The Hollywood Strike & the Myth of Disruption

Metadata

• Author: drewis.cool
• Full Title: The Hollywood Strike & the Myth of Disruption
• URL: https://www.drewis.cool/story/the-hollywood-strike-and-the-myth-of-disruption-post

Highlights

So, why weren’t these executives paying attention to these warnings? Well, because between 2007 and 2017, Netflix’s stock price grew by 4,000%. Wall Street investors had flooded Netflix with cash. And with that cash, they were able to pay multiples more for licensing deals than TV distributors. They were blitzscaling - spending more than their competitors to squeeze them out of the market. They were paying so much more up front than traditional TV distributors that Phil Kent, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting Systems at the time, said: (View Highlight)

This is a similar strategy to what was employed at Amazon awhile back.

The winner from this streaming arms race: Amazon. All of these companies used AWS - Amazon’s web hosting and infrastructure monopoly - to build these unprofitable products. And I guess in that way, these studios really nailed the tech startup formula: build a product no one wants, and give all your money to Amazon. (View Highlight)

The myth of disruption allows individuals and companies across the tech industry to disregard the real social consequences of technological development. It allows us to ignore or exploit the truly outsized impact, scale, and power we have in society. And that’s dangerous. (View Highlight)