Netflix Buys Warner Bros.

🤦 people like Gruber still don’t realize how bad media conglomeration has been for art and consumers?

This is *always* a bad thing. It always results in less creative output, lost jobs, and higher costs

If we had an even slightly decent government, this would be blocked without a second thought. There’s no upside to anyone outside of Netflix’s C Suite. Even employees of both companies are going to suffer because of this

Gruber always gets snowed by companies until they've fully enshittified. Netflix's content quality has very famously been on a downhill slide, and its movies are synonymous with mediocrity. And no company that cares about service makes the user hunt up and down the page for what they're looking for, but that's what people searching for their "Continue Watching" tab have had to do.

I just want TCM to be left alone and without ads. If it's left alone with the Discovery Garbage-plex management, I don't think TCM can survive.

At least it wasn't Paramount/Ellison/Weiss.

I left Netflix some years ago when they paid millions to former British Royals who went to America to be 'left alone' and promptly did a deal to 'not be left alone' on Netflix.

Netflix are going more and more downmarket - possibly in a move that works (unfortunately) in winning over the masses.

Such a massive merger is clearly counter to the FTC's "Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits mergers and acquisitions when the effect may be substantially to lessen competition" If the FTC allow this they may as well shut down.

@billyok I've noticed that, too. Gruber was hardly critical of Apple's downhill slide for a decade until very recently. Netflix is not a good company, either. It'll take Boomer Gruber another decade to see that most Netflix productions are "content" made to fill time. He trusts a megacorp? Tells you all you need to know about him.

I don't really see this as being very significant, at least to me, because these companies have already mostly lost the ability to contribute meaningful pieces to our culture. Any time they manage to create a good show or movie, it's more of a happy accident than intentional. I'm pretty much already checked out from modern media.

Also that Gruber quote is so out of touch.

I just want to own Black Mirror.

"these companies have already mostly lost the ability to contribute meaningful pieces to our culture"

Don't worry, it can always get worse. See: Microsoft buying Activision.

In a healthy political system, this acquisition would not be allowed to happen.

The Golden Age of Streaming was when there was only Netflix. Everything for a single subscription.

Back then they were also a challenger and had to keep in their toes.

I reckon this merger will go through, and then a slow decline of quality that tracks with an equal rise in price.

My bittorrent "subscription" "service" works just like Netflix used to, or even better. I always get the highest bitrate, without any buffering, no limitations on what device I can play, how many concurrent devices can start playback (where some "zombie" timedout player takes a slot), no regional limitations to content, no regional limitations to audio tracks, no regional limitations to subtitles, no absolute bottom of the barrel web shit UI that needs to push "engagement" instead of surface the content I am actually watching currently. I even control the artwork I see for each movie or TV show. Wonders of technology.

I left Netflix when they stopped renting discs by mail. At the time the selection from the streaming service was inadequate for me. With the addition of Warner's back catalog, it might become adequate.

I got to keep the last two discs they sent. They didn't want them back. I think by that time, the number of shipping centers across the U.S. had shrunk to one. It was kind of like the last days of Kodachrome processing.

> I just want to own Black Mirror.

I heartily recommend you pirate it!

Relatedly,

> My bittorrent "subscription" "service" works just like Netflix used to, or even better...

Back when I was a broke college student and pirated everything, partly due to having no money but also because the experience of having all of my media downloaded, ready to go, and able to be browsed and watched using a nice 10-foot interface on my TV (using the predecessor to Kodi on a modded Xbox!) was just far superior compared to broadcast television.

I knew this was going to be the way of the future, eventually, and was waiting for the world to catch up. I figured that when I had the spending money and someone offered a good service that provided the same experience, I would jump all over that.

Now here we are, with multiple streaming services in which many still show you ads if not while watching your shows then while browsing, give you shitty user hostile interfaces, and don't let you actually "own" your media because the constantly changing landscape of what megacorporation owns what means that your favorite show or movie might just disappear from your streaming service with no recourse to you. Or they might replace it with an "enhanced" version that is not an enhancement by any reasonable standard. Or they might censor it because someone cracked a joke in it that is now verboten.

So the best answer is still to pirate, and as long as we're still living in the dollar store cyberpunk dystopia that is this modern world I don't see that changing any time soon.

