Netflix Warner Bros. Takeover: Media Consolidation in the Age of Streaming

Do you remember when you cut the cord?

I do. It was around 2015, maybe? I was so proud of finally escaping that $103-a-month cable bill, breaking free from the bundle that forced me to pay for 200 channels I never watched just to get HBO and ESPN.

I switched to Netflix for $7.99. A few months later, I added Hulu for $7.99. By 2016, I splurged on HBO Now for $14.99 (or was it HBO Go? HBO Max? I gave up on keeping track of all their rebranding shenanigans).

My big total? $30.97. I felt like a genius.

Fast forward to December 2025, and Netflix just announced it’s buying Warner Bros. Discovery for $83 billion.

That means Netflix is absorbing HBO, Max, Warner Bros. Studios, and DC Comics (the one with all the non-Marvel superheros). Oh, and the entire Harry Potter franchise.

If this deal goes through, your streaming bills will likely jump significantly. But there’s something bigger and scarier happening beneath the surface.

When Netflix owns both the biggest streaming platform AND one of the largest studios producing content for it, you lose the ability to vote with your wallet. Can’t afford Netflix’s price hike? Where else are you going to watch the next season of that HBO show you love? 

Nowhere. They own it.

Hollywood unions are raising alarms too. The Writers Guild is demanding regulators block the deal, warning that fewer buyers means less competition for creative work and more algorithmic control over what even gets made. ^[1]

We thought streaming would break the cable monopoly. Instead, we just gave tech companies time to build something much, much worse.

Buckle up. This story gets depressing fast.

How Streaming Became the Thing It Was Supposed to Destroy

The promise of streaming was simple: break the cable monopoly, give consumers choice, let people pay only for what they watch.

That lasted about seven years. Barely long enough for a kid to finish elementary school.

Then the media companies realized something that pharmaceutical giants, airlines, and telecom monopolies figured out decades ago: consolidation makes you obscenely rich, and competition is expensive.

Now, don’t get me wrong: media consolidation didn’t start with streaming. It’s been in the playbook for nearly 30 years. What’s happening now with Netflix and Warner Bros. is just the latest chapter in a much longer story of corporate merger mania. To understand why this deal feels inevitable, you need to see the pattern that’s been repeating since the 1990s.

The turning point was 1996. President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, sweeping away decades of regulations that prevented media companies from swallowing each other whole. ^[2] The law lifted caps on station ownership. Take Clear Channel for example (a media holding company now known as iHeart Radio); it went from owning 40 radio stations to over 850, homogenizing every local market in America. ^[2]

The logic was always the same: bigger companies create “efficiencies” that lower prices for consumers.

Except prices never went down.

By 2011, six corporations controlled 90% of American media. ^[3] Every major TV network, film studio, cable channel. Six companies.

Then streaming arrived. For a brief moment between 2010 and 2019, it looked like genuine disruption. Netflix licensed content from everyone and kept prices low. But as studios realized Netflix was eating their lunch, they pulled their content back and launched their own services.

This kicked off the “Streaming Wars.” Suddenly there were a dozen platforms: Amazon, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Apple TV+. Each one hoarding content behind exclusive paywalls. And that’s not even mentioning the hordes of smaller streamers that have come and gone. Remember Quibi? Yeah me neither.

What looked like fragmentation was actually the setup for consolidation.

Disney bought Fox for $71 billion in 2019. ^[4] One of the six major studios vanished. Disney needed scale to compete in streaming, so it absorbed an entire competitor. Regulators approved it.

AT&T gave up on media in 2022 and spun off WarnerMedia, which merged with Discovery to create Warner Bros. Discovery. ^[5] The new company was saddled with $55 billion in debt and immediately started slashing: canceling shows, shelving completed movies for tax write-offs, desperately trying to make the economics work.

They couldn’t. The debt was too high. The cable revenue was collapsing.

Enter Netflix, seeing an opportunity to end the streaming wars permanently. Not by winning the competition, but by eliminating it altogether.

What Netflix Is Buying (And What It’s Dumping)

Here’s the clever part: Netflix doesn’t want all of Warner Bros. Discovery. Just the bits that fit its core business model.