It is not a lie though. WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is.
I for one, welcome access to stuff that WB has been sitting on without letting me pay them for it.
It is a lie. You are holding on a possible short time gain while ignoring history proven long-term harm of reduced competition, which will lead to higher prices, less innovation, and fewer choices for consumers.
USA anti-trust process is a joke, it is shame that so many company with global footprint relies on that.
> WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is.
Neither are "globally available" as "globally" includes countries that are currently under US embargo, and both those companies are US companies who (supposedly) follow US law.
What you're welcoming isn't "I didn't have access before, now I do!" but rather "I could give Company A money to see this, now I can give company B money to see the same!" which I guess you're happy about, but other's obviously see it for what it is, no practical change except for shareholders.
I guess you are in the US. For you, WB content was already available.
But you see, they never bothered to make that content available for most of the rest of the world. Netflix, on the other hand, is available most anywhere. This is exactly what it says on the can - more choice and greater value for me.
What's written on the can reads "please don't sue us, we're not a monopoly, and we will not gouge users".
On the other hand Netflix will make its subscribers fund everything without reducing their income, and will not give these subscribers at least half of that content, because, why not?
Well if I can cancel my HBO Max it will probably be a zero-sum thing (all the crappy "discovery" content they tacked on was just annoying and I have little interest in their "sports" offerings)
The unfortunate reality is that HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage. I'm constantly blown away by how mediocre everything on Netflix is. I only have it because it's bundled into myobile bill at a legacy discount which makes it only a few dollars a month. I wouldn't pay full price for Netflix now and I will likely remove it altogether if they do another price hike that adds a few more dollars beyond my current discount (~70%).
Forgot to reply, dunno about what is the focus in different markets but in Sweden the HBO-Discovery merger meant that 3 of the 12 or so old linear channels got sucked into it, what those channels lived off was cheap reality-TV of drunk/famous/naked/whatever.
I got HBO to watch good shows and suddenly the frontpage was filled with promotions of this inane reality-TV crap that I didn't have any interest in really paying for.
Yes, Netflix has added some reality crap like those fixed Tyson boxing fights and similar, but the ratio of crap to good content was still in heavy favor of content (and most importantly, they didn't try to fill my front-page with the crap).
> HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage
If you leave the featured areas and venture into any of the categories, you will see that HBO is also full of junk. HBO -> Browse by Genre -> A-Z -> any of them are full of junk.
The Netflix featured pages are more geared to showing you stuff you haven't seen yet, while HBO is geared toward showing you popular stuff, even if you have watched it on HBO.
I am not, and WB was available via local options here (Southern European country).
For me who isn't a Netflix customer (the group which is larger than the group of people who have Netflix, obviously), the choice gets less.
And obviously anti-trust regulation doesn't care about the amount of choices for Netflix customers specifically, it cares about amount of choices for consumers at large, which will decrease with this change.
Netflix buying WB doesn't mean that licensing immediately becomes available worldwide.
Netflix can provide its own content everywhere around the globe because they are the sole owner of it. The distribution rights to WB properties outside of the US will belong to completely different legal entities (even if those entities have WB in them).
Netflix acquiring WB’s content will not necessarily lead to all of it being available for streaming to you in any given country. Content licensing is complicated, to put it mildly.
I don’t know what do you mean by “most of the rest of the world” but it’s widely available in the American continent and Europe coverage will be almost complete in the next month(s):
I think it's unlikely to change because most likely the content was not available for legal reasons, not technical. That's why for example when they re-release some shows they have to switch out to completely different music – the rights were not cleared in the first place and it'd be a huge hassle to go back and negotiate with every rightholder
This is one of the good potential use cases for current gen AI; simulating a scenario again and again and seeing what effect various changes will have on the average outcome...
Probably needs an API for having LLMs play with online table top simulating websites or so, I have no idea about any of the sites for online TTRPGs though and their terms of use...
Late is better than never, right?
I'm someone who only uses only these google service: maps, the play store and sometimes, rarely, google books
I don't use google search, mail, drive or any other services, I have every single kind of history off and I use Firefox exclusively, on desktop as on Android.
I must say, I do encounter badly designed mobile sites with this setup, but it is trivial to toggle desktop mode and then the problem is gone. It helps that I have a folding device, so I can always use a larger screen when needed.
Somehow, considering the bad job humans do with maintaining a population of humans healthy and happy, I find the idea of entrusting control of animal populations to humans bewildering, but then, I was born in Istanbul, and I think our attitude towards street cats is probably well known by this point. After all, Turkish does not have a word to reflect the concept of a stray cat, they're street cats to us.
Currently living in Germany, I miss seeing cats in the streets, though the occasional duck and goose sort of make up for it in a weird way, though the Geese can get far more aggressive than any street cat.
Careful; there's the MX Keys keyboard, which is not a mechanical keyboard, and the MX keys mechanical keyboard, which IS a mechanical keyboard...
I have the latter, and as far as I know, it only works wirelessly via receiver or BT.
I have the mx 3s along with the mechanic keyboard, one set each for work and one for home... Extremely stable connection with the bolt receiver, also works with well if I take the laptop home or with my phone if I connect it to my monitor (Dex)
I already have USB-C charging cables due to the phone on either desk, so I just connect it to whichever runs low every few weeks (or months) and keep on using them.
It is not necessarily age itself.
My father is approaching 80, computer literate since '86, and keeps adapting to whatever new thing comes out, even adapting to fluke versions of windows like 8 or 11...
Small note to all frontend people: he'd be happier if you stopped using low-contrast anything and small fonts, thank you very much.
Ten years ago, the largest bookstores in Germany formed an alliance together with Deutsche Telekom and created exactly that. The name is Tolino, there are e-ink ebook readers, designed principally to be the anti-kindle, there is a web reader, there are iOS and Android apps and everything is synced by a cloud account you can upload your own books to or download any books you purchase from any of the bookstores.
You can link your bookstore accounts to your tolino account and you get to read anything you buy from them however you want.
Apart from the German ones, Belgian, Italian and Dutch bookstores joined in a few years later.
So what happened afterwards?
Deutsche Telekom sold the infrastructure to Rakuten, the Japanese owners of Kobo , in 2017. Interestingly, 6 years later, Tolino still exists with the same DRM-free architecture and new devices are actually developed by Rakuten.
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