AI, but you still can't use it to get basic features people have wanted for ages like a list of everything leaving netflix in the next month.
In reality this just lets netflix hide more of what's avilable from you so that they can aggressively advertise what they want you watch instead of what you'd rather be watching and as a bonus they can charge companies extra for visibility/not hiding their shows from subscribers.
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.
Man a second season would be so great. They could even recast the main character, given their personality lives in a brain disk. But I'd rather they didn't.
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.
>I just want to see more great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time.
Its out there, there just isn't great curation and in a world of ever increasing content more people just dont ever find it and accept whatever mediocrity they find.
I'd have to be younger, 3 notches to the left of Lenin, and in a perpetual billionaires-are-evil rage mode to find it compelling. Got through most of the first season, which is a rare point to quit a show... we either quit after the first episode, or make it all the way to the end. Painfully bad, and not half as much as the stupid Sex and the City way either.
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.
Note the OP's algo was *while* profitable. You're focused on shows that never make it. I think this is true of the cash cows, while dogs are historically (with only one or two channels so limited broadcast bandwidth) networks could be far more brutal while Netflix needs a much bigger catalog.
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.
Yeah, I dunno. There's a guy on Instagram right now making techno-futuristic stories I equate to micro-episodes and...it gets old. Economies of scale would say that finding the good content in the sea of dogshit would be impossible if everyone was doing that. Premium is premium because it's scarce; not everyone is doing it.
IIRC the Go / Now switch was due to Go being the app if you already paid for cable and wanted to watch HBO by logging into your cable provider account. Now was the pure streaming option those without cable could purchase. Took a bit to consolidate I think.
> 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.
We're going to see something like the way Boeing was hollowed out by taking over McDonnell Douglas I'd guess. I have no insider knowledge but WB doesn't seem like a poison pill you can take without adverse impact.
One only has to look at the word of mouth reputation of Plex these days to know what's going on. I'd say more of my circle knows about it than doesn't, and a solid 15% run one or use someone else's, including my non-techie friends.
Shoutout to Jellyfin it's great, but it is not nearly as turnkey, so Plex is clearly the dominant player for folks hosting their own media.
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.
Innovator's dilemma. Leadership won't invest in the up-and-coming product because they've got a $1 billion revenue target they need to hit this year.
Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma.
I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture.
> “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.”
> 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.
Sony sold it to Netflix (after the pandemic but before it was finished) for a fixed price which locked in a small profit for Sony but got them NOTHING for it being the most watched movie of all time, and Netflix gets all of the sequels as well, so they can't get anything from theaters for those movies either.
They have a streaming platform though! Sony Pictures Core. Seems half the comments in this submission is just straight up guessing and assuming whatever guesses they make are correct. Would take like 30 seconds to just fact-check what you're about to write.
It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.
That’s a completely different market. They are not trying to compete with Netflix and in fact have a deal with them that Netflix has first right of refusal to stream any Sony film
> It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.
Then you might have to look a bit closer :) There are plans out there that give you a fixed monthly fee and stream all you want, so that effectively makes it a streaming service even by your definition.
Not saying they are trying to compete with Netflix, but they do have a streaming service.
Prime video is more than just prime content, they are more of a marketplace where you can watch competitors content as well. Like their web marketplace for tv and movies. That's why you can sign up for things like HBO and even Apple TV directly via Prime.
No you’re being pedantic. Compare Amazon Prime Video subscription content to Sony’s subscription content.
Is Amazon creating new content and giving other streaming services first dibs on it? Are they putting their back catalog content on other streaming services en masse?
Is Sony spending billions of dollars to produce content to go on their own streaming service like Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Peacock, HBO Max (for now)?
Heck is HBO releasing theatrical movies and giving first run streaming rights to other streaming services?
You’re not making serious arguments if you don’t see the difference between every other streaming service and what Sony is doing or seeing what companies with both streaming services and movie studios like Warner Bros, Disney, and Paramount are doing.
You're making this way more complicated than it is, no need to compare against others to understand if what Sony is doing is a streaming service or not.
So I guess back to basics:
> A streaming media service, also known as streaming service, is an online provider that allows users to watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet
Fairly simple, I think at least. So with that, is what Sony is doing a streaming service, regardless of what HBO/Amazon/their mother is doing? Yes, in my humble opinion, what Sony is offering lets users "watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet", so it is a streaming service.
I disagree it's pedantic, it's just understanding what terms mean, in this particular case, what "streaming service" means.
These are two businesses, both under the Sony name: content production and content distribution. Very likely they are two different divisions with different P&Ls.
Every “streaming service” is a distributor. Some of them are also content producers.
Content production is also a bizarre mini world of VC-type funding and shell/temporary production corporations. Some companies lean heavily into that, some do a more traditional in-house studio model, some do both.
I'm sure everybody with a Bravia TV is super excited. If you have a streaming service no one knows or cares about do you even have a streaming service?
Yeah and how many of those are subscribing to Sony’s streaming service where they don’t even put their releases on during the initial streaming release window and don’t have any of their popular backlog content?
There isn’t an iOS app or a Roku app. Even AppleTV+ is on Roku. This isn’t a serious streaming service.
Sony bought Crunchyroll + Funimation but I have to admit that I'm sick of normie anime like Bleach and I crave the kind of things that you find on HDIVE like Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World. [1]
[1] If the Anime News Network finishes reviewing it doesn't make the cut
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.
That's absolutely not the case. Demand for physical media not only continues to exist but it's growing as streaming services prove undependable at keeping shows available, and are willing to censor/edit shows at a whim.
As long as David Zaslav is kicked to the curb instead of given power inside Netflix, this could still be a win for the world. I don't know how else we were going to get him out of there.
Heck, Netflix might actually promote Our Flag Means Death!
(HBO being so terrible at modern promotion is what ultimately got them to this place. I found multiple series I really enjoyed there, but always by total accident scrolling alphabetically. The first time I ever saw a promotion for Warrior was when it came to Netflix.)
From what I've read, Ellison was ready to make him co-CEO of Warner Paramount, and then threatened a lawsuit alleging that WBD management has its thumbs on the scales because it's prioritizing bids that give their executives sweetheart deals after the merger (in this case, with Netflix).
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.
It's the opinion of Netflix execs, who have expressed envy over how much money HBO is still making off of decades old IP. Not a lot of Netflix content has legs like that, but I suppose that's about to change with the WB acquisition.
> how much money HBO is still making off of decades old IP
I'd say Disney is the uncontested king of making money off old work. If HBO was that good they wouldn't have been scooped up so easily.
Netflix execs may be envious of the enduring cultural cachet of shows like The Sopranos or The Wire. That's completely different from making real money.
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.
Remember when Netflix almost split its brand with "Quickster"? It was the dying DVD by mail service, but the whole debacle did nothing but confuse people.
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.
Monopoly is that word. "Pure Monopoly" is the term for the platonic ideal that people like to insist companies don't live up to and so aren't at all monopolistic.
How many competitors do you need? Apple, Disney, Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount are five major competitors.
If you as a hypothetical video content creator want to get your content distributed to a wide audience, you have five companies to go to, you can publish it to any of the video on demand services, try to monetize it through ads on YouTube, etc.
We aren’t in the 30s anymore where the only way you could see content was by going to the movie theater.
Before HBO Max was a thing, they were already selling distribution rights of content to Netflix. No one said that was a monopoly.
> How many competitors do you need? Apple, Disney, Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount are five major competitors.
I actually already agree that the number is not the problem. I can't articulate better, but somehow these don't actually feel like "competitors" in the classical market sense, but rather as stars orbiting the same center, as they're all moving in the same direction, and from time to time merging with one another.
> IMO I think we are going to see Paramount, STARZ and AMC bought up soon.
You do know that David Ellison (Larry Ellison's son), through his Skydance Media, acquired Paramount Global (including its parent, National Amusements) in a merger completed in August 2025.
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.
Really conflicted on this one. On the one hand, having to pay for N+1 streaming services because none of my N favourite shows are on any one of them sucks. On the other hand, monopoly.
Netflix stopped being the good(/least bad) guys a while ago.
They've been raising prices relentlessly, banning casting, criminalizing account sharing (which THEY started by introducing profiles)… They're just as selfish and consumer-hostile as most other big companies.
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.
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...
> 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?
Well if I can cancel my HBO Max it will probably be a zero-sum thing (all the crappy "discovery" content they tacked on was just annoying and I have little interest in their "sports" offerings)
The unfortunate reality is that HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage. I'm constantly blown away by how mediocre everything on Netflix is. I only have it because it's bundled into myobile bill at a legacy discount which makes it only a few dollars a month. I wouldn't pay full price for Netflix now and I will likely remove it altogether if they do another price hike that adds a few more dollars beyond my current discount (~70%).
> HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage
If you leave the featured areas and venture into any of the categories, you will see that HBO is also full of junk. HBO -> Browse by Genre -> A-Z -> any of them are full of junk.
The Netflix featured pages are more geared to showing you stuff you haven't seen yet, while HBO is geared toward showing you popular stuff, even if you have watched it on HBO.
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.
I'd really prefer better quality over quantity. Everything just feels like slop now and I find myself mostly only enjoying older movies. I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix.
Edit: Btw I find Max is like a better quality version of Netflix. But after a while I have the same problem there too. I find myself just watching something on YouTube instead most times
I cancelled my NetFlix subscription already, what, 7 years ago, for that reason... However, it is not just NetFlix. Most newish movies don't do anything for me. I prefer a movie from the 90s (or even earlier) over almost anything produced in the last 5 to 10 years. It is likely a generational thing, and a case of old man yelling at clouds. If studios think effects are more important then the actual story, well then, so be it.
It’s fun to pick a year and do a deep dive on everything that was released to theaters (old newspapers with movie times are great for this) - so much crap you never heard about, unless it was phenomenally bad.
HBO isn't available at all on it's own. It's exclusively sublicensed (until the end of this year) to Sky which has a terrible terrible user experience and of course is another subscription.
Two days ago there was an announcement that HBO Max is to start in Germany in January. Let's see how that develops after the acquisition.
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.
I don't think many people want one monolith to own all content, what they want is an easy way to watch content from multiple different content owners without having to juggle subscriptions.
music does this far better, there's multiple different platforms that all have the vast majority of music people care about, you can easily opt to rent with streaming or purchase outright and download without DRM. spotify would probably love to have tons of exclusive content, and they're trying this with podcasts etc, but the music industry hasn't been able to enshittify as much as the movie industry, yet.
R.I.P to the quality of HBO shows and looking forward to slow burn shows getting cancelled more now. HBO has been going through a really bad phase recently ha. With Discovery, WB and now this. Is it too much to hope that the quality of content won't drop to Netflix level? I just hope the "give writers the time and resources" mindset of HBO doesn't change
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.
The current US admin will probably thumbs up this deal, but they will like face challenges elsewhere. The huge breakup fees seems to hint a high risk of non-approval
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!
How does this work? I assume there would be one parent company at the end and if that's an American company what does any other country can say about it? Sure if they incorporated a child company there they might interfere, but they could also just close the company to deal with the situation and go forward with the merger.
If a US company operates in a different country as well, it has to abide by the laws of that country, or leave it. For example, Adobe's acquisition of Figma was blocked by the UK and EU regulators, despite them both being US companies headquartered in San Francisco. They could have chosen to leave the UK and EU markets entirely, in which case their merger would have been able to proceed, but they wouldn't have been able to sell anything to UK/EU citizens.
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!".
Great re-iteration of my point :) Written for anti-trust regulators, intentionally misusing the words they'd use, but with very different meaning. Hopefully professionals will see through their thin veil.
It is not a lie though. WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is.
I for one, welcome access to stuff that WB has been sitting on without letting me pay them for it.
It is a lie. You are holding on a possible short time gain while ignoring history proven long-term harm of reduced competition, which will lead to higher prices, less innovation, and fewer choices for consumers.
USA anti-trust process is a joke, it is shame that so many company with global footprint relies on that.
> WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is.
Neither are "globally available" as "globally" includes countries that are currently under US embargo, and both those companies are US companies who (supposedly) follow US law.
What you're welcoming isn't "I didn't have access before, now I do!" but rather "I could give Company A money to see this, now I can give company B money to see the same!" which I guess you're happy about, but other's obviously see it for what it is, no practical change except for shareholders.
ok. it isn't as if there's been more than a handful of movies worth watching which have been made in the last 10 years. consolidating catalogs of at-best-mediocre platforms isn't going to make things any better or worse.
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.
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.
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.
China has its own movie industry that is highly isolated from the US one. Just look at the most successful movies and shows in China the past few years
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.
You might be referring to the remnants of broadcast television. I'm referring to the screen-based productions capturing the eyeballs of tomorrow.
One serious strand of America's whip of many thongs is the inability or refusal to acknowledge the rise in power and influence elsewhere.
