When a Phone Company Came for Hollywood – A Wakeup Call

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.