> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
dkobia 27 minutes ago [-]
A behemoth indeed but the numbers also tell an interesting story. For TV screen share, Youtube has ~13% of total US viewing time vs ~6% for Paramount/Warner. They also go into this merger with staggering debt which does not bode well.
thousand_nights 38 seconds ago [-]
youtube has slowly become like 90% of my TV time over the past few years, I think it's the fact that you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something every time and there's just way too much interesting content on it
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
scyzoryk_xyz 8 minutes ago [-]
This would be the anti anti trust argument - that it's not studio vs studio, but it's type of screen-time vs other types of screen-time.
Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.
patwolf 1 minutes ago [-]
This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.
lokar 13 minutes ago [-]
I wonder what that % would look like for US voters over 60
bigwheels 51 minutes ago [-]
Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.
hilariously 5 minutes ago [-]
Should we wonder if Goebbels was a fun guy irl? I don't get it.
lokar 10 minutes ago [-]
IMO, a better solution for the broadcast media part of this is to delegate content regulation to the states when the signal from a tv/radio station is entirely within one state (and some kind of join regulation when it spans >1).
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
Y_Y 49 minutes ago [-]
He has a nice yacht, I bet it's fun on the yacht.
yolp5 28 minutes ago [-]
Probably not if you're an underage girl though.
fhub 22 minutes ago [-]
Are you insinuating something about David Ellison here?
yolp5 21 minutes ago [-]
It's one big club
kridsdale1 6 minutes ago [-]
He’s only making an implication.
anthonypasq 9 minutes ago [-]
serious question how could you possible argue this is monopolistic when Disney, Netflix, and Youtube exist. It doesn't pass the barest level of scrutiny.
yolp5 27 minutes ago [-]
> Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.
cindyllm 3 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Hamuko 47 minutes ago [-]
Seems to me that these companies will say pretty much whatever during the merger process, and as long as there's no concrete repercussions written down somewhere, just do whatever since it's much harder to break a company apart than it is to block a merger.
bigwheels 42 minutes ago [-]
The pre-merger settlement approved by the current supreme court was that Skydance would: (1) Agree to production quota of 30 movies per year, (2) Domestic spending commitments, and (3) Separate cable package negotiations.
Film Rights: Star Trek, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, DC Comics, Tom & Jerry, Harry Potter, Citizen Kane, Transformers, A Quiet Place, Looney Tunes, The Conjuring, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dune 3, Minecraft, MonsterVerse
Remember that Citizen Kane is the movie about a media tycoon who buys everything he can and ends up alone in a mansion full of stuff.
whycome 12 minutes ago [-]
So you’re saying this opens up the possibility of some wild crossover media stories. Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth. And have Dora graduate to captain of a star ship (or explore the sea and encounter SpongeBob and Aquaman). Batman can team up with the Mission Impossible crew to solve a mystery. Ninja turtles in a mortal kombat? Wonder Woman in Westeros with Harry Potter?
Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
scun 18 minutes ago [-]
Nothing on that list should have lived this long.
aleksandrm 13 minutes ago [-]
As a Trekkie, I'm offended.
scun 9 minutes ago [-]
Then you are too invested for your own good.
nutjob2 28 minutes ago [-]
If the Trumps get their cut, you're golden.
prometheus1992 39 minutes ago [-]
not a fan of CNN, but a very right leaning person is the owner of CNN now. pre-dictatorship vibes!!
Georgelemental 12 minutes ago [-]
Where "right" means specifically "Likud"
Waterluvian 35 minutes ago [-]
I don’t follow the sentiment.
Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.
nomel 30 minutes ago [-]
Do you think only left leaning perspectives should be reported?
There should be a diverse leaning of news companies, otherwise you'll only get half truths. You can't expect a left leaning news org to report anything bad about the left, or right leaning news org to present anything bad about the right. The left will be motivated to find flaws in the right, and the right will be motivated to find flaws in the left. That's a good thing. I believe an adversarial system is required to find truth. A center leaning news org is nice, but they may be motivated to keep their reporting "even", to not appear biased, which isn't really possible with the tick tock of republican and democrat leadership.
A for-profit news org changing leadership/alignment, in a response to massively falling profits [1], isn't a sign of dictatorship, it's a sign of them being aligned to the reason they exist: making moneys.
