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.
> 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.
> ranking content based on clicks and minutes watched.
I suspect they just push what they want you to watch, like their own content. Seems that way to me at least, based on their quite shitty "recommendations"
Why do they care what you watch? I expect they pay a flat fee to license content (if not, how is that policed?) so the marginal cost to them is the same no matter what you watch.
I'd guess they push you to their content for the same reason they make that content in the first place: they believe you'll like it and keep watching it.
Ad placement is one wrinkle that would incentivize promoting their own content, but I don't get the impression that's big enough to make the difference at the margins.
I wouldn't tbh, though I'll admit I'm speculating solely on public information. During the 2023 strikes, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA negotiated additional residuals based upon whether 20% of the streaming services subscriber base viewed the content within 90 days of release.[1] So, streaming platforms are evidently willing to share subscriber viewership data with 3rd parties if it's a contractual requirement.
I would be surprised if content licensors haven't negotiated an as good or better deal for themselves.
If people are watching their content, they can rely less on licensed content and drive those costs down. It's a similar value prop to any vertical integration.
The story I heard about most Netflix content going for very long is that after two seasons a show's cast unionizes and they didn't want to pay up and they'd rather cancel shows, which seems awful penny-wise pound foolish of them.
I think they also used their metrics to figure out people liked kevin spacey (whoops) - and created house of cards - which catapulted netflix's production side.
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.
My solution with manufactured content is to just rotate services. I maintain netflix year round because they have enough, but I'll buy the special rate and cancel in the same day, giving me a month at a time of each of the different ones. It also gives them time to release the whole season, instead of dribbling them out over the course of months.
It's sports that really have driven me away. I like collegiate wrestling. This is by no means a mainstream sport. But to watch what I want, I need to subscribe to flowrestling, ESPN, B1G, and BTN. The last two are really mind blowing, because the big 10 seems to think I need two subscriptions to watch a single season for a niche sport.
It's just too much for me to bear -- not financially, but morally. I won't reward such behavior, so I just don't watch.
Then there are all the games that are on broadcast and could normally watch them for free, but unless you have an antenna, you need to subscribe to get your local channel.
Now these leagues need to contend with my family and all the others like it where the kids won't have the nostalgia for that game that was on every Sunday. We don't watch the games, so we don't go to the games, so they'll never grow into being fans themselves.
The NHL does seem to try putting their games in front of their fans as the lone exception.
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.
Doesn't the ease and low risk of individual copyright violation place an upper bound of sorts. Sharing sites are still everywhere, and they were never very successful in making people confuse civil for criminal.
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.
You can actually mostly do that through Amazon Video (although...eww). Missing HBO and Netflix but you can get a lot of the others including Apple TV, AMC+, Paramount+, etc.
> there is no one big "subscription that includes everything"
You're right, but the switching cost is super easy, and _most_ of the time, these networks aren't putting out new content that I care that much about, so I've found it easiest to just swap services, keeping one subscription active at a time, and then switching again when I've finished watching everything interesting on the next.
I don't know. Music streaming services do pretty much follow this separation of content and service. At least unless you really care about exactly which music you can access which I think most people don't.
(That's probably partly why music streaming services don't compete on content; most people don't care exactly which funky music they're listening to as long as it is funky, and had most of the popular stuff. But they definitely care if they want to watch Stranger Things and they can't watch Stranger Things but maybe you're interested in these other crap knock-offs?)
Anyway the point is music streaming services still find ways to compete. I guess they would prefer it if they could compete on content though.
> (That's probably partly why music streaming services don't compete on content; most people don't care exactly which funky music they're listening to as long as it is funky, and had most of the popular stuff. But they definitely care if they want to watch Stranger Things and they can't watch Stranger Things but maybe you're interested in these other crap knock-offs?)
Idk. I can imagine an alternate universe where Taylor Swift's new album was exclusive to Spotify. All the Swifties using Apple Music probably aren't interested in "Taylor Swift knockoffs".
It's not entirely obvious to me why this hasn't happened.
I think steaming just represents such a small share of revenue for professional musicians that negotiating over it isn't worth the headache for the most part. For Swift in particular, touring definitely represents the overwhelming majority of her income.
>Anyway the point is music streaming services still find ways to compete.
Some recommendations and playlists I guess. Most of us (outside of Spotify) get them because of a bundle with other offerings from a vendor. Spotify definitely has a following but I don't really care much and have an Apple bundle anyway.
And Spotify is barely profitable and its major competitors treat music streaming as just a slightly above break even feature to combine with other services.
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.
This feels very much like "United Stats vs Paramount Pictures: The Sequel"[1].
Vertical integration was the key problem back then. Major studios owned major cinema chains. They made it hard for independent cinemas to show the films people wanted, and they made it very hard for independent filmmakers to get their films shown anywhere. It was highly anti-competitive.
I wouldn't expect the U.S. government to step in this time around though. It's very clear that competition and benefiting consumers are no longer priorities.
> 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.
Compulsory licensing sounds interesting but isn't there a fundamental problem in terms of setting price? Music tends to not have big budget differences. Should a show with a budget of 10k get the same fee as a show with a budget of a $1mil? And who sets the price?
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.
> 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.
I would say it is monopoly.
If you are a luxury brand you may sell your pen in a brand store only and limit access and will have some business.
But other companies will produce comparable pens and then your only moat is the brand identity but in all objective criteria the other pens are equal.
With intellectual work you got the monopoly. If I want the Taylor Swift song I don't want Lady Gaga, even though both may be good. If I want a Batman movie, I don't want Iron Man. These products aren't comparable in the same way. And another vendor (studio) can't produce an equal product in the same way as with the pen example.
You can still do that though, it's just less convenient than streaming and you need to go outside.
In my city people literally put boxes of DVDs on the street and I can get several months of movies to watch by just taking a casual stroll in my neighborhood.
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
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.
Whenever a no ads tier is offered, a few ads always get shoved into the premium subscription eventually (see: spotify) because companies want to be able to reach the premium customers, who have more disposable income on average.
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.
I'm really confused why this comment is downvoted to me. It's a pretty salient observation in my opinion. If it's because it's obvious to others, I think it bears repetition because it's an important distinction to the contrary.
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.
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.
Cable was like $80/mo for me and the vast majority of the channels was absolute garbage. Now I pay like 25/mo and swap services every month or two. There’s always something new and interesting to watch - for my relatively minimal watching hours at least. I’m not sure how you feel worse off? You know you don’t need to stay subscribed to every service year round?
> 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.
Analog cable channels were on a wider range of frequencies than regular TV (radio broadcast) channels. So the VCR's tuner had to be "cable ready".
Some cable channels, especially premium channels, were "scrambled", which meant you needed a cable box to tune them. So the VCR, by itself, could only record the basic channels that came with all cable packages. To record something from a movie channel (HBO, Showtime, etc.), you needed the cable box to tune it in and provide an unscrambled signal to your VCR.
And that meant the cable box needed to be set to the correct channel at the time the VCR woke up and started recording. The simple method was to leave it on the correct channel, but that was tedious and error prone. As I recall, there were also VCRs that could send a command to the cable box to turn it on (emulating the cable box remote) and set the channel, but you had to set that up.
Later, when digital cable came along, you needed the cable box involved for every recording because the channels were no longer coming over the wire in a format that the VCR could tune in.
I was probably still using recordable VCRs when I had cable--though it was probably still composite video/audio input. But at some point I started using TiVo. Don't remember the whole tech evolution.
