Corporate consolidation continues apace. Netflix has announced it will be acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery. For a cool $72 Billion, the streaming service will now hold the IP for DC, Harry Potter, and a backlog of movies going back to the golden age of cinema.
The acquisition will make Netflix the largest streaming service (Prime edged them out by 1%) when merged with HBO Max.
Given the current climate, this merger will likely go through with some rubber stamping unless they want concessions from WB like muting shows critical of the current regime (e.g. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver). CBS Paramount had to bend the knee and cancel Stephen Colbert (allegedly) to get their buyout from Skydance approved.
I’ve been saying for years and years that streaming is going to turn back into cable. The funny thing is that cable didn’t even fight back when streaming started taking off. All they really had to do was offer à la carte subscriptions, but noooooo.
And pretty soon streaming won’t have that in any effective way either.
There are already local ISPs who are offering streaming bundles for signing with them the way they used to offer bundles of exclusive channels when they were mainly cable TV companies.
I appreciate that entertainment is shifting from time-locked to on-demand, so we can catch up on continuity heavy shows without planning to record them in advance, but otherwise it’s turning into the same beast.
Some of us have been time-shifting and binge-watching for decades (; TiVo deserved better as a company…
I’ve been time-shifting since Betamax. Even with TiVo-style products here in Canada, I needed to set it before. If someone told me that a series was great, and six episodes had already aired, I could only start watching with episode seven.
If you miss Tivo, check out Tablo. Works great for OTA programs.