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Comment by Talyen42 | Hacker News Reader

what's with all these analysts predicting mega mergers today?

> "Citi analysts see 40% chance Apple will buy Netflix"

Yeah, right. It's baseless cable news headline-bait garbage.

Could it be trial balloons? see how regulators and politicians react to gauge how likely it is to succeed or if there is a big pushback?

The tax law changes are going to liberate billions of dollars stuck overseas. They need to chase returns with that money.

We’re heading into a historic cycle of mergers.

1. Buy stock/derivatives in a large company that could plausibly purchase another large company.

2. Announce rumours of merger/acquisition.

3. Stock price rises, sell stock/derivatives at a profit.

Umm, isn't that highly illegal? If you make a good profit and it can be traced to your rumor, I don't think the SEC finds that very funny.

True, but as you can see from SEC's stance of pump and dump schemes on altcoins, there are ways of blurring the lines of legality.

I am also under the impression not many people get caught doing a pump and dump.

I'm not an expert at this! But it would seem a fairly straightforward way to profit without directly trafficking in securities linked to either purchaser or acquirer would be to instead use related company securities instead.

Ex: rumor is Amazon will buy Target. Buy securities on a basket of retail, ex-Target, with similarities to Target.

Yeah, IANAL, but that sounds like a textbook pump-and-dump.

This is exactly what Jim Cramer did

I actually think an Apple/Netflix merger makes a lot of sense. Apple sucks at online services and netflix could use the deep pockets.

  Apple sucks at online services

That's exactly why this doesn't make sense for Netflix. They'd be much better off without Apple.

There's no reason that Apple couldn't build a Netflix competitor and then ban Netflix from its mobile device platforms.

Other than the fact that every attempt apple has made at a cloud service has been terrible.

Am I wrong, or are iCloud and Apple Music both better than terrible cloud services?

I would say you are wrong. I have used both and the experience was always worse compared to that of competitors, despite their advantage of

a) deep hardware integration b) deep platform integration (so much, that it feels like effort is required to not use the services).

I guess it depends on what your bar is for “better than terrible”, but when I look at the richest company in tech that also happens to own the entire stack in play, then “better than terrible” is not remotely good enough.

Apple Music is my favorite. I like being able to buy things not included in streaming on iTunes or rip music from other sources and have it integrate into the ui. Last time I checked spotify is missing a clean way to integrate music it's streaming service is missing.

iCloud seems to be on par or better than one drive. I'm not sure who else is it's competitor. Dropbox has better syncing with multiple users and g-suite has better online editing and sharing tools. Their core stories is different than iCloud's, which is a online backup of personal documents. Maybe Google Drive has good desktop apps and works for Android users.

And that would be the day I switch to Samsung.

Yeah because Samsung is known for a free and open platform. Honestly I bought an S8+ in March and I don't think I'll be getting another Samsung device. They make their own apps for so much there are issues getting their phones to work with things built for Android. I have a car that supports Android Auto and it worked fantastically when I had my Nexus 6p but it has been unreliable and I don't use it anymore thanks to my Samsung device.

An Apple/Netflix merger makes little sense; Apple is pretty clearly not interested in online services not tied into it's hardware platforms, and it's already got a video service tied into it's ecosystem.

I suppose making Netflix's existing original content Apple-exclusive would have some value to Apple, but not enough to justify purchasing Netflix.

I always got the impression that Netflix's pockets were large anyway. I mean, a huge portion of their content has become self produced and the content is better than a lot of B level movies that I've seen. I assumed funding themselves making bad ass content was an indication that they had enough money that they were just like "Fine. We'll make it ourselves." Kind of along the same vein as PornHub being rumored to make sense8 season 3.

I am not purporting to have any knowledge that was just always my assumption.

I thought the Apple acquires Netflix rumor was old. They were also looking at acquiring Disney and some others as well, according to the rumor.

The "Apple buys Disney" seemed more like people just dreaming up what they would do with umpteen trillion dollars and making a blog post out of it.

Apple buying Netflix makes slightly more sense given that their own streaming video offerings are not exactly taking the world by storm. I have no idea what they would do with Netflix after they bought them though. Apple's STB offerings already have a Netflix app I'm sure.

They could let them keep doing they're thing as they seem to be a company that seems to know how to run themselves, also Netflix could provide a massive amount of 'free' product placement for apple products.

Like every Netflix show now has the main characters wearing iWatches and talking on the iPhones?

I'm also not sold on "We bought you out, now keep doing what you were doing before." What's the point of spending all of that money if you're not going to meddle? Netflix's paltry profits can't be all that enticing to Apple.

Black Mirror Season 4: maybe a spoiler?

In season 4 of Black Mirror, every branded piece of tech was Apple. That's just an example. There was an instance where the Apple logo was featured fully on the screen for a fraction of a second. An entire episode leveraged the creepy factor of Boston Dynamics. This obviously an extreme example but imagine every Netflix show is wall to wall Apple products. In the age of chord cutters this becomes a rather powerful tool to have.

Slow news day.

It is the first real news day since the holiday.

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