> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
They did, but first they rebranded them as Max, thus destroying the incredible name value of HBO. It was renamed back to HBO as part of the spinout IIRC.
My favorite part of that story is that McKinsey both advised WarnerBros Discovery to make that change, and then advised them to change it back, making millions each time. I wish I made that much money being bad at my job.
McKinsey and other management consultants exist to launder decisions made by upper management that management do not want to face consequences for. "It's not my fault, the consultants advised me that was the best option"
You misunderstand their job. They get paid millions to carefully construct a report that supports whatever stupid plan the coke-fueled execs came up with.
March, 1989: Time and Warner announce merger, Paramount launches hostile bid for Time.
January, 1990: Time responds by buying Warner Communications for $14 billion.
This is more consolidation of US media under extremely pro-Israel ownership. I don't think this will work out as well as they hope (look at CBS -- Bari Weiss has driven it into the ground) but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over, including both "news" and "entertainment", including TikTok.
>but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over
It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel, but this language is verging on antisemitic because Israel very much does not have "direct editorial control" over Skydance. David Ellison is the one with "direct editorial control" and you can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words. So either you're being hyperbolic with the meaning of "direct editorial control" or you're insinuating that David Ellison will defer to Israel on everything because he's Jewish which is a common antisemitic trope[1]. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, but the latter is enough of a possibility that I would suggest rephrasing this comment to avoid giving supporters of Israel a legitimate line of complaint against your underlying point.
Is it possible the next administration sues to break them up? Couldn't they also just launch endless investigations of the owners until they spun it off into its own thing
I was working with some interns and it's interesting to see how the youth knows not to trust Israel. You can see it with them just becoming the butt of more jokes, the shield of ww2 victimhood covering their behavior is slipping.
Consider me a politically ignorant folk who has heard Israel = Good his whole life, thought it was silly when recently people started hating on Israel, and has heard it long enough that he's wondering what he's been ignoring.
With that introduction, is there a quick sum up somewhere to get someone like me to understand why there's so much division on this topic? All I really know is that in the most recent stuff with Gaza, people think that Israel's actions are too much, but I would be lying if I claimed to know what any of those Middle East scurmishes are about.
A behemoth indeed but the numbers also tell an interesting story. For TV screen share, Youtube has ~13% of total US viewing time vs ~6% for Paramount/Warner. They also go into this merger with staggering debt which does not bode well.
This would be the anti anti trust argument - that it's not studio vs studio, but it's type of screen-time vs other types of screen-time.
Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Yea, and spending time with your friends and family, meeting new people, sleeping...
From [1]:
> “Think about if you didn’t watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There’s such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect—and we compete with all of that.”
When I read that interview, I became a lot more cautious of using Netflix and other streaming platforms, knowing their design is adversarial to my values (I want to be deliberate about what I watch, not be manipulated into mindless consumption).
> Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.
This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.
From my perspective YouTube has quietly won the streaming wars. It has a vastly wider variety of content, especially for non-fiction shows. In the cases where there's more direct genre competition, I tend to prefer YouTube overall because, despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices". There's a lot of outright slop to wade through, ofc, but there's also a lot of creative risk taking out there to discover.
Meanwhile, yeah, Paramount, Time Warner, Disney, etc. have all become so money-minded and risk-averse that it reminds me of the twilight days of the old Hollywood studio system, where all the major production companies were locked into a heated battle to determine who could be the absolute blandest.
I kind of agree, and it's interesting how Nebula and Spotify (at least their video efforts) have been based on elevating and funding those ultra-budget YouTube creators. Like I watch Lindsay Ellis and Practical Engineering and SkillUp all on non-YouTube platforms now, despite YouTube being the recommendation algorithm that originally brought me there.
It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games?
Yes. He always told us that we don't need to worry about the other streamers nearly as much as we have to worry about them turning off the TV and playing games or (gasp!) going outside. TikTok/Instagram Reels wasn't a thing yet, but if it were, I'm sure they would have been on the list too.
You're misinterpreting what "threat" means. And in fact he used the word "competition."
