Hollywood and Big Tech Are Preparing For War

A barrage of seemingly unrelated headlines suggest that Hollywood and Big Tech are on a collision course, and that the next few years will reshape how the world spends its free time and which platforms will dominate.

As tech and AI companies push further into entertainment and media, their stewardship of that content (or lack thereof) is becoming a story unto itself.

At the same time, strategic maneuvers by Amazon, YouTube and Meta appear designed to take over the biggest screen in the home: The TV set, ultimately stealing time from legacy studios in what is effectively a zero sum game.

So how are traditional media companies trying to fight back? By pursuing megadeals of their own to give them the scale or leverage they need to even have a shot at competing.

That is the context for Fox‘s $22 billion deal for Roku: The streaming platform fundamentally changes the relationship Fox has with other players in the ecosystem. Despite intense competition from the likes of Google, Amazon and Apple, Roku has asserted itself as the dominant streaming platform, effectively the gateway to TV.

With Roku in its arsenal, suddenly streaming giants like YouTube, Netflix and Amazon (not to mention traditional media competitors like Disney and Paramount-Warners) need Fox as a partner. Just as Comcast defined the platform-content rollup for the cable TV era, Fox is trying to define it for the streaming era, combining a relatively small amount of original content with vast advertising scale and platform dominance that could lead to intriguing and unexpected places, should the Murdochs press that leverage.

That is also the premise for David Ellison’s $111 billion deal to combine Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, which would create an entertainment company on a scale similar to Netflix and The Walt Disney Company, effectively cementing it as one of the leading players in the entertainment industry (it is not lost on many observers that the deal is being financed, in part, by the tech giant Oracle, with Larry Ellison pledging his Oracle shares as a backstop on the deal).

Even Netflix has been eyeing deals, as multiple reports have indicated.

The state of play sees YouTube dominating TV watch time, according to Nielsen’s Gauge, with Netflix stagnating and other streaming players fighting for scraps. While YouTube’s growth on TV sets keeps accelerating, most other streamers are flat, down, or up only slightly, with YouTube also rolling out new features meant to grow that share further.

YouTube is now the world’s largest media company, generating more than $60 billion in revenue last year. Notably, this week Instagram told The Hollywood Reporter that it would begin testing episodic, longform horizontal video content on its TV app as it pushes further into the space.

Meta, which owns Instagram, says that its Reels video product (Reels are on both Instagram and Facebook) now generates more than $50 billion in advertising revenue yearly, more than Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal combined, and that was without the premium CPMs that TV offers. Now it is changing that strategy, betting that creators (including many YouTubers) will cross-post their content in pursuit of revenue. A deal with Samsung to bake the app into all their TVs underscores the platform’s push onto the biggest screens in the house.

The push matters because of the zero sum nature of TV. Entertainment companies like Disney and Paramount have already lost the battle for attention on smartphones (though they are trying in little ways, like vertical video feeds, etc), but they can’t afford to lose the battle for the TV screen. Every minute someone is watching a creator on TV via YouTube or Instagram is a minute they are not watching a premium streaming service, and if Instagram and YouTube grow to become a plurality of TV watchtime the industry could fall to a place where it simply never recovers.

Which is why it is all the more troubling that Big Tech’s record on supporting creatives is far more mixed than at legacy media institutions.

In the trailer for Sony’s upcoming film The Social Reckoning, Jeremy Strong’s uncanny Mark Zuckerberg declares “I am a free speech absolutist.”

It’s a familiar refrain among the tech set: Elon Musk has made it the centerpiece of his X platform, and Jeff Bezos refocused his Washington Post‘s opinion section to be about “personal liberties and free markets.”

And yet one can’t help but notice that the Big Tech companies that are so aggressively pushing into entertainment have made some eyebrow-raising decisions about content.

This week it was revealed that Amazon MGM Studios dropped Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming filmabout OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Artificial, even though it was most of the way through production. Netflix, A24 and NBCUniversal’s Focus Features weren’t interested either, leaving the film without a home for now. Amazon recently signed a multi-billion dollar deal with OpenAI.

A24, the same day, announced an AI deal with Google, which will see the tech giant pour $75 million into the company to research AI tools.

Apple, meanwhile, dropped a project about Gawker, and famously parted ways with Jon Stewart over differences of opinion in content on his show there.

With Bezos, Musk, Altman and other tech giants all trying to get closer to the current political administration (THR watched as Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Trump on his 80th birthday at the UFC White House fight), and AI-driven deals forcing partnerships between many of the companies, it is all but certain that conflicts will arise between corporate interests and creative ideas, particularly as AI proliferates, with many creators expressing concern about their work being overtaken by slop.

The next few years are shaping up to be a battle between Big Tech and Hollywood, with the screens, the platforms, and every minute of people’s attention up for grabs.

That future will include tech giants with flywheels turning faster than ever, media companies like Fox, Disney and Warner-Paramount scaled up to fight, and other players like NBCUniversal figuring out their place in this new world.