They can money hat it sure, but for how long is it sustainable? Is this going to be a Musk situation where value is just deleted off of WB (an already struggling business) just to push their political agenda? That just would not be healthy for the economy and lead to a lot of jobs lost. I really do hope that aside from the Trump controlled USA, other governments wouldn’t let this pass. It’d just be insane and irresponsible. Ignoring all the political and social implications, it just is not an economically healthy move. WB is still a global business and they have a large number of employees and affect the economies of the countries they are in.
It doesn’t matter so much if it doesn’t make money on the media side, if it can make money elsewhere - for example being on Trump’s side has given them TikTok USA, and they can be given government advertising funds or other contracts, or getting big tax breaks.
The “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” approach to getting billionaires to buy media for you has worked a lot in Hungary, which the Republicans have actively said is a model to follow.
A subservient press parroting Trump talking points and not pushing any difficult questions, plus gerrymandering (stacking Democrat votes in a few constituencies and spreading Republican ones out enough they have a majority in the rest) and moves to disenfranchise voters are a serious way to win elections even when you shouldn’t
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I’m amazed how Netflix managed to be the winner and Paramount continued to be the loser.
Think the world (particularly the USA) is the loser if this doesn’t get blocked 
Trump will finally have his hands on CNN, the news station he hates more than any of his children…
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Well there’s that, but even without considering politic, this has self-destruction written all over it. If you think having ABK is bad (somehow), you haven’t seen nothing yet.
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But you know, theater and such. Note: I’m all in for theater to remain but yeah…
At least the subscriber count went up… 
. It is truly astonishing to me how bad of a business WB is. Like not in the Microsoft “Everyone hates it, but it’s still a massive financially stable company.” but as in WBDiscovery is actually a straight up unprofitable business struggling and looking for a bailout (in this case being purchased). Also the article reminds everyone that Paramount merging with Skydance JUST happened. Seriously isn’t there a cool down period before another massive aquistion? How is that not a law? It should be a law because that actually seems like something that impacts the economy (buying up companies, especially direct competitors, too soon after each other).
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Eww gross
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Too soon due to not knowing the next game result, but step aside, Bungie. There’s a new too much cost for an acquisition that likely result bad move in town.
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They are literally just burning money with that price. AT&T paid 85 billion for just WB (100 billion including WB’s debt) and went into even more debt paying that. WB was then losing them billions each year and after less than five years AT&T turned around and spun them out with Discovery for like half that… and then WBDiscovery became LESS profitable 
. Leaving politics aside (well not really but tabling the state media concerns for a minute), I just hate this. Capitalism is so broken. This is WB failing multiple times in less than 10 years and SUCCEEDING for it. They’re getting bailed out for more money. What the hell? I can fail financially and lose billions only for someone else to buy me for far more than I’m worth? Can some take on my billions in debt which I’ve now failed to pay down multiple times?
I don’t want WB gone. They have IP I care a lot about. I love DC to death and DC comics really gives me a lot of strength. Like reading DC comics means a lot to me. The looney tunes means a lot to me. Cartoon Network and boomerang and Hannabarbera are my childhood. But I really really hate this because it makes it all feel pointless. There are bad decisions WB has continously made which have to come with consequences for them to grow and improve and for the industry to improve. It makes it feel like I as a consumer don’t matter. WB doesn’t have to care about making good decisions to grow their business and innovate and improve and everything else that is supposed to come with capitalism. They can just do whatever and know they’ll get bailed out (bought out; they will have their problems bought and paid for) because they’re WB.
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Thank God, Netflix owning WB would be a nightmare situation for compotition. Their is a reason why Paramount chanced this so heavily, because they needed it to stay competitive but if Netflix got if we would be locked into a duopoly
Where are you getting duopoloy from? Duopoloy with what? Netflix and Disney? Umm…. no. If anything that’d be Paramount Skydance WB Discovery. The entirety of the entertainment industry isn’t just streaming. There’s still money in Hollywood and traditional releases. Netflix could have made a similar argument as Xbox did for ABK: they could have described the aquistion as a vertical one as opposed to horizontal. WB and Netflix don’t directly compete. HBO Max is only a portion of WB’s business and WB still primarily competes through theatrical releases. Netflix isn’t on that scene at all. Netflix could say they were buying WB (and at that just WB so a smaller sized aquistion) for content to bolster their streaming service. It’s not like Netflix is swimming in powerful IP. Then they’d also just make legal promises to keep releasing in theaters which would be a new market they’re competing in. In comparison Paramount Skydance is a much closer match to what WBDiscovery is currently. They’d merge not just subscription services but also theatrical releases. Netflix would lose a streaming service competitor (one that I don’t even think has that many users; HBO Max was barely a competitor in the space after their numerous mistakes), but Paramount-Skydance would lose both a streaming service competitor and theatrical releases competitor. If I had to put money on one passing and not the other then I’d be better on Paramount not passing. Of course I won’t put money down because 1) Paramount has been vocal about its ties to the trump administration and 2) Regulators let Disney buy Fox so what even matters anymore?