He was talking about the "incumbent" they are trying to displace. Netflix's challenge was not getting people to switch from watching Hulu to Netflix, but to get them not to sleep in order to watch Netflix.
youtube has slowly become like 90% of my TV time over the past few years, I think it's the fact that you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something every time and there's just way too much interesting content on it
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
Are you watching YouTubeTV, or just independent-ish creator YouTube?
I watch probably an hour of YouTube a week and would watch more if I could find anything good.
My favorite TV of the past five years is probably Severance. Is there anything of that caliber on YouTube? One of the best movies I saw last year was on Netflix (Train Dreams). Are there great movies on YouTube?
I’d love to year about some of your favorite stuff on YouTube.
I'm in the opposite camp. I find Youtube exhausting, and it keeps getting worse and worse.
Their ads are terrible. And since I watch via a device like Roku, etc, I have to put up with them. I've actively removed them from my devices. Occasionally, I feel like looking up some video. I install it, and often before I even watch the video I uninstall it because the awful UI reminds me of all the other awful stuff in it.
Curation doesn't exist. I have to work hard to find good content. Harder than any video service out there.
And shorts. Oh. Dear. God.
For some very targeted stuff (home repairs, video game walkthroughs), it's great. For the rest, it just sucks.
There are a few ways to disable/hide shorts. One day I said to a friend, “man I wish I could block these things, they’re insulting to my intelligence and just encourage clicking around” and my friend said “I’ve been blocking them for a while, just do this.” And while I can’t remember what “this” was, it’s worth a quick google.
Shorts are like the video equivalent of snacking on Doritos all day long.
Of all of the various online services, YouTube is the one where I feel I get the most value in return for paying for premium. 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free. (Well, except that so much of hobby YouTube is implicitly all ad because the video is about some piece of hobby gear, but that's sort of the nature of the beast.)
I've never watched a YouTube short.
My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
Literally the only difference between him and the rest of the wannabe media barons, but you could fart the word “Israel” with your armpit and get upvotes these days.
Well no, the difference is that this merger is in favor with the current administration which has engaged in a broad and pervasive pattern of authoritarian behaviors while being in lock-step with Israel's interests.
This merger is only happening because the deal that the seller actually preferred (Netflix buying them) was unlikely to be approved by regulators. The President literally came out right after the deal was approved and said "it could be a problem" and "I would have a say" in whether it went through.
In fact the very existence of Paramount Skydance itself, as a merged entity, appears to have been contingent upon Paramount modifying its own HR policies, placing a government ombudsman at their marquee journalistic outlet (CBS), and paying $16 million to Trump's "presidential library fund."
IMO, a better solution for the broadcast media part of this is to delegate content regulation to the states when the signal from a tv/radio station is entirely within one state (and some kind of join regulation when it spans >1).
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
There wouldn't be a clear "undo" button after years of joint operation. A future administration could in principle order the Time Warner assets to be spun back off, but realistically that'd be a huge headache, and I'd rather they spend their time and political capital imprisoning everyone who negotiated the deal.
Seems to me that these companies will say pretty much whatever during the merger process, and as long as there's no concrete repercussions written down somewhere, just do whatever since it's much harder to break a company apart than it is to block a merger.
The pre-merger settlement approved by the current supreme court was that Skydance would: (1) Agree to production quota of 30 movies per year, (2) Domestic spending commitments, and (3) Separate cable package negotiations.
Film Rights: Star Trek, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, DC Comics, Tom & Jerry, Harry Potter, Citizen Kane, Transformers, A Quiet Place, Looney Tunes, The Conjuring, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dune 3, Minecraft, MonsterVerse
Remember that Citizen Kane is the movie about a media tycoon who buys everything he can and ends up alone in a mansion full of stuff.
So you’re saying this opens up the possibility of some wild crossover media stories. Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth. And have Dora graduate to captain of a star ship (or explore the sea and encounter SpongeBob and Aquaman). Batman can team up with the Mission Impossible crew to solve a mystery. Ninja turtles in a mortal kombat? Wonder Woman in Westeros with Harry Potter?
Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
> Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth.
