Warner Bros Discovery Merger Gets Dumber As Layoffs Continue And Company Licenses Streaming Content To… Netflix

By now we've well established that the series of mergers that began with AT&T's doomed acquisition of Time Warner and ended with Time Warner's subsequent spin off and fusion with Discovery was some of the dumbest, most pointless business" exercises ever conceived by man.

The idiotic saga burned through hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than 50,000 people lose their jobs, killed off numerous popular brands (like Mad Magazine), created oceans of animosity among creatives (pissed at a company that can somehow spend billions on merger debt and bad ideas yet is routinely too cheap to pay residuals or writers), culminating in a streaming service full of holes that's arguably dumber and of lower quality than when the whole thing started.

The fun continues as Warner Bros. Discovery tries to make financial sense of the pointless deal and recoup debt, it continues to fire folks across its cable division.

When the press talks about the layoffs and chaos generated by a series of completely pointless mergers the blame always falls on ambiguities like a weakening macroeconomy" and not, say, blistering incompetence by the fail upwards trust fund brunch-lords in the c-suite, obsessed with setting their brands on fire just for a tax break and a fat bonus.

But there's been a new wrinkle as Warner Bros. Discovery desperately tries to regain its financial footing, it's now planning to license the content it spent billions of dollars to acquire to a chief competitor, Netflix:

According to sources, this is a financial move. We hear HBO veterans pushed back against the plan but corporate financial consideration won out.Insiders stress the deal is not closed and may still fall apart, but regardless, it marks a major strategy shift across the premium pay landscape. The shows are understood to be set to be distributed on a non-exclusive basis, which would still allow them to stream on Max.

Back in 2013, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos noted that his company's goal was to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." As media reporter Pete Kafka jokes, little did Sarandos know that a series of completely idiotic mergers, culminating in the lobotomization of the HBO brand, would ultimately force the company to shovel their freshly built streaming content back Netflix's direction:

This will have short term benefits: Warner Bros. Discovery gets a cash infusion to help rebalance itself after a series of dumb mergers, and consumers get access to some HBO content without having to pay for HBO. But that doesn't make going through all this trouble to build a premiere streaming brand, only to trash that brand and shovel your content over to a primary competitor, any less stupid longer term.

It's genuinely hilarious to me that you can read through entire articles on this stuff and never once find even the faintest context that any of this was avoidable or that executive incompetence and an obsession with pointless consolidation played a role. Each shoe drops without any causation, and nobody in the c-suite learns absolutely anything from the experience because they were paid handsomely for the failure.