By Nick Lichtenberg
Publication Date: 2025-12-05 19:17:00
Netflix’s $72 billion play for Warner Bros. is as much a bet on the future of artificial intelligence and chips as it is on movies and shows, according to a top Wall Street analyst, who said in an interview with Fortune that the deal cannot be understood without looking at Google’s technology ambitions.
Amid cries from the jilted Ellison family about a “tainted” sale process and indie producers and theater owners declaring the “death of Hollywood,” Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global Visible Alpha, sees a different game being played. Otto said she thinks the tech angle of the industry is being overlooked.
“I think there’s this much bigger conversation that is being missed,” she said: Google and its TPU chips.
A key question for the future of entertainment, Otto told Fortune, is control over premium video at massive scale in an era when generative AI will increasingly create, remix, and personalize moving images. (Otto called it the “video corpus” that…
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23437369/acastro_220504_STK121_0001.jpg?resize=1200,628&ssl=1 "GitHub Copilot will support models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI")