IIRC, from when I did my MBA, people who belong on the board of companies, as well as all the C-suite and some levels below have to inform with months in advance when they are going to buy or sell stock on the companies on whose boards they sit, or where they work.

If both of you still want to believe in a cospiracy theory, a more plausble one is that they either bought stock through a front-person, or advised some people close to them to "buy warner stock", or somesuch.

In the end, netflix needs warner more than paramount or Comcast does as:

Netflix does not have a BIG movie studio with DECADES of experience (and decades of back catalogue), paramount has, well, paramount, and comcast has universal.
Netflix does not have a BIG TV production studiowith DECADES of experience (and decades of back catalogue), while paramount has CBS productions and Comcast has NBC productions.
Netflix does not have a plethora of open TV and cable channels where to sydicate content, while Comcas and paramount do...

That extra need demands an extra premium.

Maybe the kids at warner can teach netflix a thing ot two:

- How to make each seasson of a show come exactly one year after the last seasson.
- Release a movie in an adequate theather exclusive Window, perhaps smaller than the current WB one, but muach, much longer than netflix's one
- Dump 2 or 3 episodes of a TV series at once for the premiere, and then drop the rest week by week to build momentum and word of mouth, so that good series have more chance to survive
- to license their old content to cable/tv channels both domesticaly (CW, wink wink) and internationally.
- That if you kill a tv series, it may behoove you to "gift" the creators of said series with enough money to make a cheapo TV-movie to close all the loose ends and resolve all cliffhangers as a gesture of good will to the audience, both of the series, and in general, lest people not watch your show until there are more than one seassons, because they got burned too many times watching series that went to nowhere because they got cancelled on a whim.

Less than 50 years ago, AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile and was told by the regulators to pound sand.

but the least overlap was with netflix.
Netflix and warner only overlap in streaming
Paramount, Comcast and warner also overlap in streaming.

Meanwhile paramount and Comcast also have a major Movie Studio business, a TV production businness, tentpole franchises, and TV/Cable Channels.

Way too much overlap both in the USoA and Outside the USoA. even if you say that in the USoA the cards were stacked in favour of Paramount, outside the USoA, Netflix was the one with the least regulatory backlash...

For futureproofing, a SFF computer is best, either X86, ARM or RISC-V. Riscv will have less software available, arm will be underpowered unless you wait for the nVIDIA Shield 2, if you go X86, make sure you get something with Xe3 or RDNA 3.5. and make sure you get upgradeable memory and PCIe M.2

IIRC, a chromecast with google tv support, while ancient, is new enough that AV1 support is there, via software decoding using the rendering pipeline of the GPU.

Meanwhile, my chromecasts 1st and 2nd gen are stuck in H.264 land.

You will probably need to update to the latest firmware. Even allow the beta firmwares while updating, and then revert to "normal" channel.

Best of luck.

For most devices, especially older ones, AV1 support comes courtesy of Software support using the rendering Pipeline inside whatever GPU is in the device.
Netflix has been very involved in these efforts in many a hardware platform/ecosystem.

Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

But either h.264 or AV1 is great compared to the clusterFSCK that is H.265, especially the licensing part, where many companies are elimination H.265 support, either retroactively like Synology:
https://nascompares.com/2024/0...

Or on a going forward basis like Dell and HP-ink:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

So, for me, wider adoption of AV1 is a ggreat development, warts and all....

If you are confused, take a dictionary... The Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, and dictionary.com dictionaries would like to have a word with you, and that word is the ENGLISH word Milliard:

Oxford:
https://www.oed.com/dictionary...

Merriam Webster:
https://www.merriam-webster.co...

Cambridge:
https://dictionary.cambridge.o...

Dictionary.com:
https://www.dictionary.com/bro...

Also, the acquiring company is italian, and there the word for 109 is "Millardo"

Of course everyone with half a brain will say it is not worth the cost. Specially if you decide to have your degree on Bachelor of arts in history with a minor on "the social and historical circumstances of the people southwest of the Ural mountains in the 15th century", I fail to see employability or a return on investment soon.

Also, the way the education has been privatized in the USoA, if you want to graduate with a paper that says "harvard, yale, MIT or GeorgiaTech" it makes more sense and is cheaper to look in your state for the best state university that allows you to transfer as many credist as possible to any of those, do your fisrt three years there, then transfer as many credits as possible to your ultimate taget, and do your last 1.5~2 years there. It will be significantly cheaper, so less economic burden on you.

And, do not get me started on people that, after 2 years on a super-costly university discover that, after all, they did not want to study a BA in history with a minor on "the social and historical circumstances of the people southwest of the Ural mountains in the 15th century", but instead, want to study a BA on Geography with a minor on "the specific geography of the indonesian achipelago", wasting 2 years of supper expensive tuition, because they went straight to the super-costly university instead of reamining in-state, so the change of heart comes with a reduced price-tag. I mean, nothing wrong with realizing that you made a mistake with your career choice. Is worse even to realize you made a mistake and yet continue because of a sunken cost falacy, or family/social/peer pressure. Everything wrong with making the change of heart more costly than it should have been.

