Netflix is eating Hollywood — because it has to

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26:17Nilay Patel:We're back with Puck media correspondent Julia Alexander. Before the break, Julia was explaining to me why Netflix even wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery and what it might do with it. We also started to get in the paramount of it all and how the billionaire Ellison family is trying to swoop in and sabotage the Netflix deal with a hostile takeover bid. But now I want to focus on the media strategy of this all. Because at the end of the day, these mega mergers are at least supposed to be about combining strengths and achieving what a single company can't do on its own. But we've been watching people try this move with Warner for years now.

26:48Nilay Patel:David Zaslav merged Warner Media with Discovery and then utterly failed to do anything meaningful with his massive library of media assets. Before that, AT &T tried to do this after it acquired Time Warner in 2018. And before that, it was AOL. This idea is not new, and it always seems to end the same way. And so here we have Paramount Chief David Elson promising to do, well, the same thing. And as unconvincing as it's been to Warner Brothers, which has already accepted Netflix software, I think it's worth trying to really nail down whether there's any substance at all to David Ellison's promises or if it's just more Hollywood wish casting from a wannabe media mogul.

27:25Nilay Patel:And then the other piece of the puzzle, it's funny that David Zaslav seems to be emerging as a master operator here, right? He's pushed a bidding process for a thing that everyone thinks sucks very high, which again is the Warner Brothers way. Yeah. The mystique of Warner Brothers can overcome any idiocy of the people who run it such that the next buyer thinks that they can do a good job. Just one of those things about Warner Brothers. This was Zaslav's plan, right? Zaslav's plan was the Paramount plan. I'll have a metric ton of reality slop on cable that funds high-end IP and then I'll be a famous movie guy and everyone will think I'm great.

28:01Nilay Patel:Straightforwardly, this was his plan. They would put up matrices of like ladies like reality shows and men like action comedies or like whatever that chart was during that process. And they were going to upgrade the tech stack and merge the streamers. David Ellison has proposed the exact same plans, right? A four-quadrant content matrix that appeals to everyone in America. And he's going to pull together all the streaming tech stacks and find efficiency. Like the only new thing is I think he's very happy for AI to write the next Mission Impossible movie, which I don't think he's directly proposed to Tom Cruise yet, but he's certainly hinted at.

28:32Nilay Patel:What is different about the Paramount plan versus the existing Zaslav plan? I think you're giving Zaslav a lot of credit for having a plan. So that's great. I think he's the type of guy. I mean, look, he's the type of guy. He came into Hollywood. He bought Robert Evans's, who's a famous producer. He bought his home. He's sitting behind Jack Warner's desk. He's throwing parties in con with Graydon Carter. like this is a guy who was always barely a cable magnet over at the NBC side and always wanted to be a Hollywood guy and so I think he went into this striking a deal with John Stanky who was that I think he's still CEO of AT &T and John Stanky very clearly wanted to just get rid of this and was like fine we'll give it to you and I think when you look at the original plan that David Zaslav had for what HBO Max is what it was and what it kind of is today the idea was just that if you have enough content, then you'll be able to kind of bring people over.

29:30And I think Paramount is very similar in that regard too, to your point. Is David Ellison saying, we just need content? We just need to have enough of it that people are willing to spend more time here? And I think if you look at the Netflix side of the equation, they've pointed out some really interesting details and data, obviously coming from their side about why this is such a great deal, that I think does address some of those concerns though, which is that there's already a strong overlap between HBO Max and Netflix subscribers. So the engagement is going to be there, unlike Discovery and HBO customers who are on opposite sides of the equation.

30:03You know, you've got Netflix coming out and saying, we think that we can do a better job with IP formation and kind of supporting IP and bringing this out to our global subscribers. We think we can do more with these IPs in different languages, in different areas. We think we can do more with this opportunity for HBO in our international markets because of the collaborations that we have with different production companies. So they're already addressing a lot of the issues that Zaslav and Ellison's plan failed to address. And I think where you see David Ellison really coming in and saying, well, here's how we're going to build on what David Zaslav is doing and do it in a more helpful way is, of course, the other big debate at the center of this, which is theatrical and who is more committed to the theatrical release.

30:45And in Hollywood, like to the rest of the world, that might not matter much just based on the data of how little we are going to movie theaters. But to Hollywood, that is the central debate.

