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> Combination Will Offer More Choice and Greater Value for Consumers, Create More Opportunities for the Creative Community and Generate Shareholder Value No do
by embedding-shape 11mo ago
> Combination Will Offer More Choice and Greater Value for Consumers, Create More Opportunities for the Creative Community and Generate Shareholder Value
No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"? I know corporate double-speak is already out of control and I know they're writing whatever they can do avoid regulators who surely are looking into the acquisition, but surely these executives cannot believe acquisitions lead to more choice, right?
- Shaanie 11mo agoMore choice as in more content available to choose from on Netflix?
- marcusb 11mo agoMore choice as in “more revenue streams from which to create shareholder value.”
- embedding-shape 11mo agoSo when they say "Consumers", it should really have been "Netflix Customers", as for everyone else there is less choice, only already paying Netflix users get more content.
- nottorp 11mo agoAlready paying Netflix users will get to either agree with a price increase or leave :) After all, there is more "content" now.
- weird-eye-issue 11mo agoI'd really prefer better quality over quantity. Everything just feels like slop now and I find myself mostly only enjoying older movies. I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix. Edit: Btw I find Max is like a better quality version of Netflix. But after a while I have the same problem there too. I find myself just watching something on YouTube instead most times
- lynx97 11mo agoI cancelled my NetFlix subscription already, what, 7 years ago, for that reason... However, it is not just NetFlix. Most newish movies don't do anything for me. I prefer a movie from the 90s (or even earlier) over almost anything produced in the last 5 to 10 years. It is likely a generational thing, and a case of old man yelling at clouds. If studios think effects are more important then the actual story, well then, so be it.
- nottorp 11mo agoMay be that our tolerance for samey bullshit reduces with age. After all, we’ve seen it all before. The movie industry isn’t that imaginative. Also, survivor bias. You have to go out of the way to find mentions of crap 3rd rate old movies. We only remember the good ones.
- bombcar 11mo agoIt’s fun to pick a year and do a deep dive on everything that was released to theaters (old newspapers with movie times are great for this) - so much crap you never heard about, unless it was phenomenally bad.
- nottorp 11mo agoSpeaking of which, I recently ran into scans of some local magazines from the 30s. There was a cinema magazine, and i ran into a 6 page obituary for this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Chaney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Chaney Some silent movie star. Never heard of him before. Looks like he was worth 1/8 of the non-ad content 1 year after his death in 1931.
- loloquwowndueo 11mo agoThere’s even more content on “gentlemen of fortune”-type sites. Just saying.
- nottorp 11mo agoThat’s their competition. I wonder if they realize it. > I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix. There was recently some link on HN about Netflix and using “AI” for “content creation”. Not that Netflix scripts didn’t sound like an “AI” wrote them even before “AI”.
- nottorp 11mo agoWait I just realized Warner is hbo. Means now im paying netflix two times.
- swiftcoder 11mo ago... don't paying Netflix customers already have access to the whole HBO back-catalogue?
- redeux 11mo agoAs a Netflix subscriber, that would be news to me.
- swiftcoder 11mo agoI see it's only a limited selection. I have Band of Brothers, Ballers, and various other HBO shows in my Netflix account.
- arlcode 11mo agoNot here (Germany). HBO isn't available at all on it's own. It's exclusively sublicensed (until the end of this year) to Sky which has a terrible terrible user experience and of course is another subscription. Two days ago there was an announcement that HBO Max is to start in Germany in January. Let's see how that develops after the acquisition.
- ulrikrasmussen 11mo agoMaybe they mean more content will be produced, which I believe. But I'd also argue that we really don't need more content on Netflix, we need higher quality. Netflix is drowning in a sea of mediocrity to the point where I have almost given up on investing in a new show because almost all of them reek of lazy writing and good-enough-but-not-outstanding direction. There are exceptions, but they are damn hard to find.
- imglorp 11mo agoI think it will. Now they don't have to go negotiate for every WB content item. As it stands, subscribers might or might not get WB things, same as all the other IP holders that are playing hard to get. Otherwise, they might have to contract some seasons of a show from one holder and some from another, and maybe not at all sometimes.
- utucuro 11mo agoI guess you are in the US. For you, WB content was already available. But you see, they never bothered to make that content available for most of the rest of the world. Netflix, on the other hand, is available most anywhere. This is exactly what it says on the can - more choice and greater value for me.
- jayveeone 11mo agoYour Netflix bill is about to skyrocket and there's no guarantee you'll have access to those titles.
- znpy 11mo agoI always smile at these situations. Yahrrr!
- xbmcuser 11mo agoYeah what I was thinking was ah higher quality low bitrate content. Will need to set the apps to auto update some stuff.
- whizzter 11mo agoWell if I can cancel my HBO Max it will probably be a zero-sum thing (all the crappy "discovery" content they tacked on was just annoying and I have little interest in their "sports" offerings)
- windexh8er 11mo agoThe unfortunate reality is that HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage. I'm constantly blown away by how mediocre everything on Netflix is. I only have it because it's bundled into myobile bill at a legacy discount which makes it only a few dollars a month. I wouldn't pay full price for Netflix now and I will likely remove it altogether if they do another price hike that adds a few more dollars beyond my current discount (~70%).
- ostacke 11mo agoAdding Warner Bros. catalog will naturally lead to more titles to choose from for Netflix users. The choice of streaming services will be slimmer though. It will be interesting to see how regulators see it.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jbs789 11mo agoI think that wording is targeted at anti-trust regulators.
- venturecruelty 11mo agoOnly when it's written in the memo line of the lobbying cheque.
- nelox 11mo agoMore choice for users of Netflix
- windexh8er 11mo agoThat is, maybe, until they gate keep the WB content beyond additional premiums.
- michaelcampbell 11mo ago> No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"? This is performative marketing for the regulators to allow the merger. No one (including the regulators) believes this, and it won't come to pass. ("More choice" won't, I mean, the merger will and a lot of regulators and politicians involved will end up with new cars, boats, and kids' college tuitions paid.)
- whycome 11mo agoIt potentially means fewer subscriptions to have more content options (eg, a bunch of services get folded into Netflix). Of course it will be region dependent for other licenses and rights.
- renegade-otter 11mo agoThere should be never any talk about "Shareholder Value". Shareholders do not create content, they do not subscribe at scale. Once your customer is no longer the focus, it's downhill from there, and it's been downhill for a WHILE. I killed my Netflix sub over a year ago and I never even think about it. It's all dull, empty-calorie background TV. The sad part is how the iconic HBO brand, already beaten by WBD into a pulp, is just going to merge with this average-ness and fade. End of an era, indeed.