Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

about.netflix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

971–980 of 1001 posts

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#971

Post by johnnyanmac »

yibg wrote: post #702
phartenfeller wrote: post #52

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 re…

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 l…

Well we have over a century of media and it should be diverse enough to serve everyone. The issue is we're shifting towards a future full of McDonalds and Dennys instead of culture. Safe, inoffensive slop that you grab because you're hungry, not curious.

It's also almost like we shouldn't have one restaurant serve 300m people. Aka a monopoly.it'll collapse overtime anyways, because of you're competing on slop you can't beat the social media model of a bunch of low cost addictive TikToks for "free". The race to the bottom was already won and ot doesn't cost $25/month.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#972

Post by johnnyanmac »

afavour wrote: post #189
phartenfeller wrote: post #52

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 re…

Warner makes a lot of crap too. They both make what sells.

By design. That's why they are ready to sell to Netflix.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#973

Post by johnnyanmac »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #934
phartenfeller wrote: post #52

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 re…

> it frequently produces mediocre or worse content I agree, and I go one step beyond: Any "series" is BY DEFINITION, bad. If to tell a good story you need +4 episodes, you're doing a poor job. Or, what's real, you're just bloating it ON PURPOSE to keep people attached to their screens. If Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, 2001 Space Odyssey or any other good film managed to tell their story in The real quality resides in ma…

>I know I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion but I don't care.

I wasn't going to downvote you till this part.

Anyways, I disagree. But it really comes down to what you value in a story. You're not going to get the rich lore of Mordor, or even Tamriel in a 2 hour runtime. Movies excel at creating character moments, and any kind of worldbuilding that isn't built on an entire series will feel shallow. Or maybe boring because it will take the entire runtime and you have nothing to attach to.

Samurai jack feels like a great example. It could have been a focus oneshot on how Jack got back to the past and beat Aku. A great one, even. But that's not what the show is about. It's showing the long term effects of aku' reign, how society adapted around it, how the next generation receives propaganda to keep serving their tyrant, and the small bits of rebellion and hope shed among it. Jack getting back to the past to undo all that wasn't why Jack is thought of as a great hero. It's the influences he had and seeds of hope he sowed among the dystopia

(And yes, now Netflix owns that).

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#974

Post by johnnyanmac »

BurningFrog wrote: post #574
phartenfeller wrote: post #52

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 re…

The cinemas not already dead are dying. Cinemas were a way to share the cost of technology to show high quality movies among hundreds of people. Most people now has that tech at home, so there is no need for cinemas anymore. I went to my local cinema a few times before it closed last year. There were never more than 3 spectators.

Maybe it's different for me in the heart of LA, but I still need to plan around a movie if it's opening week. Theatres will fill up.

Home is convenient, but also small and thus limited. Having a large commons to go out to helps. But that might not be the case for Gen Z as they adjust from 200 inch screen to 7 inch ones for consuming media. Why spend 150 million on a cinematic experience when a single creator spends maybe a week planning a 30 second tiktok for engagement?

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#975

Post by Guvante »

taeric wrote: post #962
Guvante wrote: post #959

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Never adjust to the streaming world" implies the studios were wrong. Netflix is buying Warner Brothers and you think Netflix was wasting money on licensing costs? More like Netflix's bet that if it didn't share usage information it could keep underpaying for what it was getting paid off.

Licensing being a giant mess for media is not exactly news? Netflix reportedly got some really good deals early on, but of the kind that nobody was willing to do again. They didn't have the luxury of first sale to protect their market, though. Which is a very sharp contrast to how they ran the DVD side of things. So, it isn't that they were wasting money on licensing. Licensing kept getting more and more expensive. N…

Licensing in media is relatively straightforward, you pay per view.

Netflix decided it didn't want to and caused the whole uproar.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#977

Post by tensorbodega »

jascination wrote: post #903
somehnguy wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet + the *arr stack + Plex or Jellyfin make it completely effortless to watch any movie or TV show I can think of. And I don't have to play the 'which service has this?' game.

This, but Real-Debrid. No need to self-host TBs of content and manually download them. This slightly outdated guide helps you set it up pretty easily - instead of Zurg+ Black hole, use Decypharr https://savvyguides.wiki/sailarrsguide/ 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 th…

Hah i just set up a system identical this a few days ago after moving off of a more messy torrenting setup. Glad I picked a sensible stack.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#978

Post by jasomill »

jandrese wrote: post #427
ekropotin wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I imagine major HBO resellers / direct Netflix competitors Amazon and Hulu (Disney) will insist on HBO remaining an extra-cost option, assuming these relationships survive the merger at all.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#979

Post by jasomill »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #300
meowface wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I assume it has as much to do with the fact that Disney and Comcast didn't settle on terms of sale for Comcast's minority stake in Hulu until June of this year.

Re: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

#980

Post by Suppafly »

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.)

>People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service, but then everyone pulled their content and have their own (Disney, Paramount, etc.)

This, it's been horrible ever since all of the content owners have pulled their content from netflix.

Post reply on HN