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.
Hopefully? I don't have time for yet another 10 episode limited series (best case) that could have been a 2 hour movie.
> and traditional TV businesses seriously at all.
Do you mean the stuff that occasionally interrupts the regular pharmaceutical ads?
It’s more like Net Margin (Netflix + HBO) > Net Margin (Netflix | separate HBO)
- Netflix Max: basic subscription with ads, no 4K
- Netflix Max Ultra: basic subscription with ads, but with 4K
- Netflix Pro Max: standard subscription without ads, no 4K
- Netflix Pro Max Ultra: standard subscription without ads, with 4K
You can add a Mobile VIP package for one extra viewer outside your house, but only for Pro plans.
Excluding it from the bundle lets Disney be price competitive.
Obviously having one monopoly streaming service would be bad, but in the meantime having more of them is also not great for consumers since they each charge a flat fee so you have to pay more to see shows from different studios. The ideal would be something more akin to music streaming where you can more or less pick a provider these days, but video streaming doesn't seem to be moving there in any hurry.
I think like all media consolidation this will send a lot of people back to the seven seas..
They lost me as a longtime customer after too many price hikes and low programming quality.
Netflix shows are “have it on in the background” quality whereas HBO has released some of the best TV of all time. This merger has enshittification written all over it.
Netflix is the Walmart of entertainment at this point. Yeah you can find basically anything there- and VERY occasionally, you'll find something damn good- but you're wading through a sea of mediocre shit to do so.
And like, personally I unsubbed forever ago because I'm not interested in subsidizing all the garbage to get the occasional Frankenstein. Meanwhile I've maintained an HBO subscription for that entire time.
Obviously I am but one data point here and I know my opinion is in the minority, but yeah. I don't pay attention much to Netflix.
Assuming all WB and Netflix customers move to the super platform, that's a loss for Netflix (assuming the super platform doesn't significantly reduce their costs).
And the $35 might be more than some set of current Netflix subscribers want to pay, so they drop the service, so an even bigger potential loss.
Certainly, I have no desire to subsidize sports fans via a higher Netflix super package.
Move show X, Y, and Z from Netflix to HBO Max because those profiles are likely to add the second subscription.
---
Piracy seems like the only thing that keeps prices/practices in check.
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.)
Only in the US. Everywhere else Hulu has always been integrated into Disney+).
They all had their chance. They blew it.
They will probably do a Disney+/Hulu bundle at some point.
There are already noises about FCC or DOJ leaning on things in order to 'correct' that.
Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars. Until they inevitably start turning the screws.
WB pitched that to make it easier for them to be acquired by shunting all the debt to the channels entity - but it was unlikely the debt owners were ever going to go for that as presented, there would have been quite a significant chance of the channels group going under and them losing all the money.
But ultimately it turned out that enough entities were willing to bid now, before that split, that there was no point continuing to work out how to do it. Netflix will, presuming this deal completes, be the owner of CNN/TNT/Discovery at al.
Now, I am very sure they will look to sell several parts of those off - there is absolutely no way Netflix leadership wants to continue to own TNT - but that will have to come later.
Quite possibly (and quite unfortunately) to the Ellisons.
HBO was never what you thought it was, and HBO Max definitely wasn't.
In the medium term you'll get a D+/Hulu-esque split with maybe a discounted bundle of Netflix and HBO Max together - the evidence is pretty strong that bundles reduce churn.
If they ever do go to one library, it'll be because Netflix feel they are able to push prices to the same level as both services combined.
On the one hand, competition good I guess?
On the other hand, if we're not going to have a music situation where the vast majority of mainstream content is available on most of the major platforms, fragmentation is pretty consumer unfriendly.
Netflix is pretty much a studio at this point. Not sure that back-end infrastructure or client apps is really a differentiator for anyone. An individual may find that one service is "better" in whatever respect but it's really about exclusive content.
As a consumer I certainly hope that this means there's one less streaming service to deal with (though I'm no longer an HBO subscriber at the moment) so long as pricing doesn't go up too much.
This is an absolutely wild (and incorrect) thing to assume. The problem of content lock-in is anti-competitive and it would be better solved without mergers
Netflix at least has technical chops. Other studios (looking at you, Paramount-) put out barely functional apps because they know consumers ultimately will pay for their content.
Netflix went public in 2002. It was +8 years later that the streaming-only service was launched in 2010. The digital streaming wasn't "subsidized by VC".
Netflix had more content from everybody back then because the other studios licensed their content for cheap prices to Netflix. But those studios then realized that Netflix was growing rapidly on the backs of their content. Once those multi-year contracts expired, studios like Disney didn't renew with Netflix and instead, started their own platform (e.g. Disney+).
Second, even if the purchase goes through they can still get a win, just a smaller one. Their goals of creating a Fox News like media empire are still alive. CNN doesn’t fit with Netflix and will be spun out and when it is they can submit a bid for that company. The Ellisons will then control CBS and CNN.
Meanwhile, as Netflix customers we can all look forward to paying more, but without the quality content that’s HBO’s trademark. The theatre goers among us will have to accept fewer movies getting to the theatre and going straight to streaming instead. Creative folks will have one fewer major employer, giving them less bargaining power.
For voters, viewers and workers there was no winning no matter who made the winning bid.
I tend to see much more discussion about how the main downside is for sellers of content. Why is this bad for consumers?
But they have the data and I don't. I assume there's enough stickiness and inertia that most people are not canceling and restarting services all the time. I know I don't. I just decide I don't care enough about most content (and don't really watch much video or binge watch anyway).
Many on-demand viewing experiences still play ads through atrocious “cable box apps.”
Entrenched cable bureaucracy disrupted by app culture. For the better.
