WarnerMedia, discovering a new era of media integration

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The display is A kind Weekly column Committed to everything that is happening wired The cultural world, from movies to memes, from TV to Twitter.

Five years ago, I embarked on a fool’s errand: Map who owns pop culture.From Marvel movies to Lego Hobbit, Everything is in someone’s safe. News Corporation, Comcast, Viacom-these companies have the greatest wealth. Two years after I made this picture, it is almost out of date. AT&T acquired Time Warner and expanded HBO, Warner Bros., Turner and everything related to it. A year later, Disney completed the acquisition of 21st Century Fox, effectively reuniting the X-Men and Spider-Man with their rest of the Marvel alliance and providing greater combat power for the House of Rats.

The more changes, the higher the degree to which they remain the same. One of the effects of the streaming media war is that it has pushed the war of cultural domination to a new front. Controlling Hollywood is no longer just who has the biggest premiere weekend at the box office, or takes a hit during prime time. A battle for intellectual property has become a robbery effort to see who can use the best content library to expand its streaming services. Large media companies that previously licensed their content to Netflix began to withdraw the content and launched a custom streaming service to host it. The highest HBO Paramount (Paramount)+. peacock!One change occurred this week: AT&T removed WarnerMedia (formerly Time Warner) from Merge it And Discovery is the company that brings you “OWN” by Oprah Winfrey, Many blonde women who can redecorate their houses (HGTV) and “Shark Week”.

On the surface, the reason for the merger is simple: to become “the best media company in the world” as the director of discovery, David Zaslav (David Zaslav) tell New York Times. But this is another matter: a sign of a new era of media integration.

For ordinary consumers, it is not clear what this merger will look like.In theory, Discovery+’s products-HGTV, Animal Planet, History-will be combined with HBO Max’s products, which have all of HBO’s high-end TVs, including friends, And Warner Bros. products, such as Lord of the Rings And DC movies to create some kind of streaming power. Or maybe it will be bundled with Hulu and ESPN+ provided by Disney+. This feels different from the past media mergers, when companies like Disney will acquire Pixar, or entities like Turner (where CNN, TNT and TBS are located) will merge with Time Warner. Instead, it feels like two catalogs, forming a media creation. (Although, technically speaking, Voltron is now part of Netflix.) In an earlier speech at WarnerMedia on Wednesday, JP Colaco, head of advertising sales, said: “We think IP is the new golden age.

Prime time is exactly what HBO Max needs.Streaming service made Big and eye-catching launch Around this time last year, but it did not attract a large number of subscribers initially. By the end of 2020, it has slightly more than 12 million active accounts, a small part Its competitors.Announced that the streaming service will debut all its theatrical editions in 2021, including dune And new Space jam—It’s definitely helpful, but it still doesn’t attract returning viewers like a TV series, for example. 90 days fiance Franchise. As Sarah Henschel, a streaming analyst at Omnia, pointed out, Netflix and Disney seem to be far ahead of other competitors in the field for a long time. The combined WarnerMedia-Discovery allows them to run for their own money. “Discover what is Fox to Disney for WarnerMedia? It is already a good source of power. Now, through integration with excellent mid-sized players, WarnerMedia is now consolidated,” she said, adding : “Agglomeration and integration will be the biggest and fastest method. I think we may be among the top three to five companies, and this is where the economic prospects of these streaming services lie.”

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