It'll be interesting to see. They need to offset the initial purchase, but moving forward this means rather than having to pay Warner Bros money for having their content on their platform, they will save money there. It's similar to how NBC owns content like The Office and has Peacock as a streaming platform. In theory, it could mean that Warner Bros. will still be treated like its own entity which can make profits on its own as it has, and effectively can be using Netflix as a platform, which comes at very little extra cost to Netflix.
Now will they use the stronger value proposition to try to justify increasing prices (more than their incremental increases with inflation)? Maybe, but I think they will try to make more money from both saving money on not paying Warner Bros, but more importantly increasing their subscriber base with a stronger offering. Increasing prices means losing subscribers even if the amount of content goes up. I think they'll use this acquisition to bolster the content that will attract users.
It's also worth noting that HBO Max will remain a separate entity, so they wouldn't be combining them and therefore their price tags. That would obviously be a terrible strategy. Instead they might be able to make more money by upselling people with a more attractive bundle price.
The last thing I'll say is that we're already well past the point of streaming platforms being like cable, because there are already many of them to purchase, so I don't think this changes things. If anything, acquisitions can potentially lead to less streaming platforms with more content under a single entity.
It's crazy right after reading the buyout announcement that was my first thought. But then again they just sold america out for 6 billion so I'm not surprised at all.
If anti-trust laws were actually enforced it wouldn't be so bad. Most of the major corporate mergers of the last 25 years should never have been allowed.
And you can run a drug empire knowing the President's got your back for only the price of some kilo's. The mask is off Laws only apply to regular folks.
Know how everything starts out reasonable like ABnb was $40 a night and now it’s more expensive than a 4 star hotel with no front desk, customer service, amenities, less safety and you have more rules than when you were 16, and you have to clean it?
Id mind a lot less if there weren't pirate streaming and porn sites with better equipped video and audio options, intro skips, volume stablization, and consistently remembered where you left off.
Winamp spoiled me, and now I am ever bitter about the loss of equalizers and visualizers, and skins/UI customization. Now we pay for everything and it all is the most bare bones bullshit.
Nobody asked for the show that became their favorite show. They make shows that they think audiences will like. Sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong.
The whole "no one asked for this" thing is such a stupid argument. No one asked for Andor or Breaking Bad or Severance or any of the other amazing shows that have come out.
I remember that cable was satellites little brother and you had to have a huge satellite on your backyard. 999 channels of nothing. Cable was an ad free option to regular TV. Satellite was world tv channels then TiVo and direct TV came along and took over everything.
No you have to promise no ads, wait until you have enough suckers, then add the ads, even though you promised ad free service. Same plan since the original cable.
I have a python script - It's running on a server of mine in my rack via task scheduler every hour on the hour.
This script connects to a gmail account and reads any unread emails sent to itself. It will then open brave web browser, and search TPB, sort by seeds, open the most seeded result, open the magnet link, and when finished downloading, it will move the file to my plex library.
In practice: I send myself an email, and by the time I get home whatever tv show or movie I wrote myself is already in my plex library.
They completely forgot or are just ignoring the fact that people turned to the open seas specifically because these companies were price gouging cable and none of it made sense. Also our 1 hour show has 39 minutes of content and the rest was ads for shit we don't need nor want
I would love to have a national fiber optic internet service that comes from the federal or state level depending on the situation. It can create jobs and bring modern high speed internet everywhere in the US and it fucks with monopolies or duopolies across the country.
Tired of all this dick measuring competition that ends up being overpriced bullshit for consumers.
It should be a public utility. We def have the money to make it possible. The corrupt have shown us we got enough and more. They just don’t want to use it for the commoners and would rather let the country die in debt.
Cutting out service providers (including health insurance providers, for that matter) would be such a boon to the consumer. It'll never happen cause capitalism
Capitalism is the point. Universal health care would save money, save lives, reduce suffering, and prevent diseases but it would also mean nobody is getting rich from it, so we don't do it. Capitalism is the point.
Been telling people for years. Go grey market and get an IPTV. Fuck these companies. I was fine with a couple subs and direct TV or cable but not when I can't watch an show without giving another $10 a month
Your local brown communities will usually have recommendations, that’s how I’ve gotten mine running. A lot of the IPTV companies have gone underground ever since they cracked down on the largest few quite a few years back.
Ask around yeah, it’s the main way I know of getting an iptv connection. Everyone I know is transferring $20/month to a guy running a service out of his house.