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The streaming market where all 3 conbinded make up nearly half of the US streaming market
Sure but it definitely the biggest of the movie/TV market. Cable is dying and theaters are also dying and if you want to go down this argumentation odds are once contracts ended netflix would once again limit theater releases and it harms their core streaming business
Microsoft buying Activision was both vertical and horizontal
They both would’ve been bad options for the art and cinema part of it, but politically Paramount is more apparently harmful.
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Yes, but it wasn’t like say Microsoft buying Sony or Nintendo (who both own rival console platforms in addition to owning studios and publishing games). The point is that Microsoft doesn’t directly compete with ABK in a way that Netflix doesn’t directly compete with WB. Not saying there’s no competition or that either aquistion isn’t pushing us more toward the dystopian futures we see in movies, but there isn’t a clear argument of Netflix being worse for competition. They have streaming. Paramount has streaming (to a much much lesser extent based on subscriber count) and theatrical releases. Netflix’s subscriber count is also an argument in of itself because they aren’t Disney or Paramount. Netflix is dependent on all the contracts and licensing they do. The Netflix originals keep people subscribe, but none of them are really super powerful IP. There’s a lot of arguments that Netflix could make for why the aquistion would be more vertifical than it is horizontal. Really the only horizontal aspect would be HBO Max, and that’d come down to how much market share HBO Max actually has (which I mean they literally deleted their service, renamed it to “Max”, and then changed the name again back to HBO Max…).
Which back to that point, no really where is duopoloy coming from? I’ll admit I’m lost here.
[quote=“Rando, post:35, topic:23381”]
The streaming market where all 3 conbinded make up nearly half of the US streaming market
[/quote]
3 combined = almost half the US streaming marketing = duopoloy when Netflix buys HBO Max?? What are the three here? Netflix, HBO Max, and what else? And how is it a duopoloy when Netflix is buying one of those and even if they could buy whatever the third one is then they still wouldn’t even have half the market? A duopoloy is like the smartphone market where Android is 70+% and iOS is like 20+%.
And again we can say everything but streaming is dying, but they haven’t died yet and streaming itself is struggling to grow at this stage (Netflix is a poster child for that with them throwing everything at the wall now). There’s still literally billions in theatrical releases and TV and cable is still around. Regulatory bodies wouldn’t be doing their job if they just ignored everything else and solely focused on a single market in the entertainment industry.
“We trade one evil for another.”
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I don’t get where the Duopoly statement is coming from, in movies and tv streaming we have: Netflix, Disney, Apple, Amazon, Tubi, Roku, HBO Max, Youtube, Hulu, Paramount amd Crunchy Roll(which is the biggest anime provider and none of the others can match it).
There are so many different services that we can sub to that(Tubi and Another being free with ads) show there’s a lot of competition in the streaming services. Netflix may have a massive amount of subs, but they don’t have the IP like WB or Disney, they have like 10% of the anime that Crunchy Roll does(with Crunchy Roll being one of the companies that liscenses anime to them), their original stuff isn’t as highly rated as Apple’s, they have issues with renewing things people like. What Netflixs has is being first to the market, cultivating a large user base and making deals to maintain a massive catalog.
