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
That's caused by consolidation. Compare with music: a bunch of different companies make music, a bunch of different companies stream music, but they're not the same companies, so approximately everybody's music is available on every platform.

With video, many platforms are also creators, which leads to exclusivity, and fragmentation.

Combining everything into a monopoly would also fix this problem, but would have downsides.