Sadly that isn’t far removed from the novelty “Strange New Worlds” series they recently released. What a mess season 4 was. :(
Nothing of the sort would ever happen. They would be insane to risk the integrity of their IPs by doing something so ridiculous.
That said, as snowflakey as Star Trek fans are, I would love to see their reaction to Dora the Explorer ordering Batman to launch photon torpedos at Unicron. They'd probably complain about "yet another DEI captain."
> Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.
serious question how could you possible argue this is monopolistic when Disney, Netflix, and Youtube exist. It doesn't pass the barest level of scrutiny.
Monopoly is the wrong word, but it has a close cousin, “anticompetitive”. For free market people one of the major role of the government is maintaining competition and avoiding collusion, combining to competitors is straightforward collusion.
First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.
This is the first time they are being bought by another company that makes content. Every other purchase was to add content creation to an existing company. So maybe there is chance.
But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.
It is in your best interest. All this innovation is sure to mean better quality of life for the average person, and not at all a widening of the income gap.
Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career [1], which spent $60M on Fly Boys. It grossed $17M. There's a very real "failed in Hollywood to alt-right" pipeline, actually.
The truth is that Hollywood was already dying and it had been systematically dismantled by short-term profit seeking. It dismantled the system that created hugely valuable properties like Friends, Cheers, ER, Seinfeld, etc where 22 episodes were created every year to a system where streamers could cut out having to pay for syndication by creating 8 episodes every 3-4 years.
You see a lot of stars of shows having podcasts now from shows that ended years or even decades ago (The Office, The Sopranos). In a healthy ecosystem, successful actors would be working actors.
You see productions chase tax rebates all across North America such as Georgia and Canada where once productions were typically based in LA and that had a ton of ecosystem benefits. As soon as the tax rebates go, so do the productions.
Gavin Newsom clearly isn't serious about becoming president because approving this merger is going to lead to even more layoffs and fewer productions. It's going to be deeply unpopular in California. For good reason.
So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing. Housing is an input cost to everything in that locations. LA used to be relatively cheap. It had a mix of housing types from single family homes to mansions to budget apartments so Ho actors, writers, etc could reasonably start out.
And then with declining demand as productions spread out and less pilots and shows were being made overall, the industry has become dominated by nepo babies.
I actually think that in future centuries when history is written about the turning point for American empire, it'll be the downfall of Hollywood. You cannot overstate the value the US had to export culture to the entire world with Hollywood.
>Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career
Damn, I wish my daddy was a multi-billionaire and fund my hobbies with 8 figures.
>So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing.
The Backrooms and Obsession were made by youtubers with shoestring budgets.
The core is Hollywood hasn't made any new innovative and memorable IPs to convince people to spend money watching them in over a decade. People aren't gonna go to the cinema to watch a crappy new sequel/reboot of the Terminator or the Matrix when they can watch the better originals they already have at home on DVD for free as many times they want.
>the industry has become dominated by nepo babies
More like it's been dominated by accountants and nepo-babies cosplaying as socialist political activists to score brownie points with the public but with zero talent to create something good worth watching. "Evil cannot create anything new it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"
I've seen plenty of negative (and legitimate) sentiment around this merger but I'm cautiously optimistic that David Ellison, being half the age of anyone else with greenlight authority, will do something different/better.
Skydance/Paramount has had plenty of success attracting young audiences via UFC & gaming partnerships, so I'm not sure that's a counterpoint. Re forumulaic/bland that's a personal taste thing and not worth arguing.
The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.
As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.
Being formulaic and bland is an important aspect of expecting someone to “do something different” or “shake things up”. If the owner of a film studio has so much green light power but the studio has primarily produced film following a single formula, which the audiences have grown bored with (hence bland), then how can there be an expectation of that owner suddenly doing something different simply because they bought another studio?
> As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older.
Who do you think he has more in common with? An average consumer his own age, or adult members of any age from the elite class that hes likely spent most of his time around?
