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.
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.
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.