As the dust settles on one of the biggest media deals Hollywood has seen in years, the real unpacking can begin.
Netflix’s roughly $110 billion AUD swoop on Warner Bros Discovery has ended months of speculation, backroom manoeuvring and rival bids from Comcast and Paramount Skydance. The streamer has landed a content vault spanning almost a century of studio history, from Harry Potter and Looney Tunes to Game of Thrones, Friends, Succession, Sex and the City, and beyond.
Now comes the autopsy. Why this deal, why now, and what does it actually mean for audiences and the industry?
For media veteran and CEO of The Meliora Company, Clive Dickens, the answer starts with a word few consumers would argue with. Simplification.
“If you think about the proliferation of paid streaming services and paid subscriptions that we all have to invest our money or time in, it’s gone up and up and up over the last 10 years, and when you add them all up, they’re now considerably more expensive than paid TV was at its peak,” Dickens told Mediaweek.
What the eventual bundled pricing looks like is still anyone’s guess, but Dickens is confident it will not simply stack one premium on top of another.
“Who knows what they’ll charge for a consolidated service, but it’s unlikely they will take HBO Max’s price point and simply add it to Netflix’s,” he said.
And for households straddling multiple platforms, the logic is already apparent.
“The reality is, if you’re paying to watch Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and White Lotus on HBO Max, and you’re paying to watch Emily in Paris and the latest series of The Diplomat on Netflix, you won’t need to pay for both,” he said. “So, for the consumer, this is a consolidation that needed to happen because it’s getting expensive and confusing.”
In other words, fewer apps, fewer passwords, fewer monthly hits to the card. As Dickens put it bluntly, “You’re toggling between applications all the time. And we should expect to see more of this consolidation over the coming years, because there were just too many apps and companies, and it’s unsustainable.”
Clive Dickens
From competing with sleep to competing for every minute
To understand why Netflix pushed so hard for Warner Bros now, Dickens reaches back to a line that once perfectly captured the streamer’s early dominance.
“At one point, about seven or eight years ago, Reed Hastings (the former CEO) was asked, Who is Netflix’s competitor? And at the time, he went on record saying, ‘Netflix competes with sleep.’”
Back then, the competition really was bedtime. “What he meant was that most people were binge-watching shows, going ‘just one more episode, just one more episode’, then we would realise it’s suddenly 10 pm,” Dickens said.
That era is over.
“This signals that they are no longer competing with sleep. They are now competing with any time that you and I do not spend on Netflix.”
Netflix now has more than 300 million paying households globally, which Dickens says represents a scale hard to comprehend truly. “Right now, they have more than 300 million paying households worldwide, and each household has two to four users. So really, that means there are over a billion users.”
That first billion, he said, was the easy part. “At the moment, a billion people on the planet use Netflix. Amassing that has taken them many years. But it’s going to be really hard to reach the next billion because the next billion either have another service they prefer or don’t want to spend that much money.”
Those first billion users also share some common traits. “ They are the more high-end households on the planet,” Dickens said.
“The next billion people either have different habits, different languages, different cultures, different religions, different locations, different preferences, or they’re not as into sitting down and watching 10 hours of scripted drama and probably don’t know who George Clooney is.”
Instead of chasing that harder next wave, Netflix is now turning inward.
“Those billion people exist across America, Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, predominantly France and Germany, and predominantly the sort of top, the G8 countries,” he said.
“The next billion will be very, very hard. So, instead, it is always easier to go back and make your customers spend more time and money with you than to find a new customer.”
And that, Dickens argues, is where Warner Bros truly fits. “For Netflix, they are thinking we need actually to find more time with the first billion.”
Which leads directly to the new pitch to consumers.
“So therefore, it’s much easier to come back to you and me and say, actually, why don’t you spend more time on Netflix? You don’t need HBO Max. You don’t need that other service. More time on Netflix. More time listening to Netflix or Spotify. It’s more time playing games on Netflix.”
“So whatever time we’re spending on Netflix now, they want you to spend more.”
The White Lotus
AI is the real long-term threat
For all the noise around rival streamers and subscriber numbers, Dickens argues the real existential pressure on Netflix is coming from somewhere else entirely.
“Another reason the next billion is going to be very hard is AI,” he said, pointing to how quickly audiences are shifting from consuming content to generating it.
He cites Suno as the clearest proof point.
“It’s the number one AI music platform in the world. It allows users to generate and upload songs onto the app,” Dickens said.
“They announced that the number of songs uploaded to Suno every single month is equal to all the songs on Spotify.” The behaviour shift is profound. “In other words, people are spending time generating their own music, and people are spending time generating their own films. People are spending time generating their own stuff.”
That explosion of user-generated content, powered by AI, goes a long way toward explaining why Netflix made its Warner Bros. play now.
“This is why the Netflix deal is also due to the impact of AI and the time we’re all spending on it,” Dickens said, whether that is “generating songs, generating videos, looking for recipes, or chatting with our chatbots”.
At its core, he argues, this is not just a tech arms race.
“This is all about the changing consumption of what we call media, and now AI-produced content is a threat to legacy and traditional media.” In that light, the Warner Bros acquisition looks less like overreach and more like protection, a move to lock in irreplaceable IP and long-form storytelling at scale.
Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos has described the deal as a “rare opportunity” to help define the next century of entertainment. Dickens sees something slightly starker beneath that optimism.
It is not just about growth anymore. It is about survival in a media economy being quietly reshaped by machines, not streamers. The billion-user race is still on, but the rules have changed.