(Preview) Netflix Opportunities and Anxieties, Merger Hurdles to Come, Hollywood’s Endgame and What Comes Next
- Ben Thompson reads Netflix’s proposed Warner Bros. deal primarily as a response to YouTube. His blunt conclusion—Netflix is “scared shitless”—rests on YouTube overtaking Netflix in TV viewing two to three years ago while enjoying free, effectively unlimited content and deeper personalization.
- The deal challenges Netflix’s image as a disciplined company that had already won streaming. Warner Bros. has changed hands four times since 2001, yet Netflix is considering the legacy studio anyway; Andrew Sharp wonders whether this is opportunistic offense or evidence that Netflix is “way more vulnerable than anyone realized.”
- YouTube’s structural advantage extends beyond viewing share to ownership of the creator ecosystem. Creators seeking audience growth and monetization effectively have to publish there, giving YouTube a position it “owns” more completely than Netflix could ever own Hollywood content.
- Warner’s enduring catalog could function for Netflix like a record-label library. Friends, The Office and Seinfeld are repeatable “comfort food,” closer to songs replayed for decades than disposable new releases—and precisely the kind of durable originals Netflix has struggled to create.
- Thompson argues that Netflix now needs the cultural assets its own model helped devalue. Netflix “did more to kill the rewatchable movie than any entity on Earth,” while the mid-budget film market was largely destroyed; acquiring a studio with 75 years of hits, especially titles from 25 years ago, could strengthen engagement.
- A deeper catalog may sustain engagement without insulating Netflix from YouTube’s attention machine. Thompson accepts the Warner logic but doubts whether any library can counter a “never-ending avalanche” of popular user-generated content; his final complication is that YouTube sustains this abundance by keeping creators on a terrifying “hamster wheel.”
1. Netflix’s Warner pursuit reveals anxiety beneath its discipline
Sharp starts from disbelief: Netflix had become synonymous with restraint and fiscal discipline, while Warner Bros. had been sold four times since 2001. Ben joked that the acquisitions could be ranked by “how much of a disaster they were,” making Netflix’s interest seem almost inconceivable. Sharp had also recently ranked Netflix low in his “takeability” rankings because he thought “the game is over.”
Thompson’s headline conclusion is harsher: “Netflix is scared shitless by YouTube.” Netflix long celebrated its rising share of TV—roughly 3%, then 4%, 5% and 6%—but YouTube surpassed it two to three years ago and continued growing faster.
Sharp asks whether Netflix is pressing an advantage or reacting to weak original development, licensing costs and Hollywood’s reluctance to license. He now wonders whether the apparent streaming victor was “way more vulnerable than anyone realized”; Thompson stops short of calling it vulnerable.
2. YouTube changed the competitive market from television to attention
Thompson frames the conflict as “a story as old as the internet”: professional gatekeepers lose their exclusive role when anyone can publish. His own WordPress blog competes with other blogs, Twitter, The New York Times and local newspapers because “the only plane of competition left is time and attention.” YouTube therefore is unequivocally a Netflix competitor.
YouTube also has the better production system: content arrives effectively free, supply is unlimited and recommendations are “true personalization.” Creators seeking growth naturally publish there, while Google’s “enlightened selflessness” shares revenue with creators; Thompson describes the resulting content as effectively zero-marginal-cost because there is inventory. YouTube therefore owns creator video more completely than Netflix could own Hollywood.
3. Durable television libraries behave more like music catalogs
Thompson says professional video now looks “a little bit more like music than I ever appreciated.” Record labels survived Napster better than expected because songs become permanent library assets; Spotify can influence new hits, but listeners repeatedly return to older catalogs, leaving label power more “cemented and permanent.”
Television has comparable assets in Friends, The Office and Seinfeld: familiar “comfort food” that can run while viewers cook, scroll or take calls. Thompson’s specimen is replaying roughly 15 Seinfeld episodes during a 12-hour drive because he had already seen them enough to remain attentive to the road.
4. Netflix needs the rewatchability its model helped erase
Sharp’s thesis is that television became more disposable once weekly distribution gave way to a “river of content”: viewers finish something, forget it and immediately encounter the next release. He also notes that Netflix originals have struggled to become enduring comfort viewing.