30:55Nilay Patel:Because that's where the money is, right? It's where the money was and hopefully the money will be again, right? You buy a ticket to a movie, that's a very high price compared to a month subscription to Netflix. That money might get distributed differently. Is that the only reason people care about theatrical or is it just the idea of movie theaters? It's certainly the nostalgic factor. I mean, it's a group of creatives built on nostalgia. I do think, and we have a lot of sentiment analysis data looking at this over the past few years, that movies released in theaters are more memorable to audiences.

31:27I mean, a big part of that is the marketing push that accompanies it. And so people are just more aware of it. But we see that engagement from theatrical releases on streaming is also much higher than streaming originals. And so to your point about money and why Hollywood would be interested in this. It's really hard to build yourself to be the next big, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio or Scarlett Johansson if you're not in theaters. And so I think this component of we have a nostalgic love for movie theaters, we want these more communal events, but we also don't want to be relegated to Netflix slop in an era of AI slop is a big reason why I think you saw parts of Hollywood look at Paramount and David Ellison originally as the savior of of Hollywood.

32:11And I think now, once people have started doing the math on it and realize that that would mean Paramount had to release, you know, a movie almost every other week, which is an impossible load for a company like that to do. And precedent, by the way, from the Disney Fox deal tells us that that was never was going to happen, as we've seen kind of happened with Fox Searchlight films going direct to consumer for a lot of them. I think it was worked out in Netflix's favor and saying like, we're still committed, even if they're not, But it's giving Hollywood enough time to kind of process what may or may not happen, knowing that Paramount is a little bit less likely to kind of come through.

32:45Nilay Patel:Yeah, I think the last commitment I saw from Netflix was a 45-day theatrical window. And even that's like a pretty soft commitment. Like that's not written down anywhere. That's like Sarando saying, yeah, 45, a month and a half. Then it's just Netflix again. Let me ask you this question again, though, because I think I'm getting it, but I just want to try one more time. What is actually different between Paramount's plan and the Warner Brothers Discovery plan? Because it feels to me like a bunch of cable channels that are dying, subsidizing a bunch of IP that no one has a plan to actually execute on.

33:21Nilay Patel:But the person at the top just wants to be a Hollywood guy. Yeah, there is no difference. And in part because they have the same businesses. They're coming from the same position. The only difference is that David Ellison has a personal bank from someone valued at a couple hundred billion dollars who can kind of come in and say, you know, his father, Larry Ellison, and we'll just continue to fund this. But there's no discernible difference between what David Ellison wants to do, at least that he's publicly said, versus what David Zaslav tried to do for the last few years. I think if you compare the eras of Warner Brothers and Warner Media and Warner Brothers Discovery and whatever else it's been over the last 20 years, Time Warner, I think when you look at it, the only person who really came in and said, I have an idea for what we want to do to make this a differentiated company in 2022, 2021, was Jason Kalar, who was this kind of technologist futurist who was the CEO of Warner Media for a couple of years, but who also damaged the reputation of that company with Hollywood.

34:23Nilay Patel:And that's because in the pandemic, he said, we're going straight to streaming with every movie. Anything forgot to soften the blow by saying, and then when the pandemic is over, we'll stop that. Yeah. Yeah. He's more Silicon Valley in that way than he is Hollywood. But I think if you look at what he tried to do with the Warner Media assets, he said we should have a CNN streaming service that was CNN Plus. And that didn't go anywhere. It launched for a couple of weeks, and then it was shut down. And so what are they doing now? Mark Thompson, who runs CNN, is going to launch streaming service. And so this idea of what Jason Kilar wanted to do, which may or may not have worked long term, I think was the last point that there was a plan to do something on the innovation side with the assets as opposed to just collecting more assets.

35:09And under Zaslav and under Paramount's plan, it is just a collection of the assets.

35:14Nilay Patel:So the part of the Elson plan that is somewhat different is the presence of his father, Larry Elson. A lot of the argument for why Paramount should get the deal over Netflix is that Larry Ellison exists. I mean like straightforwardly. They're like, but we have a rich guy. Like look at how rich this guy is. And I'm looking at that and I'm talking to our reporters, especially Liz Lopato about that. And it seems bananas to me that Larry Ellison, whose wealth keeps increasing every day with the hype bubble surrounding AI, wants to trade out of AI money, wants to trade out of Oracle stock. to backstop media money, which is the most under pressure, undervalued, right?

