Idle Rambling On "Streaming Wars" -- April 23, 2022

I apologize for all the time spent on "streaming wars" in the past few days, but with CNN+ being thrown overboard in less than a month, and the Netflix debacle, all of a sudden the whole story became interesting again. 

Coincidentally, last night my wife came to me, almost afraid to tell me, she just signed up for HBO Max, because there was a single "show/series" she could not live without. She thought I would be upset that we are paying for yet another "streaming service." I could / couldn't care less. It's $10 / month and I'm now spending more than that on eggs each month. LOL. 

She watched "the show/series she cannot live without" with her closest friend while out visiting in California. I checked out the series on wiki and have to agree, it appears to be "must-see" television. 

But I doubt I will watch it. LOL. I guess it's "must-see" for others, not for me.

We'll see.

But back to the "streaming wars."

When I started blogging about the Bakken revolution, one of the things that surprised me was how complicated oil company organization charts were, with an umbrella "holding" company, several wholly-owned subsidiaries, one of which was 99% of the entire mess in terms of number of employees, and two or three "LLCs" that actually made the money. Some threw in a limited partnership or two. There was upstream, midstream, and downstream. And, invariably, many filed for bankruptcy protection, coming out of a pre-packaged deal in less than six months with nothing different, except no debt and a new company name. Same individuals running the new company.

But looking at the organizational charts of "streaming" companies makes the oil companies look incredibly "clean," streamlined, transparent. 

Check out the "HBO" and "HBO Max" entries over at wiki to see how confusing this gets. 

The first paragraph on HBO is just the beginning of a rabbit hole that could take weeks to run, and one still wouldn't be done. 

Home Box Office is an American pay television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc.; itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. 

Which, up until recently, was owned by Time Warner (2016), which, in turn, was acquired by ATT (2018), which in turn was renamed WarnerMedia (2022).

In 2020, WarnerMedia reorganized in which Home Box Office, Inc, and other WarnerMedia assets were consolidated with Warner Bros Entertainment to form a new content division with a name so long it won't fit on this page. 

Fast forward to 2021, a with a definitive Reverse Morris Trust agreement, WarnerMedia would spin out from AT&T as an independent company and in turn would acquire Discovery's assets. 

HBO and all other assets of WarnerMedia would be combined with the Discovery assets and the company renamed Warner Bros Discovery.

And that summary left out a lot of stuff. 

But the wiki entry for HBO is nothing compared to the entry for HBO Max. Here, we start with this: 

As of April, 2022, HBO Max became a sister of Discovery+, following the merger of Discovery with WarnerMedia. 

A sister. 

I'm not even going to begin looking at all the HBO Max "subsidiaries" around the world.  

Oh, by the way, back to my wife signing up for HBO Max. I'm thrilled she did that. I am very, very impressed she knew how to sign up, pay for the service, and not even require any assistance from anyone. This tells me how easy it is to sign up / cancel whenever one wants. This tells me that "streaming" is only going to get more and more attention, if it's this easy to access, even if one doesn't understand how these companies are organized.

One last bit of trivia I learned by doing this: I thought that HBO Max would include everything related to "HBO" including the "original" HBO, just like Disney+ would include everything related to Disney. Not true: two completely different "animals," and each require a subscription. 

I wonder where all the CNN+ content will go. It will show up somewhere with a new name.  

If you want another take on the "streaming wars" this is a link to a very, very long thread on this whole issue.