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.)

  New co revenue >= Netflix + HBO revenue

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.

On the one hand, competition good I guess?

On the other hand, if we're not going to have a music situation where the vast majority of mainstream content is available on most of the major platforms, fragmentation is pretty consumer unfriendly.

Netflix is pretty much a studio at this point. Not sure that back-end infrastructure or client apps is really a differentiator for anyone. An individual may find that one service is "better" in whatever respect but it's really about exclusive content.

As a consumer I certainly hope that this means there's one less streaming service to deal with (though I'm no longer an HBO subscriber at the moment) so long as pricing doesn't go up too much.

WBD was on an increasingly unprofitable path, and we know where that road leads.

Quite possibly (and quite unfortunately) to the Ellisons.

There are already noises about FCC or DOJ leaning on things in order to 'correct' that.

I tend to see much more discussion about how the main downside is for sellers of content. Why is this bad for consumers?

It’s a very toxic way to view things.

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.

That said, I'm more uncomfortable with the continued consolidation of media ownership and more outsize influence of FAANG tech over media.

think old navy, gap, banana republic.

the quality difference is important for the conglomerate same with netflix vs hbo, the corporate benefit is being able to save on costs around like amortizing the corporate side of things (accounting, marketing, real estate, research ect)

* The Devil's Plan

* Alice in Borderlands

* Extraordinary Attorney Woo

* Brassic

* Back to Life

* Intelligence

* Black Doves

* Top Boy

* Mo

* The Breakthrough

* Borgen

* Love Death & Robots

* Scavenger's Reign

As well as well-known stuff like Stranger Things and Squid Game as a sibling comment mentioned.

[Edit: replies point out some of these are bought rather than produced but I think it still counts for overall quality]

Don't look at only series. They also have recipes repurposed. But they acquire good titles and also produce some good ones.

I hate this era of consolidation but Warner and HBO have already degraded, so this may be the least bad outcome here.

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.

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.

please stop them.

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.

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.

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.

lots of people have, and we've come now full circle. I wonder if it was inevitable.

Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles

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.

Is that a financialised version of piggybacking?

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.

Then there is Disney, Comcast (Peacock), Paramount, STARZ (standalone company), and AMC

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.

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.

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.

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

This has been the narrative about the state of streaming services for years now. People upset that content is too fragmented across services. Now we get some significant consolidation and people are upset. They just ignore that angle and find a different one to gripe about.

I think this is great.

But the other platforms - Disney+ (2019), Apple TV (2016/2019), HBO Max (2020), Peacock (2020), Paramount+/CBS All Access (2021 / 2014) - are all later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act

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.

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.)

this is not how markets usually work.

There's no modeling, it's a punishment or incentive. The intention is to inflict financial pain.

Besides, they still have plans to spin off the cable networks, so this would mostly concern the streaming assets, movie studio, and the IP.

So, layoffs not soonest than in 18 months.

Netflix refuses to play game, because they want to keep their data to themselves. Apple would LOVE Netflix to integrate into the app.

It may take you the next decade to complete. There are some real oddballs in there that lean toward "art film" (but what do you expect from Andy Warhol). A lot of "foreign" films (foreign for this U.S. viewer). In short a lot of surprises.

Definitely feel like a student of film now (for whatever that's worth).

[1] https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List

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.

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

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.

What's the attraction to the physical media given the availability of these versions online?

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.

This seems like a chicken and egg downward spiral with consumers pirating and studios producing slop.

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).

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.

IMO,Netflix wants to acquire their main competitor in europe.

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…