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That should be a non factor since a similar argumentation can be used with Netflix. The right doesn’t like the Netflix polotics and the left doesn’t like Paramounts polotics, I just trend to ignore that argumentation since regardless a group of people will be upset. What is important is the affect on compotition and who has the better deal for shareholders
Yeah but it is also the biggest motivator behind the proposed acquisition, netflix definitely saw WB as an opportunity to bolster their streaming platform and likely lock out any compotition in the streaming market outside of disney which is why they were bring attention to something like YouTube rather than arguing their are other comparably sized streaming platforms like Paramount Plus. Like yes you can argue Paramount and WB control more movie or animation creation that Netflix / Warner Brother but regardless their are still a lot more companies that make movies/cartoons like Universal, Disney, Sony Pictures, MGM/Amazon and to a lesser extent Apple & Netflix, this also isn’t accounting for smaller companies like anime companies like KADOKAWA to Toei, that is a much smaller concern
Because if Netflix bought Warner Brother no other streaming platform outside of Disney could realistically be competitive
Their is also Hulu which basically falls under Disney now so that is actually over 50% market share held by 2 giants if Netflix bought WB and amazon Prime which most people don’t even buy for the movies so yeah it would create a duopoly scenario most likely
The fact Youtube is comparable to streaming platforms and the fact it keeps coming up shows that rheir is realistical duopoloy concerns but if you want to count that the argumentation against Paramount Warner Brothers is killed thanks to youtube as their are hundreds of millions of creatives making content on YouTube so their will never be a monopoly or compotition concerns there, but I find counting YouTube as inhentely a different sub section as just because anyone can make a video doesn’t mean it will get big
Okay, that’s not a duopoly. Even by your very specific definition neither Disney nor Netflix would corner the market. They’d just be two big streaming services who still also compete with each other, either don’t make up half the market or barely do (depending on your math), and who in addition to not making up half the market & competing with each other will also still have to compete with every other streaming service that does make up the rest of the market.
Also yeah, YouTube counts. I’m not sure how they couldn’t. They have a subscription charge, they run ads, they stream video content for users (short form and long form), and in addition to the user created content they host full movies & TV for users to watch. You don’t even have to buy a lot of them. There’s entire movies and TV up on YouTube for free (officially not like user uploaded) that you either have to watch ads on or pay a subscription fee and don’t get ads on. That’s a streaming service.
The politics matters because it’s not politics. The right is increasingly proving that they aren’t the right and just morally corrupt individuals solely looking to benefit themselves. You can honestly make that argument for the left as well and any businessmen in America, but right now there’s no one else that has the audacity to execute people in the streets and push to the media that it’s okay actually while fabricating a story around it. You can’t ignore that when Paramount has clear ties to the Trump administration and they’ve already proven what that entails. There are genuine fears when we’re seeing entertainment IP being collectively bought up by known genuinely evil individuals.
But even ignoring everything, there’s not really any reason here why Paramount would be better for competition. As you’ve said Netflix’s motivation is bolstering their streaming service. For that Netflix was only going to purchase WB (not discovery, so there’d even be a separate entertainment company created and presumably Discovery (which was a streaming service that merged with HBO) would return as another competing streaming service). They’d bolster their content library and pipeline. Yeah their streaming service is big, but that’s not at all due to their original content and they struggle to make the originals to keep up as every entertainment company makes their own streaming service, takes their content off other platforms, and uses their plethora of long term IP to make exclusive originals on their own platforms. Heck, Netflix has depended on Paramount even. They had an entire contract to make a slew of new Nickelodeon cartoons. They’ve also used Paramount IP for originals like the live action ATLA show. That’s been Netflix’s entire business. Owning WB would be the first real case of them having the content library to stay competitive on the streaming scene, which is dwindling. New subscriptions have slowed and all they can do is keep raising prices to deal with increasing costs. That and doing stuff like adding games. Then owning WB would also put Netflix into new entertainment markets, which are in fact not dead. Cable TV is still chugging along. Heck, there are platforms bringing it into the streaming era like Sling. Cinema is very far from dead. There’s a lot of money there. The Minecraft movie made nearly a billion dollars on a 150 million budget. Netflix could also argue that the money from competing in new markets will help them diversify their business.
For Paramount… it’d just get bigger in all their existing sectors. Like it’s a much harder argument. They already have the IP and they already have a cable TV business and they already have a cinematic business. They even already have a streaming service. They would just get bigger in every aspect and their only argument for why that’d help competition is that they’ll be bigger. But also, will they be? They’ve specifically said they want to put all HBO Max content onto Paramount+ or somehow merge the services, we’ve seen that with WBDiscovery actually. Umm, people don’t just automatically convert to the new subscription. There’s a lot of fall off. There’s also people who are already subscribed to both (either individually or in their families) and people who will be priced out because merging the two isn’t cheap. Which is also to the Netflix argument. It isn’t just X + Y you have to subtract Z (any subscribers who’d just not subscribe to the new merged service or who are already subscribed to both), so inevitably whether Paramount or Netflix buys WB they don’t give HBO Max’s entire streaming market share.
It’s for regulators and shareholders to decide and for us to hope that said regulators do genuinely care about the health of the economy. That said this all just sounds like Microsoft should buy WB. #seriousnotserious
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