The failed merger and similar clawback clause between Kroger and Albertsons is currently destroying a significant part of the supply chain for food in the Pacific Northwest. Grocery stores that have been open for 50-75 years - stores where whole neighborhoods and towns were built around - are closing forever, leaving those areas as food deserts.
Either way, this entertainment merger is going to get ugly. Consumers are absolutely going to get harmed either way with that clawback clause.
I don't understand how that kind of clause can be legal. Its existence puts anti-trust enforcement in a catch-22, either they allow the merger, which reduces competition, or they reject it, and the acquiree is decimated, also reducing competition.
> I don't understand how that kind of clause can be legal.
Arguably they promote a chilling effect around acquisitions, which does help competition: "don't try to buy something unless you're prepared to deal with a possible fallout" should result in fewer attempts at consolidating dominant positions.
I'd almost be tempted to posit that such a clause should become mandatory for deals over a certain threshold (e.g. $1bn), with amounts determined according to certain parameters.
Best you can get is Aliens vs Predator vs Terminator comic book (if you are 10 years old you can like it, it is betterr than most AvP stuff but that is a low hanging bar)
I mean the franchise didnt get anything top tier apart from Aliens labirynth and the vP 2 game from.. 2001?
I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison, groceries that sell food on one hand and a brainwashing and propaganda delivery system (see History of criminal, industry/advertiser, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, and foreign nation direct ties to the industry) masquerading as “entertainment” on the other.
You don’t have to be “harmed”, just do not pay them your money. Problem solved. If the prospect of not being “entertained” fills you with anxiety and frustration, maybe that’s something to reflect on.
That makes no logical sense. So if I give up my “entertainment” subscriptions because the execs need their bonuses and drive the prices up to compensate for the penalty, causing me to think about how to spend quality time with my family paying games, reading books, and doing activities; is equally harmful as if I can’t but groceries in my town because the grocery store was closed?
I live a couple blocks down from one that was open for 40+ years. I use Amazon now for my groceries. I was gonna use Safeway but their prices are high.
Except you need food to live and tv shows are an artificially scarce resource that's actually free to distribute in unlimited quantities, so the harm is very different.
I've watched and enjoyed Andor since, but yeah other than that zero star wars movies and TV shows since episode 8. I hear 9 was also hilariously bad, but I'll not ever bother seeing it.
Seems like a bad example. The problem with Episode 8 was not lack of creativity. Episode 7 was a complete retread of "A New Hope" and a bigger offender. At least blue Jedi milk is new.
Episode 8 was a retread of Empire Strikes Back (ships chase through empty space while the main character trains with the old master on a wild planet). It seemed subversive just because ESB was subversive relative to ANH.
Episode 8 was subversive because it had self aware moments "trolling" the audience throughout like Luke mocking the idea Rey (and the audience) thought he would pick up a lightsaber again.
It also has weird "subversive" dialogue about sacrifice being bad that doesn't really fit what's happening in the movie itself where sacrifice of two characters saves the day. Which is "subversive" in the sense that a movie with dialogue saying "this is a shitty movie plot" is subversive.
It also rips off the ending of Return of the Jedi by killing the main bad guy so is "subversive" in that it trolls whoever was stuck making episode 9 without a functional villain.
Maybe 3rd. Jedi is gorgeous but the script for everything past Jabba’s Palace is a mess. Doesn’t know what to do with all its characters, feels the need to have them all around anyway.
If 8 had followed through on its narrative promises, it would have had a chance. But unfortunately, much like a modern LLM that exceeds its context window, it lost its way in the final act.
As for sequels, we are at a weird time in history. Due maybe in part just how prevalent media is and how easy (relatively) it is to create, we've been super-saturated in "like X but with Y" stories. We have dedicated websites mapping tropes. It's hard to come up with anything that hasn't been done a few million times. AI will probably accelerate that, and I can't say I know what comes next.
You will still have Amazon, Apple, Paramount, Disney, and NetMax spending billions each on content and streaming and Sony being the mercenary creating content for the highest bidder.
WB under Discovery was already becoming an also ran and more financial engineering than a real company.
Isn't this submission about Warner Bros Discover, which is a different entity? Seems to be about TV, not movies. But maybe I misunderstand, I did spend a whole of 20 seconds to skim the article...
The article bullet point referencing WB Discovery could mislead some into thinking that this takeover is only for the Discovery portion, but that's not the case. $30 would not be for Discovery only (as Netflix's bid is $27.75), it's for the whole kit and caboodle. Yes there are two entities, but/and Paramount wants it all, and the takeover intent is for both.
I've heard that what Kushner wants is CNN. If they could make CBS+CNN lean conservative like Fox, they pull off a potential to swing the country via news media.
And none of this is serious money to the Saudis and MAGA billionaires. If controlling this media ekes out a couple of percent in the midterms, it’s money well spent. A few tens of billions against consolidating power and bigger grifts? High ROI investment.
It might be. But if you're doing a short-term political power play (rather than a business investment), it could be a good tactical spend. And it might be a smart business investment if the political power play works in such way that you can politically bend the business environment in your favor.
I think that's over-simplifying it. Some YouTube personality (or whatever we want to call 'online media' that isn't just CNN's website) isn't going to be getting a Whitehouse press pass anytime soon.
You haven’t read about what’s going on at the Pentagon wanted the press to sign a release saying only approved content could be published? It was so onerous that even Fox News refused to sign. Now the press Corp is basically a bunch of right wing influencers.
Oh, they absolutely are. As Leavitt promised at her first briefing, it’s been opened to: "independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators."
That’s not correct. Paramount wants everything (including the parts Netflix wants). Netflix wants just tv and movie studio. So the paramount hostile bid would be for the part Netflix wants and the part they don’t.
No, Newline was its own division of WB, but during the financial bubble bursting, and shortly after Golden Compass lost $100M they gutted it and drastically reduced their scope of operations. It's still technically its own division but now it's more of a sock puppet.
The Hobbit for instance is a WB production, not Newline.
Apparently sometime shortly before they got the axe they paid Susanna Clarke a 7 figure sum to option Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I don't know a whole lot about options but 7 figures sounds like about 8-16x what people usually do especially for a 3 year old book by an unknown author. IIRC, that's more than Andy Weir got for The Martian. And more than Lev Grossman is worth today, and he got five seasons out of three books.
That option expired unused and BBC One and Cuba Pictures made it into a very good miniseries. Does feel a bit like a pattern of financial exuberence.
The BBC Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell miniseries is excellent. One of those times (others might include the original LOTR films and early Game of Thrones) where a genre adaptation wildly exceeded my expectations.
Yeah I'm pretty glad Newline biffed that one since we got this instead.
Also Clarke has a chronic illness, which is preventing her from trying for another book of that caliber. That mountain of cash is probably keeping her very comfortable.
That's conventionally called "studios+streaming" because the Warner Bros studio/brand is one of WBD's crown jewels. The way you've written it, someone could infer everything but HBO Max was going into "other." That's incorrect.
No. Breakup fes are for when the buyer backs out or theere are external forces that prevent the merger. You can also have a breakup fee if the buyee wants out but that's a different thing. In this case it's Paramount saying "we'll up out government-blocks-the-sale fee from $2.xbn to $5bn" which is saying they have a lot of confidence the merger will go through.
> in this case it's Paramount saying "we'll up out government-blocks-the-sale fee from $2.xbn to $5bn" which is saying they have a lot of confidence the merger will go through
No.
Paramount has nothing to do with these numbers, which both come from the Plan of Merger among Netflix, Warner and others [1].
Paramount's bid constitutes an Acquisition Proposal under § 6.2(c). It is a "proposal, offer or indication of interest" from Paramount, a party who is not "Buyer and its Affiliates," which "is structured to result in such Person or group of Persons (or their stockholders), directly or indirectly, acquiring beneficial ownership of 20% or more of the Company’s consolidated total assets."
Given it "is publicly proposed" after the date of the Plan of Merger and "prior to the Company Stockholder Meeting," it is a Company Qualifying Transaction (8.3(D)(x)).
If 8.3(D)(y) is then satisfied (a condition I got bored jumping around to pin down–if thar be dragons, they be here) and Warner consummates the Company Qualifying Transaction or "enters into a definitive agreement providing for" it (8.3(a)(D)(z)(2), the Buyer can terminate the Plan of Merger under 8.1(b)(iii). That, in turn, triggers the Company Termination Fee of $2.8bn, which is separate from the Regulatory Termination Fee of $5.8bn Netflix would have to pay Warner if other shit happened.
I assure you that Paramount has everything to do with things Paramount does, especially when it comes to purchasing prices and the numbers used to represent prices. Paramount is intimately involved with their own business, sometimes too involved.
This article is relating to Paramount's continued attempt to purchase WB despite Netflix announcing a deal with WB.
> Paramount has everything to do with things Paramount does
But not with things it does not. The numbers you quoted are not Paramount’s. (Though that is orthogonal to you being wrong on Warner owing Netflix a break-up fee if Paramount wins.)
The most concerning aspect for me is the obvious and conspicuously-timed consolidation of these companies under David Ellison. Within the past few months he's taken control of Paramount, CBS, The Free Press, and now he's working on Warner Bros.
From everything I've seen he's basically an ideologue, and has already re-structured CBS to align with his vision.
Just something that seems very out in the open yet kind of pushed off to the side.
Aren't all of the super rich ideologues? Ellisons father Larry for sure is. So is Ruppert Murdoch.
The only interesting thing about David Ellison is that his politics are different (slightly to the center) from his father. That's uncommon in those circles.
Supporting Israel is a large motivating factor for David Ellison. Part of the reason Shari Redstone sold paramount in the first place ties back to frustration around CBS's Gaza coverage. It's no secret, and mainly what I was hinting at when I said he was an ideologue. Not that it's his only reason for the acquisitions however
The Free Press wasn't worth anything, it's a blog with marginal readership. The creepy part is that Bari Weiss, a dimwit, was given $200M for that blog, put in charge of CBS News, and made a political commissar of all these new Oracle media properties with the brand names that Boomers love.
This thread is using it as an opportunity to scream about Trump, but Democrats will be all in on this. They have the same funders and the same interests. The NYT is the outlet that legitimized Weiss in the first place, a woman whose only previous interest was claiming that Palestinians were harassing her on college campuses by being there, and trying her best to get them expelled and fired. The Democrats were no opposition to the genocide; it began under their watch, they fully funded and shielded it, and they happily rounded up protesters. They'll be overjoyed to accept Ellison attention and Ellison cash.
I told all of you not to buy Oracle. Awful company, awful people, awful product.
I feel like at some level, it will be much easier to just pir.... I mean... train LLMs based on their content. Yeah. LLM training. That's acceptable. So it really doesn't matter who wins, we'll just perform LLM training.
Don't be silly. It's only LLM training if you are president's friend and bough the license to import a few BN worth of GPUs from the firm owned by his son in law.
Maybe we're all doing it wrong. Americans could instead be making "donations" to get the legal outcomes they want under this regime. We're not accustomed to the 3rd wold paradigm though it's well established elsewhere.
It's a free market. Just pool some money on kickstarter and bribe the dude to make him do whatever you want. It's the new way to petition. Pool the money, buy his tokens. Make a smart contract that transfers a few mil once the law takes effect.
Do you seriously need a Ukrainian to tell you how to do corruption in the year 2025 of our Lord? In US? In this economy?
Don't be cheap. You can get Roe v Wade back and Kavanaught's head on a pike if you bid high enough. Independent prosecutors will for sure find a pdf file one him somewhere.
the fact that this is credible should scare every entrepreneur. If you cant compete on an even playing field because some people have direct government involvement in tipping the scales we are neither a free market economy nor a democracy.
Since the beginning of the year - USA is just a shell of market economy. Small government indeed…
Also some say it’s “flawed democracy”, IMHO - for last ~3 decades (or even more) it’s just a charade of democracy. Probably soon you won’t even have that.
First-past-the-post two party system, bizarre primary elections, electoral college, land votes instead of people (how many senators are from california and how many from wyoming, they also say it’s “to balance the tyranny of majority”), abhorrent and disgusting gerrymandering (so states could also force tyranny of the minority in congress too :) ), voter suppression (voting on Tuesdays, employers can control if you can go vote that day, voting booth count is getting smaller, voter registration shenanigans in marginalised communities), etc.
The fact that in US you can win the most powerful seat in the world while not even voted for by majority of its own population is properly ridiculous. Yes we all heard about historical this and that but that doesn't matter, thats not a democracy at its core and at the lowest, most important layer of building a resilient democratic society.
Then on that questionable base you build a shaky empire that is supposed to work if people behave nicely. It works till somebody comes around who doesn't care about that and it all falls down. Lets not forget current government was voted by +-half of US population, for second time. Nobody should be shocked by direction its taking again, maybe surprised by intensity of it but thats it.
I am a minority in the fact that I openly welcome the visible consistent hostility of USG towards whole Europe and Ukraine conflict when russia attacks whole western world including US and our philosophy of existence, as much as it can (luckily for us not that much). We are waking up from our deep comfy slumber, not in ideal fashion but we already have a bigger combined military than US has in many, for us the most important aspects (since we don't want to drag ourselves to remote wars unlike you guys so ie aircraft carriers are rather unimportant).
Green deal will be soon gone (good idea in vacuum but not in world where literally nobody else cares about it and we just destroy our economy and future trying to make our 10% part count), social services will get cuts to bring them to more sustainable levels based on unavoidable demographics and more focus on more practical and military manufacturing, like it or not.
I also take issue with the electoral college system, but to claim that a representative democracy is not a democracy based on the intermediary representation seems like a fairly hollow concern.
My bigger issue with regards to how democratic we are would be more related to campaign finance laws, corruption, and the immense power wielded by those in charge that can be pointed at political challengers if the politician is so inclined.
It's not a democracy to the extent that it has systematically unequal representation. That's not a problem of “intermediary representation”, its a problem of both the system of executive election (more of a problem for the US than it would be in many other systems because the US also has an extremely powerful executive branch) and the system of apportionment of the more powerful house of bicameral legislature (having a less-democratic upper house is not uncommon, but having it still be functionally more powerful is, and having that simultaneously with it being as far from democratic as the US Senate is even less common among things that pretens to be representative democracies.)
Unless I'm mistaken, electoral college representatives are assigned based on state borders and individual state laws - usually either winner take all or proportional. The electoral college itself can't be gerrymandered in the same way congress can.
Electoral college representatives are currently elected on a statewide winner-take-all basis except Maine and Nebraska, each of which assign two electors (corresponding to the votes due to two Senate seats each state gets) based on the statewide winner while assigning the other electors based on the winner in each Congressional district.
So, in those states only, electoral votes can be gerrymandered in exactly the same was as Congressional seats, because they are exactly the same districts. (Of course, both states are small enough that the gerrymandering opportunities are fairly limited, and would have limited impact on Presidentual elections, as Maine has only two CDs and Nebraska only 3.)
The US has never really been either. At its core, the US has always been an oligarchy with the veneer of democracy to keep the pleebs in check.
Any country that has only ever really been able to choose one of two political parties who both represent the interests of wealthy elites above all else can't really call itself a "Democracy."
There are hundreds of examples of crony capitalism in the world, current and past. Now you can study them and see what'll happen in the US in the next few years.
"It can't happen here", said the arrogant American...
Americans do not like when someone uses the words "fascism" and "oligarchy". It's jarring to think that is even possible in the United States but a) we are here and b) the two have traditionally gone hand-in-hand.
> My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME! Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE! Oh well, far worse things can happen.
I just realized that the netflix ceo is a big-time democratic party donor, and that paramount is supposedly being supported by larry ellison (big-time republican/trump donor) and saudis? I'm sensing a strong political/influence angle here by the billionaires.
russia doesnt have oligarchs for 15 years at least, it has the opposite of it. Oligarchs control the big chunks of economy, media and have a lot of political influence direct and indirect. What they have right now is some friends of the dictator who own something until dictator allows them.
The closest US has to olugarcha is Bezos and Musk, but they dont have each their own party and a few poket ministers in addition to owm bank and 20ish percent gdp.
I think we are well into uncharted territory. One thing's for sure - here be dragons. I'm sure the US version of oligarchy will come in its unique flavor. Probably people won't even fall out of windows! That mode of "suicide" is maybe distinctly Russian.
Yes you can donate (why did you add the word "directly"?). It just passes through intermediary organizations, such as the Friends of the IDF. There are even non profits that pay for "lone soldiers" -- international mercenaries -- to take part in the genocide in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of "lone soldiers" took part, I believe something like 20,000 came from the US alone.
So we just blatantly lie now because "Israel=bad"? You can't donate directly to the IDF. US funding isn’t paying Oracle through some back door. If you’ve got a real source, show it—otherwise it’s just nonsense.
Thank you for asking! I thought I was just making funny comment on political situation. After quick search it turns out its not funny… just predictible.
“Larry Ellison donates $16.6 million, says, ‘Since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home’”
Oh and i know FIDF - Friends of the IDF (nonprofit through which these donations are going) are just that. Just friends.
That’s misleading. You can’t directly donate to the IDF—people give to NGOs that support soldiers’ welfare, not combat operations or weapons. And while Ellison has given millions to FIDF, there’s no evidence he’s “the largest donor,” and no public ranking shows that. You can dislike Israel without inventing facts.