Where I lived the local cable company boasted something like 250 channels on the base tier. But when your cable box arrived you discovered there were less than 50 actual broadcast channels, and the rest were pricey on-demand channels. I think it was about $5 for a movie, which is more than Amazon Prime today and much more in constant dollars.
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.
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.
Not quite the same. Cable had regional monopolies due to the high barrier of entry and economies of scale (building cable infrastructure). There is still some economy of scale for streaming platforms, but if you get rid of exclusive content and the difficulty of making license deals (especially for a small player), then it is a lot easier for a new startup to compete in the area then it ever was to compete with a cable company.
I'm more for requiring licensing to anyone and everyone for the same price, including yourself. No more exclusives. Streaming platforms compete on cost, features and availability of niche content. Even further, choosing to not license content to anyone creates an implicit license for everyone. No more lost content. But I don't think any countries are looking at legislation like this, with entertainment way down on everyone's agenda.
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.
You can have one middle man platform to stream everything but competition to get good movies to that platform, it's a shame that we have so many platforms now
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.
Gabe Newell (Valve/Steam) seems to agree with your analyst friend's take.
> The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
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.
Fair point! In many libraries, you can go to the library and check out DVDs as well.
That could be a way to make videos available for free but inconvenient enough that people would pay for a more convenient way, just as they do with books.
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 that a show like Westworld is a great example of the realities of the streaming era. If HBO kept streaming it on HBO Max it probably costs them $2-4 million in residual liabilities. HBO removed dozens of scripted shows during that phase, and had a mandate to cut around $3B in post merger costs.
After Year 1, WGA/SAG residual formulas decrease:
Year 2: ~80% of Year 1
Year 3: ~55%
Year 4+: sometimes stabilize at a “floor” rate
So what did they do? They ran it for a few years, ran the numbers, realized that Westworld was no longer profitable on the platform. (Profitable would have to mean draws enough new subscribers to the platform). AND THEN - Warner Bros. Discovery made new deals with other platforms with ads. I think you can still find Westworld on Tubi and other ad-supported platforms that actually pay Warner licensing fees.
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...)
With a lot of competition you might have 20 great shows spread across 10 streamers. People will complain because they’d have to subscribe to 10 streamers to get everything.
Consolidation reduces the number of streamers, but reduces the competition too. The number of great shows will go down faster than than the number of streamers too.
The endpoint would be one streamer, with maybe 0-1 great shows. The vast majority of content will be low risk and cheap to produce.
With one big streamer it will be easy to manage your subscription, but the price will still be at least as high as subscribing to half a dozen small streamers, and the shows will be worse.
(Hope you like repetitive, formulaic shows, which, at best, are a rehash last year’s mildly entertaining show. That’s what you can look forward to.)
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.
> 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.
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
I think it would be more accurate to say there was not enough cross-licensing. The generally preferable model seems to be service platforms that compete with each other, but with access to all the same production companies that also compete with each other. Vertical integration is an obvious win for the owners, but this fight has been going on since the earliest days of mass media with radio and motion picture studios.
Netflix was the early beneficiary of broad licensing because the draw bridges hadn't been pulled up yet.
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.
I didn't even realize that Redbox had shut down. I only used them once or twice.
Ultimately there was just so much content available with a click for people (who collectively are mostly not that fussy) for "free" (subscription) or at most by a payment from their TV rooms.
> 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.
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.
That crazy thing is that a knee jerk reaction can still be right
This IS bad for consumers - we are slowly inching towards the pre streaming world of only a handful of studios who run Hollywood, except now it’s pretentious tech companies
People were happy because they only needed one subscription and one app. Buying Warner Bros won't bring that back. If anything, it makes it less likely.
>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.
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 consolidation in the sense that they want to just have a service that has everything instead of having to juggle multiple competing channels around. The problem is that this service would have to be very expensive. The glory days of streaming had 10 services all selling more or less the same product.
The kind of consolidation on offer here just means having to pay for two streaming services at once. That is, at some point HBO Max will get rolled up into Netflix, and Netflix will increase their prices to make sure you don't save any money from it. Because let's be honest here: the only reason why the glory days of streaming were so glorious is that nobody knew what anything was worth and everything was being subsidized by the suckers still paying for cable.
The problem is once you run out of suckers, you have to start charging what the show actually costs to make (or license). Once you account for that plus margin you have a cable bill again[0]. Except since there's like five major services they can split the content and bill five ways. They have to charge about the same as the others to maintain this equilibrium, but with fewer services there's less alternatives and they can raise prices higher.
What people really want out of their streaming service is a free ride, no more and no less. Either that, or they're going back to physical media because one time payments are the only fair and consumer-friendly way of paying for creative works.
[0] Yes, I know most of that was actually sports. For everything else, there was a second layer of subsidy involved: ads. Most of the stuff that didn't charge carriage fees were getting shittons of ad revenue, and that subsidy has also largely vanished.
That's caused by consolidation. Compare with music: a bunch of different companies make music, a bunch of different companies stream music, but they're not the same companies, so approximately everybody's music is available on every platform.
With video, many platforms are also creators, which leads to exclusivity, and fragmentation.
Combining everything into a monopoly would also fix this problem, but would have downsides.
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.
We could get back to that world with anti-trust enforcement and mandatory licensing, while still keeping whatever positive effects competition has had on content production (which I think are debatable at best: it seems like no one outside of low-budget stuff like Dropout is making anything interesting in the US right now.)
So should Disney be forced to license Avengers at the same price I license my cat videos? Should every content creator be forced to license everything? Why stop at video? What about books? Software?
I think a great copyright compromise to the insanely long copyright periods would be if certain types of content had standardized licensing costs that kicked in after a certain amount of time.
It would be a very interesting concept if after 10/20 years, anyone could grab any copyrighted content and redistribute it as long as they paid the copyright owner a license fee determined by copyright law.
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.
We already know prices will go up considerably-- they always do after a merger, and you'll lose the option of subbing for one or the other only when they have something you want to watch. Most people are not keeping two subs going constantly and are just alternating when there's something worthwhile.
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...
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.
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.
"Larry Ellison has been involved with two philanthropic organizations. First he made a $300M donation to Stanford, in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing in an options backdating scandal. All other philanthropic work is to the Larry Ellison institute for prolonging of life--namely his." -- Bryan Cantrill
> In 1992, Ellison shattered his elbow in a high-speed bicycle crash. After receiving treatment at University of California, Davis, Ellison donated $5 million to seed the Lawrence J. Ellison Musculo-Skeletal Research Center.
> In 1998, the Lawrence J. Ellison Ambulatory Care Center opened on the Sacramento campus of the UC Davis Medical Center
> In 2007, Ellison pledged $500,000 to fortify a community centre in Sderot, Israel, against rocket attacks
> In 2014, he donated $10 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.
> In 2017, he donated $16.6 million donation to support the construction of well-being facilities on a new campus for co-ed conscripts
> In May 2016, Ellison donated $200 million to the University of Southern California to establish a cancer research center: the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC
> Between 2021 and 2023, Ellison invested $130 million in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and has pledged a further $218 million since then
Note that I made that claim in 2011. I had tried to research this a bit for the brief period of time that I was at Oracle, and really couldn't find anything (other than the Ellison Medical Foundation). That said, I think my essential assertion stands: given his wealth, Ellison's philanthropic work is de minimis.
Nobody claimed otherwise. The claim was that he gave money to nothing except his own life extension fund. And you agree that he's given money to other things.
