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.
Jokes aside, HBO is a prestige TV brand. Netflix had a deep desire to create and run premium content previously, but the cost and volume they could put out was clearly a problem for the business. Maybe HBO becomes the premium, prestige TV brand and we get 1-2 series at a time from that + movies, and Netflix remains as it is. This consumer would be quite happy with that.