Reverse the Polarity!
Of mergers, AI, and format wars
Industry News Items
The Mock Turtle’s song that is Paramount these days has potentially added another dance partner in Peacock*. Reports are that Comcast and Paramount have held talks to join forces in some way, possibly through bundling their respective streaming services or even a new joint venture (both companies already have one of those, SkyShowtime, in Europe). So Brian Roberts, will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
Get back in there, you mock turtle! Speaking of tie-ups, ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery announced that they are joining forces to create a sports-centric Voltron of a streaming service scheduled to launch in the fall. Sports is one of the major reasons people still subscribe to cable, so making a ‘Shulu’ focused on sports makes a certain amount of business sense.
Trouble is, the Houses of Mouse, Murdoch and Zaslav didn’t tell the NFL before the announcement, and the league is not happy. At all. We’ll see if it really does launch this fall once the NFL’s lawyers get through with it (or they get a big check). Other carriers of sports content, such as Comcast and Fubo, have their own questions and concerns about this new joint venture, so watch this space as the year progresses.
Start practicing your nose twitches, because a reboot of Nick at Night staple Bewitched is in development at Sony. Interestingly it will be an hour-long show, as opposed to the half-hour traditional sitcom format of the original. I remember watching and enjoying the original as a kid (it’s one of my wife’s favorites) so it will be interesting to see what an hour-long dramedy (?) version will be like. The more important question is, who is the modern-day Paul Lynde to play Uncle Arthur?
Walmart is looking at buying TV manufacturer Vizio, which I think makes sense and is also weird at the same time. What makes sense is Walmart wanting ownership of a smart TV brand (mainly the software) as a potential gateway into people’s home as a way to better compete with Amazon. I can totally foresee a (dystopian) future where one can load up their digital Walmart shopping cart from products they see on their Vizio TV, be exposed to ads brokered by Walmart, and potentially even licensing or creating exclusive content with loads and loads of Walmart product placement.
What I think is weird about this is that Walmart has tried to get into the digital content business before when they owned Vudu, and they ended up selling it to ComcastNBCUniversal after failing to do much of anything with it, so unless the Waltons made some new hires who know how to actually leverage both hardware and software, not to mention ad sales and content creation, Vizio might end up relegated to simply be Walmart’s house brand of televisions.
Speaking of Vudu, the transactional VOD service that is the first choice for people who don’t use the iTunes Store, Google Play, or Movies Anywhere, is changing its name to ‘Fandango at Home’. Cue the “we have Fandango at home” memes.
And finally, let’s talk about Sora, the text-to-video AI tool that was just announced by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. If you haven’t seen the videos yet I encourage you to watch and see just how far AI generated video has come in less than a year after the terrifyingly hilarious AI Will Smith eating spaghetti video. Already there have been lots of discussion about the impact of AI generated videos so of course I have a few thoughts about this (Sora, not AI Will Smith and his insatiable hunger for pasta):
Future iterations of this tech is exactly why the guilds were so concerned about AI during last year’s strikes. It is not inconceivable that a future AI text-to-video product will be able to take a script and generate an entire film. Now whether that film will be any good is up for debate; personally I feel like we are still a long way off from being able to have AI generate emotional performances (how does one direct AI actors, for example?), but I do think that this tech in the nearer term will begin to be used in place of animatics and storyboarding, which leads me to my next thought…
What about animation? Jeffery Katzenberg, fresh off his success with Quibi, stated last November that he believes AI will greatly reduce the number of people it will take to create animated projects, perhaps as much as eliminating 90% of artists typically needed. I guarantee all of the upper executives of animation studios have already been pointing at Sora and asking their teams how they might be able to leverage such tech in their animation pipelines (I’m sure similar convos are happening with VFX departments as well), and if I were to put money on it I’d say watch the animation space for the first use of this tech over the next 2-3 years. Longer-term I believe this will not be healthy for the animation industry, which is already rife with companies lowballing pay and overworking its animators, because how can people break into the business if AI replaces the work done by junior artists? Eventually the senior artists and producers will retire/die, then we’ll really be in a pickle.
