zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
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 backend infrastructure at the very least.

>>afavou+Jd
> 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.)

>>noneth+Rp
With a lot of competition you might have 20 great shows spread across 10 streamers. People will complain because they’d have to subscribe to 10 streamers to get everything.

Consolidation reduces the number of streamers, but reduces the competition too. The number of great shows will go down faster than than the number of streamers too.

The endpoint would be one streamer, with maybe 0-1 great shows. The vast majority of content will be low risk and cheap to produce.

With one big streamer it will be easy to manage your subscription, but the price will still be at least as high as subscribing to half a dozen small streamers, and the shows will be worse.

(Hope you like repetitive, formulaic shows, which, at best, are a rehash last year’s mildly entertaining show. That’s what you can look forward to.)