(arstechnica.com)
> 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
...Paramount sulks, and bides its time....
https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-medi...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/paramount-merger-settlemen...
Which foreign adversary and you implying? Are you implying that a specific ally of the USA is really an adversary? On what basis did you make this connection? Which foreign citizens are involved in this transaction? What tangible connection does said foreign adversary have to this company?
Now lets see..
Did you mean Russia?
Two RT Employees Indicted For Covertly Funding And Directing U.S. Company That Published Thousands Of Videos In Furtherance Of Russian Interests - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/two-rt-employees-indict...
Intel report: Putin directly ordered effort to influence election - https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/intelligence-report-...
U.S. Accuses Russian TV Network of Conducting Covert Intelligence Acts https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/us/politics/russia-sancti...
Do you mean Qatar?
U.S. Orders Al Jazeera Affiliate to Register as Foreign Agent: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/business/media/aj-al-jaze...
Maybe you meant China? DOJ brands Chinese-owned U.S. newspaper a foreign agent https://www.axios.com/2021/08/25/doj-chinese-owned-sing-tao-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
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.
Post truth world. Sad stuff.
Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.
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.
There should be a diverse leaning of news companies, otherwise you'll only get half truths. You can't expect a left leaning news org to report anything bad about the left, or right leaning news org to present anything bad about the right. The left will be motivated to find flaws in the right, and the right will be motivated to find flaws in the left. That's a good thing. I believe an adversarial system is required to find truth. A center leaning news org is nice, but they may be motivated to keep their reporting "even", to not appear biased, which isn't really possible with the tick tock of republican and democrat leadership.
A for-profit news org changing leadership/alignment, in a response to massively falling profits [1], isn't a sign of dictatorship, it's a sign of them being aligned to the reason they exist: making moneys.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cnn-net-worth-sliced-half-192...
If - for example - you find a major news outlet that's pro-union, pro-single-payer, pro-wealth-taxes, and pro-debt-free-education, let me know.
Do you think this is being prevented somehow? There are many left leaning news agencies [1]. Maybe the "problem" is that they're all for profit, most of which comes from ads, most of which are anti union companies.
What's the alternative? Mandated reporting?
[1] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-literacy/2021/sh...
No! but where did you get that from?
There is Fox news, X, and Truth socia for right leaning perspectives.
Democrat Al Franken got kicked out of Senate when it was found he inapproprately kissed a woman. I can name a long list of creeps in the GOP side who received protection from their side. Matt Gaetz, Roy Moore, Sexual Harassment Hegseth, Epstein-Friend in Chief. The GOP doesn't seem to have any principles about which sexual deviant they have, they just care about having the majority (in congress) or the power. Oh yeah, speaking of that, sexual assaulter Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh...
I'd trust left-leaning media to report wrongdoing whoever does it, whereas right-leaning media will gloss or bare-face lie about wrongdoing done by the right, and exaggerate about wrongdoings by the left...
Famously fair and balanced, I know.
NYT - i think so.
NPR - funding crisis.
The Atlantic - i don't read this - is this the one who's journalist was added in the top secret signal chat?
Now the center right is supporting concentration camps like "alligator alcatraz" so the overton window has shifted a lot in the last ten years.
I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
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.
Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
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.
Sadly that isn’t far removed from the novelty “Strange New Worlds” series they recently released. What a mess season 4 was. :(
Do Trekkies not crave novelty?
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.
But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.
Sorry for the sarcasm.
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.
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?
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-...
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/skydance-credit-rating-down...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-01/paramount... | https://archive.today/SEtX9
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-prom...
They had a Lower Decks cartoon crossover already, so they can't even deny the possibility now.
r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.