iWorld
VBS 2024: OTT aggregation and beyond
Mumbai: India is in the grips of seismic changes as far as video and broadband consumption is concerned. Pay TV cord-cutting is rampant even as free TV subscriptions are on the rise and OTT buy-ins are churning with the signs up for certain platforms stagnating even as others are seeing rapid increases and some are seeing cataclysmic drops. Aggregators of OTTs are popping up on the horizon promising cheap bundles along with value-added services for cable TV and DTH. There’s a rush to set up free advertising-supported TV channels by TV set manufacturers and smart TV device makers. There’s the Jio factor where it is seeking to convert most pay TV customers to free streaming of video content by offering access to consumers at no cost. The consumer continues to demand bandwidths higher than ever imagined even as prices are dropping. Margins are under pressure as every player goes one-up on each other to acquire and retain customers.
Clearly, the video and broadband distribution landscape has not been as vibrant as it is now… How long will this pot-boiling continue? What will the magic potion of video and broadband look and taste like? And what’s the end game? Indiantelevision.com held its 20th edition of Video and Broadband Summit better known as VBS at Sahara Star Hotel, Mumbai.
The fireside chat on the topic: ‘OTT Aggregation And Beyond’ had HT Media Ltd chief revenue officer (HT Labs) Anil Dua in conversation with Indian Television.com group founder, chairman & editor-in-chief Anil NM Wanvari.
Beginning the conversation, Wanvari asked, “How is OTTplay overcoming the challenge faced by consumers who seek ease of use?”
Dua replied, “Now you don’t need to go to different apps. we have possibly the largest OTT aggregator platform in India called OTTplay, which covers more than 35 apps containing live TV channels. Gone are the days when you have to worry about the hassle of going from one platform to another to check what exactly you want to watch. So we have solved the problem of what to watch, through our recommendation engine, and also the proper way to stream it because in one app, you will get all the apps together. So that’s OTTplay. Maybe this is a good time for us to show you what our platform looks like.”
After an AV of OTTplay was played on the screen, Wanvari asked, “You’re aggregating and you’re serving to telcos, you’re servicing to ISPs, cable. So what’s the percentage distribution between them?”
To which, Dua replied saying, “So we have a very good mix of the internet service providers with whom we do the bundling with the broadband plans. We also have cable operators, through whom we reach out to our customers. We also have a direct-to-customer channel through our digital landscape, which helps us reach out to our clients.”
He added, “If you look at our content, we have a very good balance across regions. That’s one of the big USPs that we bring to the table. Let’s start with the South. If you go to Coimbatore, their number one OTT Sun NXT is with us. If you come to AP or Telangana, their number one and two OTT and TV, aha are with us. When you go to a Hindi heartland, we have Bhojpuri, for Ludiana we have Punjabi, We have, of course, the large Hindi OTTs, i.e., ZEE, Sony, Lionsgate, etc. We have most of these OTTs. So we are relevant across a spectrum of customers. I believe we are relevant to everyone”
Wanvari interjected, “I’m not talking about relevance. I’m talking about penetration so far. My understanding is, that you’ll have been pushed so aggressively in the west. You’ll have been more aggressive up north, and possibly down south, rather than the west and the east.”
Dua answered, “You’re right! So far, south is obviously the leading market for us, followed by the north, west, and then the east.”
Wanvari then asked, “What’s the kind of watch time that people are spending across your apps?”
Dua replied, “By DNA, we are a tech company. We have customers at the middle of everything that we do. We track watch hours, average time per user, and average time that each user spends. I won’t be able to share the exact numbers, but it’s pretty good. We have seen that in tier two and three cities, our average time per user goes up significantly. So that’s one of the insights that we have got with focus on the regional content that we have done.”
Wanvari said, “What is that? Are those areas TV dark?”
Dua answered, “Things are changing in this pandemic industry. I believe that so far the OTT penetration has largely happened in the larger towns, and there’s a lot of scope in tier two and tier three for both OTT platforms as well as aggregators like us.”
Moving on to the next question, Wanvari asked, “Are the other lower tier of society picking up your app because of your long package with all 35 plus all the 400-500 TV channels? That’s pretty affordable at Rs 3000/year. But people can pick up regional packs at 100 rupees, etc. So what is finding the most takers and where is it finding, in tier two, and tier three? Is it the upscaled customers or is it the lower ones? Is it mobile or is it Smart TV?
