by smallerfish 13 hours ago
I'm a fan. Injecting a huge catalog into Netflix is a win for consumers who want just one subscription. And injecting studio talent into Netflix (assuming the merge gives WB creatives influence) can only help.
HBO's tech sucks. Apple is (in my experience) hard to get running in the Android ecosystem. Most of the other options are too narrow in catalog, or ad ridden.
Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
> Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
this is not how markets usually work.
Correct, but the current market is not working. 15+ streaming services is terrible for consumers. Catalogs are compromised. Bigger services can push prices up because they have more stuff. Clearly if there are too few players then there's less competition and no price pressure, but there's a sweet spot between what exists today and that.
This makes zero sense.
Can you name another scenario where consolidation helped the consumer? Where a sweet spot involved more consolidation?
Did Breyer’s ice cream get better when it was purchased by Unilever?
Did your local grocery store chain get better after it was acquired by Kroger or Albertsons?
Did the smartphone market get better when Microsoft acquired Nokia and HP acquired Palm?
What about Hashicorp? Sun Microsystems? Dark Sky? Red Hat? Slack? Nest? Any of these product markets get better post-consolidation?
I struggle to think of a single example of a product category that got better with industry consolidation.
Youtube, Android and Google Maps got better (and became financially viable at all) when Google bought them. Github got better and cheaper when Microsoft bought it.
I'm not necessarily talking about the product itself getting better, I'm talking about the overall consumer situation being better.
All these products were acquired very early in their lifespans, so them getting "better" was practically inevitable.
GitHub's acquisition effectively took at least one competitor off the market. Now, Microsoft doesn't have to seriously develop a competitor, they just bought their competitor and adopted it. They never had to improve Azure DevOps (VSTS) enough to be attractive, they just bought the market leader. If GitHub was never acquired, my company might be deciding between BitBucket, Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure Repos. Instead, Azure Repos is more of a niche offering where most of Microsoft's effort has focused on GitHub. Microsoft removed an option which likely raised prices or reduced user choice.
Google Maps was acquired in basically a prototype stage before it was ever a public product, so that case is irrelevant.
Android is worse in a number of ways due to Google's integration. Google Play Services APIs and other Google technologies have led to heavy Google lock-in. If Android continued as its own project, it would have been much more vendor-agnostic.
In the case of YouTube, I'd argue it's worse in a number of key ways: ads are wildly pervasive (sure, monetization would have had to happen anyway in some fashion), many of the platform changes are user-hostile (removed dislike count, background playback limited to premium subscription), content moderation more heavily influenced by Google's advertisement-based business model (e.g., if YouTube had continued on its own, it might have chosen a different monetization strategy less advertisement oriented, but Google is an advertisement company. Advertisers are more sensitive to their products being presented next to objectionable content) and competitors were snuffed out due to ecosystem integration (YouTube videos as Google search results rather than agnostic video results).
Remember the era where YouTube got extremely badly integrated in to Google+ and basically forced you to use it? That was a pretty terrible user experience.
It's bad for everyone. Fewer buyers = less content made and lower budgets, fewer voices being heard.
Netflix have never been a streaming service to put loads of good content on their service and keep it there. I would imagine they will use this injection of content to drip feed and slowly rotate movie franchises in order to keep users interested.