How much could Netflix charge if a subscription included HBO Max?

Here’s what streaming companies, many of which offer streaming bundles, charge now.

Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming businesses in one of the biggest acquisitions of the year — one that could shake up the entertainment industry and also greatly affect regular customers. Pending regulatory hurdles, Netflix says it plans to combine Warner Bros.’ vast content library — including HBO programming and the 100-year-plus portfolio of Warner Bros. films — into its own dominant streaming platform rather than operate the services separately.

“This acquisition will improve our offering and accelerate our business for decades to come,” co-CEO Greg Peters said in a press release.

For customers, who are surely happy to get titles like “Citizen Kane” and “Harry Potter,” the key question is: How much will this cost?

Streaming services have been steadily ratcheting up prices in recent years. They’ve also increasingly turned to bundles — pairing services like Paramount+ and Apple TV+ or Disney, Hulu, and HBO Max at a discount — as a way to compete.

Netflix, however, has been notably resistant to first-party bundles, and this deal doesn’t suggest a change in strategy. Instead of offering HBO Max as a separate subscription, Netflix appears poised to integrate the content directly into its core service. And because HBO Max’s audience significantly overlaps with Netflix’s, the acquisition won’t meaningfully expand Netflix’s reach. The likeliest lever left for the company is pricing — though how high it might go remains unclear.

As Disney CEO Bob Iger said on a recent earnings call announcing the coming merger of Disney+ and Hulu into a single app: “I imagine down the road, it may give us some price elasticity as well that we haven’t had before.”

Here’s where the prices of existing streaming services stand:

Rani Molla2h

Meta reignites on-again, off-again relationship with news organizations with multiple AI content licensing deals

Meta has a long and tumultuous relationship with news organizations: first flooding them with traffic, then cutting it off; declaring news a priority, then deprioritizing it in people’s feeds; even hiring its own team to curate breaking news before abruptly disbanding it.

Now it seems media companies are back in Meta’s good graces. The social media company has struck a number of content licensing deals with publishers — including USA Today, People, CNN, Fox News, and The Daily Caller — in order to use information from their articles in Meta’s AI tools, Axios reports. The company first inked an AI news deal with Reuters last year.

Meta has been integrating its AI chatbots across its suite of products, and these licensing deals, which the company reportedly plans to expand to more news organizations, will give users better access to real-time information.

Exclusive: Meta strikes multiple AI deals with news publishers

Millie Giles5h

Cloudflare just went down again, but apparently only for 20 minutes this time

Another day, another massive network outage taking down huge sections of the internet... and, once again, the cause of the hiccup was Cloudflare.

On Friday morning, the American IT giant reported that a change made to “how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests” caused its network to “be unavailable for several minutes.”

Roughly 20 minutes later, the company said that “a fix has been implemented,” helping to soothe the stock’s losses after falling as much as 6% in premarket trading, according to Bloomberg. Shares of Cloudflare are trading about 2% lower at the time of writing.

Users reported that sites including LinkedIn, Zoom, Fortnite, Shopify, and Coinbase were all made unavailable by the outage — or at least they would’ve reported that, if Downdetector weren’t also down, per The Verge. Even so, some are still seeing issues as the service supposedly gets back on its feet.

Cloudflare went down only last month, though that time the network was down for roughly three hours and took OpenAI, X, and “League of Legends” with it — and that incident followed in the digitally disruptive footsteps of Amazon Web Services, which saw a major outage in October lasting some 15 hours.

Jon Keegan18h

Apple poaches Meta’s chief legal officer

Just a day after Meta announced that it had hired away Apple’s user interface design lead, Apple has announced that it’s poached Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, to become Apple’s new general counsel. Kate Adams, Apple’s general counsel since 2017, will be retiring late next year.

Apple also announced the retirement of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who will leave the company in late January 2026.

The flurry of high-level management changes at Apple happens amid fervent speculation that CEO Tim Cook may be retiring soon.

Apple announces executive transitions

Apple also announced the retirement of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who will leave the company in late January 2026.

The flurry of high-level management changes at Apple happens amid fervent speculation that CEO Tim Cook may be retiring soon.

Jon Keegan21h

EU calls for bids to build “AI gigafactories” in 2026

The European Union wants to shore up its domestic AI infrastructure and reduce its dependence on American tech companies.

To further this goal, the bloc is planning on accepting bids to build EU-based “AI gigafactories,” according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

EU Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen announced that bids would begin in January or February, per the report.

As the AI arms race heats up, countries are racing to secure their own sovereign AI infrastructure, including building their own AI models that reflect their culture and language and offer control over cloud computing resources.

Europe is lagging behind the US and Asia in AI infrastructure. But it may be hard for the EU to fully break free of American tech — unlike the US and China, there is no European alternative for the powerful GPUs needed to train and run AI models. It’s very likely that any AI gigafactories in the EU will be filled with GPUs from Nvidia.

EU to Open Bidding for AI Gigafactories in Early 2026

EU Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen announced that bids would begin in January or February, per the report.

Jon Keegan23h

Google’s AI chip business could be a $900 billion boon for the company

Google may be sitting on a massive new business that it has yet to fully exploit.

Google’s custom tensor processing unit (TPU) AI chips have been getting a lot of attention recently, making the tech world wonder if there are other ways to power its AI dreams rather than just by using Nvidia’s GPUs.

Bloomberg spoke with analysts who estimate that, if it does decide to sell its chips to others, Google could capture 20% of the AI market, making it a $900 billion business. For comparison, Google Cloud pulled in $43.2 billion of revenue last year.

Even if Google just sticks with renting access to its TPUs, it will continue to drive down costs and increase margins as it ekes out performance improvements, such as the 30x improvement in power efficiency that the latest generation of TPUs has delivered for the company.