Dua answered, “So first of all, by design, we are a TV-first app. We want more and more customers to be watching us on television., When I say, TV, it is TV and mobile by default. That’s the first thing. The second thing as you talked about the packs. We have packs ranging from, as high but like you rightly said you said, as affordable as 250 rupees a month for 32 OTTs and 350 plus five TV channels a month. If you come to the regional packs like the Hindi heartland pack or a north pack or an east pack, that starts from as low as Rs 100 a month. So they’re very affordable. The high-income strata in tier two are the most takers. The metros are more around the larger packs.”
Wanvari further asked, “Do you have specials coming up from time to time, special promotions? Secondly, do you also have special price promotions for the content that has been put out there by your partners?”
Dua said, “We belong to the HT Media group. We are a media company ourselves. We have our reach through our newspapers, through our digital landscape that we have. One is that we use our own media to reach out to the customers. And we have the content nudges that go to the customers who subscribe to us.”
He added, “The answer to both your question is yes! If you look at our digital reach across our basic platforms, hindustantimes.com or live mint or live Hindustan, we have 300 million plus, on a monthly basis and use. So we use that, to reach out to our prospective customers to start with and to the subscribers who are already with us. There are time-to-time content nudges that go to them, the new arrivals coming in and reaching out to them to not only continue to be with us but also watch and use us, so that we can offer value to our customers.”
Wanvari immediately asked, “ Are you EBIDTA positive or are you bleeding?”
Dua answered, “We are right now in the start-up mode. We are in our third year running. We are now very close to coming to a place where we can start generating revenue.”
Wanveri further asked, “Is the capacity full or do you see more partners coming in? How do OTT players partner with you all?”
Dua replied, “Today, we are 32 OTTs. Very soon, by June, we should roughly be at about 43 to 45 and we clearly see that in the short term. In the short to medium term we should be at 50 plus OTTs. So there is no limitation with respect to the capacity. Partnering is simple. If the content is relevant to our customers, we are willing to discuss and partner. There is obviously a different discussion with each of our content partners that we have.”
Wanvari quickly asked, “So, how long does it take to come up with a partner, to conclude a partnership? Is the process quick or prolonged?”
Dua answered “My experience has been that gently the closure of the commercial discussion in this kind of business takes about 30 days and then another about 30 to 45 days. In about two and a half months we are GTM ready.”
Asking a question about their subscriber base, Wanvari asked, “Where do you all see yourselves two to three years down the line? Do you think the appetite will continue in the space when it gets competitive?”
Dua replied saying, “If you look at the growth of broadband, today we have roughly 50 per cent plus penetration in rural India. The smartphone penetration itself is growing into tier two and tier three by more than 25 per cent every year. So growth is not going to be an issue. Talking about the large telcos, remember that still one-third of the market is with non-telco broadband providers. That market is not only there today but it is also growing. We clearly see that as the market for us. And with bundling with their proposition is how to we want to reach out to the customers. On top of that, we have our D2C channel, which caters to the first two-thirds part of the customer base. A lot of customers of large telcos who have not used the content that is provided by them. So they keep looking for the right platform, and the right value proposition. So that’s how we’re building this whole mix.”
Wanvari then asked, “You said discoverability is very easy for your customer. How different are you all from Netflix, which is supposed to be the gold standard, in terms of recommendation, search, discovery, and all of that?”
Dua answered, “We talk about the four pillars of our business. The first pillar of our business clearly is the user experience and the user interface that we bring in. We have single sign-on for most of the apps. If you have, for example, OTTplay with you, and you want to watch Scam 2003 on Sony LIV, because you don’t need to have a Sony LIV app. So it’s deep integration. You can just move from one platform to another within OTTplay without having those apps. That’s the first thing. The second thing that we bring to the table. You talked about Netflix recommendations. If you are a customer or a subscriber of OTTplay, you get AI-based recommendations from all 32 platforms and not just one. So if you’ve watched an action movie or content on one of the platform, the next time you come to OTTplay player you will get recommendations across. The third thing is we are extremely regional in the content that we bring in. Fourthly, of course, is the affordability. We want to reach out, we want to be affordable to the masses of India.”
A wave of panic swept through Delhi and Mumbai over the past week as viral social media posts claimed a sudden spike in missing and kidnapped children. The alarm bells proved false. Both cities’ police forces issued categorical denials, pointing fingers at paid promotion and rumour-mongering designed to create public hysteria. The twist: fingers are now pointing at Yash Raj Films, accused of orchestrating the scare as guerrilla marketing for Mardaani 3, its upcoming vigilante thriller about child trafficking.