I think the public should be able to view true left-of-centre perspectives from mainstream media outlets, and that is very much not happening in the US.
If - for example - you find a major news outlet that's pro-union, pro-single-payer, pro-wealth-taxes, and pro-debt-free-education, let me know.
prometheus1992 25 minutes ago [-]
>>Do you think only left leaning perspectives should be reported?
No! but where did you get that from?
There is Fox news, X, and Truth socia for right leaning perspectives.
jasondigitized 24 minutes ago [-]
In a alternative universe, a very wealthy person starts a not for profit news agency and gives zero f's how many eyeballs it gets. Hires an army of world class journalists, investigators, and producers to churn out high quality, vetted, in depth content. Does this exist?
kridsdale1 3 minutes ago [-]
Bezos with the WaPo was this until 2024.
nextstep 25 minutes ago [-]
Do you have an example of left-leaning reporting that is mass media in the US?
reliabilityguy 22 minutes ago [-]
WaPo, NYT, The Atlantic, NPR, and many others.
hilariously 2 minutes ago [-]
It's not a clear divide between right and left, and NYT, the Atlantic, and NPR stans right wing voices constantly, have constantly used their editorialization to promote right wing ideals, and have gone out of their way to center right wing voices to give the appearance of being centrist to the right, which has had a direct impact in their perception as not really left wing by any of the left.
Now the center right is supporting concentration camps like "alligator alcatraz" so the overton window has shifted a lot in the last ten years.
prometheus1992 6 minutes ago [-]
WaPo? definitely not. going through independence crisis.
NYT - i think so.
NPR - funding crisis.
The Atlantic - i don't read this - is this the one who's journalist was added in the top secret signal chat?
lokar 8 minutes ago [-]
NPR takes "both sides" reporting to an absurd extreme
sailfast 19 minutes ago [-]
Have you read the WaPo and NYT lately?
penskymaterial 20 minutes ago [-]
Yes, all of them, minus the ones you can count on one hand that's missing a few fingers from a fireworks mishap.
blakesterz 49 minutes ago [-]
First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.
Papazsazsa 20 minutes ago [-]
I've seen plenty of negative (and legitimate) sentiment around this merger but I'm cautiously optimistic that David Ellison, being half the age of anyone else with greenlight authority, will do something different/better.
hilariously 1 minutes ago [-]
As long as you are hoping he has a really, really, really positive view of Israel you're going to be happy!
developerDan 10 minutes ago [-]
His running of Skydance says otherwise. The most formulaic and bland film studio there is.
kwanbix 1 hours ago [-]
Yes! What the consumer needs! Less competition! Hurrah!
Sorry for the sarcasm.
stavros 50 minutes ago [-]
Less regulation means more innovation!
roroh4310 38 minutes ago [-]
I will believe this internet comment. Thanks!
stavros 36 minutes ago [-]
It is in your best interest. All this innovation is sure to mean better quality of life for the average person, and not at all a widening of the income gap.
xnx 45 minutes ago [-]
Seems fine. There are more options for entertainment than ever. Often these mergers don't work out anyway.
ramon156 32 minutes ago [-]
how exactly do they "not work out"? its two behemoths merging for the sake of more money
pupppet 32 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
cdrnsf 54 minutes ago [-]
So when do they raise prices and start laying folks off?
cmorgan31 52 minutes ago [-]
They already acknowledged layoffs so likely within 30 days the cull list will be presented to senior leadership.
brnt 50 minutes ago [-]
Do we really need two Ellisons?
thinkingtoilet 39 minutes ago [-]
Do we even need one?
superxpro12 47 minutes ago [-]
Its so weird how these layoffs somehow targeted every left wing news organization or show. We just cant be certain how that happened. oh well
toomuchtodo 50 minutes ago [-]
Their debt load is enormous due to how quickly debt costs have risen from M&A talks to issuing the debt.
You have to admit that David Ellison is extremely talented at being born to one of the wealthiest people in human history.
cheesecakegood 49 minutes ago [-]
So they’ve committed to for example releasing 30-32 movies a year for the next five years [1] but after that, no promises. Good thing mergers are famously temporary and we never need to worry about the next 10 years! Oh wait…
so does this mean i get paramount plus for free with my hbo?
throw03172019 1 hours ago [-]
It means they are going to raise prices for both platforms because they can.
fooqux 59 minutes ago [-]
And then everything else will follow suit. Not that they haven't already been doing just that.
