1. More Warner Bros Hijinks
As just about everyone has been warning you, the Warner Bros.’ Merger Saga is not going to be a mini-series, but rather a multi-season, old-school TV sitcom run.
Meaning we are still in early innings.
This past week’s shenanigans included an activist investor firm called Ancora that seems to have some ties to Trumpdom making noise about forcing Warner to consider Paramount’s offer.
And then Warner announcing that it was, in fact, going to consider Paramount’s latest offer, given that it seemed to promise even more money going into Warner’s coffers.
Followed by a piece in Washington Monthly by noted reporter Jonathan Alter who reported that “[F]rom what I’ve heard from very good sources, the Justice Department will announce what Republican senators have already hinted at, which is that they will block a merger with Netflix on antitrust grounds.”
Only that wasn’t how Washington Monthly spun it. On X, they posted that “Jonathan Alter has learned that Trump will kill Netflix’s bid for Warner Bros. and help Paramount win, giving the president control of Fox, CBS, CNN, and TikTok.”
Which, if you actually read the article, is not even close to what Alter is suggesting.
Why It Matters
So much to unpack here.
In reverse order: Regardless of your feelings towards President Trump, the Justice Department’s decision to block the deal is not inherently political, nor is it all that absurd. Meaning it’s the sort of decision a Kamala Harris-DOJ might also have reached.
The crux is how we define the market that Warner and Netflix are playing in.
If it is “all purveyors of video content watched on a TV set” as Netflix is claiming, then that market includes Google (YouTube), Bytedance (TikTok), Amazon (Prime Video) and Apple (Apple TV) and a combined Warner-Netflix would be a small player in that market.
If, however, the market is defined as “major US-based streaming services” then, yes, there is a strong argument that Netflix-Warner would become far too dominant a player given the respective sizes of both services.
Whereas Paramount-Warner, which would see Paramount+ and HBO merged, would not produce a dominant player.
This is not an argument I agree with, mind you, but it is within the realm of rational, or, more accurately, it is not within the realm of totally irrational.
Plus, as Alter notes, “International regulators may say the same, ending Netflix’s bid.”
So there’s that and if you are wondering why so few people trust the media these days, there’s Exhibit A.
Then there’s the Ancora thing, which seemed to be as much a coup for their PR team as anything else.
They own a very small portion of Warner stock, certainly not enough to influence any sort of voting, and even the WSJ admitted that they’d need to convince a sizable swath of shareholders in order to have any impact.
So that was mostly about reviving a dying story, which Team Social Media picked up on, given that Ancora’s CEO had donated to MAGA-ish candidates.
Because really, what’s wrong with just asking questions, right?
Said conspiracy theorists soon felt justified though in that Warner announced that it would be considering Paramount’s latest offer.
Which they had a fiduciary duty to do, but no matter. It’s far more fun to believe in the supernatural.
Which, given this month’s Epstein-dominated headlines, may not be as irrational as it sounds.
I mean Prince Andrew just got arrested and Obama said space aliens were real.
So what’s a little Warner conspiracizing among friends?
What You Need To Do About It
If you are Warner, keep playing Paramount and Netflix off against each other to get yourself the very best deal. Bluesky may damn you for it but it is indeed your fiduciary duty to do so.
Call it the collective warmth of capitalism.
Terry Kawaja would not disagree.
If you are the Supreme Court, realize that the antitrust case will ultimately be up to you. And that even though many of you still need your grandchildren to talk you through TikTok, it’s time to give up the ghost that legacy media is anything more than AOL circa 2010, a slowly leaking tire that’s got a bunch more miles left on it, but isn’t reflating any time soon.
Meaning that whoever Warner marries, they are going to have to face off against the tech giants. Not NBCU, Disney and Fox.
And that the sooner we start adjusting our media legislation to reflect that reality the better. Only with the current Congress in place, there’s really not much hope.
2. The Great AI Scare
By now you have likely read the uber-viral post by 26-year-old Matt Shumer entitled “Something Big Is Happening” that posits that AI is about to take over the world. Or something close.
And that even if you didn’t actually read it, you’ve heard about it. Or read one of the many equally viral takedowns.
Which is why I am going to use the second half of the Week In Review to convince you that this is mostly hype and you have nothing to worry about.
Why It Matters
Shumer’s biggest claim is that we have around 18 months until The World As We Know It™ comes to an end.
It did not help that this claim was echoed by one Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, who threw out an even more ambitious “12 to 18 months” timeline.
But I mean FFS people—you all work at or with major North American and European companies.
You know that it takes them around “12 to 18 months” just to agree on a slightly different typeface for their logo.
So in what universe are they going to lay off most of their workforce and hand the reins over to ChatGPT in that timeframe?
I mean just scheduling the meeting to discuss what is going to happen at the actual meeting easily takes a month or two.
Longer if you’re in Europe where everyone gets the entire summer off.
So on a purely practical level, there is that.
Then there is what AI can and cannot do.
Yes, the new coding models are pretty amazing. But coding is easy for GPTs.
Why?
Because it is easy to train them on something that is a finite objective task.
The code either works or it doesn’t.
So it is easy enough to see why someone (or a corporate someone) would turn most of their coding work over to an AI.
But then take medicine and what I will call The Second Opinion Dilemma.
Meaning that given the same exact set of facts, most every doctor will come up with a different solution.
Which is why we often want to get a second opinion before embarking on any major medical procedure. Or even a third.
And I will guarantee you that all three opinions will not match.
So what’s an AI to do?
But more than that, medical decisions are often based on trust and risk assessment and a number of other intangible factors.
And so again, on what planet are we seeing the majority of patients putting their trust in Doctor AI by August of next year?
Will AI help doctors immensely and change how they practice?
100%. It can help automate medical notetaking, billing, dealing with health insurance, even in weighing out decisions. But not in the next 18 months.
You know who is going to get screwed though?
All those people working at call centers in Bangalore and Manila. Because an AI reading from a prescribed script is far more efficient than a human doing the same exact thing. Not to mention far more reliable.
Again, this will not happen in the next 12 months. But it will happen soon enough. And let’s see if the social media voices find the same degree of empathy when it’s not their peers being disrupted.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are in the media industry, I get why stories like this freak you out. Because media was disrupted by the internet in a way that other white collar professions were not.
Law firms lost their typing pool.
Newspapers lost much of their reporting staff, ad agencies lost their layout artists, and magazines, well, they just lost.
Meaning there’s no small amount of PTSD.
But remember that right now AI excels at tasks over which there is no agency, where the decision tree is a purely rational one: is the price lower? Yes? Then buy.
You can add in extra branches to the decision tree like “Is it likely to go even lower? Yes. Is that likely to happen within the next 24 hours? Yes, then buy” but there is no agency to that math.
Versus most of your jobs, where there is a whole lot of agency, a whole lot of points at which you will be called on to make a largely subjective decision.
So what you need to do is to not freak out, to realize that AI will indeed change most everything, much in the way that electricity, and then the internet did, but to know that it will open up new fields and new adventures that we cannot even begin to imagine.
And that you need to position yourself so that your skills can shine in that new environment.
Meaning you should embrace AI rather than dismissing or rejecting it.
But remember that hype is hype is hype.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.