THB #340: Groundhog Day: Streaming Like It's 1999

May you live in interesting times.

So goes the ancient curse, which should be printed on every Starbucks cup that goes out in Hollywood these days.

Yesterday, there was a trio of stories that we given big headlines… but were in some ways, business as usual.

Warner Bros Discovery announced via leak that it would license some HBO shows to Netflix.

Of course, it quickly pushes to a sentence that doesn’t fit the history: “Such a deal would mark the first time in nearly a decade that HBO shows would exist on a rival SVOD service in the U.S.”

HBO Now didn’t exist 10 years ago… so HBO did not have an SVOD.

Here’s a deal that Warners Television did with Netflix in 2013.

Here are deals that Warners did with Amazon in 2012 and for India in 2017 and 2022.

Here’s when The Sopranos was licensed to A&E in 2005. Also licensed around then was Curb Your Enthusiasm to TV Guide Channel. (I am leaving off TBS and TNT deals since they are in the family.)

“But wait!,” you say. These are The Streaming Wars! This is completely different!!!

Uh… no… it’s not.

This is a return to form.