TheOtherHobbes 2 minutes ago [-]
Plus ads. And biographies of Trump's kids.
2muchcoffeeman 30 minutes ago [-]
Everybody just stop subscribing and do something else and pirate the shit out of their content.
rylando 1 hours ago [-]
Free? I don’t think a monopoly knows the meaning of that word
Hamuko 45 minutes ago [-]
It means that Paramount Plus is saddled with debt, and HBO is saddled with debt. And that someone needs to pay off that debt.
greyw 1 hours ago [-]
If it makes them more money
trebligdivad 52 minutes ago [-]
When do we get Bugs Bunny on the Enterprise ?
wccrawford 21 minutes ago [-]
I'm not even mad. Let's do it. With Marvin the Martian.
They had a Lower Decks cartoon crossover already, so they can't even deny the possibility now.
ReptileMan 9 minutes ago [-]
Let's hope that the fears of new owners being rightwing are correct so we can finally see The Censored Eleven in their full glory.
smashah 60 minutes ago [-]
How much did the Gulf states pledge towards this?
Hikikomori 56 minutes ago [-]
Another nail in Americas coffin.
stock_toaster 46 minutes ago [-]
Yet another oligarchy centralization play. I assume more to come.
optimalsolver 59 minutes ago [-]
From what I see on r/stablediffusion, Hollywood has maybe 2 years left, in the optimistic case.
fooqux 57 minutes ago [-]
Even if it gets good enough, you're forgetting about everything else that goes into movie making and distribution. Hollywood will keep their hold on media, they just might use AI to increase profits even higher.
john_strinlai 53 minutes ago [-]
i am extremely wary of making any predictions about ai, given what's happened in the last year, but i would put good money on hollywood being around in 2 years. there's much more to the movie industry than slapping some video together.
r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.
foobarian 36 minutes ago [-]
The vibe I get is like when the Meta VR app store product launched, and there was huge promises and optimism about all the amazing apps and experiences, but when you bought it and actually tried, it was a few juiced up flagship things and a bunch of shovelware.
beanjuiceII 52 minutes ago [-]
ehhhh i dunno about that. the stuff i've seen from people, and watched looks much better than most crap hollywood puts out anymore
john_strinlai 50 minutes ago [-]
to reiterate: there is more to the movie industry than putting a video together
Rendered at 21:47:44 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.
I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.
Assets: TNT, CBS, CNN, MTV, TCM, Showtime, Adult Swim, DC Studios, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, HBO/HBO Max, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network
Film Rights: Star Trek, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, DC Comics, Tom & Jerry, Harry Potter, Citizen Kane, Transformers, A Quiet Place, Looney Tunes, The Conjuring, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dune 3, Minecraft, MonsterVerse
Remember that Citizen Kane is the movie about a media tycoon who buys everything he can and ends up alone in a mansion full of stuff.
Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.
There should be a diverse leaning of news companies, otherwise you'll only get half truths. You can't expect a left leaning news org to report anything bad about the left, or right leaning news org to present anything bad about the right. The left will be motivated to find flaws in the right, and the right will be motivated to find flaws in the left. That's a good thing. I believe an adversarial system is required to find truth. A center leaning news org is nice, but they may be motivated to keep their reporting "even", to not appear biased, which isn't really possible with the tick tock of republican and democrat leadership.
A for-profit news org changing leadership/alignment, in a response to massively falling profits [1], isn't a sign of dictatorship, it's a sign of them being aligned to the reason they exist: making moneys.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cnn-net-worth-sliced-half-192...
If - for example - you find a major news outlet that's pro-union, pro-single-payer, pro-wealth-taxes, and pro-debt-free-education, let me know.
No! but where did you get that from?
There is Fox news, X, and Truth socia for right leaning perspectives.
Now the center right is supporting concentration camps like "alligator alcatraz" so the overton window has shifted a lot in the last ten years.
NYT - i think so.
NPR - funding crisis.
The Atlantic - i don't read this - is this the one who's journalist was added in the top secret signal chat?
Sorry for the sarcasm.
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/skydance-credit-rating-down...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-01/paramount... | https://archive.today/SEtX9
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-prom...
They had a Lower Decks cartoon crossover already, so they can't even deny the possibility now.
r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.