HBO as it is remembered was gone after AT&T got their hooks into it and did what they do. Since then it's been inevtiable something like this would happen.

Considering the circumstances this isn't the worst thing that could have happened to what's left of it.

To me this reads more like the mid-point of the cycle of re-creating cable. I think Chandler's comment is about right. Hopefully at some point someone manages to do what Netflix what Netflix did to cable and I get to re-live this cycle at its peak one more time, where the companies are forced to act like they care about their users for a while before enshittification takes hold again.

@Bri It's not just the terrible services and their high cost; it's also retarded 20-th century mentality that still lingers in these studios' licensing deals. Even if I want HBO and am willing to pay for it, I can't access it here in Israel. Why? 🤷‍♂️ Some asshole in a costume decided that they might sell some show to some Israeli company and that deal would not be as lucrative if people could pay outside of the clutches of the local broadcaster. This is true all over the world. I remember when Netflix first arrived here in Israel, it was still not as strong in its own content offering, and was mostly an aggregator is third-party content. Well, the library was basically a sparse matrix of missing content. If you moved to the US (physically or otherwise), a different sparse matrix was revealed. If you then moved to Canada, yet another, different, library was shown. Just ridiculous. Yet the price in each region was roughly the same. Today, the landscape is much worse, ironically, because back then, much of the older library was on Netflix. This is no longer the case. Now you have a sparse array of indirection, each leading to a region-based sparse matrix of content. You don't know which version of this matrix you will get. If you are in the US, you are likely to receive the most fuller of the matrices, but if you are looking for something specific, you might, for example, discover that it only exists in Brazil, but not in the US, because some music was licensed in a retarded way 22 years ago and that license expired 2 years ago, so the episode is just poof gone.

Even when content is available, not all content is presented equally. Apparently, showing a higher quality stream also hurts the same local broadcaster licensing deal, so a piece of content might only be available for streaming in 720p in your region, because the "rights" to broadcast at 1080p or 2160p are held by some local channel you haven't watched in 20 years.

All this nonsense should have been resolved decades ago, when streaming was starting to materialize. Instead, studios in their infinite greed and wisdom, ended up creating a system worse than cable television.

Meanwhile, in my "subscription" "service", I just search for the content, get a list of available qualities, and shortly after, the content finds its way to my NAS, which I can offload to my iPad for travel, consume even in case of internet failure (which happens from time to time) and so on.

"I don’t know if this deal makes sense for Netflix, but Netflix has earned my trust. Netflix is a product-first company. They care about the quality of their content, their software, their service, and their brand."

Seriously, what the f**k is he talking about? Netflix has been dive-bombing in quality for years. They've even developed a reputation for killing shows that were high quality for no reason other than they weren't putting up Stranger Things numbers (anyone remember Inside Job?) They are now best known for inventing the obnoxious auto-playing, volume blasting full screen trailer that no one wanted because it A/B tested slightly better, defining the genre of TV shows that are designed to played on a second screen while you're doing other things (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-second-screen-enough-is-netflix-deliberately-dumbing-down-tv-so-people-can-watch-while-scrolling), and their documentaries are either interviewing "web sleuths" (i.e., no one of any consequence or even any personal connection to the topic of the documentary) or using genAI to add fake suspense (https://www.decodingeverything.com/netflix-what-jennifer-did-ai-controversy/). How can Gruber say what he's saying with a straight face? It's a breathtakingly bad take.

No one has a better streaming experience than pirates, and it isn’t even close. The delivery system is immaculate, the apps (I prefer infuse but take your pick) prioritize user experience over dark patterns, and never having to worry which of the 300 streaming services are carrying some show or movie is priceless. Once you get it set up, everything just works, and it’s considerably more polished than even peak Netflix was when that company cared about its product.

The only obvious downside: Setting it up is way beyond the understanding of most people who stream tv and movies. But knowing that most are stuck paying certainly helps keep my conscience clear that I’ve taken the time to set up a much better way.

@Yarrr Ahoy matey!

I think most people who don’t care to learn the “tools of the trade” moved to Telegram, where they somehow get direct links and watch content in 480p on their phones, but they are happy enough about it. Others use stuff like the modern equivalent of Popcorn Time, where it somehow streams torrents from public trackers at a decent enough quality.

What a major failure of streaming companies that people are willing to go through that manure than use their services.