> From a Hacker News perspective, I wonder what this means for engineers working on HBO Max. Netflix says they’re keeping the company separate but surely you’d be looking to move them to Netflix backend infrastructure at the very least.

The HBO Max service has something like 128M subscribers. This is < half of the 301M subscribers Netflix has, but is still a large number.

Certainly there's going to be some duplication, but it would be unwise to suddenly disrupt the delivery vehicles that you have 128M paying customers using in favor of a different delivery vehicle.

So, you should expect all the various HBO Max clients in existence to continue working for at least 5 years after the acquisition closes, if not longer.

Suddenly turning that off and saying "go use the Netflix app" wouldn't be good.

In any case, moving all the WB content onto the Netflix CDN and making it available on all the Netflix clients is "product integration", not "infrastructure integration". You are likely to see that very quickly. Weeks to months after the acquisition closes.

But, getting rid of all the HBO Max client software that talks to the HBO Max Servers running in whatever data center or cloud WB is using, and downloading video from whatever CDN WB has, and all the associated infra stuff, that's infra integration and it won't happen for a while. I think that will take 5-10 years.