Netflix acquires Warner Bros
A new era of multimedia might be around the corner, and we're watching it happen
Aside from the jokes of the future one-single-corporation that runs every piece of media, I think we’ve all been surprised that Netflix has acquired Warner Bros., and while I have a lot of opinions on what that might mean for the multimedia world, there’s one aspect that has been brought up, not confirmed, that has been making the rounds on social networks.
For the moment, we will ignore the legal ramifications, accusations of monopoly, government involvement, and the push against Paramount Pictures; that’s outside the scope of this particular article.
The claim is that Netflix purchased Warner not so much for the media content (which they obviously want to use) but for the potential that all of this data has for automating systems, including AI training and media production.
When investigating on the reasons of this acquisition, of course that the IP and the content was one of the decisive factors. A second big factor is Netflix being relatively new to the production and studio industry, and this allows them to get a high step up that ladder.
Now, I have no way of proving that it’s true, but I’d be willing to bet money on the possibility that Netflix is indeed looking to make use of all of that.
Netflix has, for a long while, been at the forefront of technology, even from the standpoint of processes and quality, and they have been pushing the boundaries of what we expect services to be. (Netflix: this is not a bootlick post to you, if you keep degrading your service or increasing prices, I might as well become a sea-dweller.) So much that they created the Netflix Open Source Software Center, giving us jewels like Nebula (Gradle plugins), Dynomite (Redis/Memcache server), Chaos Monkey (reliability tester)… and these are just the ones I heard about making the rounds in technical social media. There are many other things they did to give back to the community.
But the point stands: Netflix has huge technical capabilities, and if anything, they are a technology-first company. The current status of the industry is at an inflection point for what’s going to happen to actor’s images and voices – can they be automated into full-fledged movies and episodes? Technologically, they can. The state of the art is almost there, and what’s missing is just a bit of a bigger push.
We’ve seen that those “bigger pushes” can either be achieved with:
a. A change in architecture that improves the capabilities of a network to learn better, or b. More data
This has been the playbook of OpenAI for over 3 years, and they’ve kept going.
My guess isit that Netflix is going in the same direction.