I wasn’t bowled over by the idea of Netflix ownership but a merge of Paramount and Warner seems way, way worse. In a sane political situation this would raise huge antitrust concerns but… well, here we are I guess.
If it does go through I wonder if there’s a scenario where it still works out for Netflix: they could pick up assets at bargain prices when the merged studios inevitably sell and lay off everything they can.
The thing is it is less of an antitrust concern for two also-rans in an industry to merge than it is for the industry leader to buy a struggling competitor. People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership but from a competition perspective this is the better outcome.
We’re talking about multiple industries here. In streaming Netflix is dominant. In terms of movie production studio Netflix is the also-ran compared to Warner and Paramount.
A purchase by Netflix would give them something they currently do not have. A purchase by Paramount is a much more direct merge of two competitors.
> People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership but from a competition perspective this is the better outcome.
This was a much more compelling argument 14-odd months ago. People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership because they’re aligned with the authoritarians currently trying to take control of the country - this isn’t a dispute over tax policy.
Netflix is going to buy them both for the same price in about 5 years. Paramount is a highly leveraged company. They are not going to come out of this very expensive acquisition unscathed.
> Paramount is a highly leveraged company. They are not going to come out of this very expensive acquisition unscathed.
Is this before or after Ellison et co gut the news side of the organization to create another Fox New / RT? We've already seen what happened with 60 Minutes and CBS News:
Ellison is more pragmatic than his current activities make it appear. He's playing to the right wing now because Trump was in office, but during the last administration he played heavily to the left.
When push comes to shove, he'll follow the money. If Republicans lose the midterms, CBS will start shifting back to the middle to regain the millions of viewers it lost to NBC and ABC since Weiss took over and Weiss will probably be looking for a new job.
> Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, is part of Paramount's hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, according to a regulatory filing
> Affinity Partners was not mentioned in Paramount's press release on Monday morning about its $108 billion bid, nor were participating sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.
> Recent public reports and a Senate investigation have uncovered significant evidence that Mr. Kushner acted as an unregistered foreign agent of [SA]
>> Kushner - who was never credentialed by State Department, an ambassador, or registered as a foreign agent in the US or in any other country - has now, in 2025, helped sell Electronic Arts to SA and is trying to help sell Warner Brothers Discovery to SA, a foreign territory which does not support Freedom of Speech.
>> Trump wanted Ellison to purchase TikTok (from the owners in China that weren't offering to sell it) so that US data would remain in the US.
>> By comparison, why did Trump/Kushner help sell EA (NFL Madden, NBA Live, PGA Tour,) to foreign interests, and why is Trump/Kushner trying to help sell WBD to foreign interests?
I’m sure this administration has some plan to fund this. They want to turn our airwaves in far right propaganda machines, they’ll find a $100 billion somewhere.
I'm hope not, and that they'll instead spin out WB, for it to be gobbled up again. Anything done three times is tradition, and breaking it just wouldn't do.
Interesting perspective, here, from someone who has observed a tiny bit of unknown streaming history.
So, way back in the day, 2005, Turner Broadcast corp. launched this weird-ass thing, known as GameTap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameTap . It was a subscription-based service that offered on-demand retro videogames. While it started as a way to play MAME Pac-Man and Metal Slug legally from a legit service, it grew into a competitor in the online games market arena in a time when Steam was still nascent.
The whole thing was created by this amazing fellow named Blake Lewin. Blake was really sharp, and having built this on-demand, streaming emulation service, he even went on to add at-the-time-modern games. Now, this stuff literally just installed the game on your HD and let you play, so it wasn't quite Stadia or Luma, but it was absolutely ahead of its time, and it was really slick.
I was a journalist then, and while games journalists get pampered, Turner moving into games was on another level. They launched this thing at the Armani Store on Market St. in SF, and when you walked in, they asked you to pick some sun-glasses from the case to take with you when you left.
GameTap was great and even gathered a following, but from the moment it launched, I knew what it really was: Turner's scientific experiment to build the infrastructure to later allow it to stream its enormous library of content. Movies, cartooons, TV shows, etc.
I was having lunch with Blake, a few years into GameTap, and I asked him point blank how the video streaming prototypes were coming (pure guess, no evidence). He was baffled and wanted to know how I knew they were working on that. Said it had been going great!
But in the end, the service never launched, AFAIK. Maybe some remnant is still there somewhere, but it just shows, you can be years ahead in your planning and development, and still end up alone at the end dance. It's a shame. Turner has so many great things in their library, why is it not possible for me to just pay someone for access to all the old movies in the TCM vault!?
