On December 5, 2025, Netflix announced it had agreed to acquire Warner Bros., including HBO, in a transaction valued at approximately $82.7 billion in enterprise value. The deal brings together Netflix’s global streaming dominance with Warner Bros.’ century-long legacy of storytelling, including franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Wizard of Oz, and the entire DC Universe. The implications seem straightforward: more content consolidated in one place, likely higher subscription prices, and the creation of an entertainment behemoth with over 340 million paying subscribers and access to one of Hollywood’s most valuable intellectual property libraries.
But there’s another player in this story that complicates Netflix’s consolidation strategy: YouTube. While Netflix generated $39 billion in revenue in 2024, YouTube earned $54 billion. Netflix was projected to overtake YouTube by 2025, despite the platforms operating on fundamentally different economic models. Additionally, YouTube reaches more than 2 billion users globally through advertising and free access, while Netflix depends on premium subscriptions. This distinction becomes critical in markets like Nigeria, where Nollywood has become the world’s second-largest film industry by volume. As Netflix assembles the most expensive content library in streaming history to compete globally, Nigeria offers a revealing test case: Can Netflix’s $82.7 billion bet on premium content overcome YouTube’s accessible model?
The Netflix-Warner Bros. Discovery merger represents a reshaping of the entertainment industry’s power structure. Warner Bros. Discovery brings together content from HBO, Warner Bros. film and television studios, Discovery Channel, CNN, Cartoon Network, and numerous other brands, creating what may become the most comprehensive content library ever assembled under a single streaming platform.
The crown jewels are considerable. Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max catalog includes HBO Originals, the DC universe, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and programming from HGTV, Food Network, Discovery Channel, TLC, and ID. The library spans everything from prestige dramas like Game of Thrones and The Last of Us to reality television juggernauts to an entire universe of superhero franchises.
This deal is far from an isolated event. It’s part of a broader consolidation wave that has been reshaping the streaming landscape for years. In June, Disney completed its acquisition of NBCUniversal’s remaining stake in Hulu for $439 million, bringing its total investment to roughly $9 billion and now fully owning Hulu. Meanwhile, Paramount Global had been in discussions with other entertainment companies about merging its Paramount+ streaming service, with Warner Bros. Discovery among those expressing interest before this Netflix deal. The pattern is clear: streaming services that once proliferated wildly are now merging and consolidating as the industry matures beyond its initial land-grab phase.
For Netflix, this acquisition solves a critical problem: library depth and franchise ownership. While Netflix has excelled at producing hit originals, it has historically lacked the deep IP portfolios that give Disney and Warner Bros. their competitive moat.
The real competitive threat to Netflix is YouTube, as previously established. And the reason why reveals everything about what’s at stake for markets like Nigeria. While Netflix sells subscriptions, YouTube sells attention. YouTube’s business model relies on user-generated content, advertising, and subscription services, with more than 2.7 billion active users a month as of 2024. The platform doesn’t commission expensive prestige dramas or pay licensing fees for decades-old film catalogs. Instead, it shares revenue with millions of creators who upload content for free, taking approximately 45 percent of advertising revenue while passing 55 percent to creators. The platform has essentially democratized content production, turning anyone with a camera and an internet connection into a potential media company.
Traditional streamers like Netflix are threatened not just by YouTube’s revenue figures, but by what those figures represent: a shift from the attention economy to the access economy. Netflix competes for your $15 monthly subscription. YouTube competes for your time, regardless of whether you can afford to pay anything at all. This is the context in which the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger must be understood. And for the Nigerian cinema audience, the question becomes: which platform actually serves Nollywood’s audience?
Nollywood exists in two worlds. There’s the traditional industry: cinema releases and television broadcasts, then there’s the digital world that has redefined how Nigerian stories reach audiences. YouTube’s Nollywood ecosystem earned an estimated $120-180 million in 2024, a figure that reveals where the industry’s economic center of gravity has shifted. The platform has become Nollywood’s primary distribution channel, not by design but by necessity and opportunity. YouTube users in Nigeria are projected to reach 11.99 million by the end of 2025, dwarfing Netflix’s presence in the market. A 2023 study showed that Netflix has only 169,000 subscribers in Nigeria, which is a tiny fraction of the population and a revealing data point about the economic realities of premium subscription services in the country.