The sharpest irony is in Thompson’s Netflix article: Spotify’s Rewatchables podcast is becoming Netflix-exclusive in January, even though Thompson argues that Netflix “did more to kill the rewatchable movie than any entity on Earth.” The mid-budget movie market was “more or less destroyed” as Hollywood’s ecosystem changed.
For Thompson, that makes Warner strategically legible: Netflix needs content to keep people engaged, and Warner represents a studio that has produced hits for 75 years, including highly reusable titles from roughly 25 years ago. Buying the catalog could provide cultural durability that Netflix has not reliably manufactured itself.
5. Warner is an engagement hedge, not a demonstrated YouTube moat
Thompson understands the acquisition logic but doubts whether it insulates Netflix from YouTube’s disruption threat. Warner content may keep people engaged, yet Sharp likewise asks how much it actually moves the needle against YouTube’s “never-ending avalanche of user-generated content”—especially when YouTube already consistently beats Netflix in minutes watched on television sets.
Thompson closes on YouTube’s hidden cost. He cites Asianometry’s Johnny and says he has heard similar concerns from MKBHD and other creators: an “overwhelming, inescapable sense” of being trapped on a hamster wheel that never stops. The machine’s abundant supply is structurally powerful, but creator dependence is part of how that advantage is maintained.
Full transcript
Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, Andrew. I'm girded.
Oh, boy.
Is that the word? Girded for battle.
Your loins are girded? Sure.
Yes. We have both written about Netflix and Warner Bros. this week. I think there are excellent points on both sides and some possible points of contention.
Hmm.
I would imagine there are some points of contention. We're gonna talk through every aspect of the Netflix–Warner Bros. proposed merger, and we're gonna begin with John at UVA, who sent this email on Friday night. He wrote, “Ben and Andrew, my friends and I found out about the Netflix–Warner Bros. deal, and our immediate reaction was, ‘Devastated. We have to wait till Monday for the Ben Thompson take on this.’”
He included a picture of him and his two friends at an ice cream shop with their heads in their hands, really laying on the drama. Just tremendous nerd behavior that made my Friday night. So I wanna start with a thank-you to John and his friends, counting the hours until Stratechery published on Monday morning. Any thoughts on that note?
I did do an emergency podcast with Michael Nathanson about this deal on Sunday.
Mm-hmm.
And we could have gotten it out on Monday, but I'm not gonna lie: This picture in the message made me feel like, no, I need to get my take out first. Then I dropped the interview on Tuesday. Turns out I can be affected and influenced, so yes, thank you. Thank you for the note. It was very funny.
Absolutely. As we talk through this deal, we did get a request for a good old-fashioned antitrust argument.
I know it's been a while.
I wanna put a pin in the regulatory angle at the top and focus first on the Netflix side. It's funny because you mentioned the Netflix–Warner Bros. possibility maybe 6 weeks ago in a Daily Update, and when I was reading that Daily Update, my honest reaction at the time was, “Man, I'm surprised Ben is even dignifying these rumors,” because Netflix, I mean, they've become known for their restraint and fiscal discipline over the last couple of years, and Warner Bros. has been sold 4 times since 2001, and it just—
Right, and it—
—seemed like a crazy idea.
You could rank all the acquisitions by how much of a disaster they were.
Exactly. And so Netflix going that direction seemed inconceivable, but here we are. So question number 1 for you: What have we learned about Netflix and its position in the market over the last week? What do you take away from their interest here?
I have bad news for you, Andrew.
Oh, boy.
Because I think the biggest takeaway cuts right back to where we're going to have the biggest point of contention on this podcast.
My biggest takeaway from this is that Netflix is scared shitless by YouTube.
Yeah.
They can feel their share. You could go back a number of years. Netflix is inexorably growing as a share of TV.
Mm-hmm.
This is one of those things—I should probably go back and cite all these—but I've read every Netflix investor letter and their comments to the media. Netflix's investor calls are hilarious, by the way. They used to have interviews where 1 analyst was allowed to go on and ask them questions at the earnings call as a stand-in for everyone.
