It’s been a bloodbath for movies, tv programs, jobs etc.
Why would they allow this kind of mega-merger to go through? It’s nothing but negatives all around.
Because we currently have a government completely uninterested and/or powerless in reining in monopolies. Late-stage capitalism, baby.
Part of it was probably that AT&T spun off Warner Media a few years earlier.
From a regulatory POV was there a reason to block this one? The merger has been awful (as most are) but it seems like there’s plenty of competition in that particular market. Would the FTC have grounds to try to stop it?
Yeah, exactly. Canceled TV shows and refusing to release movies and redundancies related to a merger are not really what regulators are concerned with.
Honestly the WB Discovery merger felt more fair, at the time, because they were trying to compete with Netflix and the soon to be behomoth that was Hulu/Disney/ESPN.
I do think that they are incredibly shitty to artists and customers, and that may end up costing them in the long run as companies compete to purchase shows, but hindsight is 20/20 here. In theory, it was great for consumers to combine discovery plus and HBO, reducing the need for 2 subs. They were also serving very different markets where Discovery was almost all reality TV and Warner Bros did not have much reality TV.
But, overall mergers can be really dangerous to a fair market, and should be reviewed very closely.
The speculation over a WB and Paramount merger seems pretty bad to me, but also when Disney was allowed to purchase Fox, it created an environment where companies need to be huge to compete.
We have created an incredibly shitty environment for studios due to past mergers, which really sucks.
Mergers are always bad in the long run. No way out of it.
How long that takes though, is variable.
I think that the problem is when you let one company do it, it becomes difficult to stop another company from doing it as well.
Yeah, sure, it’s like the Microsoft acquisition, no good reason why it shouldn’t happen taking into account all the rest, but it’s not “good” that it happened.
And I really don’t think mergers, companies buying other companies, it should never have been allowed, but I’m probably a few centuries too late with my take.
I don’t imagine it would have been a good deal in general but a lot of the debt that they’re trying to address with the slashing and burning was loaded onto the company by the acquisition, which really feels to me should not be allowed.
I get Max as part of my AT&T mobile plan, but rather dislike all of the Discovery content. It added a ton of rather bad TV content to wade through what used to be a pretty tidy and efficient HBONow app. Usually more is better, but to me it really crapped up the app.
I think the more consequential factor is the promotion of a cable schlock and reality TV executive to the head of a venerable film and prestige TV outlet.
Yea. That’s another big part of my dislike. That guy is such a pompous asshole.