Netflix also will some day be disrupted, as the wheel turns.
I'm not particularly thrilled about this kind of consolidation, but given that Warner was going to be bought by somebody, Netflix may be one of the least worst outcomes.
I think we can expect HBO streaming to continue as a premium subscription for movies and high-production-value shows. That would let everything else to land on Netflix with no conflict.
WBD was on an increasingly unprofitable path, and we know where that road leads.
Second paragraph of the article.
Funny thing though. When I cancelled my subscription, they offered me 50% off for a month or something like that.
^^This isn’t accurate based on the multiple articles I’ve read, including this OP article. The entities they are acquiring are clearly laid out. Your statement is complete speculation at best, and plainly false and at odds with the current facts we know about the deal.
I’ve just gone cold turkey from watching any streaming tv or movies until the situation improves. Blu Ray works better than ever.
Having Discovery's awful content push out quality HBO content was already a major blow.
Make it like music streaming, where all services have the same catalog so you can choose on price, features, etc.
If the provider is big and experienced, they negotiate to get to do what they want, and they have their own opinions that work.
I'm sure Apple is contributing significantly to many of those shows' budgets and helping them all reach similar quality bars, but Apple is also certainly benefiting from spreading that budget across multiple studios and not putting all their risk in (micro-)managing their own studio. Whereas a lot of the "streamer X has gone downhill" seems to be directly related to being able to source projects only from sibliing studios creating very simple monocultures of every project feeling the same and risking that bad or unlucky projects tainting other projects in that monoculture stew.
And I already have Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ through other bundles I have for other reasons. We'll see.
Lower prices is the last thing we'd expect from that deal.
I think Netflix is the most well run media company today by a mile, but also on the spectrum of quality/art -vs- straight money/tech domination they fall into the latter category, and they are the among the least friendly to creators as far as contract/rights.
We will see.
They're probably making more with users saying "I'll subscribe now but cancel when I'm done watching this show" then don't bother cancelling.
Same always comes up when we talk about why doesn't Company X open source their 20 year old video game software? Someone always chimes in to say "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
Yes, the price of one subscription. I think some cable packages in the US are $200 per month?
> In June 2025, WBD announced plans to separate its Streaming & Studios and Global Networks divisions into two separate publicly traded companies. This separation is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026, prior to the closing of this transaction.
Annual plans are a big factor in the stickiness of Amazon's efforts. Especially with Amazon's dark patterns around trying to make people forget they pay it (and making it hard to cancel).
It is curious there aren't more explorations in increasing stickiness. Though admittedly cable's biggest trick (long term contracts) is maybe thankfully out of reach for most of the streamers.
The only explanation I can think of is that most of the subscribers are elderly folks who signed up long time ago and didn’t bother to look into current bills.
Also maybe some ardent sport fans?
It’s a very toxic way to view things.
This is so silly. It's like saying "Sweet manufacturers all had the chance to sell the same sweets, and they blew it. So I just nick most sweets." Just say "I don't like paying for things and can get away with this, and my ethics only work in public or when I'm forced to obey them." And then we're done.
At best, WBD could have gone bankrupt and a court order could require it to be sold as parts with no one studio getting a significant chunk, scattering WBD's IP moat across many competitors.
But most likely it just means someone like Netflix would have the chance to make a smaller offer for the same kind of deal on a WBD with a worse negotiating position. Same consequences, different day.
Apple is less pronounced but I'm very much in the Apple ecosystem so TV+ isn't really a big adder.
>Though admittedly cable's biggest trick (long term contracts) is maybe thankfully out of reach for most of the streamers.
Yeah. You make too much of an on/off ramp for just a streaming service and that's a hard pass for me.
Renegotiating the contracts would require lengthy and expensive processes of discovering the proper parties to actually negotiate with in the first place.
Although the contracts that were already executed can be relied upon, it truly is a can of worms to open, because it's not "Renegotiate with Studio X", it's "Renegotiate with the parent company of the defunct parent company of the company who merged with Y and created a new subsidiary Z" and so on and so forth, and then you have to relicense music, and, if need be, translations.
Then repeat that for each different region you need to relicense in because the licenses can be different for different regions.
The cost of negotiation would be greater than the losses to piracy tbh.
It also helped that the largest player in the music content library game (Sony) was not really as adept at software as Comcast, Disney, and NBCU were.
Though, he's a trustfund kid and you can make a case that Larry owns it indirectly. (But if you want to make that case then it implies that Larry owns two media empires given his daughter Megan Ellison owns slightly less successful Skydance rival Annapurna.)
Another is broadband deployment. Choice is low in many parts of the country, and bundled service offerings are frequently priced near the "internet only" offerings to nudge customers into a "might as well" posture.
Which is a perfectly sensible reason for a business decision.
> "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
So laws should just be ignored? Issues created by human social constructs are very real.
You seem to be making incredibly banal observations.
The only way to keep Internet/TV costs low is to threaten to cancel or switch every year, and actually be willing to do it. For some that isn't an option because there is only 1 provider, and others I've talked to hate that idea because you have to learn a new channel lineup. It's amazing how much people will pay to not be slightly inconvenienced.
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.
I don't think consolidation is necessarily bad. It makes sense from a cost perspective too. I guess they could just license out the content, but this will probably grow the catalog a lot.
From another angle, if copyright were more like it was originally in the US, every single show I watched as a kid would be in the public domain, since I haven't been a kid for 28 years.
Depends what you wanted.
Both a deep back catalog of TV and film more generally were always pretty lacking on all-you-could-eat streaming services. Frankly, my biggest complaint with Netflix is that they basically drove local video rental out of business and then shut their own rental down.
