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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:
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?
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.
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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