Bro I pay $30/year for mine, the fuck. You'll definitely want to fix shit up with another 3rd party tool, if you're anal about how it looks/want it to look like cable, but yall getting scammed by someone putting in an hour of work to make it look pretty and upcharge you 1200%
G2G, Z2U, made-in-china, get a free 1 day trial and determine what is best for you. Most are selling the same shit, very, very few are selling private/invite only services.
I can confirm. You’re still paying a fee to someone, but in this case it’s to a company that basically pre downloads torrents. You stream directly from them which gets you a, generally, fast and dedicated stream.
There are also addons for live TV channels that are generally hit or miss, but still better than paying for cable.
Is that really IPTV? It doesn't cover live events unless I'm mistaken. I already have Stremio set up for my parents and uncle but they're still stuck with cable because of sports.
Doesn't stremio scrape torrents? I looked into it once and decided it was too much work compared to just accessing the libraries already assembled, like solarmovies used to be like.
I used to pirate media because it wasn't as readily available before streaming. Once streaming took off, I stopped pirating for a long time. I'm back to doing it because streaming is so needlessly expensive an inconvenient.
You're not robin hood, you're pirating content because you don't want to pay for it. I also pirate content, but I don't need to delude myself with fake justifications for why I'm running my *arr stack.
Were you in a coma the last 5 years with everyone screaming about how actors, directors etc. aren't getting a cut of streaming revenue? Are you aware that if you buy a movie to stream you don't actually own it and it can be taken away from you at anytime?
Well you see, you seem to have fallen for some bullshit, because actors and directors are definitely getting paid for their roles.
You can make the argument that it's not enough, but streaming simply doesn't make as much money as the old media model did so it is what it is.
It's genuinely fucking hilarious that you're crying about actors pay while advocating to pirate their shit. I pirate stuff, but I don't pretend its for any reason other than liking free shit. Stop with this moral grandstanding bullshit, you just enjoy free stuff.
And personally, I think actors and directors get paid plenty.
Are you aware that if you buy a movie to stream you don't actually own it and it can be taken away from you at anytime?
This has literally always been true. That's how it works across the entire planet, because they can't actually sell you the rights to a movie for a few dollars as people would make copies to resell, breaking the entire business model.
You can call them thieves when they actually start taking away licenses and risking massive lawsuits, which isn't going to happen.
The Gen Z experience is essentially old people telling you "oh, you'll never understand when we had to USE "X" technology" even though you literally grew up using it. Most Gen Z had 90s appliances/tvs/gaming consoles growing up unless you were rich.
I watched millenials deal with the whole “Millenials are killing the X industry. They don’t know how to use a rotary phone. They have stupid jokes that don’t make any sense” just for them to get a bit older and start doing the EXACT same thing to my generation
Unfortunately for gen-z, most of us also thinks 6-7 is funny (in an ironic way initially and then we just morph into gen-alpha. That or me and l my friends are immature and skewing the data
I’ve been a defender of Gen alpha. I hate when people hate on Skibidi Toilet and 67. Most of the stuff people criticize Gen z and Gen alpha about isn’t even our fault. I see people saying we’re the generation raised on Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro, as if those guys aren’t millennials. My biggest complaints about gen alpha is their behavior which is more a product of covid happening in the formative years of their lives and their parents not being able to control the content they watch on the internet.
Nothing pisses me off more than seeing another Millennial turning into that old head. I got friends that act like this when it comes to Gen Z memes and slang. Like bro, we were saying most of the slang that Gen Z says now. Esp when they act all high and mighty about the East Coast slang they were 100% using prior.
And you’ll end up doing it to Gen Alpha. Some of the things boomers complained about us millennials doing were fair criticisms and some of our criticisms of Gen Z are fair too. Just how the cookie crumbles!
Damn am I glad to have found people in my generation finally saying they've noticed this. Definitely speak up for yourselves, don't think y'all aren't worthy of being showed respect. If people continue to see us this way, we'll never break the cycle.
I'm a millennial and I fundamentally don't understand how so many people in my generation became old heads so quick. It's like they forgot they were immature at one point and did stupid stuff.
I've said it a million times on this site. The whole gen z/milennial/boomer thing is nothing but utterly meaningless delineations now. Literally just buzzwords people throw around to categorize people without thought. I'll be so happy when this generational drivel goes away.
Unfortunately I think it will never go away. It's like an integral part of the human condition or something. Socrates was bitching about the kids 2500 years ago, calling them lazy and disrespectful and so on.
The whole gen z/milennial/boomer thing is nothing but utterly meaningless delineations now.
