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Oh, sweet Netflix. They got to the tippy top just at the very end. The breaking news today originally came to me in the form of Netflix buying HBO. No, no. They're buying all of Warner Bros too: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/netflix-to-buy-warner-bros-rcna247510
Why not? I just spent hours a few days ago on the draft of a post about how Netflix was blowing absurd amounts of cash on in-house programming. Why not buy yourself the biggest diamond mine right around the time that pocket sized diamond factories start popping up everywhere?
The original target of my ire was Frankenstein. I hated it because I have lost the childlike innocence required to sit through a Guillermo del Toro movie and like it. I grew up, he didn't; or worse, he did and still has to make this shit. At least I can fold laundry while watching it. Which is, by the way, the average streaming viewing experience. Which is now the average "high" culture consumption experience. Phones being the lower version and garnering more and more of that sweet eyeball juice called money every day.
Instead, I decided to see what I could make with Veo for around $200 dollars. I present it to you, the discerning culture war audience:
The real losers here are movie theaters.
Your grandchildren (if you even get to have any lol) will be completely perplexed that driving multiple miles to watch a movie in a big room with dozens of strangers was not only a thing that happened sometimes, but was one of the nation's most popular passtimes.
Theaters are businesses operating under these constraints:
Theaters have been doomed for quite some time.
That said: I make AI videos, I like AI content, I went to the movies last night to watch a terrible Daniel Radcliffe musical. Humans are sticky.
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It'll be for film buffs to watch classics. Instead of pretentious people watching a movie they've already seen in a freezing muddy park, they'll do it in a nice climate controlled(and dry) theater.
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I'd be surprised if we don't still have at least discount theatres in twenty years playing movies that have been out on 'conventional' digital services for months or years -- without the weird cost behaviors downstream of the studio system, movie theaters have sizable fixed asset costs and trivial operating costs -- but they're definitely going to be labors of love.
Weird that it's become one the more implausible Mystery Science Theatre 3000 assumptions. Or, hell, Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death bits.
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There was a communal aspect to it that I still miss—especially for comedies.
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I'm seeing a lot of indications though Paramount is going to move for a hostile takeover. Trump is friendly to Ellisons and hostile to Netflix. I would put it at least 33% chance Paramount does hostile takeover instead of Netflix.
I think the market is less friendly to the Ellisons on WBD. Netflix was willing to pay so much, and to offer much more in a hostile scenario they’ll need to find more lenders willing to lend against Oracle. Oracle is the single most exposed business to the data center (I won’t say AI) bubble, colossally indebted, CDS spreads are insane given its profile, it has $100bn in debt (the largest non-bank issuer in the US), and the share price is down 50% in three months.
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This would be great for me; Netflix is the *only* streaming service that I don't already get for free through my employer (see username)
Pretty much all of the others are affiliated with legacy media publishers/broadcasters (ie HBO and Warner up until this buy-out) and in turn have relationships with the cable companies.
I will be very disappointed if I lose my free HBO lol
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I've certainly heard rumors of this, so I decided to check Polymarket. Turns out it's over. Looks like capital markets are still superior for truthseeking, since WBD stock was not trading at the aquisition price on Friday. Now I have to do merger arbitrage math.
I was thinking about buying some shares of Paramount at that price but the conditions:
Yes a hostile takeover is going to take longer than that. If it were by May 2027 Paramount would be trading much higher. Market makes sense with these conditions where it resolves with the "expected" company.
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It isn’t AI that is the main threat but TikTok. How many hours of movies do people consume annually? How many hours of TikTok?
For a company wanting to increase shareholder value, that is not the relevant metric. The relevant metric is how much money their respective audiences generate for TikTok or Netflix.
My gut feeling is that short video platforms relying on content creators have very little in the way of a moat. Nothing is stopping people from uploading their videos on multiple platforms, and if a company tries to squeeze their viewers too hard through obtrusive ads or payment requirements, they can switch to another platform with little hassle.
By contrast, video platforms like Netflix which offer their own content have a moat. If you wanted to watch Game of Thrones and were unable or unwilling to infringe copyright, then you had to pay for HBO. The alternative is to decide that you are not into your favorite series and watch another series with another streaming provider (or watch TikToks or read a book). This gives the companies which own their content's copyright a lot more leeway to squeeze their customers.
I did a little look into Tiktok economics. In the West, it's smaller than Netflix in revenue and unprofitable (expansion, content moderation, various legal issues). In China it's gigantic and has a huge e-commerce wing too, Douyin is far more profitable than Netflix. So Tiktok (the whole thing globally with both names) is already much more profitable than Netflix.
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The moat is the network effects. If you want people to see your short form video, it’s on TikTok.
