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Comment by routerl | Hacker News Reader

I remember when Netflix began to produce their own shows and movies, some C-suite exec saying something like "we're gonna become HBO before they realize they need to become Netflix". I.e. vertically integrated content production and distribution.

Well, wrong target I guess. Disney has always been the big player in this space.

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Turns out it’s much faster for a content producer to spin up a Netflix clone than vice-versa.

Some of this is not realizing just how much technology has advanced since Netflix was first mover - second mover often has much less problems in the area (especially as someone has already done the heavy work of showing it can be done).

Yeah, building Netflix when they first got into streaming was a massive technical undertaking. There were a lot of companies who tried very hard to do streaming video who just never got it to work well enough. Building a Netflix clone is still certainly not trivial by any means, but it's probably an order of magnitude less work than it was ten years ago. When they first shifted into original content production it didn't make sense for HBO to even try to compete with them, but those days are clearly long one.

An ironic statement considering HBO has been doing vertically integrated content production and distribution for a pretty long time (though it took them a few years to take streaming seriously).

Not a wrong target at all. Streaming is pretty much a solved problem now and Netflix is competing mostly on content.

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