Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. It was great and we got things like the Netflix Prize and all sorts of content ranking improvements, better CDN platforms, lower latency and less buffering, more content upgraded to HD and 4K. Plus some annoying but clearly effective practices like auto-play of trailers and unrelated shows.

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.

> I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content.

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.

This feels very much like "United Stats vs Paramount Pictures: The Sequel"[1].

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 should really be the end goal. We are worse off than cable right now with all these streaming services and worse , overlapping content.

This is how it was with cable, and it was actually better for the content providers. They made shows and got fat checks from the cable companies every year.

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.

>>> I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content. >>> 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.

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.

You can today no? You can buy or rent a single movie / tv series from apple tv, amazon etc. problem is most people don't want to buy each thing they want to watch.

This would be ideal. The cable model was inherently flawed; it was just a series of local monopolies that poisoned it. Give consumers a choice. But considering everyone operates like Disney anymore and is highly protective of its IP I doubt this world will ever exist without direct government intervention.

This is how cable worked, no? And how streaming has been working. And it MIGHT be getting things cheaper, maybe? I guess?

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 wish that'd happen, but instead what we have is that everybody is making terrible new content, and getting any of the old content is a nightmare too because there are 28 or so subscriptions needed, which are constantly increasing prices (yeah, they are supposed to be competing, but somehow...) and constantly shuffling their lists, so you can just lose access to a series in the middle of a rewatch. I hope eventually it will organize into something resembling normalcy, but it's not happening so far... There's of course other solution (ahoy, matey!) but I'd rather just pay reasonable sum for a subscription. I know Netflix buying everything is not a solution either, but so far it's only getting worse.

I want more than two parties competing to run the democracy, also.

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'm more for requiring licensing to anyone and everyone for the same price, including yourself. No more exclusives. Streaming platforms compete on cost, features and availability of niche content. Even further, choosing to not license content to anyone creates an implicit license for everyone. No more lost content. But I don't think any countries are looking at legislation like this, with entertainment way down on everyone's agenda.

I'm still upset with how quickly shows get cancelled nowadays, like the axed Altered Carbon and The Expanse and the endings of neither felt satisfying and the final seasons - rushed.

Whatever set of circumstances leads to that, it would be nice not to have that. Somehow it feels like a huge org owning both the content creation as well as distribution leads to that.

Mostly agree, but I’d advocate for a carve-out for DropoutTV; maybe; exempt if (1) only hosting your own content and (2) that content can be licensed by other services?

I agree that separation of concerns might bring better content but I can't afford buying multiple services in hopes of catching what I want.

(Actually, I can afford it but I'm ... frugal.)

You can have one middle man platform to stream everything but competition to get good movies to that platform, it's a shame that we have so many platforms now

I want all the movies for free without pirating

We could deliver to consumers over some sort of "cable". But what would we call it?

Let the market figure it out. There has never been an easier time to make content and there has never been an easier time to distribute content.

HBO owns Westworld and stopped streaming it to avoid paying residuals.

I think ideally you'd have 2-3 streaming services that all have all the content without exclusives? (So the spotify of movies and tv, the tidal of movies and tv, the bandcamp of movies and tv...)

[dead]

Like we had for music on the radio, compulsory licensing

We could do that by limiting copyright to just 10-14 years. All platforms could have all that content forever without paying a dime. New stuff and exclusives would still be a draw to attract people to one platform or another.

It would be great for consumers if it was just free

>Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars.

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+).

As a consumer, I feel that consolidation is wonderful because it is one less account and password and charge on my credit card that I have to think about.

That only happened because the content libraries decided to exit the music streaming game.

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.

So does that mean if I ever create a video I just allow anyone to have it?

Netflix is still "competing" with discs at this point, although I would accept that discs aren't exactly winning. Most of the content I watch comes from blu-rays, and with a few exceptions (The Americans, grr), most of the things I want to watch have been released on disc. In fact, there is a small community of film enthusiasts who continue to purchase media outright, e.g., https://www.blu-ray.com.

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.

We could get back to that world with anti-trust enforcement and mandatory licensing, while still keeping whatever positive effects competition has had on content production (which I think are debatable at best: it seems like no one outside of low-budget stuff like Dropout is making anything interesting in the US right now.)

Netflix may have the technical ability, but they don't deliver. Their UI just gets worse and worse in terms of usability and they keep cutting features on top of steadfastly refusing to provide features people have been asking for since they started steaming movies.

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.

>you paid a pretty low price to get virtually everything you wanted

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.

