While I’m still burning that SNW introduced the first main cast person with disability and killed them off just to lean on the crutch of development-by-death-of-mentor for Uhura, I’m super happy that Bruce Horak is now being regularly cast in guest star and recurring television roles in Canada.
It’s a long way from a Star Trek stint being a career-limiting choice as it was viewed in the past.
So we are heading toward three streaming channels, basically cbs, nbc, abc, but instead of OTA and free with ads, it will be 20/month each with ads. All the utter crap on cable nobody wanted to watch, (100 channels with nothing on) will instead be ready to stream on demand. Well done shitty end stage capitalism, well done.
While the business has reckoned with more seismic deals in recent years, among them Disney-Fox and AT&T-Time Warner, this time the reality seems to be dawning that bigger is not always better. Streaming platforms swim in red ink and legacy media assets (mainly linear TV) are eroding. Yes, Zaslav has hinted at opportunities to be had, but WBD was not really considered a buyer given its oft-stated focus on reducing its enormous debt. It’s not clear how trying to swallow a company with hefty debt of its own solves any problems.
Before I say anything, I am against the merger. However as far as streaming goes, having a monopoly on content makes a streaming platform inherently better. WBD isn’t betting on being the most successful streaming platform, it’s betting on every other streaming platform that can’t compete with Zaslav buying everything.
The best tv and movie streaming platform in history, Netflix circa mid-2010s, had no monopoly on content whatsoever. All these studios trying to monopolize their content onto their own streaming services has only made streaming worse.
Absolutely. I wasn’t saying Netflix was at any point morally right, and the rise of the Netflix original was definitely part of the beginning of the end of paid legal streaming being a good experience for the viewer.
the only streamers were Netflix and Hulu? When anything you wanted to stream was on one or the other? Otherwise known as a duopoly. It’s like how the PC gaming marketplace was objectively at it’s best when Steam had a monopoly on selling games. Having everything in one place is better.
Streaming will get better, everything else will get worse as the monopolies get to full power again.
Netflix had a near monopoly on the streaming but not on the actual shows and movies. All the studios still owned their shows and movies and could unilaterally pull them off Netflix and make their own services, evidenced by the fact that that’s exactly what they did. Importantly, the monopoly was not vertically integrated. Similarly, Valve makes very few of the games available on Steam.
Streaming will not get better as the studios fully monopolize it. Not without at the very least and most liberal an enforced ban on vertical integration in visual media and on exclusive licensing agreements. That won’t happen under capitalism though, so the only real improvement will be in the resurgence of piracy.
The current head of the FTC is bringing the first anti-trust case in many years. She’s launched cases against Google, and Amazon so far, and is investigating Facebook. That gives me some hope.
Such a deal would likely attract less regulatory scrutiny than other potential mergers, with WBD lacking any domestic broadcast network, and with mostly synergistic businesses. The biggest source of friction would likely be combining the two legacy film and TV studios.
Both their New York and Vancouver studios have joined IATSE in the last few years - the Canadian studio was the first animation house in the country to join a union, ever.
So they think it’s better to get a tax write off of half the cost, and sell it to a streamer to cover the other half, than make money and profit with a global cinematic release?
Well, I’m not going to assume that every decision made by the senior decision-makers in a company is rational for the firm or for ‘maximizing shareholder wealth’ in the long term.
CEOs and executives may act in their own, or their firm’s short term interests, they can however also get complex decisions entirely wrong. Not to mention tax law can incentivize some sub rational behaviour.
There are enough historical cases of absolutely bad thinking running companies into the ground, with deceptive practices that leave lenders and subcontractors short.
The stock market’s reaction to act against bad management can be tardy.
(I’m setting aside corporations taking responsibility for larger societal benefits here because US SEC norms for publicly traded corporations don’t provide for that the way they are in Canadian or European law. In the other hand, there may be some arguments that some of these actions are anticompetitive, and worthy of antitrust investigation.)
I just wanted to point out how amazing it is that the Sistine Chapel was painted 541 years ago and is still emulated in art such as this thumbnail. That’s crazy!
The actors’ strike is unique in that compromising on AI kills the existence of their profession. Once their likeness and voice can be replicated by machines, they are all fired and have zero job prospects moving forward.
TPTB will churn out endless drivel at zero cost, pay actors nothing, and drown the world in more shallow, meaningless deepfake AI culture.
They didn’t go after the Arts first. They’re just able to go after them now. People in tech have watched their jobs get slowly eaten away by automation for over a decade now. And factory workers for longer than that.
drown the world in more shallow, meaningless deepfake AI culture
I find the imagery of a bunch of people entertaining themselves to death while non-sentient automated machines pump video into their eyeballs so deeply creepy that I’d like to assume it could never happen on a large scale, since a feeling of “connection” is kind of a big part of art consumption.
But part of me also knows that there will be a non-inconsequential part of society that wouldn’t have any problems with it.
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