The episode lays bare a darker truth about India’s social media ecosystem. With smartphone penetration soaring and screen time at record highs, paid promotion tools have become weapons of mass hysteria. A few thousand rupees can boost a post to millions of eyeballs within hours. When that post plays on primal fears like child safety, verification becomes an afterthought. Users share first, question later. The result: manufactured crises that feel real until authorities scramble to debunk them.
Delhi Police took to Instagram 23 hours ago with a blunt message: “After following a few leads, we discovered that the hype around the surge in missing girls in Delhi is being pushed through paid promotion. Creating panic for monetary gains won’t be tolerated, and we’ll take strict action against such individuals.” The post, captioned “Facts matter, Fear doesn’t”, made clear the force’s irritation at being dragged into what it views as a manufactured crisis.
Mumbai Police followed suit, issuing a statement denying claims of kidnappings. “Certain social media handles are misrepresenting data and indulging in rumour-mongering regarding cases of missing and kidnapped children. We categorically deny these claims,” the force wrote. It added that FIRs were being registered against those “deliberately spreading false information and creating public panic.”
The misinformation spread with startling effectiveness. Popular Instagram and Twitter accounts, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, shared alarming statistics and anecdotal reports of vanished children, tagging police handles and demanding action. The posts gained traction quickly, amplified by concerned parents and activists. Only when both police forces traced the origin of the claims did the facade crumble: many of the viral posts were boosted through paid promotion, a telltale sign of coordinated astroturfing rather than organic concern.
Enter Yash Raj Films, the 50-year-old production house behind the Mardaani franchise. The series, starring Rani Mukerji as a no-nonsense cop battling human trafficking rings, has built its brand on gritty, socially conscious thrillers. Mardaani 3 is in production, and online chatter swiftly connected the dots between the missing persons panic and the film’s subject matter. Accusations flew: had YRF seeded fake stories to drum up buzz for its vigilante cop sequel?
YRF issued a furious rebuttal. “Yash Raj Films is a 50-year-old company founded on the core principles of being highly ethical and transparent,” a spokesperson said. “We strongly deny the accusations floating on social media that Mardaani 3’s promotional campaign has deliberately sensationalised a sensitive issue like this and we have immense trust in our authorities that they will share all facts and truths in due course of time.”
The denial is categorical, but scepticism lingers. Guerrilla marketing, viral hoaxes masquerading as public service announcements, manipulated data: these are not unheard of in Bollywood’s playbook, though rarely deployed on such a sensitive issue. Child safety is a third rail; exploiting it for box office returns crosses a line even by the industry’s elastic ethical standards.
Yet the evidence tying YRF directly to the posts remains circumstantial. No smoking gun links the production house to the paid promotions flagged by police. What is clear is that someone paid to amplify posts about missing children at precisely the moment a film about missing children was in the public eye. Whether that someone was a rogue marketing agency, an overzealous publicist, or a bad actor with no YRF connection remains murky.
The fallout is reputational. YRF, which has cultivated a family-friendly, socially responsible image across five decades, now finds itself defending against accusations of weaponising child safety fears. The Mardaani franchise, built on the premise of protecting the vulnerable, risks being tarred as exploitative. Rani Mukerji, the face of the series, has yet to comment.
For Delhi and Mumbai police, the episode is a reminder of social media’s double-edged sword. The platforms amplify genuine crises but also manufacture fake ones with alarming ease. Paid promotion tools, designed to help legitimate businesses reach audiences, can just as easily turbocharge hoaxes. Distinguishing signal from noise requires resources and speed that overstretched forces often lack.
India’s social media consumption has exploded. The average urban user now spends over four hours daily on platforms, doom-scrolling through an endless feed of news, gossip and outrage. Algorithms prioritise engagement over accuracy, pushing emotionally charged content to the top. A post about missing children triggers immediate shares; a dry police denial struggles for traction. By the time fact-checkers mobilise, the lie has circled the country thrice.
Paid promotion supercharges this dynamic. For as little as Rs2,000, anyone can boost a post to lakhs of users, targeting specific demographics and geographies. The tools are legitimate, used daily by small businesses and political campaigns. But in the wrong hands, they become misinformation missiles. A fabricated crisis about child kidnappings, amplified by paid reach, looks indistinguishable from organic concern. Users see friends sharing it, assume it must be true, and hit repost. The cascade is self-reinforcing.
