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Netflix use BSD heavily. Oracle is Solaris. It was just BSD vs SysV all over again.
Linux is just as free (or free-er), and it's a ton better supported: why would these major companies not use it?
> With his new toy having a leverage ratio north of 6x, David Ellison has promised $6 billion in “synergies” within three years. (Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos put the figure closer to $16 billion, after examining WBD’s books. What is it that these CEOs think they are seeing, that everyone else is missing? I can believe they have inflated egos, but they’re not totally crazy, right? My impression is that Netflix is fair…
Succession planning. This appears to be Larry Ellison trying to manage succession for his kids. We'll probably see a second major acquisition like this for Megan (who tends to be more progressive leaning) [edit: I was right. Megan Ellison is making moves as well now [0]] Larry would not be able to do something similar at Oracle today (definitely in the 2000s though), as by the 2010s operational control at Oracle incr…
This is the same as acquiring the Washington Post or Twitter, right? It's more about media control than any classic business case. Once you start meddling with the money machine it's not just Net Profit = Revenue – All Expenses (COGS + Operating Expenses + Interest + Taxes)
> With his new toy having a leverage ratio north of 6x, David Ellison has promised $6 billion in “synergies” within three years. (Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos put the figure closer to $16 billion, after examining WBD’s books. What is it that these CEOs think they are seeing, that everyone else is missing? I can believe they have inflated egos, but they’re not totally crazy, right? My impression is that Netflix is fair…
> that everyone else is missing? To be fair, sometimes they do. Musk saw genuine bloat at Twitter. I’m doubtful one can optimize that much out of WarnerBrothers. But Hollywood isn’t exactly known for being efficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea is that this is a political deal, not a business deal - by buying WBD, the Ellisons add CNN to a portfolio that already includes CBS and TikTok, and shaping coverage matters more to them than the stock price.
If that's the case, shouldn't they have been able to work out a much cheaper deal with Netflix where they get CNN and Netflix everything else?
Why is Netflix in the "Big Tech" categorization in the "value in market cap" graphic? I do not see how Netflix's primary business is any different than the businesses in the "Hollywood" categorization that also pay to make media and then sell it. Apple and Amazon can be in a different category because making and selling media is an ancillary part of their business. Alphabet does not make or curate any media, it just…
Netflix pays like a Big Tech company, is valued like a Big Tech company and was part of FAANG. 10 years ago the streaming tech they had was fairly high tech, even if it's now pretty standard. So they're considered Big Tech for historical reason
That would be circular. The author was trying to show how much smaller hollywood media companies are than big tech.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea is that this is a political deal, not a business deal - by buying WBD, the Ellisons add CNN to a portfolio that already includes CBS and TikTok, and shaping coverage matters more to them than the stock price.
If that's the case, shouldn't they have been able to work out a much cheaper deal with Netflix where they get CNN and Netflix everything else?
Netflix use BSD heavily. Oracle is Solaris. It was just BSD vs SysV all over again.
Legitimate question (I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just ignorant): why? Linux is just as free (or free-er), and it's a ton better supported: why would these major companies not use it?
Netflix's CDN nodes are basically single-purpose appliances that do one thing: push video bytes to your screen as fast as possible. For that kind of workload FreeBSD's network stack was historically stronger, and the codebase was easier for a small team to reach into and tune aggressively. They've gotten individual servers past 100 Gbps of TLS-encrypted traffic. A lot of the optimizations they needed (kernel TLS offload, sendfile improvements, custom TCP tuning) they built themselves and contributed back to FreeBSD, and the kernel's size and structure made that practical in a way that would've been harder in Linux.
The other piece is licensing. BSD license is permissive, GPL isn't. Netflix wanted the option to make deep kernel modifications without being required to open source everything. They ended up open sourcing a lot of it anyway, but having the choice mattered.
Worth noting they only use FreeBSD for the CDN. All their backend services, recommendations, control plane, that's all Linux on AWS. So it's not that they rejected Linux, they just picked FreeBSD for the one job where it had a real edge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rich people don't buy media companies because this is the best business in the world. Quite the opposite, most media companies are mediocre or lose money. They do this because of the political clout they get with the control of these media properties.
> They do this because of the political clout they get with the control of these media properties Bezos bought the Post for clout. Ellison (and his investors) are buying Warner Brothers first and foremost to make money.