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Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

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Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#621

Post by BigGreenJorts »

ezconnect wrote: post #485
ryandrake wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. R…

Licensing is really complicated and requires lot of paper work. The best example is the music soundtracks of old TV series. They even get substituted if they don't get the proper license to stream them. So some old show get new soundtrack or background music and they don't feel the same.

Noticed that with a lot of intl shows Netflix gets the rights to. They so often have these awful chipper toony music

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#622

Post by gessha »

bko wrote: post #518
afavour wrote: post #182

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…

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.

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.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#624

Post by senordevnyc »

jmkd wrote: post #199
quasarsunnix wrote: post #186

We’re witnessing the globalization of television. When all is said and done there’s going to be a few players left and they’re all going to be American by the current looks of things. You could argue movies were already like this, but for television that’s quite the change as most countries had many television production companies and stations. Now it seems like they’ll be a few global media companies and maybe some…

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.

Why on earth would Madrid be the dividing line between east and west?

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#625

Post by NoGravitas »

josefresco wrote: post #395
dclowd9901 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're starting to up their quality. Frankenstein and Death by Lightning were two standout successes recently. That said, I'm more uncomfortable with the continued consolidation of media ownership and more outsize influence of FAANG tech over media.

> Frankenstein and Death by Lightning were two standout successes recently. IMHO Frankenstein" was pretty terrible. The makeup was awful, the effects were cheap, the monster... wasn't a monster! The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.

The 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.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#626

Post by jodrellblank »

Off topic, but I am boggled that Larry Ellison came back to “richest man in the world” this year.

For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Microsoft breadth of products, Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, Amazon’s massive cloud dominance, the AI boom for nVidia…

Oracle?!

“On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$393 billion.

In June 2020, Ellison was reported to be the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $66.8 billion”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#627

Post by subtlesoftware »

afavour wrote: post #182

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…

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.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#628

Post by Nevermark »

themerone wrote: post #573
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

HBO owns Westworld and stopped streaming it to avoid paying residuals.

Wow. That is dysfunctional.

I would be curious how the financial wires got crossed.

I would have assumed residuals were proportional to views, and views valued proportionally as contributing to subscription demand. And it would be a rare viewer to watch one show like that, over & over. I.e. only upside. Something went sideways.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#629

Post by tptacek »

malvim wrote: post #599
thayne wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 terribl…

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.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#630

Post by deegles »

nonethewiser wrote: post #315
afavour wrote: post #182

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…

> 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 mean... did we really expect the content owners to roll over and let the streaming platforms capture the potential profits?
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