As a rule of thumb maybe, but in this case it might well.

for me it is pirating everything since since the video stores closed down and never giving any money to any of these companies

>People were happy because they only needed one subscription and one app. Buying Warner Bros won't bring that back. If anything, it makes it less likely.

Plus a cable TV subscription in many/most cases.

Netflix really struggles to make quality content. If we could somehow divorce the studios from the platforms, that would be ideal. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

In their books (e.g. "No Rules Rules" Netflix seems extremely attractive to creators because they pay top dollar, as a general policy, and have the internal decision-making processes that support making bold bets on art without committees that push "safer" creative choices.

Totally fair. The rights around a lot of media is a giant mess. Is why songs used on some movies are not the same as the ones that were used in theaters. And is just baffling for people from the outside to consider.

Netflix is a terrible media company. They don't invest in their library and are happy to cancel shows without concluding them screwing the creators and the fans. They canceled a show within the same month it released!

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.

Licensing being a giant mess for media is not exactly news? Netflix reportedly got some really good deals early on, but of the kind that nobody was willing to do again.

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.

Speaking as someone who once worked at a company where these were real issues that came up - it's very often the case that intermediate parties in the contracts have dissolved.

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.

I'm with you in spirit, but I think you are underestimating how wide and complex the dependency trees can be in content licensing. And simplifying those licensing structures often mean removing control from individual artists, which we tend to consider a Bad Thing.

> Reality is, the people making these decisions don't want to change things, at least not enough to go through the effort of changing and renegotiating the licenses.

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.

The issue is that Netflix doesn't control those restrictions, the content creators (well, rights holders) do, and their incentives don't always align.

Licensing is really complicated and requires lot of paper work. The best example is the music soundtracks of old TV series. They even get substituted if they don't get the proper license to stream them. So some old show get new soundtrack or background music and they don't feel the same.

The discovery+ app is still operating in some regions because of licensing 3.5 years since all the discovery content got integrated into hbo-max.

I quit my 50% discount after realizing that if I don't watch it anyways.

Funny thing though. When I cancelled my subscription, they offered me 50% off for a month or something like that.

Oh no I am reminded of my dead physical Rolling Stone lifetime subscription!

"The price of one subscription" being the price of Netflix plus the price of HBO. Streaming is turning back into cable where everything is trapped in one bill, no matter how expensive and uninteresting some part of that bill is.

Having Discovery's awful content push out quality HBO content was already a major blow.

Yeah but there is 0 chance that the cost would remain similar to what it is now

> Netflix and HBO Max content at the price of one subscription

Yes, the price of one subscription. I think some cable packages in the US are $200 per month?

well, you'd get it at price of twice of current subscription

> Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor.

Only in the US. Everywhere else Hulu has always been integrated into Disney+).

Part of that is because Disney didn’t outright own Hulu until recently. It was a joint ownership.

I assume it has as much to do with the fact that Disney and Comcast didn't settle on terms of sale for Comcast's minority stake in Hulu until June of this year.

Everything about these big moves in the streaming space is basically to re-create the "good old days" of cable subscriptions and pay-per-view.

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.

I can imagine an internal analysis that says:

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.

Yeah, I can easily see something like 2 separate at $20/month vs 1 super at $35/month (make-believe figures).

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.

And their service is trash, technically speaking. I sometimes sit down with a burrito and pick a show and wonder if I’m going to finish the burrito before the show actually starts playing. It’s embarrassing. There’s a lot to hate about Netflix but they are highly competent when it comes to the perf of the UI and the streaming.

No, that was going to happen next year, but it never did and this deal has been agreed for the whole company.

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.

If they like money, they'll just roll HBO into Netflix and raise prices. I really doubt Disney's complex bundling/pricing scheme is helping their bottom line.

Well all the content costs don't change, and they can combine CDN servers anywhere it makes sense regardless of whether it's one service or two. So revenue and margin numbers should track pretty tightly.

Yeah to be honest i see approaching 45-50/mo coming at some point in the next few years easily.

> They all had their chance. They blew it.

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.

Or...don't pirate and rotate streaming services. Just because a new show drops doesn't mean you need to watch it next week

The comment you're replying to said "legally".

Yeah until Netflix adds tiered pricing for content and you end up paying more than what Netflix + HBO Max together would have cost because Netflix is the only game in town for that content..

I think like all media consolidation this will send a lot of people back to the seven seas..

Which is why it won't happen, what would the revenue benefit of that be?

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.

I'm actually a little surprised that, some discounts for annual subscriptions notwithstanding, the streaming services haven't done more to discourage short-term jump on/jump off subscriptions.

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).