Why do you have such an issue with the donation to the IDF? I understand disputing that he's the largest donor, but I doubt he has ever written a big cheque directly to Trump (or in fact anyone except his family) either, is it also unclear whether he's a Trump donor?
Even if there were no mechanism for donating to the IDF available to the general public, do you believe someone like Ellison couldn't easily give money to whomever he wanted?
It’s something I recently learned and has informed the way I think about him and his family. Seems others have appreciated the knowledge too.
As a Jew myself, I think the actions of Israel over the past 2 years are clearly ethnic cleansing and I believe anyone who supports that effort should be exposed for doing so.
My man, you don't have to mince words here. This hostile bid is backed by Jared Kushner, who is the President's son in law. One Rich Asshole owns Paramount, and is most certainly supporting the bid here.
This deal would also leave CNN in a very vulnerable position (they are owned by WB), which is exactly what Trump wants.
One thing that is remarkable is how fast American media companies are folding or getting scooped up by the oligarchs in order to bring the sacrificed carcass to the ruler. Even Putin did not have it this easy - took him years.
It took decades, this is the late stages of an organized and intentional process they've been working towards, and spending vast amounts of money on, since the 1990s if not earlier.
Netflix isn't buying CNN though, Paramount can just pick up Discovery on the cheap when its split off. There's no reason for them to even be trying to do a hostile bid either. I think this is just purely an ego/power trip thing.
It's scheduling. WBD was set to spin off Discovery Global in April --- after the March congressional primaries. The hostile bid creates leverage to get the TV networks spun off sooner, rather than later, to ensure that the Ellisons can pick them up Q1, in time to set the narrative for the congressional primaries.
Party X may have been planning on something, but party Y threw a wrench in the middle, causing party X to have to make some response. By implication, party X believes party Y to be throwing a wrench, hence, party X must act. Therefore, party Y also must be planning something that counteracts party X's desires. If it weren't so, party X would not act (as that costs money).
The thing that contradicts Party X's desires can just be not doing the thing Party X wants done, it doesn't have to be doing an equal and opposite thing.
This seems like a variation on the fallacy of the excluded middle.
It's closer to so-far-unnamed fallacy of "the right has no agency." Everything they do is in response to something done by the democrats or the left or whatever and so they aren't responsible for their actions.
Netflix and those involved hasn't conclusively metamorphosed into a Larry Ellison-esque state of Lawn Moweriness.
Make no mistake, it (Netflix) is still a billionaire corp; on the humanity scale, it scores quite low, but not lawn mower low. They're still outside the Ellison event horizon.
More than that, Trump said yesterday that Netflix's purchase of WB "might be problematic" and that he would be "personally involved in the decision of approving it".
I am not a supporter of most things this admin is doing, but also wouldn't be too sure on this one. I found it interestingly odd that out of nowhere he makes a comment on the deal after attending an event dealing with celebrating music and film. A regular shakedown would have happened before the deal when he met with the Netflix CEO recently, which the added link article mentions and was a person who Trump liked.
And now we see the Paramount thing that leads me to think it fits more with the suggestion that he takes the side of the last person he speaks with, which was probably someone at the same event on the paramount side.
I wouldn't rule out that he now plays them against each other in order to get something from it, but don't think it was the original reason for helping to throw a wrench into it
"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."
This is what happens in markets without a functional regulatory body - when the regulator turns into a market participant. It’s closer to a jungle than anything else.
Thank you, I had no idea how this was politically related, and honestly cannot keep track of all the corruption these days anyways. How does anyone? This is pretty much a genuine question.
I mean it's not even politics in the way most people think about it—like this is just blatant corruption. Trump moved in and said this is my swamp.
We're not even gonna get a good investigative journalism podcast about the corruption because it's just right there in front of you. There's not much to uncover.
All independent agencies are dead, according to SCOTUS fiat. If we want anything to survive they'll have to be rebuilt, either with an enlarged court that won't strike them down again, or as section 1 agencies that Congress has to power directly (which will also be hugely corrupt). Either that or an amendment that creates a branch that straddles the legislative and executive, to be truly independent.
Nah, they are fine. They ate head of presidents office alive last week.
Add: it's also not one anticorruption agency, but the whole bunch of them -- law enforcement one (think of FBI, but investigating corruption in government), special prosecutors office, another agency monitoring assets of anyone close enough to government (including immigration officers on a country level) and their family and a whole separate court with judges vetted by independent panel.
It's elections of Doge of Venice level of indirection.
> "Nah, they are fine. They ate head of presidents office alive last week."
That's the same guy who tried to take over that anti-corruption office. He would be controlling it now, if it weren't for the massive country-wide protests about it. I'm not sure that they're doing fine.
Economist, July 2025:
> "On July 22nd the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, passed a bill that would place the country’s two main anti-corruption bodies—NABU, which investigates wrongdoing, and SAPO, which prosecutes it—under the control of the presidency. This was not the work of rogue MPs. It was orchestrated from the top by President Volodymyr Zelensky and his all-powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak."
>That's the same guy who tried to take over that anti-corruption office. He would be controlling it now, if it weren't for the massive country-wide protests about it. I'm not sure that they're doing fine.
Viewing this acquisition in terms of simple revenue alone is like positing Musk bought Twitter for its ad revenue. Total information control is priceless.
(In case anyone hasn't kept up with the plutocratic oligarchy in the US: Oracle's Larry Ellison currently owns Paramount (since July 2024), and Warner Bros. Entertainment owns CNN. This isn't explained in the CNBC OP: David Ellison is Larry's son and the token CEO).
Except there is robust competition in media —be it news, social, etc.
I think the political angle in terms of motivation is overstated. In terms of closing the deal though, it’s huge. David Ellison has been producing movies for quite some time. So his desire to become a big time player in that space would be a believable motivation. But he can use his father’s connections to Trump to sink the Netflix bid (or create enough FUD to convince shareholders to favor his bid).
Stage AGs have a strong role to play in anti-trust law. And the other party they're suing _isnt_ a Federal agency this time.
Now maybe nothing matters. But conflicts of interest will come up in those cases. Trump doesn't win _everything_. Trump wins at places where the Supreme Court is using him for their own project of reworking the constitutional order. Basically Trump shoots up a volley with some absolutely batshit PoV, they interpret the topic in some saner (still crazy) right wing legal idea. And the Supreme Court fast track's these cases about executive power.
This case would be State AGs having independent standing to challenge major M&A.
It will drag things out at a minimum, in a way the Supreme Court's rapid resolution of executive branch cases is not dragged out.
I think it gives Netflix an advantage. When it comes up in front of a judge he'll note the obvious conflict of interest and Trump's idiotic pronouncements, like the fact that he said he will be personally involved, and rule for Netflix.
This will go to SCOTUS, which typically gives the administration preferential treatment. The US's current level of corruption is way too high to assume your scenario.
HA hardly. Balance that against two of the top four streaming platforms (youtube, hbo, disney, netflix) trying to merge, probably should worry about some anti-trust there, but not under this administration.
They've just about said as much. They thought they had a friendly bid in the works just before WB announced a more exclusive friendly bidding process with Netflix. Definitely some drama going on there.
They tilt like everyone else - maybe the chaos and mayhem behind the last few years of this industry mean the old guard is finally failing, and we'll see meaningful copyright reform and sanity in our lifetime.
Are you betting on the content conglomerate bidding tens of billions, or the nepo baby LBO shop wearing the corpse of a movie studio as a salmon hat to spur copyright reform?
I'm hoping that they're sufficiently absurd in their mere existence to spur questions among the electorate. "Hey, that looks weird, and not right. Maybe we should fix that!"
Paramount broke its tradition of barely treading water [1] in 2023 by booking multibillion cable losses [2] before being acquired in a de facto LBO [3] at half the price it traded at in 2005 [4]. (90% off its 2021 peak, though that may have been meme-y.)
Paramount Skydance–the one bidding for Warner–has $15bn of debt on $600mm operating cash flow supporting $15bn of equity trading above book value while still posting losses [5].
How does one learn to think about companies buying each other. It’s counterintuitive to me for an entity with stock to buy stock in another entity which could itself own stock in the first.
The way you write it I can’t see why WB would be allowed to sell itself when it makes the most sense for Patamount to go bankrupt some time from now and be split up amongst US media; Netflix/HBO/Disney/Peacock
The rest of the world is the one thing that gives me hope in this regard, really.
It feels like year by year, Asia, even China, is becoming more and more culturally relevant. Western media is just too damn stagnant.
Hollywood used to be known as possibly the most important cultural powerhouse history has seen. It might still be that, but it certainly doesn't feel like it anymore.
Like its predecessor, the film received highly positive reviews from critics, and achieved even greater commercial success at a gross of $2.2 billion worldwide against a production budget of US$80 million.
Ne Zha 2 broke numerous box office records inside and outside China, including becoming the highest-grossing film in a single box office territory, the highest-grossing animated film, being the first adult animated film in this position, the highest-grossing non-English language film and the first animated film in history to cross the $2 billion mark, as well as being the highest-selling animated film based on ticket sales.
It also ranks as the highest-grossing film of 2025 and the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time.
and that immediately sprang to mind for a 60+ Australian english speaking mathematician / geophysicist not of asian descent. No Google / Bing / AI required.
Having grandchildren made it hard to avoid.
As for China in Africa:
Global power dynamics in Africa are shifting, with China eclipsing the influence of the US and France. China has become Africa’s single largest trading partner.
is true, but has been overstated by some to raise fear of Red Menace.
I'm curious how often tactics like this work. It is essentially asking the Warner stockholders to act against the wishes of their elected board.
It seems the main thrust of the pitch is "we're friends with Trump therefore more likely to win approval" which is so deeply gross but also probably persuasive to many. Jared Kushner is involved in the Paramount bid so you know they're greasing the right wheels.
Their case for approval is much stronger than Netflix's regardless of who is president.
Netflix is the largest streaming service in the country right now. It is 4x larger than Paramount+ in terms of total subscribers. Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers is naturally going to receive more scrutiny for this reason alone.
Sure, but Netflix is the non-nepotism and non-cronyism option. I'll take that over the corruption we are witnessing right before our eyes with free markets disappearing.
Hostile takeovers hit their zenith "in the 1980s" [1], when about 50% of attempts succeeded [2].
Since then, Delaware courts have become more Board friendly (specifically, friendly to takeover defences), antitrust made "it more difficult for companies with large market shares to acquire competitors without some level of cooperation from the target company," and stocks became more expensive [1]. (I'm struggling to find recent literature on frequencies.)
Compared to the 1980s and pre-Covid hostile takeover zenith, stocks remain expensive. But money is chaper, particularly for the politically connected. Antitrust is a wild card. And Warner has reduced takeover defences given it's already in the market for a sale (Revlon duties).
Reading the comments -- it is amazing how quick it takes to from allegedly a democracy governed by a rule of law to a corrupt oligarchy. I personally understand the reasons, but it's a bit "funny" given all the grand-standing before about the founding fathers, checks and balances etc.
Well, it took a lot of people by surprise that our famed checks and balances turned out to be toothless. Schoolhouse Rock sure didn't teach me that when other branches of government try to tell the executive branch to cut it out, they can just reply "no lol get bent".
The fatal mistake I see people repeatedly making is that it isn't about the system or checks and balances or whatever. It's about the people. The US had a deep bench of mostly reasonable leaders that mostly respected ideas like checks and balances or conflicts of interest.
Those people are mostly gone now. Our society used to elevate people like that, but it just doesn't now.
> all the grand-standing before about the founding fathers, checks and balances etc.
Trump exposed what looks great on paper (checks and balances) as being worthless if you're willing to break all conventions, use the government as a tool against your political enemies, and have a strong enough political base to beat the Senate (ultimately the only ones with the power to stop you) into submission.
What all of this really exposed is that laws and constraints don't mean anything if there's no actual way to enforce them at the highest level.
I can’t even use Paramount+ at home. Have network wide ad and tracking filters on (simple NextDNS presets, nothing crazy), and while others work, Paramount+ doesn’t. Makes me wonder what they are doing to get blocked. Kind of wish neither were getting WB.
I've had the same issue and go so far as to remove the streaming stuff from my Pihole to make sure it wasn't a DNS filtering issue. Paramount+ app still is sketchy as hell sometimes. Usually won't work on my AppleTV, but works on phones and stuff.
Paramount bids $30 all cash for all of Warner Brothers Discovery. Netflix bids $27.75 “for Warner’s studio and HBO Max streaming business” only [1]. (“$23.25 in cash and $4.50 in shares” [2].)
The latter leaves behind “sports and news television brands around the world including CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, top free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as the profitable Discovery+ streaming service and Bleacher Report (B/R)” [3]. (Paramount is effectively bidding $5.9bn for these assets.)
Note that Zaslav, Warner’s CEO, is a prominent donor to Democrats [4], as is Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder [5]. (Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO with Greg Peters, is mixed, leaning Dem [6]. No clue on the latter.) Ellison is a staunch Trump ally. The partisan tinge will be difficult to ignore.
All I can say is welcome back to torrenting. This perpetual "same shit deal for consumers, different corporation" problem doesn't end until copyright kicks the media into public domain. Until then, you can play their content reindeer games[1] or you can download a copy of Reindeer Games[2] and watch it without worrying about ownership foofaraw.
I looked for a modern, trending show on predb.me (Pluribus) and the results were unweighted, without any comments or votes, and sorted by upload time. They were also multiplied out by broadcast language (at least for German, “iTalian” and “MULTI”.) I know it’s not meant to be perfect but it was kind of a backed up toilet of results.
It would be a lot nicer if I could see a social network of torrenters and locate the market leader — the most popular with the best rips or most friends or something like that.
It feels like Altavista when I really wanted Google.
I'm not sure why someone would browse for torrents on predb, unless I'm missing something. It lists releases, it doesn't provide downloads or magnets or anything.
Use literally any torrent indexer (I use 1337x) and you'll be able to see # of seeders/leechers to determine popularity.
TPB and its mirrors still work fine. Then there is Stremio, a media player with support for plugins and once you acquire the the torrenting kind you got yourself a netflix. Streaming torrents is cool.
I don't even care anymore. There have been so few TV shows or movies that I've wanted to watch in the past decade. Books, podcasts, YouTube, music, and older movies for me. I got sick of the Marvel movies somewhere around the first Avengers movie. I don't think anything currently on TV interests me other than Bob's Burgers
The problem here isn’t as simple as torrenting. It’s the narrowing of what culture is created and promoted and what isn’t. Paramount is overtly a right wing organization now under the Ellison’s. Part of their bid to WB is “it’d be a shame if trump killed this deal of yours”. Netflix’s groveling or Paramounts success might mean we see less art critical of the government and more that panders to its interest
> It’s the narrowing of what culture is created and promoted and what isn’t.
What professional media companies create and promote gets less and less relevant every year. The content served by Meta/ByteDance/Alphabet’s computers and other online sources get more and more relevant.
It's more about how the buyers intend to use the media themselves.
The Ellisons are personal friends of Trump and Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spoken repeatedly about media as a weapon, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs. Ellison is the largest individual donor to the IDF. Trump handed Tiktok to Ellison.
The bid is backed by Kushner (i.e. Trump) and their Saudi allies.
It's hard to cancel popular shows for political reasons (at least in america) - it's too transparent.
But its possible to starve them of talent, funding and eventually let them wither into obscurity, by not promoting nor giving it the opportunity to flourish.
But there's still youtube even if these incumbent media outlets are compromised - independents can still create and distribute there. This is very different from the airwaves or cable.
And that’s before we’ve even touched HBO. John Oliver is probably the most obvious example. But I’d say shows like Watchmen count too. Fahrenheit 451. Succession was pretty clearly mocking FOX News and its media ecosystem.
Art that’s critical of the government doesn’t literally have to be shouting “Trump bad”, it can be done through critique or mocking of the values it holds.
I remember when it hadn't come out and there were mostly images and speculation I was really concerned that Lindelof had no idea what he's doing. A friend who watches a lot more TV than me insisted when it did release that it was very good, and reluctantly I agreed to watch Episode 1, and I knew immediately he got it and I was hooked. Watchmen is about masks, what masks mean, what it means when people wear masks, and Lindelof's TV show takes this somewhere the original book didn't but still remains about masks.
I knew about Tulsa, about Black Wall Street but I didn't know there was actually a plane. I was like, "That's surely creative license" when I saw it. But nope, the racists actually had a fucking plane.
I am so embarrassed to admit I didn’t know about Black Wall Street or the Tulsa massacre. And when I learned about it I was shocked I didn’t know about it.
And you’re absolutely right, it’s all about masks and he gets it.
The success of a Netflix>WBD acquisition would consolidate a third of US streaming markets under one roof, which should receive anti-trust scrutiny. Despite this, there is still a strong appearance of conflict of interest in Trump’s public remarks regarding denying Netflix acquisition the necessary regulatory approval, in conjunction with his son-in-law Jared Kushner being one of the financial backers for Paramount’s cash bid.
My guess is that if it went to trial Netflix would win tbh. That’s why Paramount is having to raise its bid substantially, they can’t rely on getting Trump to serve WB up on a platter.
I have seen several aspects of entertainment in my life get squeezed for money (Magic The Gathering, movies, TV streaming, video games) and I have decided to basically quit any form of entertainment which is solely controlled by large corporations.
