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Some of this has been in the Batgirl thread but let's give it a thread of its own. WB has a history of surviving being bought by/merged with other companies: Here's the difference between their two streaming services, as described by CEO David Zaslav: https://www.avclub.com/hbo-max-discovery-plus-genredom-male-skew-merger-1849375117 Recently, lots of things have been removed from HBO Max, even things owned by WB and not available to stream anywhere else. These range from things as recent as the Zemeckis version of The Witches, to things as old as early episodes of Sesame Street: https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/hbo-max-removes-warner-bros-films-streaming-exclusive-1235332258/ https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/hbo-max-originals-removed-1235344286/ https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/hbo-max-removes-sesame-street-episodes-1235345685/ Additionally, things associated with promoting the removed series elsewhere online are being deleted, such as YouTube clips, soundtrack albums, and even tweets mentioning the programmes' titles. Tweet by the creator of OK KO: Lots of people asked: "Why do this? Surely it costs WB almost nothing to host streaming copies of things that it owns?" Apparently not, because of residuals that go towards the animators' union: Owen Dennis, the creator of the removed series Infinity Train (who has now changed his Twitter bio to "Creator of #InfinityTrain, a show that got pulled from @HBOMax and can now only be pirated") wrote this Substack newsletter about the situation: https://owendennis.substack.com/p/so-uh-whats-going-on-with-infinity These film and TV series removals, and the finances of the merged companies, raise some wider questions about the shift away from physical media and towards streaming, such as: 1. The ethics of using piracy to preserve media that would otherwise be lost (Owen Dennis's post above includes a section with his opinion on this). 2. The temporary nature of things available only via streaming. We had a thread in Discussion about what digital collections mean for game ownership, but I don't think we've had a similar one about film & TV: 3. Will it really turn out to be a sound financial decision for the whole film and TV industry to try and follow Netflix? Yes, Netflix's subscriber numbers and share price were increasing until recently, which has led to Amazon, Disney, Paramount, Hulu etc focusing on making CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT to attract subscribers. But is that amount of film and TV production sustainable with the current funding system based around monthly subscriptions? Especially now there are so many competing services, and people will start cycling their subscriptions between multiple different services every few months.