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.
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.
They all had their chance. They blew it.