I vaguely remember watching a video that held that a huge factor in the dot-com crash was a revelation that the build-out of broadband (last-mile fiber-optic in particular) was going to be way slower than initially thought, which left a ton of nascent services dead in the water.
It feels like that was something companies were still feeling the sting of through the early 2010s. So many services and platforms that launched and, whoops, there still aren't enough Americans with fast-enough internet to support them. And then echoes of it in sectors like VR.
The thing is, it wasn't just that all of these companies were making stupid miscalculations. They seemed to have been earnestly following forecasts for adoption, only to have the other companies that controlled how much of the public was going to be able to access those resources in the following month, year, 3 years, etc., slow-walk their roll-outs for their own strategic benefit.
It makes me feel a little better that I can almost never afford to be an early-adopter for these things anyway, but it's frustrating as a consumer to see how long it takes for them to finally hit the market in a robust way (and eventually become cheap enough for mass consumption).
We're all used to instant hi-def YouTube but it wasn't until pretty darn recently that the average household had access to Internet fast enough to stream those qualities, and devices to play them.
Gametap was so great and really underrated at the time. I think I probably ended up introducing it to 4-5 people.
We're starting to see some gametap-esqu stuff again these days but it's like 15 years later and the quality isn't there for me. Even though my employer keeps giving me free Xbox ultimate subscriptions I never really use them. I think a big part was gametap was so frictionless, you boot up the client and start playing.
Netflix win this by losing. Paramount has massively overpaid for Warner Brothers, and taken on a crippling amount of debt. It was existential for them, they had a failing studio and streaming service which they hope Warners IP and HBO can compensate for.
Let's not forget that Warner Brothers has been a bit of an albatross and never made money for anyone, that's why it's passed through so many different hands. Time, AoL Discovery to name a few.
Now Paramount are going to be sitting there with a mountain of debt, while Netflix and Disney are relatively debt free and very profitable and cash generative.
$2.8B! Which isn't huge next to Netflix's market value of $357B... but when you compare it with its $45B 2025 yearly revenue, it's at least a noticeable bump. You could make almost 4 five-season-long Stranger Things with it.
Yes. But it may be the Ellisons victory politically. Elon was made to pay a lot for Twitter and I would argue he won and greatly damaged our politics in the process, by amplifying far right extremists.
The Ellisons already own Star Trek, and I shudder to think what they will do with it once the current shows are out of the pipeline. Now they get to do it to DC Comics and their characters. Which is I guess good news for Frank Miller, bad news for the rest of us.
Based on how the takeover of CBS has been going, it really does seem like waning support for Israel is the major motivation behind this huge consolidation. Pretty unbelievable to watch
In a matter of months: Paramount, CBS, TikTok, CNN, FreePress...
This is 100% the reason. They have the money, they have the motive, they have donated enough to end up with the political support to win any antitrust case filed against them. And they have the networks with bots and sycophants that will argue endlessly on their behalf. Religion is a scarily powerful motivator.
Well, hope you enjoyed Pax Americana. We're heading into something that feels... about halfway between reich-y and soviet-y, at least on the propaganda front. Which is deeply ironic, of course.
Readit News
If it does go through I wonder if there’s a scenario where it still works out for Netflix: they could pick up assets at bargain prices when the merged studios inevitably sell and lay off everything they can.
A purchase by Netflix would give them something they currently do not have. A purchase by Paramount is a much more direct merge of two competitors.
This was a much more compelling argument 14-odd months ago. People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership because they’re aligned with the authoritarians currently trying to take control of the country - this isn’t a dispute over tax policy.
Is this before or after Ellison et co gut the news side of the organization to create another Fox New / RT? We've already seen what happened with 60 Minutes and CBS News:
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/bari-weiss-c...
* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/26/inside-bari-we...
When push comes to shove, he'll follow the money. If Republicans lose the midterms, CBS will start shifting back to the middle to regain the millions of viewers it lost to NBC and ABC since Weiss took over and Weiss will probably be looking for a new job.
Choosing not to jump aboard all the insane modern woke politics doesn’t make you some scary right winger.
She could only help a legacy news outfit in my opinion.
At the end of the day, you have to draw attention to make money.
