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Meta and Google are reportedly offering tens of millions of dollars to Hollywood studios for AI licensing deals. Disco Bros is thinking about it, while the House of Mouse and Netflix… not so much. Meta and Google have no official comments.
In yesterday’s post about the OpenAI/NewsCorp licensing deal, I mentioned that OpenAI had done a similar deal with Reddit just a week before. I went on to say: one is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, three is a trend, and four is a business model. Hundreds of you called me out on the fact that DDM did a similar deal earlier in the month; obviously, it’s already a “trend.” Looking across the landscape of media companies and AI companies who are courting each other, I think we’re safe declaring that this is an emerging new business model. But… should it be?
Hollywood (and the traditional media business writ large) should remember how well licensing all of their content to Netflix worked out for them. They made windfall profits for a few years while training an audience to go find content on a competitive (more technologically sophisticated) branded distribution channel. The rest, as they say, is history. For today’s cliché, we remember George Santayana’s famous quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.