So they’ve committed to for example releasing 30-32 movies a year for the next five years [1] but after that, no promises. Good thing mergers are famously temporary and we never need to worry about the next 10 years! Oh wait…
In 1 or 2 years AI movies will be better in everything. From acting , to camera work to environments to story telling. Check out the quality of some of work already out there. There is a massive shift going on. China is going full speed mode. The film industry will be reshaped. Warner Bros should have used those billions to purchase products like seadance. Otherwise they are out
Even if it gets good enough, you're forgetting about everything else that goes into movie making and distribution. Hollywood will keep their hold on media, they just might use AI to increase profits even higher.
i am extremely wary of making any predictions about ai, given what's happened in the last year, but i would put good money on hollywood being around in 2 years. there's much more to the movie industry than slapping some video together.
r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.
The vibe I get is like when the Meta VR app store product launched, and there was huge promises and optimism about all the amazing apps and experiences, but when you bought it and actually tried, it was a few juiced up flagship things and a bunch of shovelware.
Nilay Patel: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/1004286/senator-adam-schiff...
> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
Oh this is hilarious. Didn't AT&T also acquire HBO and spin them off too?
They did, but first they rebranded them as Max, thus destroying the incredible name value of HBO. It was renamed back to HBO as part of the spinout IIRC.
The "credit" for that move actually belongs to WarnerBros Discovery
My favorite part of that story is that McKinsey both advised WarnerBros Discovery to make that change, and then advised them to change it back, making millions each time. I wish I made that much money being bad at my job.
McKinsey and other management consultants exist to launder decisions made by upper management that management do not want to face consequences for. "It's not my fault, the consultants advised me that was the best option"
You misunderstand their job. They get paid millions to carefully construct a report that supports whatever stupid plan the coke-fueled execs came up with.
March, 1989: Time and Warner announce merger, Paramount launches hostile bid for Time. January, 1990: Time responds by buying Warner Communications for $14 billion.
...Paramount sulks, and bides its time....
This is more consolidation of US media under extremely pro-Israel ownership. I don't think this will work out as well as they hope (look at CBS -- Bari Weiss has driven it into the ground) but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over, including both "news" and "entertainment", including TikTok.
https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-medi...
>but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over
It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel, but this language is verging on antisemitic because Israel very much does not have "direct editorial control" over Skydance. David Ellison is the one with "direct editorial control" and you can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words. So either you're being hyperbolic with the meaning of "direct editorial control" or you're insinuating that David Ellison will defer to Israel on everything because he's Jewish which is a common antisemitic trope[1]. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, but the latter is enough of a possibility that I would suggest rephrasing this comment to avoid giving supporters of Israel a legitimate line of complaint against your underlying point.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_loyalty#Jews
They sure aren’t fooling you!
Is it possible the next administration sues to break them up? Couldn't they also just launch endless investigations of the owners until they spun it off into its own thing
Sadly that probably won't happen:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/paramount-merger-settlemen...
Under what criteria exactly is Israel a "foreign adversary"...?
> I don't think this will work out as well as they hope (look at CBS -- Bari Weiss has driven it into the ground)
I think that's actually what they hope, to discredit all mainstream media.
It's the same plan as with the federal government: discredit it and make people lose faith via sabotage.
I was working with some interns and it's interesting to see how the youth knows not to trust Israel. You can see it with them just becoming the butt of more jokes, the shield of ww2 victimhood covering their behavior is slipping.
Consider me a politically ignorant folk who has heard Israel = Good his whole life, thought it was silly when recently people started hating on Israel, and has heard it long enough that he's wondering what he's been ignoring.
With that introduction, is there a quick sum up somewhere to get someone like me to understand why there's so much division on this topic? All I really know is that in the most recent stuff with Gaza, people think that Israel's actions are too much, but I would be lying if I claimed to know what any of those Middle East scurmishes are about.
This is a good starting point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
A behemoth indeed but the numbers also tell an interesting story. For TV screen share, Youtube has ~13% of total US viewing time vs ~6% for Paramount/Warner. They also go into this merger with staggering debt which does not bode well.
This would be the anti anti trust argument - that it's not studio vs studio, but it's type of screen-time vs other types of screen-time.
Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Yea, and spending time with your friends and family, meeting new people, sleeping...
