I can only see companies solely interested in stripping anything valuable from a pair of husks, or foreign investors looking to effectively own a great portion of the American cultural sphere.
Netflix is legitimately looking to consolidate streaming services into a functional monopoly. There’s a real value add in capturing all those HBO subscriptions and turning them into Netflix subscriptions. Plus, the benefit of adding the Netflix catalog to their own exclusive platform is self-apparent. Given the Netflix model for making movies - make one movie and reskin it a hundred times - this would be incredibly bleak for the HBO property set.
That said, Ellison has a ton of money coming in from his friends in Saudi Arabia and Softbank. And the Saudis really do seem to believe the future of their country is just a thousand data centers propping up a feudal style caliphate. Manipulating the world’s largest military through their idiot-boxes seems to be a winning formula for global hegemony, so there’s also plenty of value-add for The Kingdom.
Saudi Arabia
Netflix is legitimately looking to consolidate streaming services into a functional monopoly. There’s a real value add in capturing all those HBO subscriptions and turning them into Netflix subscriptions. Plus, the benefit of adding the Netflix catalog to their own exclusive platform is self-apparent. Given the Netflix model for making movies - make one movie and reskin it a hundred times - this would be incredibly bleak for the HBO property set.
That said, Ellison has a ton of money coming in from his friends in Saudi Arabia and Softbank. And the Saudis really do seem to believe the future of their country is just a thousand data centers propping up a feudal style caliphate. Manipulating the world’s largest military through their idiot-boxes seems to be a winning formula for global hegemony, so there’s also plenty of value-add for The Kingdom.
So you’re probably right on both fronts.