35:55Nilay Patel:Like if I have Oracle stock, I would not be like, you know what I should do with it is I should buy Warner Brothers. Like that's not rational. Why do you think Larry Elson is willing to backstop a Warner Brothers deal with his own Oracle stock? A couple of different theories on this and they get more outlandish and subreddity as they go on. But there's part of me that sees almost this parallel to what Larry Ellison might be thinking of doing. And I don't speak to Larry Ellison on the regular. So I'm really just kind of projecting here what he might want to do to why AT &T originally bought Time Warner, which was this idea of things are happening on phones.

36:36And I want to have some level of investment in TikTok. I want to have some level of investment in what people are watching and can we create some kind of integration using the cloud computing aspects that we have to make this so that we collect a lot of data. So we collect a lot of data and we do something with this. And down the road, what actually is worth the gold bars is not the content, but kind of everything we're collecting around that content, which is very Mark Zuckerberg, right? It's very like Sundar Pichai. It's very much like this is where a lot of the value of what we do comes in.

37:10But the issue there is you have to have people on these platforms. In order to collect that amount of data to make it valuable, in order to find what's really fascinating or interesting and worth doubling down on investment-wise, you have to have the audience. And Paramount +, even with a combined HBO Max, makes up a sliver of attention and engagement in the United States. Both of them barely have any global presence. They don't have really any global owned and operated presence because all their streaming platforms are in conjunction and partnership with other companies and other distribution platforms in order to kind of try and scale.

37:45And TikTok, which was down apparently this weekend in its first U.S. debut again or re-debut, like whether or not TikTok has the staying power now versus whether people go over to Instagram or YouTube Shorts, like that question of who ends up winning that kind of short form battle, I think makes it really questionable. but I agree with you I don't think someone who clearly smart as Larry Ellison looks at a decaying asset in a decaying industry in a hyper competitive attention ecosystem and goes like yeah this thing's worth 110 billion or whatever it's 105 106 billion cash and by the way we're going to go to Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders and say like you're going to get a bigger payout basically and you should go with us and don't worry about the rest of this business because you're going to get paid out for it.

38:31I don't see why he would do that unless there's something far more compelling within what the assets will help generate down the road that are not just pure engagement of people watching Michael Keaton's Batman. Because the only other answer is he's a dad with guilty father issues.

38:47Nilay Patel:I will say the only things you can do with data at that scale are target advertising or send drones to kill you. And I don't know which one it is. It is unclear, but that's what you can do with the data. There's not much else with data at scale. And I'm not sure Paramount has that ad business. I'm not sure that if you combine Paramount with Warner Brothers, with TikTok, you get that ad business. That's not really TikTok's ad business either. Right. There's just a set of question marks there. I agree. I agree completely. And I think it's a desperate attempt, especially in this kind of meta and Google age, just where it feels difficult to even try and compete at that scale.

39:27And then again looking at netflix or even disney disney streaming services have pretty strong engagement they've got active subscribers they they've got a pretty active ad base and disney famously very good at advertising like they just have a great ad business and so if you're coming in this late to the game on a hail mary in hope that having enough movies and tv shows enough sports right they just paid 7.7 billion dollars for ufc it just debuted on their platform on saturday and you have enough overlap, maybe with a TikTok. And even that is like a huge question. That is like, is this even part of it?

40:05It becomes further unclear as to why this is the deal to make. And I remember thinking about this. I was talking to an analyst and I was like, you know, if I had$110 billion in cash and I do not, if I had that, I would be looking at Epic games. I'd be looking at Roblox. I'd be looking at other areas where there seems to be deep levels of engagement and deep level of young kind of consumers. Let's say they're emerging kind of 15, 16 plus consumer base where you've got a lot of brands like FIFA who want to partner, Disney who wants to partner with Fortnite. I don't know why I would be spending all my efforts on Warner Brothers Discovery unless I was deeply like unless I deeply love my son.

40:49And this is what my son really wanted. He wanted to do this. And if that's the basis for why Paramount is upping their bid and kind of acting so dramatically in public about it, that should be far more concerning to shareholders than anything else.

41:04Nilay Patel:Let me ask you about the other side of this, the Warner Brothers shareholder side. They keep rejecting Paramount. I think they're up to eight times they've said no to Paramount. Is it just the stink of desperation or is the Netflix deal that much better? I think the Netflix deal includes some kind of optimism for the future of what that could look like. And I think the Paramount deal is a last ditch effort to cling to relevancy. I think shareholders know that, especially shareholders who have been, by the way, with WBD this long. There was a lot of exit points that they could have taken and just said, like, I'm going to get rid of this.

