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
I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content.

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.

>>thayne+BO
This should really be the end goal. We are worse off than cable right now with all these streaming services and worse , overlapping content.

>>throwa+NS
Did people forget that on cable you could only watch what was being broadcast in that moment?

Streaming is infinitely better.

>>Burnin+vU
growing up I always had on-demand and recording on the set top boxes

>>bakies+TX
Certainly TiVo came in--as well as boxes from cable companies (though I only had TiVo). And, if you really want to go old school, you could program VCRs to record shows if you were off on vacation.

But there was a long period even after cable came in for more channels and potentially better reception when TV was largely on a set schedule.

>>ghaff+OZ
Didn't the VCR still work with cable? (I haven't used one)

>>bakies+pr1
It did, but it was awkward.

Analog cable channels were on a wider range of frequencies than regular TV (radio broadcast) channels. So the VCR's tuner had to be "cable ready".

Some cable channels, especially premium channels, were "scrambled", which meant you needed a cable box to tune them. So the VCR, by itself, could only record the basic channels that came with all cable packages. To record something from a movie channel (HBO, Showtime, etc.), you needed the cable box to tune it in and provide an unscrambled signal to your VCR.

And that meant the cable box needed to be set to the correct channel at the time the VCR woke up and started recording. The simple method was to leave it on the correct channel, but that was tedious and error prone. As I recall, there were also VCRs that could send a command to the cable box to turn it on (emulating the cable box remote) and set the channel, but you had to set that up.

Later, when digital cable came along, you needed the cable box involved for every recording because the channels were no longer coming over the wire in a format that the VCR could tune in.

So yeah, you could do it, but it was a pain.