From [1]:
> “Think about if you didn’t watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There’s such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect—and we compete with all of that.”
When I read that interview, I became a lot more cautious of using Netflix and other streaming platforms, knowing their design is adversarial to my values (I want to be deliberate about what I watch, not be manipulated into mindless consumption).
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40491939/netflix-ceo-reed-hastin...
> Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.
Nobody listened.
This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.
From my perspective YouTube has quietly won the streaming wars. It has a vastly wider variety of content, especially for non-fiction shows. In the cases where there's more direct genre competition, I tend to prefer YouTube overall because, despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices". There's a lot of outright slop to wade through, ofc, but there's also a lot of creative risk taking out there to discover.
Meanwhile, yeah, Paramount, Time Warner, Disney, etc. have all become so money-minded and risk-averse that it reminds me of the twilight days of the old Hollywood studio system, where all the major production companies were locked into a heated battle to determine who could be the absolute blandest.
I kind of agree, and it's interesting how Nebula and Spotify (at least their video efforts) have been based on elevating and funding those ultra-budget YouTube creators. Like I watch Lindsay Ellis and Practical Engineering and SkillUp all on non-YouTube platforms now, despite YouTube being the recommendation algorithm that originally brought me there.
It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games?
Yes. He always told us that we don't need to worry about the other streamers nearly as much as we have to worry about them turning off the TV and playing games or (gasp!) going outside. TikTok/Instagram Reels wasn't a thing yet, but if it were, I'm sure they would have been on the list too.
“Being an adult is staring at medium screens all day to come home and stare at a little screen while a big screen is on in the background”
https://x.com/andlikelaura/status/1392091221032460291
Reed Hastings may be rich, but he is a fucking moron. By his logic the greatest threat to entertainment is people who parent without screens.
You're misinterpreting what "threat" means. And in fact he used the word "competition."
He was talking about the "incumbent" they are trying to displace. Netflix's challenge was not getting people to switch from watching Hulu to Netflix, but to get them not to sleep in order to watch Netflix.
Evil maybe, but nothing moronic about it.
youtube has slowly become like 90% of my TV time over the past few years, I think it's the fact that you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something every time and there's just way too much interesting content on it
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
Are you watching YouTubeTV, or just independent-ish creator YouTube?
I watch probably an hour of YouTube a week and would watch more if I could find anything good.
My favorite TV of the past five years is probably Severance. Is there anything of that caliber on YouTube? One of the best movies I saw last year was on Netflix (Train Dreams). Are there great movies on YouTube?
I’d love to year about some of your favorite stuff on YouTube.
I'm in the opposite camp. I find Youtube exhausting, and it keeps getting worse and worse.
Their ads are terrible. And since I watch via a device like Roku, etc, I have to put up with them. I've actively removed them from my devices. Occasionally, I feel like looking up some video. I install it, and often before I even watch the video I uninstall it because the awful UI reminds me of all the other awful stuff in it.
Curation doesn't exist. I have to work hard to find good content. Harder than any video service out there.
And shorts. Oh. Dear. God.
For some very targeted stuff (home repairs, video game walkthroughs), it's great. For the rest, it just sucks.
There are a few ways to disable/hide shorts. One day I said to a friend, “man I wish I could block these things, they’re insulting to my intelligence and just encourage clicking around” and my friend said “I’ve been blocking them for a while, just do this.” And while I can’t remember what “this” was, it’s worth a quick google.
Shorts are like the video equivalent of snacking on Doritos all day long.
Of all of the various online services, YouTube is the one where I feel I get the most value in return for paying for premium. 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free. (Well, except that so much of hobby YouTube is implicitly all ad because the video is about some piece of hobby gear, but that's sort of the nature of the beast.)
I've never watched a YouTube short.
My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
If you have the ads turned off, it's a lot nicer. I got that with some family bundle for more Drive space.
Let me put it this way.
Youtube without ads is still worse than pretty much all the major streaming services with ads.
I don't want to pay for that.
Or just watch Youtube on a laptop, and install an ad blocker.