Yeah.
Now they do have a group of analysts, but they're very controlling about this whole process. That has always been interesting to me. But there was this ongoing sense. They include charts of their increasing share of TV, and part of that was to show how well they're doing, but also part of it was to show how much potential they still had.
“It's just a single-digit share.” It's 3%, then it's 4%.
So much room to grow.
Then it's 5%.
Sure, yeah.
Then it's 6%. The problem with those charts is that there is another entity that is growing faster than them and surpassed them 2 to 3 years ago.
Even more inexorably.
And that is YouTube.
Yeah.
I'm talking specifically about share of TV.
Mm-hmm.
This isn't mobile. YouTube's actually far, far larger. We're talking about TV specifically.
Yeah.
The thing on your wall.
Total minutes watched on TV, YouTube now beats Netflix consistently.
It's not just that there is another entity that is doing better on the graphic that Netflix was so proud of for so long.
Mm-hmm.
That entity has a fundamental structural advantage, which is that they get their content for free.
It's unlimited content that they're able to serve, sure.
That's right, and it's totally personalized. Netflix can talk about, “Oh, we have data, and then we can personalize your f—” If you want true personalization, that's what YouTube is.
Mm-hmm.
Look, I could monologue for a while here, so feel free to jump in.
No, I'm enjoying it.
What I've enjoyed about this deal personally—and this actually, I owe Michael Nathanson for it because I think this crystallized for me while we were talking—
Mm-hmm.
And then I put it in my article, then didn't post the interview until the next day, so sorry, Michael.
Sorry, Michael, and thank you, Michael. I love any interview you do with Michael Nathanson. Always a great podcast.
Netflix is always—
I was delighted.
—a core piece of it, so we had to do this one.
Well, you revisit the same Netflix argument that you've been having with Michael Nathanson for about 7 years, so it's—
I know.
—interesting to chart the progress of the takes over time. I enjoy that you kick things off that way. I will just note, before you finish: I did the takeability rankings with tech companies last month and had a bunch of fun. Netflix was low on that list, and they were low on that list—
Oh, regret on your side, huh?
Well, a little bit, because, look, in my mind, the—
You thought they graduated—
The game is over.
—from the take game, yeah.
The game is over. There are lots of arguments about Netflix going back to your conversations with Michael Nathanson, and they won, was the way I saw it a month ago. The fact that they are interested in this deal, I find myself wondering: Is this a great opportunity where they can press their advantage? Or are they panicked about some of the failures they've had developing original content of their own, the ongoing costs, licensing, the unwillingness of others in Hollywood to license content, and, of course, the threat to Google? I've come away from the last week wondering whether they were way more vulnerable than anyone realized.
I don't know that I'd put it as vulnerable, but just zooming out, let me get to my insight that this is a story as old as the internet.
Mm-hmm.
Which is the threat to professional media from the masses like me, right?
Sure.
I know people now would consider me a professional media creator or whatever it might be. But I'm still a guy on a WordPress blog at the end of the day.
Mm-hmm.
There's just this aspect: These were gatekeepers, in both a positive and a negative sense. If you wanted to write something that people read, you had to get into the newspaper, because how were people going to access it? What are you going to do? Print it out like a crazy person on the street corner and start passing out pamphlets?
Mm-hmm.
You needed to actually get the content into people's hands so they could read it, and newspapers were the way that you did that.
Sure.
And do letters to the editor. That's how I started, writing letters to the editor in college. Then I got invited to be an opinion columnist.
I wrote an angry letter to the Boston College student paper, and they ended up publishing it, and I was officially a published author.
I love it.
And so the internet made that different. Anyone can publish. I actually think one of my better articulations of aggregation theory was in 2014. Number 1, it speaks to the power of branding.
I think I've referenced this: “Economic Power in the Age of Abundance” is the name of the title. Not so catchy.
It didn’t really stick. But it was about this: I think I put in there a couple of graphs or drawings that were like, “Look, I have readers in, at that time, I think it was, 150 countries.” Now I think I might—I don’t know if I have North Korea yet, but I haven’t looked for a while—but I have readers in literally every country in the world, or basically every country in the world. I shouldn't screw up my labor.
