Netflix to Buy Warner Bros. Discovery in Major Streaming Deal

[DEXTERITY]

My Netflix stock better go up on that news!

womp dropped to 98-100

 

[Abazigal]

Price hikes, worse content, job losses.
Basically anything negative one can think of will likely apply here.

I am scratching my head as to why price hikes is being listed as a negative.

Like say I am paying $30 a month for Netflix and $15 a month for HBO. If Netflix acquires HBO, merges their content libraries into Netflix, and raises the price to $40 a month, won’t consumers be no worse off in this regard? They are still paying for same for roughly the same amount of content.

Also, it wasn’t so long ago that people were complaining about there being so many different streaming services that they had to pay for, and were openly wishing that everything could be consolidated under one umbrella and they only needed to pay for one. And now that we are one step closer to that reality, suddenly everyone gets cold feet?

Sure, job losses always suck, but the flip side is the economies of scale when you don’t need to employ multiple people to do the same job.

Worse content is a reasonable concern, but to my knowledge, very few streaming services are actually profitable (Netflix only recently became so). If HBO isn’t acquired, and it subsequently is closed down, how is that any better?

In the greater scheme of things, this may be the only viable way out for many struggling streaming services. To get acquired because there’s just no way they can ever expect to turn a profit.

 

[bgillander]

I am scratching my head as to why price hikes is being listed as a negative.

Like say I am paying $30 a month for Netflix and $15 a month for HBO. If Netflix acquires HBO, merges their content libraries into Netflix, and raises the price to $40 a month, won’t consumers be no worse off in this regard? They are still paying for same for roughly the same amount of content.

Also, it wasn’t so long ago that people were complaining about there being so many different streaming services that they had to pay for, and were openly wishing that everything could be consolidated under one umbrella and they only needed to pay for one. And now that we are one step closer to that reality, suddenly everyone gets cold feet?

Sure, job losses always suck, but the flip side is the economies of scale when you don’t need to employ multiple people to do the same job.

Worse content is a reasonable concern, but to my knowledge, very few streaming services are actually profitable (Netflix only recently became so). If HBO isn’t acquired, and it subsequently is closed down, how is that any better?

In the greater scheme of things, this may be the only viable way out for many struggling streaming services. To get acquired because there’s just no way they can ever expect to turn a profit.

And I’m amazed how anyone could not see why price hikes would strike some as a negative. The rather obvious issue would be that not everyone subscribes to or wants to subscribe to both, so the existing Netflix only subscribers in your example would simply be getting a 33% price increase, while the HBO only subscribers would be getting a somewhat noticeable 167% increase in price.

As for the redundant job reductions, I guess there could be a large savings if HBO has a huge number of middle management and support positions, but I believe they have already been chopping those to get to profitability, so that leaves the production staff as likely the largest redundant group. Getting rid of that group reduces their ability to produce content, so while you may end up with both libraries of the originals, the production of new content by the combined organization would most likely not equal the amount produced by the separate organizations.

And, indeed, it appears that HBO has managed to get to profitability already, despite repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with branding changes, so I question whether there isn’t more risk of losing a greater number of HBO productions by them being swallowed by Netflix than by them not: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/wa...rofit-hbo-max-expansion-minecraft-1236481308/

 

[chmania]

I am scratching my head as to why price hikes is being listed as a negative.

Like say I am paying $30 a month for Netflix and $15 a month for HBO. If Netflix acquires HBO, merges their content libraries into Netflix, and raises the price to $40 a month, won’t consumers be no worse off in this regard? They are still paying for same for roughly the same amount of content.

Have a look at the email I got yesterday, nothing is changing today, both services will continue to operate separately. By the way, I'm paying the equivalent of $4.95 per month for Netflix until July 2027 for 4K reception on four devices.

 

[Abazigal]

Have a look at the email I got yesterday, nothing is changing today, both services will continue to operate separately. By the way, I'm paying the equivalent of $4.95 per month for Netflix until July 2027 for 4K reception on four devices.

Good for you. Here’s the rates in my country. Seems like Singapore always gets gouged for everything.

It also makes me wonder why Netflix doesn’t have an annual plan. Seems like that would be an excellent way to mitigate churn.