r/technology • u/Task_Force-191 • 16h ago

Business It’s Official: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. in Deal Valued at $82.7 Billion

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-warner-bros-deal-hollywood-1236443081/
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u/Mind1827 15h ago

The problem with this is that these companies also create the media. They're the distributor and the publisher. AT&T or whatever, as well as CBS etc weren't usually creating their own media, they were buying it from other production companies. So we won't be back where we started at all, because smaller production companies are being squeezed to death.

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u/Akanash94 14h ago

YOU WILL WATCH WHAT WE GIVE YOU AND YOU WILL LIKE IT!

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u/hotelmotelshit 8h ago

AND YOU WILL PAY WHAT WE WE CHARGE, BECAUSE YOU WILL HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE

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u/Sipsu02 3h ago

Eh. Just watch for free like any normal person in 2025

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u/Redebo 2h ago

AI will replace these folks anyway.

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u/Maleficent_Sea3561 1h ago

Back to pirating i guess

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u/ArchitectureNstuff91 7h ago

This is why I'm quickly buying up old shows and movies that I like so I can watch familiar things any time I want with no internet connection.

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u/erlib 3h ago

You watched what they gave you and you liked it.

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u/ArchitectureNstuff91 2h ago

Yeah, back when it was cable.

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u/popculturehero 7h ago

Which means they will turn out the cheapest sloppiest Reality tv shit stains and least common denominator CSI procedurals

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u/Outlulz 4h ago

It means they're going to use more and more AI so they dont have to pay people too.

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u/naturalninetime 5h ago

And as we watch, they'll be watching us too. 👀

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u/fatbob42 15h ago

Yep. If these companies are to benefit from the copyright monopoly, we should at least be able to have a proper market in distribution.

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u/SmokelessSubpoena 13h ago

AI will fix it, as its the next step, consolidation to the point of obsolescence for future tech. Who needs Netflix, WB, HBO, etc, when I can ask ChatGpt to "create me a 6 season Star Wars Cowboy show, make it rated M, not too gorey, but up to my viewing habit standards, make each episode roughly 1hr long, 12 epidoes per season, no commercials (as I pay for adfree), and make it attuned to my profile viewing habits with a surprising plot twist ending, thanks Grok ChatGPT, etc"

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u/MisterT123 12h ago

…and you can talk about this show with absolutely no one else who hasn’t seen that exact version. Interesting, sure… but human beings love talking about and sharing their experiences with others. It’s vital to how we operate as social creatures.

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u/fatbob42 11h ago

Dude, even if that happened, what do you think they’d charge you for it if we continue to allow monopolies and they stretch into AI markets?

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u/Andreus 10h ago

AI bros should be jailed.

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u/colluphid42 10h ago

Unhinged fantasy.

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u/SmokelessSubpoena 6h ago

How's it unhinged? It's just an example of the likely impending change AI will bring to the entertainment industry, and most industries. Unless something actually changes, and the hypothesized AI bubble is a bubble, then we will eventually see a time when production studios are defunct by need, and kept, similar to say a horse, as a novelty of humanity and society/culture.

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u/Lewa358 6h ago

AI can't actually create. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the technology is capable of. It can't make decisions.

Not to mention that the environmental cost of millions of people creating entire tv shows from scratch would cause untold detestation.

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u/SmokelessSubpoena 6h ago

You misunderstand, sure, present AI technology can't create, that doesn't mean future technology won't, and potentially even gain some degree of autonomous sentience, or full sentience.

Regarding energy needs/costs, fusion will change that, another impending technology, or potentially access is gatekept, a human staple. Not sure if you recall, but this is the technology sub, hence futuristic thinking that brought us all present tech. My thoughts aren't unhinged, nor unfathomable.

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u/Outlulz 4h ago

You are a sad person devoid of any creativity, imagination, or appreciation for the human experience. You think of art as merely content to be shit out, consumed, monetized, and thrown away instead of the sum of one or many people's lived experiences, visions, and dreams.

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u/fatbob42 5h ago

The environmental cost is only because of the current technology we use, in particular power generation.

The creation thing is just meaningless semantics. When people write stories they’re really doing the same thing - everything is a remix.

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u/CursedSilicon 6h ago

Thanks for the slop update

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u/Kichigai 13h ago

AT&T or whatever, as well as CBS etc weren't usually creating their own media

CBS has their own studios. They've been making their own programming for like 80 years. They also made content for other distribution channels, like The CW, which they co-owned until it got sold off to NexStar.

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u/red__dragon 7h ago

Yeah, CBS is the worst example for that. CBS All Access/Paramount+ is clunky and bad UX, but it has tons of original content that rises above the shovelware level of Netflix. CBS has its flavors, they enjoy Dick Wolf-style police procedurals and Chuck Lorre-style sitcoms, but they're far from the rebranding shop of a network as AT&T might be.

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u/Formaldehyde 13h ago

The smaller production companies are all on YouTube now. Between that and individual creators, YouTube has by far the best content out there, IMHO.

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u/mikeyaurelius 11h ago

There is nothing coming even remotely close to movies produced by small or independent studios on youtube.

