https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/par...
https://press.wbd.com/us/media-release/hbo-max/hbo-max-nears...
They made the comment and CBC reported on it https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/us-netflix-warner-bros...
That’s a completely different market. They are not trying to compete with Netflix and in fact have a deal with them that Netflix has first right of refusal to stream any Sony film
https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408
Sony created KPop Demon Hunters and sold the streaming rights to Netflix .
If you look at any of their popular back catalog TV content, it is all being streamed on other services.
It may take you the next decade to complete. There are some real oddballs in there that lean toward "art film" (but what do you expect from Andy Warhol). A lot of "foreign" films (foreign for this U.S. viewer). In short a lot of surprises.
Definitely feel like a student of film now (for whatever that's worth).
See here: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...
Edit: I did really enjoy Frankenstein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarnerMedia#AOL-Time_Warner_me...
Here is some history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2J0pRJSToU
You do know that David Ellison (Larry Ellison's son), through his Skydance Media, acquired Paramount Global (including its parent, National Amusements) in a merger completed in August 2025.
He also wanted Warner Brothers. I'm super glad that nepo baby isn't getting what he wants. He is using his daddy to talk to Trump to try stop it though: https://nypost.com/2025/12/04/media/paramount-skydances-davi...
"Hate the player AND the game (10 Sep 2025)" https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-p...
"The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street (14 Aug 2024)" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enfo...
"End of the line for Reaganomics (13 Aug 2021)" https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
"10 Oct 2022 Antitrust is – and always has been – about fairness" https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/10/play-fair/#bedoya
And his archives for more:
This is a misconception on a similar level to thinking the monster's name is Frankenstein: "As depicted by Shelley, the creature is a sensitive, emotional person whose only aim is to share his life with another sentient being like himself."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster#Perso...
They could also do crossover merch, putting Bugs Bunny on a Squid Game jacket: https://www.netflix.shop/en-pe/collections/squid-game/produc...
They'll have to step up their game in plush, this to me looks like it's from CafePress: https://www.netflix.shop/en-pe/collections/squid-game/produc...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F1...
I started using Netflix in 2001 as a DVD subscriber. It was wonderful for nearly 20 years. I ended up canceling before the service officially ended because it was clear that the writing was on the wall and the service was going downhill fast. You used to be able to get nearly any movie or TV series, domestic or foreign. It's a lot more work to find good stuff now, even with streaming in the mix.
https://www.pinkbike.com/news/netflix-in-exclusive-talks-for...
(yes Pinkbike is my source)
Netflix was a silicon valley start-up with a tech founder (Reed) who teamed up with an LA movie buff (Ted). They tried to solve a problem: it was too hard to watch movies at home, and Hollywood seemed to hate new tech. The movie industry titans alternated between fighting Netflix and making deals. They fought Netflix's ability to bulk purchase and rent out DVDs. Later, they lobbed insults even while taking Netflix's money for content licensing. Here's Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, in 2010:
"It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so." [1]
Remember: this was the same movie industry that gave us the MPAA and the DMCA. They were trying to ensure the internet, and new tech in general, had zero impact on them. Streaming movies and TV probably wouldn't exist if Netflix had not forced the issue.
Netflix buying HBO is significant, but also just another chapter in this story of Netflix's internet distribution model out-competing the Hollywood incumbents. Even now in 2025, at least 12 years after it was perfectly clear that streaming direct to the consumer would be the future, the industry is still struggling to turn the corner. Instead, they're selling themselves to Netflix.
I was at Netflix 2009-2019. It was shocking how easily our little "Albanian army" overthrew the empire. Our opponents barely fought back, and when they did, they were often incompetent with tech. To me, this is a story about how competent tech carried the day.
Netflix has been rapidly buying and building studio capacity for a decade now. Adding the WB studio production capacity is a huge win for Netflix. It makes those studios more productive: each day of content production is now worth more when distributed via Netflix's global platform.
