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.
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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this will work out nicely for Netflix. It overleverages their competition, putting them in a worse spot, and I suspect traditional media is going to be far less of an demand from a pure screen-time perspective in the next 10 years. Generative content is just starting to get good enough with Seedance 2 - the cost of creation is about to plumet.
Are they truly over leveraged when the purchase is being backstopped by countries like Saudi Arabia that have unlimited funds? I feel like people said the same thing about the Twitter purchase being over leveraged and it looks like Musk is about to very successfully offload that entire debt bomb onto happy public investors via SpaceX. I think this could work out quite well for the Ellisons, Trumps and Saudis, this purchase really bulks up their media empire and increases their ability to control public opinion via all major forms of modern media (Streaming, Tiktok, 24 hour news networks).
Paramount has a lot of problems right now, financially. Maybe Netflix plans to buy them both in the next few years after those issues come home to roost for Paramount.
I was looking forward to good UX accessing HBO through Netflix. Too bad, but looking forward to good UX accessing HBO, and paramount (?) some day down the line through Netflix when this converges.
After the Paramount & Warner merger it will be good if they launch a Criterion Collection type of thing with the outstanding back catalog, going in the other direction of streaming, and producing and selling good quality Blu ray hardware. In my dreams of course.
My guess is that they are looking forward to juicy licensing deals with OpenAI, Google or Meta for the rights to generate AI content featuring Batman, Harry Potter, and other characters in the WB stable.
No mention of Trump issuing insane threats against a Netflix board member and Netflix itself, in the story or the comments, because that is just normal now I guess.
Paramount's financing package combines roughly $45–46 billion in equity with more than $57 billion in debt.
The deal values Warner Bros. Discovery at around $111 billion ($31 per share), and including WBD's existing debt, the total takeover comes to more than $110 billion. NBC News
It would be the largest leveraged buyout (LBO) in history, with $87 billion of total pro forma gross debt and an estimated gross leverage of approximately 7x 2026 EBITDA before synergies.
My question is: who is lending the money for these leveraged buyout deals? They seem to leave the lenders holding the bag at some point when it all implodes. Do these deals really pay off often enough to be worth financing them?
I’m so happy, because I collect movies and the idea of Netflix putting the entire WB catalog behind a subscription with no purchase option sounds awful to me.
So NF is just not matching or exceeding an elevated Paramount offer... But could WBD still choose the already on the table NF deal at the end of the day? I guess with the sort of statement that Netflix made though, it's likely WBD would not and realizes NF is just done at this point. Or maybe it's some sort of double bluff by NF? Hard to really know for sure.
It would not be in WBD shareholders interest to walk away from Paramount's overpayment. It is a great deal for WBD shareholders, but a poor financial outcome for Paramount. Netflix's discipline is noteworthy.
Like many things, phone OS, desktop OS, CPUs, GPUs, ride sharing, credit card payments, video game consoles, we are heading towards a Disney/Paramount duopoly
> Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos failed Thursday to convince a skeptical Trump administration to approve his proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery – and with that, his nearly done deal to buy WBD’s streaming service and studio went into a death spiral.
Is this about the price of the deal or the administration not approving mergers that they think don’t align with right wing ideology?
I wrote the following comment 4 months ago when Larry Ellison bought Tiktok (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45267643 ). Reposting it here, verbatim since it is part of the same story (imo) and everything in it has been confirmed in the last 4 months except for the last paragraph. I guess we will find out eventually :
So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
afavour|3 days ago
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.
ls612|3 days ago
softwaredoug|3 days ago
thiht|2 days ago
darth_avocado|3 days ago
throw0101c|2 days ago
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...
programmertote|3 days ago
dyauspitr|3 days ago
cyanydeez|3 days ago
jsnell|3 days ago
HDThoreaun|3 days ago
mudil|3 days ago
VonGuard|3 days ago
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!?
underlipton|3 days ago
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).
PacificSpecific|3 days ago
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.
bitwize|3 days ago
drumhead|2 days ago
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.
mullingitover|3 days ago
They could arguably just build a better WB from scratch with that kind of money.
crazygringo|3 days ago
add-sub-mul-div|3 days ago
nutjob2|3 days ago
internet101010|3 days ago
throw0101c|2 days ago
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
feb012025|3 days ago
In a matter of months: Paramount, CBS, TikTok, CNN, FreePress...
bananamogul|3 days ago
burnt-resistor|2 days ago
spiderfarmer|3 days ago
throwaway290|3 days ago
pickleglitch|2 days ago
master_crab|3 days ago
SilverElfin|3 days ago
dyauspitr|3 days ago
PearlRiver|3 days ago
It is pretty clear that Trump wanted Paramount to win so it is smart for them to cut their losses.
dylan604|3 days ago
throwaway5752|3 days ago
underlipton|3 days ago
ta9000|2 days ago
israrkhan|3 days ago
softwaredoug|3 days ago
Paramount was about to go to idiotic lengths to get this. Netflix is willing to walk away.
jjcm|3 days ago
mystraline|3 days ago
Theres TONS of 1950-1990 SciFi content. Lots of 1 off books, or trilogies. Really cool stories.
And generative video could get to the point where we can make those books into movies.
The weird place here is who owns the rights, and all that. And it coukd easily fall into an area like The Last Ringbearer is in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
Epub free, because of weird rights issues with Tolkien estate. https://www.tenseg.net/press/lastringbearer
ipnon|3 days ago
nullocator|3 days ago
softwaredoug|3 days ago
galleywest200|3 days ago
pjjpo|1 day ago
pentagrama|3 days ago
elondaits|3 days ago
ZeroGravitas|3 days ago
expedition32|2 days ago
(On a positive note conservatives are really terrible at art. They will always need the gays, communists, atheists and liberals to entertain them).
anduril22|3 days ago
DudeOpotomus|2 days ago
Like buying Aol, circa 2000
The audience has already left and it's never, ever coming back.
NoGravitas|2 days ago
andsoitis|3 days ago
The deal values Warner Bros. Discovery at around $111 billion ($31 per share), and including WBD's existing debt, the total takeover comes to more than $110 billion. NBC News
It would be the largest leveraged buyout (LBO) in history, with $87 billion of total pro forma gross debt and an estimated gross leverage of approximately 7x 2026 EBITDA before synergies.
Seems like a poor decision driven by ego.
xenadu02|3 days ago
daft_pink|2 days ago
etchalon|3 days ago
indigodaddy|3 days ago
andsoitis|3 days ago
burnt-resistor|2 days ago
hnburnsy|3 days ago
andsoitis|3 days ago
Duopoly over what? Worldwide video entertainment?
ibero|3 days ago
russianGuy83829|3 days ago
andsoitis|3 days ago
The deal won't be closed by then. You can expect it to take 12 - 18 months.
zedlasso|3 days ago
aaronbrethorst|3 days ago
pupppet|3 days ago
nullocator|3 days ago
ulfw|3 days ago
speedylight|3 days ago
SilverElfin|3 days ago
> Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos failed Thursday to convince a skeptical Trump administration to approve his proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery – and with that, his nearly done deal to buy WBD’s streaming service and studio went into a death spiral.
Is this about the price of the deal or the administration not approving mergers that they think don’t align with right wing ideology?
lateforwork|3 days ago
cocacola1|3 days ago
volleyball|3 days ago
So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
[2] - https://archive.is/20250916040811/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Ellison&old...
unknown|3 days ago
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helaoban|3 days ago
mocheeze|3 days ago
ta9000|2 days ago