People get extremely angry when Magic The Gathering charges more money, for more exclusive products, in more frequently occurring releases. Rage, grief, and sorrow over an aspect of your life that you allow a singular company to control. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can walk away , and find more fulfilling activities that you control.
This is what the kids call “touching grass”.
At this point I don’t watch TV, I don’t watch movies, I don’t play Magic The Gathering, I only play video games over 10 years old.
As I have gotten older I see now that this entertainment is junk food that replaces real satisfaction and accomplishment in life. Humans now more than ever have the opportunity to learn and do anything, but instead they spend it squandered on a shadow of real life.
> As I have gotten older I see now that this entertainment is junk food that replaces real satisfaction and accomplishment in life
A bit too condescending if you ask me. People are free to choose to spend time on things they find entertaining and that has no bearing on whether you find it "junk food" or whether the company producing the entertainment is trying to squeeze every penny they can out of it.
People are given a choice on what they eat as well and many also eat junk food, despite it largely being agreed upon that junk food is not good for you.
Both cheap entertainment and junk food cede your autonomy to large corporations whose main goal is to make you addicted to their product and extract the maximal amount of money.
This is purely subjective, but I believe that the path to personal fulfillment does not involve watching TV and playing video games in your spare time. I say this as someone who was addicted to video games and played 40 hours a week in addition to a full time job.
When someone says “No matter who wins, we lose” they are implying that we are all beholden to corporations who will inevitably screw us, but that does not have to be the case. You can choose not to participate.
I disagree with your premise that your non-preferred form of entertainment is equivalent to eating junk food.
I’m sorry that you were addicted to playing video games (truly) but I think your past experience is preventing you from thinking rationally about this.
People can find fulfillment from many different things, including the ones that you personally don’t find fulfilling. One's fulfillment is also irrelevant with respect to whether the product they are consuming was designed by a corporation to extract maximum profits (though I sympathize with your anti-corporate stance, despite the fact I find this point of yours to be irrational).
You admitted your view was subjective, yet you are prescribing it as a general view that applies to everyone which is both elitist and dissonant.
I didn't get that read at all. I read it as their journey of understanding how the world works and how they've reached their opinions on personal autonomy.
Your replies feel as if they're trying to paint turbobrew's comments as something more than they are; as some kind of prescribed doctrine, as opposed to an individuals opinion.
But that may just be because I happen to strongly agree with turbobrew's commentary.
Suggesting that personal fulfillment should not be controlled by a corporation is not elitist — it is philosophy. You disagree with my philosophy, which is fine.
I typed out my ideas as they came to me, so I may have missed the mark. The core idea I want to portray is that you can choose not to play the game of for profit corporations. You can walk away.
> Suggesting that personal fulfillment should not be controlled by a corporation is not elitist — it is philosophy.
So now if I choose to play a video game, that means my personal fulfillment is being controlled by a corporation? You seem to be conflating one's agency to choose versus a corporation having utter control over one's choices. Again, I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but you mentioned being addicted to video games and I think that is affecting your objectivity. As someone who plays video games only a few hours a week, your claim sounds ridiculous.
> I typed out my ideas as they came to me, so I may have missed the mark. The core idea I want to portray is that you can choose not to play the game of for profit corporations. You can walk away.
Sure, no argument there - but that's not what you said originally.
Choosing to play a video game made by a corporation doesn't mean the corporation is controlling one's fulfillment, nor does it mean one is not getting fulfillment or satifsfaction from it (your words).
As someone who has begun to fall into the "Machine Zone"[1] with gaming and stream watching (and trying to get back out) I'm feeling many of the things you're describing.
I struggle with defining the line for myself because a lot of my own hobbies and goals are creative - making music, building a video game, performing improv comedy. And those things are naturally in want of an audience.
Does it mean that I'm part of the problem in wanting to create entertainment, because I'm essentially asking an audience to indulge in the "junk food" that I create? I don't know.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on that question because your ideas seem to be well-articulated. My current thinking is that there is a distinction between:
- "So good" and "So good I could watch it for hours"
- "The artistic content" and "The platform moderating your access to it"
- "Pro-social" and "Anti-social" encouragement / culture of various media (the medium is the message, etc).
Making good quality, non-addictive, pro-social art, independently seems to be an ideal outcome, but then your art - while also being extremely expensive to create and distribute - is in competition with highly visible, well-established, strongly addictive... McDonald's franchises.
I believe your thinking is sound. Creating original things is one of the fundamental ways to fulfillment, I believe. As long as the goal of your creation is to create for yourself — and yourself only — I believe it can lead to the highest level of achievement. I would caution that creation can be addictive almost as much as consumption. Seeing the number of likes on a video you created go up is extremely addictive and can lead yourself towards overworking to make the next creation. Almost every big youtuber goes through a phase of burnout as they try and chase bigger and bigger hits. Additionally, you are beholden to Youtube not screwing you over which may lead to a situation where YouTube has power over your personal fulfillment.
If you haven’t already I would check out the book “Hooked” as well to learn more about the addictive patterns that are put out there to trap you.
>large corporations whose main goal is to make you addicted to their product and extract the maximal amount of money.
I wasted thousands of hours in the 1990s reading Usenet. The part of Usenet I used (i.e., not the binary newsgroups) never made anyone any money and was never intended to make money by the people who built and administered it.
The software I used to read Usenet, namely Wayne Davison's trn, was likewise never intended to make any money: since its license had a clause prohibiting commercial use, it technically did not qualify as open-source software, but it was freely redistributable, i.e., basically given away (along with its source code).
But trn was designed for addiction. Hitting the space key always brought up a new screenful of text. Whenever I got bored with a post, the n key would skip the rest of the post and show me the first screenful of the next post. Once I'd been shown all the posts in one group, trn would automatically start showing me the next group with unread messages. In summary, the path of least resistance (namely, repeatedly hitting the space key till bored, then hitting the n key) caused a continuous "waterfall" or firehose of text to scroll by on the screen.
Moreover, it was difficult to use trn reflectively: e.g., if I found myself returning in my thoughts to a screenful of text I saw a minute ago, there was a good chance that there was no practical way for me put that earlier screenful back on the screen unless I was still reading the post in which the desired screenful occurred, in which cause I could scroll backward using the b key. (The early web, when the back button still reliably returned the user to the previous page, was a big improvement over trn in its support for reflective use.)
Point is that we should put the blame for the addictiveness of modern life on the right cause: not large corporations, not even the profit motive, but rather the technological progress that has accumulated over the centuries, which enables the creation and the delivery at an affordable price to the average person of experiences that are much more potent or pleasurable than anything available to an average person in the environment in which we evolved.
Yes, sex and eating good food with interesting people were always potent experiences for people, but in past centuries, it took a lot of effort, expense or risk to obtain those experiences in contrast to the ease, cost-efficiency and safety with which potent experiences can be arranged on the internet. And if a person carries around a smartphone, these cheap easy-to-arrange safe potent experiences are available at almost every waking moment.
For me the Usenet of the 1990s was a potent experience because I was strongly motivated by curiosity and learning. (1990s Usenet was full of conversations between very smart people.) Comedian and talk-show host Arsenio Hall joked in the 1990s that the internet was cocaine for smart people. This was true even before the US government lifted (in 1993 IIRC) the ban on using the US internet backbone for any commercial purpose.
You raise a good point, addictive technology is not necessarily for profit. The difference is that being addicted to a decentralized technology means that no one actor can control you. Usenet was a distributed system with a distributed network of control.
The analog I would say is being addicted to Chess, which is decentralized activity.
The fact that it was a distributed system, impossible for any single entity to control, didn't AFAICT ameliorate or moderate the intensity or the duration of my compulsive over-consumption of Usenet.
The great thing about games that are 10+ years old is that they're cheap, you can filter out all but the best rated, and the hardware to run them won't require mortgaging your first born.
I'm building a Steam library for my retirement.
I quit gaming when I had kids, and currently play tennis and do inline skating as my regular active hobbies (which, I believe, count as touching grass), with gaming as my injury / infirmity backup.
Agreed, part of playing old games is that you aren’t required to be exploited by hardware manufacturers who are charging exorbitant prices for GPUs and RAM. A constant whine I hear is the unaffordability of hardware to play new games, but you do not have to play new games. For the cost of a single GPU you can fund many other hobbies for a lifetime.
> It doesn’t have to be this way. You can walk away , and find more fulfilling activities that you control.
For some people, they may their particular hobby/form of entertainment a core part of their identity. So walking away feels a huge indictment of themselves in particular. It can be hard for people to find something else to "pivot" their identity to in many cases.
The junk food analogy is perfect. At some point you no longer get the satisfaction from video games you once did and you start to question the whole thing. I was created to do good works, not to spend most of my time in a virtual world for self gratification purposes.
Maybe? Paramount was already deep in shuffling a lot of movies to Paramount+ exclusives, and new parent company Skydance seems to have first-look deals with both Apple TV and Netflix who may or may not ask for movie projects to be streaming exclusive.
(Apple TV is nearly as bad at theatrical runs as Netflix, though admittedly some of Apple's biggest "mistakes" are in presenting things beyond Oscar-bait such as Argyle that "box office flopped", but yet it is far better for physical theaters that they tried and as a fan of physical theaters I want to keep seeing them trying.)
Right now I pay $38 for ad free Disney + Hulu + HBO max bundle. How would it be different if Netflix raised the price of Netflix + Warner brothers content?
I doubt that Netflix is going to take all of its content out of the video on demand/pay once markets like iTunes. Disney hasn’t.
Disney and WB are part of the MovieAnywhere consortium where you can buy content from iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google, Vudu etc and it automatically shows up in the other libraries
I thought I read somewhere paramount is in survival mode, avoiding risky projects and focusing on reliable projects. This is surprising indeed.
Amazon took MGM, maybe netflix can take over paramount after it takes over warner bros?
I know people have strong opinions on this, but both from studios like warner and netflix, their quality has been subpar, i don't think this will change much in terms of risk taking. There used to be lots of more flops but lots of really good blockbusters as well. Now there are a lot less of both, it is profitable but enshittified.
Paramount sold themselves to Skydance who now get referred to as Paramount because Paramount is the older, stabler brand. That sale is generally considered to have pulled Paramount out of survival mode, though it will probably be at least a few more quarters before it the results are seen.
(Arguably, Skydance's ideas for Paramount are too similar to the weird Paramount and CBS divorce era, that I find it hard to believe Skydance is less wrong of a steward for Paramount than Paramount was before the consolidation. But a lot of that opinion comes from bias as a Star Trek fan and Skydance's approach seems to return to the semi-broken idea that Star Trek seems to be better as a film franchise than a TV franchise.)
Skydance owning both Paramount and Warner Brothers might be very concerning in terms of IP consolidation alone.
Skydance is also known as the then-obscure company that picked up Pixar head John Lasseter when his reputation for being overly affectionate got him pushed out of Disney.
It's one of the Ellison family's forays into media. David's sister/Larry's daughter Megan has Annapurna. Annapurna produced the Spike Jonze's AI romance "Her" and many of the the most prominent indie games of the last decade (Outer Wilds, Cocoon, Stray, Kentucky Route Zero, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Journey, Donut Country…).
Right. Also the weird part of the Skydance Lasseter drama is not just that is happened once, there, but that it happened at nearly the same time but worse at Annapurna. Annapurna games division that had done so well last decade got purged by rehiring someone to oversee it who had been fired the first time for the "overly affectionate" types of problems just before Annapurna's "Golden Age" and was hired as much to better align the games division with making movie knockoffs rather than producing indie darlings (which was a "distraction" for a company trying so hard to be a movie company). (You can almost excuse "hired someone Disney fired for this reason", but how do you excuse "we already fired once for this reason"?)
The Ellison family's willingness to be tied to serial harassers, and in the case of Annapurna in direct expense of being a beloved media producer, makes you wonder what worse skeletons that family has in its closet if this is already just the open awful stuff they want us to know about their close associates.
David Ellison was an intern at Pixar in college and has a personal relationship with Lasseter. Annapurna games was under his sister and has no management connection to Skydance.
I guess if there is any common denominator it’s a familial default to loyalty vs fear of public perception? Not the worst trait in the world despite leading to this outcome.
Also to be fair Lasseter’s “serial harassment” (while real and I’m not trying to discount) consisted of his insistence that everyone hug him when greeting him. So while you can make the argument his firing had merit, his ”issue” is pretty easy to prevent at a new firm: No hugs policy
> his insistence that everyone hug him when greeting him.
As far as I understand it, that's the least objectionable of the many stories about him. From a 2017 article [1], we also have:
> “He’s very tactile in a weird way,” said one former female executive who, like others, spoke with Deadline on condition that she not be named in the story for fear of reprisals. “He would rub my leg in a meeting … It was creepy and weird. It got to the point where I wouldn’t sit next to him in a meeting, because it undermined everything I said.”
> Lasseter was observed passionately kissing a female subordinate at a 2010 Miramax party,
> one person saw Lasseter pull the female executive tightly to him and move his hands over her body. The female executive later sought to laugh off the encounter, saying she didn’t think her job description included “being groped by John Lasseter,” the observer said. “But you could tell she was pissed.”
Do a quick web search for "lasseter harassment" before posting stuff about it, maybe?
Topmost link on DDG starts with:
"John Lasseter was accused by multiple former employees and reports of a pattern of unwanted sexualized behavior at Pixar and Disney Animation, including persistent unwelcome touching, kisses, and leering that made staff uncomfortable"
> who's gonna produce that once Paramount owns HBO?
Netflix.
If they win, they own HBO. If they lose, they have a beef with Ellison.
(Speaking out of my ass here. But I think there is broad underappreciation of how intensely a lot of Hollywood creatives do not want to work for a rightwinger. I imagine Netflix, Disney and others will have a bit of a bonanza over the coming years of picking up disaffecteds from Paramount et al, even assuming the latter don't wind up in bankruptcy.)
Don't sleep on the A24 or NEON model. I think we'll see a boom in independent film production and distribution companies over the next few years, especially with the inevitable dry powder from either deal.
When did silicon valley shift from "making the world a better place through disintermediation of relational data structures" to "own the means of production, control all government and bring back public hanging for masculine leadership"? Are they immature enough to think that people will just accept this without pushback? This is not the SV I believed in, and it won't end well for anyone.
As an outside observer, hasn't Thiel's Zero to One has been treated like a gospel basically since it's publication in 2012? Aiming for monopolies and total control has been part of the strategy for a decade now.
That says nothing about this particular situation. Written language has been a thing for 5,000 years, and it's used for this bid, so nothing remarkable here ...
I guess the OP is just making an unrelated comment, because it almost sounds like he thinks that a hostile bid is evidence that the US has Ukraine-levels of corruption. Leaving aside the odd time period (Ukraine was much less corrupt pre-war than it was pre-Maidan, not to speak of its other more corrupt neighbor), the fact that hostile bids have been around for a long time in the US is good evidence to suggest that they don't indicate the level of corruption implied by OP. If OP made the same comment under a post about verb conjugation, wouldn't that seem odd to you too?
Or maybe they just happened to make an off-topic comment that had nothing to do with the hostile takeover.
It has really strange bugs like with an hour left of a Champions League match it thought it had reached the end credits of the show and tried to automatically start showing something else. Was confusing figuring out how to tell it I wanted to really watch the "end credits" which was the last hour of the soccer contest.
That's interesting as the Champions League is the most compelling thing for me to consider P+ subscription. Unfortunately for P+ it just hasn't been compelling enough. I feel for the Peacock subscription to watch EPL, but even with that subscription there are matches only on USA and maybe also on Telemundo. I can only imagine P+ doing similar, and I'm just not here for it
Eh, I liked it, but canceled my service after they made a bribe to the current president to approve one of their acquisitions. I like Star Trek plenty, but not enough to support anti-American businesses like Paramount.
I subscribed to SkyShowtime (Euro joint venture from Paramount) for a few months (it was cheap) ... then I realized it doesn't work on Linux... cancelled.
The Paramount+ user interface on my Samsung TV is horrendous.
It frequently crashes after displaying ads, forcing me to re-open the app and watch ads again.
When watching ads does succeed (all 3 minutes of them…) and playback of my show begins, it shows the enormous pause button, the giant fade-to-black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and covers up the subtitles, as though I had pressed ‘Play’.
And trying to pause requires you to press the pause button TWICE.
I tried to play a series, but instead of starting from the last-played episode + 1, it always plays the most recent episode since it’s a rewatch. This happened every time until I got caught up.
So I strongly disagree. If only to be able to watch all of this content without all of frustrating design flaws.
EDIT: They also end each episode with 2-3 minutes of ads. So you had to exit the show, then re-enter to not get hit with two ad breaks in a row.
IMO no 3rd party app is worth using on those devices.
My parents pay over $300/mo for an Xfinity bundle. It includes everything (phone, internet, and all streaming services on one bill)
The paramount+ app on the Xfinity box took TEN MINUTES to load a show. This is after crashing three times back to the logo.
Xfinity warns that it’s a 3P app and they aren’t responsible for it but it should be criminal to take the money and subject elderly people to this under spec hardware. Even live sports will pause and stutter.
Hmm speaking of that, what happened to google's Chromecast?
