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.
New co revenue >= Netflix + HBO revenue
> traditional TV business
This was actually excluded from the deal. CNN, TNT, Discovery and the rest are being spun off into their own company. Presumably to wither and die.
Excluding it from the bundle lets Disney be price competitive.
That still seems to mostly apply. In the US on Disney+ the US sports are often front and center, sure, but you can still scroll the list and get European football matches and some Aussie Rules Rugby and Cricket all kinds of things that people don't necessarily think US sports fans would watch. I think part of what ESPN realized, too, is that even regional sports can have global appeal with the right marketing or the fact that not much else is being played in that moment.
ESPN is also still often the home in the US of things like the Scripps National Spelling Bee and various Poker and Chess championships. This was famously mocked in the comedy movie Dodgeball with that movie's climactic Dodgeball championship happening on ESPN Ocho, the fictional 8th cable channel for US ESPN (which had 3 channels at the time). That joke has come full circle in interesting ways as ESPN has roughly 7 cable channels today and intentionally uses the "ESPN Ocho" branding for weirder/smaller audience championships even though the number of people that still remember the comedy movie Dodgeball is shrinking and people don't remember why it was a joke.