It’s kind of nice for us normies, to be fair.

Corporate consolidation is ALWAYS bad in the long run. There will be more rent seeking behavior as a result of this. The product will get worse and you will be asked to pay more for it.

Personally, it feels like video streaming going the way of audio streaming with more content for the price. Just this merge would greatly increase Netflix’s catalog size. I’m okay with it, personally.

I’m not sure I have time to go into this completely but what you are describing as good has objectively been a death sentence to tons of musicians. Spotify is the biggest music streaming platform right? Did you know that they actually charge artists to be on their radios (you know the things they use dark patterns in their apps to drive you to)? You literally can’t be in the prime spots for visibility on the app without paying a tax to the company. Did you know that the music industry basically coerces artists into a system of indentured servitude where they are stuck in a debt trap with the large mega studios that got their album made (they also retain no rights to the master and essentially do not own their own work)? That price comes from companies squeezing out the variety in the music we hear to be just the shit that bangs the hardest in the most inoffensive and generic way to the most people. Depressing for that to be how art is made no? This is what Netflix is ALREADY doing. Rest assured your “value” will be realized in more ads and membership tiers they can stick on top of content they previous had to pay exorbitant licensing costs on. Rest assure it will be more middle of the road slop that Netflix is already famous for because its keep and just good enough people will watch it even though it is devoid of all kind of unique character. This merger will hurt the artists who pump out your favorite shows today. There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind.

I guess personally don’t really see enshitification happening to things with a producer-distribution model. Besides music, there are podcasts, app/play store, and video games which never really went through enshitification where I’m like forced to watch more ads, so it isn’t likely video will either, at least in my opinion. Amazon prime tried it with adding a lot of ads and people just stopped watching Amazon shows, entirely. Like music, there’s just too much content to watch out there.

Apps and video games have been thoroughly enshittified, at least on mobile. Amazon Prime is also still very successful and people have not stopped watching Amazon shows entirely.

I mean maybe like a year ago, for a short time, Amazon suddenly had multiple 4 minute ads in a video. It was unwatchable so I just dropped the platform entirely. I was in the middle of watching Vox Machina. When I came back a few months later, even though the ads were gone, the damage was already done.

Sure, that’s fair, but 1) you’re just one user out of many thousands, and 2) stuff like “multiple 4 minute ads in a video” is usually rolled out through A/B testing, so many users probably never saw it.