I currently pay $20 something for Netflix every month and $10 for HBO Max a couple of months through the year when I’m binging a show from HBO. I as a consumer would prefer to keep it that way. I absolutely do not have the appetite to pay $30+ a month if the two are combined.
I still like the name.
Edit: didn't Netflix have a feature called "Netflix Max" on the PS3 app? I remember it really liking it to find what to watch.
Plus a cable TV subscription in many/most cases.
premium subs are for people who BUY subs not for people who WANT subs.
Then the fragmentation got worse, as all the legacy media companies rolled out their own platforms, and it suddenly became ~5x$20/month to get the same content. And ads got added back into the mix, even after subscription fees.
These days, I actively switch platforms every few months. It's a bit annoying, but beats the old cable days.
My biggest complaint today is the fragmentation across some sports. Take pro cycling (TDf, etc) - it's split across 3-4 platforms in the US. So, I need to get FloSports, Peacock, and a few others. I wish I could either get individual events OR a bundle that included everything. Oh well, I'll pay for a few and pirate the Sky or continental feeds for the rest.
Streaming is infinitely better.
On-demand cable content existed and was significant at the tail end of the period when cable was still dominant, so it is probably lost of most people's baseline (at least, those that didn't either abandon it early or never had it at all) in comparing to cable.
Cable in its heyday was expensive, even for a low tier package with CNN, TNT, MTV, Nickelodeon and other non-premium channels. Most people did not have premium channels like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc. Even Disney was a paid add-on in the early 90s. Adding or removing those channels at the minimum meant calling customer service and in certain eras of cable technology could even mean waiting on a tech visit to provision physical descrambling equipment. And obviously TV was linear, not on-demand.
If you watch a series or movie here and there, and aren't a big TV viewer, the streaming era is much, much cheaper with greater choice. You can often even access what you want to watch through a free trial, a single-month subscription, or a free service like Tubi or Pluto. Movie rental options are much better, more convenient, and cheaper (often even before adjusting for inflation) than Blockbuster, and you have access to much better information before you pull the trigger on renting a movie you haven't heard of before.
Their pricing, and their doubling down on account sharing policies over the last few years have shown that they are no longer in a growth phase.
I cancelled my Netflix account a few months ago because I had gotten the "You're not accessing this from your typical location" blocker. Even though I was trying to watch from my permanent residence and I was the account owner / payee.
The reason that happened was that my wife and I own two properties. We are happily married, not separated, but we just like our space... especially with two adult daughters who still live at home with one of their significant others also living in the house.
We are a single family "unit" but have two locations. Furthermore, my wife has sleeping issues and was using Netflix at night in order to fall asleep. To have to get me to check my email for an access code, was a total deal breaker since I would be fast asleep. So that cut her off from her typical usage of Netflix.
And the reason Netflix thought that I was accessing the service from a different location was that I hardly ever watched it. Every time I'd pull it up, I would spend more time scrolling for something to watch than actually watching anything.. and typically I'd just give up and go watch a 30m YouTube video instead.
So I was paying more, receiving less ... mostly had the account purely for my wife and daughters who watched it the most ... and then the final deal breaker was logistical barriers preventing me from being able to use what I'm paying for.
Fuck Netflix.
Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
> 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
This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.
"why should I watch TV on the fiddly computer when I can just pop a disc in?" or "why should I turn on Netflix when there's clearly stuff on cable TV?" -- that was Netflix's competition in those days. Because there was competition, they had to lower prices and improve service to win consumers.
Now, that competition is being destroyed. Rest assured, Netflix will use this market power to extract more from the consumer.
Let's say I like Show A and Show B. Show A is available on Provider 1 and Provider 2, Show B is available at Provider 2 and Provider 3. Thanks to overlapping content, I can subscribe to Provider 2 and I can watch both of my favorite shows.
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.
Slightly different reasons for enshitiffication - if Spotify lost half of their catalogue suddenly they might move in the same way I guess.
The stickiness is probably just that. Even as they raise prices, it's still less than we're paying for pretty much anything else. Gas, electricity, food, housing. Cut Netlix and well great, I just reduced my monthly spend from $5000 to $4980. Really making a dent there. I can retire comfortably now. It's almost as patronizing as the old avocado toast thing. Avocado toast might be overpriced and nowhere near worth it, but it isn't the reason anyone is broke.
Still, the real issue is one that both cable and streaming services don't solve.
People don't want to pay for what they don't watch. Both streaming and cable have the price of everything they own and produce built into the price. When you subscribe to either, you're subsidizing a bunch of stuff you don't care about.
People don't want to pay $20 a month to watch stranger things in oreer to subsidize a bunch of stuff they don't watch. It was the same with cable. Netflix is just one giant cable bundle, it always has been.
The things you want arn't going to happen under the current operating procedures of the United States of America.
I hope that's clear.
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.
But watching specific stuff you want is hell. The cognitive load of searching a bunch of services, or finding a site that tells you where to watch, then it’s not in that same service in your country, you might have to pay extra, or sign up for another streaming service or… Holy cow, it’s a terrible experience.
I’m not saying I have a better idea, or that it couldn’t be worse. But it’s terrible.
I don't even know where I would get a good blu ray drive. The videophile subreddits keep suggesting very specific models with flashed firmware, which is not exactly accomodating to the public.
Of course Netflix is saying all the right things now to keep anti-trust off their backs, but at some which culture do you think is going to win out?
You have a broadcast station. You know that estimated 30k people are listening. You sell those numbers to advertisers. Now you play a song 1x, you record that fact. At the end of the month, you tally up 30k users for that artist and you cut a check to ASCAP or BMI. Thats it. You just keep track of how many plays and your audience size, and send checks monthly itemized.