It is always enlightening when people criticizing "virtue signaling" accidentally reveal that the problem they have is not the signaling, it's the having virtue.
There was a time when one of the virtues was not to brag about how virtuous you were. I think that's why a lot of folks have a problem with virtue signalling. In their minds if you're signalling by doing something publicly it karmically negates what you're doing and almost alchemically turns it into something resembling vice.
I'm merely trying to explain how it is that people can have a problem with virtue signalling and to them it doesn't really contradict what is to them true virtue where you do something good and stay quiet about it.
This comment feels like it was made outside the context of the existing conversation. The comment I replied to was calling all charity virtue signaling and not just vocal giving.
But either way, I personally don’t think a library is any less valuable to a community just because it has Carnegie’s name above the entrance.
It's not virtue signally if you're tangible helping people. Like if I give away food, maybe I have the intent of signalling something, but I'm also giving away food. That actually happened.
The world would be a much better place if rich people virtue signalled much more and thereby donated more.
Even a cursory google search will give a rather long list:
- Giving Pledge: Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of his wealth to philanthropy. Recently, he announced plans to donate 95% of his $373 billion fortune, focusing on science, healthcare, climate change, and AI research.
- Ellison Medical Foundation: Invested nearly $1 billion in biomedical research on aging and disease prevention before closing in 2013
- Lawrence Ellison Foundation: Supports research on aging, health, education, sustainable agriculture, and wildlife conservation.
- Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine (USC): Established with a $200 million donation to advance cancer research and personalized therapies
- Ellison Institute of Technology (Oxford): A for-profit philanthropic initiative tackling global challenges like healthcare, food insecurity, climate change, and AI. A new campus worth $1.3 billion is planned for 2027
- Significant funding for Oxford University through EIT partnerships, including scholarships and research programs.
- Lion Country Safari Acquisition: Purchased the 254-acre wildlife sanctuary in Florida for $30 million through his foundation, ensuring continued conservation efforts.
- Larry Ellison Conservation Center: Opened in California to rehabilitate and breed endangered species
I'm not a huge fan of his or how Oracle has conducted business, but his giving represents billions to charity, not exactly fitting for the "dung beetle" label people are so quick to apply to him.
So according to you there's some magical formula for when he has to give it all away? If you were him, wouldn't you want a lasting legacy? Something that your wealth effects generations over decades or even a century?
Also, keep in mind he's already given away over $2B in charity, but even at 1%, that's still not very much for you?
Yeah I would say 1% is not very much, even if it is $2bn. In fact, it's less because it's $2bn. Him giving 95% of his wealth away would affect his lifestyle about as much as most people giving 1% of their wealth away. Probably less. Him giving 1% away is completely insignificant.
I guess you could argue he can't give away 95% now because he wants to maintain control of Oracle... which is fair enough I guess. But still, 1% is not very much.
I don't understand how people can defend extremely wealthy sociopaths. He's a CIA contractor and a genocide supporter, and he's trying to consolidate media to censor certain narratives. The guy is a piece of work. And there's no way he contributed that much more than everyone else to capture most of the wealth generated by the work of his employees. Being more of an aggressive sociopath doesn't mean you did more or better work than everyone else in his orgs.
Which is kinda irrelevant. Him selling Oracle shares does not fundamentally change the world in any way. Sure you can say "he should sell shares and do charity", but you could make the same argument that whoever would be buying those shares could be doing charity instead.
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.
It could make it worse. IP from companies that got chopped up and sold for parts can be a nightmare. You may have to do deals with multiple parties, and it can be unclear who owns what (even to the potential owners themselves).
There is debate as to whether the FreeZFS license (CDDL) is compatible with the GPL, which is why FreeZFS is not part of the Linux Kernel. Some distros are baking it in, but there has long been concern about if merging it violates the license or not.
Even if Oracle evaporated and their contemporary ZFS source became unencumbered, I doubt OpenZFS would want to try and merge significantly parts. They already have their own encryption implementation for example.
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.
"Ellison was married to Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986.[92] Boothe was a former receptionist at Oracle (RSI at the time).[93] They had two children, David and Megan, who were (as of 2024) film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively"
So he bought studios so his kids could make movies
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.
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.
> "Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free)"
Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company with a lot of multi-billion dollar product streams and a lot of business lockin around basically any company on the planet which isn't a new web app startup.
Oracle sell an RDBMS. Competing with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and the last 15 years of NoSQL. Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019, and were very happy about it, popping champagne in their announcement video[1]. Oracle license Java which has seen a mass migration to free OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto and all the other free forks. Oracle make a cloud service that you wouldn't touch unless you had a team of Fortune 100 lawyers pressing enter for you because you know Oracle saleslawyersharks are watching on the other side.
Why does anyone other than the government give them money? What for? Okay yes they're "the best" at something or other for a Fortune 100 with serious needs, nothing else comes close, ... but 4-5x their valuation in the last 5 years??
> "Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. Amazon is... Actually wildly successful"
Yeah, Tesla is hype-valued and Amazon does a lot of things in a lot of big markets, of course they're valuable. Oracle does some obscure boring IBM style thing that is never hyped and there is never any positive sentiment about it on the tech internet.
It took Amazon like 10 years to get off Oracle didnt it? Amazon is a tech company where tech is the product and so has lots of internal expertise.
It is like banks trying to get off mainframes, they just cant do it organizationally and there are loads of failed attempts both public and private. I imagine most companies using Oracle are like that.
Oracle had $57 billion in revenue in 2025, up 8% from last year. You do make the excellent observation that it's not as high or spiky as other tech companies. It is, however, consistent, and they've been at it much longer than most on the list (founded 1977).
That last fact probably matters most regarding Ellison's fortune. Their "boring IBM style thing" continues to grow, slowly, and continues to make him money (a lot of it, given his continually-owned large stake); even if the velocity isn't as high as other billionaires, he started a lot earlier than they did.
> Why does anyone other than the government give them money?
I asked a similar question of a relative who was all-in on Microsoft in the '90s. His response was simple: "reliability and expectation of business-oriented service." When a company's been around since 1977, there's more trust they'll be around 10 years out. Oracle is many things, but it's not a company with a notorious "killed by" list of abandoned critical projects that other companies were relying upon to prop their revenue streams. And, if you spend enough money with them, they tend to put someone on helping you solve your problems to keep your business; this is something the alternatives do as well, but Oracle's seen a lot more business problems and has a big portfolio of past solutions that worked.
I got to be a fly on the wall at one of the FAANGs transitioning off an Oracle DB, and the process took about 3x longer than scoped. The reason? Conservative decisionmaking: all the money flowed through the Oracle DBs, and you cannot screw with the money flow. This goes beyond the need for a business to make revenue; failing to properly track your money flow can put you out of compliance with financial laws and make people go to jail. They trusted their in-house databases for tracking user PII, for keeping the core services running, for doing internal infrastructure monitoring and employee recordkeeping... It took convincing to get every stakeholder to trust it with the money.
Companies buy in with Oracle because they have some confidence they won't go to jail for doing so.
The richest person must be a natural person, not a company. These are large companies but their shareholding is spread out. The lawnmower owns 40% of Oracle.
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.
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.)
And to be further clear, I don't mean that as a way to assert you are wrong. I legit don't know if Netflix is better or worse than the norm in this area.
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.
Yes, thank you, not enough people know this. Though, it should be inferable from the name. “Copy right” to mean “I/we retain the right to make copies”. Certainly sounds like a publisher right to me.
> 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.
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.