The Crown is absolutely a prestige TV show. Stranger Things is also high quality and high budget. You could probably include Bridgerton in there too, it's not my kind of show but I can still recognize that it's a well put together one.

> produce something as high-quality as GoT

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.

Until Disney killed it because "they didn't like the numbers" the Avengers series, including Dare Devil, Luke Cage, etc were highly regarded by all my friends at the time. I don't know why Disney screwed that up colossally outside of wanting the show within Disney Plus.

Let's be honest, all the netflix plans will have ads just like they do now. They might not interrupt your show while you're in the middle of it, but you'll get ads no matter what. Ads as soon as the credits roll, a barrage of full screen ads if you pause a show for more than 10 seconds, full screen ads the moment you open the app, etc.

There's still the one layer that comes with Dolby Atmos and access to the WB back catalogue

Netflix Plus (Netflix+) which is a side subscription to all of that which lets you syncopate different playback screens to one account, or some other esoteric value add which muddies the waters

"Maxflix" sounds like a name for a pornstudio but it is i guess better than the alternative of "NetB.O."

MaxNet if you want to go final form Fortune 100

And then to X

then to NetMax

look up the parent tree... There was this statement:

> 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.

The HBO Max service has something like 128M subscribers. This is < half of the 301M subscribers Netflix has, but is still a large number.

Certainly there's going to be some duplication, but it would be unwise to suddenly disrupt the delivery vehicles that you have 128M paying customers using in favor of a different delivery vehicle.

So, you should expect all the various HBO Max clients in existence to continue working for at least 5 years after the acquisition closes, if not longer.

Suddenly turning that off and saying "go use the Netflix app" wouldn't be good.

In any case, moving all the WB content onto the Netflix CDN and making it available on all the Netflix clients is "product integration", not "infrastructure integration". You are likely to see that very quickly. Weeks to months after the acquisition closes.

But, getting rid of all the HBO Max client software that talks to the HBO Max Servers running in whatever data center or cloud WB is using, and downloading video from whatever CDN WB has, and all the associated infra stuff, that's infra integration and it won't happen for a while. I think that will take 5-10 years.

"Something good" is subjective and your opinion. They make a lot of shows to appeal to all kinds of different audiences. I'm not sure why you'd conclude they would 'drag down' the quality.

This year Netflix and HBO both tied for most Emmy awards, at 30 each. Netflix is usually in the top few slots for both nominations and wins.

> The exact same road that generally leads to the same sort of problematic consolidation?

But more drawn out. This way, creatives, consumers will get a reinvigorated outlet, rather than seeing it spiraling downward.

Technically Skydance is led David Ellison, Larry's son.

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.)

That’s David Ellison, not Larry. (Same family, though.)

Why would one need to self-host TBs of content with Usenet? That makes no sense.

It's also a lot less prone to failures than debrid services, especially with old content.

Hah i just set up a system identical this a few days ago after moving off of a more messy torrenting setup. Glad I picked a sensible stack.

Radarr (movies), Sonarr (tv), etc.

https://github.com/Radarr/Radarr

https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr

Having figured it out myself, I agree. And it's not obvious that you need both a Usenet _indexer_ (who tells you what content is available) and a Usenet provider (who actually serves you the content).

FWIW, and I'm not sure if this is against terms here, but I use newsgeek for the former and giganews for the latter. Both are paid services but reasonably priced imo. When I can find something on Usenet, it typically downloads with speeds > 10MBps vs. torrenting which can exceed that but is usually much slower.

You can use whatever client you want. I have the *arr stack mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well and SABnzbd is the recommended option there.

I bet if you Google "how to get started with Usenet", someone has written about this.

Sounds like a feature, not a bug

PAR2 files have their beauty

Firefly *cries*

If it's not already on a streaming platform it might help them sell it to Netflix or something. But I think they ultimately are a lot more interested in effect on revenue than popularity among pirates.

Success rate in that era was very low. There are thousands of movies from that time that no one cares about today.

Casablanca? The only way to really see it then was at a theater. They just bankrolled an A team of filmmakers and actors.

It was real for the actors, som ehad really fled the Nazis (including the ones playing the Nazis).

Also: Your relatives and friends. And their friends and friends' friends. Your neighbors. Ask around. And whenever someone moves, they usually want to get rid of things.

eBay, yard sales, Goodwill, local thrift stores, Facebook Marketplace, etc.

Likely Facebook Marketplace or maybe Craigslist. eBay is pretty rough these days by all accounts.