The broader pattern is troubling. Misinformation thrives on emotional triggers: fear for children, distrust of institutions, calls to action. A viral post claiming kidnappings demands immediate sharing; verifying it feels like wasted time when lives might be at stake. By the time authorities debunk the claims, the damage is done. Panic has spread, trust in institutions has eroded, and the original purveyors of the hoax have vanished into the digital ether.
This is the new normal. Every week brings a fresh panic: contaminated food, imminent disasters, communal violence rumours. Most prove baseless. Yet each one finds traction because social media rewards speed over truth. The infrastructure designed to connect people now excels at frightening them. Platforms profit from the chaos; advertisers pay for eyeballs regardless of whether the content is fact or fiction. The incentives are perverse, and there is no fix in sight.
Whether YRF is guilty or merely collateral damage in a misinformation campaign will depend on what authorities uncover in their investigations. The production house insists it has “immense trust” that police will reveal the truth. If that truth exonerates YRF, the studio will still carry the stain of association. If it implicates them, Mardaani 3 will enter cinemas under a cloud that no amount of box office success can dispel.
For now, the message from both police forces is unambiguous: there is no surge in missing children, the panic was engineered, and those responsible will face consequences. Parents can exhale. Social media users might want to pause before hitting share. And Bollywood’s marketers, ethical or otherwise, have been put on notice: weaponising fear for profit will not go unpunished.
A wave of panic swept through Delhi and Mumbai over the past week as viral social media posts claimed a sudden spike in missing and kidnapped children. The alarm bells proved false. Both cities’ police forces issued categorical denials, pointing fingers at paid promotion and rumour-mongering designed to create public hysteria. The twist: fingers are now pointing at Yash Raj Films, accused of orchestrating the scare as guerrilla marketing for Mardaani 3, its upcoming vigilante thriller about child trafficking.
The episode lays bare a darker truth about India’s social media ecosystem. With smartphone penetration soaring and screen time at record highs, paid promotion tools have become weapons of mass hysteria. A few thousand rupees can boost a post to millions of eyeballs within hours. When that post plays on primal fears like child safety, verification becomes an afterthought. Users share first, question later. The result: manufactured crises that feel real until authorities scramble to debunk them.
Delhi Police took to Instagram 23 hours ago with a blunt message: “After following a few leads, we discovered that the hype around the surge in missing girls in Delhi is being pushed through paid promotion. Creating panic for monetary gains won’t be tolerated, and we’ll take strict action against such individuals.” The post, captioned “Facts matter, Fear doesn’t”, made clear the force’s irritation at being dragged into what it views as a manufactured crisis.
Mumbai Police followed suit, issuing a statement denying claims of kidnappings. “Certain social media handles are misrepresenting data and indulging in rumour-mongering regarding cases of missing and kidnapped children. We categorically deny these claims,” the force wrote. It added that FIRs were being registered against those “deliberately spreading false information and creating public panic.”
The misinformation spread with startling effectiveness. Popular Instagram and Twitter accounts, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, shared alarming statistics and anecdotal reports of vanished children, tagging police handles and demanding action. The posts gained traction quickly, amplified by concerned parents and activists. Only when both police forces traced the origin of the claims did the facade crumble: many of the viral posts were boosted through paid promotion, a telltale sign of coordinated astroturfing rather than organic concern.
Enter Yash Raj Films, the 50-year-old production house behind the Mardaani franchise. The series, starring Rani Mukerji as a no-nonsense cop battling human trafficking rings, has built its brand on gritty, socially conscious thrillers. Mardaani 3 is in production, and online chatter swiftly connected the dots between the missing persons panic and the film’s subject matter. Accusations flew: had YRF seeded fake stories to drum up buzz for its vigilante cop sequel?
YRF issued a furious rebuttal. “Yash Raj Films is a 50-year-old company founded on the core principles of being highly ethical and transparent,” a spokesperson said. “We strongly deny the accusations floating on social media that Mardaani 3’s promotional campaign has deliberately sensationalised a sensitive issue like this and we have immense trust in our authorities that they will share all facts and truths in due course of time.”
The denial is categorical, but scepticism lingers. Guerrilla marketing, viral hoaxes masquerading as public service announcements, manipulated data: these are not unheard of in Bollywood’s playbook, though rarely deployed on such a sensitive issue. Child safety is a third rail; exploiting it for box office returns crosses a line even by the industry’s elastic ethical standards.