There really, really, REALLY needs to be some updates to laws and industry standards around AI-generated video. Once Sora or another AI video tool becomes open to the public there will be a deluge of deepfake porn, videos of politicians and public figures saying and doing things they never did, fake news reports to confuse and panic the public, all spread at the speed of social media. Agreeing to digital watermarking standards, clear and consistent labeling, and repercussions for both businesses and individuals who misuse this technology all seem like a good place to start.
One day when I was at Netflix I remember someone asking me what I thought the long-term future of the streamer was, and my answer then is what it is now - in the long-term once the technology to create truly believable video and audio content completely computer generated, I believe Netflix (and others) will use their treasure trove of user data to have AI create series and films tailored to their subscribers’ preferences.
There will still be ‘traditionally made’ films and series, but that will be the fancy steakhouse of content. The AI-generated stuff will be the fast food of content, cheap, easy to make, and disposable. Are you a Gen Z fan of Stranger Things? Netflix will whip up a supernatural thriller starring teens fighting monsters in the early 2000s. Wish there was more eps of Grace and Frankie? With the proper likeness license rights the senior dramedy can continue for as many seasons as you keep watching it. Is your television comfort food having 90s and 00s sitcoms on repeat? Here’s a sitcom that’s a pastiche of all the sitcom plots you clearly enjoy, complete with a shlubby dude in a relationship with someone much hotter than him, working a blue collar job that somehow pays enough to own a house, and just the right number of wacky friends/relatives to keep each 22-minute plot moving.
Is this going to happen overnight, or in the next few years? No, mainly because I think it will take a while for believable and enjoyable performances to come out of AI video, but from a business perspective (aka the worst kind of perspective) it will be a lot less expensive to have a computer dream up disposable content than it is to hire a human cast and crew because the people who run the big media companies don’t spend billions creating movies and shows because they want to bring more art into the world, it’s because they see movies and shows as ways to turn those billions into tens and hundreds of billions, and if they can save a bunch money by having machines create those movies and shows instead of humans they are all for it. Buckle up everybody, because this tech ain’t going anywhere, and like any tool where AI video goes from here greatly depends on how it is used and who is using it.
Mixed Media, the BBC, and You! Who!
I found the below video from the Michael in Lo-Fi channel on Youtube about the various formats used during the filming of the classic era of Doctor Who (1963-89) and rather than my trying to summarize I highly encourage you to watch the video (just under 20 minutes) if you are at all interested in why classic Doctor Who can look so different from episode to episode, and often, from scene to scene within since episodes. There’s discussions around the use of both film and video, how many episodes were lost (junked by the BBC in a famously short-sighted move), capturing video off television screens with film, converting not only from PAL to NTSC for home video release but also back again to fill gaps in the BBC’s archives, and more. If you were interested in my previous post about the secret history of HD television, then you’ll enjoy this.
Go Watch This!
Rebecca (1940) - My wife and I just went to a screening of this at the Egyptian where the film was projected from a nitrate print, which aside from having a wonderful picture is also quite flammable. Even though this film format was widely used in the first several decades of movies, currently only five theaters in the entire country are properly set up to safely project nitrate films, and fortunately one of them is in Los Angeles. Fantastic film and a fascinating format for archival; we were fortunate enough to have an introduction from one of the curators of the George Eastman Museum who provided context around the museum’s preservation efforts, nitrate itself, and the film. If you get the chance to see a film projected from nitrate I encourage you to see it, just know where the fire exits are.
Mad Heidi (2022) - Completely switching gears, this modern grindhouse homage (or should I say, fromage**?)is more enjoyable and well-made than its SNL-esque concept might suggest. It really captured the feeling of exploitation films, made me laugh out loud more than once, and sustained my interest throughout. Is it something I would watch a second time? Probably, and for this kind of film that’s pretty high praise. Available via MadHeidi.com, to buy/rent on digital storefronts and on physical media
Thanks for reading, and tell your friends!
*Disclaimer - I currently work at Peacock
**If you watch Mad Heidi you will find this joke is excellent