41:43I'm like, I'm not going to be here. obviously people many of them hoping for like a big sale and this kind of moment but i do think netflix there's a there's a coolness to it and i was talking to this media investor a while back and we were talking about when when knowing when to sell and the thing they said to me and they work with a lot of kind of notable athletes they said to me they're like my biggest concern is you have founders and ceos who do not want to sell because they think that they're still riding the level of cool, but cool is a very quick factor that goes away. And so you have to know when, okay, this is my off-put and I'm going to go here.

42:16And I think there's a level with Netflix where they are still writing that cool. There is this level of like, it's Netflix. We think this could be a really big business. It's exciting to kind of see play out. This is the first major acquisition that Netflix has done. The one before this was, I think the Roald Dahl library for about$750 million,$800 million versus again, like the Paramount side where the cool has been gone for years, for decades. And so again, it just feels like Netflix seems to have a better plan. How much they stick to, to your point, we don't know. How much they actually stick to beyond what they're contractually obligated to stick to, who knows?

42:52But the fact that they have the big movies and the big TV shows and they're the number one premium streamer, I think really does do a lot for shareholders.

43:05Nilay Patel:We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

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46:45Nilay Patel:We're back with Puck Media correspondent Julia Alexander. Before the break, we were talking about the strategy of the two competing offers for Warner Brothers Discovery. and why it seems obvious that Netflix has emerged as the clear winner. But as you've heard Julia say throughout this conversation, the old Hollywood is dying. Linear TV is in permanent decline, and now you have a bunch of entertainment giants reduced to decaying brands whose only value lies in the mountains of old TV shows, movies, and aging franchises that they don't really know what to do with. Netflix is the only one of these companies that you could reliably even call a tech company, and that helps explain why Warner Bros.

47:17Nilay Patel:sees its future in Netflix when it comes to competing against short-form video, gaming, and the dominance of YouTube. So I wanted to finish this conversation by talking with Julia about what the future of Hollywood might look like, especially now that it's staring down the barrel of an internet rife with AI slop and a tech industry more emboldened than ever to lay claim to our attention. When you think about the reception that these various studios and these various deals got in Hollywood, there has been a pretty quick flip, right? There was an immediate reaction to Netflix from Hollywood that was pretty negative.

47:48Nilay Patel:I think Hollywood did not want Netflix to consolidate even more power, to have even more influence over creative. And then Paramount showed up and suddenly Netflix, like you said, seems cool again. Why don't people want Paramount? Like you have a billionaire Nepo baby who just wants to make big budget movies and he's going to spend his dad's money to do it. Like why aren't more creatives trying to butter him up to get that cash? It's two names and they are heavily related to entertainment in a way that Hollywood detests. and it's Neil Mohan and Sam Owman. And at this point, Netflix is cool because Netflix has proven that it's committed to, maybe not theatrical, but committed to filmmakers, right?

48:27They took on The Irishman, the big Martin Scorsese movie when no one else would do it. They're obviously committed to the television side, the equation, and they produce a lot of really great TV. No one's ever doubted that. At the same time, when they first came in and they were the disruptors and they were disrupting the theatrical model and kind of how writers and actors were getting paid on the TV side of the equation. It was scary because people don't like change and Hollywood is especially antiquated in its approach to things. And so they especially don't like change. And then at the same time, you know, Netflix hit 10 years, 11 years of producing original content proved itself.

49:00At the same time that Sam Altman came in and was like, we're going to take people's likeness and we're just going to let people do what they want. And the next Star Wars movie is going to come out of Sora 2 or whatever. And Neil Mohan is going out and saying, by the way, television is YouTube. We're premium content. Our creators make premium content. We make up the vast majority of engagement on TV sets. We know that 10 years ago, less than that, you were worried about anti-Semitic content on our platform. And now we're the future of TV partnered with the NFL and the Oscars. But I think when you look at that deep concern about Silicon Valley's encroaching impact on the traditional media business, you have a lot of traditional media players who say, okay, well, who's our best bet?

49:39Who's our best guy? And the best guy at this point is Netflix and Disney. And so if the fight is like, well, we'd rather Netflix have Warner Brothers Discovery, and that creates enough engagement to continue supporting the artistic community so it's not just Mark Rober and Mr. Beast on Netflix and Amazon, then we're going to support that versus the guy who we don't know can get this through.