I wonder what that % would look like for US voters over 60
not a fan of CNN, but a very right leaning person is the owner of CNN now. pre-dictatorship vibes!!
Where "right" means specifically "Likud"
I don’t follow the sentiment.
Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.
Ah yes, but Larry Ellison is Jewish.
Literally the only difference between him and the rest of the wannabe media barons, but you could fart the word “Israel” with your armpit and get upvotes these days.
Well no, the difference is that this merger is in favor with the current administration which has engaged in a broad and pervasive pattern of authoritarian behaviors while being in lock-step with Israel's interests.
This merger is only happening because the deal that the seller actually preferred (Netflix buying them) was unlikely to be approved by regulators. The President literally came out right after the deal was approved and said "it could be a problem" and "I would have a say" in whether it went through.
In fact the very existence of Paramount Skydance itself, as a merged entity, appears to have been contingent upon Paramount modifying its own HR policies, placing a government ombudsman at their marquee journalistic outlet (CBS), and paying $16 million to Trump's "presidential library fund."
I'm not arguing any of that, obviously this all reeks of corruption and cronyism as almost everything in this admin does.
But that's not what people were focusing on here, it's a lot of "Practically Likud" and the increasingly uncomfortable dog whistle "Zionist".
More importantly he's a zionist and put bari Weiss in charge. It's pretty clear what they want to do.
He's donated to and voted for candidates of both parties, and claims to be a centrist.
Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.
Should we wonder if Goebbels was a fun guy irl? I don't get it.
Are you seriously making that comparison?
He's literally the media arm of a genocidal state, what do you want?
Should we compare Ellison to a lawnmower instead, as bcantrill so eloquently did?
He has a nice yacht, I bet it's fun on the yacht.
Probably not if you're an underage girl though.
Are you insinuating something about David Ellison here?
It's one big club
He’s only making an implication.
IMO, a better solution for the broadcast media part of this is to delegate content regulation to the states when the signal from a tv/radio station is entirely within one state (and some kind of join regulation when it spans >1).
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
There wouldn't be a clear "undo" button after years of joint operation. A future administration could in principle order the Time Warner assets to be spun back off, but realistically that'd be a huge headache, and I'd rather they spend their time and political capital imprisoning everyone who negotiated the deal.
Seems to me that these companies will say pretty much whatever during the merger process, and as long as there's no concrete repercussions written down somewhere, just do whatever since it's much harder to break a company apart than it is to block a merger.
The pre-merger settlement approved by the current supreme court was that Skydance would: (1) Agree to production quota of 30 movies per year, (2) Domestic spending commitments, and (3) Separate cable package negotiations.
Assets: TNT, CBS, CNN, MTV, TCM, Showtime, Adult Swim, DC Studios, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, HBO/HBO Max, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network
Film Rights: Star Trek, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, DC Comics, Tom & Jerry, Harry Potter, Citizen Kane, Transformers, A Quiet Place, Looney Tunes, The Conjuring, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dune 3, Minecraft, MonsterVerse
Remember that Citizen Kane is the movie about a media tycoon who buys everything he can and ends up alone in a mansion full of stuff.
Please enjoy this SlopGen Fantasy Skydance Kingdom.
https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6ac56dbab5448191866eb7c80c31c025
So you’re saying this opens up the possibility of some wild crossover media stories. Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth. And have Dora graduate to captain of a star ship (or explore the sea and encounter SpongeBob and Aquaman). Batman can team up with the Mission Impossible crew to solve a mystery. Ninja turtles in a mortal kombat? Wonder Woman in Westeros with Harry Potter?
Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
> Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth.
Sadly that isn’t far removed from the novelty “Strange New Worlds” series they recently released. What a mess season 4 was. :(
Nothing of the sort would ever happen. They would be insane to risk the integrity of their IPs by doing something so ridiculous.
That said, as snowflakey as Star Trek fans are, I would love to see their reaction to Dora the Explorer ordering Batman to launch photon torpedos at Unicron. They'd probably complain about "yet another DEI captain."
Nothing on that list should have lived this long.
As a Trekkie, I'm offended.
Then you are too invested for your own good.
Do Trekkies not crave novelty?