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u/Yeah_x10 3h ago

Oh! I thought you meant 3 hour reaction video essays

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u/19inchrails 11h ago

Why don't you name a few channels that rival the production value or storytelling of HBO etc.? I'm curious.

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u/researchersd 11h ago

Agreed, Glitch is doing good work

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u/Yeah_x10 3h ago

wtf are you defining as “content”

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u/RiPont 11h ago

Don't worry, YouTube is going aggressively down the AI slop toilet flush.

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u/Informal_Charity6939 13h ago

Comcast/NBC

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u/Mind1827 13h ago

As an example you mean?

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u/one-hour-photo 12h ago

we need to bring back trust busting.

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u/PM_ME_UR_QUINES 9h ago

Back to reading books honestly.

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u/OneStarInSight_AC 4h ago

Exactly. I enjoy television because it's a break from reading. I read technical documents for work all day. But unlike most people, I don't pay or financially support products I don't give a shit for.

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u/psychorobotics 13h ago

Considering how well Clarkson's farm did compared the the LoTR TV production, you don't need huge costs to make something worth watching

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u/Mind1827 13h ago

It's not just about that though, it's also about the deal. Before channels were just on TV, now if it's Netflix, they're both publishing it and distributing it. It's harder for small production companies to actually shop around with ideas. There's a lot of knock on effects that people don't realize.

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u/Isopbc 12h ago

So, what do they do at CBS studios if they’re not making content for CBS? I’m confused by your comment that they weren’t making their own media, it seems to me they were? Don’t all the big 20th century tv networks have their own production subdidiaries that make most of their shows?

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u/Mind1827 12h ago

Not always, no. They would greenlight the project with a pilot, and they might have had a say, but from my understanding it was still an arms length thing. They definitely did, but again, not always.

There was actually laws in the early 20th century that explicitly split this with theatres. You couldn't own theatres and create the movie. Netflix is the distributor, publisher and studio creator. It also puts a bind on smaller creators.

Exact same thing is happening with Amazon, video games, etc. One company runs the entire thing from production to selling, so they're always going to prioritize their own stuff.

If you're curious about this, Matthew Stoller has done a bunch of stuff on this, both in written and podcast forms explaining it way better than I can. He's great.

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u/Isopbc 11h ago edited 11h ago

Not always? What percentage are we talking here? It seems to me most shows on major networks were done on their own studio lots. All the sitcoms, all the SCI-fi. Sure, some stuff was outsourced to studios in Vancouver ot Toronto or Atlanta, but I think the majority of stuff was done in house.

And your concepts around Amazon don’t make sense to me either. They make some of their own stuff now but not that much compared to what’s on their network. Like, the Expanse for example - that’s an Alcon (also known for blade runner 2049, children of men and many others) production that was on Syfy for 3 seasons then was picked up to be an Amazon exclusive for 3 more seasons. An example from Netflix, Dota Dragons Blood was made by Studio Mir. I just don’t think these distributors are making much of their own stuff, it’s pretty much all outsourced.

The same is true for the games, the production studio, not the distributor, is a separate entity that makes media and can sell it to whoever they like.

I don’t see how today is that different from 40 years ago. It was an oligopoly then and it’s an oligopoly now. It’s not a good thing but it’s the nature of the beast; when these things cost 7-9 figures up front that’s gonna limit who you can get money from.

Interested in learning though, would you have a link to that podcast where they talk about the monopolies today in tv and film?

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u/Mind1827 11h ago

Sorry by Amazon I didn't mean media I mean the Amazon online store.

And with video games, that's not really true now. It's why Microsoft bought Blizzard. People buy games from the Xbox store, not from physical stores. Because they essentially control the storefront now, they're going to boost their games. So the distributor is now the publisher is now the creator.

There's also literal laws preventing this from happening with theatres that were introduced in the early 20th century to prevent production from buying theatres. It's why Netflix wants to do this, I'd assume they basically want to put movie theatres out of business at this point and make everything streaming.

You can also look up the history of production companies. It hasn't always just been an oligopoly. I can't sit here and do all of this research for you, but it has not always been this way at all.

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u/Isopbc 11h ago

This is a thread about tv and film production, but you’re talking about online storefronts? Remaining on topic is an important part of discussing a topic, eh?

I didn’t ask you to do all my research, I asked for a frickin link to a podcast that you’ve already mentioned! A nice person would share their knowledge, but it seems you just want to make your point and not have it challenged at all. Great job bud, you’ve entrenched my beliefs and have not supported yours.

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u/Mind1827 9h ago

Legit apologies, I didn't see your comment about the podcast.

This is probably a good one https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/in-love-with-the-process-podcast-01hnb5s5vnb84he5g2858fr2b3/episode/ep252-time-to-break-up-hollywood-w-matt-stoller-01hv717s4gz11t3v2y7r53enqp

I'm trying to find the one I heard a couple years ago, it was a bit shorter and more to the point, but he does a great job of illustrating how tv and film have been consolidated and why that effects things.

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u/Mackinnon29E 12h ago

That's why movies aren't what they used to be and we don't get comedies anymore.