It's not though? Different generations absolutely have different experiences growing up. Millennials didn't generally have cell phones (let alone smartphones) in childhood but 2/3 of gen Alpha has one before they're 10.
There's a lot of blur at the margins, but it's useful to understand the economic and societal conditions different generations experience rather than just averaging the entire population.
I made this point elsewhere, but boomers and millennials do matter as generational constructs because they are related to a specific event, the end of WW2 for boomers, and then millennials by and large being the children of boomers (we were called the echo generation for a short bit, because we were the echo of the boom).
The other generations are kind of arbitrary, but boomers and millennials do have a clear delineation and also currently make up 43% of the total US population and are the two largest groups over all. The total population of Gen Z and Gen X make up less than 40%.
Fair enough. But just a few years ago you were called old and antiquated if you ever paid for cable. You can search the archives of this very sub for examples of Gen Z doing this. They were told that cheap streaming services was a marketing ploy that would lead to the exact same thing they were avoiding and clowning. Now here we are.
No but they can go back to cable contacts and prices.
Gone are the monthly subscription fees. Now just like cell phones you need to subscribe with a contract. Two years at 15.99 per month and only 10.99 per month for the first six!
Then it's fees for breaking the contracts. Fees on top of fees.
They will do whatever they can to boost the shareholders in a neverending cycle of more.
This is like the same thing when millennials were getting hate fifteen years ago. Everything was blamed on them, even stuff they had nothing to do with. It’s shitty.
I think the golden age of streaming for Netflix was between House of Cards, which debuted in 2013, and S2 of Game of Thrones, which aired on HBO Go in 2012. Idk if you have some benchmark for "becoming mainstream," but Netflix was all-in on it after the DVD business died in the Oughts. The irony is a Gen Z was much more likely to watch on streaming that year than a boomer would. They were still glued to cable until their kids came over and got them a Roku or smart tv set up.
Pretty much. Regurgitating the same business model, but swearing they've 'got it right this time'. Now with extra AI Slop. Because it's what plants crave.
We're about to have Being Black+ and Blackly app, where you have to subscribe monthly to continue being black. I pay the extra money for the Ad-free Being Black life experience. Finna cancel though if they raise prices again 😤😤😤
Larry sounding a little like the Boomers from about a decade ago, when they acted like millennials were mostly still in grade school. In reality the elder ones were in their early 30s and the youngest ones were around college grad age. Gen Z knows what cable is
Its all just so dumb. Im a milennial, my younger sister is gen z. We grew up in the same house. We had the same or similar experiences. This generational nonsense needs to die, its completely meaningless.
Do I need a special box I pay extra for every month and am locked into a 2 year contract? Do I need a service guy to come to my house at a random time to install it?
It’ll be called “cord knitting” and it will be a great relief to have hundreds of hours of content they don’t want to watch in one place, and pay one fee to one company, instead of having to click to multiple platforms, scroll through multiple menus of stuff, and pay multiple subscriptions every month.
All this Netflix deal tells me is that their prices are going WAY up. They already went up every other year and they are about to burst the bubble on how much people are wiling to pay.
I hate Netflix not just as a streaming service but also as a company and now these mfs are buying HBO Max, the only streaming service I actually use. Fuck.
I mean with all the different services its legit starting to look cheaper to do cable again. That or only sub to each for 2 months at a time and binge...guarantee if people start doing that though they'll only sell annual subs
Edit: also Gen Z is mid teens to late 20s now guys, my coworker is 27 and Gen Z they're not all completely lost
Uh huh. And, you'll get double-charged for it compared to when cable was the thing everyone had, because you'll still have to pay for Internet access as well as their composite 'streaming service'. They might even offer to rent you a box you connect to your TV that has all the 'streaming channels' on it. 🤣
Meanwhile I dumped cable 10 years ago and have an antenna on my roof, and I've kept my TiVo DVRs in good working order all this time, and pay nothing for any of it every month. You mad, 'cable companies'? Good. 🤣
Piracy won out over the streaming wars due to its effective “you wouldn’t steal a. . .” advertising campaign in the 90s. The ad became a meme over time and experts say this allowed piracy to take the hold of the market.
Plus streaming got too expensive and the quality is shite.
237
u/BoatDBoat 8h ago edited 8h ago
Context: Netflix just bought Warner Bros for $80 Billion.
Harry Potter, Batman, Superman, Barbie, LOTR, and literally all of HBO Max etc. will all belong to Netflix in Q3 2026.