That shows how tech monopolies are bad for content creators.
Like Spotify monopolizing music streaming, and now creators have the choice of getting virtually nothing from Spotify or literally nothing by avoiding Spotify (unless you're already Taylor Swift).
With radio stations, no single radio station could really hold you over a barrel, because there were still a lot of other radio stations to work with.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
And their service is trash, technically speaking. I sometimes sit down with a burrito and pick a show and wonder if I’m going to finish the burrito before the show actually starts playing. It’s embarrassing. There’s a lot to hate about Netflix but they are highly competent when it comes to the perf of the UI and the streaming.
No, that was going to happen next year, but it never did and this deal has been agreed for the whole company.
WB pitched that to make it easier for them to be acquired by shunting all the debt to the channels entity - but it was unlikely the debt owners were ever going to go for that as presented, there would have been quite a significant chance of the channels group going under and them losing all the money.
But ultimately it turned out that enough entities were willing to bid now, before that split, that there was no point continuing to work out how to do it. Netflix will, presuming this deal completes, be the owner of CNN/TNT/Discovery at al.
Now, I am very sure they will look to sell several parts of those off - there is absolutely no way Netflix leadership wants to continue to own TNT - but that will have to come later.
>> 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.
There are a few American sports fan who get up at 9am on a Saturday morning to watch the Premier League but that comes with an unbundled and affordable Peacock subscription. I used to be one of those guys but these days I might go to multiple games at my Uni and the other college in town and a weekend so I'm not inclined to watch sports on TV. Peacock has some other primo international sports such as the Rugby World Cup.
Yeah, it's interesting to watch which US streamers are adding which sports (that don't already have ESPN deals). Apple made a big deal about their MLS deal. Paramount+ has some random CBS Sports now. HBO Max has some sort of sports, I don't remember which.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
Are you saying I wouldn’t steal a car, or a handbag, or a television, or a dvd? So piracy is a crime?
Are you really making that argument in 2025? You must be very young.
Bittorrent didn’t become popular because no one wanted to pay for things. In fact people stopped when Netflix was good. I stopped, all my friends stopped. It was no longer a mainstream thing. We even put up with a few price hikes. Then 1 service became whatever and people started torrenting and streaming sites started popping up.
Everyone was willing to pay for convenience. No ones wants to pay even more for in convenience.
You’ll note music piracy is not really a thing anymore. Thanks Spotify.
This argument has always confused me. Yes, it's true that a digital copy of a video can be duplicated endlessly in a way a physical item cannot. But... so?
It's an item available for purchase at a price. If you take it without paying that price then the seller is out money they would otherwise have received. If everyone pirated Netflix's output then they would have to shut down, just the same as a grocery store would if everyone stole their produce. The only reason that doesn't happen is because piracy is a minority activity.
Seriously how old are some of the people responding? An entire generation already went through this.
Bootleg DVDs, pirated files were common place. I could literally go out whenever and spend change on a VCD. Or a friend would have a copy of whatever movie on their HD. I’d go to anime screenings where people would bring their RAID arrays full of fan subbed anime. Music was pirated all over the place. Digital players just made music piracy more common. Everyone used BitTorrent. Everyone. People got sued. ISPs used to send out letters saying “we think you’re torrenting. Please stop or we’ll cancel your service”.
You know what didn’t happen? The entertainment industry didn’t collapse. You know why? Because none of these people were never going to spend money on entertainment. You know what I did if I couldn’t afford to see a movie or get a new CD in college? Something else.
When Netflix started streaming, they fixed all this. We all stopped BitTorrenting because Netflix was easier. They know how to fix it and they fixed it for a while. Sell us convenience. But I’m not paying and managing 5 subscriptions.
Personally, I can pay for media, so I believe it's ethical that I do. If someone in my position chooses not to pay, there's a pretty solid argument that the media company is out money they could have had otherwise.
However, not everyone who pirates something was ever going to buy it in the first place. A huge portion of the world lives in sufficiently deep poverty that the option was either: have the thing for free or not have it at all. These folks don't represent lost sales.
Luckily though, "price" is not the same thing as "cost". If they watch for free, it doesn't cost us anything.
Just out of curiosity, how certain are you that "piracy is a minority activity"?
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.
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.
Netflix is a different creature because of streaming and time shifting.
They don't care about people watching a pilot episode or people binge watching last 3 seasons when a show takes off.
The quality metric therefore is all over the place, it is a mildly moderated popularity contest.
If people watch "Love is Blind", you'll get more of those.
On the other hand, this means they can take a slightly bigger risk than a TV network with ADs, because you're likely to switch to a different Netflix show that you like and continue to pay for it, than switch to a different channel which pays a different TV network.
As long as something sticks the revenue numbers stay, the ROI can be shaky.
Black Mirror Bandersnatch for example was impossible to do on TV, but Netflix could do it.
Also if GoT was Netflix, they'd have cancelled it on Season 6 & we'd be lamenting the loss of what wonders it'd have gotten to by Season 9.
Until Disney killed it because "they didn't like the numbers" the Avengers series, including Dare Devil, Luke Cage, etc were highly regarded by all my friends at the time. I don't know why Disney screwed that up colossally outside of wanting the show within Disney Plus.
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.
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.
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.
Right but the production strands are all still their own thing. It's not like there's one big "Netflix Originals" meat grinder all the shows will get lumped into. The existence of reality shows on Netflix for example doesn't mean that they're going to be incapable of producing prestige dramas.
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.
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.
ignoring all "hate" against streaming services, you have to at least give Netflix credit where it's due.
They contribute a lot to the open source community, and their engineering blog is always a good read. Granted, not many people will benefit from their specific type of problems, but for those of us that work with large scale infrastructure, there's often inspiration to be had.
And no, it's usually not directly applicable in a financial setting. Most of the time it's actually the exact opposite, where Netflix thrives on distributed loads, eventual consistency, etc, finance is a lot more reliant on "real time" events.
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.
I imagine it probably would’ve been bought by David Ellison rather than Larry Ellison but that probably would be an effective use of the Warner Brothers IP – have you seen a review of the Suicide Squad game? For a piece of content viewed as the spiritual successor to the award-winning Batman Arkham games it is very disappointing.
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.
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.
Sounds like something a buyer would say. Surely Netflix can handle HBO traffic better and cheaper. Maybe HBO are stuck in some deals. But it is a no-brainer to trash the HBO backend over time.
IP acquisition makes stuff like this inevitable. And the streaming companies still aren't good enough at making and sustaining content, while the older companies simply can make better stuff still.
It might be a path to breaking up some of the media conglomerates. Even if it's just different, newer conglomerates, maybe better media and news will shake out for a bit.
But with big tech making EVERYTHING worse it touches with no regards for wetware customers, it's probably a bad thing.
Honestly the HBO streaming engineers should be promptly shot (or possibly their managers). HBO has the worst streaming interface of any service. Netflix on the other hand is quite good.
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.
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.
With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:
- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.
- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.
- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.
Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.
I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:
- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time
- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do
- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.
So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
I’d note they’re not mutually exclusive revenue streams and both add meaningfully to their value. I think the reality is they peaked the first one and growth is in the second one. Subscriptions that are sticky however are much more valuable individually than an advertising tier user. But if you can cater to both and not downgrade subscriptions to ads tier you win in two parallel markets via the same platform. This is not a bad business strategy. But they need to not lose the subscriptions and their reason for being in the quest for growth or they’ll see nominal growth with decline in value.
note: I hate ads so I'm not trying to manifest this, but can you explain why you're so sure of this?