Creators like Ruth Kadiri, Omoni Oboli, and Uche Montana have built million-subscriber channels that function as independent distribution companies. Omoni Oboli launched her YouTube channel, Omoni Oboli TV, in December 2023, and within under two years her subscriber base skyrocketed to over 1.34 million. One of her standout films, Love In Every Word, led cultural conversations this year, gaining over 12 million views, demonstrating the platform’s capacity to create blockbuster-level reach without traditional distribution gatekeepers. Of the top 10 creators in Nigeria, which YouTube just recently released, nine are movie channels. The typical Nollywood YouTube channel creates an entire ecosystem of content: behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, teasers, and serialized content designed to keep audiences engaged between major releases.
The viewing habits of Nigerian audiences reflect these economic realities. Viewers prefer free content when possible, access films primarily on mobile devices, and value quantity and cultural relevance over production polish. Netflix raised subscription fees by 40 percent in 2024, further widening the gap between premium streaming services and free alternatives. For most Nigerian viewers, paying ₦8,500 monthly for Netflix—plus data costs that can easily match or exceed that amount—simply isn’t viable when YouTube offers unlimited Nollywood content for free.
Yet the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger could possibly change Nigerian cinema’s relationship with global audiences and production capital. In the spirit of further expanding their horizons, Netflix could resume its investment in Nigerian originals. Netflix invested around $250 million in South African content from 2021-2024, after earlier investments of $175 million across South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya from 2016-2022. The merger might redirect similar capital flows back to Nigeria, particularly if the platform needs distinctive content to compete with YouTube’s volume.
Counterintuitively, consolidation might pressure Netflix to prioritize authentic African stories. If the merged platform truly wants to compete with YouTube for attention, it needs content that YouTube can’t easily replicate—high-production-value narratives rooted in specific cultural contexts. This could push Netflix away from the formulaic global content approach that often dilutes local specificity, and toward stories that feel more African.
But these possibilities remain largely theoretical, and recent history suggests why they’re unlikely to materialize in Nigeria. Netflix already ran this experiment. Between 2016 and 2024, the platform invested over $23.6 million in Nigerian content, partnered with the country’s top filmmakers, and produced originals that elevated Nollywood’s global profile. Then Netflix halted all Nigerian original production in late 2024, canceling projects mid-development and quietly exiting a market it had courted for nearly a decade.
Netflix’s premium subscription model collides with Nigeria’s infrastructure reality in ways the Warner Bros. content library cannot fix. The infrastructure constraints that drove Netflix to cancel Nigerian originals—expensive data, unstable connections, mobile-first viewing on small screens—remain unchanged regardless of what intellectual property sits in the catalog. This is why YouTube’s dominance in Nigeria will continue to work.
For emerging filmmakers, YouTube remains the only viable entry point into the industry. According to a recent YouTube survey, more than 27% of Nigerian content creators have hired at least one staff member, signalling how content creation is increasingly moving from a side hobby into a structured business. The NollyTube scene has created its own ecosystem with stars like Chike Dike, Maurice Sam, Ego Nwosu, Uche Montana, Sandra Okuzua, Onyi Alex, Chinenye Nnebe, actors who may not frequently appear in a Netflix original but command massive audiences and sustainable incomes.
Ultimately, the likely future isn’t YouTube versus Netflix but rather a tiered ecosystem where both coexist, serving different functions. Netflix will remain the platform for prestige productions with international ambitions. YouTube, meanwhile, becomes the volume engine: multiple films per month, familiar casts, culturally specific narratives, and direct community engagement. One serves the industry’s aspirations; the other serves its audience’s daily entertainment needs.
This dual-platform reality mirrors Nollywood’s historical resilience. The industry thrived during the DVD era not by competing with Hollywood’s production values but by outpacing it in volume. YouTube channels releasing multiple films monthly, building subscriber bases that rival traditional television viewership, and monetizing through a combination of ads, brand partnerships, and merchandise represent the same entrepreneurial spirit that built Nollywood in the first place. The Netflix-Warner Bros. merger may reshape premium content distribution, but for most Nollywood creators and their audiences, YouTube has become home.
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