I couldn't care less about the "casting" functionality but I use the (3rd gen?) version with a remote as a netflix/hbo/prime terminal. I know it's google, but it works much better than any random android box.
Problem is, what do I do when it dies? I heard they discontinued it and they put out a more expensive box out instead. Or did they, being google, cancel it?
Why for the love of all that is holy are you using the in built smarts of any TV? Well except the Roku TVs are okay. But I still prefer my AppleTV. It has by far the best hardware in the business and supports the volume up/down button and power off of the TV through either CEC or IR.
I dont know the political angle. But if the DVDs and Blurays still keeping rolling under Paramount for WB Archives, I want Paramount to get it. It's super unlikely that Netflix will let the WB Archive live with physical media.
I mean, the way things are going, it's unlikely in both the cases. But I would get more time to collect everything I want by then with Paramount. Also, under Paramount WB Archive would be in the spotlight far more than under Netflix.
Ellison wants WBD for the TV networks, including CNN.
I don’t think they want the film division but the vast number of cable channels that Discovery owns. Giving them a rather large control of the American mind share.
The best outcome would be for all of the bids to fail, all the streaming services would bleed money due to people sick of the siloing, and for there to be multiple streaming services competing on experience because they all have access to the same catalog.
The second best outcome would be the cartoon villain Larry not getting what he wants.
Which is why the model that would actually be good for consumers and the model that absolutely no content producer wants which is splitting content creation from distribution isn't going to happen. Let a bunch of companies compete over being the best streaming platform and then let those companies all compete for licensing deals for content.
I think a big copyright holders in a strange way actually don't want a repeat of cable. They want all content to be exclusive by default to their own streaming service.
When you make something (eg TV shows), you might also want a direct relationship with your customer (eg viewer). Consequently, A platform where you get to choose how to present and celebrate the stories seems like a reasonable thing.
In the US, the film industry originally worked like the streaming industry does today. Besides just creating films, the major studios distributed them through the theaters they owned. If you wanted to see a Paramount film you had to go to a Paramount owned theater, if you wanted to see an MGM film you had to go to an MGM owned theater, and so on. In 1948, this distribution scheme was ruled to be in violation of antitrust law and the studios were forced to divest themselves of their theaters. Now you can see major films in any studio and the theaters have to compete on price and amenities. I don't see why the same logic shouldn't apply to streaming services.
Here in Norway we have a law for mobile carriers which is intended to prevent moats. It states that carriers must provide access for a "reasonable price" to other phone companies. It seems to have worked fairly well.
One could imagine something similar, that sure you can put your own movie or TV show on your own website, but you must also sell it to companies who asks on reasonable terms. So Netflix can make a movie but couldn't say no to say Plex if they wanted to buy the rights to show it on Plex.tv.
This is completely different. Cell phone infrastructure in particular is by nature a natural monopoly. Two carriers can’t operate over the same frequency and only certain frequencies are conducive for cell phones.
Content has no such restriction. Are you really saying every piece of content anyone produces must be licensed? Who decides what is “reasonable”?
No, just media production companies on their own streaming service. There is no reason to pretend that billion dollar, publicly traded companies are poor college kids just trying to get noticed on the Internet for their quirky videos.
Okay, and if they move ownership and production outside of the country and stream it from their website ate yoi going to block them from streaming to the US?
How is that law going to apply to Sony who is Japanese owned and CrunchyRoll?
Do we force PluralSight and Udacity to share their content? YouTube creators?
I want Netflix to lose. After living with their binge release schedule for however long now I think we're all worse off for it. So I want less of the industry to use it.
You don't need the streaming service though, you can just do without or find other methods of obtaining their content. It's not like food, electricity, or water where you may have no actual options or very limited options. Movies and shows are wants, not needs, and people can walk away and fill the time some other way.
Saying everyone should just quit streaming and go touch grass or read a book is not a productive recommendation. It's been tried for decades and fails because people really like TV and Movies. Given that, the discussion here needs to start from the assumption that people will continue to watch TV and movies and suffer meaningful quality of life impacts when they do not.
Once Netflix buys all of these companies, you won't ever be able to watch a WB movie without a $25 netflix sub per month. (and yeah, when they are done buying all the competition that's what the monthly will be.
> Once Netflix buys all of these companies, you won't ever be able to watch a WB movie without a $25 netflix sub per month. (and yeah, when they are done buying all the competition that's what the monthly will be.
That's kind of a silly argument. "People are better off paying $100+/month for 4+ streaming services than $25/month for one that has everything."
If your argument were that you'd have to pay more than the current combined cost, it'd be a better argument against mergers. Arguing against something because it's a better deal is just strange.
It's not that silly of an argument when you factor in Blu-Ray as the other side of "won't be able to watch a WB movie without". Right now the only Netflix "Exclusives" you can find on Blu-Ray are the ones they source from Sony, Warner Brothers, or Paramount. If they own Warner Brothers one of those Blu-Ray sources goes away.
Instead of a one-time Blu-Ray purchase for ~$25 for a movie to watch as many times as you'd like, it's an ongoing subscription for $25/month. If you only want to watch that one movie in two different calendar months, you've easily doubled your spend.
(Yes, it is still apples-to-oranges because you may watch more than one movie in a month, but the flipside is that the $25/month is a variable catalog fee. The movie you want to watch may be "vaulted" that second month you want to go watch it. With Blu-Ray you control your film catalog, with Netflix some finance team does.)
(Also, yes, easy to forget Blu-Ray in this debate because Blu-Ray is dying/dead, especially in physical retail with Target and Best Buy dropping its sections. You can also substitute a lot of the same arguments here with arguments for Movies Anywhere and/or iTunes Store.)
thats not how most people do streaming, they consume everything on netflix - when the content gets stale, they cancel, move to P+, consume for a few months, stale, d+, stale, A+, etc....
1 at a time
I'm never paying any of them, anything, ever again, but I'm sure we'll all get a little fucked somehow. I do hope it triggers more in-fighting amongst the scum of the earth.
Don't worry, no matter which way it goes, each executive will still figure out a way to give themselves hundreds of millions of dollars for their hard work.
Putting aside all the politics involved in this merger, I kind of agree with you... My first thought when reading about Netflix acquiring WB was that a whole lot of IP was going go down the drain thanks to how hard they try to push an agenda in their content.
My opinion is mostly based on old interviews with Coppola when he was asked why he would make Godfather with Paramount and not United Artists. He said Paramount doesn't care about movies, they are bankers and only care about money. They would not interfere at all with his artistic direction. And they didn't.
Now that we have the Ellison, I don't know anymore. His daughter is excellent, but with a different studio. His son has no idea. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. We'll see.
My European colleagues are mostly worried about more MAGA nonsense in the media with the Ellisons
Does WB have to pay the breakup fee to Netflix if a Paramount hostile takeover succeeds?
It looks like it. $2.8bn by Warner Brothers to Netflix [1].
If the vote looks close, Paramount would be expected to raise their bid to cover that cost.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065280/000119312525... 8.3(a)
The failed merger and similar clawback clause between Kroger and Albertsons is currently destroying a significant part of the supply chain for food in the Pacific Northwest. Grocery stores that have been open for 50-75 years - stores where whole neighborhoods and towns were built around - are closing forever, leaving those areas as food deserts.
Either way, this entertainment merger is going to get ugly. Consumers are absolutely going to get harmed either way with that clawback clause.
I don't understand how that kind of clause can be legal. Its existence puts anti-trust enforcement in a catch-22, either they allow the merger, which reduces competition, or they reject it, and the acquiree is decimated, also reducing competition.
> I don't understand how that kind of clause can be legal.
Arguably they promote a chilling effect around acquisitions, which does help competition: "don't try to buy something unless you're prepared to deal with a possible fallout" should result in fewer attempts at consolidating dominant positions.
I'd almost be tempted to posit that such a clause should become mandatory for deals over a certain threshold (e.g. $1bn), with amounts determined according to certain parameters.
> don't try to buy something unless you're prepared to deal with a possible fallout
The kroger Albertsons deal was the other way around, the seller had to pay the buyer if the deal didn't go through.
yeah, that sounds like a bit of blackmail...
8.3(b) on pg. 79 says that "Regulatory Termination Fee" is $5,800,000,000 from Netflix to WB. (IANAL)
It's not like we aren't drowning in entertainment options.
Food on the other hand, that's a real problem.
12 Fast and the Furious, 42 X-Men movies… yeah - drowning
Not to mention franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, Alien, Predator, Jurassic Park etc.
Speaking of anti-trust, all of those franchises save Jurassic Park are owned by Disney through mergers.
I'm still waiting for the "Alien vs Jurasic park". It must be a very entertaining movie. /s
Best you can get is Aliens vs Predator vs Terminator comic book (if you are 10 years old you can like it, it is betterr than most AvP stuff but that is a low hanging bar)
I mean the franchise didnt get anything top tier apart from Aliens labirynth and the vP 2 game from.. 2001?
Look back, not forward my dude. Plenty of good material from previous years. With the benefit of hindsight having filtered the crap out
I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison, groceries that sell food on one hand and a brainwashing and propaganda delivery system (see History of criminal, industry/advertiser, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, and foreign nation direct ties to the industry) masquerading as “entertainment” on the other.
You don’t have to be “harmed”, just do not pay them your money. Problem solved. If the prospect of not being “entertained” fills you with anxiety and frustration, maybe that’s something to reflect on.
The machine works in the aggregate, and so does the harm. Lets not pretend that all will be well if I just avoid the propoganda myself.
That makes no logical sense. So if I give up my “entertainment” subscriptions because the execs need their bonuses and drive the prices up to compensate for the penalty, causing me to think about how to spend quality time with my family paying games, reading books, and doing activities; is equally harmful as if I can’t but groceries in my town because the grocery store was closed?
I most certainly did not imply that cancelling subscriptions is harmful; I think you read something I did not write.
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I live a couple blocks down from one that was open for 40+ years. I use Amazon now for my groceries. I was gonna use Safeway but their prices are high.
Sounds like an opportunity to open grocery stores.
So when it's not happening as readily as we expect what do we do next?
We just sit back and watch as the invisible hands of capitalism cleanse themselves of our existence.
Aldi is always looking for property
I suspect in a lot of those places there is only the one supply chain.
UNfI is the big distriubor, Kehei is second. Both serve essentially all grocery stores.
Forever seems pretty definitive
Except you need food to live and tv shows are an artificially scarce resource that's actually free to distribute in unlimited quantities, so the harm is very different.
Real people work in this industry, though. A merger of this size is bound to come with some layoffs and canceled projects.
It's not as bad as food scarcity, of course. But it can do some collateral damage.
That, plus fewer studios mean less creativity goes to the mainstream. If you thought AI slop was bad, go re-watch Star Wars Episode 8.
Me and my wife were Star Wars fans. The last Star Wars media we watched was episode 8. I almost walked out the theater.
I've watched and enjoyed Andor since, but yeah other than that zero star wars movies and TV shows since episode 8. I hear 9 was also hilariously bad, but I'll not ever bother seeing it.
Star Wars is synonymous with Andor at this point. The original trilogy is second, but it isn't a close second.
Oh really? What’s Andor?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9253284/
my biggest problem with episode 8 was that they freed the camels but not the camel jockey slave children
Seems like a bad example. The problem with Episode 8 was not lack of creativity. Episode 7 was a complete retread of "A New Hope" and a bigger offender. At least blue Jedi milk is new.
Episode 8 was a retread of Empire Strikes Back (ships chase through empty space while the main character trains with the old master on a wild planet). It seemed subversive just because ESB was subversive relative to ANH.
Complete with "this guy will help us" to "oh no, they betrayed us!"
Episode 8 was subversive because it had self aware moments "trolling" the audience throughout like Luke mocking the idea Rey (and the audience) thought he would pick up a lightsaber again.
It also has weird "subversive" dialogue about sacrifice being bad that doesn't really fit what's happening in the movie itself where sacrifice of two characters saves the day. Which is "subversive" in the sense that a movie with dialogue saying "this is a shitty movie plot" is subversive.
It also rips off the ending of Return of the Jedi by killing the main bad guy so is "subversive" in that it trolls whoever was stuck making episode 9 without a functional villain.
I mean, 8 was easily the most functional of the new trilogy, if a somewhat overly ambitious muddle, so that's a bad example.
There is a real problem with too many sequels and adaptations though.
8 is at least the fourth best Star Wars movie.
Maybe 3rd. Jedi is gorgeous but the script for everything past Jabba’s Palace is a mess. Doesn’t know what to do with all its characters, feels the need to have them all around anyway.
If 8 had followed through on its narrative promises, it would have had a chance. But unfortunately, much like a modern LLM that exceeds its context window, it lost its way in the final act.
As for sequels, we are at a weird time in history. Due maybe in part just how prevalent media is and how easy (relatively) it is to create, we've been super-saturated in "like X but with Y" stories. We have dedicated websites mapping tropes. It's hard to come up with anything that hasn't been done a few million times. AI will probably accelerate that, and I can't say I know what comes next.
You will still have Amazon, Apple, Paramount, Disney, and NetMax spending billions each on content and streaming and Sony being the mercenary creating content for the highest bidder.
WB under Discovery was already becoming an also ran and more financial engineering than a real company.
Does that mean the DCU Movies might get delayed or canceled?
One can only hope.
That's the only thing most people are looking forward to from WB!
Instead they’re a 20 part serial with about 5 mins of actual content per episode. Enjoy!
money is just this construct that we invented to distribute limited resources. why are we doing this?
Too many people are too obsessed in making some number in a database be as large as possible...
Maybe they should just play that paperclip game.
The Invisible Hand demands its tribute. It’s giving us the Invisible Middle Finger again.
Yeah, the reverse breakup fee is ~2.6B I believe, but the Paramount takeover doesn't have to succeed for that fee to kick in. WB just has to back out.
Right, but if it does succeed, does it then kick in?
Yes
Warner breakup fee is different. 2.8 billion.
Isn't this submission about Warner Bros Discover, which is a different entity? Seems to be about TV, not movies. But maybe I misunderstand, I did spend a whole of 20 seconds to skim the article...
It’s all one entity with subsidiaries for tv and movies, etc.
This has nothing to do with the Netflix bid.
Warner bros is being divided into the cable TV stations + discover channel stations and the movie studio and the backlog is separate.
Netflix wants the movie studio + tv back catalog
The article bullet point referencing WB Discovery could mislead some into thinking that this takeover is only for the Discovery portion, but that's not the case. $30 would not be for Discovery only (as Netflix's bid is $27.75), it's for the whole kit and caboodle. Yes there are two entities, but/and Paramount wants it all, and the takeover intent is for both.
I've heard that what Kushner wants is CNN. If they could make CBS+CNN lean conservative like Fox, they pull off a potential to swing the country via news media.
That's a shitty gamble when online media is where it is at now a days. These big media networks are dinosaurs hanging on by a thread.
The people who vote are the people also glued to 24hr news.
Plus, they already own all of the online media. The important bits, anyway.
2028 is closer than you think. Dinosaur media still connect with dinosaur-voting audiences.
And none of this is serious money to the Saudis and MAGA billionaires. If controlling this media ekes out a couple of percent in the midterms, it’s money well spent. A few tens of billions against consolidating power and bigger grifts? High ROI investment.
It might be. But if you're doing a short-term political power play (rather than a business investment), it could be a good tactical spend. And it might be a smart business investment if the political power play works in such way that you can politically bend the business environment in your favor.
And a cheap spend if you can scrounge the money in some roundabout way from Uncle Sam.
I think that's over-simplifying it. Some YouTube personality (or whatever we want to call 'online media' that isn't just CNN's website) isn't going to be getting a Whitehouse press pass anytime soon.
There is a My Pillow network, and their person is in the Pentagon press pool.
https://lindelltv.com/lindelltv-press-corps/
You haven’t read about what’s going on at the Pentagon wanted the press to sign a release saying only approved content could be published? It was so onerous that even Fox News refused to sign. Now the press Corp is basically a bunch of right wing influencers.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/03/nx-s1-5630076/the-press-corps...
Just in case you think this is just another liberal hit piece, let me repeat that Fox News refused to sign the agreement.
Oh, they absolutely are. As Leavitt promised at her first briefing, it’s been opened to: "independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators."
Yes, all of them right-wing chuds.
A lot of YouTube political influencers have more viewers than CNN.
Online media where they have x and Facebook already?
That’s not correct. Paramount wants everything (including the parts Netflix wants). Netflix wants just tv and movie studio. So the paramount hostile bid would be for the part Netflix wants and the part they don’t.
Netflix also wants HBO / HBO Max. They're just leaving the Discovery stuff.
Because WB owns what is left of Newline, that would include LotR and The Hobbit.
"What's left"?
New Line has been part of Warner since they merged with TBS in the mid 90s.
No, Newline was its own division of WB, but during the financial bubble bursting, and shortly after Golden Compass lost $100M they gutted it and drastically reduced their scope of operations. It's still technically its own division but now it's more of a sock puppet.
The Hobbit for instance is a WB production, not Newline.
Apparently sometime shortly before they got the axe they paid Susanna Clarke a 7 figure sum to option Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I don't know a whole lot about options but 7 figures sounds like about 8-16x what people usually do especially for a 3 year old book by an unknown author. IIRC, that's more than Andy Weir got for The Martian. And more than Lev Grossman is worth today, and he got five seasons out of three books.