Same with WB and HBO catalog and IP: it's worth more when its available to Netflix's approx 300 million members. Netflix can make new TV and films based on that IP, and it will be worth more than if it was only on HBO's platforms.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13bewkes.h...
For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Microsoft breadth of products, Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, Amazon’s massive cloud dominance, the AI boom for nVidia…
Oracle?!
“On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$393 billion.
In June 2020, Ellison was reported to be the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $66.8 billion”
Not only this, but there's also Stranger Things, which imho had too many long breaks between seasons. Black Mirror was another one that was really popular. Squid Game as well.
Narcos is another and one of my personal favorite shows of all time, really captures a lot of details that I had no idea about as known by the DEA agents who went after some of the biggest drug lords of our time.
They also fund and produce some of the best high quality documentary series.
https://screenrant.com/marvel-netflix-tv-show-cancellations-...
Maybe? You’re making blind assertions with no data. I have no idea how frequently the average person sits in front of their 60” TV by themselves and watches a movie on their tablet. My guess is not very often but again, I have no data on this.
> My point was large TV’s “have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement” people owning them still went to the moves.
And we come back to the beginning where your assertion is true but also misleading.
Most people have a large tv in their homes today. Most people did not have this two decades ago, despite then being available.
The stats agree. TV sizes have grown significantly.
https://www.statista.com/chart/3780/tv-screen-size/?srsltid=...
Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma.
I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture.
> “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.”
https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-s...
There was a cinema magazine, and i ran into a 6 page obituary for this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Chaney
Some silent movie star. Never heard of him before. Looks like he was worth 1/8 of the non-ad content 1 year after his death in 1931.
I don't see why Netflix wants to keep any of HBO Max tech.
Edit: the deck[1] from Netflix webcast mentions:
> Uniting Netflix’s world-class member experience and global reach with Warner Bros.’ renowned franchises and extensive library will…
It seems obvious Netflix is only interested in WB's IP's and content catalog.
[1] https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_events/2025/Dec/05...
Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company with a lot of multi-billion dollar product streams and a lot of business lockin around basically any company on the planet which isn't a new web app startup.
Oracle sell an RDBMS. Competing with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and the last 15 years of NoSQL. Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019, and were very happy about it, popping champagne in their announcement video[1]. Oracle license Java which has seen a mass migration to free OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto and all the other free forks. Oracle make a cloud service that you wouldn't touch unless you had a team of Fortune 100 lawyers pressing enter for you because you know Oracle saleslawyersharks are watching on the other side.
Why does anyone other than the government give them money? What for? Okay yes they're "the best" at something or other for a Fortune 100 with serious needs, nothing else comes close, ... but 4-5x their valuation in the last 5 years??
> "Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. Amazon is... Actually wildly successful"
Yeah, Tesla is hype-valued and Amazon does a lot of things in a lot of big markets, of course they're valuable. Oracle does some obscure boring IBM style thing that is never hyped and there is never any positive sentiment about it on the tech internet.
[1] https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-...
But I guess with the first one having ended pre-Oracle, he's had a pretty solid pre-nup ever since.
Billionaire Drools That “Citizens Will Be on Their Best Behavior” Under Constant AI Surveillance
https://futurism.com/the-byte/billionaire-constant-ai-survei...
Is the kind of mindset behind this guy.
Here is a list of hundreds and hundreds of HBOs work over the past several decades. How many do you even recognize the name of? 20%?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HBO_original_programmi...
(Actually, he walked it back slightly in 2024 - https://archive.ph/V5Kt1).
https://medium.com/@danial.a/how-netflix-used-data-to-create...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HBO_original_programmi...
I don't recognize half the titles on that page.
They also make less content overall. This makes sense because they are one TV channel and assume you can get your reality TV fix somewhere else.
Netflix wants to be the only thing you watch. So they have to serve all needs.
No, not even close. According to Nielsen from this year, Netflix has only 7.5% of total TV hours and "Warner Bros + Discovery" clocks in at 1.5% ("HBO" as an independent entity is not tracked), for a total of 9%. A whopping 16% to go before crossing that 25% threshold.
https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2025/streaming-reaches-h...