To me, it seems like they "should" (for greed reasons, I mean, not for my happiness) hike the prices of subscriptions aggressively while keeping the ad-tier attractively-priced, moving as many people as possible over. This increases ad revenue and allows more YoY growth if their ML can manipulate you into more watch hours in 2027 than you do in 2026.
Sure, some people like me will probably drop Netflix before they'll pay $35 a month or endure ads. But the current delta is only $10. I suspect they can make $10 a head in ad revenue in a year -- and if they can make $15, they would break even if they lost 3 ad-free subscribers but gained 2 back onto the ad tier. Anything better than those numbers would be a net gain.
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.
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.
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.
It’s saying something that your post lists all the negative aspects of movie theaters and positive aspects of watching at home without actually specifying why “Movie theaters still win on a couple fronts”.
I went to see Avatar on a Imax screen. It was already about a month after the release so it was pretty quiet.
But those kinds of movies are rare- and it is expensive. You have to drive and park for half an hour, pay 30 euro for two tickets and ofcourse the drinks. Not something I want to do every week.
> 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.
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).
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.
Depends where you are. In Berlin we have around 20 movie theaters nearby. It costs 14 euros per ticket and the nearest theater is in a walking distance.
Yes we watch a lot of movies home, but there are multiple festivals every year curating interesting content.
I would argue not good enough but better. A home cinema depending on viewing distance can have superb visual qualify. Comfort is going to be impossible to beat to being at home. A lot of theater projectors top out at 4k just like home TVs and they’re not as bright. Also information density is lower (it’s 4k spread over a huge wall).
The only shortcoming now really is if you want to view with several people and socialize after, it may be difficult for someone to accommodate a large party with good viewing in their home without a theater setup. And of course audio, audio is where theaters can still stand out. It’s a pain in the ass for most homes to setup a good sound system, you really often do want a dedicated theater area which most aren’t going to have. A soundbar helps. You can Jerry rig some surround speakers into any space but it’s often a pain. So that’s really the last barrier: cheap low latency sound that can beat a theater.
For me comfort trumps the slightly degraded sound. Plus some baby crying or random person chatting during the movie can break that as well.
Not only the movie theater, Netflix killed social life. Well, streaming, feeds and their algorithms in general, but Netflix is very much the ones that really owned the narrative of what to do on a weekend night.
This is very anecdatal, certainly, but I've spoken/overheard a few neighborhood hospitality business owners that had to forclose or cut down due to the constant decline of people leaving the house to just meet in a bar or coffee shop. Only sport nights keeps them going, because sports online remain expensive in most places.
Maybe just my observation or my neck of the woods, but seems to fit the general sentiment of a reduced social environment on the streets in certain parts of the world.
I don't know, that metaphors doesn't hold. I still like going to a local theaters (not multiplexes!) few times a year, the screen is much better than any TV, and the whole experience is overall nicer (beer on tap, etc.). TV can be good enough, but it can't replace larger screen. Few weeks ago I saw Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid for the first time and I'm glad I could see it in a cinema.
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.
Home theater sound is often/usually better than the theater, if you actually put any effort in. Many theaters can't do proper Dolby Atmos with height channels. You can install a setup at home for ~$1500.
Adds complexity, cost, and clutter. Meanwhile, the living situations of many (most?) people forbid it; no big-kicking subwoofers in apartments and condos, and you're probably keeping the volume at polite levels.
And for all that, it's likely still not up to par with a theater, unless you geeked out on a dedicated theater room.
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 you say, Walmart now sells 100" 4k TV's with HDR for less than the average persons tax return. They often have them in-stock in the store.
Meanwhile most theaters are 2k, lack dolby vision or other HDR, have worse audio (many can't do Dolby Atmos with proper height channels), and are filled with people using their cell phones through the entire film.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
Eh, I like an interesting spin on a classic. I’ve seen/heard the Frankenstein plot and small variations on it many times, taking a different direction is a good way to keep in a general universe but develop something new. If you’re not going to come up with new interesting content, at least don’t rehash the exact story I’ve heard many times. But that’s just my preference—I really enjoyed it and have become a fan of Guillermo del Toro works recently (due to exposure on Netflix). I’m not huge critic really so I won’t speak to artistic merit but I can at least say I really enjoyed it.
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).
HBO is expensive and most people don't have it. Ergo most people never see or hear about their lower quality content. Only the good stuff that their rich friends rave about.
You not recognizing their shows doesnt mean they are bad. Ive seen most of those and the overwhelming majority are at least solid. I understand netflix's business model, Im just annoyed that theyre buying HBO because they will likely make it worse. Maybe netflix wants more prestige content and will let HBO be HBO but I doubt it.
> 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.
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".
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 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.
HBO releases tons of great shows every year. They will reliably have at least one running all the time. Netflix releases maybe one good season a year padded by endless amounts of cruft.
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
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.
I think you are true to a point. But great movies get almost universal praise with scores of 9/10 on IMDb or near 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The same goes for food; there are things that are quite controversial, but who says no to fantastic ice cream or bread?
But most importantly for movies, it is not the micro-genre that decides. People who are not into fantasy or astrology still love Lord of the Rings or Interstellar because they are particularly highly produced, where all crafts making up that movie are treated highly instead of strategizing and optimizing.
Yea but those are typically self selected sets. People that are interested in that particular type of movies watches it and rates it highly. But if you only offered that movie to the entire population, likely a large portion of the population won't want to watch it.
For example, The Shawshank Redemption has very high rating on IMDB, but also many people have never seen it and are not interested in watching it.
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)
Major studios haven't made excellent content for a while, so them acquiring WB doesn't matter much. If you want to see the "excellent" films (i.e. I'm assuming you mean well-directed, well-written, well-acted, meaningful, etc.), watch film festivals. They have lots of fantastic stuff, and their movies are getting easier to access.
We've lost nothing with WB except more Joker: Foile a Deux and Wonka garbage.
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.
Cinema used to be a really good shared experience. I don't go to cinema anymore because we have a newborn at home, but we used to pre-order tickets in advanced for movies we really wanted to see (like Wicked last year, Fantastic 4 this year) and the theater was almost empty at opening night for both of those.
Contrast a few years ago when avengers endgame came out, and Spiderman far from home came out shortly after that, and No Way Home a few years after that... They were lively events. People dressed up, the theater handed out free swag and merch, and it was just a really cool shared experience, almost akin to a live concert.
I don't know exactly what's changed in that time, considering No Way Home came out after Covid and it was still a spectacle of an event, but I don't think cinema will get its magic back.
A few years ago I did go to a "Stranger Things" experience and I think that might be the future of shared experiences/narratives. It was essentially a week-long pop-up event, you'd get tickets, and it was basically a "walking simulator" that took you through a narrative within the Stranger Things universe. This wasn't just a bunch of people looking at a screen, it was live actors, holographics, sound design, lights, a lot of crazy stuff for a pop-up venue.
As a fan of the franchise it was really well done. A friend of mine want to a similar "Experience" for the Bridgeton universe, which I care nothing about, but she really enjoyed it as well.
So I think if Netflix were to reimagine cinema, it would probably be in that direction.
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.
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 seems to have a no-nudity policy more or less (or at least, minimal nudity).
I dunno. Sex is part of human existence so it shouldn’t be off-limits for media IMO. But the sort of perfunctory thing where every show on Netflix or HBO has to have some nudity in the first couple episodes was a bit annoying. I don’t mind the lack of nudity in Apple’s stuff. There’s a balance that Apple falls on the “overly conservative” side of, though.