"Jared Kushner is part of Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery" https://www.axios.com/2025/12/08/jared-kushner-paramount-war... .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195124 :
> Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, is part of Paramount's hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, according to a regulatory filing
> Affinity Partners was not mentioned in Paramount's press release on Monday morning about its $108 billion bid, nor were participating sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196242 :
> "Letter to DOJ on Kushner - FARA (Wyden - Raskin) final.pdf" (October 2024) https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/demo... :
> Recent public reports and a Senate investigation have uncovered significant evidence that Mr. Kushner acted as an unregistered foreign agent of [SA]
>> Kushner - who was never credentialed by State Department, an ambassador, or registered as a foreign agent in the US or in any other country - has now, in 2025, helped sell Electronic Arts to SA and is trying to help sell Warner Brothers Discovery to SA, a foreign territory which does not support Freedom of Speech.
"Kushner's Affinity Partners exits Paramount bid for Warner Bros. Discovery" (2025-12) https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/16/kushner-affinity-paramount-w...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196370 :
>> Trump wanted Ellison to purchase TikTok (from the owners in China that weren't offering to sell it) so that US data would remain in the US.
>> By comparison, why did Trump/Kushner help sell EA (NFL Madden, NBA Live, PGA Tour,) to foreign interests, and why is Trump/Kushner trying to help sell WBD to foreign interests?
So, way back in the day, 2005, Turner Broadcast corp. launched this weird-ass thing, known as GameTap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameTap . It was a subscription-based service that offered on-demand retro videogames. While it started as a way to play MAME Pac-Man and Metal Slug legally from a legit service, it grew into a competitor in the online games market arena in a time when Steam was still nascent.
The whole thing was created by this amazing fellow named Blake Lewin. Blake was really sharp, and having built this on-demand, streaming emulation service, he even went on to add at-the-time-modern games. Now, this stuff literally just installed the game on your HD and let you play, so it wasn't quite Stadia or Luma, but it was absolutely ahead of its time, and it was really slick.
I was a journalist then, and while games journalists get pampered, Turner moving into games was on another level. They launched this thing at the Armani Store on Market St. in SF, and when you walked in, they asked you to pick some sun-glasses from the case to take with you when you left.
GameTap was great and even gathered a following, but from the moment it launched, I knew what it really was: Turner's scientific experiment to build the infrastructure to later allow it to stream its enormous library of content. Movies, cartooons, TV shows, etc.
I was having lunch with Blake, a few years into GameTap, and I asked him point blank how the video streaming prototypes were coming (pure guess, no evidence). He was baffled and wanted to know how I knew they were working on that. Said it had been going great!
But in the end, the service never launched, AFAIK. Maybe some remnant is still there somewhere, but it just shows, you can be years ahead in your planning and development, and still end up alone at the end dance. It's a shame. Turner has so many great things in their library, why is it not possible for me to just pay someone for access to all the old movies in the TCM vault!?
It feels like that was something companies were still feeling the sting of through the early 2010s. So many services and platforms that launched and, whoops, there still aren't enough Americans with fast-enough internet to support them. And then echoes of it in sectors like VR.
The thing is, it wasn't just that all of these companies were making stupid miscalculations. They seemed to have been earnestly following forecasts for adoption, only to have the other companies that controlled how much of the public was going to be able to access those resources in the following month, year, 3 years, etc., slow-walk their roll-outs for their own strategic benefit.
It makes me feel a little better that I can almost never afford to be an early-adopter for these things anyway, but it's frustrating as a consumer to see how long it takes for them to finally hit the market in a robust way (and eventually become cheap enough for mass consumption).
We're starting to see some gametap-esqu stuff again these days but it's like 15 years later and the quality isn't there for me. Even though my employer keeps giving me free Xbox ultimate subscriptions I never really use them. I think a big part was gametap was so frictionless, you boot up the client and start playing.
Let's not forget that Warner Brothers has been a bit of an albatross and never made money for anyone, that's why it's passed through so many different hands. Time, AoL Discovery to name a few.
Now Paramount are going to be sitting there with a mountain of debt, while Netflix and Disney are relatively debt free and very profitable and cash generative.
They could arguably just build a better WB from scratch with that kind of money.
4 good long running series is all HBO needed to become successful, so they got a free HBO.
How does one build a back catalogue going back decades, including things like Casablanca, Superman/Batman, Harry Potter, and V for Vendetta?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Warner_Bros._films
Dead Comment
It is pretty clear that Trump wanted Paramount to win so it is smart for them to cut their losses.
In a matter of months: Paramount, CBS, TikTok, CNN, FreePress...