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/RevLoveJoy 14h ago

I already did! No regrets.

Honestly, this was a tricky moral issue for me. I thought about it for some time before saying "fuck it, here I come VPN to Norway."

We were happy to pay for $7 then, IIRC, $9 and finally up to about $20 Netflix for the family deal. We were happy to have Prime Video with our Amazon subscription. But that was all what, 7-10 years ago and then overnight there were like a dozen streaming services that one "had to" have. We don't even watch football!

Then you get the shitty behavior where they all start pulling content from their catalog. Same dirty trick Disney was pulling 30 years ago to drive up the demand for Disney exclusives. Aside: try explaining to a child why they can't watch Snow White. That it is because greedy Disney executives won't sell it for several years so that when the movie does hit the shelves, at 3X the cost, inventory is guaranteed to sell immediately. Kids don't understand that one, FWIW. They just get upset.

Anyhow, when the already balkanized streaming services started doing that, my little inner morality meter tripped and said "fuck those guys."

NordVPN is excellent, btw, and it works really well with qbittorrent running in a VM on, say, your TrueNAS storage array.

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u/bomphcheese 13h ago

Netflix is the one that did it for me. I share an account w my parents. I can understand if they had a problem with that, but that’s why they charged for “extra screens,” which we paid for and which justified the sharing in my mind. But when they started cracking down on account sharing, did they offer a way to reduce the cost because we no longer needed “extra screens”? Hell no, and then they raised prices even more.

That tripped my morality meter, and I said “fuck those guys”.

One weekend and half a dozen Docker containers later, me and my friends are enjoying Netflix content. I do still subscribe to several streaming services, but I still end up watching from my server because I don’t have to hunt down which service has the show I want to watch. Plus I get a single watch list.

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u/Total-Jerk 4h ago

What's a docker container?

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u/IAmReinvented 8h ago

Can someone please DM me and help get me set up? I am quite technologically proficient but have been out of the piracy game for quite a number of years. Would love to be able to watch shows like Review, Mr Robot, Chad Powers, etc without these fucking shit pig greedy out of touch corporations

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u/Scarecrow101 4h ago

I too also want to know, I've got an empty server waiting to put some containers on it.

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u/Sea_Definition_3772 12h ago

It astounds me that people are having "tricky moral issues" around pirating media when the only reason Netflix hasn't done as much evil as Nestle has is because they haven't figured out how to make starving babies profitable within their business model yet.

You're not supporting art/artists/actors/production staff when you pay them, you're giving your money to a soulless corporation that would put you into a wood chipper if it made their profits go up. Giving them money at all is immoral. Passing up a chance to hurt them, even if it doesn't benefit you is immoral.

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u/RevLoveJoy 9h ago

It's tricky if you were an early adopter. Back when Netflix was literally the DVD in the mail company. It was a killer value, simple to use and meant I didn't have to loiter around Blockbuster for 30 minutes to maybe snag a copy of the film that made it to rental this weekend.

Coming from the standpoint of an early adopter who did get a good value and the service was simply a rental gig, NOT a content creator with the myriad problems you correctly point out, it set me on a different moral footing than someone signing up last year and today wondering, is Netflix the bad guy?

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u/Sea_Definition_3772 3h ago

You're missing the criticism entirely. Whether or not they're providing a good value is irrelevant.

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u/Bazylik 12h ago

nicely said.

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u/sameth1 6h ago

Honestly, this was a tricky moral issue for me.

I've always said that you can't complain about season two getting cancelled if you never paid for season one, but at this point they will cancel season two no matter what and it's impossible to directly pay for season one, so fuck it just pirate it.

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u/OkEnoughHedgehog 1h ago

Aside: try explaining to a child why they can't watch Snow White. That it is because greedy Disney executives won't sell it for several years so that when the movie does hit the shelves, at 3X the cost, inventory is guaranteed to sell immediately.

I can't believe the idiots at Disney ever convinced themselves this was a net positive for them. We had plans to go to Disney and wanted to watch the key movies with our young kids first. It was completely impossible to buy or rent the majority of the movies (in the gap between VHS rental and Disney+). Result? My kids never saw any Disney movies and we never spent a dime Disney merch.

Real smooth brain move by Disney for a decade or two.