That option expired unused and BBC One and Cuba Pictures made it into a very good miniseries. Does feel a bit like a pattern of financial exuberence.
The BBC Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell miniseries is excellent. One of those times (others might include the original LOTR films and early Game of Thrones) where a genre adaptation wildly exceeded my expectations.
Yeah I'm pretty glad Newline biffed that one since we got this instead.
Also Clarke has a chronic illness, which is preventing her from trying for another book of that caliber. That mountain of cash is probably keeping her very comfortable.
I'm grateful we got Piranesi, which is one of my favorite books of the last few years. The audiobook is splendid.
the split is hbo+streaming platform on one side and pretty much everything else on the other (discovery, cablechannels, cnn)
That's conventionally called "studios+streaming" because the Warner Bros studio/brand is one of WBD's crown jewels. The way you've written it, someone could infer everything but HBO Max was going into "other." That's incorrect.
No. Breakup fes are for when the buyer backs out or theere are external forces that prevent the merger. You can also have a breakup fee if the buyee wants out but that's a different thing. In this case it's Paramount saying "we'll up out government-blocks-the-sale fee from $2.xbn to $5bn" which is saying they have a lot of confidence the merger will go through.
> in this case it's Paramount saying "we'll up out government-blocks-the-sale fee from $2.xbn to $5bn" which is saying they have a lot of confidence the merger will go through
No.
Paramount has nothing to do with these numbers, which both come from the Plan of Merger among Netflix, Warner and others [1].
Paramount's bid constitutes an Acquisition Proposal under § 6.2(c). It is a "proposal, offer or indication of interest" from Paramount, a party who is not "Buyer and its Affiliates," which "is structured to result in such Person or group of Persons (or their stockholders), directly or indirectly, acquiring beneficial ownership of 20% or more of the Company’s consolidated total assets."
Given it "is publicly proposed" after the date of the Plan of Merger and "prior to the Company Stockholder Meeting," it is a Company Qualifying Transaction (8.3(D)(x)).
If 8.3(D)(y) is then satisfied (a condition I got bored jumping around to pin down–if thar be dragons, they be here) and Warner consummates the Company Qualifying Transaction or "enters into a definitive agreement providing for" it (8.3(a)(D)(z)(2), the Buyer can terminate the Plan of Merger under 8.1(b)(iii). That, in turn, triggers the Company Termination Fee of $2.8bn, which is separate from the Regulatory Termination Fee of $5.8bn Netflix would have to pay Warner if other shit happened.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065280/000119312525...
I assure you that Paramount has everything to do with things Paramount does, especially when it comes to purchasing prices and the numbers used to represent prices. Paramount is intimately involved with their own business, sometimes too involved.
This article is relating to Paramount's continued attempt to purchase WB despite Netflix announcing a deal with WB.
> Paramount has everything to do with things Paramount does
But not with things it does not. The numbers you quoted are not Paramount’s. (Though that is orthogonal to you being wrong on Warner owing Netflix a break-up fee if Paramount wins.)
Thanks, this was more the gist of my question.
The most concerning aspect for me is the obvious and conspicuously-timed consolidation of these companies under David Ellison. Within the past few months he's taken control of Paramount, CBS, The Free Press, and now he's working on Warner Bros.
From everything I've seen he's basically an ideologue, and has already re-structured CBS to align with his vision.
Just something that seems very out in the open yet kind of pushed off to the side.
Back to the spoils system [1] baby! Hope you have a lot of capital and a tent to camp the White house lawn while you wait for your appointment.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
https://bpr.studentorg.berkeley.edu/2025/12/03/how-the-ellis...
> How the Ellison Empire is Killing America’s Democratic Media
Aren't all of the super rich ideologues? Ellisons father Larry for sure is. So is Ruppert Murdoch.
The only interesting thing about David Ellison is that his politics are different (slightly to the center) from his father. That's uncommon in those circles.
Supporting Israel is a large motivating factor for David Ellison. Part of the reason Shari Redstone sold paramount in the first place ties back to frustration around CBS's Gaza coverage. It's no secret, and mainly what I was hinting at when I said he was an ideologue. Not that it's his only reason for the acquisitions however
He's seems very centered on Trump.
Don't forget that the Ellisons have a 15% stake in TikTok's American business as well!
Yes, and he will control CNN just prior to the first midterms runoffs, this is all part of a plan.
He bought the free press so he could install giant zionist bari weiss as CBS editor.
The Free Press wasn't worth anything, it's a blog with marginal readership. The creepy part is that Bari Weiss, a dimwit, was given $200M for that blog, put in charge of CBS News, and made a political commissar of all these new Oracle media properties with the brand names that Boomers love.
This thread is using it as an opportunity to scream about Trump, but Democrats will be all in on this. They have the same funders and the same interests. The NYT is the outlet that legitimized Weiss in the first place, a woman whose only previous interest was claiming that Palestinians were harassing her on college campuses by being there, and trying her best to get them expelled and fired. The Democrats were no opposition to the genocide; it began under their watch, they fully funded and shielded it, and they happily rounded up protesters. They'll be overjoyed to accept Ellison attention and Ellison cash.
I told all of you not to buy Oracle. Awful company, awful people, awful product.
They probably figured the plots of "Succession" and "The Morning Show" could be...merged.
Economic consolidation is one thing, consolidating under a malign foreign ideology is another. Definitely worrying.
How can all this consolidation in media even be justified?
Greed, power and corruption.
The media companies have had less and less power every year since the internet went mainstream. Big tech supplanted them a long time ago.
I feel like at some level, it will be much easier to just pir.... I mean... train LLMs based on their content. Yeah. LLM training. That's acceptable. So it really doesn't matter who wins, we'll just perform LLM training.
I'm LLM training right now!
I'm using a well established distributed data pipeline for my LLM training.
Don't be silly. It's only LLM training if you are president's friend and bough the license to import a few BN worth of GPUs from the firm owned by his son in law.
For a large enough "donation" the current administration will approve any merger.
Not even large. Trump is cheap. https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-makers-turbotax-gave-trum...
Maybe we're all doing it wrong. Americans could instead be making "donations" to get the legal outcomes they want under this regime. We're not accustomed to the 3rd wold paradigm though it's well established elsewhere.
It's a free market. Just pool some money on kickstarter and bribe the dude to make him do whatever you want. It's the new way to petition. Pool the money, buy his tokens. Make a smart contract that transfers a few mil once the law takes effect.
Do you seriously need a Ukrainian to tell you how to do corruption in the year 2025 of our Lord? In US? In this economy?
Don't be cheap. You can get Roe v Wade back and Kavanaught's head on a pike if you bid high enough. Independent prosecutors will for sure find a pdf file one him somewhere.
FIFA just had to pay for a little trophy
The FIFA Physics Price?
Jared Kushner's firm? I am pretty sure about who is going to win....
the fact that this is credible should scare every entrepreneur. If you cant compete on an even playing field because some people have direct government involvement in tipping the scales we are neither a free market economy nor a democracy.
Since the beginning of the year - USA is just a shell of market economy. Small government indeed…
Also some say it’s “flawed democracy”, IMHO - for last ~3 decades (or even more) it’s just a charade of democracy. Probably soon you won’t even have that.
First-past-the-post two party system, bizarre primary elections, electoral college, land votes instead of people (how many senators are from california and how many from wyoming, they also say it’s “to balance the tyranny of majority”), abhorrent and disgusting gerrymandering (so states could also force tyranny of the minority in congress too :) ), voter suppression (voting on Tuesdays, employers can control if you can go vote that day, voting booth count is getting smaller, voter registration shenanigans in marginalised communities), etc.
The fact that in US you can win the most powerful seat in the world while not even voted for by majority of its own population is properly ridiculous. Yes we all heard about historical this and that but that doesn't matter, thats not a democracy at its core and at the lowest, most important layer of building a resilient democratic society.
Then on that questionable base you build a shaky empire that is supposed to work if people behave nicely. It works till somebody comes around who doesn't care about that and it all falls down. Lets not forget current government was voted by +-half of US population, for second time. Nobody should be shocked by direction its taking again, maybe surprised by intensity of it but thats it.
I am a minority in the fact that I openly welcome the visible consistent hostility of USG towards whole Europe and Ukraine conflict when russia attacks whole western world including US and our philosophy of existence, as much as it can (luckily for us not that much). We are waking up from our deep comfy slumber, not in ideal fashion but we already have a bigger combined military than US has in many, for us the most important aspects (since we don't want to drag ourselves to remote wars unlike you guys so ie aircraft carriers are rather unimportant).
Green deal will be soon gone (good idea in vacuum but not in world where literally nobody else cares about it and we just destroy our economy and future trying to make our 10% part count), social services will get cuts to bring them to more sustainable levels based on unavoidable demographics and more focus on more practical and military manufacturing, like it or not.
I also take issue with the electoral college system, but to claim that a representative democracy is not a democracy based on the intermediary representation seems like a fairly hollow concern.
My bigger issue with regards to how democratic we are would be more related to campaign finance laws, corruption, and the immense power wielded by those in charge that can be pointed at political challengers if the politician is so inclined.
It's not a democracy to the extent that it has systematically unequal representation. That's not a problem of “intermediary representation”, its a problem of both the system of executive election (more of a problem for the US than it would be in many other systems because the US also has an extremely powerful executive branch) and the system of apportionment of the more powerful house of bicameral legislature (having a less-democratic upper house is not uncommon, but having it still be functionally more powerful is, and having that simultaneously with it being as far from democratic as the US Senate is even less common among things that pretens to be representative democracies.)
The electoral college system wouldn't be nearly as bad of a system if you couldn't just rearrange some borders and suddenly change the results.
Unless I'm mistaken, electoral college representatives are assigned based on state borders and individual state laws - usually either winner take all or proportional. The electoral college itself can't be gerrymandered in the same way congress can.
Electoral college representatives are currently elected on a statewide winner-take-all basis except Maine and Nebraska, each of which assign two electors (corresponding to the votes due to two Senate seats each state gets) based on the statewide winner while assigning the other electors based on the winner in each Congressional district.
So, in those states only, electoral votes can be gerrymandered in exactly the same was as Congressional seats, because they are exactly the same districts. (Of course, both states are small enough that the gerrymandering opportunities are fairly limited, and would have limited impact on Presidentual elections, as Maine has only two CDs and Nebraska only 3.)
We also pick all our other leaders directly.
The US has never really been either. At its core, the US has always been an oligarchy with the veneer of democracy to keep the pleebs in check.
Any country that has only ever really been able to choose one of two political parties who both represent the interests of wealthy elites above all else can't really call itself a "Democracy."
this is the end of socially acceptable political norms as we know them
Worse, a redefinition of what "socially acceptable" even means.
There are hundreds of examples of crony capitalism in the world, current and past. Now you can study them and see what'll happen in the US in the next few years.
"It can't happen here", said the arrogant American...
"Hold my beer", said an even more arrogant American.
Americans do not like when someone uses the words "fascism" and "oligarchy". It's jarring to think that is even possible in the United States but a) we are here and b) the two have traditionally gone hand-in-hand.
The Americans that react most extremely to those words are generally those that don't realize it's actually what they want.
They just know the words as derogatory, without realizing that they represent the world as they think they'd like it to be.
That, is very Russian. They are "fighting the fascists" though they are.
Not surprising that the same people have special affection for Russia and their dictator. It's a role model.
> [Paramount say Netflix deal] would lead to “a challenging regulatory approval process.”
"Only we have sufficiently greased the current government to get this deal done"
(not a joke) I wonder to what extent the ability to produce a Rush Hour 4 will effect the deal.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/25/trump-pushed-paramount-reviv...
Stranger than fiction.
I can't wait to see how Chris Tucker plays it
They’re both at least trying to play [1].
The wild move for Ellison would be to bid for one of Trump’s crypto projects if the shareholder vote looks like it could fail.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/netflixs-sarandos-w...
Trump dislikes Paramount, thought?
https://deadline.com/2025/12/trump-paramount-60-minutes-davi...
He did until they paid him off, fired people he doesn't like and his buddy bought it.
Like Comcast (Philadelphia) acquired NBC/SNL in 2011?
Wasn't there a former Comcast employee as CEO of "X" initially?
Trump stated this today:
> My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME! Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE! Oh well, far worse things can happen.
Goes to show that paying bullies only buys temporary relief.
Grandpa forgot that they paid him bribes but his handlers will quickly remind him of it.
Kushner is involved in the money for the Paramount bid
I just realized that the netflix ceo is a big-time democratic party donor, and that paramount is supposedly being supported by larry ellison (big-time republican/trump donor) and saudis? I'm sensing a strong political/influence angle here by the billionaires.
There's no "supposedly."
His kids are nepobabies that each run their own media company. His son is running Paramount, and his daughter has Annapurna.
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russia doesnt have oligarchs for 15 years at least, it has the opposite of it. Oligarchs control the big chunks of economy, media and have a lot of political influence direct and indirect. What they have right now is some friends of the dictator who own something until dictator allows them.
The closest US has to olugarcha is Bezos and Musk, but they dont have each their own party and a few poket ministers in addition to owm bank and 20ish percent gdp.
US is still too big and rich for this shit
I think we are well into uncharted territory. One thing's for sure - here be dragons. I'm sure the US version of oligarchy will come in its unique flavor. Probably people won't even fall out of windows! That mode of "suicide" is maybe distinctly Russian.
I don't want to disappoint, but you won't get oligarchy. You will get dictatorship and war.
It makes sense actually. :-( The US might be "free" and federated enough to not just bow down to a dictator.
Larry Ellison is also a very public supporter of Israel and the IDF, as recently as a few months ago speaking in support of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
He’s the largest individual donor to the IDF.
Wait...individuals can donate to a country's army?
No, you can't donate directly to the IDF, but turns out you can just make stuff up as long as it fits one's world views.
There's a lot of people making this stuff up on the internet then.
Yes you can donate (why did you add the word "directly"?). It just passes through intermediary organizations, such as the Friends of the IDF. There are even non profits that pay for "lone soldiers" -- international mercenaries -- to take part in the genocide in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of "lone soldiers" took part, I believe something like 20,000 came from the US alone.
Sure! And in return Oracle gets sweet IDF contracts payed by the US gov.
So we just blatantly lie now because "Israel=bad"? You can't donate directly to the IDF. US funding isn’t paying Oracle through some back door. If you’ve got a real source, show it—otherwise it’s just nonsense.
Thank you for asking! I thought I was just making funny comment on political situation. After quick search it turns out its not funny… just predictible.
“Larry Ellison donates $16.6 million, says, ‘Since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home’”
Oh and i know FIDF - Friends of the IDF (nonprofit through which these donations are going) are just that. Just friends.
There is a huge war in europe (largest since WW2) and both sides rely on donations from individuals
Yes. I donated to the Ukrainian army and others can easily too
That’s misleading. You can’t directly donate to the IDF—people give to NGOs that support soldiers’ welfare, not combat operations or weapons. And while Ellison has given millions to FIDF, there’s no evidence he’s “the largest donor,” and no public ranking shows that. You can dislike Israel without inventing facts.
Why do you have such an issue with the donation to the IDF? I understand disputing that he's the largest donor, but I doubt he has ever written a big cheque directly to Trump (or in fact anyone except his family) either, is it also unclear whether he's a Trump donor?
Even if there were no mechanism for donating to the IDF available to the general public, do you believe someone like Ellison couldn't easily give money to whomever he wanted?
He financed facilities on an IDF base.
I think we can leave the pedantry for the ICC and just stop at him being a rather nasty genocide supporter regardless of the details.
What does this have to do with anything?
It’s something I recently learned and has informed the way I think about him and his family. Seems others have appreciated the knowledge too.
As a Jew myself, I think the actions of Israel over the past 2 years are clearly ethnic cleansing and I believe anyone who supports that effort should be exposed for doing so.
>supposedly
My man, you don't have to mince words here. This hostile bid is backed by Jared Kushner, who is the President's son in law. One Rich Asshole owns Paramount, and is most certainly supporting the bid here.
This deal would also leave CNN in a very vulnerable position (they are owned by WB), which is exactly what Trump wants.
Strong ”I am the State” vibes.
Does seem to be the direction things are going. The admin picks the winners and losers, and of course the real winners are Trump, family and allies.
One thing that is remarkable is how fast American media companies are folding or getting scooped up by the oligarchs in order to bring the sacrificed carcass to the ruler. Even Putin did not have it this easy - took him years.
It took decades, this is the late stages of an organized and intentional process they've been working towards, and spending vast amounts of money on, since the 1990s if not earlier.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing
It took years to get here tho. The oligarchs worked on this for years.
That is exactly what is going on. Everyone at WB management knows that the Ellisons want to weaponize CNN before the midterms runoffs start in spring.
Netflix isn't buying CNN though, Paramount can just pick up Discovery on the cheap when its split off. There's no reason for them to even be trying to do a hostile bid either. I think this is just purely an ego/power trip thing.
It's scheduling. WBD was set to spin off Discovery Global in April --- after the March congressional primaries. The hostile bid creates leverage to get the TV networks spun off sooner, rather than later, to ensure that the Ellisons can pick them up Q1, in time to set the narrative for the congressional primaries.