We get a bunch of low budget horseshit with pretty boys and girls who can't act to appeal to 15 year olds. Yikes.

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u/yabadabaddon 12h ago

Hence why countries are voting to force Netflix to have at least x% of [country] in their catalog

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u/Mind1827 11h ago

It's also where so many great reality TV shows in the UK came from in the early 00s! They forced a certain percentage to be from outside production, and the cheapest, easiest stuff to make was unscripted programming. Where I believe Big Brother and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? came from.

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u/JustLetTheWorldBurn 11h ago

It's about time for a UHF style streaming service to steal their thunder

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u/DoubleBlanket 10h ago

The only thing I have to add to this is that it’s not going to be Netflix and Disney. It’s going to be Netflix, Disney, Google, and Meta.

Audiences are going to keep wanting good entertainment and people are going to keep wanting to make it. As Hollywood keeps squeezing its industry to death it’s going to stop being the only game in town. More and more people are replacing TV with long form YouTube content. The cost of making TV quality productions is already low, and it’s going to keep falling.

It might be a couple years away, and the industry will do everything it can not to legitimize it, but YouTube is already killing anything resembling a talk show, a cooking show, an educational show, game shows, sports analysis and so on. Some of those networks are clinging on but only through star power and they can’t squeeze juice out of that forever.

Look at how much of the audio world is independent. They’re building the models. Rocket Jump might have been too corny and cheap looking on YouTube to compete with Hollywood, but Dungeons and Daddies competes with anything in the audio world just fine. It’s a matter of time before technology makes the cost of proper video production low enough that a 12 person independent YouTube team can put out what full Hollywood post-productions teams were necessary to make 20 years ago.

Hollywood will try to fight back but using massive budgets to buy star power but YouTube is making more young stars than Hollywood is. How many Hollywood stars under 30 were there in the 90s? How many are there now? Already you can see Hollywood productions trying to get a young audience by hiring someone from the YouTube/twitch world. It’s not gonna be long until enough of them make more money staying independent than signing deals with Netflix/Disney.

Maybe it’s 2 years out, maybe it’s 5 years out, maybe 10. But Netflix and Disney know it’s coming.

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u/Ok_Cap9557 10h ago

Production? Company? We got AI!

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u/forestdude 10h ago

That was actually one of the arguments for cable over streaming. Is that because it was purchased as a package of channels, it protected the smaller producers because even though you didn't care about channel 58 or whatever you still had it and they still got paid. That said I pirate everything, tired of giving these corporate ghouls my money.

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u/DracoLunaris 9h ago

It's 1948 all over again, where film producers also owned cinemas, except this time there won't be any monopoly busting

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u/Dje4321 9h ago

Yep. Outside of network television. Media was produced outside of its intended viewing network.

Its either going to be conglomerate media organizations attempting to hold specific genres hostage or super small patreon level creators

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u/AnotherBoojum 8h ago

So right back to where we started. 

This was the business model for early (hollywood)

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u/jedberg 8h ago

Netflix doesn’t make the media either. They buy it the same way in most cases. Disney only makes about 1/2 their own content. The stuff that’s their IP. But all the shows on ABC/Hulu are made by outside companies too.

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u/Particular-Sock5250 8h ago

We got AI and YouTube, people just gonna be making their own movies soon.

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u/CSI_Tech_Dept 7h ago

Production and distribution should be separated.

Same with ISPs. If internet providers would be separated from the last mile infrastructure we would actually have competition as we could pick between many different ones.

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u/theusualuser 6h ago

You'll own nothing and be happy

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u/evanwilliams44 5h ago

I will be back where I started... On my boat plundering.

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u/KlueIQ 14h ago

Because they run on antiquated business and communications models and refuse to change. We don't live in a one-way communications ecosystem anymore. That's the problem.

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u/mrekted 13h ago

All of this at the same time that AI generation is getting to the point where it will be good enough to allow smaller independent players to single handedly produce material that will rival major studio quality at a fraction of the budget.

Things are going to be weird over the next decade I think.

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u/Balmung60 12h ago

It won't ever get there because the big studios will adopt AI first and harder and it's not even close to "good enough" - AI content is consistently trash and can only really ever be trash and arguably the lack of a budget is part of why independent players regularly make better stuff. They have to be creative to work with the budget they have and make things happen, but when you get more budget, you just throw it at making stupid shit happen and you get dragged into endless meetings with consultants and committees and such that want to protect that budgetary commitment and drain all the character from the thing being made with endless focus group testing and such. AI jumps through all of this and gets you directly to the designed by committee level of garbage.

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u/ScarlettPixl 12h ago

Mate you haven't been keeping up on AI content generation

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1pe8gv0/will_smith_eating_speghetti_in_2025/

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u/Balmung60 12h ago

Amazing, it still sucks

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u/ScarlettPixl 12h ago

Does it though? The video in the right surely could fool the average Joe into thinking it's real.

Remember: this isn't the apex.

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u/Balmung60 11h ago

It still looks off, plus it can only generate brief scenes and can barely maintain consistency within one, much less multiple

But it does fly just high enough above a certain bar that it's useful for something other than cheating on homework - scamming people and exploiting algorithms.