49:59Nilay Patel:So it's basically just doubt, right? It's doubt in David Ellison to compete with YouTube, to compete with any disruption from AI. I mean, and to be clear, David Ellison keeps waving at AI as though it's important. I don't know what he thinks is important about AI, but he keeps gesturing at it as though something will happen and he'll be cool because of it. Do you know what David Ellison thinks about AI? Because I have not been able to figure it out. I think it's whatever Bob Iger also thinks about AI. And I think, well, maybe not, because I think Bob Iger looks at OpenAI and says, man, imagine if we didn't sue Google and YouTube in 2007, and instead we just asked for a stake in that business and what that would have become, kind of like AL, Yahoo, and Google.

50:39I mean, I would love to know what David Ellison thinks about AI. I think he's a guy who deeply does love technology. If you read through the letter he sent to staff when the Paramount deal was first done with Skydance, he used the term tech and technology more than film, television, entertainment, streaming. He loves technology. what he thinks he's going to accomplish by loving ai beyond the enterprise side of it beyond the like you know use this for your microsoft word or whatever and including it in more original content at a time when there was the longest writer's strike in a very long time and actor's strike because of artificial intelligence less than two years ago i don't know what he's gonna think that he's trying to accomplish but he's again he's a guy who's making a lot of manic moves very publicly And I think that's off-putting to a town very well known for kind of keeping up a very stoic face at times and kind of moving slowly through technological changes.

51:35Nilay Patel:Yeah, I would love – if David wants to come on the show, I'd love to ask him what he thinks the word technology means specifically. I also would put that right next to – you're trying to buy a library of content made before any of this technology existed. Yeah. Because the thing that audiences find valuable is well-crafted things from the past. And there's no evidence that all this technology can make a well-crafted thing in the future. And in fact, most of the AI slop that I see trades on the IP of the past. Like, you know, Sora does not explode into the public consciousness unless you can make Michael Jackson do things.

52:08Nilay Patel:Like, you need literally a monoculture figure to make the AI seem relevant. Otherwise, you just have literally pure slop, which no one cares about. I'm unclear. Like I said, David, if you want to come on and tell me what your plan is, I would love to hear it. Let me end by asking one of the more Julia questions I can think of. We keep talking about these things like they're different businesses and they have different scopes, right? YouTube versus Netflix versus TikTok versus whatever. And it feels like the pressure is making them all the same business, right? So if you're like, I don't like what Neil Mohan is saying as CEO of YouTube, I'm going to place my bets on Netflix.

52:48Nilay Patel:That feels divorced from the fact that Netflix is just another app on your phone that is soon to introduce vertical video scrolling as a discovery mechanism to get you to do whatever next transaction they're going to do. That is divorced from the fact that Amazon has live shopping notifications in its app today. And that is right next to Instagram turning itself into some sort of like chaotic AI-powered QVC. They're all the same. Like they all have the same economics fundamentally, right? Compared to there used to be TV where you had your cable carriage agreements and your guaranteed advertising and that sat next to movies, which had a theatrical window and then a pay one window and then like whatever, right?

53:28Nilay Patel:They're like radically different businesses with different economics and they produce different art. All of these feel like the same business to me right now, no matter what. How does any of that get differentiated ever again? the word that gets passed around a lot in different executive meetings is quality and not in the sense of we need to protect quality but more from the nihilistic point of view of just quality matter the question of no one thought youtube was tv a lot of these hollywood executives still thought it was just cat videos up until like the nielsen gauge started breaking out YouTube consumption on TV sets.

54:05People are worried that if quality doesn't matter, it's just scale, then how do you play into this? And it wasn't a concern until, as you just perfectly outlined, the ad dollars were going across all these same platforms. It used to be that Netflix or even, you know, back in the day, Disney and CBS and whatever it might be, had one level of ad spend. And then there was, you know, search ad spend, right? And there was like social video before we called it that ad spending YouTube video and whatever it was. And now all of these companies have started to realize that where the real money is going to be over the next few years outside of the mobile social space and kind of the shopping space happening inside these different apps is on connected TV sets.