As Gandalf - the last remaining talkshow host - gets pulled off the bridge into the abyss, he looks up to see a motley brigade of multi-cultural hobbits dashing for the surface with their wits and wallets thankfully intact.
Please excuse my excruciating reimagining of your wild fantasy metaphor.
The things China does strictly within the walls of its own insular society is a very far cry from representative of "global media culture and business".
It is very much dominated by American media companies at every level. Funding, development, production, distribution.
Something doesn't happen until it happens. And even when it happens, it might fail.
So far China hasn't broken down many walls, for example I'm fairly sure they can't do what TSMC does.
And for media... guess what, they need to open a lot of things up. There's a lot more freedom of speech in the US, so US media can be about a lot of things interesting to the rest of the world. The US even has a lot media catering to other countries (for example media targetting Chinese audiences).
I mean, China could try that, we have the examples of Japanese and South Korean media, but both of those are democratic, and even then, it took them a long time to develop. Plus neither of them are near the levels of influence US media has.
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.
Ne Zha 2 comes to mind. One of the largest box offices ever and it came out this year. In my opinion: Good attempt but I dont see them supplanting Western media yet.
Netflix was a great product innovator for a long time but now that they're running out of ideas they're pivoting to acquisitions.
I guess one big difference is that their direct competitors aren't startups - they're Amazon, Apple, etc. - so perhaps this plays out more as a race to acquire studios, IP, and creative talent.
Then if/when they have a monopoly they'll charge $20 a month and still play ads every 5 min and we'll be back to cable.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I dont think its anti consumer, just anti competitive. Why would you allow a direct competitior to show your content on their branded devices and interface to help them become a one stop shop for all streaming services?
Apple should not be allowed to become a streaming front for all other companies.
Yeah true, but also this is a bit like saying the lock screen of your phone should not become a "one stop shop" for all push notifications. I actually do not own an Apple TV but I just imaging you have a list of shows from different streaming providers on the "home screen" (like it is on my PS4). And on a technical level it is just an API you integrate with (same as push notifications), which helps UX.
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?”
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.
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)".
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
I disagree. Spotify and YouTube Music are competitors, because I can switch freely between them, and expect more or less the same catalog. HBO and Netflix are supplementary and many will just get both, because switching from one to the other makes no sense. For example I can't watch Star Trek on HBO and the rights deals made with the studios ensure that I'll never be able to watch it one both.
Assuming that Netflix, Disney, Paramount and HBO where competing, then why aren't pricing at rock bottom? There's zero competition and removing HBO won't change a damn thing, other than removing one subscription for a large number of people (potentially).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe the GP was referring to most quality rips originating from physical media (ie. 4K UHDs).
In a world without physical media, the best piracy can deliver is no better than the best encoding streamers have available (and that assumes DRM circumvention remains forever possible, otherwise we're gonna get worst quality from re-encoding decoded playbacks)
> the quality of ahem copies is often no worse than you'd get from an official streamed source
"No worse than streamed" is a far cry from a quality high-bitrate 4k UHD physical release.
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.
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
He also really doesn't do much (almost any?) charity so far in his life. And he never had to split assets in a divorce. So he's like a dung beetle of money.
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.
> Oracle will be the first to freeze
one can hope
Will this somehow liberate ZFS?
It’ll just make their auditors and legal team desperate for money, which is kinda horrifying to consider.
How does ZFS need to be liberated?
Isn’t that all from the one OpenAI deal they made 5 months ago?
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.
Back when he was in competition with Gates for #1, I recall him changing his contract so he was getting paid in stock options instead of salary so he could get rich faster.
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.
being the tech industry's conduit to the US president pays well.
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.
Yeah, that headline struck me as backwards too, but I acknowledge it's based on an old framework that doesn't match the modern facts.
P.S. punished for what, honest self-deprecation? By "it" I meant my expectation, not the headline ... is that really not clear?
It felt the same way when AOL bought Time Warner.
In business, it's sometimes more about people's expectations for a company's future than their past performance.
We must never assume the market is rational, and enough people getting hyped at the same time can give a company enough short-term cash to make an unexpected move.
It's a combination of the over-valuation of Oracle - popping on the late stage of the AI bubble - and Ellison owning so much of Oracle.
Even after the recent drop, Oracle is trading for ~33 times last four quarters operating income. With their meh growth rate, fair value is closer to half that. Except we're in an AI bubble. Oracle is riding the tail of the AI bubble just as they popped to the moon toward the end of the dotcom bubble. Oracle will contract afterward accordingly. The stock probably won't see this era's highs again for another 20 years, if ever.
> 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.
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.
It is worth noting that the Netflix Prize winner's solution was never meaningfully used, because Netflix pivoted from ranking content based on what you tell them you like to ranking content based on clicks and minutes watched.
To say that "we have solved ranking" because Netflix decided to measure shallow metrics and addiction is... specious at best. Instead the tech industry (in all media domains, not just streaming video) replaced improving platforms and services in meaningful ways with surveillance and revenue extraction.
Exactly. Nothing is really preventing a $200/month aggregator beyond paying a bunch of lawyers and people not wanting to pay that. I know I'll live with some service fragmentation in exchange for not paying for a bunch of stuff I'll maybe watch once in a blue moon. And I'll probably buy some discs for things I really want to see.
Exclusive deals are preventing it. Media content is resistant to commodification, making it a durable value proposition, and this makes exclusive licensing deals highly desirable - lawyers hired by an upstart aren't going to make a dent in this.
Don't disagree. Just paying lawyers was sort of a facile dismissal on my part. In video content, there's a lot of history that makes it hard to get closer to the way things are in music. Though there are also monetary incentives and practicalities as well.
Ah yes, today where they optimized out the recommendation algo to the point I haven't found something recommended to be watch worthy in years. The only thing worse than the video streaming recommendations is what's become of Amazon/Audible's book recommendations (though Spotify is trying hard to enshitify their algos to catch up).
Sad that we can't have nice things, but capitalism must be fed and I guess good, targeted recommendation algorithms are anti-capital.
> 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.
Not only movie theaters, but also movie rental and selling of VHS tapes/DVDs etc.
One could go to the favorite department store and get movies from all studios right next to each other, sorted by genre or title or similar.
Music publishing vs radio stations is a fascinating example - compulsory licensing, meaning radio stations are free to broadcast any music at all; even rules preventing radio stations and DJs from accepting payola from publishers to promote their records.
Like vertical integration isn't always bad 100% of the time, but this particular case of marrying distribution and production seems to serve minimal beneficial purpose and inevitably the main outcome is high levels of rents-collection and squeezing the people doing the actual creative work. There's pretty much nothing but up-side to forcing the two roles to remain separate.
It's probably got something to do with copyright. Like the way it interacts with markets makes this sort of arrangement net-harmful pretty much any time you see it.
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.
This should really be the end goal. We are worse off than cable right now with all these streaming services and worse , overlapping content.
Strong disagree on being worse off than cable. I now almost never see ads, that is a huge benefit in my book.
it is nice that if you pay enough you can avoid ads, but they are definitely coming to all the lower price tiers… and the premium tiers will of course get more expensive over time
At some point, the market will no longer be able to bear premium price hikes, and they'll just shove in ads instead - exactly as happened with cable.
HBO never had a tier with ads when it was on cable, it was simply expensive.
Lots of things didn't have ads on the past (basic cable TV for example). Today the model has changed to being expensive and still collect data/push ads. This isn't a cable vs streaming thing, it's a then vs now thing.
True. People forget television itself is barely 100 years old. Business models don't grow on trees, they need to be invented and they evolve along with the technology.
Advertising was with us for centuries, but it took until last few decades for it to evolve into a social cancer it is today.
That was 80s Reagan/conservative American. Those folks weren't as greedy as modern day companies and they cared about their product/experience, whereas nowadays caring about that is outsourced (see the Mad Men mess) and greed is king.
It's wild to long for the day of 'caring', 'sane', Reagan era corporate 'governance'.
Look up "corporate raiders" if you think business people weren't greedy in the 80s, or the dissolution of Ma Bell, that used to rent you your phone. In fact, the 80s era cable TV also started the box rental racket. You could not choose to buy, you had to rent.
Regan's politics are completely orthogonal to IP content today.
My understanding is that they already make more money on the ad tiers.
(So the price increases are about finding the revenue maximizing price for the ad free tiers, not about overall profit)
There is a difference between a streaming platform and cable. Streaming platforms are on demand while cable is broadcast.
To have an ads/no ads option with cable, you need 2 distinct channels with different programming, as you need something fill what would be the ad breaks. With an on-demand platform, there is no fixed schedule, so you can insert ads at will without having to account for that.
So even if the market for no ads is small, it doesn't cost them much to provide that option, and they just have to price it above how much they get from ads to make a profit. Even the seldom used YouTube Premium is actually quite profitable for Google. Streaming platforms won't miss that opportunity.
...and piracy will once again become rampant!
Where's the amazon prime tier where I don't get ads?
As far as I can tell there isn't one. Even when you pay extra for no ads the interface itself is infested with them. A truly ad free amazon prime tier wouldn't constantly push shows and movies you that you have to pay for on top of the higher monthly fee you're already paying for or show ads for shows and movies on other platforms.
They're clever with that, by offering subscriptions to various producers and other streaming platforms within Amazon Prime video UI. The Amazon subscription is very cheap, but then you end up sub-subscribing to SkyShowtime and MGM and Apple Video to get access to your favorite space shows, and suddenly it's cable 2.0.
Wouldn't be so bad if the player didn't suck. You'd think video streaming chrome would be a solved problem by now, but it's not, and somehow we're regressing on this front.
It is called: Prime Video Ad Free
Go to the Prime Video website, or check your settings in Prime Video on your device.
I have lived a video ad free life for decades. I am convinced video ads do bad things to our brains. In aggregate, beyond any individual impact they may or may not have.
Ad blockers, ad free YouTube, Kagi, … whatever it takes.
Two to five years ago. :P depending on how you feel about their cross-promotions (which are ads, but at least aren't inserted into the content)
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Did people forget that on cable you could only watch what was being broadcast in that moment?
Streaming is infinitely better.
> Did people forget that on cable you could only watch what was being broadcast in that moment?
On-demand cable content existed and was significant at the tail end of the period when cable was still dominant, so it is probably lost of most people's baseline (at least, those that didn't either abandon it early or never had it at all) in comparing to cable.
Steaming is slowly going back to that too. Netflix got popular for letting people binge shows that released but increasingly they are putting out shows one episode a week so that they can keep the hype up over a longer period and better monitor/control social media.
Netflix also hides a ton of their content and aggressively pushes whatever is new because it makes it easier for them to get immediate metrics on how popular something is.
Right now, you're pretty much stuck watching whatever is being "streamed in that moment" as it is. For example, netflix added the austin powers movies in October, but by Dec 1 they were removed. You had a window of just 2 months to watch and if you missed them you're stuck waiting for them to "rerun" just like regular TV. I expect that trend to continue with shorter and shorter windows as Netflix pushes people to watch shows when they want you to watch them.
growing up I always had on-demand and recording on the set top boxes
Certainly TiVo came in--as well as boxes from cable companies (though I only had TiVo). And, if you really want to go old school, you could program VCRs to record shows if you were off on vacation.
But there was a long period even after cable came in for more channels and potentially better reception when TV was largely on a set schedule.
Didn't the VCR still work with cable? (I haven't used one)
For a short time there VCRs and DVRs even came with ad blockers that automatically removed commercials!
I remember upgrading the tivo for this
Why is overlapping content an issue? Isn't that good?
Let's say I like Show A and Show B. Show A is available on Provider 1 and Provider 2, Show B is available at Provider 2 and Provider 3. Thanks to overlapping content, I can subscribe to Provider 2 and I can watch both of my favorite shows.
It depends on what you watch and how much you watch.
Cable in its heyday was expensive, even for a low tier package with CNN, TNT, MTV, Nickelodeon and other non-premium channels. Most people did not have premium channels like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc. Even Disney was a paid add-on in the early 90s. Adding or removing those channels at the minimum meant calling customer service and in certain eras of cable technology could even mean waiting on a tech visit to provision physical descrambling equipment. And obviously TV was linear, not on-demand.
If you watch a series or movie here and there, and aren't a big TV viewer, the streaming era is much, much cheaper with greater choice. You can often even access what you want to watch through a free trial, a single-month subscription, or a free service like Tubi or Pluto. Movie rental options are much better, more convenient, and cheaper (often even before adjusting for inflation) than Blockbuster, and you have access to much better information before you pull the trigger on renting a movie you haven't heard of before.
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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.
You mean the "license while they feel like it" kind of purchase?
If I could pay for individual TV shows and actually own them I'd definitely prefer that over the disaster we have today. Buying a blue-ray and ripping it is not very practical and it's by design.
