Why does Netflix want to buy Warner Bros? To copy, not kill, traditional TV

By Anthony Smith and Laura Minor for The Conversation

Salford (UK): The recent news that Netflix has agreed to buy part of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) for USD 83 billion (£61.8 billion), followed by Paramount Global’s hostile counterbid to acquire WBD in its entirety for USD 108.4 billion (£81 billion), has triggered shockwaves through Hollywood and the wider entertainment industry.

Initial responses – and passionate outcries – have largely centred on fears over job cuts, subscription fee rises, anti-trust concerns regarding the increased market share either bid would create, and the potential negative impact that Netflix’s acquisition might have on the future of the film industry.

While these issues are no doubt important, one aspect of the Netflix deal has been relatively overlooked: the streamer’s decision to cut out Discovery’s portfolio of cable channels from its agreed acquisition of WBD. But this element of the deal is significant for what it reveals about the current state, and future, of the television industry.

Netflix’s decision to excise Discovery’s cable channels from the agreement indicates its desire to avoid ownership of the legacy TV infrastructure of broadcast, cable and satellite television. It also reflects the broader trend of linear TV businesses becoming less attractive to media corporations as audiences continue to migrate online. At first glance, Netflix’s exclusion of Discovery seems to confirm what we’ve been told for over a decade: streaming is killing traditional TV.

Since launching House of Cards in 2013, Netflix has cultivated an image as television’s great disruptor, a tech company that rendered the old broadcast model obsolete. What’s more, this is a reputation that journalistic and scholarly debate has often burnished.

But as we argue in our new book, Television Goes Back to the Future: Rethinking TV’s Streaming Revolution, this narrative of revolution is overstated and oversold. Beneath the rhetoric, streamers have persistently adopted, adapted, and often directly copied the conventions of legacy television.

The Netflix-WBD deal is no exception to this trend. Netflix’s own announcement celebrates combining its “innovation” with Warner Bros’ “century-long legacy of world-class storytelling”. Yet in potentially acquiring HBO, Netflix is set to buy the very cable TV innovator it originally modelled its prestige drama strategy on.

This deal, then, represents less of a break from television history than prevailing narratives suggest.

Back to the evergreen future

This is evident in the rationale underpinning Netflix’s aims to acquire WBD’s vast back catalogue of film and television. For decades, channels like TBS, TNT, and in the UK, Gold and Dave, have built their business models on syndicated repeats of evergreen programming, such as studio sitcoms and police procedurals.

Streaming platforms have adopted the same approach. For example, both Suits and Lost recently became streaming hits years after their original linear TV runs ended.

When Netflix UK recently announced Friends would be leaving the platform at the end of the year, subscribers responded with uproar, revealing just how much “reruns” matter to streaming audiences. The Warner catalogue – which includes Friends – offers Netflix a ready-made library to meet this demand.

Amazon’s USD 8.5 billion purchase of MGM in 2022 reflected a similar calculation, with the studio’s library alone valued at USD 3.4 billion. What this tells us is that the film and TV back catalogue, long the foundation of cable television, has become equally foundational to streaming.

Should the Netflix-WBD deal succeed, it would represent another step in what industry observers call “the great rebundling”. Under the American cable model that solidified in the 1980s, viewers pay a monthly fee for a large package of channels rather than selecting them individually.

Streaming initially fragmented this model, leaving viewers to juggle competing subscriptions (and frequently cancel them). In response, platforms have begun consolidating content and brands in ways that echo the cable bundle model.

This pattern is already evident in Disney’s ongoing integration of Hulu within the Disney+ app, offering US consumers both services as part of a bundle deal. Industry commentators predict Netflix will take a similar approach with HBO.

Media analyst Rua Aguete foresees that Netflix will eventually operate as “a global gateway” for viewers, with HBO sitting as a “premium content brand within that ecosystem”, allowing Netflix to offer both services under a single subscription.

But Netflix’s embrace of traditional television practices is not new, nor limited to bundling and the reliance on much-loved TV classics. The platform spent years positioning itself against appointment viewing: watch what you want, when you want.

Yet as we show in Television Goes Back to the Future, the platform has increasingly embraced live events that create shared, simultaneous experiences in the long tradition of broadcast TV: WWE wrestling, NFL matches and comedy specials like The Roast of Tom Brady.

Netflix’s introduction of an ad-supported tier in 2022 marked a further retreat from its original promise of uninterrupted viewing – a direct adoption of commercial television’s long-established funding model.

Similar continuities are evident in how Netflix operates across borders. Streaming was supposed to make borders irrelevant: one global library, available everywhere. Instead, as media scholar Ramon Lobato argues, Netflix can be seen as “a series of national services linked through a common platform architecture”.

The company establishes local production offices, hires regional executives, and commissions programming calibrated to national audiences, resulting in culturally specific originals such as the UK’s Adolescence, Spain’s Money Heist, and South Korea’s Squid Game. Through such practices, Netflix, in some ways, mimics the practices and infrastructures of national broadcasting systems.

Should Netflix’s deal with WBD go through, it would represent not a departure from Netflix’s recent trajectory, but its logical culmination. For all its disruptive rhetoric, the platform has spent the past decade embracing the very conventions it once positioned itself against.

Purchasing WBD would simply accelerate this process, enabling Netflix to further adapt the models and logics of longstanding network and cable TV practices to online contexts.

( Anthony Smith is a lecturer in Television Theory, University of Salford and Laura Minor is a lecturer in Television Studies, University of Salford)