They were downloading pirate Britney Spears over Napster and playing it on air. And since 100% royalties are paid for, was actually legal. Not a lawyer, but they evidently checked and was fine.
I'd like something similar for video. Grab shows however, and put together the biggest streaming library of EVERYTHING, and cut royalty checks for rights holders. But nope, can't do that. Companies are too greedy.
Right now, you can pretty much rent any movie you want through Amazon Prime with not late fee or rewind penalty, but you have to pay a couple of (extra!) dollars to do it. This is, undebatably, a massive improvement over the way it used to be in every way, but it still bothers me even though I can't put my finger on exactly why.
Exactly the correct solution.
We did something similar with movie theaters and film studios for decades, up until a couple years ago. Same sort of problem, same solution should work.
That was also before they started aggressively pushing their own content. For a while, it looked like Netflix was going to be the place you go to stream any movie that ever existed (which was pretty much what they were with mail-in DVDs before the streaming service came along). Now it seems like they don't really want to be in that business either.
But, yes, if you're either poor or optimizing points on an airline or whatever is sort of a hobby, then sure. But otherwise, it's just not very interesting to many of us and involves mental overhead we can just live without.
Go to the Prime Video website, or check your settings in Prime Video on your device.
I have lived a video ad free life for decades. I am convinced video ads do bad things to our brains. In aggregate, beyond any individual impact they may or may not have.
Ad blockers, ad free YouTube, Kagi, … whatever it takes.
What happened to Netflix DVD by mail was that Redbox ate its lunch, which ultimately was also a failing business model.
What people want (presumably) is a market where you pay once and you access everything and the money get divided based on creators, distribution or whatever.
Under current market conditions, that will happen only in the limit where a single company owns everything.
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”
I would be curious how the financial wires got crossed.
I would have assumed residuals were proportional to views, and views valued proportionally as contributing to subscription demand. And it would be a rare viewer to watch one show like that, over & over. I.e. only upside. Something went sideways.
Sad that we can't have nice things, but capitalism must be fed and I guess good, targeted recommendation algorithms are anti-capital.
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-...
Netflix also hides a ton of their content and aggressively pushes whatever is new because it makes it easier for them to get immediate metrics on how popular something is.
Right now, you're pretty much stuck watching whatever is being "streamed in that moment" as it is. For example, netflix added the austin powers movies in October, but by Dec 1 they were removed. You had a window of just 2 months to watch and if you missed them you're stuck waiting for them to "rerun" just like regular TV. I expect that trend to continue with shorter and shorter windows as Netflix pushes people to watch shows when they want you to watch them.
It's wild to long for the day of 'caring', 'sane', Reagan era corporate 'governance'.
Joking. Honestly, the only thing that surprises me more than seeing Larry Ellison at the top of the list, is seeing Netflix buying Warner Bros, and not the other way around. Maybe I'm too old, but the very notion somehow does not compute.
Then they all copied Netflix, because the stockmarket was rewarding it, and had to start dealing with billing, customer retention, technology platforms, advertising platforms. And they all lost a ton of money a doing it.
One could go to the favorite department store and get movies from all studios right next to each other, sorted by genre or title or similar.
Netflix was great when it was the only streaming service because all the legacy media companies licensed shows for cheap. They basically considered it bonus income like syndicated television.
Most of Netflix’s content at that time was very popular but was basically just reruns. The Office, etc. It was a time when you’d be hard pressed to find any movie resembling a blockbuster, just bargain DVD bin type of stuff.
If all the streaming services consolidate there will be less reason than ever to put effort into content. As long as most people stay subscribed the less they spend on content the better.
With an à la carte landscape that we have now, streaming services all have to fight it out in open competition to keep their service on your monthly bill.
It might be less convenient but it is better for content than having a market with just one, two, or three players.
Maybe not the broke 20 year old per another comment. (Who doesn't have a lot of money anyway.) But a lot of people are happy and able to pay for a subscription that doesn't involve screwing around with a lot of dodgy stuff.
If I could pay for individual TV shows and actually own them I'd definitely prefer that over the disaster we have today. Buying a blue-ray and ripping it is not very practical and it's by design.
For a while... Eventually, you can expect that functions will be streamlined, compacted, and impacted
P.S. punished for what, honest self-deprecation? By "it" I meant my expectation, not the headline ... is that really not clear?
To have an ads/no ads option with cable, you need 2 distinct channels with different programming, as you need something fill what would be the ad breaks. With an on-demand platform, there is no fixed schedule, so you can insert ads at will without having to account for that.
So even if the market for no ads is small, it doesn't cost them much to provide that option, and they just have to price it above how much they get from ads to make a profit. Even the seldom used YouTube Premium is actually quite profitable for Google. Streaming platforms won't miss that opportunity.
It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.
I will not lament the loss of visual mass media. I’ve already reduced my viewing to just Kanopy, but even they are reducing tickets.
Fortunately there are plenty of other fun and entertaining things to do than sit in front of a screen and drool at slop.
Unfortunately people will “suffer” with their first-world problems of not getting new Marvel movies every 8 months or Spider-Man reboots every 2 years, or having to pay $100+/month for drivel. Oh the humanity.
An increasing number of shows are never getting released on physical media to prevent this. The only thing streaming services are competing with in any meaningful way is piracy and I'm guessing piracy is going to get more and more popular the more greed/enshittification keeps making streaming platforms worse
Don't want this to happen to your content? Then don't release it to the public.
We need to bring back explicit copyright registration and renewals.
Basically every streaming app is minimally functional and obnoxious in their own ways. netflix isn't the worst of them, but it's no exception and getting worse all the time.