54:47We're spending more time with our connected TV sets. And so the amount of dollars that is left over from linear as they move over to CTV is very, very, very high. It's why the Nielsen gauge has become this big problem in Hollywood because YouTube can use it to say, we want these bigger TV brand or ad deals. And we can work with our creators on that. And the brands on it with the podcasts, those are playing out on TV living room sets, all that stuff. It's what's encouraging Adam Masseri to say, let's be on TV sets. And it's also, it's concerning the Netflix's and the Paramount's and the WBDs of the world.

55:20Because if they can't rely on that guaranteed collection of revenue going to their services, because now you've got these big disruptors coming in, then they have to find out ways to either lean into the lower quality content that people seem to want. And that's not to diss it many YouTubers. I'm saying it's just on average how they think of it. Or go the other way and be super high premium content. So kind of going back to what we started this conversation on, Why does Netflix want WBD at the same time they want podcasts? They don't know the answer. They don't know. They don't know if the idea is to go$50 a month in 10 years and have the best quality stuff in the world, and that's the differentiator in a world of AI slop, or if they should have more podcasts and more UGC videos in order to kind of glean onto that audience.

56:06And so I think we used to talk about attention across all these different formats as something completely different. But the reality is, is that all those little slivers of attention that they once thought they could have are completely melded into each other. Now all it's left is crumbs. They're fighting for crumbs. And so the fighting just means that it went from being, you know, maybe we'll bid on a Martin Scorsese movie or we'll bid on the UFC to now we're actually going to spend $83 billion in order to kind of protect our future. It's the most expensive defensive bet in entertainment in a very long time.

56:37Nilay Patel:The last outstanding piece of this puzzle is regulatory approval, which we've been hinting at throughout this conversation. Obviously, Larry Ellison is a big Trump supporter. David Ellison, his son, made enormous changes at CBS News after buying Paramount. Trump seems very pleased with them. In classic Trump fashion, he's not even hiding the idea of a quid pro quo. He's just saying to the anchors of CBS News, like, I got you, your job. It feels very obvious that Warner shareholders want to go with Netflix. The Trump administration could get in the way of that, right? The Federal Trade Commission could say, we're initiating anti-monopoly review.

57:10Nilay Patel:They could push it towards Paramount. Does that seem likely to happen? Is Netflix ready for that outcome? Netflix is super ready. They had an earnings call a couple weeks ago. They seem to feel pretty confident, although how much of that is just public posturing, we never know. What I will say is they're sowing the seeds very, very well of saying that if this is a conversation about premium video, then yes, we are the biggest. But to your last point, Eli, what is video in 2026? And so they keep pointing out YouTube's advantage and Instagram's advantage. And I think the case I keep thinking about the regulatory stuff is the most recent.

57:48You'll have to correct me if I'm wrong. I think it was DOJ meta, right? It wasn't FTC meta. It's FTC meta. It was FTC meta where meta was like, people come here not to connect with friends. They love video, right? Like they love watching stuff. Now, if you're Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, you're like, thank God. Because now we can say, look, people are spending time on Facebook watching video. They're spending time on Instagram. Instagram is coming to TV sets and they can point to YouTube's growth where they if you look at a chart of Netflix versus YouTube in the United States, Netflix has like a very little slope in terms of increased engagement and YouTube is like on a huge swing upwards on TV sets.

58:22And so I think if they can look at the precedent of what is video on all these major distribution platforms, which Facebook, you know, is now a part of, they have, I think, the advantage of being able to say that were competing against all these guys. But of course, again, as we said earlier in the Trump administration and the Trump era, never say never about how this could go.

58:43Nilay Patel:Do you think if Netflix buys Warner Brothers, they will succeed where literally every company in the past has failed? I think it will ultimately, similar to the 2019 conversation about Disney and Fox, it will ultimately be that it was probably a good thing to own. They probably should have done it at half the price. And somehow David Zaslav and Rupert Murdoch are the two that, you know, came out swinging and winning in this world. But no, I think it'll do well for Netflix because they have the audience and it will be vastly, vastly overpriced in three, four years when we look at that deal. Julia, this has been great.

59:17Nilay Patel:We're gonna have to have you back soon. Every time I talk to you, I feel like we should just do this every single week. I assume there's going to be more twists and turns in the saga. So we'll have you back real soon. Absolutely. I'd like to thank Julia Alexander for taking time to speak with me, and thank you for listening to Decoder. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube.

59:41Nilay Patel:You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. And we have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're at DecoderPod as well, and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. It's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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