I think what trips people up with jellyfin is making sure they aren’t exposing their network. Getting it to work at home is one thing, getting it to work outside your home is a different beast

isn't Plex literally an XBMC fork? And Jellyfin a Kodi fork? Something like that.

"Not poisoning rivers since 1997"

Innovator's dilemma. Leadership won't invest in the up-and-coming product because they've got a $1 billion revenue target they need to hit this year.

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...

Silo-ing is the biggest brake on human progress

Yeah lol, Sony still doing good in Music,Film etc

Sony just focus at their home market more

Right reading that, didn’t Sony produce KPOP demon hunters, which is now the most watched movie of all time?

I am not attached to any memories, I am remarking that a company that is currently 170~B market cap allowed a tiny upstart become a 460~B company when they had all the means and distribution to have stop them or outcompete them at many stages of the ascent.

Really, it is probably an inevitable and somewhat healthy feature of life and the business cycle, but it is also baffling to witness.

When I was at Amazon, I came away feeling that the gap between retail and Amazon was too large and the disruption was warranted. But in the case of Sony, it feels they were so much closer to the space that it feels like a much bigger own goal...

Maybe but they were still good enough to in house a whole bunch of dev - console OS, games, mobile OS, various forms of content distribution...

I disagree. I strongly recommend this talk by Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8

So innovative, the toilets have cameras in them now! I love the future.

Yup. Can't redirect the ocean. So-to-speak.

“””innovation”””

That's absolutely not the case. Demand for physical media not only continues to exist but it's growing as streaming services prove undependable at keeping shows available, and are willing to censor/edit shows at a whim.

Yeah, I dunno. There's a guy on Instagram right now making techno-futuristic stories I equate to micro-episodes and...it gets old. Economies of scale would say that finding the good content in the sea of dogshit would be impossible if everyone was doing that. Premium is premium because it's scarce; not everyone is doing it.

Reminds me of Red Vs Blue series of 2003 that were only using the Halo game. They were quite fun to watch. Imagine what can be done with AI nowadays!

Disney Channel in the 90s didn't have any ads. And they would show whole Disney movies uninterrupted by anything. For this reason it was a paid add-on to your cable package though, like HBO -- never included in the basic cable package.

In the '00s they still had no real ads, only promo spots for mostly other Disney shows on the channel, and the occasional tie-in with some other Disney property. I think today they have some normal ads but I'm not sure.

They do (did?) exist. Nickelodeon was originally a completely ad-free channel. HBO and Cinemax also didn't have ads.

C-SPAN

That was the given reason, and I'm sure they knew it was ridiculous and fixed it as soon as they could get all their ducks in a row, but it sure was comically bad from the outside perspective of ordinary users. Even if there had to be 2 apps for some contractual reasons I think most people would have been more tolerant if they had identical functionality and appearance after login, and were just titled "HBO Go for Cable" and "HBO Go Streaming."

> and some good stuff

which is mostly inexistent on Netflix

Remember when Netflix almost split its brand with "Quickster"? It was the dying DVD by mail service, but the whole debacle did nothing but confuse people.

"HBO or Cinemax... um, I wonder which name I should keep."

I'd wager that those non-monetary rewards are not what drive any decisions in the Netflix C-suite.

Star Trek: Voyager(7 seasons, 172 episodes) And they still rushed it at the end.

Yes but some badly ended, serialized, long running shows have made consumers fairly wary.

After Game of Thrones, I think the average consumer is less likely to dive in feet first without knowing the show runners have a clear plan.

It was indeed originally conceived as 5 seasons, but the creator Tony Gilroy has consistently said shortening it was his decision because the production was too long and taxing:

"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 read it as $4501. It's common to put a dot after the thousands in some places. :)

Premarket open

> they need to not lose the subscriptions

note: I hate ads so I'm not trying to manifest this, but can you explain why you're so sure of this?

To me, it seems like they "should" (for greed reasons, I mean, not for my happiness) hike the prices of subscriptions aggressively while keeping the ad-tier attractively-priced, moving as many people as possible over. This increases ad revenue and allows more YoY growth if their ML can manipulate you into more watch hours in 2027 than you do in 2026.

Sure, some people like me will probably drop Netflix before they'll pay $35 a month or endure ads. But the current delta is only $10. I suspect they can make $10 a head in ad revenue in a year -- and if they can make $15, they would break even if they lost 3 ad-free subscribers but gained 2 back onto the ad tier. Anything better than those numbers would be a net gain.

55” TV’s have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement especially when put in a normal living space.

The issue IMO is so few movies are worth any extra effort to see. Steam a new marvel movie and you can pause half way through when you’re a little bored and do something else.

