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Comment by utucuro | Hacker News Reader

I guess you are in the US. For you, WB content was already available. But you see, they never bothered to make that content available for most of the rest of the world. Netflix, on the other hand, is available most anywhere. This is exactly what it says on the can - more choice and greater value for me.

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What's written on the can reads "please don't sue us, we're not a monopoly, and we will not gouge users".

On the other hand Netflix will make its subscribers fund everything without reducing their income, and will not give these subscribers at least half of that content, because, why not?

If approval of this resulted in Netflix being required to release their crap on DVD (eventually) it’s actually be a win for consumers.

DVDs at least keep working.

Yes. However, I'd take a downloadable, well encoded and chapter marked mp4 over any DVD. 1080p SDR is enough.

I can just store it in my NAS and watch it whenever I like it.

Somewhat same end result; DVDs just are more palatable to the studios - you argue it is for “libraries”.

> What's written on the can reads "please don't sue us, we're not a monopoly, and we will not gouge users".

No reawwy this time we double-dog super promise

Your Netflix bill is about to skyrocket and there's no guarantee you'll have access to those titles.

I always smile at these situations. Yahrrr!

Yeah what I was thinking was ah higher quality low bitrate content. Will need to set the apps to auto update some stuff.

Well if I can cancel my HBO Max it will probably be a zero-sum thing (all the crappy "discovery" content they tacked on was just annoying and I have little interest in their "sports" offerings)

The unfortunate reality is that HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage. I'm constantly blown away by how mediocre everything on Netflix is. I only have it because it's bundled into myobile bill at a legacy discount which makes it only a few dollars a month. I wouldn't pay full price for Netflix now and I will likely remove it altogether if they do another price hike that adds a few more dollars beyond my current discount (~70%).

> HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage

If you leave the featured areas and venture into any of the categories, you will see that HBO is also full of junk. HBO -> Browse by Genre -> A-Z -> any of them are full of junk.

The Netflix featured pages are more geared to showing you stuff you haven't seen yet, while HBO is geared toward showing you popular stuff, even if you have watched it on HBO.

Forgot to reply, dunno about what is the focus in different markets but in Sweden the HBO-Discovery merger meant that 3 of the 12 or so old linear channels got sucked into it, what those channels lived off was cheap reality-TV of drunk/famous/naked/whatever.

I got HBO to watch good shows and suddenly the frontpage was filled with promotions of this inane reality-TV crap that I didn't have any interest in really paying for.

Yes, Netflix has added some reality crap like those fixed Tyson boxing fights and similar, but the ratio of crap to good content was still in heavy favor of content (and most importantly, they didn't try to fill my front-page with the crap).

> I guess you are in the US.

I am not, and WB was available via local options here (Southern European country).

For me who isn't a Netflix customer (the group which is larger than the group of people who have Netflix, obviously), the choice gets less.

And obviously anti-trust regulation doesn't care about the amount of choices for Netflix customers specifically, it cares about amount of choices for consumers at large, which will decrease with this change.

Netflix buying WB doesn't mean that licensing immediately becomes available worldwide.

Netflix can provide its own content everywhere around the globe because they are the sole owner of it. The distribution rights to WB properties outside of the US will belong to completely different legal entities (even if those entities have WB in them).

Netflix acquiring WB’s content will not necessarily lead to all of it being available for streaming to you in any given country. Content licensing is complicated, to put it mildly.

I don’t know what do you mean by “most of the rest of the world” but it’s widely available in the American continent and Europe coverage will be almost complete in the next month(s):

https://press.wbd.com/us/media-release/hbo-max/hbo-max-nears...

I think it's unlikely to change because most likely the content was not available for legal reasons, not technical. That's why for example when they re-release some shows they have to switch out to completely different music – the rights were not cleared in the first place and it'd be a huge hassle to go back and negotiate with every rightholder

> more choice and greater value for me

That will exactly follow Netflix's price hikes.

As in "value for money", they silenced the latter part :D

But Netflix content breadth and quality varies a lot from country to country. There's not one Netflix.

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