Yet the evidence tying YRF directly to the posts remains circumstantial. No smoking gun links the production house to the paid promotions flagged by police. What is clear is that someone paid to amplify posts about missing children at precisely the moment a film about missing children was in the public eye. Whether that someone was a rogue marketing agency, an overzealous publicist, or a bad actor with no YRF connection remains murky.
The fallout is reputational. YRF, which has cultivated a family-friendly, socially responsible image across five decades, now finds itself defending against accusations of weaponising child safety fears. The Mardaani franchise, built on the premise of protecting the vulnerable, risks being tarred as exploitative. Rani Mukerji, the face of the series, has yet to comment.
For Delhi and Mumbai police, the episode is a reminder of social media’s double-edged sword. The platforms amplify genuine crises but also manufacture fake ones with alarming ease. Paid promotion tools, designed to help legitimate businesses reach audiences, can just as easily turbocharge hoaxes. Distinguishing signal from noise requires resources and speed that overstretched forces often lack.
India’s social media consumption has exploded. The average urban user now spends over four hours daily on platforms, doom-scrolling through an endless feed of news, gossip and outrage. Algorithms prioritise engagement over accuracy, pushing emotionally charged content to the top. A post about missing children triggers immediate shares; a dry police denial struggles for traction. By the time fact-checkers mobilise, the lie has circled the country thrice.
Paid promotion supercharges this dynamic. For as little as Rs 2,000, anyone can boost a post to lakhs of users, targeting specific demographics and geographies. The tools are legitimate, used daily by small businesses and political campaigns. But in the wrong hands, they become misinformation missiles. A fabricated crisis about child kidnappings, amplified by paid reach, looks indistinguishable from organic concern. Users see friends sharing it, assume it must be true, and hit repost. The cascade is self-reinforcing.
The broader pattern is troubling. Misinformation thrives on emotional triggers: fear for children, distrust of institutions, calls to action. A viral post claiming kidnappings demands immediate sharing; verifying it feels like wasted time when lives might be at stake. By the time authorities debunk the claims, the damage is done. Panic has spread, trust in institutions has eroded, and the original purveyors of the hoax have vanished into the digital ether.
This is the new normal. Every week brings a fresh panic: contaminated food, imminent disasters, communal violence rumours. Most prove baseless. Yet each one finds traction because social media rewards speed over truth. The infrastructure designed to connect people now excels at frightening them. Platforms profit from the chaos; advertisers pay for eyeballs regardless of whether the content is fact or fiction. The incentives are perverse, and there is no fix in sight.
Whether YRF is guilty or merely collateral damage in a misinformation campaign will depend on what authorities uncover in their investigations. The production house insists it has “immense trust” that police will reveal the truth. If that truth exonerates YRF, the studio will still carry the stain of association. If it implicates them, Mardaani 3 will enter cinemas under a cloud that no amount of box office success can dispel.
For now, the message from both police forces is unambiguous: there is no surge in missing children, the panic was engineered, and those responsible will face consequences. Parents can exhale. Social media users might want to pause before hitting share. And Bollywood’s marketers, ethical or otherwise, have been put on notice: weaponising fear for profit will not go unpunished.
WASHINGTON: At OpenAI, the fight was not about artificial intelligence going rogue—it was about who got the GPUs.
An internal email from Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott, sent on November 19, 2023, offers the clearest account yet of the events that culminated in the sudden firing of Sam Altman as OpenAI’s chief executive. Far from a single ideological rupture, Scott describes a combustible mix of resource wars, bruised egos and a board ill-equipped to manage the world’s hottest AI company.
According to the email, addressed to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, president Brad Smith and other senior leaders, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever had been “increasingly at odds” with Altman on two fronts.
Read the full email below to find out:
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]
From: Kevin Scott
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2023 7:31 AM
To: Frank X. Shaw, Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, Amy Hood, Caitlin McCabe
Frank,
I can help you with the timeline and with our best understanding of what was going on. I think the reality was that a member of the board, llya Sutskever, had been increasingly at odds with his boss, Sam, over a variety of issues.