Advertising was with us for centuries, but it took until last few decades for it to evolve into a social cancer it is today.
It's probably got something to do with copyright. Like the way it interacts with markets makes this sort of arrangement net-harmful pretty much any time you see it.
In contrast, of the list of companies you highlighted,
- Apple makes hardware, which is lower margin
- Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) and unlike Oracle is struggling to define why they should be the best choice (ads in the OS?!).
- Meta doesn't actually have a monetization strategy beyond ads that is revenue-positive, and the reliability of ads turns out to be dicey (Google built their nest-egg on ads earlier than Facebook, and even Google has been thrashing about to find tent-poles besides ads; they see the risk). In spite of that, Zuck is currently above Ellison in the Fortune 2025 rankings.
- AI is ghost money (behind the scenes, a lot of companies paying themselves essentially)
- SpaceX is in a tiny market ultimately (each launch costs a fortune; a handful of customers want to put things in space)
- Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking.
- Amazon is... Actually wildly successful and Bezos is #3 on the Forbes ranking. I think the only reason Bezos might not be higher is he spends his money.
No, it's often the quiet ones nobody talks about that are the real leaders. Lions don't have to roar to be noticed.
So no, I don't think this gets in the way of Ellison taking over the rest of TV news; if anything it seems like it smooths the path.
Netflix is a different creature because of streaming and time shifting.
They don't care about people watching a pilot episode or people binge watching last 3 seasons when a show takes off.
The quality metric therefore is all over the place, it is a mildly moderated popularity contest.
If people watch "Love is Blind", you'll get more of those.
On the other hand, this means they can take a slightly bigger risk than a TV network with ADs, because you're likely to switch to a different Netflix show that you like and continue to pay for it, than switch to a different channel which pays a different TV network.
As long as something sticks the revenue numbers stay, the ROI can be shaky.
Black Mirror Bandersnatch for example was impossible to do on TV, but Netflix could do it.
Also if GoT was Netflix, they'd have cancelled it on Season 6 & we'd be lamenting the loss of what wonders it'd have gotten to by Season 9.
Wouldn't be so bad if the player didn't suck. You'd think video streaming chrome would be a solved problem by now, but it's not, and somehow we're regressing on this front.
If a show does somehow get more than one season they can also be painfully slow. Stranger things took a 9 years to drop just 5 seasons. The Witcher was 6 years for just 4 seasons.
We must never assume the market is rational, and enough people getting hyped at the same time can give a company enough short-term cash to make an unexpected move.
To say that "we have solved ranking" because Netflix decided to measure shallow metrics and addiction is... specious at best. Instead the tech industry (in all media domains, not just streaming video) replaced improving platforms and services in meaningful ways with surveillance and revenue extraction.
But more drawn out. This way, creatives, consumers will get a reinvigorated outlet, rather than seeing it spiraling downward.
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.
It was invented to protect publishers (printing press operators). That continues to be who benefits from copyright. It's why Disney is behind all the massive expansion of copyright terms in the last hundred years.
In collaborative productions it is almost never the "individual" artist anyway: it's whatever giant conglomerate bought whatever giant conglomerate that paid everyone involves as little as the union would let them get away with.
They haven't been because the people being hurt by it are way less organized than the people benefitting, not because things couldn't ever change.
To wit, finding a show that was canceled the month it was released probably isn't that hard? Same for shows that had trouble keeping cadence. Especially during COVID.
Do we have data that shows they are worse?
(Also, I think it is perfectly valid to object to this acquisition on other merits. I just would love some old backlogged cartoons to get wider distribution.)
Even after the recent drop, Oracle is trading for ~33 times last four quarters operating income. With their meh growth rate, fair value is closer to half that. Except we're in an AI bubble. Oracle is riding the tail of the AI bubble just as they popped to the moon toward the end of the dotcom bubble. Oracle will contract afterward accordingly. The stock probably won't see this era's highs again for another 20 years, if ever.
Today you can instantly distribute media to the entire planet at near zero expense. If you can't make money after a decade you have only yourself or your product to blame. Also, it's not as if once something goes into the public domain all income stops either. With even a small amount of effort creators can continue to successfully package and sell their stuff to the fans even when it's avilable for free. It's worked on me several times in fact.
(So the price increases are about finding the revenue maximizing price for the ad free tiers, not about overall profit)
Regan's politics are completely orthogonal to IP content today.
Which is kinda irrelevant. Him selling Oracle shares does not fundamentally change the world in any way. Sure you can say "he should sell shares and do charity", but you could make the same argument that whoever would be buying those shares could be doing charity instead.
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...
“No Rules Rules”, as in “no rules is awesome! It rules!”
Or
“No Rules Rules”, as in “the only rules are that there are no rules”.
The difference in interpretation matters because the tone is quite different.
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.
> It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.
Kudos
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.
Are you really making that argument in 2025? You must be very young.
Bittorrent didn’t become popular because no one wanted to pay for things. In fact people stopped when Netflix was good. I stopped, all my friends stopped. It was no longer a mainstream thing. We even put up with a few price hikes. Then 1 service became whatever and people started torrenting and streaming sites started popping up.
Everyone was willing to pay for convenience. No ones wants to pay even more for in convenience.
You’ll note music piracy is not really a thing anymore. Thanks Spotify.
That last fact probably matters most regarding Ellison's fortune. Their "boring IBM style thing" continues to grow, slowly, and continues to make him money (a lot of it, given his continually-owned large stake); even if the velocity isn't as high as other billionaires, he started a lot earlier than they did.
> Why does anyone other than the government give them money?