What’s adult mean to you? Nudity, violence, I dunno. Severance considers things like self-identity and the fake personalities, and fake social constructs of our workplaces… it seems more adult to me than a gangster or cowboy story.
I also quite like Pluribus, it feels like actual sci-fi (in the same way 3 Body Problem from Netflix does, actually—legit sci-fi, not action heroes in space).
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.
That video game/superhero IP adaptations are considered "prestige TV" says more about diminished creative expectations than HBO continuing to uphold it's traditional high standards.
Nothing against people who like them, to each his own. But the throughput of quality programming out of HBO has dropped off a cliff through it's multiple changes in ownership.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Real-debrid == imagine a huge cloud storage service. You have 1000 people trying to download Burgonia.4k.mkv. it downloads the torrent once to the shared server, then gives each user their own access to it via a WebDAV mount.
WebDAV == trick you server into thinking a cloud server is a local folder. You use RClone to mount this and it's accessible from your local drive so you can stream all your stuff directly.
What this means: you add a show in Sonarr or a movie in Radarr. Prowlarr searches Torrentio or Zilean for torrents. The best match is chosen. It sends to Decypharr (or black hole) to say "download this torrent to my real debrid box". It finds the cached version of the file, which is instantly available in your drive. It's symlinked so Plex can pick up the file.
Basically the lead time from requesting a movie/series to watching it on your tv is about 10 seconds, with no storage overhead required.
Having figured it out myself, I agree. And it's not obvious that you need both a Usenet _indexer_ (who tells you what content is available) and a Usenet provider (who actually serves you the content).
FWIW, and I'm not sure if this is against terms here, but I use newsgeek for the former and giganews for the latter. Both are paid services but reasonably priced imo. When I can find something on Usenet, it typically downloads with speeds > 10MBps vs. torrenting which can exceed that but is usually much slower.
You can use whatever client you want. I have the *arr stack mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well and SABnzbd is the recommended option there.
Between you and your provider the downloads are over HTTP. The distribution of content between the Usenet providers is over the Usenet protocol which predates HTTP and the WWW.
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."
Buying used media could also a viable option. My kid likes to watch the same thing over and over, subscription content does not make sense for her. You just have to buy it slowly.
In a society that’s built on the foundations of perpetual profit growth it is. Sometimes you just can’t innovate, so instead of improving the product you cut the costs and enshittify. We’re in an enshittification regime right now.
Why are there alternating cycles of innovation and enshittification? I think it’s because investors are always trying to pull forward profit, but because they only have a 10 year horizon on investment strategy they tend to create cycles that are around that same period. If there was less investment, the innovation would be slower but the reactionary enshittification would be lessened too.
I do the following:
www.yandex.com
MOVIENAME direct streaming
And that is it... I have prime + netflix + hulu and such, but I use "yandex.com" as it does not have ads - even if sometimes it takes a bit to load and rarely it gets stuck for a second, it is less time than the stupid ads.
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.
yeah I'm back to Torrenting too. I was more than happy to pay for Prime, Netflix, and maybe Apple TV+ a few times a year but now they expect me to pay for HBO & Crave & x & y & z & a... I might as well get a cable package.
The funny thing is, between a NAS & a monthly VPN subscription & usenet subscriptions I probably could have paid for all those streaming services for a few years :D
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 think what trips people up with jellyfin is making sure they aren’t exposing their network. Getting it to work at home is one thing, getting it to work outside your home is a different beast
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.
Maybe this is because of scarcity.. if existing algos are applied on top of infinitely generated entertainment then perhaps we'll see something even more addictive than YouTube.
Yeah, currently generated content made with some interconnected ideas, vision, script and talent is kinda better than I thought it will be. I expected it will be extremely sloppy at first.
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.
That was the given reason, and I'm sure they knew it was ridiculous and fixed it as soon as they could get all their ducks in a row, but it sure was comically bad from the outside perspective of ordinary users. Even if there had to be 2 apps for some contractual reasons I think most people would have been more tolerant if they had identical functionality and appearance after login, and were just titled "HBO Go for Cable" and "HBO Go Streaming."
> 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.
Disney Channel in the 90s didn't have any ads. And they would show whole Disney movies uninterrupted by anything. For this reason it was a paid add-on to your cable package though, like HBO -- never included in the basic cable package.
In the '00s they still had no real ads, only promo spots for mostly other Disney shows on the channel, and the occasional tie-in with some other Disney property. I think today they have some normal ads but I'm not sure.
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.
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.
Also funny is how many of the companies listed as top-level parts of the conglomerates, like Viacom, Paramount, Boeing, SBC-Ameritech, Bell Atlantic-NYNEX, etc. have since conglomerated further in the years since!
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.”
Sony is still the 2nd largest music distributor and label in the world, behind Universal Music and ahead of Warner music.
My 65" Bravia is one of the best TV's in its class and runs Google TV (IMO a major leg up over the junky Tizen/WebOS offerings from competitors).
They make some of the best noise cancelling headphones money can buy. They have the PS5 and own a bunch of game studios to provide exclusive content for it.
> 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.
They do but that is a digital store & rental service you cited, basically like iTunes. The streaming service they own is the entirely anime-focused Crunchyroll and it’s not managed specifically as an outlet for Sony Pictures because that’s not its core audience.
Sony Pictures for its part does quite well for itself not being tied to a specific vertically-owned streaming service, and given the number of those already out there which will eventually consolidate, they’re probably all the better for it.
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.
Sony Rootkit, Sony BetaMax, Sony MiniDisc, Sony ATRAC, Sony Memory Stick [Select / PRO / Duo / PRO Duo / PRO-HG Duo / M2 / XC / PRO-HG Duo HX / WTF], Sony UMD, Sony Elcaset, Sony SDDS, Sony VAIO, Sony Walkman, Sony Discman, [...]
At least they had some lasting success with their Umatic video tape cartridge, and with the CD that they co-developed with Philips. Their Trinitron tubes were unique and generally quite good -- and they lasted as long in the market as any other CRT did, I suppose. And their various iterations of PlayStation console have all been popular despite being Sony products.
> 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.
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.
Netflix got it's start shipping CDs, which was only possible due to the first-sale doctrine. The rights landscape hasn't adjusted for the new technologies. How could an new player disrupt a streaming world when everything is so locked down?
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure Netflix execs spend much time worrying about cultural cachet like that. They care about popularity and virality but I think they'd be 100% contented to make 100 reality shows like the one I affectionately dubbed "Sluts Island" that each make them $10 million than make one Sopranos-type show that makes them $500 million and 57 Emmys.
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.
True, although Netflix knew the DVD business had no permanent future anyway, so they really didn't care. If they'd picked a less silly name like "DVDflix" or something, it wouldn't have become a viral story, but either way it wouldn't have changed NFLX's fortunes.
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.
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.
Even NYC is having a soundstage boom. It's not just about cutting costs, it's also about being free to go where the talent and resources are, instead of being chained to LA.
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.
But none of the streaming services are competing because they don't offer the same products, by design. Nobody is switching from Apple TV to Netflix because they don't share any shows - they buy both.
> Does HBO+Netflix have a 25% share of the streaming market? I've no idea, but possibly.
No, not even close. According to Nielsen from this year, Netflix has only 7.5% of total TV hours and "Warner Bros + Discovery" clocks in at 1.5% ("HBO" as an independent entity is not tracked), for a total of 9%. A whopping 16% to go before crossing that 25% threshold.