You have to cling to some beacon of hope in a world that decided future is dead and proceeded to drown itself in its own dystopia fetishism.
> Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.
An extra sprinkle of race-baiting and you’d have the Obama-era Occupy Wall St special.
I learned from working with some that psychopaths are a lot of fun going for a drink after work, but at work they make your life a misery.
If the Trumps get their cut, you're golden.
serious question how could you possible argue this is monopolistic when Disney, Netflix, and Youtube exist. It doesn't pass the barest level of scrutiny.
Monopoly is the wrong word, but it has a close cousin, “anticompetitive”. For free market people one of the major role of the government is maintaining competition and avoiding collusion, combining to competitors is straightforward collusion.
It's never been a better time to start consuming less. Let's drive that demand way, way down.
First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.
This is the first time they are being bought by another company that makes content. Every other purchase was to add content creation to an existing company. So maybe there is chance.
But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.
So what does this mean? Superman vs. the Transformers?
I'm not sure I was interested in either company by themselves—less likely to be interested in the merged one.
Yes! What the consumer needs! Less competition! Hurrah!
Sorry for the sarcasm.
Less regulation means more innovation!
I will believe this internet comment. Thanks!
It is in your best interest. All this innovation is sure to mean better quality of life for the average person, and not at all a widening of the income gap.
Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career [1], which spent $60M on Fly Boys. It grossed $17M. There's a very real "failed in Hollywood to alt-right" pipeline, actually.
The truth is that Hollywood was already dying and it had been systematically dismantled by short-term profit seeking. It dismantled the system that created hugely valuable properties like Friends, Cheers, ER, Seinfeld, etc where 22 episodes were created every year to a system where streamers could cut out having to pay for syndication by creating 8 episodes every 3-4 years.
You see a lot of stars of shows having podcasts now from shows that ended years or even decades ago (The Office, The Sopranos). In a healthy ecosystem, successful actors would be working actors.
You see productions chase tax rebates all across North America such as Georgia and Canada where once productions were typically based in LA and that had a ton of ecosystem benefits. As soon as the tax rebates go, so do the productions.
Gavin Newsom clearly isn't serious about becoming president because approving this merger is going to lead to even more layoffs and fewer productions. It's going to be deeply unpopular in California. For good reason.
So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing. Housing is an input cost to everything in that locations. LA used to be relatively cheap. It had a mix of housing types from single family homes to mansions to budget apartments so Ho actors, writers, etc could reasonably start out.
And then with declining demand as productions spread out and less pilots and shows were being made overall, the industry has become dominated by nepo babies.
I actually think that in future centuries when history is written about the turning point for American empire, it'll be the downfall of Hollywood. You cannot overstate the value the US had to export culture to the entire world with Hollywood.
[1]: https://brobible.com/culture/article/david-ellison-tried-to-...
>Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career
Damn, I wish my daddy was a multi-billionaire and fund my hobbies with 8 figures.
>So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing.
The Backrooms and Obsession were made by youtubers with shoestring budgets.
The core is Hollywood hasn't made any new innovative and memorable IPs to convince people to spend money watching them in over a decade. People aren't gonna go to the cinema to watch a crappy new sequel/reboot of the Terminator or the Matrix when they can watch the better originals they already have at home on DVD for free as many times they want.
>the industry has become dominated by nepo babies
More like it's been dominated by accountants and nepo-babies cosplaying as socialist political activists to score brownie points with the public but with zero talent to create something good worth watching. "Evil cannot create anything new it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"
Seems fine. There are more options for entertainment than ever. Often these mergers don't work out anyway.
how exactly do they "not work out"? its two behemoths merging for the sake of more money
So when do they raise prices and start laying folks off?
They already acknowledged layoffs so likely within 30 days the cull list will be presented to senior leadership.
Its so weird how these layoffs somehow targeted every left wing news organization or show. We just cant be certain how that happened. oh well
Do we really need two Ellisons?
Do we even need one?
Their debt load is enormous due to how quickly debt costs have risen from M&A talks to issuing the debt.