Yep by a significant margin in fact https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2025/streaming-reaches-h...
> The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...
I wouldn't tbh, though I'll admit I'm speculating solely on public information. During the 2023 strikes, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA negotiated additional residuals based upon whether 20% of the streaming services subscriber base viewed the content within 90 days of release.[1] So, streaming platforms are evidently willing to share subscriber viewership data with 3rd parties if it's a contractual requirement.
I would be surprised if content licensors haven't negotiated an as good or better deal for themselves.
[1] https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/sag-aftra-streaming-bonus-...
Vertical integration was the key problem back then. Major studios owned major cinema chains. They made it hard for independent cinemas to show the films people wanted, and they made it very hard for independent filmmakers to get their films shown anywhere. It was highly anti-competitive.
I wouldn't expect the U.S. government to step in this time around though. It's very clear that competition and benefiting consumers are no longer priorities.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
This slightly outdated guide helps you set it up pretty easily - instead of Zurg+ Black hole, use Decypharr
https://savvyguides.wiki/sailarrsguide/
Real-debrid == imagine a huge cloud storage service. You have 1000 people trying to download Burgonia.4k.mkv. it downloads the torrent once to the shared server, then gives each user their own access to it via a WebDAV mount.
WebDAV == trick you server into thinking a cloud server is a local folder. You use RClone to mount this and it's accessible from your local drive so you can stream all your stuff directly.
What this means: you add a show in Sonarr or a movie in Radarr. Prowlarr searches Torrentio or Zilean for torrents. The best match is chosen. It sends to Decypharr (or black hole) to say "download this torrent to my real debrid box". It finds the cached version of the file, which is instantly available in your drive. It's symlinked so Plex can pick up the file.
Basically the lead time from requesting a movie/series to watching it on your tv is about 10 seconds, with no storage overhead required.
After that came ads for what was going to shown on other channels as well, but again they'd never interrupt the programs you were watching and there zero ads for things like cars or laundry detergent.
Then slowly, a few channels started adding them in various formats until eventually there was little difference between ads shown on cable and ads on broadcast TV
Here's an article from the 80s talking about ads slowly but surely encroaching on what was essentially an ad free space: https://web.archive.org/web/20180120172105/https://www.nytim...
some choice quotes:
> When cable first came on the scene, one of the most important points it made was that it was a non-commercial alternative to television,'' she says. ''Now advertisers are saying, 'Here's another place to think of on a costper-thousand basis.' ''
> A much-cited - and widely disputed - study by the Benton & Bowles advertising agency found that the public would accept advertising if it meant a reduction or a holding-of-the-line on subscription fees
> The bottom-line assessment of cable advertising is that it is too good to turn down. ''Who wants advertising on cable?'' Mr. Dann asks rhetorically. ''Anyone who wants to make money.''
MTV was also an early cable station and it launched in 1981 - with ads. USA, CNN, ESPN and Nick also came around in 1979-1980 - with ads from day one.
This is an article from 1981 in the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
BTW, I’m 51.
If retransmitted broadcast TVs had ads - the first content on cable - and the superstations, and the first pure cable channels, how could there have been a time without ads? There were never national basic cable stations that weren’t trying to sell ads from day one.
The article said people thought there wouldn’t be ads as cable got more popular - ie as cable channels popped up and cable became more than just a way to rebroadcast OTA TV.
This argument comes up all of the time on HN
That said, my interpretation is that bands don’t really make a lot of money from streaming, it’s more of a promotional platform for them so it makes sense to just be everywhere to be seen. This is not true for tv/films.
This sounds fine in theory, but how would it work if the content were continuously changing? For example, the final straw that made my cut the cord of cable-tv was getting locked into a 3yr plan for cable TV only to get the Disney channel for the kids -- only to learn that Verizon/Disney had a fight and I lost the channel. https://deadline.com/2018/12/disney-warns-verizon-fios-custo...
