What’s Possible Now and Where It’s Going — Over the last nine months, I’ve been writing about why several new technologies, especially AI (including generative AI), are poised to disrupt Hollywood in coming years by lowering the barriers to high quality video content creation. (See The Four Horsemen of the TV Apocalypse and Forget Peak TV, Here Comes…

We Know the Bear Case, What Could Go Right? — The woes of the big media companies (Disney, Fox, NBC Universal, Paramount and WarnerBros. Discovery) have been well documented: linear TV is in decline; streaming has not proved the panacea most hoped; the box office is weak, with many prospective blockbusters disappointing of late; the ad environment is tepid; and…

A Framework for Thinking Through the Speed and Extent of Disruption Shows Hollywood’s Vulnerability — Six months ago, I wrote an essay titled Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV. It laid out the case for why four technologies, most notably virtual production and AI, are poised to democratize high quality video content creation over the next 5–10 years. …

A Personal Story About How Disruption Happens and Why It’s So Hard to Stop — I use the word disruption a lot. Lately, I’ve been writing about why the last decade in TV and film was defined by the disruption of content distribution and the next decade will be defined by the disruption of content creation (see Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV, Power…

Streaming Won’t Fill the Pay TV “Hole.” Let’s Move On. — The TV business is going through a difficult transition, even putting aside near-term challenges like the writers’ strike and the effect of macroeconomic uncertainty on ad spending. Over the past year or so, the consensus expectations for both linear TV and streaming have gotten worse. Linear pay TV revenue is…

How Music Labels Have Stayed Dominant in an Infinite Content World — In recent months, I’ve been writing about “infinite TV,” which I first laid out in Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV. The idea is that several technologies, particularly virtual production and AI-assisted tools, are set to dramatically reduce the barriers to create high quality video content over the coming…

Why the TV Business Needs to Tackle Rising Risk — The value of any business, or any financial instrument for that matter, is a function of two things: growth and risk. It has a direct relationship with the former and an indirect relationship with the latter. It’s widely understood that in the past year growth expectations have declined in the…

Why Hits Will Persist in an Infinite Content World — Almost 20 years ago, Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail, which accurately predicted that the Internet would fragment attention and consumption would shift into the “tail.” But Top Gun Maverick generated over $700 million at the domestic box office last year, Bad Bunny had 18.5 billion streams on Spotify last…

How Entertainment Companies Can Capitalize on Infinite Content — Last month, I published a post called Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV. It made the case that over the next 5–10 years, several technologies (including virtual production and AI) will cause the quality distinction between professionally-produced and user-generated content to blur, resulting in effectively “infinite” high-quality video.