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.)
The kind of consolidation on offer here just means having to pay for two streaming services at once. That is, at some point HBO Max will get rolled up into Netflix, and Netflix will increase their prices to make sure you don't save any money from it. Because let's be honest here: the only reason why the glory days of streaming were so glorious is that nobody knew what anything was worth and everything was being subsidized by the suckers still paying for cable.
The problem is once you run out of suckers, you have to start charging what the show actually costs to make (or license). Once you account for that plus margin you have a cable bill again[0]. Except since there's like five major services they can split the content and bill five ways. They have to charge about the same as the others to maintain this equilibrium, but with fewer services there's less alternatives and they can raise prices higher.
What people really want out of their streaming service is a free ride, no more and no less. Either that, or they're going back to physical media because one time payments are the only fair and consumer-friendly way of paying for creative works.
[0] Yes, I know most of that was actually sports. For everything else, there was a second layer of subsidy involved: ads. Most of the stuff that didn't charge carriage fees were getting shittons of ad revenue, and that subsidy has also largely vanished.