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 is the strategy for all companies that have lots of risk in their business. The media industry has a lot of risk. Too many failed projects can sink a studio. The only way to guard is to increase in scale across different types of media and channels so your environment is diversified
It’s no different from vail buying up all the ski resorts because they have such global reach they can diversify income streams across a wider set of mountains that have variable quality in winter and there for one bad winter doesn’t sink the whole business because they own so many - the ones that have a good year offset the ones that have a bad one
Same thing with media. A wider range of projects from a wider range of talent increases the chances of discovering the next hit show or gold mine movie property and offsetting all the projects that fail.
The other thing to remember is bigger companies turn slower and adapt to disruption slower. So it also opens up an opportunity in 5-10 to disrupt.
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).
I think theres a possibility that Zaslav prefers Netflix because if the government denies the merger he walks away with the breakup fee and can keep running WB as his own fiefdom
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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 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
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.)
It potentially means fewer subscriptions to have more content options (eg, a bunch of services get folded into Netflix). Of course it will be region dependent for other licenses and rights.
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 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.
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.
When all is said and done there’s going to be a few players left and they’re all going to be American by the current looks of things. You could argue movies were already like this, but for television that’s quite the change as most countries had many television production companies and stations.
Now it seems like they’ll be a few global media companies and maybe some local production houses that have to sell their stuff to these guys or setup their own services like the BBC does with iPlayer in the UK, with somewhat limited success compared to these giants.
They won't be American. The balance of power has already shifted east. There are now more productions, more money and more facilities east of Madrid than west of it.
Look I get how Ne Zha 2 was a big success and showed signs of good production quality, but lets be honest: The movie was boring. I'm sure the mostly Chinese audience that sat with me in the theater enjoyed it but I fell asleep halfway in.
The "east" has more work to do to capture that magic that the western imperial order (Hollywood) has wrought upon the world.
I will continue to watch and observe how things play out.
So the companies in charge of distributing the content are American-based multinationals; production leaks out of the US toward prettier places and more amicable laborers; if you’re American and want to tag along—in or behind the scenes—you’re going to need a passport or a visa.
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.
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.
> 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.
But the EU is "the west". Europe is where "the West" started. It's bizarre you would group EU with the middle east and far east rather than with the US.
Your comments make no sense. India, China, Nigeria, etc may have their own film productions, but they all watch american films. But that's not true of indian, chinese, nigerian films which are consumed locally. Beyond film production, what is india, china or nigeria's equivalent to netflix or hulu or amazon prime?
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
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.
Does this mean Netflix is acquiring AOL? Can they bring back the internet cd on a magazine cover ? /s anyone remember AOL Time Warner ? Like the biggest company in the world when it merged … is that what Netflix are buying? The former largest company in the world just decade before last?
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!".
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.
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.
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 most realistic acquirers were Paramount/Skydance or Netflix. Paramount/Skydance is a relatively new-ish entity with David Ellison (Larry's son) as CEO. The general sense in Hollywood is Paramount/Skydance will do little high-brow, art house or awards-fodder films but they will at least distribute films primarily to theaters (they promised to release at least 14 Warner films per year to theaters if their bid was accepted).
Netflix is mostly uninterested in theatrical distribution so the main practical impact of this most of us see day to day may be less theatrical release movies and probably fewer higher budget films being made at all.
Caveats include that the deal has to actually get regulatory approval in the U.S. and EU and survive potential (inevitable?) shareholder lawsuits. Netflix's offer reportedly involved less cash and more debt. Paramount/Skydance argued regulatory approval and the heavy debt made Netflix's offer less attractive than their own despite Netflix's higher top-line price.
The streaming platforms suffer from fragmentation right now: People don't like hopping between a dozen different streaming platforms to consume entertainment - regardless of price or ads. If you give them an option for a single place where all their media is, they will use it, regardless of what is happening behind the scenes.
They will never all merge into one because of regulatory pressure and because they are competitors.
It seems nice to have one less streaming platform in some ways, but it's not a pathway forward.
I'll continue to use Jellyfin with a few hard drives.
It seems like the demise of the possibility of great art in the next 50 years. Maybe my bias I find everything made by Apple or Netflix almost perfect but not it. Every moment is curated for maximum something, but not the feeling I get I used to get, even with filler episodes in between.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just hope they won't destroy sagas like they did to the Witcher. In other words, I don't think this is good for future content as there is a risk movies/series will follow the same scripts, underlying story plots, cultural norms, same cinematography, etc. Quality going down.
Moreover, this also means more time for ads to pay for this merger.
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.
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!
1) steel and rail are important for survival, and actual monopolies that result you being only able to get a necessary good or service from 1 seller
2) there are a billion different ways to entertain yourself, including spending time on HN. It matters very little to real life that there are 5 different places to stream expensive media compared to 6. If they get too expensive, you can watch youtube or tiktok or come back to HN or whatever else.
The pro-monopoly stance never ceases to amaze me. Competition is good, apparently, but multi-hundred-billion-dollar mergers are... also good? Make it make sense.
"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.
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
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.
> 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.
Youtube, Android and Google Maps got better (and became financially viable at all) when Google bought them. Github got better and cheaper when Microsoft bought it.
I'm not necessarily talking about the product itself getting better, I'm talking about the overall consumer situation being better.
All these products were acquired very early in their lifespans, so them getting "better" was practically inevitable.
GitHub's acquisition effectively took at least one competitor off the market. Now, Microsoft doesn't have to seriously develop a competitor, they just bought their competitor and adopted it. They never had to improve Azure DevOps (VSTS) enough to be attractive, they just bought the market leader. If GitHub was never acquired, my company might be deciding between BitBucket, Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure Repos. Instead, Azure Repos is more of a niche offering where most of Microsoft's effort has focused on GitHub. Microsoft removed an option which likely raised prices or reduced user choice.
Google Maps was acquired in basically a prototype stage before it was ever a public product, so that case is irrelevant.
Android is worse in a number of ways due to Google's integration. Google Play Services APIs and other Google technologies have led to heavy Google lock-in. If Android continued as its own project, it would have been much more vendor-agnostic.
In the case of YouTube, I'd argue it's worse in a number of key ways: ads are wildly pervasive (sure, monetization would have had to happen anyway in some fashion), many of the platform changes are user-hostile (removed dislike count, background playback limited to premium subscription), content moderation more heavily influenced by Google's advertisement-based business model (e.g., if YouTube had continued on its own, it might have chosen a different monetization strategy less advertisement oriented, but Google is an advertisement company. Advertisers are more sensitive to their products being presented next to objectionable content) and competitors were snuffed out due to ecosystem integration (YouTube videos as Google search results rather than agnostic video results).
Remember the era where YouTube got extremely badly integrated in to Google+ and basically forced you to use it? That was a pretty terrible user experience.
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.
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.
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)".
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.
Netflix will adapt AI-driven Streaming on demand content. But, critically, it will now be backed up by the entire IP catalogue of WB. Wanna watch a new Superman movie where he meets Harry Pitter? Ok. Wanna see the Matrix as an animated version that includes the Flintstones? Ok.
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.
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.
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.
To be fair people used to have their tv (or even radio) on all the time.
I’m not sure this is that much different. If anything the quality has gone up in the sense that maybe you have a bit more choice about what you put on in the background
Except that both the number of commercial minutes and the number product plugs in each hour have quadrupled in my recent memory, which is not even so good anymore since the Dumont network vanished and Ed Murrow took that government job.
