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Maybe there are licensing restrictions or other things that prevent it, but wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app? Or at
by meowface 10mo ago
Maybe there are licensing restrictions or other things that prevent it, but wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app? Or at least make all HBO Max content also available in Netflix (and then eventually sunset HBO Max). That would make a Netflix subscription a much more compelling purchase for a ton of people.
- ComputerGuru 10mo agoThey might make less money with one super subscription than two separate ones.
- alistairSH 10mo agoYeah, 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.
- philistine 10mo agoWe're reinventing cable!
- butlike 10mo agoYup. All of them combined would probably be ~$100-120/mo. which is, lo and behold, the price of a cable package
- parineum 10mo agoWith inflation, it's much cheaper. Still, the real issue is one that both cable and streaming services don't solve. People don't want to pay for what they don't watch. Both streaming and cable have the price of everything they own and produce built into the price. When you subscribe to either, you're subsidizing a bunch of stuff you don't care about. People don't want to pay $20 a month to watch stranger things in oreer to subsidize a bunch of stuff they don't watch. It was the same with cable. Netflix is just one giant cable bundle, it always has been.
- ghaff 10mo agoThe irony is that a lot of people complained loudly about the cable bundle then complained loudly about streaming service fragmentation even when it at least offered a choice to cut their monthly bill.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoI don’t see how this is ironic at all. Doesn’t this just make sense that people are complaining about the same business model? Or are you saying people should be more grateful we don’t have to watch ads anymore?
- Larrikin 10mo agoWhen Netflix started losing shows did they lower their price to allow users to sign up for competing services? The price just went up for everyone in reality.
- ghaff 10mo agoNo but there's very little I deeply care about watching, including live TV. I definitely pay less for video content than I was paying 5 years or so ago. Netflix has been on my bubble for a while. We'll see what happens with this news. And I already have Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ through other bundles I have for other reasons. We'll see.
- alistairSH 10mo agoThere was a brief happy period where you could ditch cable ($100/month or whatever), subscribe to ~2-3 streaming services (~2-3x $20/month), save a decent amount and still have a good selection of content. And bonus, you didn't have any ads. Then the fragmentation got worse, as all the legacy media companies rolled out their own platforms, and it suddenly became ~5x$20/month to get the same content. And ads got added back into the mix, even after subscription fees. These days, I actively switch platforms every few months. It's a bit annoying, but beats the old cable days. My biggest complaint today is the fragmentation across some sports. Take pro cycling (TDf, etc) - it's split across 3-4 platforms in the US. So, I need to get FloSports, Peacock, and a few others. I wish I could either get individual events OR a bundle that included everything. Oh well, I'll pay for a few and pirate the Sky or continental feeds for the rest.
- buildbuildbuild 10mo agoCable failed at millennial+ user experience. Many on-demand viewing experiences still play ads through atrocious “cable box apps.” Entrenched cable bureaucracy disrupted by app culture. For the better. Netflix also will some day be disrupted, as the wheel turns.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoWe deserve to divorce the content from the service. Can you even purchase Netflix content? I’ve just gone cold turkey from watching any streaming tv or movies until the situation improves. Blu Ray works better than ever.
- ghaff 10mo agoI'm regularly a bit surprised at how many people don't even consider purchasing a la carte content or Blu Rays. For films it's often a pretty reasonable option for occasional viewing.
- alistairSH 10mo agoWhat does a hard copy of a movie cost these days? $20? That’s a month of one platform. How many times can you rewatch Iron Man in 31 days?
- athrowaway3z 10mo agoI 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.
- aerostable_slug 10mo agoI wonder how much piracy really impacts their pricing strategy? I honestly don't know.
- pragma_x 10mo agoEverything 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.
- observationist 10mo agoPirate everything.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoHulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor. There's a lot of content licensed to Hulu that is not necessarily licensed to Disney Plus, though Disney Plus seems to be showing more Hulu content, but I assume it has to do with licensing.
- johneth 10mo ago> Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor. Only in the US. Everywhere else Hulu has always been integrated into Disney+).
- dagmx 10mo agoPart of that is because Disney didn’t outright own Hulu until recently. It was a joint ownership.
- jasomill 10mo agoI 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.
- consp 10mo agoEasy way to get rid of the few remaining "lifetime 50% discount" HBO Max subscriptions.
- indigodaddy 10mo agoOh no I am reminded of my dead physical Rolling Stone lifetime subscription!
- torh 10mo agoI 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.
- ekropotin 10mo agoThat would be amazing if we could watch both Netflix and HBO Max content at the price of one subscription. At least for me, these two platforms covers 95% of my video content needs.
- slenk 10mo agoYeah but there is 0 chance that the cost would remain similar to what it is now
- jandrese 10mo ago"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.
- ekropotin 10mo agoWell, I guess one more significant price jump would be a sign to finally replace streaming with reading
- jasomill 10mo agoI imagine major HBO resellers / direct Netflix competitors Amazon and Hulu (Disney) will insist on HBO remaining an extra-cost option, assuming these relationships survive the merger at all.
- oblio 10mo ago> 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?
- ekropotin 10mo agoThe cable thing in US is something Im struggling to wrap my mind around. I can’t imagine someone deliberately paying so much money for such a bad content. The only explanation I can think of is that most of the subscribers are elderly folks who signed up long time ago and didn’t bother to look into current bills. Also maybe some ardent sport fans?
- JadeNB 10mo agoMaybe we could come up with another ludicrous suite of names for HBO/HBO Go/HBO Max once it's merged with Netflix.
- ryandrake 10mo agoNot attacking you in particular, but I've always hated how we talk about "licensing restrictions" as if they're some kind of vague law of nature, like gravity. Oh, Studio X can't do Y... Because Licensing. "Licenses" are entirely conjured up by humans, and if there was an actual desire by the people who make decisions to change something, those people would find a way to make the "licensing restrictions" disappear. 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. It's not "licensing restrictions" that is stopping them. Same always comes up when we talk about why doesn't Company X open source their 20 year old video game software? Someone always chimes in to say "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
- aerostable_slug 10mo agoThe issue is that Netflix doesn't control those restrictions, the content creators (well, rights holders) do, and their incentives don't always align.
- ryandrake 10mo agoYea, what I mean by "people who make decisions" is everybody involved: studios, distributors, rights holders, and the maze of middlemen who have inserted themselves into the business: If all of them decided that more money could be made, if not for those pesky licenses, the "licensing problems" would immediately disappear.
- jimbokun 10mo agoAnd if any of them decide they are better served by the current arrangement, the licensing problems remain. You seem to be making incredibly banal observations.
- roguecoder 10mo agoThat's what governance is for, though. These laws can be changed to require collaboration or remove the artificial monopolies. They haven't been because the people being hurt by it are way less organized than the people benefitting, not because things couldn't ever change.
- darth_avocado 10mo ago> wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app I currently pay $20 something for Netflix every month and $10 for HBO Max a couple of months through the year when I’m binging a show from HBO. I as a consumer would prefer to keep it that way. I absolutely do not have the appetite to pay $30+ a month if the two are combined.
- cyanydeez 10mo agoThe thing is, HBO _the brand_ is the valuable thing.
- hamburglar 10mo agoAnd 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.
- wooger 10mo agoDo netflix still use FreeBSD at some level for their streaming?
- hephaes7us 10mo agoI'd rather not even have to sift through all the stuff on Netflix to get to the stuff from HBO. And I definitely don't want to pay double for one big catalog.