I asked a similar question of a relative who was all-in on Microsoft in the '90s. His response was simple: "reliability and expectation of business-oriented service." When a company's been around since 1977, there's more trust they'll be around 10 years out. Oracle is many things, but it's not a company with a notorious "killed by" list of abandoned critical projects that other companies were relying upon to prop their revenue streams. And, if you spend enough money with them, they tend to put someone on helping you solve your problems to keep your business; this is something the alternatives do as well, but Oracle's seen a lot more business problems and has a big portfolio of past solutions that worked.
I got to be a fly on the wall at one of the FAANGs transitioning off an Oracle DB, and the process took about 3x longer than scoped. The reason? Conservative decisionmaking: all the money flowed through the Oracle DBs, and you cannot screw with the money flow. This goes beyond the need for a business to make revenue; failing to properly track your money flow can put you out of compliance with financial laws and make people go to jail. They trusted their in-house databases for tracking user PII, for keeping the core services running, for doing internal infrastructure monitoring and employee recordkeeping... It took convincing to get every stakeholder to trust it with the money.
Companies buy in with Oracle because they have some confidence they won't go to jail for doing so.
Furthermore, what money the government doesn't itself have, it can pressure others into spending, on occasion. e.g. that Bytedance/Oracle deal
It is like banks trying to get off mainframes, they just cant do it organizationally and there are loads of failed attempts both public and private. I imagine most companies using Oracle are like that.
And I definitely don't want to pay double for one big catalog.
If you reject that absurd false framing, no.
This is true consolidation and monopolization - regardless of the "narrative" in whichever news you happen to consume.
There's plenty of valid arguments against piracy, but equating it to zero-sum material theft is not one of the strong ones.
"Ellison was married to Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986.[92] Boothe was a former receptionist at Oracle (RSI at the time).[93] They had two children, David and Megan, who were (as of 2024) film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively"
So he bought studios so his kids could make movies
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...
It's an item available for purchase at a price. If you take it without paying that price then the seller is out money they would otherwise have received. If everyone pirated Netflix's output then they would have to shut down, just the same as a grocery store would if everyone stole their produce. The only reason that doesn't happen is because piracy is a minority activity.
Even a cursory google search will give a rather long list:
- Giving Pledge: Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of his wealth to philanthropy. Recently, he announced plans to donate 95% of his $373 billion fortune, focusing on science, healthcare, climate change, and AI research.
- Ellison Medical Foundation: Invested nearly $1 billion in biomedical research on aging and disease prevention before closing in 2013
- Lawrence Ellison Foundation: Supports research on aging, health, education, sustainable agriculture, and wildlife conservation.
- Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine (USC): Established with a $200 million donation to advance cancer research and personalized therapies
- Ellison Institute of Technology (Oxford): A for-profit philanthropic initiative tackling global challenges like healthcare, food insecurity, climate change, and AI. A new campus worth $1.3 billion is planned for 2027
- Significant funding for Oxford University through EIT partnerships, including scholarships and research programs.
- Lion Country Safari Acquisition: Purchased the 254-acre wildlife sanctuary in Florida for $30 million through his foundation, ensuring continued conservation efforts.
- Larry Ellison Conservation Center: Opened in California to rehabilitate and breed endangered species
I'm not a huge fan of his or how Oracle has conducted business, but his giving represents billions to charity, not exactly fitting for the "dung beetle" label people are so quick to apply to him.
The world would be a much better place if rich people virtue signalled much more and thereby donated more.
> In 1992, Ellison shattered his elbow in a high-speed bicycle crash. After receiving treatment at University of California, Davis, Ellison donated $5 million to seed the Lawrence J. Ellison Musculo-Skeletal Research Center.
> In 1998, the Lawrence J. Ellison Ambulatory Care Center opened on the Sacramento campus of the UC Davis Medical Center
> In 2007, Ellison pledged $500,000 to fortify a community centre in Sderot, Israel, against rocket attacks
> In 2014, he donated $10 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.
> In 2017, he donated $16.6 million donation to support the construction of well-being facilities on a new campus for co-ed conscripts
> In May 2016, Ellison donated $200 million to the University of Southern California to establish a cancer research center: the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC
> Between 2021 and 2023, Ellison invested $130 million in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and has pledged a further $218 million since then
>> Refreshing honest
?
I'm merely trying to explain how it is that people can have a problem with virtue signalling and to them it doesn't really contradict what is to them true virtue where you do something good and stay quiet about it.
But either way, I personally don’t think a library is any less valuable to a community just because it has Carnegie’s name above the entrance.
Businesses Oracle is in:
- Databases (several)
- Cloud
- Software for planning everything related to manufacturing and logistics (ERP, supply chain management)
- Software for customer relationship management (CRM)
- Software for healthcare, managing hospitals and clinics
- Software for managing every aspect of running a bank
- Point of sale equipment
- Software for running utility companies
- Software for everything people related inside companies (payroll, HR, hiring, etc)
- Competing with Red Hat on commercial Linux
- Programming languages (several)
- Software for managing inventories
And a gazillion other things.
It might be a path to breaking up some of the media conglomerates. Even if it's just different, newer conglomerates, maybe better media and news will shake out for a bit.
But with big tech making EVERYTHING worse it touches with no regards for wetware customers, it's probably a bad thing.
(Actually, I can afford it but I'm ... frugal.)
Netflix was the early beneficiary of broad licensing because the draw bridges hadn't been pulled up yet.
However, not everyone who pirates something was ever going to buy it in the first place. A huge portion of the world lives in sufficiently deep poverty that the option was either: have the thing for free or not have it at all. These folks don't represent lost sales.
Luckily though, "price" is not the same thing as "cost". If they watch for free, it doesn't cost us anything.
Just out of curiosity, how certain are you that "piracy is a minority activity"?