The problem with TikTok is that it's hard to monetize. People aren't going to watch a minute worth of ads before a 30 second video. Adam Ragusea talked about this back when he was still doing his podcast. A listener asked if he had ever thought about producing content for the platform, and apparently some group had paid him to create it, but it didn't get very far because they couldn't figure out how to make any money off of it. His content obviously isn't ideal for short videos (at least without being reductive to the point of pissing some people off), but the point remains.
People don’t stay on TikTok for only 30 seconds. My guess is they watch numerous videos. You could have some short ads.
Ada per video and videos per ad are two entirely different economic propositions.
Sure. But when videos are 30 seconds long, you could have one ad per ten videos and still end up with a decent ad return.
Also ads shown to customers are not the only important monetization stream.
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It only takes a click to upload content to a new platform. It takes money, but a surprisingly small amount to convince creators to crosspost to your thing
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All-time win for David Zaslav. Sold the company at triple the market’s valuation a few months ago. Saddle the cable TV assets with impossible debt, spin them out for almost nothing, ride off into the sunset. Even Patrick Drahi would struggle to be this smart.
Will AI replace all human-created media? I doubt it. I think there will still be a market for camera-filmed media, albeit a smaller one. People watch thousands of hours really bad reality TV where the sole attraction is that it’s real people involved, for example. Maybe movies will die out and it’ll just be the stage left, or hobbyists. Either way, this would have been a bad deal even without generative AI, and it’s an especially bad one with it.
Some funny comments about a Warner buyout spelling the end of a big tech bubble for the second time, too.
I know I could just go ask ChatGPT or something, but does anyone want to throw out even just a few sentences on how this is legal? What measures prevent every company from just pinning their debts on spinoffs meant to die, and why did those measures fail here?
Creditors did approve over the summer, as (of course) they have to.
Why did they approve? The debt was junk rated, with a negative outlook, trading well below par. Absent a spinoff there would have been further painful restructuring anyway. Some (about 25%) would end up with the profitable streaming business now being acquired by Netflix. And, most importantly, WBD agreed as part of the plan to a major debt buyback plan that made creditors happy.
In the end, approving was the least bad option for them.
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Banks have to agree (generally for some inducement). You can’t just put all of your debt in a legal entity and spin it out thereby eliminating your debt. Banks aren’t stupid. Likewise you can’t strip assets out of the banking group without consent (again banks aren’t stupid).
The other poster is making a value judgement that the banks are making a bad deal. The banks don’t share the pessimism. We will see who is right.
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The official SEC filing says:
Presumably, the devil is in the details of "associated with such business".
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I do wonder how AI will affect these types of things. AI has been better at chess than humans for quite some time, but still people care much more about human chess than matches between different chess engines. I'm not predicting it will turn out this way everywhere, but I can imagine a world in which a similar dynamic happens in a lot of creative media where people really do prefer it to be more human. For me personally simply the knowledge that something is AI generated will cause something to feel less meaningful. But I suppose my media consumption is rather far removed from the median to begin with, so my feelings on the matter might very well not be representative of wider trends.
For competitive spectacles like chess, I think there is always a niche to see humans compete. People watch competitive swimming even though the median shark would swim circles around the fastest humans.
But acting is non-competitive, typically. Animated movies are a thing. Many popular franchises invest heavily in CGI, which is completely orthogonal to human acting ability.
That being said, actor name recognition might be a huge draw for a part of the audience. Some people will have crushes on hot actresses and actors and watch all their movies out of general principle, and follow their life off-screen. Even if AI can act, it can not match the real thing in scandals and messy divorces.
But the obvious solution here is for real people to license their name, image and likeness to AI movies, then spend their fortunes on scandalous pursuits as customary. After all, audiences are fine with watching their favorite actors faking death scenes and their favorite porn stars faking orgasms, so this would be just more of the same.
It's interesting because this is a double-edged sword. Messy scandals and divorces indisputably garner publicity for actors and by extension the movies they star in. On the other hand, actors being human means they sometimes have to be sent to rehab to dry out (holding up production on their latest movie and costing the studio millions), or get arrested for sexual harassment or domestic abuse (meaning the studio has to just sit on their latest movie until the scandal blows over), or simply express a controversial opinion in an interview that goes viral.
There's no doubt that there are financial benefits associated with actors being flawed, imperfect human beings, but there are also costs. I have no doubt that there are individual films which have posted a loss specifically because one of the lead actors did something suspect in their private life. I think it would be legitimately difficult to definitively say whether the fact of actors having private lives outside of their work is a net help or a net hindrance to movie studios.
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I know this isn't the point, but I'd way prefer competitive shark swimming
Ah, the logic behind greyhound races.
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I feel like the best, if imperfect, comparison is to look at how the art community reacted to the development of photography (ironically here including film). Maybe it did decimate the ranks of realist oil planters (sad, actually), but I'd hardly say the art world hasn't survived.