Disagree, I'd gladly go and watch movies in a cinema, the experience cannot be replicated at home, at least not unless you're very rich.. a 55" tv and a soundbar just doesn't do it.

For me, the price is killing it (80% of the reason) and bad movies (20%)... two tickets, drinks, popcorn/nachos/candy/something, and we're in the 50eur+ range. Then add the messy audiences, ads, trailer#1, more ads, trailer #2, another ad for some reason, and it's been 20 mintues of technially all ads for something that i paid money for. Then the movie is a total disappoint. I'm not into superheroes nor into pedro pascal, so most of the movies are out before i even buy the ticket and the rest are somehow... just 'bad'. Watching a bad movie at home is ok... you fall asleep, press stop, it doesn't matter... whatching a bad movie at an artsy film festival is also ok.. it was low budget, the ticket was 4 euros, no popcorn, had beer before you enter, so you can fall asleep in the cinema and hope not to snore. But 50 euros and all the ads for a bad movie is just too much.

I would argue not good enough but better. A home cinema depending on viewing distance can have superb visual qualify. Comfort is going to be impossible to beat to being at home. A lot of theater projectors top out at 4k just like home TVs and they’re not as bright. Also information density is lower (it’s 4k spread over a huge wall).

The only shortcoming now really is if you want to view with several people and socialize after, it may be difficult for someone to accommodate a large party with good viewing in their home without a theater setup. And of course audio, audio is where theaters can still stand out. It’s a pain in the ass for most homes to setup a good sound system, you really often do want a dedicated theater area which most aren’t going to have. A soundbar helps. You can Jerry rig some surround speakers into any space but it’s often a pain. So that’s really the last barrier: cheap low latency sound that can beat a theater.

For me comfort trumps the slightly degraded sound. Plus some baby crying or random person chatting during the movie can break that as well.

Not only the movie theater, Netflix killed social life. Well, streaming, feeds and their algorithms in general, but Netflix is very much the ones that really owned the narrative of what to do on a weekend night.

This is very anecdatal, certainly, but I've spoken/overheard a few neighborhood hospitality business owners that had to forclose or cut down due to the constant decline of people leaving the house to just meet in a bar or coffee shop. Only sport nights keeps them going, because sports online remain expensive in most places.

Maybe just my observation or my neck of the woods, but seems to fit the general sentiment of a reduced social environment on the streets in certain parts of the world.

I remember being amazed when the Michael Keaton’s Batman movie was released on VHS in the same year as the theatrical release. I had never seen a movie come out for home use that fast.

I don't know, that metaphors doesn't hold. I still like going to a local theaters (not multiplexes!) few times a year, the screen is much better than any TV, and the whole experience is overall nicer (beer on tap, etc.). TV can be good enough, but it can't replace larger screen. Few weeks ago I saw Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid for the first time and I'm glad I could see it in a cinema.

I was flabbergasted to find that there are 100" TVs available for sub-$1500. Only a few years ago, they were five figures, minimum. Combined with a decent audio set-up, you really can have 90% of the theater experience at home.

Movie theaters can compete by installing LED screens. My company has a movie screen sized LED screen and it looks so much better than modern digital projectors.

It's the sound that's missing from a home viewing setup

Begone, bot

Other issues also took their toll on movie theaters:

--Ticket prices of $20 or more per person.

--Jaw-dropping prices on snacks and drinks.

--People talking and using phones during the movie.

--30 minutes of ads before the movie. Not coming attractions but straight-up commercials when you've already paid $20 to be there.

--The general slop quality of most movies being made if you're not a comic book or video game fan (and frankly even if you are).

The above bullshit was enough that I stopped going to movie theaters more than about once per year. And then COVID happened.

Yeah, now it's tv's turn to abuse the consumers!

I believe the Academy Awards and a few other things too also influence this. The rules to be eligible still very much favor legacy studios IIRC. But, with this that may change? Hard to say. I know that quite a few Netflix movies have had theatrical runs at random mom and pop theaters in Cali so they could meet eligibility requirements for the various awards.

Now I'm envisioning WB movie pass combined with streaming subscriptions. The business models can get quite funky in this paradigm.

> The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.

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...

I was surprised at how many shots that I thought were terrible CGI were in fact practical effects.

The creature was always supposed to be a mix of sympathetic and monstrous. He becomes a monster by turning himself implacably toward revenge, but we can sympathize with him for what sets him on that path. The entire premise rests more on Victor being a monster. I thought the movie handled both of those fairly well. There's really no living director who gets the Gothic sensibility quite as well as del Toro.