Media companies today are in a war for attention. But winning it isn’t the hardest part — keeping it is. The old playbook of competing on content alone — more shows, more rights, bigger libraries — no longer guarantees that audiences stay. In a world where content is becoming truly infinite, what keeps them is connection.
The reality of this horizontal scaling is currently playing out in the form of two very different deals. Netflix recently announced its forward-looking acquisition of InterPositive, the AI filmmaking company founded by Ben Affleck, which builds technology to streamline production workflows while maintaining the creative integrity of human storytellers. The other — a more traditional horizontal scaling on a massive scale — is the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — its studios, HBO, and linear networks — in a deal valued at roughly $111 billion. (Of course, the Paramount deal is going through after Netflix decided to drop out of the bidding for WBD.)
The InterPositive deal by Netflix is an early signal that creators are investing not only in original stories, but in the tools and ecosystems that support how those stories are made. As technology lowers barriers to production and expands the volume of original content, there is an even stronger imperative to differentiate by moving downstream towards the relationships audiences form with the stories they care about; the connection they make with the content.