Netflix (notoriously) does not license most of their content this way. You can't rent/buy Stranger Things on Apple TV, no matter how much you're willing to pay. If Netflix acquires Warner Bros, I expect this restriction to extend to that content too over time.
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 agree with you that modern streaming service are a hassle, BUT - I'm old enough to remember Blockbuster, too. It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you drove to the video store, found a copy, paid $2 to rent it for 24 hours, tried to remember to rewind it and got it back to the store before it was late. Streaming services are _definitely_ more convenient.
Right now, you can pretty much rent any movie you want through Amazon Prime with not late fee or rewind penalty, but you have to pay a couple of (extra!) dollars to do it. This is, undebatably, a massive improvement over the way it used to be in every way, but it still bothers me even though I can't put my finger on exactly why.
An analyst friend of mine wrote that Napster was more about convenience than price (free). I disagreed with him at the time but, with the rise of various streaming services, I've come to view myself as at least partially wrong.
Maybe not the broke 20 year old per another comment. (Who doesn't have a lot of money anyway.) But a lot of people are happy and able to pay for a subscription that doesn't involve screwing around with a lot of dodgy stuff.
I thought this conclusion about Napster was and is widely considered as true and most important lesson of that time. Success of YouTube, Spotify, Netflix and Steam and the near-demise of piracy are usually attributed to that.
I'm talking from at least a decade ago. There was a pretty wide assumption (including from myself) that the main attraction of Napster was piracy; it certainly was mine at the time as I replaced a bunch of old vinyl. The expansion of music streaming services are certainly a pretty good indication that convenience of getting mainstream content at prices that people historically paid for vinyl/CDs works pretty well.
Even Amazon Prime’s catalogue is only a third the size of what Netflix had 15 years ago.
Watching specific stuff you want to see is 1000x easier today than it was in the 1990s, when cable ran this whole industry, and anything you wanted came bundled with 100 things you didn't want.
It still works this way.
We could deliver to consumers over some sort of "cable". But what would we call it?
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.
Honestly the biggest problem was/is copyright law. Make everything older than 10-14 years public domain and streaming services would have endless amounts of content always available. Independently operated streaming sites would be all over the internet.
That would also solve the problem of AI training data. Build a data set, wait 14 years, and it's guaranteed to be legal.
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 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.
HBO owns Westworld and stopped streaming it to avoid paying residuals.
If they don't make their content available legally, then it should go into the public domain.
Don't want this to happen to your content? Then don't release it to the public.
We need to bring back explicit copyright registration and renewals.
Hoarding is never good for society. It is wild that we've adopted laws to reward it.
Wow. That is dysfunctional.
I would be curious how the financial wires got crossed.
I would have assumed residuals were proportional to views, and views valued proportionally as contributing to subscription demand. And it would be a rare viewer to watch one show like that, over & over. I.e. only upside. Something went sideways.
Thats how it used to work in the movie theater/cable days. Then Netflix said "I will pay you a ton of money up front to own everything" Creatives said amazing! Then the "war" for creative talent started because of the fragmentation of services, so you got people saying I will pay you X + a royalty regardless because you are so sought after, which eventually, as you see here, priced them out of their own content.
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...)
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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.
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.
Give 10 years of copyright for free, then a $1000 fee for the next decade, and make every subsequent decade 100x more expensive.
Nah, there's no reason why trillion dollar companies should be allowed to pay anything to keep our shared culture locked up. Doing so only hinders innovation and the creation of new works. 14 years was long enough back when global distribution was unimaginable and any distribution at all was highly expensive.
Today you can instantly distribute media to the entire planet at near zero expense. If you can't make money after a decade you have only yourself or your product to blame. Also, it's not as if once something goes into the public domain all income stops either. With even a small amount of effort creators can continue to successfully package and sell their stuff to the fans even when it's avilable for free. It's worked on me several times in fact.
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.
>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+).
You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean they weren't still in "growth" phase.
Their pricing, and their doubling down on account sharing policies over the last few years have shown that they are no longer in a growth phase.
I cancelled my Netflix account a few months ago because I had gotten the "You're not accessing this from your typical location" blocker. Even though I was trying to watch from my permanent residence and I was the account owner / payee.
The reason that happened was that my wife and I own two properties. We are happily married, not separated, but we just like our space... especially with two adult daughters who still live at home with one of their significant others also living in the house.
We are a single family "unit" but have two locations. Furthermore, my wife has sleeping issues and was using Netflix at night in order to fall asleep. To have to get me to check my email for an access code, was a total deal breaker since I would be fast asleep. So that cut her off from her typical usage of Netflix.
And the reason Netflix thought that I was accessing the service from a different location was that I hardly ever watched it. Every time I'd pull it up, I would spend more time scrolling for something to watch than actually watching anything.. and typically I'd just give up and go watch a 30m YouTube video instead.
So I was paying more, receiving less ... mostly had the account purely for my wife and daughters who watched it the most ... and then the final deal breaker was logistical barriers preventing me from being able to use what I'm paying for.
Fuck Netflix.
Agree, but I think they moved away from growth to this not because they lost investor money / vc demands but because they started losing a lot of licensing deals and content, and had to shift from redistribution to making more and more originals with capital investment cost and etc.
Slightly different reasons for enshitiffication - if Spotify lost half of their catalogue suddenly they might move in the same way I guess.
These content library contracts are only for a couple of years, and each time one lapses, some terms get negotiated. Nobody in the streaming industry is successful because they have a long term lock on someone else’s content. It’s all about eyeballs and margins.
Netflix had a 4 year deal with Starz, which is where a significant chunk of their early streaming content came from (Including all the Disney films).
Sure, that was very early though. You could argue that was crucial for establishing their brand, but the industry has caught up and doesn't do that very much now.
> 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
> 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.
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.
I think the main reason they aren't competing as much now is that blu ray players / computers with disc drives / consoles with disc drives are getting more scarce?
I don't even know where I would get a good blu ray drive. The videophile subreddits keep suggesting very specific models with flashed firmware, which is not exactly accomodating to the public.
The causality might be backwards there. Blu ray and other disk players are likely becoming scarce because people are using them less rather than people using them less because the devices are scarce.
What happened to Netflix DVD by mail was that Redbox ate its lunch, which ultimately was also a failing business model.
> Netflix is still "competing" with discs at this point
An increasing number of shows are never getting released on physical media to prevent this. The only thing streaming services are competing with in any meaningful way is piracy and I'm guessing piracy is going to get more and more popular the more greed/enshittification keeps making streaming platforms worse
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
This. I loved the DVD service and I don't think I was alone. Younger folks didn't perhaps use it as much as some, but for those who don't have the best internet speed or service, they were great.
Even when I had good service/speeds the DVD service was amazing because it had way more options than streaming does even now, including some pretty hard to find DVDs, and you got the extra features! It was also nice to regularly get something in my mailbox besides spam...
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.
>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.
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.
I mean... did we really expect the content owners to roll over and let the streaming platforms capture the potential profits?
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.
As a rule of thumb maybe, but in this case it might well.
How? This only means prices will go up.
But if you don't need to pay for two subs, and the cost of two apps and two lots of infra goes away, that could be good value.
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.
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.
And this is precisely because Netflix doesn't have to hit the jackpot with each new movie. They just have to keep people hooked on that subscription. It's one of the few times where the subscription model works best.
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.
Equally if not more baffling is that songs used in one region for DVDs might not be the same as other regions because of the same licensing issues
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.
I mean, I'm not going to try and defend them from never having made bad calls. But, I'm not clear that they are any worse at this than other media companies?
To wit, finding a show that was canceled the month it was released probably isn't that hard? Same for shows that had trouble keeping cadence. Especially during COVID.
Do we have data that shows they are worse?
(Also, I think it is perfectly valid to object to this acquisition on other merits. I just would love some old backlogged cartoons to get wider distribution.)
You're right about covid for sure. That really screwed with just about everyone's production schedule.
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.
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.
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.
That’s why I strongly believe there needs to be term limits on these kinds of contracts. Copyright is supposed to benefit the consumer, after all.
Copyright has never been about benefitting consumers. Or artists, for that matter.
It was invented to protect publishers (printing press operators). That continues to be who benefits from copyright. It's why Disney is behind all the massive expansion of copyright terms in the last hundred years.
> 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.
Disobeying unjust laws is a moral imperative. Working around laws that hurt society is good for society. Changing laws that aren't benefiting society is the sign of a functioning government.
We can change the laws. Radio stations don't have "licensing issues" with playing songs.
From another angle, if copyright were more like it was originally in the US, every single show I watched as a kid would be in the public domain, since I haven't been a kid for 28 years.
Radio is a lot simpler. Used to work in that realm back in the Napster and Kazaa days.
You have a broadcast station. You know that estimated 30k people are listening. You sell those numbers to advertisers. Now you play a song 1x, you record that fact. At the end of the month, you tally up 30k users for that artist and you cut a check to ASCAP or BMI. Thats it. You just keep track of how many plays and your audience size, and send checks monthly itemized.
They were downloading pirate Britney Spears over Napster and playing it on air. And since 100% royalties are paid for, was actually legal. Not a lawyer, but they evidently checked and was fine.
I'd like something similar for video. Grab shows however, and put together the biggest streaming library of EVERYTHING, and cut royalty checks for rights holders. But nope, can't do that. Companies are too greedy.
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.
Much like local control of zoning, that is an principle that many folks take on faith as being "good" despite all the actual outcomes.
In collaborative productions it is almost never the "individual" artist anyway: it's whatever giant conglomerate bought whatever giant conglomerate that paid everyone involves as little as the union would let them get away with.
The issue is that Netflix doesn't control those restrictions, the content creators (well, rights holders) do, and their incentives don't always align.
Yea, what I mean by "people who make decisions" is everybody involved: studios, distributors, rights holders, and the maze of middlemen who have inserted themselves into the business: If all of them decided that more money could be made, if not for those pesky licenses, the "licensing problems" would immediately disappear.
And if any of them decide they are better served by the current arrangement, the licensing problems remain.
You seem to be making incredibly banal observations.
That's what governance is for, though. These laws can be changed to require collaboration or remove the artificial monopolies.
They haven't been because the people being hurt by it are way less organized than the people benefitting, not because things couldn't ever change.
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.
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.
Noticed that with a lot of intl shows Netflix gets the rights to. They so often have these awful chipper toony music
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.
"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.
Well, I guess one more significant price jump would be a sign to finally replace streaming with reading
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?
The cable thing in US is something Im struggling to wrap my mind around. I can’t imagine someone deliberately paying so much money for such a bad content.
The only explanation I can think of is that most of the subscribers are elderly folks who signed up long time ago and didn’t bother to look into current bills.
Also maybe some ardent sport fans?
Internet/TV bills can be negotiated, but it is usually something you have to do annually and most people, rightly so, hate it. The companies make it hard to do, so most people would rather pay an extra $5-10 rather than spending an hour or two on the phone. After 5-10 years, those fee bumps really add up.
The only way to keep Internet/TV costs low is to threaten to cancel or switch every year, and actually be willing to do it. For some that isn't an option because there is only 1 provider, and others I've talked to hate that idea because you have to learn a new channel lineup. It's amazing how much people will pay to not be slightly inconvenienced.
The question is why to keep TV subscription at all? Is there some very unique content which is not available on digital?
Live sports and public television was kind of the last bastion in my mind, but the former is piecemeal being acquired by streaming the platforms and the latter is largely being put on the internet for free.
Your last point is the stronger one. Live events, including sports, are a heavy driver of these subscriptions.
Another is broadband deployment. Choice is low in many parts of the country, and bundled service offerings are frequently priced near the "internet only" offerings to nudge customers into a "might as well" posture.
For me it's sports.
Easy way to get rid of the few remaining "lifetime 50% discount" HBO Max subscriptions.
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!
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.
> 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.
> 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.
They might make less money with one super subscription than two separate ones.
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.
Pirate everything.
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.
I wonder how much piracy really impacts their pricing strategy? I honestly don't know.
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.
We're reinventing cable!
The irony is that a lot of people complained loudly about the cable bundle then complained loudly about streaming service fragmentation even when it at least offered a choice to cut their monthly bill.
There was a brief happy period where you could ditch cable ($100/month or whatever), subscribe to ~2-3 streaming services (~2-3x $20/month), save a decent amount and still have a good selection of content. And bonus, you didn't have any ads.
Then the fragmentation got worse, as all the legacy media companies rolled out their own platforms, and it suddenly became ~5x$20/month to get the same content. And ads got added back into the mix, even after subscription fees.
These days, I actively switch platforms every few months. It's a bit annoying, but beats the old cable days.
My biggest complaint today is the fragmentation across some sports. Take pro cycling (TDf, etc) - it's split across 3-4 platforms in the US. So, I need to get FloSports, Peacock, and a few others. I wish I could either get individual events OR a bundle that included everything. Oh well, I'll pay for a few and pirate the Sky or continental feeds for the rest.