TL;DR: If you want to pursue a 4 year degre, look for high employability high return careers (within your calling) and do your first 3 years in state (so less student debt for you), in an institution that allows you to transfer as many cradits as possible to your final target, it will be cheaper overall, and, in case of a change of heart, the change of direction will be cheaper as well.

JM2C
YMMV

Full disclosure: My country (Venezuela) gave me university education for free (I consider a tuition of U$D 10 per year free), but my country did not pay for room, board, or books and materials. This was the top notch university for engineering in my country, and the academic level was nice indeed. As I was inmature (I entered university @ 16), a career that should have taken 5 years took me 7, nonetheless, I got an honorific mention on my thesis, so I was able to mend the ship once I became a more mature person. My country was generous and forgiving, and I was very fortunate, priviledged even.

LTS kernels are supported for two years. The Linux Civil Infrastructure Group support (just barely) certain LTS kernels for 10 years... I am dying to see who will support the kernel of ubuntu for 15 years.

Or they will change the kernel at the end of the 10 years, which in turn means changes on the hardware and the upper layers of the software, while keeping the name of the distro the same, but you will end up doing an "upgrade that is not called an upgrade" and paying extra for the priviledge to call the upgrade the same fancy adjective-animal + version number as the old OS you had.

As they are comparin end of support of Win7 to end of support from Win10. Thing is, when support for Win7 ended, there was no ESU for users, and what's more, there was no Free-ish ESU for users. Meanwhile, Win10 has a (Free-ish) ESU for users.

So, the real comparison is to compare adoption of Win10 when Win7 reached end of support to adoption of Win11 when Win10's Free-ish ESU runs out, that is to say: Nov 2026

The '90s called, and want their Amazon back. Amazon in 2025 competes in various fronts.

If the laid off engineers worked in the "Tat-Bazaar" competitors exist beyond Target and Walmart and include the websites Costco, BJ's, and for Amazon Engineers located in LatAm, Sites like Mercado Libre.

If the fired engineers worked in Amazon Prime Video, the doors are wide open at Netfilx, Apple TV (plus or not plus, I do not remember), Disney+, HBO Max, Peackcok/Universal+, and plenty of other streamers worldwide.

In Cloud, engineers fired could go seek employment in competitors like Microsoft Cloud, oracle cloud, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, OVH, Hetzner, and plenty of companies offering OpenStack clouds. Heck, since netflix (and many other large companies) runs on top of amazon clud, maybe they want some engineers with intimate knowledge of how things work inside the "black box"

Were those engineers working at AI efforts at Amazon? OpenAI, anthropic, Google, Grok, meta and many more are there waiting.

Were said engineers working with gadgets like alexa? plenty of consumer electronics companies looking for good engineers

I see plenty of competition for Amazon engineers, if all these companies were also not reducing and re-aligning their engineering efforts.

And please, I/we do not buy the argument that the Ilumminati are sitting on the boards of all the large companies, in tall leather chairs, with cigars and cognac, plotting the end of the peasants class.

Again, in this particular case, is not lack of competition, but lack of unionization.

I do not think there are no competitors. There are plenty of competitors, but said competitors have ALSO been firing engineers left, right and centre. And that "synchronized firing of engineers" can not be stoped by anti-trust laws, but it can be slowed down by unionization.

1.) DELL and HP-ink* DID NOT kill codec support retroactively. Unlike Synology (also mentioned in the article), who removed the codecs RETROACTIVELY FOR ALL MODELS PAST AND PRESENT, probably because they could not be arsed to keep different versions of their DSM 7.3 OS with or without the codecs depending on the HW model, and also, because the oldest models could not for the life of them keep doing the transcoding with all the extra stuff that was dumped on them form DSM 5 all the way to DSM 7.3.

2.) The thing is, if you had a DELL or HP-ink computer model XYZ-rev1 from early 2025 you had the codec, and then all of the sudden, when you buy a second computer model XYZ-rev02 from late 2025 with pretty much the same hardware, sudenly, you do not have said codecs, even if the hardware encoder/decoder is still there.This baffled some customers, and offered untold click-bait-rage potential for tech news outlets everywhere.

3.) DELL and HP-ink want to either save the price of the olive** by not paying the 24cents for the codec royalties going forward, or upsell you to a higher priced fuller featured laptop. Either way, is money in their pocket.

4.) Cue people developing scripts to re-inject support by automaticaly downloading and extracting drivers and miscelaneous files (like .inf files) from older computers from DELL and HP-ink website (or failing that, downloading them from the generic driver packs from Intel and AMD iGPU drivers), complementing them with FFMPEG 8, and making some registry and other tweaks in 3... 2... 1...

5.) Again, this is not retroactive to older models, if the laptop you bought a few quarters back had the codecs active then, it still has the codecs active now. Is models within the same series, with very similar hardware and model numbers the ones that now ship without said codecs that are causing confusion.

* A few years ago HP split into HPe (e for enterprise) for servers, networking and datacenter stuff, and HP Inc for PCs and Laptops and Printers. HP-ink is a pun.

** https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...