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.
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
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?”
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
I once worked for a tech company that bought Warner Brothers, well time Warner. Did not end well for the tech company (AOL). In my opinion at the time, the cultures between the two were so different. Fly by night tech guys making a decent amount of money mixing with people who worked long to get where they were in the content space, plus the commercial internet was “newer” e.g. less established then. As they used to say, content is king. Good luck.
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.
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.
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.
Netflix should buy a theme park and make a rival to Disneyland. Call it Westworld... put a Westworld area, Harry Potter area (make the Hogwarts train like the monorail), Dune area, Lord of the Rings areas (Shire, Rivendell, Gondor, Mordor), DC comics area (Gotham, Metropolis), Game of Thrones areas, etc. So many other properties from Cartoon Network to add for kids. So many other areas to expand on with the IP from WB if Netflix wants to.
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.
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).
Yeah, I'm not sure if the best response from society is to simply stop appreciating an entire genre of human art. I mean, I get it, but like... we can't just keep giving up more and more lovely things forever, right? We shouldn't have to. We shouldn't have to put up with this nonsense, and snarkily clocking out doesn't seem like the answer. Some of us want to continue to have a rich variety of movies and TV shows, and we shouldn't let a very wealthy few control that.
I had to stop watching Netflix. Every few minutes, I felt I was taken out of the story by some agenda-pushing content. It's so sad because they are very good at storytelling. I hope they won't enshittify Warner Bros. content too
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
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.
On the news of Netflix acquiring Warner Bros, I’m reminded of how good Netflix has been at innovating their business model.
Over the past 27 years, their business model has changed multiple times and each evolution appears to be in direct response to the bottleneck of growth, from maintaining inventory of DVD to acquiring global streaming rights.
Year /
Business Model /
Bottleneck to Growth
1998 /
Sell DVDs over the internet /
Need to continually replenish DVD inventory,
1999-2006 /
Rent DVDs over the internet /
USPS delivery & return times
2007 /
Stream movies over the internet /
Acquiring US streaming rights to a massive library of movies
2009 /
Start producing movies (Netflix Originals) /
Number of subscribers watching Netflix Originals
2010-2012 /
Global expansion; Canada, South America, Europe /
Maintaining rights globally
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.
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.
Its been going around in cicles between "WB is fine, just rejected 2 other offers, whats the worst that could happen" and "Netflix buy out any day now WB is in the toilet"
I’m really disappointed, because Netflix doesn’t sell any of their content. You have to subscribe.
I own Soprano’s, White Lotus, Batman Movies, etc on regular media, but I can’t get shows like Black Mirror outside of a subscription for the rest of my life.
I really hope they continue to offer physical and digital sales of their media for those who perfer to buy instead of renting.
Paramount, Disney, NBC Universal, etc all still sell their content even though they operate subscription services and I wish Netflix would do the same.
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.
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.
That's the exact opposite of Netflix most recent history, Westworld was an expensive production and viewing numbers on HBO were declining as seasons went on. Even relatively inexpensive looking Netflix shows got cancelled, i.e. GLOW, I Am Not Okay with This, Santa Clarita Diet, never mind shows that were less expensive than Westworld that had poor Netflix viewer metrics like The Residence, The OA, probably lots more I am leaving out. Early years maybe, like when they kept Orange is the New Black and House of Cards going to completion or resurrected Arrested Development.
Netflix 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.
Enshittification marches on. Oh well. At least we have 80-odd years of stuff to watch. There are enough good old movies to easily keep one occupied for a lifetime or two.
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.
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.
I know the guideline about complaining about site display and rendering, but there’s more to this one, I promise.
This gives a CloudFront 403 error when loaded from a Mullvad VPN endpoint in the US.
How can I vote with my wallet for privacy support from a vendor when there are only a few vendors and they all block VPNs? This is bigger than Netflix, bigger even than streaming media.
I fear that we are very rapidly advancing to a point where you can’t use any of the “normal internet” and the mass-appeal normie services without doing full identification with some unique identifier. For most apps, it’s your phone number (which is 1:1 with a person and these days never changes). For websites, it’s going to be your residential home (IP) address.
I’m glad I downloaded all the movies I’ve ever cared about and have local copies of 100% of them. I doubt I’ll be permitted to use any of these services that stream them now, even if I wanted to.
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.
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.
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.
Couple of unrelated thoughts on this very long thread...
1. I'm sure multiple people have pointed it out, but for all the talk of a bubble, the AOL Time Warner merger was likely the biggest canary in the coal mine for what was to come. History repeats itself with literally the same brand and a lot of the same assets? Sort of depressing if the bubble does now burst because it's like we never learn our lesson
2. Trump wanted the Ellisons because they support him. There's almost no question in my mind the government will fight this. Will they win in court? Hard to say, but my quick thoughts:
If market cap was the basis for antitrust then the answer would be maybe, but that's not the basis for it. Is revenue the basis? No, but Disney generates more than Netflix, so does Comcast, so as a proxy for market share, which I think is somewhat the basis for antitrust (iamaal) it seems like there's no chance this creates some anticompetitive media juggernaut. But then the question is whether streaming is different than more general media. And if it is, how do you define the market when a company like Apple is involved in streaming but not fully a media company? Does that balance things out a bit? I don't think it does because I don't think anyone could claim that Apple counterbalances Netflix in streaming market share. If anything it would be a further argument against Netflix having Netflix and HBOMax.
Now having written all of that, I think the government would win because Paramount streaming with HBO would at least stand a chance in the streaming market against Netflix. And then also increase general media competition because you'd have Disney/ABC, Comcast/NBC, Paramount/CBS with the WBD addition improving Paramount's competitive position relative to the other two.
1938 Superman didn't fly; he jumped. And he was named Kal-L. But he was also a lot more of a social justice warrior. His chest emblem was different, too. But yeah, I expect good things.
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.
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.
It’s nice to see business that rewarded customers with convenience win in the end.
Well, except for Netflix refusing their catalogue to be indexed in the TV app on macOS and iOS. I won’t pay for Netflix until they drop that anti customer practice.
If you want me to buy the video content you’re selling, it better be searchable in the TV app. And if not, there should be a better reason than you want to keep people trapped in the Netflix app.
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.
> 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)
I wonder if we can use modern tech to get high quality screen recordings.
By "screen recordings" I mean pointing an actual camera at a screen and by "high quality" I mean some sort of post processing involving automation to remove noise and other artifacts.
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…
AI TL;DR of 500 Hacker News Comments
Mostly complainers. A few useful nuggets.
Useful:
Music streaming has universal catalogs; video doesn't. That's why one works and the other feels broken.
Blu-rays keep working. Streaming licenses don't.
WB has been cursed—AOL, AT&T, Discovery all saddled it with debt. Pattern worth noting.
HBO is nearly impossible to access legally outside the US. Real issue.
Noise:
"Enshittification" with no specifics
Piracy boasting
Subjective quality debates
Anti-trust speculation from non-lawyers
Cable nostalgia
true inflection point of the already prolonged withering away and inevitable death of one of America’s great art forms.
yes i’m aware of the proud film traditions of france, italy, england, & japan (among others). nevertheless the paradigms of popular film are uniquely homegrown.
netflix is not in the film business. they are in the streaming business.
yet another example of the rape aka “enshittification” of culture. why share an experience together as a public in front of the silver screen? much easier to sit alone on our fucking couches while we doomscroll and dick around.
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.
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.
reply