When Netflix started losing shows did they lower their price to allow users to sign up for competing services? The price just went up for everyone in reality.
No but there's very little I deeply care about watching, including live TV. I definitely pay less for video content than I was paying 5 years or so ago. Netflix has been on my bubble for a while. We'll see what happens with this news.
And I already have Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ through other bundles I have for other reasons. We'll see.
I don’t see how this is ironic at all. Doesn’t this just make sense that people are complaining about the same business model? Or are you saying people should be more grateful we don’t have to watch ads anymore?
Yup. All of them combined would probably be ~$100-120/mo. which is, lo and behold, the price of a cable package
With inflation, it's much cheaper.
Still, the real issue is one that both cable and streaming services don't solve.
People don't want to pay for what they don't watch. Both streaming and cable have the price of everything they own and produce built into the price. When you subscribe to either, you're subsidizing a bunch of stuff you don't care about.
People don't want to pay $20 a month to watch stranger things in oreer to subsidize a bunch of stuff they don't watch. It was the same with cable. Netflix is just one giant cable bundle, it always has been.
Cable failed at millennial+ user experience.
Many on-demand viewing experiences still play ads through atrocious “cable box apps.”
Entrenched cable bureaucracy disrupted by app culture. For the better.
Netflix also will some day be disrupted, as the wheel turns.
We deserve to divorce the content from the service. Can you even purchase Netflix content?
I’ve just gone cold turkey from watching any streaming tv or movies until the situation improves. Blu Ray works better than ever.
I'm regularly a bit surprised at how many people don't even consider purchasing a la carte content or Blu Rays. For films it's often a pretty reasonable option for occasional viewing.
Maybe we could come up with another ludicrous suite of names for HBO/HBO Go/HBO Max once it's merged with Netflix.
The thing is, HBO _the brand_ is the valuable thing.
> 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.
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.
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.
>> Netflix will, presuming this deal completes, be the owner of CNN/TNT/Discovery at al.
^^This isn’t accurate based on the multiple articles I’ve read, including this OP article. The entities they are acquiring are clearly laid out. Your statement is complete speculation at best, and plainly false and at odds with the current facts we know about the deal.
FTA:
> 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 transaction is expected to close after the previously announced separation of WBD’s Global Networks division, Discovery Global, into a new publicly-traded company, which is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026.
Second paragraph of the article.
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.
I think it is. ESPN is a totally separate vertical than the rest of what Disney offers, and it’s subject to compulsory high rate licensing.
Excluding it from the bundle lets Disney be price competitive.
It also underlines in the US that sports is probably the last interest in linear programming. It would be interesting to get a picture of how many US customers will pay for ESPN in a Disney+ bundle but not Linear Hulu. I'm sure Disney will be tracking it, and probably made a smart move making the more interesting bundle the one with ESPN but not Linear Hulu.
There's a huge interest in sports in the US (and elsewhere). And broadcast rights reflect that. But there are also a bunch of people who would happily take a discount on all their other video to not include sports.
And sports coverage is very regional. Disney plus shows African football matches in S. Africa but in the US, I wouldn’t be surprised if it focused only on US football and US college teams.
In the US, ESPN somewhat built its reputation on having some of "all" sports, in part because when the channel started it was much easier/cheaper to fill 24 hours a day on cable with imports and non-traditional sports.
That still seems to mostly apply. In the US on Disney+ the US sports are often front and center, sure, but you can still scroll the list and get European football matches and some Aussie Rules Rugby and Cricket all kinds of things that people don't necessarily think US sports fans would watch. I think part of what ESPN realized, too, is that even regional sports can have global appeal with the right marketing or the fact that not much else is being played in that moment.
ESPN is also still often the home in the US of things like the Scripps National Spelling Bee and various Poker and Chess championships. This was famously mocked in the comedy movie Dodgeball with that movie's climactic Dodgeball championship happening on ESPN Ocho, the fictional 8th cable channel for US ESPN (which had 3 channels at the time). That joke has come full circle in interesting ways as ESPN has roughly 7 cable channels today and intentionally uses the "ESPN Ocho" branding for weirder/smaller audience championships even though the number of people that still remember the comedy movie Dodgeball is shrinking and people don't remember why it was a joke.
I don't have cable or Disney+ any longer but, as someone who played rugby in school and still have an occasional interest, I find it's difficult to find in the US on TV.
I could buy the ESPN carve-out, but the fact that Hulu is separate is just mental.
I dunno about that. They introduced the ad supported tier as a way to reach consumers at a lower price point and apparently it’s been very successful. I don’t think they want to lose those customers by jacking up prices now.
Netflix has raised prices about 25% at the premium tier since they released the ad-free version in 2022. The with-ads plan has also seen increases since launch.
Their prices have been inching up. I pay for the lowest non-ad tier, and it's $17.99/mo. If I wanted 4K & HDR, it's up to $24.99/mo. At $7.99/mo for the ad-supported tier, they could easily bump that to $9.99/mo if it included HBO/Hulu/ESPN.
I suspect you are right, but I’m not alone in walking away from this trend.
They lost me as a longtime customer after too many price hikes and low programming quality.
Netflix shows are “have it on in the background” quality whereas HBO has released some of the best TV of all time. This merger has enshittification written all over it.
I agree, but HBO has also gone downhill as they lost talent to other services. Currently the streamer with the highest consistent quality is Apple, which is pretty unexpected.
Apple has the benefit of the original Netflix exclusives model (and the original TV primetime distribution model) that they don't operate their own studios and instead can pick and choose from the cream of the crop of the more expensive projects from the others. (Severance is from Ben Stiller's Red Hour mini-studio, Ted Lasso and Shrinking are from WB Television, Slow Horses and Pluribus are from Sony Television, Foundation and Murderbot are from Skydance/Paramount Television, and so forth.)
I'm sure Apple is contributing significantly to many of those shows' budgets and helping them all reach similar quality bars, but Apple is also certainly benefiting from spreading that budget across multiple studios and not putting all their risk in (micro-)managing their own studio. Whereas a lot of the "streamer X has gone downhill" seems to be directly related to being able to source projects only from sibliing studios creating very simple monocultures of every project feeling the same and risking that bad or unlucky projects tainting other projects in that monoculture stew.
Very hit or miss though. And withs some exceptions like Slow Horses, their productions feel overly produced, oiled by agency crossover and 360 package deals, i.e., manufactured from script to screen. Even Pluribus has that smug sanitized gloss.
I don’t completely disagree with you, although For All Mankind has become a top 20 all time show for me.
Honestly, in these days when pretty much everything is sourced from individual production companies and showrunners, it becomes pretty clear that while some studios have their own brands/budgets/priorities/execs/etc. there's no magic formula to getting it all right. It's been tried before and will be tried again.
I’m pretty sure I would riot if they raise prices more. I’m not paying $30 to one streaming service. Criterion and Kanopy are working great for me as is.
Your model might be too simplistic.
It’s more like Net Margin (Netflix + HBO) > Net Margin (Netflix | separate HBO)
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.
> 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
Yeah to be honest i see approaching 45-50/mo coming at some point in the next few years easily.
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 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.
> 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.
I agree overall, but it is a lot different when each further thievery requires no additional work (since you're not streaming from them). It'd be more like paying someone each time you walk in your door, for the lifetime of the door. In this case they can also take the door off anytime they want, put ads on it, or do pretty much whatever they want.
The comment you're replying to said "legally".
It's legal until you get caught. Schrodinger's download.
That is in no way true
Or...don't pirate and rotate streaming services. Just because a new show drops doesn't mean you need to watch it next week
There are certainly people who do this with free trial subscriptions when a show they want becomes available.
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.
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..
The seven seas can't stop netflix from canceling good shows though.
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).
A big part of the reason I keep my Paramount+ subscription month-to-month despite mostly just watching Star Trek on it is that they sold me a pretty good annual plan discount.
Annual plans are a big factor in the stickiness of Amazon's efforts. Especially with Amazon's dark patterns around trying to make people forget they pay it (and making it hard to cancel).
It is curious there aren't more explorations in increasing stickiness. Though admittedly cable's biggest trick (long term contracts) is maybe thankfully out of reach for most of the streamers.
Bundles, where they exist, are a big stickiness factor. Especially during COVID, getting stuff delivered to my door before I'd have gotten around to the hassle of going to the store, was a big factor in making Prime more useful to me than it already was.
Apple is less pronounced but I'm very much in the Apple ecosystem so TV+ isn't really a big adder.
>Though admittedly cable's biggest trick (long term contracts) is maybe thankfully out of reach for most of the streamers.
Yeah. You make too much of an on/off ramp for just a streaming service and that's a hard pass for me.
As you say, most users probably don't bother stopping/starting subscriptions. Besides, if they make it harder to cancel some users might not subscribe in the first place in fear of being locked in.
They're probably making more with users saying "I'll subscribe now but cancel when I'm done watching this show" then don't bother cancelling.
As much as people complain, maybe if I was still 22 and dirt broke, I'd do something like that, but more likely I just wouldn't watch TV. I didnt own a TV back then and it was fine. Now, sure, I don't exactly like being nickle and dimed from a pure intellectual perspective, but these streaming services are what? Like $15 a month a pop? That's 1/40 the cost of groceries. It's annoying but makes no difference and isn't anywhere near worth the hassle of starting and stopping. If it was a $120 a month gym subscription or the old cable bundles I used to pay $200 for, then it's getting to the point that it's worth caring about.
The stickiness is probably just that. Even as they raise prices, it's still less than we're paying for pretty much anything else. Gas, electricity, food, housing. Cut Netlix and well great, I just reduced my monthly spend from $5000 to $4980. Really making a dent there. I can retire comfortably now. It's almost as patronizing as the old avocado toast thing. Avocado toast might be overpriced and nowhere near worth it, but it isn't the reason anyone is broke.
I do keep a vague eye on subscriptions/credit cards/etc. that I'm really not getting value out of over the course of months.
But, yes, if you're either poor or optimizing points on an airline or whatever is sort of a hobby, then sure. But otherwise, it's just not very interesting to many of us and involves mental overhead we can just live without.
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.
lol at the idea that Netflix would ever produce something as high-quality as GoT or HotD. Those days will soon be over.
> 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.
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.
Its subjective, and full of nuance, but I do feel that Netflix has its own style that is very different to HBO's style. Consider the witcher vs game of thrones or black mirror pre-netflix vs post netflix. Its not black and white though, as Netflix animations (Castlevania, Pluto etc.) are amazing TV, but personally I would much rather watch a HBO show than a Netflix one - especially if its a fantasy/science fiction one where Netflix's style isn't one I find appealing.
Nothing that Amazon has produced comes even close to what HBO produced between 1995-2015. Netflix programming is cargo cult TV.
The problem is all the crap kills the prestige. HBO remains what HBO is because they don't put out 600 other shows besides Game of Thrones that are utter garbage.
Netflix is the Walmart of entertainment at this point. Yeah you can find basically anything there- and VERY occasionally, you'll find something damn good- but you're wading through a sea of mediocre shit to do so.
And like, personally I unsubbed forever ago because I'm not interested in subsidizing all the garbage to get the occasional Frankenstein. Meanwhile I've maintained an HBO subscription for that entire time.
Obviously I am but one data point here and I know my opinion is in the minority, but yeah. I don't pay attention much to Netflix.
The HBO Max that had "Fboy Island" yeah?
HBO was never what you thought it was, and HBO Max definitely wasn't.
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.
Lol I wrote Avengers instead of Defenders, not sure why the downvote, but it was a really good series of shows, it was highly recommended on Netflix at the time any time a new season came out. Disney just wanted to pull it into Disney Plus that much is obvious considering they've only just started to do that, with the same cast.
Not only this, but there's also Stranger Things, which imho had too many long breaks between seasons. Black Mirror was another one that was really popular. Squid Game as well.
Narcos is another and one of my personal favorite shows of all time, really captures a lot of details that I had no idea about as known by the DEA agents who went after some of the biggest drug lords of our time.
They also fund and produce some of the best high quality documentary series.
https://screenrant.com/marvel-netflix-tv-show-cancellations-...
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?
"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.
I think your comment is proving the point. Trying to make shows appeal to all kinds of services is not exactly an approach to making high quality shows. Masses tend to converge to mediocrity. If you consider it an art form then it really needs to come from the production side and not the consumption.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And for shows they produce, product placements galore. Like when characters suddenly started saying "just bing it!" to each other.
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
There's still the one layer that comes with Dolby Atmos and access to the WB back catalogue
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"
MaxNet if you want to go final form Fortune 100
"Maxflix" sounds like a name for a pornstudio but it is i guess better than the alternative of "NetB.O."
Very close to Netflix's core business: violence.