Hmm.
I have subscribers everywhere.
Mm-hmm.
For anyone who reads me, every minute spent reading me is a minute not spent reading something else. That something else could be other bloggers. It could be Twitter. It could be The New York Times. It could be your local newspaper. This speaks to the point that the only plane of competition left is time and attention.
Mm-hmm.
I’m not The New York Times. They are a publicly listed company. They make a lot of money. I’ve raved endlessly about how they’ve handled the transition, especially over the last 10 years, just from a business perspective, setting aside all the editorial stuff, really brilliantly. They’ve also sort of cleaned up the entire space because everyone just subscribes to them first. So their success is very much at the cost of a lot of other newspapers. It’s funny how—
Including The Washington Post, for example.
Yeah.
Yeah. No one holds them responsible for everyone else getting decimated.
Mm-hmm.
And they are one of the chief entities that ought to be held responsible. But the plane of competition is shifting, and this is a core problem. Again, I’m talking about newspapers, but this sort of matters everywhere.
Mm-hmm.
And it certainly matters in media. YouTube is absolutely a competitor for Netflix, and I’m willing to go to the mat fighting with you about this point.
Yeah.
So, in that context, what do you do?
Hmm.
Because YouTube owns that supply. Netflix is doing these deals with Spotify. This is how you opened your piece, which I want you to articulate your thesis on in a little bit, but with some of The Ringer’s content, for example. Is it professional content?
A feeble attempt.
Is it whatever?
Yeah. I don’t really know what that deal is supposed to be.
If you create video content, you do it on YouTube.
Yeah.
That’s where the audience is if you want to get any sort of growth, if you want to have any sort of breakthrough, and they monetize you. One of the brilliant parts of YouTube is how, from the very beginning, they’ve helped creators monetize. It is actually a beautiful manifestation of Google’s—what’s the word?—enlightened selflessness, where they’ve shared a lot of revenue with creators all along. And does that mean their revenue is actually zero-marginal-cost content? Yes, I think it does, because there’s inventory.
Yeah.
But setting that aside, they own that space. They own that space more than Netflix could ever dream of owning Hollywood content, even if this deal goes through. So what do you do? What I think has been revealed over the last, I would say, 10 years or so is that what distinguishes professional content at its best is that it’s a little bit more like music than I ever appreciated.
Hmm.
I wrote an article differentiating between different types of media and why different industries played out differently with these internet dynamics. I did print, and I did TV and movies—they might have been together, I can’t remember—and I did music. The thing about music was that I was pretty early on saying that the labels are, all things considered, doing pretty good.
Yeah.
They’re the poster child for the internet ruining their business model. Napster comes along, all that sort of thing. But why? The reason is because with music, yes, of course, new releases matter. Spotify’s ability to create hits or make people aware of new things is very powerful and useful, and they are making real money selling access to help that happen.
Mm-hmm.
But at the end of the day, I get my Spotify Unwrapped—
They’re making money from Biggie Smalls and Tupac and all sorts of music we still listen to 30 years later.
—and it’s like, “What did you listen to this year?” It’s ’90s alternative. That’s what I listened to, right? You listen to the same songs again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. As you get older, it gets worse.
Mm-hmm.
The thing about music is, once a song is published, it’s part of the library. There’s a bit where the power of the labels—it’s not perfect, it’s not absolute—but their power is more cemented and permanent than you might think because of the control they have of libraries.
Yeah.
There actually are some shows that are like that on TV. You have Friends, you have The Office, you have Seinfeld. It’s really interesting how a lot of these sorts of shows don’t get made anymore. But these are shows that you come back to as comfort food, again and again. They’re content that people enjoy. I would like to be a music person and be into the new bands, and I just don’t have the time and mental energy to do that. And frankly—
Neither do I, which I think signifies we’re officially old.
We’re the worst.
It’s like, “Listen to a new album. Come on.”
But the great thing—just leaning into how washed we are—gives us sort of real expertise in this area, right?
Yeah.