That said, photography led to a lot of less-photoreal art styles that I won't claim to be a huge fan of (see "modern art"). I do see a human-rendered painting of, say, a landscape to be more interesting than a large photo print, but I do see lots of photos on walls too.
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Isn't that tied to the AI content just being bad? The issue I'm having is much like with JJ's mysterybox style story telling, there is no point, it's just narratively stringing people along. It works for a while but then people get pissed.
If there was a point and it wasn't completely inane then I'd wager almost no-one would care about whether something was AI made or not. The amount of people seeking out (good) human performances of music and theatre is microscopic, even when it's free!
It's easy to grandstand about not consuming AI slop (not saying you are) when it's uniformly abject shit.
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I am a fan of multiple book series featuring talking cats, eg Dungeon Crawler Carl, Craig Alanson's Convergence. However current CGI techniques are expensive and the thespian skills of cats are famously limited.
So I am very excited about the possibilities that AI is creating for feline main characters.
It should be possible to do a scene with a puppet or very rough cgi and just have AI replace it with a realistic cat.
WTF?! How did they get the cat to do that??
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Off-topic, but I recently came across Fritz Leiber's short story Space-Time for Springers. It's about a super-intelligent kitten who can't yet speak but longs to become a man. Very good (though melancholic) if you like cat literature. AGI will have been achieved once it figures out how to adapt it to screen.
anime_butterfly_boy.jpg Is this AGI? https://youtube.com/watch?v=8opC-VYGiTc
I'm genuinely unsure. I didn't read the story you linked to try to avoid influencing Opus 4.5 as much as possible. I did see from the text it loaded that it involves a cat and I do indeed see a cat in the video, so benchmark score of 1/1?
I'd call it a failure. But that's not because of failing to understand the story or ugly visuals, but just because it's a really hard story to adapt to the screen--I'm skeptical a human could do any better (maybe what I proposed is a benchmark for ASI, not AGI).
The core difficulty is that the story is very deeply intertwined with Gummitch's internal dialog. That's hard to represent even for a human character, but for a cat, you're likely to land in ridiculous territory. The video sidesteps this by using music to narrate what's going on. But, something about it just comes off as a saccharine commercial.
That said, I appreciate the attempt!
I agree that a voiceover or some change to the lyrics would have helped a lot. I feel like this was less of an adaptation and more of a companion piece for people who are already familiar with the story. If I had to guess at the story from the video it'd be something like: a playful kitten is growing up and wants to eat with the family instead of the older cats, there's something wrong with the daughter, she tries to kill the family's new baby which the now older kitten / cat feels obligated to protect, the cat protects the baby by some sort of magical healing of the daughter(?) that robs the cat of its magic(?) and now it has to live out its life like an ordinary, older cat.
Which, while not a terrible story, strikes me as unlikely to be difficult to adapt. I'm guessing there's a lot about the magic cat and the little girl's problem that's being glossed over.
In fairness to Opus 4.5, I did tell it that I only had the money / time for a roughly 3 minute video. We still ended up going over - I would have trimmed Act 1 considerably. I think that would have helped cut the sweetness.
Opus 4.5 brought a little sugar to the party (example video generation prompt: "1960s kitchen table from low angle. Two adults pour coffee, hands and cups visible, conversation implied. Warm, hazy.") but the real Hallmark schoolmarm here was Veo. I did have to try several rounds of generations and tweak the prompts for about 10% of the shots - enough that I considered just using a black background and "[Veo refusal]" caption. It may not surprise you to learn that Google is extremely sensitive about generating clips of sad looking little girls in their bedrooms.
If anyone's interested in the process / instructions for making your own videos on topics of your choice, here's the transcript of the Opus 4.5 conversation showing how it developed the story / prompts / etc.: https://claude.ai/share/93589514-db93-4ffb-aa7d-579f28154a38
Thanks for the challenge and the feedback. It was fun.
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That was lovely, thank you. I love his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stuff, looks like I should read the rest. Now that I think of it, kind of surprised there hasn't been recent adaptations of his work.
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Hey, hey, hey! It's the dog that talks in the Convergence series! Mister Boots is a grimlik. Okay, okay, he does talk, and he looks like a huge cat, if cats had three toes, but still. Grimlik. Completely different!
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Why the puppet or rough CGI? I’m able to do one of these videos in about three hours now.
Please send me a rough set of beats and characters you want for a 20-30 second scene with your weird cat people. It can’t be sexually explicit, nothing too reliant on precise dialogue or character direction.
After I finish my next video I’ll post a link to yours.
The idea with rough CGI or a puppet is to give precise character direction and control over timing of the dialogue. The puppet also gives actors something to act against.
I want to keep actors and make production very smooth. Let everyone in the production have a decent idea how a scene will look on air by looking at the dailies.
Why do you think you need that level of control? While you're waiting for exact precision I've finished another video. It helps to work with the form. https://youtube.com/watch?v=TSiF2niMGpI
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