See: https://substack.com/@thedreydossier/p-180959723
> the midterms runoffs
Do you mean primaries? Runoffs are a thing in some elections in the US, but not a thing that would start in spring for the congressional midterms.
Doesn't that imply that Netflix was planning to do the same (for their party)? Or are you saying Netflix is innocent here
No, it doesn't imply that. Saying party X plans to do something implies nothing about what party Y plans to do.
> Saying party X plans to do something
but that's not the whole thing being said.
Party X may have been planning on something, but party Y threw a wrench in the middle, causing party X to have to make some response. By implication, party X believes party Y to be throwing a wrench, hence, party X must act. Therefore, party Y also must be planning something that counteracts party X's desires. If it weren't so, party X would not act (as that costs money).
The thing that contradicts Party X's desires can just be not doing the thing Party X wants done, it doesn't have to be doing an equal and opposite thing.
This seems like a variation on the fallacy of the excluded middle.
It's closer to so-far-unnamed fallacy of "the right has no agency." Everything they do is in response to something done by the democrats or the left or whatever and so they aren't responsible for their actions.
Netflix wasn't buying CNN.
Both-sidesism is a hell of a drug.
Netflix and those involved hasn't conclusively metamorphosed into a Larry Ellison-esque state of Lawn Moweriness.
Make no mistake, it (Netflix) is still a billionaire corp; on the humanity scale, it scores quite low, but not lawn mower low. They're still outside the Ellison event horizon.
> it (Netflix) is still a billionaire corp
What does that mean?
It means do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
Didn't you know? It's only bad when the people I don't like are doing it.
Well Netflix hasn’t given Trump a $15 million bribe or any other politician yet.
his son-in-law is outbidding netflix so $15bn maybe would do it :)
More than that, Trump said yesterday that Netflix's purchase of WB "might be problematic" and that he would be "personally involved in the decision of approving it".
He's trying to shakedown Netflix to pay fealty.
> More than that, Trump said yesterday that Netflix's purchase of WB "might be problematic"
Adding Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn815egjqjpo
> He's trying to shakedown Netflix to pay fealty.
I am not a supporter of most things this admin is doing, but also wouldn't be too sure on this one. I found it interestingly odd that out of nowhere he makes a comment on the deal after attending an event dealing with celebrating music and film. A regular shakedown would have happened before the deal when he met with the Netflix CEO recently, which the added link article mentions and was a person who Trump liked.
And now we see the Paramount thing that leads me to think it fits more with the suggestion that he takes the side of the last person he speaks with, which was probably someone at the same event on the paramount side.
I wouldn't rule out that he now plays them against each other in order to get something from it, but don't think it was the original reason for helping to throw a wrench into it
The President's son-in-law is involved in the hostile bid through his private equity firm Affinity Partners. https://www.axios.com/2025/12/08/jared-kushner-paramount-war...
Sounds like Paramount bosses are bidding in anger.
I think the political angle of this should not be discounted
Some context:
"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."
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/08/jared-kushner-paramount-war...
The dark side of all this is a propaganda network.
The government and who runs it should not be in business I'm sorry. This isn't free markets, it's manipulation and corruption.
This is what happens in markets without a functional regulatory body - when the regulator turns into a market participant. It’s closer to a jungle than anything else.
> This is what happens in markets without a functional regulatory body
It's almost more that we have semi-functional regulation. Trump's influence over this transaction entirely stems from his antitrust powers.
This really isn’t the free market, this is de facto cartels when like 90% of media properties are owned by 3 or 4 companies.
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Thank you, I had no idea how this was politically related, and honestly cannot keep track of all the corruption these days anyways. How does anyone? This is pretty much a genuine question.
are executives breathing? then there is corruption. start following the money and you'll find it, we're in the new gilded age
The Bulwark is fairly on top of the pillaging that's happening in the US government.
"all" is a high standard. This issue has been in the news for awhile. Read a major, serious news source like The Economist or NY Times.
The news are flooded with these stories, for anyone who cares, but I imagine what we don't know is even more shocking.
The political angle is the whole ball game
always has been
I mean it's not even politics in the way most people think about it—like this is just blatant corruption. Trump moved in and said this is my swamp.
We're not even gonna get a good investigative journalism podcast about the corruption because it's just right there in front of you. There's not much to uncover.
We need some kind of independent anti-corruption agency, like the one we told Ukraine they had to have to receive aid.
All independent agencies are dead, according to SCOTUS fiat. If we want anything to survive they'll have to be rebuilt, either with an enlarged court that won't strike them down again, or as section 1 agencies that Congress has to power directly (which will also be hugely corrupt). Either that or an amendment that creates a branch that straddles the legislative and executive, to be truly independent.
Yes I know, sorry should have clarified my sarcasm :)
It wasnt US, it was EU who did that, then gave us visa free travel and a few BN for it. Then monitored the whole thing and imlementation of it.
Anticorruption agency head cant be removed even by parliament vote, not even the executive.
But then again, every governmemt and political person has their taxes published by default
Didn't that anti-corruption agency end up being corrupt too? Hard to follow all this stuff.
Nah, they are fine. They ate head of presidents office alive last week.
Add: it's also not one anticorruption agency, but the whole bunch of them -- law enforcement one (think of FBI, but investigating corruption in government), special prosecutors office, another agency monitoring assets of anyone close enough to government (including immigration officers on a country level) and their family and a whole separate court with judges vetted by independent panel.
It's elections of Doge of Venice level of indirection.
> "Nah, they are fine. They ate head of presidents office alive last week."
That's the same guy who tried to take over that anti-corruption office. He would be controlling it now, if it weren't for the massive country-wide protests about it. I'm not sure that they're doing fine.
Economist, July 2025:
> "On July 22nd the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, passed a bill that would place the country’s two main anti-corruption bodies—NABU, which investigates wrongdoing, and SAPO, which prosecutes it—under the control of the presidency. This was not the work of rogue MPs. It was orchestrated from the top by President Volodymyr Zelensky and his all-powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak."
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/23/volodymyr-zelen... ( https://archive.is/kYh4w )
BBC, last week: "...was forced to U-turn after mass demonstrations",
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz0nljm4y74o ("Andriy Yermak: How Zelensky's right-hand man fell from power" / "Fall of Zelensky's top aide - reboot for Kyiv or costly shake-up?")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_anti-corruption_protests_...
>That's the same guy who tried to take over that anti-corruption office. He would be controlling it now, if it weren't for the massive country-wide protests about it. I'm not sure that they're doing fine.
Well, they won for now, that's what matters.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000977 ("Larry Ellison discussed axing CNN hosts with White House in takeover bid talks (theguardian.com)")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048351 ("Larry Ellison Met with Trump to Discuss Which CNN Reporters They Plan to Fire (techdirt.com)")
Viewing this acquisition in terms of simple revenue alone is like positing Musk bought Twitter for its ad revenue. Total information control is priceless.
(In case anyone hasn't kept up with the plutocratic oligarchy in the US: Oracle's Larry Ellison currently owns Paramount (since July 2024), and Warner Bros. Entertainment owns CNN. This isn't explained in the CNBC OP: David Ellison is Larry's son and the token CEO).
> Total information control is priceless.
Except there is robust competition in media —be it news, social, etc.
I think the political angle in terms of motivation is overstated. In terms of closing the deal though, it’s huge. David Ellison has been producing movies for quite some time. So his desire to become a big time player in that space would be a believable motivation. But he can use his father’s connections to Trump to sink the Netflix bid (or create enough FUD to convince shareholders to favor his bid).
> Except there is robust competition in media —be it news, social, etc.
As of a few years ago, there were six corporations owning 90% of US media: NewsCorp, TimeWarner, Comcast, Disney, Viacom, Sony.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/fs5g0b/more_tha...
* https://techstartups.com/2020/09/18/6-corporations-control-9...
Add to that local channel ownership (like Sinclair) concentration:
* https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/media-consolidation-me...
* https://www.vox.com/2018/4/6/17202824/sinclair-tribune-map
* https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/broadcasters-urge-fcc-to-h...
This is especially true when it comes to investigative journalism, where it may take weeks or months to run down leads and information.
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Much like you also have a robust choice of cereals at the supermarket.
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Stage AGs have a strong role to play in anti-trust law. And the other party they're suing _isnt_ a Federal agency this time.
Now maybe nothing matters. But conflicts of interest will come up in those cases. Trump doesn't win _everything_. Trump wins at places where the Supreme Court is using him for their own project of reworking the constitutional order. Basically Trump shoots up a volley with some absolutely batshit PoV, they interpret the topic in some saner (still crazy) right wing legal idea. And the Supreme Court fast track's these cases about executive power.
This case would be State AGs having independent standing to challenge major M&A.
It will drag things out at a minimum, in a way the Supreme Court's rapid resolution of executive branch cases is not dragged out.
I think it gives Netflix an advantage. When it comes up in front of a judge he'll note the obvious conflict of interest and Trump's idiotic pronouncements, like the fact that he said he will be personally involved, and rule for Netflix.
This will go to SCOTUS, which typically gives the administration preferential treatment. The US's current level of corruption is way too high to assume your scenario.
HA hardly. Balance that against two of the top four streaming platforms (youtube, hbo, disney, netflix) trying to merge, probably should worry about some anti-trust there, but not under this administration.
They've just about said as much. They thought they had a friendly bid in the works just before WB announced a more exclusive friendly bidding process with Netflix. Definitely some drama going on there.
they snoozed they losed
They tilt like everyone else - maybe the chaos and mayhem behind the last few years of this industry mean the old guard is finally failing, and we'll see meaningful copyright reform and sanity in our lifetime.
> and we'll see meaningful copyright reform
Are you betting on the content conglomerate bidding tens of billions, or the nepo baby LBO shop wearing the corpse of a movie studio as a salmon hat to spur copyright reform?
I'm hoping that they're sufficiently absurd in their mere existence to spur questions among the electorate. "Hey, that looks weird, and not right. Maybe we should fix that!"
Yeah, I know, way too optimistic.
We're more likely to get government by "honest AI" than for that to happen.
Paramount is dead?
> Paramount is dead?
Paramount broke its tradition of barely treading water [1] in 2023 by booking multibillion cable losses [2] before being acquired in a de facto LBO [3] at half the price it traded at in 2005 [4]. (90% off its 2021 peak, though that may have been meme-y.)
Paramount Skydance–the one bidding for Warner–has $15bn of debt on $600mm operating cash flow supporting $15bn of equity trading above book value while still posting losses [5].
It's not dead. But it's at least necrotic.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/cbs:us:net-income
[2] https://www.filmtake.com/distribution/paramounts-financial-t...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Skydance
[4] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/para/history/
[5] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PSKY/key-statistics/
How does one learn to think about companies buying each other. It’s counterintuitive to me for an entity with stock to buy stock in another entity which could itself own stock in the first.
The way you write it I can’t see why WB would be allowed to sell itself when it makes the most sense for Patamount to go bankrupt some time from now and be split up amongst US media; Netflix/HBO/Disney/Peacock
You're missing the key part. The Paramount deal includes billions in Saudi money funneled through the President's son in law.
What matters is if paramount can pony up enough money to buy. Stores don't reject your cash even if you are debt.
> we'll see meaningful copyright reform and sanity in our lifetime.
I think there is a better chance of the state collapsing than there is of seeing meaningful IP reform
The state collapsing might effectively be copyright reform at the same time though so there's that?
The rest of the world is the one thing that gives me hope in this regard, really.
It feels like year by year, Asia, even China, is becoming more and more culturally relevant. Western media is just too damn stagnant.
Hollywood used to be known as possibly the most important cultural powerhouse history has seen. It might still be that, but it certainly doesn't feel like it anymore.
Or maybe I'm just getting old.
China rising should not comfort anyone except Xi. They are all about raw power.
> year by year, Asia, even China, is becoming more and more culturally relevant
And powerful export sectors.
Based on what culture exactly? Can you name a single Chinese worldwide hit movie or TV show from the last 12 months?
I can think of only Korean Squid Game and a few Japanese anime shows that are somewhat successful.
Do Chinese movies even get distributed into places like India, Africa, South America as US produced stuff does?
Ne Zha 2 was huge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Zha_2
and that immediately sprang to mind for a 60+ Australian english speaking mathematician / geophysicist not of asian descent. No Google / Bing / AI required.Having grandchildren made it hard to avoid.
As for China in Africa:
is true, but has been overstated by some to raise fear of Red Menace.Source: https://theconversation.com/maps-showing-chinas-growing-infl...
FWiW China has been a significant employer of US mercs in Africa.
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Services_Group
One can only wish to have that amount of money to bid in anger.
Don't worry, it's other peoples' money.
Uncle Saud yes, Uncle Sam, no. You think Kushner won’t find a way to invest your tax money into himself?
I'm curious how often tactics like this work. It is essentially asking the Warner stockholders to act against the wishes of their elected board.
It seems the main thrust of the pitch is "we're friends with Trump therefore more likely to win approval" which is so deeply gross but also probably persuasive to many. Jared Kushner is involved in the Paramount bid so you know they're greasing the right wheels.
Their case for approval is much stronger than Netflix's regardless of who is president.
Netflix is the largest streaming service in the country right now. It is 4x larger than Paramount+ in terms of total subscribers. Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers is naturally going to receive more scrutiny for this reason alone.
Sure, but Netflix is the non-nepotism and non-cronyism option. I'll take that over the corruption we are witnessing right before our eyes with free markets disappearing.
> curious how often tactics like this work
Hostile takeovers hit their zenith "in the 1980s" [1], when about 50% of attempts succeeded [2].
Since then, Delaware courts have become more Board friendly (specifically, friendly to takeover defences), antitrust made "it more difficult for companies with large market shares to acquire competitors without some level of cooperation from the target company," and stocks became more expensive [1]. (I'm struggling to find recent literature on frequencies.)
Compared to the 1980s and pre-Covid hostile takeover zenith, stocks remain expensive. But money is chaper, particularly for the politically connected. Antitrust is a wild card. And Warner has reduced takeover defences given it's already in the market for a sale (Revlon duties).
So...somewhere below 50%?
[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/11/08/the-comeback-of-h...
[2] https://faculty.fiu.edu/~daiglerr/pdf/hostile_takeovers.pdf
>> We are offering shareholders $17.6 billion more cash than the deal they currently have signed up with Netflix
> It seems the main thrust of the pitch is "we're friends with Trump therefore more likely to win approval"
It seems to me that the main thrust of the pitch is more money.
Sure, if you think that the portion that would be spun off and stay public under Netflix's deal would have a stock value of like $2.
"Jared Kushner is part of Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195014
And probably also right.
Reading the comments -- it is amazing how quick it takes to from allegedly a democracy governed by a rule of law to a corrupt oligarchy. I personally understand the reasons, but it's a bit "funny" given all the grand-standing before about the founding fathers, checks and balances etc.
Well, it took a lot of people by surprise that our famed checks and balances turned out to be toothless. Schoolhouse Rock sure didn't teach me that when other branches of government try to tell the executive branch to cut it out, they can just reply "no lol get bent".
The fatal mistake I see people repeatedly making is that it isn't about the system or checks and balances or whatever. It's about the people. The US had a deep bench of mostly reasonable leaders that mostly respected ideas like checks and balances or conflicts of interest.
Those people are mostly gone now. Our society used to elevate people like that, but it just doesn't now.
The mercenary values become quite plain sometimes. They have told us who they are, these people who are now brazenly about money and power.
It's up to us not to forget, and to vote accordingly, and to call BS when we see it.
Otherwise we lose our democracy.
> to vote accordingly
too many people are too comfortable - both with not voting, but also to vote blindly.
> we lose our democracy.
it's half-way into the grave imho.
> all the grand-standing before about the founding fathers, checks and balances etc.
Trump exposed what looks great on paper (checks and balances) as being worthless if you're willing to break all conventions, use the government as a tool against your political enemies, and have a strong enough political base to beat the Senate (ultimately the only ones with the power to stop you) into submission.
What all of this really exposed is that laws and constraints don't mean anything if there's no actual way to enforce them at the highest level.
It all starts with regulatory capture, imo
https://archive.is/d71qC
I can’t even use Paramount+ at home. Have network wide ad and tracking filters on (simple NextDNS presets, nothing crazy), and while others work, Paramount+ doesn’t. Makes me wonder what they are doing to get blocked. Kind of wish neither were getting WB.
Most likely as simple as "they use the same servers for content and ads/tracking so you can't block just one part as easily".
I've had the same issue and go so far as to remove the streaming stuff from my Pihole to make sure it wasn't a DNS filtering issue. Paramount+ app still is sketchy as hell sometimes. Usually won't work on my AppleTV, but works on phones and stuff.
A plague on both your houses.
Paramount bids $30 all cash for all of Warner Brothers Discovery. Netflix bids $27.75 “for Warner’s studio and HBO Max streaming business” only [1]. (“$23.25 in cash and $4.50 in shares” [2].)
The latter leaves behind “sports and news television brands around the world including CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, top free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as the profitable Discovery+ streaming service and Bleacher Report (B/R)” [3]. (Paramount is effectively bidding $5.9bn for these assets.)
Note that Zaslav, Warner’s CEO, is a prominent donor to Democrats [4], as is Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder [5]. (Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO with Greg Peters, is mixed, leaning Dem [6]. No clue on the latter.) Ellison is a staunch Trump ally. The partisan tinge will be difficult to ignore.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/media/paramount-makes-hostile-t...
