Our previous arguments against Netflix as the right fit for a Warner Bros. acquisition now look even stronger. Netflix never needed Warner’s library to compete. It needed the market to be kept exactly as it is: fragmented, weaker, and miles behind.
That helps explain the latest round of Netflix price hikes, which, by our calculation, would leave the company with an eye-watering $40-a-month premium price tag by the middle of the next decade. Why anyone would pay that for Emily in Paris, and its ilk, evades us.
Indeed, in under two months since insisting a Warner deal would give consumers “more content for less,” Netflix is doing the precise opposite—because it can.
With roughly 325 million subscribers and no true rival within striking distance, Netflix flexes the kind of market dominance that turns “consumer choice” into a poor joke. Prices will continue to go up, and subscribers will lazily stay put.
The old Hollywood bargain has been torched in the process, too.
Consumers will surely continue to pay more, but writers, actors, and directors are paid less through the erosion of residuals and the casualization of creative labor. Netflix has built a commanding position not just on scale, but on the weakening of everyone around it: competitors, customers, and talent alike.
That is why the Warner Bros. deal was never the right prize for Netflix. It would not have produced a better market. It would have deepened the imbalance. And now, with the merger dead, Netflix is showing exactly what streaming supremacy looks like: higher prices, lower obligations, and no reason to pretend otherwise.
