Sharon Waxman

This weekend, a telephone company bought one of Hollywood’s most treasured studios, the home of “Harry Potter” and “The Sopranos” and “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones.” It’s a real wakeup call, when a phone company came for Hollywood. And it makes you wonder if content is king after all. And if it is — for how long? It’s all, apparently, about mobile, and being able to move content at lightning speed on those little screens that have become our constant obsession.

In many ways, by agreeing to sell Time Warner, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has admitted that a legacy content company cannot keep up with the pace of innovation demanded in an age of competition by Netflix and Amazon. Though those companies are relatively new to creating original content, their ability to drive decisions based on data is something with which Time Warner cannot compete on its own. But as part of AT&T, it probably can. Or possibly. (It’s unclear if NBCU uses the data Comcast could likely provide to drive its own content decisions.) For so many of us who’ve seen Hollywood as the crown jewel in the creation of popular culture, getting bought by a phone company feels like the tail wagging the dog.

The future of broadcast television is everywhere on the minds of television and media executives across the industry. Network television is most definitively under the microscope as a business.

Compared to movie studios, television divisions still produce significant revenue, but that's only because they have cable networks to lean on.

[Commentary] The decision by the US Supreme Court to back US broadcasters against the upstart service Aereo will send a clear message to innovators: Don't.

It makes a nice short-term win for the broadcasters who have legacy businesses and retransmission fees to protect. But it's a long-term loss for the entertainment industry, which can only survive by embracing change, encouraging innovation and being willing to blow up old business models to win in the brave new world of digital media in which we live. Broadcast television already faces a highly challenged business model.

With overall broadcast ratings declining every year and the fragmentation of audience across basic cable, premium cable and a dizzying number of streaming services, the advertising money that is its lifeblood inexorably diminishes.

As a result this industry desperately needs to understand and work with innovators, not shut them out. Change is coming anyway, Hollywood may as well drive it and maintain some sort of control over the pace and nature of that change.