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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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