In my city people literally put boxes of DVDs on the street and I can get several months of movies to watch by just taking a casual stroll in my neighborhood.
I would say it is monopoly.
If you are a luxury brand you may sell your pen in a brand store only and limit access and will have some business.
But other companies will produce comparable pens and then your only moat is the brand identity but in all objective criteria the other pens are equal.
With intellectual work you got the monopoly. If I want the Taylor Swift song I don't want Lady Gaga, even though both may be good. If I want a Batman movie, I don't want Iron Man. These products aren't comparable in the same way. And another vendor (studio) can't produce an equal product in the same way as with the pen example.
If you want quality you'd go to something like mubi
Also, keep in mind he's already given away over $2B in charity, but even at 1%, that's still not very much for you?
Like Spotify monopolizing music streaming, and now creators have the choice of getting virtually nothing from Spotify or literally nothing by avoiding Spotify (unless you're already Taylor Swift).
With radio stations, no single radio station could really hold you over a barrel, because there were still a lot of other radio stations to work with.
Consolidation reduces the number of streamers, but reduces the competition too. The number of great shows will go down faster than than the number of streamers too.
The endpoint would be one streamer, with maybe 0-1 great shows. The vast majority of content will be low risk and cheap to produce.
With one big streamer it will be easy to manage your subscription, but the price will still be at least as high as subscribing to half a dozen small streamers, and the shows will be worse.
(Hope you like repetitive, formulaic shows, which, at best, are a rehash last year’s mildly entertaining show. That’s what you can look forward to.)
It's sports that really have driven me away. I like collegiate wrestling. This is by no means a mainstream sport. But to watch what I want, I need to subscribe to flowrestling, ESPN, B1G, and BTN. The last two are really mind blowing, because the big 10 seems to think I need two subscriptions to watch a single season for a niche sport.
It's just too much for me to bear -- not financially, but morally. I won't reward such behavior, so I just don't watch.
Then there are all the games that are on broadcast and could normally watch them for free, but unless you have an antenna, you need to subscribe to get your local channel.
Now these leagues need to contend with my family and all the others like it where the kids won't have the nostalgia for that game that was on every Sunday. We don't watch the games, so we don't go to the games, so they'll never grow into being fans themselves.
The NHL does seem to try putting their games in front of their fans as the lone exception.
Bootleg DVDs, pirated files were common place. I could literally go out whenever and spend change on a VCD. Or a friend would have a copy of whatever movie on their HD. I’d go to anime screenings where people would bring their RAID arrays full of fan subbed anime. Music was pirated all over the place. Digital players just made music piracy more common. Everyone used BitTorrent. Everyone. People got sued. ISPs used to send out letters saying “we think you’re torrenting. Please stop or we’ll cancel your service”.
You know what didn’t happen? The entertainment industry didn’t collapse. You know why? Because none of these people were never going to spend money on entertainment. You know what I did if I couldn’t afford to see a movie or get a new CD in college? Something else.
When Netflix started streaming, they fixed all this. We all stopped BitTorrenting because Netflix was easier. They know how to fix it and they fixed it for a while. Sell us convenience. But I’m not paying and managing 5 subscriptions.
It would be a very interesting concept if after 10/20 years, anyone could grab any copyrighted content and redistribute it as long as they paid the copyright owner a license fee determined by copyright law.
I suspect they just push what they want you to watch, like their own content. Seems that way to me at least, based on their quite shitty "recommendations"
After Year 1, WGA/SAG residual formulas decrease: Year 2: ~80% of Year 1 Year 3: ~55% Year 4+: sometimes stabilize at a “floor” rate
So what did they do? They ran it for a few years, ran the numbers, realized that Westworld was no longer profitable on the platform. (Profitable would have to mean draws enough new subscribers to the platform). AND THEN - Warner Bros. Discovery made new deals with other platforms with ads. I think you can still find Westworld on Tubi and other ad-supported platforms that actually pay Warner licensing fees.
You're right, but the switching cost is super easy, and _most_ of the time, these networks aren't putting out new content that I care that much about, so I've found it easiest to just swap services, keeping one subscription active at a time, and then switching again when I've finished watching everything interesting on the next.
https://medium.com/@danial.a/how-netflix-used-data-to-create...
With video, many platforms are also creators, which leads to exclusivity, and fragmentation.
Combining everything into a monopoly would also fix this problem, but would have downsides.
They contribute a lot to the open source community, and their engineering blog is always a good read. Granted, not many people will benefit from their specific type of problems, but for those of us that work with large scale infrastructure, there's often inspiration to be had.
And no, it's usually not directly applicable in a financial setting. Most of the time it's actually the exact opposite, where Netflix thrives on distributed loads, eventual consistency, etc, finance is a lot more reliant on "real time" events.
I don't know. Music streaming services do pretty much follow this separation of content and service. At least unless you really care about exactly which music you can access which I think most people don't.
(That's probably partly why music streaming services don't compete on content; most people don't care exactly which funky music they're listening to as long as it is funky, and had most of the popular stuff. But they definitely care if they want to watch Stranger Things and they can't watch Stranger Things but maybe you're interested in these other crap knock-offs?)
Anyway the point is music streaming services still find ways to compete. I guess they would prefer it if they could compete on content though.
I guess you could argue he can't give away 95% now because he wants to maintain control of Oracle... which is fair enough I guess. But still, 1% is not very much.
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.
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.
Some recommendations and playlists I guess. Most of us (outside of Spotify) get them because of a bundle with other offerings from a vendor. Spotify definitely has a following but I don't really care much and have an Apple bundle anyway.
Exactly how do you pass a law in 2025 that no one is allowed to create their own content and publish it on the internet?