I’m famously not a TV watcher, right? I’m a big TV watcher, but if it’s sports. I will watch any sort of sports content. But I can recognize and appreciate that just having Friends on in the background, maybe you’re watching, maybe you’re not, is pretty great. That’s distinct from, “I’m going to watch this new show, and I’m going to lean forward, and I’m going to lock in and sort of see what’s happening,” versus, “Oh, I’m watching the show and I’m also scrolling on my phone,” or I’m making dinner or whatever it might be, or someone calls me, and it’s fine.
Yeah.
I can pause it, or I don’t have to pause it because I’ve seen the show like 57 times. I went to Canada fishing this summer. On the drive back, me and my buddy, who used to watch every episode of Seinfeld on Thursdays in high school, put on Season 7, which I think was the all-time great season, and just plowed through like 15 episodes on this 12-hour drive.
That sounds fantastic.
It was awesome. It was so great, right? And guess what? I was an attentive driver on the road because I didn’t need to pay close attention—I’ve seen all these episodes—but it was also so delightful. We were actually recalling certain things from high school that were tied to this. It was like a connection to it.
Were you a Seinfeld guy or a Simpsons guy growing up?
Seinfeld. I was a—
Me too.
Seinfeld guy. Yeah.
Look, we were destined to podcast together. I was a Seinfeld fan as well. I listened to an interview with Julia Louis-Dreyfus earlier this week, and as I was listening to the interview, I found myself thinking, “You know what? I need to revisit Seinfeld,” because I have very fond memories of growing up watching Seinfeld. It was syndicated when I was growing up, so I would watch it every day at 5:30.
Yeah, TBS or whatever. Yep.
And that’s the sort of content—they’re not buying Seinfeld, but that’s the sort of content that Netflix is acquiring if this deal goes through with Warner Bros. And this is where I come back to the struggles that Netflix has had with its own original efforts, because they’ve been unable to develop the sort of comfort food that people come back to over and over again on the Netflix platform. So it’s actually useful.
Well, give me your thesis. You talked about the flattening of TV and, overall, what happened? Why can’t they do this?
Well, I would say that everything is now more disposable than it was 25 years ago, when there were more traditional distribution mechanisms. You would watch Seinfeld on TV every Thursday, for instance. And now there’s just this river of content. As soon as I watch stuff, I forget it, and then there’s something new on.
And then you try to convince me to watch more TV. It’s ridiculous.
Yeah.
Well, it's enjoyable. Look, we're all just waiting to die here, trying to fill the time.
Oh my God.
I enjoy myself watching TV, but I feel like it's been rendered less meaningful than it once was, and particularly with movies. I actually cited an email that Steven sent us. The market for mid-budget movies has been more or less destroyed.
Yep.
So my article about Netflix this week started with the irony that The Rewatchables podcast, as part of that Spotify deal, will be exclusive to Netflix beginning in January, and Netflix and the emergence of Netflix did more to kill the rewatchable movie than any entity on Earth. The ecosystem in Hollywood looks completely different than it did even 10 or 15 years ago.
What that creates is this new environment. Netflix needs to serve content to keep people engaged, and it actually makes sense to go back to a studio that has been making hits for 75 years and particularly has a lot of hits from 25 years ago that may help keep people engaged. I understand the logic of this move from that perspective.
I do find myself wondering whether it is in fact any sort of insulation from the disruption threat that YouTube poses with a never-ending avalanche of user-generated content that happens to be pretty popular. I don't watch YouTube on my TV, but clearly lots of people do. I'm not sure how much Warner Bros. content actually moves the needle as they try to fend off that threat.
Well, the thing—this is sort of the contrast. The thing with YouTube, and I'm more familiar with this from the creator side just because I've talked to creators and, you know, Johnny, who is a part of the Stratechery Bundle—Asianometry is sort of amazing, and I feel bad for him sometimes because every YouTube creator you talk to, I've heard similar things from MKBHD, and I've talked to a fair number of other ones off the record.
The overwhelming, inescapable sense that you are on a hamster wheel and you just have to keep going is kind of terrifying.
All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at email@sharptech.fm.