The world is getting very anxious about AI, and who can blame them? What can AI really do, what will it be able to do, can we trust those in charge of it, can we stop them, can we stop it? Not surprising then that politicians seem to circle the problem and then put it […]
In the early to mid 20th Century, there were the movie moguls; Mayer, Zukor, the Warners, Zanuck, Goldwyn, Fox. In the mid-late 20th Century came the media moguls: Murdoch, Berlusconi, Redstone, Maxwell, Turner. All of them were big in business but all of them were also characters about whom their studios could have made scarcely […]
The worst kept secret in broadcasting is out; Matt Brittin becomes BBC DG to wrestle with the myriad challenges facing the corporation. News focuses on his background as a senior European Google executive. He’s also a white, male, British, Oxbridge graduate in his late fifties. Don’t hold your breath for radical moves. He’s also a […]
Congratulations(!!???) to Paramount shareholders – you have won the battle for Warner Bros Discovery (WBD). Your board has done it by throwing the kitchen sink at its target – that’s a sink with a super clever three way tap and a massive waste disposal unit. You have to read the terms they have offered more […]
Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic have come out against the Netflix takeover of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD). What did Netflix ever do to them? Well, in the case of the US, it’s more a question of what Netflix hasn’t done for them. Because it’s never been a network, it’s never had the wherewithal […]
Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) certainly compete for the dubious honour of the ugliest kids in the family of media giants. Both badly need a suitor, and Paramount made it to the altar first. But, you know, marry in haste and all that. Skydance was the only serious caller and so became the partner/owner. […]
You don’t have to be as old as me to remember the dotcom crash of March 2000. But, by the same token, there are plenty of senior executives and fund managers around who would have been children at the time. Are their perceptions of the inevitability of AI’s success, their assumption that we are all […]
Who will be the new DG of the BBC? It is hardly the most attractive job just now – there’s little upside reputationally or financially. However, they will not be short of candidates; the prospect of being a high-profile saviour – the $64 million question being what does it need saving from? – will bring […]
To no one’s surprise it has come to this: Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) isn’t working out and something must be done. To no one’s further surprise, no one knows what to do for the best. We have enjoyed reminiscing here before about the worst deal in history that was the takeover of Time Warner by […]
There’s no moral in this story because, of course, it is about television. For as long as it has been around there have been moral panics about TV, as in ‘does what it puts on screen erode the moral fibre of a nation?’ As the word panic implies, the answer is, generally, no. Nowadays even […]
