Whether or not Netflix's $82.6 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. goes through, the deal encapsulates a fraught moment for Hollywood, as the entertainment business is increasingly overshadowed by tech giants. On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec and I discussed the deal's implications, both for Netflix and the larger Hollywood ecosystem. Kirsten noted that it's just the latest move bringing more consolidation to the media business, and she wondered whether it's 'too big a risk' for Netflix. Meanwhile, I discussed a call with Netflix executives where Wall Street analysts also seemed to be struggling to wrap their heads around the deal. And then of course there's Paramount's competing hostile bid ' whatever happens, Warner Bros.' days as a standalone company seem to be numbered. Kirsten: I remember when Netflix was just a little baby startup and I got their [DVDs] in the mail. Here they are, all grown up, bidding for a legacy company. Did that run through your head when you saw the news'...

The pending US$83 billion deal is being described as an upending of the existing entertainment order, a sign that it's now dominated by the tech platforms rather than the traditional Hollywood power brokers. Maybe so. But what are those rules' And are they being rewritten, or will moviegoers and TV audiences simply find themselves back in the early 20th century, when a few powerful players directed the fate of the entertainment industry' He used Wall Street financing to acquire and merge his film distribution company, Famous Players-Lasky, the film production company Paramount and the Balaban and Katz chain of theaters under the Paramount name. Together, they created a vertically integrated studio that would emulate the assembly line production of the auto industry: Films would be produced, distributed and shown under the same corporate umbrella. Meanwhile, Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner ' the Warner brothers ' had been pioneer theater owners during the nickelodeon era, the period from roughly 1890 to 1915, when movie exhibition shifted from traveling shows to permanent, storefront theaters called nickelodeons....

Using YouTube's takeover of podcasts as a starting point, he explores how video has devoured audio and turned podcasts into something closer to daytime TV and late-night talk shows. NPR's Rachel Martin, host of the celebrity-interview show Wild Card, joins to talk about her own shift from intimate, audio-only conversations to highly visible video chats with mega-celebrities. She explains how the visual layer changes everything'from building trust with guests and audiences to deepening parasocial relationships, and why showing your face is necessary in a low-trust media world. To trace the business and cultural arc of this pivot, Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman explains the rise and fall of the podcast 'gold rush''from the Serial era to Spotify's billion-dollar bet, to the collapse of expensive narrative audio and YouTube's emergence as a true power player. Then, writer and Plain English host Derek Thompson joins to explain his theory that 'everything is television now.' Warzel and Thompson explore how short-form video, autoplay feeds, and video podcasts are reshaping our attention, our politics, and even our sense of self'turning podcasts into background 'wallpaper' while nudging more of us into broadcasting our lives. Together, the conversations sketch a weird, slightly berserk future where video podcasts aren't just a format'they're a window into a lonelier, more fragmented, video-first culture....

If you want to get all technical about it, Time's Person of the Year is actually not a person at all but a collection of people: the architects of AI. One of the two covers Time released is a re-creation of the 'Lunch Atop a Skyscraper' photograph from 1932, which depicted blue-collar ironworkers suspended hundreds of feet in the air during the construction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In its image, Time replaces these laborers with tech personalities such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang. That editorial decision alone is, shall we say, a rich text. Perhaps you are wondering: Where do you, Charlie, fit in' And what of myself' I'm glad you asked. Odds are, you have not personally developed a large language model at a large technology company. (If you have, my Signal handle is @cwarzel.92, and I would like to talk.) And yet, the odds are also decent that morsels from your life have been used to train chatbots. For the past two years, my colleague Alex Reisner has investigated precisely how tech companies use massive data sets to train their LLMs. He has repeatedly found that so-called architects of AI have relied heavily on enormous databases of copyrighted work to create chatbots and other programs, and has also found that this work is generally taken without the consent or awareness of its creators: musicians, filmmakers, YouTubers, podcasters, illustrators, writers'anyone who has ever posted online, or had anything about them posted by someone else, really. Relatively early in the generative-AI boom, Reisner uncovered that AI companies had used Books3, a data set of nearly 200,000 books, and since then, he's revealed much more: a far larger pirated-book collection, as well as a data set of writing from movies and TV shows, plus millions of hoovered-up YouTube videos. Much of the information that's crawl-able on webpages indexed by Google has been siphoned by these companies. And God only knows what kinds of data the social platforms are using to train their systems. Well, God and Mark Zuckerberg, anyway....