Alisa Perren

Totally!

Portrait of US TV, film and online video market based on 2023 revenue data.

Quick take on potential Netflix takeover of Warner Bros. Discover vs Paramount SkyDance or Comcast NBCU. Key point: it's the least worse deal, especially wrt Trump loyalist Ellison family controlled Paramount SD. Here's what the US TV, film & online video market looks like premerger. 1/

*completely acceptable to speculate (it’s fun) just not in published work :)

*At least, in all likelihood won’t be any better

If it is stopped it won’t be for the reasons most people who want it stopped would like and whatever happens instead won’t be any better

Netflix’s acquisition of WB becomes my new exhibit A for teaching industry oriented grad students why you NEVER put predictions in scholarship (or assume anything as it is at a given historical moment means something like that will never happen)

*assuming regulators let this happen

Netflix to Buy Warner Bros. and HBO Max in $82.7 Billion Deal It's official: Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery announced an agreement under which Netflix will acquire Warner Bros., including its film and television studios, HBO Max and HBO.

2013: "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us” — Ted Sarandos about Netflix

2025: Netflix buying HBO along with its parent company

The last decade (and change) in a nutshell

variety.com/2025/tv/news...

👇👇👇

Moments like this demonstrate how unstable, or active, or alive, media is. We think of movies and TV as stable objects, but they can change! Sometimes, like here, the change is unintentional, clearly wrong. Yet, briefly, we can see how easy it is to see a variation on something we think of as fixed.

...and thank you for entrusting your papers to @ransomcenter.bsky.social so that future researchers can learn more about your creative process.

research.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/fin...

#TomStoppard #booksky #theatre 📜🗃️

Holiday Sale 2025! Coupons will automatically be applied. Save 30%  USE CODE: BFCM30 Eric Canete Cary Nord Elia Bonetti Ramon Perez Justin Mason

GUESS WHAT? My original art is on sale for 25% off at Essential Sequential! Just go here:

essentialsequential.com/holiday-sale...

...and use the code BFCM25 at checkout for a 25% discount! And it's not just me! You can also get various holiday discounts on many other great ES artists!

If you have ever thought that my journalism or my first book were net positives for the world, understand that they probably would not exist if I did not have a spouse who paid the mortgage. If I'd been a solo earner/parent, I likely would have left criticism, journalism or book writing long ago.

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

JPMorgan recently calculated that the tech industry must draw an extra $650 billion in revenue every year — nearly double Google’s total sales in 2024 — for AI investments forecast through 2030 to earn a modest 10 percent return.

Welp.

WAPO jumps into the circular-revenue graphic game.

@washingtonpost.com $ORCL $NVDA
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Well slap my ass and call me Suzy

This FT piece on OpenAI and Oracle is bonkers, esp bc of these charts showcasing just how much the business is projected to become OpenAI-dependent

Bummer

Elsevier has a 38% profit margin, and the other journal publishers aren't far behind.

Give me all the John Wells doing the medical profession and none of John Wells doing politics. Thank you

A screenshot with a photograph of a light brown cat whose smooshed face has the effect of making him look grumpy. In the blurry distance is a drawing of this same cat, with a sadder expression. Under the photo, text reads: "Meet Gary, the cat who ended a friendship and cost $25,000 in legal fees" A calligraphic "I" (the logo of the Philadelphia Inquirer) is in the bottom right corner of the image.

Amazing, no notes, I do not desire to learn anything else about this story, for it would only detract from the perfection on this headline.

Some great charts on #AI from the Wall Street Journal. t.ly/xvvbw "AI products would have to create an additional $650 billion a year, indefinitely, to give investors a reasonable 10% annual return. That’s more than 150% of Apple’s yearly revenue"

The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is above all an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console, but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us, and sometimes, even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.

Some inspiring words on cinema in the streaming era from the Pope.

Yes, THAT Pope.

Please make this timeline stop