Cable TV started out as a means to broadcast network TV in areas where they couldn’t get it over the air. Those stations always had ads.
Then came nationwide rebroadcast of local “SuperStations” in Atlanta (TBS) and Chicago (WGN) with ads.
There has never been a time where basic cable didn’t have ads
That could be a way to make videos available for free but inconvenient enough that people would pay for a more convenient way, just as they do with books.
Ultimately there was just so much content available with a click for people (who collectively are mostly not that fussy) for "free" (subscription) or at most by a payment from their TV rooms.
I'd guess they push you to their content for the same reason they make that content in the first place: they believe you'll like it and keep watching it.
Ad placement is one wrinkle that would incentivize promoting their own content, but I don't get the impression that's big enough to make the difference at the margins.
Idk. I can imagine an alternate universe where Taylor Swift's new album was exclusive to Spotify. All the Swifties using Apple Music probably aren't interested in "Taylor Swift knockoffs".
It's not entirely obvious to me why this hasn't happened.
> 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-...
Look at GitHub as an example, they were acquired in 2018, and are just migrating to Azure now after 7 years.
Microsoft shipping integrations with GitHub in 20108.
This is definitely the case with several Salesforce acquisitions (early product integration, little, no, or much later infrastructure integration).
So… I predict some level of content integration within a few months.
But infra integration is likely years away.
This IS bad for consumers - we are slowly inching towards the pre streaming world of only a handful of studios who run Hollywood, except now it’s pretentious tech companies
If they successfully steer you towards Netflix produced content, you're less sensitive to what happens to the licensed content.
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-...
Having worked close to the recsys folks at Netflix, I can tell you that this statement couldn't be further from the truth.
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....
How does that work?
The thing to understand is that the benefits of competition isn't price. It's innovation. Sometimes that innovation is how to make a component cheaper but other times it's new components. The iPhone was not the cheapest phone when it was released.
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
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.
At your age, if you never saw ad free cable you were either a late adopter or you just had a terrible local cable provider.
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.
Basic cable delivered in order
- broadcast TV stations - with ads
- “Superstations” - with ads and your neighbors couldn’t get TBS unless they lived in metro Atlanta
- MTV, Nickelodeon, ESPN, USA, CNN etc - with ads and informercials
Everything I find was that HBO was first. But not basic cable in 1972. CSPAN in 1979 (well admittedly that didn’t have commercials). Then TBS
By 1983, I remember I had about 20 channels - two each of NBC, CBS, ABC - CNN, MTV, TBS, Nickelodeon, USA, some medical precursor to Lifetime, CBN, WGN, the weather channel, are the ones I can remember
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.
Then on top of that, similar to YouTube, half of that content are things I have already watched. HBO and Amazon are even worse in this aspect but it just drives me crazy, feels like seeing the same 100 movie options over and over for months. Has the catalog shrinked that much over the years?
I started keeping a separate list of films to watch on IMDB, but 6/10 times they are not available on any service except for rent in AppleTV.
The sales pitch was that cable channels didn't have ads because your fees paid for those channels instead, but obviously broadcast TV would still include ads because the ads were just part of the broadcast. Cable programing was very limited, but the promise was it would get better and it was still ad free and looked better than TV over rabbit ears and you got access to broadcast TV in that same quality. It was a pretty easy sell! I doubt many people would have paid for cable if it only offered broadcast TV which most people were already getting for free. I mean, the quality jump was nice, but it's not like most of us hadn't been putting up with it just fine. For people who couldn't get a decent signal I could see it though.
At some point the number of channels expanded to include national channels. Which national channels you got and when depended on your cable provider and whatever agreements they reached for those feeds. Then all you had were national channels. You might even remember ads on some of those channels asking you to call your cable provider and demand certain other national channels that weren't yet avilable in your area.
Eventually cable TV sort of homogenized and everyone pretty much everyone had access to the same set of channels no matter where they were even as some channels changed or went away entirely. Channels were split between premium and basic, then split again to basic, expanded basic, and premium and then split again to multiple package tiers etc. That's how I remember it anyway.
Do Porsche dealerships have a monopoly on Porsches because only they sell Porsches, and you want a Porsche from somewhere else?
If your song is streamed 10 million times chances are a festival will call your manager. The money is in concerts not albums.
>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_...
It is hard to not get the feeling that outside of the local food bank, most charities are a type of money making scam when you dig into what they do with the money.
Consumers are going to pay for this consolidation through higher subscription prices because the cost always goes somewhere.
What you’re seeing now is the same consolidation and ad loading that drove the old piracy waves.
What we see now is that old system reforming around streaming.
A large profit margin is not something that a business is owed.
Content producers must not be vertically integrated with content distributors.
Live TV? Ads. Shows available as part of streaming packages for channels included in live TV? Ads. Random other stuff "due to streaming rights"? Ads.
At this point I pretty much assume any non-Disney programming that isn't a Hulu original will have ads, and access it by other means, partly as a minor act of civil disobedience, but mostly because I'm impatient (i.e., never in my life have I actually watched television advertising, even when forced to sit through it).
Netflix is buying Warner Brothers and you think Netflix was wasting money on licensing costs?
More like Netflix's bet that if it didn't share usage information it could keep underpaying for what it was getting paid off.
They didn't have the luxury of first sale to protect their market, though. Which is a very sharp contrast to how they ran the DVD side of things.
So, it isn't that they were wasting money on licensing. Licensing kept getting more and more expensive. Not fully for nefarious reasons, but that doesn't change that it was so.
If Porsche were to do that, a lot of customers would probably switch to BMW or Audi instead. But with Movies and TV, competing products are less fungible.
Netflix decided it didn't want to and caused the whole uproar.