I don't find Netflix "live action" movies to be super violent and there are a lot of non-violent shows. Its animations can be quite violent though (and those are good quality). From the little I know, it, like every other big platform, does shy away from sex. This has been a theme for decades - its ok to be violent but sex is a no no.
And then to Max
And then to X
then to NetMax
Endgame: Netflix renames itself to HBO
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.
> Netflix says they’re keeping the company separate
For a while... Eventually, you can expect that functions will be streamlined, compacted, and impacted
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Ellison is already in trumps pocket, netflix is going to have to up it's bribes or else somehow paramount will end up with the studio.
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.)
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.
HBO Max will need a new logo.
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?
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.)
You’re right, apologies, I forgot and now can’t edit my original post. Point still stands, just with a different name!
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.
55” TV’s have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement especially when put in a normal living space.
The issue IMO is so few movies are worth any extra effort to see. Steam a new marvel movie and you can pause half way through when you’re a little bored and do something else.
Movie theaters still win on a couple fronts, but not by enough to overcome the downsides like the “person behind you chewing popcorn with their mouth open” factor. Also, movies are getting long enough to really need an intermission or two. Legs need stretching, bladders need emptying. If Hollywood and the theaters won’t provide that, at least at home I can use the pause button. I’m looking for a pleasant evening, not a simulation of what it’s like to be on a three hour flight.
55” TVs have been available for decades but not affordable. I purchased a 60” plasma TV about 2 decades ago but it cost about $2500 dollars. Now I can pick up a 55” 4K TV from Best Buy for $220.
The widespread affordability of large screen TVs has absolutely eroded the value of a movie theater.
A 55” Rear-projection television was way less than a 60” plasma TV back then. Like you I went a little upmarket but from what I recall budget 1080i options were well under a grand.
What matters is the premium over a normal TV and how long it lasts. Spending an extra few hundred for something that lasts 5+ years wasn’t going to break most families budgets. As demonstrated by just how many of those TV’s where sold.
Rear projection TVs always looked like garbage. They were just the best option at the time. There’s a reason no one sells them anymore.
> What matters is the premium over a normal TV and how long it lasts.
I think what matters for this conversation is how close the experience is to a theater. Rear projection 1080i is pretty far.
> Spending an extra few hundred for something that lasts 5+ years wasn’t going to break most families budgets. As demonstrated by just how many of those TV’s where sold.
Do you have some stats for how many were sold? Because I have hunch that sales of large screen TVs had absolutely skyrocketed over the past 20 years.
I had an awesome 1080p rear projection DLP TV in a dark room. A brighter screen works better in a bright room, but you really want a dark room for an optimal experience anyway.
The technology got quite good but inherently took up more space and eventually couldn’t compete on price. Though that also means you’re sitting closer to the screen which made replacement flatscreens in the same space look smaller.
Also 220 is in the same ballpark as going to two movies as a family with snacks. Three would already be a stretch.
I got a 4k 55" TV for $299 earlier this year. It weighs maybe 10lbs, and is super thin and fits on the wall.
Large 4k TVs being this accessible/affordable for most households has not been an option for "decades"..
Screen size makes little difference for an individual they can just sit closer, viewing angels are the problem for a family where 55” doesn’t cut it.
4k also makes little difference here, most people really don’t care as seen by how many people use simple HD vs 4k streaming.
> Screen size makes little difference for an individual they can just sit closer
This is silly. Most people don’t want to sit in a chair 3 feet from their TV to make it fill more of their visual area. A large number of people are also not watching movies individually. I watch TV with my family far more than I watch alone.
> This is silly.
Tell that to every streaming on their tablets sitting on their stomachs. People even watch movies on their phones but they aren’t holding them 15’ away.
Also you don’t need to sit 3’ from a 37” TV.
No one says the experience of watching on their tablet matches the experience of watching a movie in the theater.
But this isn’t the point. TVs are furniture. People generally have a spot where the TV naturally fits in the room regardless of its size. No one buys a TV and then arranges the rest of their furniture to sit close enough to fill their visual space. If the couch is 8 feet from the TV, it’s 8 feet from the TV.
I do. I’ve researched the optimal distance for a smallish tv screen (which fits between the studio monitor stand). I move the tv closer when watching a film, it stands on hacked together wooden box like thing which has some yoga tools and film magazines in it - it has wheels. Crazy stuff. There is a flipchart like drawing of my daughter covering the tv normally which we flip when watching films.
People watching their tablet on a couch in from of a 55+” TV with a surround sound speaker system says on some level it’s a better experience. I’ve seen plenty of people do this to say it’s common behavior.
> No one buys a TV and then arranges the rest of their furniture to sit close enough to fill their visual space. If the couch is 8 feet from the TV, it’s 8 feet from the TV.
It’s common on open floor plans / large rooms for a couch to end up in a completely arbitrary distance from a TV rather than next to a wall. Further setting up the TV on the width vs length vs diagonal of a room commonly provides two or more options for viewing distance.
> People watching their tablet on a couch in from of a 55+” TV with a surround sound speaker system says on some level it’s a better experience.
It’s a more private/personal experience. Turning on the TV means everyone watches.
> It’s common on open floor plans / large rooms for a couch to end up in a completely arbitrary distance from a TV rather than next to a wall. Further setting up the TV on the width vs length vs diagonal of a room commonly provides two or more options for viewing distance.
You’re essentially arguing that people can arrange their furniture for the best viewing experience. Which is true, but also not what people actually do.
The set of people willing to arrange their furniture for the best movie watching experience in their home are the least likely to buy a small TV.
> Turning in the TV means everyone watches.
People still do this while home alone, you’re attacking a straw man.
> least likely to buy a small TV.
People can only buy what actually exists. My point was large TV’s “have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement” people owning them still went to the moves.
> People still do this while home alone, you’re attacking a straw man.
Maybe? You’re making blind assertions with no data. I have no idea how frequently the average person sits in front of their 60” TV by themselves and watches a movie on their tablet. My guess is not very often but again, I have no data on this.
> My point was large TV’s “have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement” people owning them still went to the moves.
And we come back to the beginning where your assertion is true but also misleading.
Most people have a large tv in their homes today. Most people did not have this two decades ago, despite then being available.
The stats agree. TV sizes have grown significantly.
https://www.statista.com/chart/3780/tv-screen-size/?srsltid=...
> Maybe? You’re making blind assertions with no data.
I’ve seen or talked to more than five people doing it (IE called them, showed up at their house, etc) and even more people mentioned doing the same when I asked. That’s plenty of examples to say it’s fairly common behavior even if I can’t give you exact percentages.
Convince vs using the TV remove was mentioned, but if it’s not worth using the remote it’s definitely not worth going to the moves.
Living rooms are not that big to start with. I don't think you actually asked anyone's opinion on this! :D
Small TVs are not comfortable to watch. No one I know is okay with getting a smaller TV and moving their sofa closer. That sounds ridiculous. If there's any comfort to this capatilistic economy, it is the availability of technology at throw away prices. Most people would rather spend on a TV than save the money.
As for the theatre being obsolete, I do agree with you, atleast to some extent. I think everyone is right here. All factors combined is what makes going to the theatre not worth the effort for most of the movies. It's just another nice thing, not what it used to be.
Also, the generational difference too. I think teen and adolescents have a lot of ways to entertain themselves. The craze for movies isn't the same as it used to be. And we grew old(er). With age, I've grown to be very picky with movies.
37+” isn’t a small TVs. Resolution was an issue in the 90’s but midsized TV’s have been around for a long time.
Also, I see plenty of people use tablets to watch stuff laying on the couch in front of a big screen TV. So viewing distance is plenty relevant.
Yeah, these things take a long time to shake out. We still have cable subscriptions because older people watch TV that way, but no one would tell you that linear television is thriving. We're only now seeing sports start to somewhat move to streaming services, when the writing's on the wall for a while.
And would you entertain the idea that few movies are worth seeing because going to the movie theatre is a hard sell for audiences, and studios produce movies that try and adapt to that reality?
That part. But it even worse than that.
My wife and I used to be avid theater goers. We used to watch at least five movies a year in the theaters; more if you count the times we went individually. Almost all of the theaters we visited were high-end lounge-style movie houses. Think "Alamo Drafthouse," which is a poster child for the downfall of theaters I'm about to describe.
We're the perfect demo for the movie theaters: free time and disposable income. Yet, we've only seen two movies in the theaters this year, and not for lack of trying.
Theaters are in a kind-of death spiral. they're losing revenue to streaming, so they can't invest in making an experience that attracts people to the theater, which leads to them losing more revenue to streaming, etc. Companies circling the drain are perfect targets for M&A and enshittification in the name of growth.
This is exactly what's happening to high-end theaters: Moviehouse and Eatery (a small chain of high-end theaters) selling to Cinépolis, Alamo Drafthouse selling to Private Equity, IPIC starting to raise red flags, and probably more.
The end result is always the same: endless ads appear where mostly-ad-free prerolls used to be, food and drink prices go up while quality goes down, service gets worse as staff are asked to do more for effectively-less pay, and previously-super comfortable lie-flat lounge seating gets more and more decrepit, all while increasing ticket prices!
All of this is even more insulting when the movies you pay to see are distributed by Netflix or Apple and are all but guaranteed to end up on their platforms in mere weeks, sometimes with better post-production.
We used to happily pay $100+ for a night out at the movies seven years ago. Our experiences have gotten costlier and more disappointing, however. Families deciding to drop $1500 on a 100" TV with an Atmos soundbar and relegating the theaters to the past makes total sense to me. It's sad --- theaters are a social experience and have given me so many great memories --- but it was all but an eventuality the minute streaming on Netflix went live.
Probably many underestimate the importance of the sound.
A home theater arguably is as much about the subwoofer and surround speakers as it is about the screen.
Especially the subwoofer has a big impact. When you feel the sound it's literally impactful. At other times, it really helps immerse yourself in the scene, even if it's not a typical bass sound, but like background noise in a busy city street.
The properly configured subwoofer makes you feel like you're there, while it just falls flat on a regular speaker.
That said, the fewest people have a home theater setup, so it's probably irrelevant to why people stopped going to the cinema.
I mean... there's a ton of movies worth the effort. Just take a look into the big festivals every year: Cannes, Venice, Berlin... Many amazing movies.
For many of the families I know it's less about the quality of movies than the cost and effort of going to the movies.
Going to the movies costs an extra hour for the round-trip to the theater, ~$40 for adult tickets, ~$60 for the kids (2h babysitter or movie tickets), ~$20 for concessions. Whereas watching at home on our 75" TV with homemade popcorn costs a tiny fraction of that, even including electricity and popcorn kernels and the amortized cost of the TV.
As nice as it can be to see a good movie in a theater, it's typically not so much better than watching at home that it's worth an extra hour and more than a hundred dollars.
Well, I'd say that the standard movie format just isn't what people want anymore.
The problem movies have is they have a relatively short amount of time to deliver a complete story. 90 to 120 minutes just isn't a lot of time to be compelling. That's why some of the best movies are split into parts.
Consider Andor as an example. It's some of the best media ever made (IMO) and it simply would not work in the movie format. What makes Andor work is the excellent character development and the time spent building and shaping the universe under a fascist government.
Andor had no length constraints per episode. That allowed it to tell complete satisfying stories with the promise that you'll get more in the next episode.
Telling a detailed story is different than telling a compelling story.
Andor isn’t as compelling as the original movie or significantly longer than the Harry Potter series of movies. Babylon 5 is probably the poster child for a long running space opera series with a planned story arch, but they added plenty of filler because you don’t actually need that much time.
If anything movies tend to be better than TV shows because of the time constraints rather than the budget.
Eh, the current 10-hour seasons are the worst of both worlds.
Telling a story in a "tight 90" means making very deliberate choices about what to include, what not to, and how to make scenes do double duty. Having 23 episodes a season lets you slow down, spend time with the characters that's not all focused on the season plot, it lets you have B-stories in every episode. A 10-hour season doesn't get to do that, but it doesn't enforce the same discipline as 90-120 minutes.
Compare Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to Star Trek: Discovery or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I greatly enjoy SNW, but the characters and their relationships with each other are in no way as substantial as in DS9 (or even TNG, which was much less character-focused than DS9).
You're replying to ChatGPT
I remember being amazed when the Michael Keaton’s Batman movie was released on VHS in the same year as the theatrical release. I had never seen a movie come out for home use that fast.
Disagree, I'd gladly go and watch movies in a cinema, the experience cannot be replicated at home, at least not unless you're very rich.. a 55" tv and a soundbar just doesn't do it.