[2] https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-to-acquire-warner-...
[3] https://www.wbd.com/news/warner-bros-discovery-separate-two-...
[4] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=david+...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/reed-hastings...
[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Ted+Sa...
All I can say is welcome back to torrenting. This perpetual "same shit deal for consumers, different corporation" problem doesn't end until copyright kicks the media into public domain. Until then, you can play their content reindeer games[1] or you can download a copy of Reindeer Games[2] and watch it without worrying about ownership foofaraw.
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/reindeer-games
[2] predb.me
I looked for a modern, trending show on predb.me (Pluribus) and the results were unweighted, without any comments or votes, and sorted by upload time. They were also multiplied out by broadcast language (at least for German, “iTalian” and “MULTI”.) I know it’s not meant to be perfect but it was kind of a backed up toilet of results.
It would be a lot nicer if I could see a social network of torrenters and locate the market leader — the most popular with the best rips or most friends or something like that.
It feels like Altavista when I really wanted Google.
I'm not sure why someone would browse for torrents on predb, unless I'm missing something. It lists releases, it doesn't provide downloads or magnets or anything.
Use literally any torrent indexer (I use 1337x) and you'll be able to see # of seeders/leechers to determine popularity.
TPB and its mirrors still work fine. Then there is Stremio, a media player with support for plugins and once you acquire the the torrenting kind you got yourself a netflix. Streaming torrents is cool.
I don't even care anymore. There have been so few TV shows or movies that I've wanted to watch in the past decade. Books, podcasts, YouTube, music, and older movies for me. I got sick of the Marvel movies somewhere around the first Avengers movie. I don't think anything currently on TV interests me other than Bob's Burgers
Oppressed cultures often produce the best work. This might be amazing opportunity for Hollywood.
+1 for Bob's Burgers. Great show, been great for a long run.
The problem here isn’t as simple as torrenting. It’s the narrowing of what culture is created and promoted and what isn’t. Paramount is overtly a right wing organization now under the Ellison’s. Part of their bid to WB is “it’d be a shame if trump killed this deal of yours”. Netflix’s groveling or Paramounts success might mean we see less art critical of the government and more that panders to its interest
> It’s the narrowing of what culture is created and promoted and what isn’t.
What professional media companies create and promote gets less and less relevant every year. The content served by Meta/ByteDance/Alphabet’s computers and other online sources get more and more relevant.
The current status quo of Hollywood has extremely narrowed what culture is created and promoted, it is only now starting to open back up.
Has WB or Netflix ever been critical of the government?
It's more about how the buyers intend to use the media themselves.
The Ellisons are personal friends of Trump and Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spoken repeatedly about media as a weapon, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs. Ellison is the largest individual donor to the IDF. Trump handed Tiktok to Ellison.
The bid is backed by Kushner (i.e. Trump) and their Saudi allies.
HBO Max still airs “Last Week with John Oliver”.
Even Paramount still has “South Park” and the creators are basically daring Paramount to cancel them.
It's hard to cancel popular shows for political reasons (at least in america) - it's too transparent.
But its possible to starve them of talent, funding and eventually let them wither into obscurity, by not promoting nor giving it the opportunity to flourish.
But there's still youtube even if these incumbent media outlets are compromised - independents can still create and distribute there. This is very different from the airwaves or cable.
Didn't the South Park contract predate the Skydance takeover?
Yes but Paramount was already debating whether to bribe Trump and clamping down on news shows that reported anything critical of Trump.
> Conservatives Take Aim at ‘One Battle After Another’: “Year’s Most Irresponsible Movie”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/one-batt...
> Netflix's 93% RT Hit Show That Has the U.S. Government Furious Is a Streaming Sensation
https://collider.com/netflix-boots-streaming-success-after-g...
And that’s before we’ve even touched HBO. John Oliver is probably the most obvious example. But I’d say shows like Watchmen count too. Fahrenheit 451. Succession was pretty clearly mocking FOX News and its media ecosystem.
Art that’s critical of the government doesn’t literally have to be shouting “Trump bad”, it can be done through critique or mocking of the values it holds.
Rewatched Watchmen (show) recently and just wow. It hasn’t aged a day and is truly a masterpiece.
I remember when it hadn't come out and there were mostly images and speculation I was really concerned that Lindelof had no idea what he's doing. A friend who watches a lot more TV than me insisted when it did release that it was very good, and reluctantly I agreed to watch Episode 1, and I knew immediately he got it and I was hooked. Watchmen is about masks, what masks mean, what it means when people wear masks, and Lindelof's TV show takes this somewhere the original book didn't but still remains about masks.
I knew about Tulsa, about Black Wall Street but I didn't know there was actually a plane. I was like, "That's surely creative license" when I saw it. But nope, the racists actually had a fucking plane.
I am so embarrassed to admit I didn’t know about Black Wall Street or the Tulsa massacre. And when I learned about it I was shocked I didn’t know about it.
And you’re absolutely right, it’s all about masks and he gets it.
Nuremberg
The success of a Netflix>WBD acquisition would consolidate a third of US streaming markets under one roof, which should receive anti-trust scrutiny. Despite this, there is still a strong appearance of conflict of interest in Trump’s public remarks regarding denying Netflix acquisition the necessary regulatory approval, in conjunction with his son-in-law Jared Kushner being one of the financial backers for Paramount’s cash bid.
(1)https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/trump-netflix-wbd-paramount.... (2)https://www.techradar.com/streaming/netflix/trump-says-the-b...
My guess is that if it went to trial Netflix would win tbh. That’s why Paramount is having to raise its bid substantially, they can’t rely on getting Trump to serve WB up on a platter.
No matter who wins, we lose.
I have seen several aspects of entertainment in my life get squeezed for money (Magic The Gathering, movies, TV streaming, video games) and I have decided to basically quit any form of entertainment which is solely controlled by large corporations.
People get extremely angry when Magic The Gathering charges more money, for more exclusive products, in more frequently occurring releases. Rage, grief, and sorrow over an aspect of your life that you allow a singular company to control. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can walk away , and find more fulfilling activities that you control.
This is what the kids call “touching grass”.
At this point I don’t watch TV, I don’t watch movies, I don’t play Magic The Gathering, I only play video games over 10 years old.
As I have gotten older I see now that this entertainment is junk food that replaces real satisfaction and accomplishment in life. Humans now more than ever have the opportunity to learn and do anything, but instead they spend it squandered on a shadow of real life.
> As I have gotten older I see now that this entertainment is junk food that replaces real satisfaction and accomplishment in life
A bit too condescending if you ask me. People are free to choose to spend time on things they find entertaining and that has no bearing on whether you find it "junk food" or whether the company producing the entertainment is trying to squeeze every penny they can out of it.
People are given a choice on what they eat as well and many also eat junk food, despite it largely being agreed upon that junk food is not good for you.
Both cheap entertainment and junk food cede your autonomy to large corporations whose main goal is to make you addicted to their product and extract the maximal amount of money.
This is purely subjective, but I believe that the path to personal fulfillment does not involve watching TV and playing video games in your spare time. I say this as someone who was addicted to video games and played 40 hours a week in addition to a full time job.
When someone says “No matter who wins, we lose” they are implying that we are all beholden to corporations who will inevitably screw us, but that does not have to be the case. You can choose not to participate.
I disagree with your premise that your non-preferred form of entertainment is equivalent to eating junk food.
I’m sorry that you were addicted to playing video games (truly) but I think your past experience is preventing you from thinking rationally about this.
People can find fulfillment from many different things, including the ones that you personally don’t find fulfilling. One's fulfillment is also irrelevant with respect to whether the product they are consuming was designed by a corporation to extract maximum profits (though I sympathize with your anti-corporate stance, despite the fact I find this point of yours to be irrational).
You admitted your view was subjective, yet you are prescribing it as a general view that applies to everyone which is both elitist and dissonant.
> prescribing it as a general view
I didn't get that read at all. I read it as their journey of understanding how the world works and how they've reached their opinions on personal autonomy.
Your replies feel as if they're trying to paint turbobrew's comments as something more than they are; as some kind of prescribed doctrine, as opposed to an individuals opinion.
But that may just be because I happen to strongly agree with turbobrew's commentary.
Suggesting that personal fulfillment should not be controlled by a corporation is not elitist — it is philosophy. You disagree with my philosophy, which is fine.
I typed out my ideas as they came to me, so I may have missed the mark. The core idea I want to portray is that you can choose not to play the game of for profit corporations. You can walk away.
> Suggesting that personal fulfillment should not be controlled by a corporation is not elitist — it is philosophy.
So now if I choose to play a video game, that means my personal fulfillment is being controlled by a corporation? You seem to be conflating one's agency to choose versus a corporation having utter control over one's choices. Again, I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but you mentioned being addicted to video games and I think that is affecting your objectivity. As someone who plays video games only a few hours a week, your claim sounds ridiculous.
> I typed out my ideas as they came to me, so I may have missed the mark. The core idea I want to portray is that you can choose not to play the game of for profit corporations. You can walk away.
Sure, no argument there - but that's not what you said originally.
Choosing to play a video game made by a corporation doesn't mean the corporation is controlling one's fulfillment, nor does it mean one is not getting fulfillment or satifsfaction from it (your words).
As someone who has begun to fall into the "Machine Zone"[1] with gaming and stream watching (and trying to get back out) I'm feeling many of the things you're describing.
I struggle with defining the line for myself because a lot of my own hobbies and goals are creative - making music, building a video game, performing improv comedy. And those things are naturally in want of an audience.
Does it mean that I'm part of the problem in wanting to create entertainment, because I'm essentially asking an audience to indulge in the "junk food" that I create? I don't know.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on that question because your ideas seem to be well-articulated. My current thinking is that there is a distinction between:
- "So good" and "So good I could watch it for hours"
- "The artistic content" and "The platform moderating your access to it"
- "Pro-social" and "Anti-social" encouragement / culture of various media (the medium is the message, etc).
Making good quality, non-addictive, pro-social art, independently seems to be an ideal outcome, but then your art - while also being extremely expensive to create and distribute - is in competition with highly visible, well-established, strongly addictive... McDonald's franchises.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design
I believe your thinking is sound. Creating original things is one of the fundamental ways to fulfillment, I believe. As long as the goal of your creation is to create for yourself — and yourself only — I believe it can lead to the highest level of achievement. I would caution that creation can be addictive almost as much as consumption. Seeing the number of likes on a video you created go up is extremely addictive and can lead yourself towards overworking to make the next creation. Almost every big youtuber goes through a phase of burnout as they try and chase bigger and bigger hits. Additionally, you are beholden to Youtube not screwing you over which may lead to a situation where YouTube has power over your personal fulfillment.
If you haven’t already I would check out the book “Hooked” as well to learn more about the addictive patterns that are put out there to trap you.
>large corporations whose main goal is to make you addicted to their product and extract the maximal amount of money.
I wasted thousands of hours in the 1990s reading Usenet. The part of Usenet I used (i.e., not the binary newsgroups) never made anyone any money and was never intended to make money by the people who built and administered it.
The software I used to read Usenet, namely Wayne Davison's trn, was likewise never intended to make any money: since its license had a clause prohibiting commercial use, it technically did not qualify as open-source software, but it was freely redistributable, i.e., basically given away (along with its source code).
But trn was designed for addiction. Hitting the space key always brought up a new screenful of text. Whenever I got bored with a post, the n key would skip the rest of the post and show me the first screenful of the next post. Once I'd been shown all the posts in one group, trn would automatically start showing me the next group with unread messages. In summary, the path of least resistance (namely, repeatedly hitting the space key till bored, then hitting the n key) caused a continuous "waterfall" or firehose of text to scroll by on the screen.
Moreover, it was difficult to use trn reflectively: e.g., if I found myself returning in my thoughts to a screenful of text I saw a minute ago, there was a good chance that there was no practical way for me put that earlier screenful back on the screen unless I was still reading the post in which the desired screenful occurred, in which cause I could scroll backward using the b key. (The early web, when the back button still reliably returned the user to the previous page, was a big improvement over trn in its support for reflective use.)
Point is that we should put the blame for the addictiveness of modern life on the right cause: not large corporations, not even the profit motive, but rather the technological progress that has accumulated over the centuries, which enables the creation and the delivery at an affordable price to the average person of experiences that are much more potent or pleasurable than anything available to an average person in the environment in which we evolved.
Yes, sex and eating good food with interesting people were always potent experiences for people, but in past centuries, it took a lot of effort, expense or risk to obtain those experiences in contrast to the ease, cost-efficiency and safety with which potent experiences can be arranged on the internet. And if a person carries around a smartphone, these cheap easy-to-arrange safe potent experiences are available at almost every waking moment.
For me the Usenet of the 1990s was a potent experience because I was strongly motivated by curiosity and learning. (1990s Usenet was full of conversations between very smart people.) Comedian and talk-show host Arsenio Hall joked in the 1990s that the internet was cocaine for smart people. This was true even before the US government lifted (in 1993 IIRC) the ban on using the US internet backbone for any commercial purpose.
You raise a good point, addictive technology is not necessarily for profit. The difference is that being addicted to a decentralized technology means that no one actor can control you. Usenet was a distributed system with a distributed network of control.
The analog I would say is being addicted to Chess, which is decentralized activity.
The fact that it was a distributed system, impossible for any single entity to control, didn't AFAICT ameliorate or moderate the intensity or the duration of my compulsive over-consumption of Usenet.
The great thing about games that are 10+ years old is that they're cheap, you can filter out all but the best rated, and the hardware to run them won't require mortgaging your first born.
I'm building a Steam library for my retirement.
I quit gaming when I had kids, and currently play tennis and do inline skating as my regular active hobbies (which, I believe, count as touching grass), with gaming as my injury / infirmity backup.
Agreed, part of playing old games is that you aren’t required to be exploited by hardware manufacturers who are charging exorbitant prices for GPUs and RAM. A constant whine I hear is the unaffordability of hardware to play new games, but you do not have to play new games. For the cost of a single GPU you can fund many other hobbies for a lifetime.
> It doesn’t have to be this way. You can walk away , and find more fulfilling activities that you control.
For some people, they may their particular hobby/form of entertainment a core part of their identity. So walking away feels a huge indictment of themselves in particular. It can be hard for people to find something else to "pivot" their identity to in many cases.
The junk food analogy is perfect. At some point you no longer get the satisfaction from video games you once did and you start to question the whole thing. I was created to do good works, not to spend most of my time in a virtual world for self gratification purposes.
If you like going to a physical theater, a Paramount victory could be slightly less bad.
Maybe? Paramount was already deep in shuffling a lot of movies to Paramount+ exclusives, and new parent company Skydance seems to have first-look deals with both Apple TV and Netflix who may or may not ask for movie projects to be streaming exclusive.
(Apple TV is nearly as bad at theatrical runs as Netflix, though admittedly some of Apple's biggest "mistakes" are in presenting things beyond Oscar-bait such as Argyle that "box office flopped", but yet it is far better for physical theaters that they tried and as a fan of physical theaters I want to keep seeing them trying.)
Right now I pay $38 for ad free Disney + Hulu + HBO max bundle. How would it be different if Netflix raised the price of Netflix + Warner brothers content?
I doubt that Netflix is going to take all of its content out of the video on demand/pay once markets like iTunes. Disney hasn’t.
Disney and WB are part of the MovieAnywhere consortium where you can buy content from iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google, Vudu etc and it automatically shows up in the other libraries
Alien vs. Predator Whoever wins... We lose...
The Alien and Predator are now both Disney Princesses. IP consolidation came for them already.
Very tangential, but that tagline was pretty misleading and it kind of pissed me off, because it was very clearly "if the Predator wins, we win".
We? I would hope everbody on hackernews knows how to access movies without funding Hollywood.
Eh, I feel like I lose less if Netflix wins
"Whoever wins... We lose."
Paramout is Trump Land now. So suddenly it is a problem if Netflix gets Warner.
"You watch the content of you ARE the content"
I thought I read somewhere paramount is in survival mode, avoiding risky projects and focusing on reliable projects. This is surprising indeed.
Amazon took MGM, maybe netflix can take over paramount after it takes over warner bros?
I know people have strong opinions on this, but both from studios like warner and netflix, their quality has been subpar, i don't think this will change much in terms of risk taking. There used to be lots of more flops but lots of really good blockbusters as well. Now there are a lot less of both, it is profitable but enshittified.
Paramount sold themselves to Skydance who now get referred to as Paramount because Paramount is the older, stabler brand. That sale is generally considered to have pulled Paramount out of survival mode, though it will probably be at least a few more quarters before it the results are seen.
(Arguably, Skydance's ideas for Paramount are too similar to the weird Paramount and CBS divorce era, that I find it hard to believe Skydance is less wrong of a steward for Paramount than Paramount was before the consolidation. But a lot of that opinion comes from bias as a Star Trek fan and Skydance's approach seems to return to the semi-broken idea that Star Trek seems to be better as a film franchise than a TV franchise.)
Skydance owning both Paramount and Warner Brothers might be very concerning in terms of IP consolidation alone.
Skydance is also known as the then-obscure company that picked up Pixar head John Lasseter when his reputation for being overly affectionate got him pushed out of Disney.