One of those issues is that there is a perfectly natural tension inside of the company between Research and Applied over resource allocations. The success of Applied has meant that headcount and GPUs got allocated to things like the API and ChatGPT. Research, which is responsible for training new models, could always use more GPUs because what they’re doing is literally insatiable, and it’s easy for them to look at the success of Applied and believe that in a zero sum game they are responsible for them waiting for GPUs to become available to do their work. I could tell you stories like this from every place l’ve ever worked, and it boils down to, even if you have two important, super successful things you’re trying to work on simultaneously, folks rarely think about the global optima. They believe that their thing is more important, and that to the extent that things are zero sum, that the other thing is a cause of their woes. It’s why Sam has pushed us so hard on capacity: he’s the one thing about the global optima and trying to make things non-zero sum. The researchers at OAl do not appreciate that they would not have anywhere remotely as many GPUs as they do have if there were no Applied at all, and that Applied has a momentum all its own that must be fed. So the only reasonable thing to do is what Sam has been doing: figure out how to get more compute.
The second of the issues, and one that’s deeply personal to llya, is that Jakub moreso than Ilya has been making the research breakthroughs that are driving things forward, to the point that Sam promoted Jakub, and put him charge of the major model research directions. After he did that, Jakub’s work accelerated, and he’s made some truly stunning progress that has accelerated in the past few weeks. I think that Ilya has had a very, very hard time with this, with this person that used to work for him suddenly becoming the leader, and perhaps more importantly, for solving the problem that Ilya has been trying to solve the past few years with little or no progress. Sam made the right choice as CEO here by promoting Jakub.
Now, in a normal company, if you don’t like these two things, you’d appeal to your boss, and if he/she tells you that they’ve made their decision and that it’s final, your recourse is accept the decision or quit. Here, and this is the piece that everyone should have been thinking harder about, the employee was also a founder and board member, and the board constitution was such that they were highly susceptible to a pitch by Ilya that portrays the decisions that Sam was making as bad. I think the things that made them susceptible, is that two of the board members were effective altruism folks who all things equal would like to have an infinite bag of money to build AGI-like things, just to study and ponder, but not to do anything with. None of them were experienced enough with running things, or understood the dynamic at OAI well enough to understand that firing Sam not only would not solve any of the concerns they had, but would make them worse. And none of them had experience, and didn’t seek experience out, in how to handle something like a CEO transition, certainly not for the hottest company in the world.
The actual timeline of events through Friday afternoon as I understand them:
Thursday late night, the board let’s Mira know what they’re going to do. By board, it’s Ilya, Tash, Helen, and Adam.
Mira calls me and Satya about 10-15 minutes before the board talks to Sam. This is the first either of us had heard of any of this. Mira sounded like she had been run over by a truck as she tells me.
OAl Board notifies Sam at noon on Friday that he’s out, and that Greg is off the board, and immediately does a blog post.
OAl all hands at 2P to rattled staff.
Greg resigns. He was blindsided and hadn’t been in the board deliberations, and hadn’t agreed to stay.
Jakub and a whole horde of researchers reach out to Sam and Greg trying to understand what happened, expressing loyalty to them, and saying they will resign.
Friday night Jakub and a handful of others resign.
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK: The US Department of Justice is probing whether Netflix deployed anti-competitive tactics around its proposed $82.7bn acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery’s studios and streaming business, the Wall Street Journal reported, signalling early antitrust unease over a deal that could redraw Hollywood’s power map.
In a civil subpoena reviewed by the paper, the department asked another entertainment company to detail “any other exclusionary conduct” by Netflix that could plausibly entrench market or monopoly power. Regulators also sought views on whether rival bids, most notably from Paramount Skydance, could harm competition, and how past studio or distributor mergers have affected bargaining power for creative talent, including variations in talent contracts across studios.
Warner Bros’ appeal is obvious: marquee film and television studios, a deep content vault, and franchises spanning Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and DC Comics’ Batman and Superman. But the scale is precisely what has caught regulators’ attention. The DOJ’s review, the WSJ said, is at an early stage.
The spotlight is not limited to Netflix. The DOJ is also reviewing Paramount’s proposed bid, which Warner Bros’ board has unanimously rejected as “inadequate” and “not in the best interests” of shareholders. Paramount is pressing to wrap up the government’s review within weeks, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Once information requests are satisfied, a 10-day waiting period will begin for the DOJ to decide whether to challenge the offer on competition grounds.
Politics is adding heat. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos faced sharp questioning from US senators this week over how the deal might affect competition across entertainment. Overseas, scrutiny is building too: British politicians and former policymakers have urged the UK’s competition watchdog to open a full review, while EU antitrust regulators are expected to examine rival bids by Netflix and Paramount Skydance in parallel.
Markets, for now, shrugged. The S&P 500 rose about 2 per cent and the Nasdaq gained more than 2 per cent.
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