For me, the price is killing it (80% of the reason) and bad movies (20%)... two tickets, drinks, popcorn/nachos/candy/something, and we're in the 50eur+ range. Then add the messy audiences, ads, trailer#1, more ads, trailer #2, another ad for some reason, and it's been 20 mintues of technially all ads for something that i paid money for. Then the movie is a total disappoint. I'm not into superheroes nor into pedro pascal, so most of the movies are out before i even buy the ticket and the rest are somehow... just 'bad'. Watching a bad movie at home is ok... you fall asleep, press stop, it doesn't matter... whatching a bad movie at an artsy film festival is also ok.. it was low budget, the ticket was 4 euros, no popcorn, had beer before you enter, so you can fall asleep in the cinema and hope not to snore. But 50 euros and all the ads for a bad movie is just too much.
It's the sound that's missing from a home viewing setup
Great home theater sound systems with subwoofers are cheap and readily available now. They make the home movie-watching experience dramatically better than it used to be.
I was flabbergasted to find that there are 100" TVs available for sub-$1500. Only a few years ago, they were five figures, minimum. Combined with a decent audio set-up, you really can have 90% of the theater experience at home.
...as long as you don't connect that TV to the internet so it can spy on you and show you ads. That's why it's so cheap.
Other issues also took their toll on movie theaters:
--Ticket prices of $20 or more per person.
--Jaw-dropping prices on snacks and drinks.
--People talking and using phones during the movie.
--30 minutes of ads before the movie. Not coming attractions but straight-up commercials when you've already paid $20 to be there.
--The general slop quality of most movies being made if you're not a comic book or video game fan (and frankly even if you are).
The above bullshit was enough that I stopped going to movie theaters more than about once per year. And then COVID happened.
Begone, bot
Movie theaters can compete by installing LED screens. My company has a movie screen sized LED screen and it looks so much better than modern digital projectors.
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).
I believe the Academy Awards and a few other things too also influence this. The rules to be eligible still very much favor legacy studios IIRC. But, with this that may change? Hard to say. I know that quite a few Netflix movies have had theatrical runs at random mom and pop theaters in Cali so they could meet eligibility requirements for the various awards.
A current example (although not Netflix) is The Secret Agent with an award qualification run in NYC and LA before wider release.
Now I'm envisioning WB movie pass combined with streaming subscriptions. The business models can get quite funky in this paradigm.
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.
Fair. Everything is an adaption of some IP somewhere. I think the most interesting job now is cranking out self published books hoping to get adapted, but not well known to US audiences and was highly rated by critics was my point
That is true*, but the Netflix series is exceptionally well done. Much better than the average Netflix show.
* More precisely it's Scottish/American
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.
> The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
This is a misconception on a similar level to thinking the monster's name is Frankenstein: "As depicted by Shelley, the creature is a sensitive, emotional person whose only aim is to share his life with another sentient being like himself."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster#Perso...
I disagree that it's a misconception. Yes, the premise is that the true 'monster' was the creator, but the monster itself is intentionally grotesque and disfigured to teach us the beauty on the inside lesson.
He is unsettling but definitely not simply grotesque and disfigured:
> His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
Thanks for stating the obvious and I assure you I know the story well. In order for the entire premise to work, there needs to be this conflict or tension between the perception of the "monster" and the true reality of his humanity. This movie failed at effectively portraying this conflict by humanizing the monster too much. Just my 2 cents.
Ah, I understand what you mean. I don't think the viewer necessarily needs to experience the dissonance personally for the premise to work. That said, I agree that it could have afforded being less black and white, it at times felt like a children's movie with how plainly the message is communicated.
Completely agree. The movie ruined Dr. Frankenstein's motives by adding his benefactor, and ruined his monster by removing the inner rage he felt and expressed towards the world the shunned him. A very, very odd decision by GDT. Similar to Spike Lee remaking High & Low, but removing the critique of capitalism and the complicity of the wealthy so he could make Denzel the true protagonist.
The creature was always supposed to be a mix of sympathetic and monstrous. He becomes a monster by turning himself implacably toward revenge, but we can sympathize with him for what sets him on that path. The entire premise rests more on Victor being a monster. I thought the movie handled both of those fairly well. There's really no living director who gets the Gothic sensibility quite as well as del Toro.
Personally, I didn't like it that much. Super long, droll, the casting was misstepped, and they changed the ending.
It was too long.
> The entire premise depends on him being a monster
Have you read the book? She emphasises how pretty all the body parts that Victor picked were.
>His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
As I said, the contrast between "pretty" or "human" traits vs "monster" just wasn't there.
> The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
Uh, the "monster" is definitely the most sympathetic character in the original novel.
Sympathetic sure! But the story doesn't work without the contrast between his outward horrid appearance and his inner humanity.
I was surprised at how many shots that I thought were terrible CGI were in fact practical effects.
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".
> 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".
Did you see the show Dark?
U.S. version: "Even a blind squirrel (or pig) finds an acorn every now and then."
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).
You're describing TV and movies since forever.
Ever year there are a few good shows and movies and a lot of mid-to-bad shows and movies.
This is not a Netflix thing, nor is it new.
By the definition of "stand out" you can't have very many right?
If all of them "stand out" then none of them do.
If WB was any good, would they have been snatched up by Netflix?
All these studios fought the good fight against big tech over many years but the writing was on the wall.
Hopefully a future Progressive presidency reviews all these mergers and breaks up big tech big time.
> If WB was any good, would they have been snatched up by Netflix?
Yes because the situation of WB has nothing to do with their performance.
In 1990s they merged with TIME publishing right before the internet killed all magazines. In 2000s with AOL right before th dot com bubble. In 2010s with AT&T who realised they needed a shit ton of money to roll out 5G so they took a massive loan and charged it to Warner debt.
So WARNER keeps performing and the business side keeps adding debt from horrible decisions
Lol so this means Netflix/streaming is the next trend going down?
Honestly Warner would have been fine if they hadn't been saddled with the debt that AT&T used to buy them. It wasn't an issue of Warner's business performance.
AT&T was able offload a bunch of debt on to them, and cash out at about what they paid in 2016. Not shabby.
At this point why would you consider WB as an entity at all. Thry were just another IP bundle
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.
I think such is the reality of serving a large customer base on something subjective like movies and TV. Most people would find most content not that appealing, and a small subset they like. The problem is everyone's small subject are different.
It's like having a restaurant that serves 300 million people. You can try to offer every type of food there is, but most people may not like most of them. Which is fine, as long as you have something they like.
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.
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)
> 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.
> it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.
This was probably always true, with some randomly amazing years every now and again, like 1972 (The Godfather, Cabaret, Deliverance, What's Up Doc?,...).
IMDB listing shows 470 films released US in 1972. Google says there are ~3,900 IMDB entries for 1972 (why the 4X discrepancy?). The hit ratio was veeeery small even in killer years.
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?"
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.
Long Story Short was pretty good and less stressful than Bojack.
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.
Same with Extraordinary Attorney Woo and a lot of "originals" on netflix. They'll just buy the rights to air something and then slap their name on it like they made it. That said, I actually appreciate them looking for good media produced overseas and buying up the rights to those shows to bring them to the US. It's a good thing (although it'd be nice if put some effort in making sure there are always quality subs) but it can cause some people to think netflix is producing more good shows than they actually are.
Netflix also created "Netflix lightning" where there are zero shadows to make lighting scenes faster but is really ugly.
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.
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.
Netflix outside of the US is a very different experience.
In the US, it's mostly their own productions and older content they explicitly acquired, but elsewhere, especially in markets that don't have a local HBO or Disney streaming service, they have incredible backlogs.
I remember finding basically everything I could wish for on there when traveling in SE Asia almost a decade ago, compared to a still decent offering in Western Europe, and mostly cobwebs in the US.
459!? It must take a while to check your list…
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.
If you want some considered thoughts on consolidation and antitrust implications, Cory Doctorow's writings are interesting. Some relevant examples:
"Hate the player AND the game (10 Sep 2025)" https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-p...
"The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street (14 Aug 2024)" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enfo...
"End of the line for Reaganomics (13 Aug 2021)" https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
"10 Oct 2022 Antitrust is – and always has been – about fairness" https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/10/play-fair/#bedoya
And his archives for more:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/monopoly/
https://pluralistic.net/tag/antitrust/
The laws only exist if people are willing to apply them.
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.
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.
> Apple
do we really want big tech to also control our media?
> want
I described what is happening, not what I want to have happen.
Anyway it is entertainment media, not news media, so less of a big deal. But yeah it would be nice if somebody else tried.
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.
If you listed the best movies or books or plays or albums or video games you could think of, they would tend to be older too. 99% of stuff is kinda crap, always.
Survivor bias is very misleading.
> The majority of that list is quite old. Have you seen what they're doing now?
Adolescence (which won big at the Emmy's this year), Stranger Things, The Beast in Me, Last Samurai Standing, A Man on the Inside, The Gentlemen, Absentia, Baby Reindeer, Ripley, Arcane, Squid Game, Dynamite Kiss, Delhi Crime, etc.
You mention Arcane, and that reminds me that Netflix's support of animation is really undervalued. LD&R has been mentioned, but they also helped bankroll a ton of marquee projects from Science Saru (Devilman Crybaby, DanDaDan), Orange (Beastars, Trigun Stampede), and Trigger (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Delicious in Dungeon). They picked up Pantheon and Scavenger's Reign. They've got another season of Blue Eye Samurai coming. Oh, and K-Pop Demon Hunters.
If you care about animation as either a visual or storytelling medium, Netflix has made a lot of the best movies and series of the past few years possible or accessible. (Having to pirate Pantheon S2 because it was initially only released in Australia was not fun.)
Interesting that most of the shows you like are +- 10 years old. From the early Netflix days.
I suspect the same would be the case for HBO. Their back catalog is more impressive than their current output.
The Pitt, The Penguin, Hacks, White Lotus, The Rehearsal, The Last of Us, The Chair Company--all shows off the top of my head that debuted or aired a season in 2025. A few of which won several Emmys, and all of which are critically acclaimed.
Industry is highly underrated
Discovery really did a number on HBO.
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.
I feel like people who say this never watched a lot of TV before Netflix. Every popular show overstays its welcome and gets cancelled once people get bored. That's just how TV works. Netflix isn't even the worst offender.
I would rather a show go on too long and let me decide when to stop watching, like how my Simpsons DVD rips are only seasons 1 through 10 (including season 11 holdovers, so my set ends on Sneed lol)
Corollary: I really miss Inside Job
Netflix doesn't wait for people to get bored. It canceled Kaos the same month they released it! It had good reviews and a lot of binges but that didn't save it from the axe.
Dead Boy Detectives was canceled less than 5 months after it was released.
With so much competing for our time there's no way everyone is going to jump on every show immediately after it gets released and watch it several times over so whatever bullshit metrics netflix is using look impressive enough for them to give the show's fans a satisfying conclusion.
If you watched TV before netflix you might remember that sometimes it took two or more entire seasons before a show became popular. Some extremely popular and successful shows were like that and would never have happened if netflix had put them out.
I don't watch Netflix anymore. If a shows on Netflix I just skip it mostly because of two main reasons
1. It's going to get cancelled, so why invest my time. 2. I won't be able to find it.. discoverability is the absolute pits in that app.
If you unsubscribe for more than a year then Netflix will delete your profile data entirely and discoverability gets so much worse. I signed up for a month to watch Star Trek: Prodigy S2 right when it dropped and was so offput by the "vanilla" recommendations of a fresh profile I really didn't see any point but to cancel it as soon as I finished that one exact show I knew I cared to watch and could find only with the search feature despite it being a new release.
Discoverability is getting worse too. Netflix's position is that consumers hate having choices and that their customers just want netflix to choose what they're going to watch for them. That was the goal behind their last UI change which was supposed to guess at "your moods and interests in the moment" and only show you a small number of things netflix thinks you want.
In an impressive bit of gaslighting they actually said "With bigger boxes, we’re showing more information up front to help you make a better decision," because nothing gives you 'more information' like giving you barely any information on the screen at all. They also spent a fortune infesting their product with AI, but you still can't use it to get basic features people have wanted for ages like a list of everything leaving netflix in the next month.
In reality this just lets netflix hide more of what's avilable from you so that they can aggressively advertise what they want you watch instead of what you'd rather be watching and as a bonus they can charge companies extra for visibility/not hiding their shows from subscribers.
Netflix has shows that absolutely overstayed their welcome.
Stranger things should have been one maybe two seasons.
Far more shows go on too long than get cancelled too early.
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. ;-)
Man a second season would be so great. They could even recast the main character, given their personality lives in a brain disk. But I'd rather they didn't.
Maybe it's because I loved the books, but I loathed the Netflix adaptation. Possibly the worst sci-fi adaptation I've ever seen.
The casting was OK, but they mangled the plot and motivations of every character nearly beyond recognition!
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
I don't like they buried their own show, Westworld, to fuck the actors on residuals
[dead]
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.
>I just want to see more great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time.
Its out there, there just isn't great curation and in a world of ever increasing content more people just dont ever find it and accept whatever mediocrity they find.
