Speaking as someone who once worked at a company where these were real issues that came up - it's very often the case that intermediate parties in the contracts have dissolved.

Renegotiating the contracts would require lengthy and expensive processes of discovering the proper parties to actually negotiate with in the first place.

Although the contracts that were already executed can be relied upon, it truly is a can of worms to open, because it's not "Renegotiate with Studio X", it's "Renegotiate with the parent company of the defunct parent company of the company who merged with Y and created a new subsidiary Z" and so on and so forth, and then you have to relicense music, and, if need be, translations.

Then repeat that for each different region you need to relicense in because the licenses can be different for different regions.

The cost of negotiation would be greater than the losses to piracy tbh.

> Reality is, the people making these decisions don't want to change things, at least not enough to go through the effort of changing and renegotiating the licenses.

Which is a perfectly sensible reason for a business decision.

> "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.

So laws should just be ignored? Issues created by human social constructs are very real.

I'm with you in spirit, but I think you are underestimating how wide and complex the dependency trees can be in content licensing. And simplifying those licensing structures often mean removing control from individual artists, which we tend to consider a Bad Thing.

The issue is that Netflix doesn't control those restrictions, the content creators (well, rights holders) do, and their incentives don't always align.

Licensing is really complicated and requires lot of paper work. The best example is the music soundtracks of old TV series. They even get substituted if they don't get the proper license to stream them. So some old show get new soundtrack or background music and they don't feel the same.

"The price of one subscription" being the price of Netflix plus the price of HBO. Streaming is turning back into cable where everything is trapped in one bill, no matter how expensive and uninteresting some part of that bill is.

Having Discovery's awful content push out quality HBO content was already a major blow.

Yeah but there is 0 chance that the cost would remain similar to what it is now

> Netflix and HBO Max content at the price of one subscription

Yes, the price of one subscription. I think some cable packages in the US are $200 per month?

I quit my 50% discount after realizing that if I don't watch it anyways.

Funny thing though. When I cancelled my subscription, they offered me 50% off for a month or something like that.

Oh no I am reminded of my dead physical Rolling Stone lifetime subscription!

> Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor.

Only in the US. Everywhere else Hulu has always been integrated into Disney+).

Part of that is because Disney didn’t outright own Hulu until recently. It was a joint ownership.

Everything about these big moves in the streaming space is basically to re-create the "good old days" of cable subscriptions and pay-per-view.

I think we can expect HBO streaming to continue as a premium subscription for movies and high-production-value shows. That would let everything else to land on Netflix with no conflict.

I can imagine an internal analysis that says:

Move show X, Y, and Z from Netflix to HBO Max because those profiles are likely to add the second subscription.

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Piracy seems like the only thing that keeps prices/practices in check.

Yeah, I can easily see something like 2 separate at $20/month vs 1 super at $35/month (make-believe figures).

Assuming all WB and Netflix customers move to the super platform, that's a loss for Netflix (assuming the super platform doesn't significantly reduce their costs).

And the $35 might be more than some set of current Netflix subscribers want to pay, so they drop the service, so an even bigger potential loss.

Certainly, I have no desire to subsidize sports fans via a higher Netflix super package.