Now, i'm still locked into the 3yr plan with Verizon but dont have the content I wanted. I know people complain about paying $10 or $15 for a streaming service, but imagine paying $100 for cable TV and being locked into a 3yr contract. I'd much, much rather have a la carte services I can pick and choose and cancel as desired.
However, if you're talking about the Amazon Prime TV model, then I'd totally agree with you. I think that is the ideal model -- Prime is a nominal cost (for now) and you can add/remove channels as you wish.
>The organization states that it is the official U.S. charity authorized to collect donations for IDF soldiers.
>Charity evaluators have generally rated the organization favorably.[9]
>The organization is recognized as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity in the United States and has been tax-exempt since July 1983.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Israel_Defense_...
> [Netflix] now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers.. Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.. Netflix’s strategy is straightforward market power exploitation.. cancelling shows that subscribers like, so it won’t have to pay creators the amount they would otherwise be able to get for making good commercially successful art.
> [Pre 1990s] The Paramount Consent Decrees and the Fin-syn rules were designed to break creative industries into a three-tiered structure: production, distribution, and retailing. Producers were prohibited from vertically integrating into the traditional distribution business. That way, there are fewer conflicts of interest in the content business; producers had to create high quality work, and if they didn’t, distributors could choose to sell someone else’s art. Policy removed power as the mechanism of competition, and emphasized art..
> We should aim to restore open markets for content again. This means separating out the industry into production, distribution, and retailing. We should probably ban predatory pricing so Netflix isn’t dumping into the market. And we should probably begin a radical decentralization of chains and studios. This is all possible. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.
Netflix CEO Says Movie Theaters Are Dead - >>43542633
Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that - >>42529756
"We were halfway through shooting season 1, coming through Covid, and the monumental size of the show, the effort, and everything else was just dawning on us. We realized that I didn't have enough calories to do it, and Diego's face couldn't take the timing, because it just takes too long to make it."
https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/star-wars-tv-shows/...
"By that point, the work that was required to make the show, at its minimum, was just dazzlingly blinding to look at. And Diego was like ‘Oh my god, we told them we’d do five years.’ Nobody, if we were gonna do it like this, you couldn’t physically do it. It was just impossible."
https://screenrant.com/andor-tony-gilroy-original-five-seaso...
I think this is about Netflix's model reflecting a fundamental technology shift; any company not participating fully in that shift will be operating less and less efficiently compared to those that are. Look at the inside history of HBO's attempts to build a streaming platform; in the early 2010s their leadership knew they probably should, but were their hearts in it? Did they have executives with competence in this area? No, they outsourced it and mismanaged it. Repeatedly. But like you said, my view includes being a former Netflix employee so maybe I'm biased.
I don't have current information on whether or to what degree studio production capacity is a constraint. Content spending was publicly projected to grow, so studio capacity had to grow, which is why Netflix decided to build giant new studio facilities in New Mexico and New Jersey. Those were referenced in the Q&A Netflix held Friday morning [1]. Wild guess: Netflix's own studios run at full capacity, which is why they're continuing to expand them. I'd love to know if WB studios run at capacity.
> I assumed their interest was strictly a content play and the extra studio space might actually be an anchor they were willing to drag along to get the content/IP.
Doubt it. Like I said, I'm not an insider on that question and I'm 6 years out of date. But if I had to guess, it would be that WB studio capacity will be a highly productive asset for Netflix -- most likely, it will be more valuable connected to Netflix's global distribution model that it was when operated under WB's model.
[1] Q&A transcript https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_events/2025/Dec/05...
[0] https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2025/05/20/cinematography-of-...
https://www.theverge.com/news/612911/netflix-apple-tv-app-su...
And then Netflix immediately disabled it:
https://www.theverge.com/news/613307/netflix-apple-tv-app-su...
Everyone else allows their content to be indexed, and does not pay Apple anything for it. Disney, Paramount, HBO, Peacock, they all could have refused like Netflix.