This is Succession erasure.
I'd have to be younger, 3 notches to the left of Lenin, and in a perpetual billionaires-are-evil rage mode to find it compelling. Got through most of the first season, which is a rare point to quit a show... we either quit after the first episode, or make it all the way to the end. Painfully bad, and not half as much as the stupid Sex and the City way either.
> 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
Mostly agree but their original k-dramas for the US market are pretty good.
Is it still a K-drama if it's for the US market?
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.
Note the OP's algo was *while* profitable. You're focused on shows that never make it. I think this is true of the cash cows, while dogs are historically (with only one or two channels so limited broadcast bandwidth) networks could be far more brutal while Netflix needs a much bigger catalog.
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.
Yeah, I dunno. There's a guy on Instagram right now making techno-futuristic stories I equate to micro-episodes and...it gets old. Economies of scale would say that finding the good content in the sea of dogshit would be impossible if everyone was doing that. Premium is premium because it's scarce; not everyone is doing it.
Don't worry, there will be algorithms to help you find what you like. And content will still go viral within subcultures.
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)
IIRC the Go / Now switch was due to Go being the app if you already paid for cable and wanted to watch HBO by logging into your cable provider account. Now was the pure streaming option those without cable could purchase. Took a bit to consolidate I think.
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.
Firefly *cries*
>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.
Hard agree. My read on the whole situation is that this is R.I.P. for Netflix as a tech company.
We're going to see something like the way Boeing was hollowed out by taking over McDonnell Douglas I'd guess. I have no insider knowledge but WB doesn't seem like a poison pill you can take without adverse impact.
One only has to look at the word of mouth reputation of Plex these days to know what's going on. I'd say more of my circle knows about it than doesn't, and a solid 15% run one or use someone else's, including my non-techie friends.
Shoutout to Jellyfin it's great, but it is not nearly as turnkey, so Plex is clearly the dominant player for folks hosting their own media.
I'm almost back there at this point given how annoying streaming services are getting.
https://theonion.com/just-six-corporations-remain-1819564741...
> Bill Clinton, chief executive of U.S. Government, a division of MCI-WorldCom, praised Monday’s merger as “an excellent move.”
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.
Inflation adjusted it would be about double since 1998 - $223 billion, this Netflix deal is for approximately 1/3rd that amount.
“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.
Innovator's dilemma. Leadership won't invest in the up-and-coming product because they've got a $1 billion revenue target they need to hit this year.
Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma.
I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture.
> “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.”
https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-s...
Silo-ing is the biggest brake on human progress
> 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.
Right reading that, didn’t Sony produce KPOP demon hunters, which is now the most watched movie of all time?
Sony sold it to Netflix (after the pandemic but before it was finished) for a fixed price which locked in a small profit for Sony but got them NOTHING for it being the most watched movie of all time, and Netflix gets all of the sequels as well, so they can't get anything from theaters for those movies either.
Yeah lol, Sony still doing good in Music,Film etc
Sony just focus at their home market more
They purposefully stayed out of the money losing streaming wars and sell their content to the highest bidder
They have a streaming platform though! Sony Pictures Core. Seems half the comments in this submission is just straight up guessing and assuming whatever guesses they make are correct. Would take like 30 seconds to just fact-check what you're about to write.
It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.
That’s a completely different market. They are not trying to compete with Netflix and in fact have a deal with them that Netflix has first right of refusal to stream any Sony film
https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408
Sony created KPop Demon Hunters and sold the streaming rights to Netflix .
If you look at any of their popular back catalog TV content, it is all being streamed on other services.
> It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.
Then you might have to look a bit closer :) There are plans out there that give you a fixed monthly fee and stream all you want, so that effectively makes it a streaming service even by your definition.
Not saying they are trying to compete with Netflix, but they do have a streaming service.
You can’t watch the full catalog of movies they have for rent or purchase for one price.
You know you’re being pedantic.
Same is true for Amazon, you can't watch 100% of the content unless you "Buy"/Rent, so is Amazon Prime Video not a streaming service?
You know you're trying to be misleading, but not everyone falls for those sort of things.
Prime video is more than just prime content, they are more of a marketplace where you can watch competitors content as well. Like their web marketplace for tv and movies. That's why you can sign up for things like HBO and even Apple TV directly via Prime.
No you’re being pedantic. Compare Amazon Prime Video subscription content to Sony’s subscription content.
Is Amazon creating new content and giving other streaming services first dibs on it? Are they putting their back catalog content on other streaming services en masse?
Is Sony spending billions of dollars to produce content to go on their own streaming service like Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Peacock, HBO Max (for now)?
Heck is HBO releasing theatrical movies and giving first run streaming rights to other streaming services?
You’re not making serious arguments if you don’t see the difference between every other streaming service and what Sony is doing or seeing what companies with both streaming services and movie studios like Warner Bros, Disney, and Paramount are doing.
You're making this way more complicated than it is, no need to compare against others to understand if what Sony is doing is a streaming service or not.
So I guess back to basics:
> A streaming media service, also known as streaming service, is an online provider that allows users to watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet
Fairly simple, I think at least. So with that, is what Sony is doing a streaming service, regardless of what HBO/Amazon/their mother is doing? Yes, in my humble opinion, what Sony is offering lets users "watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet", so it is a streaming service.
I disagree it's pedantic, it's just understanding what terms mean, in this particular case, what "streaming service" means.
These are two businesses, both under the Sony name: content production and content distribution. Very likely they are two different divisions with different P&Ls.
Every “streaming service” is a distributor. Some of them are also content producers.
Content production is also a bizarre mini world of VC-type funding and shell/temporary production corporations. Some companies lean heavily into that, some do a more traditional in-house studio model, some do both.
I'm sure everybody with a Bravia TV is super excited. If you have a streaming service no one knows or cares about do you even have a streaming service?
Or anyone who plays online with a PS4 or PS5, which correct me if I'm wrong, probably is more people than the people with Bravia TVs.
Yeah and how many of those are subscribing to Sony’s streaming service where they don’t even put their releases on during the initial streaming release window and don’t have any of their popular backlog content?
There isn’t an iOS app or a Roku app. Even AppleTV+ is on Roku. This isn’t a serious streaming service.
My point is that it's included...
Sony bought Crunchyroll + Funimation but I have to admit that I'm sick of normie anime like Bleach and I crave the kind of things that you find on HDIVE like Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World. [1]
[1] If the Anime News Network finishes reviewing it doesn't make the cut
> 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.
> 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.
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
Well, AOL did ship 1 billion CDs over its heyday and they acquired Warner Brothers in 2000…
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.
I disagree. I strongly recommend this talk by Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
Yup. Can't redirect the ocean. So-to-speak.
> 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.
That's absolutely not the case. Demand for physical media not only continues to exist but it's growing as streaming services prove undependable at keeping shows available, and are willing to censor/edit shows at a whim.
For most things in the world there’s some demand, but that doesn’t mean it is a big business.
I buy vinyl but mostly listen to music on Tidal. People buy cassettes and CDs, but that’s, for all intents and purposes, a dead business.
The physical medium is not the content.
As long as David Zaslav is kicked to the curb instead of given power inside Netflix, this could still be a win for the world. I don't know how else we were going to get him out of there.
Heck, Netflix might actually promote Our Flag Means Death!
(HBO being so terrible at modern promotion is what ultimately got them to this place. I found multiple series I really enjoyed there, but always by total accident scrolling alphabetically. The first time I ever saw a promotion for Warrior was when it came to Netflix.)
From what I've read, Ellison was ready to make him co-CEO of Warner Paramount, and then threatened a lawsuit alleging that WBD management has its thumbs on the scales because it's prioritizing bids that give their executives sweetheart deals after the merger (in this case, with Netflix).
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.
Premarket open
“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.
> and some good stuff
which is mostly inexistent on Netflix
That's a matter of opinion. Other people all over this thread have shared what they think are good Netflix shows and movies.
It's the opinion of Netflix execs, who have expressed envy over how much money HBO is still making off of decades old IP. Not a lot of Netflix content has legs like that, but I suppose that's about to change with the WB acquisition.
> how much money HBO is still making off of decades old IP
I'd say Disney is the uncontested king of making money off old work. If HBO was that good they wouldn't have been scooped up so easily.
Netflix execs may be envious of the enduring cultural cachet of shows like The Sopranos or The Wire. That's completely different from making real money.
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.
Remember when Netflix almost split its brand with "Quickster"? It was the dying DVD by mail service, but the whole debacle did nothing but confuse people.
"HBO or Cinemax... um, I wonder which name I should keep."
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.
Market share matters little when most people have multiple streaming services they use simultaneously.
It’s not like Apple and Google where the majority of people either have an Android or iOS based phone.
YouTube I believe has more viewing hours than Netflix.
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.
Monopoly is that word. "Pure Monopoly" is the term for the platonic ideal that people like to insist companies don't live up to and so aren't at all monopolistic.
How many competitors do you need? Apple, Disney, Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount are five major competitors.
If you as a hypothetical video content creator want to get your content distributed to a wide audience, you have five companies to go to, you can publish it to any of the video on demand services, try to monetize it through ads on YouTube, etc.
We aren’t in the 30s anymore where the only way you could see content was by going to the movie theater.
Before HBO Max was a thing, they were already selling distribution rights of content to Netflix. No one said that was a monopoly.
> How many competitors do you need? Apple, Disney, Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount are five major competitors.
I actually already agree that the number is not the problem. I can't articulate better, but somehow these don't actually feel like "competitors" in the classical market sense, but rather as stars orbiting the same center, as they're all moving in the same direction, and from time to time merging with one another.
That was more or less the case from the advent of TV onwards, though.
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.
> IMO I think we are going to see Paramount, STARZ and AMC bought up soon.
You do know that David Ellison (Larry Ellison's son), through his Skydance Media, acquired Paramount Global (including its parent, National Amusements) in a merger completed in August 2025.
He also wanted Warner Brothers. I'm super glad that nepo baby isn't getting what he wants. He is using his daddy to talk to Trump to try stop it though: https://nypost.com/2025/12/04/media/paramount-skydances-davi...
You're right, I forgot about that. Paramount with Sky is pretty big.
> 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.
Quite true thanks I was just shifting the discussion further east.
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.
Really conflicted on this one. On the one hand, having to pay for N+1 streaming services because none of my N favourite shows are on any one of them sucks. On the other hand, monopoly.
Netflix stopped being the good(/least bad) guys a while ago.
They've been raising prices relentlessly, banning casting, criminalizing account sharing (which THEY started by introducing profiles)… They're just as selfish and consumer-hostile as most other big companies.
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.
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...
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!
None of the live sports programming, including MTB, will be part of the acquisition.
https://www.pinkbike.com/news/netflix-in-exclusive-talks-for...
(yes Pinkbike is my source)
Yeah saw that after posting. Pretty tragic.
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.
> HBO has been around for way longer... HBO Go started in 2010.
Netflix started streaming on January 16, 2007.
>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.
> 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?
If approval of this resulted in Netflix being required to release their crap on DVD (eventually) it’s actually be a win for consumers.
DVDs at least keep working.
Yes. However, I'd take a downloadable, well encoded and chapter marked mp4 over any DVD. 1080p SDR is enough.
I can just store it in my NAS and watch it whenever I like it.
> What's written on the can reads "please don't sue us, we're not a monopoly, and we will not gouge users".
No reawwy this time we double-dog super promise
Your Netflix bill is about to skyrocket and there's no guarantee you'll have access to those titles.
Well if I can cancel my HBO Max it will probably be a zero-sum thing (all the crappy "discovery" content they tacked on was just annoying and I have little interest in their "sports" offerings)
The unfortunate reality is that HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage. I'm constantly blown away by how mediocre everything on Netflix is. I only have it because it's bundled into myobile bill at a legacy discount which makes it only a few dollars a month. I wouldn't pay full price for Netflix now and I will likely remove it altogether if they do another price hike that adds a few more dollars beyond my current discount (~70%).
> HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage
If you leave the featured areas and venture into any of the categories, you will see that HBO is also full of junk. HBO -> Browse by Genre -> A-Z -> any of them are full of junk.
The Netflix featured pages are more geared to showing you stuff you haven't seen yet, while HBO is geared toward showing you popular stuff, even if you have watched it on HBO.
I always smile at these situations. Yahrrr!
Yeah what I was thinking was ah higher quality low bitrate content. Will need to set the apps to auto update some stuff.
> 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.
Already paying Netflix users will get to either agree with a price increase or leave :)
After all, there is more "content" now.
Wait I just realized Warner is hbo. Means now im paying netflix two times.
I'd really prefer better quality over quantity. Everything just feels like slop now and I find myself mostly only enjoying older movies. I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix.