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/skydance-credit-rating-down...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-01/paramount... | https://archive.today/SEtX9
I'm sure they'll figure that out.
You have to admit that David Ellison is extremely talented at being born to one of the wealthiest people in human history.
I've seen plenty of negative (and legitimate) sentiment around this merger but I'm cautiously optimistic that David Ellison, being half the age of anyone else with greenlight authority, will do something different/better.
As long as you are hoping he has a really, really, really positive view of Israel you're going to be happy!
His running of Skydance says otherwise. The most formulaic and bland film studio there is.
Skydance/Paramount has had plenty of success attracting young audiences via UFC & gaming partnerships, so I'm not sure that's a counterpoint. Re forumulaic/bland that's a personal taste thing and not worth arguing.
The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.
As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.
Being formulaic and bland is an important aspect of expecting someone to “do something different” or “shake things up”. If the owner of a film studio has so much green light power but the studio has primarily produced film following a single formula, which the audiences have grown bored with (hence bland), then how can there be an expectation of that owner suddenly doing something different simply because they bought another studio?
> As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older.
Who do you think he has more in common with? An average consumer his own age, or adult members of any age from the elite class that hes likely spent most of his time around?
False dichotomy. He obviously has materially different generational priors.
so does this mean i get paramount plus for free with my hbo?
It means they are going to raise prices for both platforms because they can.
And then everything else will follow suit. Not that they haven't already been doing just that.
Plus ads. And biographies of Trump's kids.
Everybody just stop subscribing and do something else and pirate the shit out of their content.
Free? I don’t think a monopoly knows the meaning of that word
It means that Paramount Plus is saddled with debt, and HBO is saddled with debt. And that someone needs to pay off that debt.
If it makes them more money
Who else is mourning the end of Star Trek?
So they’ve committed to for example releasing 30-32 movies a year for the next five years [1] but after that, no promises. Good thing mergers are famously temporary and we never need to worry about the next 10 years! Oh wait…
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-prom...
Apparently the Force Majeure section of the deal is very weak, so if there's the slightest upset, they get out of that.
T-Mobile raised a lot of plan prices exactly 5 years after their merger with Sprint.
When do we get Bugs Bunny on the Enterprise ?
I'm not even mad. Let's do it. With Marvin the Martian.
They had a Lower Decks cartoon crossover already, so they can't even deny the possibility now.
So all TV is going to be republican propaganda now. Cool from some perspectives, horrible from the other 9 out of 10 situations.
How much did the Gulf states pledge towards this?
Saudis, Abu Dhabi and Qatar put in 24B and own 38.5% of the company.
Let's hope that the fears of new owners being rightwing are correct so we can finally see The Censored Eleven in their full glory.
In 1 or 2 years AI movies will be better in everything. From acting , to camera work to environments to story telling. Check out the quality of some of work already out there. There is a massive shift going on. China is going full speed mode. The film industry will be reshaped. Warner Bros should have used those billions to purchase products like seadance. Otherwise they are out
Some of you are outright hostile towards art and it's gross.
To be fair to art, commercial movie theaters are increasingly comparable to theme parks.
Another nail in Americas coffin.
It's yet another oligarchy centralization play. I assume more to come.
From what I see on r/stablediffusion, Hollywood has maybe 2 years left, in the optimistic case.
Even if it gets good enough, you're forgetting about everything else that goes into movie making and distribution. Hollywood will keep their hold on media, they just might use AI to increase profits even higher.
But why Hollywood?
i am extremely wary of making any predictions about ai, given what's happened in the last year, but i would put good money on hollywood being around in 2 years. there's much more to the movie industry than slapping some video together.
r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.
The vibe I get is like when the Meta VR app store product launched, and there was huge promises and optimism about all the amazing apps and experiences, but when you bought it and actually tried, it was a few juiced up flagship things and a bunch of shovelware.
ehhhh i dunno about that. the stuff i've seen from people, and watched looks much better than most crap hollywood puts out anymore
to reiterate: there is more to the movie industry than putting a video together
Please post a link to some of this "stuff". I'm begging you.
I'll pass on slop stories and the quality of the visuals won't change that.