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.
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 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 that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content (scifi/fantasy, stuff for kids, old movies, international, sports, etc.) regardless of what company made it.
Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
> I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content
This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.