Edit: Btw I find Max is like a better quality version of Netflix. But after a while I have the same problem there too. I find myself just watching something on YouTube instead most times
I cancelled my NetFlix subscription already, what, 7 years ago, for that reason... However, it is not just NetFlix. Most newish movies don't do anything for me. I prefer a movie from the 90s (or even earlier) over almost anything produced in the last 5 to 10 years. It is likely a generational thing, and a case of old man yelling at clouds. If studios think effects are more important then the actual story, well then, so be it.
May be that our tolerance for samey bullshit reduces with age. After all, we’ve seen it all before. The movie industry isn’t that imaginative.
Also, survivor bias. You have to go out of the way to find mentions of crap 3rd rate old movies. We only remember the good ones.
It’s fun to pick a year and do a deep dive on everything that was released to theaters (old newspapers with movie times are great for this) - so much crap you never heard about, unless it was phenomenally bad.
Speaking of which, I recently ran into scans of some local magazines from the 30s.
There was a cinema magazine, and i ran into a 6 page obituary for this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Chaney
Some silent movie star. Never heard of him before. Looks like he was worth 1/8 of the non-ad content 1 year after his death in 1931.
There’s even more content on “gentlemen of fortune”-type sites. Just saying.
That’s their competition. I wonder if they realize it.
> I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix.
There was recently some link on HN about Netflix and using “AI” for “content creation”.
Not that Netflix scripts didn’t sound like an “AI” wrote them even before “AI”.
... don't paying Netflix customers already have access to the whole HBO back-catalogue?
As a Netflix subscriber, that would be news to me.
Not here (Germany).
HBO isn't available at all on it's own. It's exclusively sublicensed (until the end of this year) to Sky which has a terrible terrible user experience and of course is another subscription.
Two days ago there was an announcement that HBO Max is to start in Germany in January. Let's see how that develops after the acquisition.
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.
I don't think many people want one monolith to own all content, what they want is an easy way to watch content from multiple different content owners without having to juggle subscriptions.
music does this far better, there's multiple different platforms that all have the vast majority of music people care about, you can easily opt to rent with streaming or purchase outright and download without DRM. spotify would probably love to have tons of exclusive content, and they're trying this with podcasts etc, but the music industry hasn't been able to enshittify as much as the movie industry, yet.
You're almost making it sound like billionaires are fulfilling the people's wishes instead of their own.
R.I.P to the quality of HBO shows and looking forward to slow burn shows getting cancelled more now. HBO has been going through a really bad phase recently ha. With Discovery, WB and now this. Is it too much to hope that the quality of content won't drop to Netflix level? I just hope the "give writers the time and resources" mindset of HBO doesn't change
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.
The current US admin will probably thumbs up this deal, but they will like face challenges elsewhere. The huge breakup fees seems to hint a high risk of non-approval
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!
We didn't decided that–they did.
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.
How does this work? I assume there would be one parent company at the end and if that's an American company what does any other country can say about it? Sure if they incorporated a child company there they might interfere, but they could also just close the company to deal with the situation and go forward with the merger.
If a US company operates in a different country as well, it has to abide by the laws of that country, or leave it. For example, Adobe's acquisition of Figma was blocked by the UK and EU regulators, despite them both being US companies headquartered in San Francisco. They could have chosen to leave the UK and EU markets entirely, in which case their merger would have been able to proceed, but they wouldn't have been able to sell anything to UK/EU citizens.
Either they comply or exit the country. Remember how the UK blocked the Microsoft/Activision merger for a time?
They have production, distribution, and marketing ops in other markets. Those could be flogged until compliance.
Then they lobby Trump who threatens the country with tariffs
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.
Great re-iteration of my point :) Written for anti-trust regulators, intentionally misusing the words they'd use, but with very different meaning. Hopefully professionals will see through their thin veil.
Every major merger announcement includes this obvious lie.
It is not a lie though. WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is. I for one, welcome access to stuff that WB has been sitting on without letting me pay them for it.
It is a lie. You are holding on a possible short time gain while ignoring history proven long-term harm of reduced competition, which will lead to higher prices, less innovation, and fewer choices for consumers.
USA anti-trust process is a joke, it is shame that so many company with global footprint relies on that.
> WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is.
Neither are "globally available" as "globally" includes countries that are currently under US embargo, and both those companies are US companies who (supposedly) follow US law.
What you're welcoming isn't "I didn't have access before, now I do!" but rather "I could give Company A money to see this, now I can give company B money to see the same!" which I guess you're happy about, but other's obviously see it for what it is, no practical change except for shareholders.
You keep posting this without any idea whether Netflix will relicense anything at all or if you're going to get the movies you want.
It's just copium fueled corporate bootlicking at this point.
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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ok. it isn't as if there's been more than a handful of movies worth watching which have been made in the last 10 years. consolidating catalogs of at-best-mediocre platforms isn't going to make things any better or worse.
They got it for cheap. AOL paid $165 billion for Time Warner in 2000. Is Netflix the next AOL?
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.
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.
Well UFC and WWE are both part of the TKO group.
Im not sure how that is a response to my comment about one being more valuable than the other.
I wonder what the US administration will demand from Netflix for approving this.
equity stake obviously
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.
China has its own movie industry that is highly isolated from the US one. Just look at the most successful movies and shows in China the past few years
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.
You might be referring to the remnants of broadcast television. I'm referring to the screen-based productions capturing the eyeballs of tomorrow.
One serious strand of America's whip of many thongs is the inability or refusal to acknowledge the rise in power and influence elsewhere.
As Gandalf - the last remaining talkshow host - gets pulled off the bridge into the abyss, he looks up to see a motley brigade of multi-cultural hobbits dashing for the surface with their wits and wallets thankfully intact.
Please excuse my excruciating reimagining of your wild fantasy metaphor.
American companies control:
* The largest global streaming platforms (Netflix/HBO/Max, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+)
* The largest content libraries by revenue
* The most extensive international distribution networks
* The vast majority of high-budget scripted shows (budgets > $5M/episode)
* The highest global licensing revenue streams
* The most valuable franchises (DC, Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, LOTR rights distribution through Amazon, etc.)
No European or Asian company has anything close to this global reach.
This a highly focussed western lens but is not representative of global media culture and business.
If you completely discount Tencent Video, iQIYI, Youku, Bilibili, Kuaishou and so on in this outlook then that is the whip of many thongs in action.
I realise some of these platforms operate behind a wall you can't see over but don't think for a minute that wall isn't coming down.
The things China does strictly within the walls of its own insular society is a very far cry from representative of "global media culture and business".
It is very much dominated by American media companies at every level. Funding, development, production, distribution.
Its nothing to do with the wall they are behind, the market and companies are just smaller.
For example, Tencent Video ranks 4th largest streamer in the world by subscribers after Amazon, Netflix, and Disney+. All American companies.
Your argument doesnt really seem to hold water.
Something doesn't happen until it happens. And even when it happens, it might fail.
So far China hasn't broken down many walls, for example I'm fairly sure they can't do what TSMC does.
And for media... guess what, they need to open a lot of things up. There's a lot more freedom of speech in the US, so US media can be about a lot of things interesting to the rest of the world. The US even has a lot media catering to other countries (for example media targetting Chinese audiences).
I mean, China could try that, we have the examples of Japanese and South Korean media, but both of those are democratic, and even then, it took them a long time to develop. Plus neither of them are near the levels of influence US media has.
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?
I haven't heard of any of them, which I am open to being because of my own ignorance. Can you give some examples?
Ne Zha 2 comes to mind. One of the largest box offices ever and it came out this year. In my opinion: Good attempt but I dont see them supplanting Western media yet.
Here is some history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2J0pRJSToU
Why on earth would Madrid be the dividing line between east and west?
Because really we can split into three or more. US on one side, EU, middle and far east on the other.
East of Madrid is booming, West is in decline.
More accurately the line should be in Lagos but many are more familiar with EU film production centres.
Meta playbook.
Netflix was a great product innovator for a long time but now that they're running out of ideas they're pivoting to acquisitions.
I guess one big difference is that their direct competitors aren't startups - they're Amazon, Apple, etc. - so perhaps this plays out more as a race to acquire studios, IP, and creative talent.
Then if/when they have a monopoly they'll charge $20 a month and still play ads every 5 min and we'll be back to cable.
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.
With this buy Netflix becomes as big as Disney (Disney+Hulu) by market share.
Unwelcome consolidation in the long term.
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
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.
At least so far, some private groups have access to Widevine decryptors.
Widevine L3 are galore. Ahem
The problem is the quality.
Those streams are only like 6-10mbps bitrate. A regular blu-ray is closer to 30, and UHD can be well over 100mbps.
Yarr
Yeah, as a physical media collector, this is pretty devastating.
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.
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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
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/netflixs-warner-purc...
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
I dont think its anti consumer, just anti competitive. Why would you allow a direct competitior to show your content on their branded devices and interface to help them become a one stop shop for all streaming services?
Apple should not be allowed to become a streaming front for all other companies.
Yeah true, but also this is a bit like saying the lock screen of your phone should not become a "one stop shop" for all push notifications. I actually do not own an Apple TV but I just imaging you have a list of shows from different streaming providers on the "home screen" (like it is on my PS4). And on a technical level it is just an API you integrate with (same as push notifications), which helps UX.
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.
:'(
How is Apple gonna respond
Fortunately, the Warner sister, Dot, will remain independent.
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?”
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
Smart move to sell before GenAI takes over the entire industry.
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)".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I'm excited about getting access to the whole WB catalogue?
Well, for sure the price will go up too.
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!
I am still shocked not to see the opposite order -- but those days are long gone.
$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.
Remember when the saying was that Netflix was trying to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix? That turned out weird
Well, at least it wasn't Larry Ellison.
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 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.
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)
Memories of AOL-TimeWarner...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarnerMedia#AOL-Time_Warner_me...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly every media journalist in Hollywood considers this to be the worst outcome for Hollywood.
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?
How the mighty have fallen.
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
A functioning FTC sure would.
Too bad business hated Lina Khan's basic anti-trust enforcement so much they decided to throw in with fascism.
Until Netflix pays Trump personally $15M like Paramount did
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...
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...
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.
I didn't actually specify which Ellison. But we could say the Ellison clan to be inclusive.
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.
For cinema, I guess that's all folks.
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...
I wonder what this means for DC Comics and the current crop of DC films. Will Netflix prefer to start with a clean slate?
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.”
Nothing like a copyrighted text to use as the bible of freedom
Not sure who you are talking about but I wouldn’t consider it anything beyond a work of fiction with some applicable quotes.
> 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.
Unfortunately, that may yet become a reality.
Remind me in 20 years when we have old people complaining nobody is supporting traditional social media
They already do, no need to go 20 years further.
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.
Wow the up and comer swallows an extremely established brand
> 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.
Is this as big as I think it is?
Netflix was the worst option, except for all the others who were bidding.
This should be an illegal aquisition
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.
Ads. This is how you get ads in streaming services.
Both Netflix and HBO already have ads.
Netflix thwarting David Ellison and his push to pro-Israel-ify everything.
We will never have another The Wire under Netflix
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.
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"
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.
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
> HBO Max and Netflix are director competitors
I disagree. Spotify and YouTube Music are competitors, because I can switch freely between them, and expect more or less the same catalog. HBO and Netflix are supplementary and many will just get both, because switching from one to the other makes no sense. For example I can't watch Star Trek on HBO and the rights deals made with the studios ensure that I'll never be able to watch it one both.
Assuming that Netflix, Disney, Paramount and HBO where competing, then why aren't pricing at rock bottom? There's zero competition and removing HBO won't change a damn thing, other than removing one subscription for a large number of people (potentially).
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.
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.
What happens to my hbo max susbcription?
> 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?
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?
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...
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.
Where's Brendan Carr when you need him?
So, the big news has arrived finally
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
Paramount being the spurned suitor. David Ellison doesn't sound happy.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/par...
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.
F...k , more forced inclusion on theaters now...
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.
"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.
Too big to fail?
Netflix acquires Warner Bros and uncensored Looney Tunes and uncensored Tom & Jerry were never seen again.
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.
its wabbit season I guess
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…
John Oliver is a really happy man today
Can't wait for him to talk shit about "new business daddy".
Netflix is buying WB for "friends". That show will be on air for another 50 years.
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.
I believe the GP was referring to most quality rips originating from physical media (ie. 4K UHDs).
In a world without physical media, the best piracy can deliver is no better than the best encoding streamers have available (and that assumes DRM circumvention remains forever possible, otherwise we're gonna get worst quality from re-encoding decoded playbacks)
> the quality of ahem copies is often no worse than you'd get from an official streamed source
"No worse than streamed" is a far cry from a quality high-bitrate 4k UHD physical release.
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.
and Warner Brothers owns HBO? So potentially, could we get all HBO shows on Netflix?
E N S H I T T I F I C A T I O N
Hey America, you're the problem.
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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