It's one of the Ellison family's forays into media. David's sister/Larry's daughter Megan has Annapurna. Annapurna produced the Spike Jonze's AI romance "Her" and many of the the most prominent indie games of the last decade (Outer Wilds, Cocoon, Stray, Kentucky Route Zero, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Journey, Donut Country…).
Right. Also the weird part of the Skydance Lasseter drama is not just that is happened once, there, but that it happened at nearly the same time but worse at Annapurna. Annapurna games division that had done so well last decade got purged by rehiring someone to oversee it who had been fired the first time for the "overly affectionate" types of problems just before Annapurna's "Golden Age" and was hired as much to better align the games division with making movie knockoffs rather than producing indie darlings (which was a "distraction" for a company trying so hard to be a movie company). (You can almost excuse "hired someone Disney fired for this reason", but how do you excuse "we already fired once for this reason"?)
The Ellison family's willingness to be tied to serial harassers, and in the case of Annapurna in direct expense of being a beloved media producer, makes you wonder what worse skeletons that family has in its closet if this is already just the open awful stuff they want us to know about their close associates.
David Ellison was an intern at Pixar in college and has a personal relationship with Lasseter. Annapurna games was under his sister and has no management connection to Skydance.
I guess if there is any common denominator it’s a familial default to loyalty vs fear of public perception? Not the worst trait in the world despite leading to this outcome.
Also to be fair Lasseter’s “serial harassment” (while real and I’m not trying to discount) consisted of his insistence that everyone hug him when greeting him. So while you can make the argument his firing had merit, his ”issue” is pretty easy to prevent at a new firm: No hugs policy
> his insistence that everyone hug him when greeting him.
As far as I understand it, that's the least objectionable of the many stories about him. From a 2017 article [1], we also have:
> “He’s very tactile in a weird way,” said one former female executive who, like others, spoke with Deadline on condition that she not be named in the story for fear of reprisals. “He would rub my leg in a meeting … It was creepy and weird. It got to the point where I wouldn’t sit next to him in a meeting, because it undermined everything I said.”
> Lasseter was observed passionately kissing a female subordinate at a 2010 Miramax party,
> one person saw Lasseter pull the female executive tightly to him and move his hands over her body. The female executive later sought to laugh off the encounter, saying she didn’t think her job description included “being groped by John Lasseter,” the observer said. “But you could tell she was pissed.”
[1]: https://deadline.com/2017/11/john-lasseter-behavior-pixar-di...
Do a quick web search for "lasseter harassment" before posting stuff about it, maybe?
Topmost link on DDG starts with:
"John Lasseter was accused by multiple former employees and reports of a pattern of unwanted sexualized behavior at Pixar and Disney Animation, including persistent unwelcome touching, kisses, and leering that made staff uncomfortable"
> thought I read somewhere paramount is in survival mode
Paramount's multi-year sale process deserves an HBO miniseries. But at this point, it's a de facto LBO platform for the Ellisons.
But who's gonna produce that once Paramount owns HBO?
The US has freedom of speech, so anyone who wants to spend money producing a tv show or movie about Paramount’s sale, regardless of HBO’s ownership.
I think it would be quite boring, though
Apple TV will buy it from Sony.
> who's gonna produce that once Paramount owns HBO?
Netflix.
If they win, they own HBO. If they lose, they have a beef with Ellison.
(Speaking out of my ass here. But I think there is broad underappreciation of how intensely a lot of Hollywood creatives do not want to work for a rightwinger. I imagine Netflix, Disney and others will have a bit of a bonanza over the coming years of picking up disaffecteds from Paramount et al, even assuming the latter don't wind up in bankruptcy.)
Don't sleep on the A24 or NEON model. I think we'll see a boom in independent film production and distribution companies over the next few years, especially with the inevitable dry powder from either deal.
When did silicon valley shift from "making the world a better place through disintermediation of relational data structures" to "own the means of production, control all government and bring back public hanging for masculine leadership"? Are they immature enough to think that people will just accept this without pushback? This is not the SV I believed in, and it won't end well for anyone.
As an outside observer, hasn't Thiel's Zero to One has been treated like a gospel basically since it's publication in 2012? Aiming for monopolies and total control has been part of the strategy for a decade now.
No. Lots of us founders recognize that ecosystems create wealth and opportunity. Monopoly destroys it.
It works for one person on the short term but erodes society and all future opportunity.
Ecosystems are what built SV dispute a few selfish monopolistic pricks.
When did SV ever actually do what you're claiming? Need to see some evidence of this claim before taking it as true.
From my observations, SV just had good marketing and PR during the 2000s - 2010s.
Probably sometime around the early 1800s
Malcolm Harris wrote a book “Palo Alto” about how this culture took root in SV long before it was called Silicon Valley: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/10/palo-alto-book...
I don’t agree with this at all when you look at how much founder reinvestment in other younger founders has driven the ecosystem over generations.
Are a few hand-picked winners from VCs hand-picking the next generation's winners _actually_ creating any sort of social prosperity?
The level of corruption is really being raised. Trump family has not a shred of decency.
The US is starting to resemble pre-war Ukraine, with industrial oligarchs owning their own media empires and openly buying elections/influence.
Hostile bids have been a thing forever.
That says nothing about this particular situation. Written language has been a thing for 5,000 years, and it's used for this bid, so nothing remarkable here ...
I guess the OP is just making an unrelated comment, because it almost sounds like he thinks that a hostile bid is evidence that the US has Ukraine-levels of corruption. Leaving aside the odd time period (Ukraine was much less corrupt pre-war than it was pre-Maidan, not to speak of its other more corrupt neighbor), the fact that hostile bids have been around for a long time in the US is good evidence to suggest that they don't indicate the level of corruption implied by OP. If OP made the same comment under a post about verb conjugation, wouldn't that seem odd to you too?
Or maybe they just happened to make an off-topic comment that had nothing to do with the hostile takeover.
You've completely missed the point. It's not that there's a hostile bid, it's the conditions of this particular hostile bid pointing to corruption.
Sure, it could be that. If only OP said that.
[dead]
Larry Ellison is my named enemy
larry ellison is guilty of all of the things they accuse soros of doing
Ever played Horizon: Zero Dawn? He’s like a real-life version of Ted Faro
I must be thte only one who like Paramount+
Honestly would rather have the Warner Bros content over there than on Netflix.
It has really strange bugs like with an hour left of a Champions League match it thought it had reached the end credits of the show and tried to automatically start showing something else. Was confusing figuring out how to tell it I wanted to really watch the "end credits" which was the last hour of the soccer contest.
That's interesting as the Champions League is the most compelling thing for me to consider P+ subscription. Unfortunately for P+ it just hasn't been compelling enough. I feel for the Peacock subscription to watch EPL, but even with that subscription there are matches only on USA and maybe also on Telemundo. I can only imagine P+ doing similar, and I'm just not here for it
So far all the Champions League games have been available on the app. Serie A is a nice bonus, with a few other competitions as well.
EPL requiring both Peacock and a cable subscription to watch all of the games is extremely annoying. But I do it anyway.
All of those combined let me watch all the Arsenal games except FA and Carabao Cup.
I believe a combined Hulu+Disney+ESPN gets those, maybe. I know I've seen something via ESPN, but those would be the last 2 I pay attention
They do not. ESPN has La Liga and very little else for soccer.
Eh, I liked it, but canceled my service after they made a bribe to the current president to approve one of their acquisitions. I like Star Trek plenty, but not enough to support anti-American businesses like Paramount.
I subscribed to SkyShowtime (Euro joint venture from Paramount) for a few months (it was cheap) ... then I realized it doesn't work on Linux... cancelled.
Once they ended 'Lower Decks' I was out.
Star Trek was basically the only reason for Paramount+ to exist.
Once they axed Prodigy and sold season 2 to Netflix (ironic, in retrospect), the writing was on the wall.
The Paramount+ user interface on my Samsung TV is horrendous.
It frequently crashes after displaying ads, forcing me to re-open the app and watch ads again.
When watching ads does succeed (all 3 minutes of them…) and playback of my show begins, it shows the enormous pause button, the giant fade-to-black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and covers up the subtitles, as though I had pressed ‘Play’.
And trying to pause requires you to press the pause button TWICE.
I tried to play a series, but instead of starting from the last-played episode + 1, it always plays the most recent episode since it’s a rewatch. This happened every time until I got caught up.
So I strongly disagree. If only to be able to watch all of this content without all of frustrating design flaws.
EDIT: They also end each episode with 2-3 minutes of ads. So you had to exit the show, then re-enter to not get hit with two ad breaks in a row.
IMO no 3rd party app is worth using on those devices.
My parents pay over $300/mo for an Xfinity bundle. It includes everything (phone, internet, and all streaming services on one bill)
The paramount+ app on the Xfinity box took TEN MINUTES to load a show. This is after crashing three times back to the logo.
Xfinity warns that it’s a 3P app and they aren’t responsible for it but it should be criminal to take the money and subject elderly people to this under spec hardware. Even live sports will pause and stutter.
Hmm speaking of that, what happened to google's Chromecast?
I couldn't care less about the "casting" functionality but I use the (3rd gen?) version with a remote as a netflix/hbo/prime terminal. I know it's google, but it works much better than any random android box.
Problem is, what do I do when it dies? I heard they discontinued it and they put out a more expensive box out instead. Or did they, being google, cancel it?
Why for the love of all that is holy are you using the in built smarts of any TV? Well except the Roku TVs are okay. But I still prefer my AppleTV. It has by far the best hardware in the business and supports the volume up/down button and power off of the TV through either CEC or IR.
And why are you not paying for ad free streaming?
I dont know the political angle. But if the DVDs and Blurays still keeping rolling under Paramount for WB Archives, I want Paramount to get it. It's super unlikely that Netflix will let the WB Archive live with physical media.
I mean, the way things are going, it's unlikely in both the cases. But I would get more time to collect everything I want by then with Paramount. Also, under Paramount WB Archive would be in the spotlight far more than under Netflix.
Ellison wants WBD for the TV networks, including CNN.
I don’t think they want the film division but the vast number of cable channels that Discovery owns. Giving them a rather large control of the American mind share.
What is the difference between bits on a Blu-ray vs on a drive platter?
I brought popcorn, who are we rooting for?
The best outcome would be for all of the bids to fail, all the streaming services would bleed money due to people sick of the siloing, and for there to be multiple streaming services competing on experience because they all have access to the same catalog.
The second best outcome would be the cartoon villain Larry not getting what he wants.
> and for there to be multiple streaming services competing on experience because they all have access to the same catalog.
That's a weird way to write "and for us to go back to owning copies of movies instead of just renting them."
More and more content can't be bought at all due to streaming platforms. That's a real problem.
They will all go back to just licensing to Netflix.
Meet the new boss…
I honestly don't think cbs paramount would be any better, if anything, wb content would be further paywalled and tiered off
Which is why the model that would actually be good for consumers and the model that absolutely no content producer wants which is splitting content creation from distribution isn't going to happen. Let a bunch of companies compete over being the best streaming platform and then let those companies all compete for licensing deals for content.
I think a big copyright holders in a strange way actually don't want a repeat of cable. They want all content to be exclusive by default to their own streaming service.
When you make something (eg TV shows), you might also want a direct relationship with your customer (eg viewer). Consequently, A platform where you get to choose how to present and celebrate the stories seems like a reasonable thing.
In the US, the film industry originally worked like the streaming industry does today. Besides just creating films, the major studios distributed them through the theaters they owned. If you wanted to see a Paramount film you had to go to a Paramount owned theater, if you wanted to see an MGM film you had to go to an MGM owned theater, and so on. In 1948, this distribution scheme was ruled to be in violation of antitrust law and the studios were forced to divest themselves of their theaters. Now you can see major films in any studio and the theaters have to compete on price and amenities. I don't see why the same logic shouldn't apply to streaming services.
So you want to pass a law that no one can produce content and put it on their own website?
Here in Norway we have a law for mobile carriers which is intended to prevent moats. It states that carriers must provide access for a "reasonable price" to other phone companies. It seems to have worked fairly well.
One could imagine something similar, that sure you can put your own movie or TV show on your own website, but you must also sell it to companies who asks on reasonable terms. So Netflix can make a movie but couldn't say no to say Plex if they wanted to buy the rights to show it on Plex.tv.
This is completely different. Cell phone infrastructure in particular is by nature a natural monopoly. Two carriers can’t operate over the same frequency and only certain frequencies are conducive for cell phones.
Content has no such restriction. Are you really saying every piece of content anyone produces must be licensed? Who decides what is “reasonable”?
The law would decide what is reasonable
Would you want the “law” deciding that you had to license software code to anyone and have the law set the price?
How does the law decide how much Disney should license the Avengers for compared to my cat videos I’m going to put on my website?
Should we expand the law so if I post open source code under AGPL, I must license it to at a certain price?
No, just media production companies on their own streaming service. There is no reason to pretend that billion dollar, publicly traded companies are poor college kids just trying to get noticed on the Internet for their quirky videos.
Okay, and if they move ownership and production outside of the country and stream it from their website ate yoi going to block them from streaming to the US?
How is that law going to apply to Sony who is Japanese owned and CrunchyRoll?
Do we force PluralSight and Udacity to share their content? YouTube creators?
> no content producer wants which is splitting content creation from distribution isn't going to happen.
Sony does that now
I want Netflix to lose. After living with their binge release schedule for however long now I think we're all worse off for it. So I want less of the industry to use it.
You are not forced to buy their product, or to buy into their schedule.
You can only vote with your feet if you can step somewhere else. We are watching locations for your feet to go shrink in real time.
You don't need the streaming service though, you can just do without or find other methods of obtaining their content. It's not like food, electricity, or water where you may have no actual options or very limited options. Movies and shows are wants, not needs, and people can walk away and fill the time some other way.
Saying everyone should just quit streaming and go touch grass or read a book is not a productive recommendation. It's been tried for decades and fails because people really like TV and Movies. Given that, the discussion here needs to start from the assumption that people will continue to watch TV and movies and suffer meaningful quality of life impacts when they do not.
Once Netflix buys all of these companies, you won't ever be able to watch a WB movie without a $25 netflix sub per month. (and yeah, when they are done buying all the competition that's what the monthly will be.
> Once Netflix buys all of these companies, you won't ever be able to watch a WB movie without a $25 netflix sub per month. (and yeah, when they are done buying all the competition that's what the monthly will be.
That's kind of a silly argument. "People are better off paying $100+/month for 4+ streaming services than $25/month for one that has everything."
If your argument were that you'd have to pay more than the current combined cost, it'd be a better argument against mergers. Arguing against something because it's a better deal is just strange.
It's not that silly of an argument when you factor in Blu-Ray as the other side of "won't be able to watch a WB movie without". Right now the only Netflix "Exclusives" you can find on Blu-Ray are the ones they source from Sony, Warner Brothers, or Paramount. If they own Warner Brothers one of those Blu-Ray sources goes away.
Instead of a one-time Blu-Ray purchase for ~$25 for a movie to watch as many times as you'd like, it's an ongoing subscription for $25/month. If you only want to watch that one movie in two different calendar months, you've easily doubled your spend.
(Yes, it is still apples-to-oranges because you may watch more than one movie in a month, but the flipside is that the $25/month is a variable catalog fee. The movie you want to watch may be "vaulted" that second month you want to go watch it. With Blu-Ray you control your film catalog, with Netflix some finance team does.)
(Also, yes, easy to forget Blu-Ray in this debate because Blu-Ray is dying/dead, especially in physical retail with Target and Best Buy dropping its sections. You can also substitute a lot of the same arguments here with arguments for Movies Anywhere and/or iTunes Store.)
thats not how most people do streaming, they consume everything on netflix - when the content gets stale, they cancel, move to P+, consume for a few months, stale, d+, stale, A+, etc.... 1 at a time
That's what some people do, the average household (per polling) has 4+ video service subscriptions.
So essentially less than the cost of two tickets to see a movie in theaters today. The horror.
Subscriptions add up + you will see ads and have to pay for "premium" content.
It will be $50 soon enough if this goes through
Piratebay
I'm never paying any of them, anything, ever again, but I'm sure we'll all get a little fucked somehow. I do hope it triggers more in-fighting amongst the scum of the earth.
Don't worry, no matter which way it goes, each executive will still figure out a way to give themselves hundreds of millions of dollars for their hard work.
definitely not Ellison Jr lol
Ah that Ellison, didn't make the connection.
That would be much better, as Paramount understands to make good movies, trusting good directors. This year only Warner had the good movies
Putting aside all the politics involved in this merger, I kind of agree with you... My first thought when reading about Netflix acquiring WB was that a whole lot of IP was going go down the drain thanks to how hard they try to push an agenda in their content.
>> Putting aside all politics…
>> how hard they try to push an agenda…
Are you talking about a political agenda? What kind of Netflix shows have any kind of political agenda?
My opinion is mostly based on old interviews with Coppola when he was asked why he would make Godfather with Paramount and not United Artists. He said Paramount doesn't care about movies, they are bankers and only care about money. They would not interfere at all with his artistic direction. And they didn't.
Now that we have the Ellison, I don't know anymore. His daughter is excellent, but with a different studio. His son has no idea. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. We'll see.
My European colleagues are mostly worried about more MAGA nonsense in the media with the Ellisons