A key asset that Netflix could be eyeing in the Warner Bros deal is one few people are talking about: an AI trove.
Among the most important aspects of the coming automated age, say forward-looking insiders, is a rich well of content going back many decades, either to train your own studio on or to give consumers to play with. Warner Bros has it. Netflix doesn’t. And if the deal goes through, the streamer will.
Netflix executives on an investor call Friday morning announcing the lucrative deal didn’t note this point explicitly; co-chief executive Ted Sarandos just said innovation several times while he and others alluded to “world-building.” But the subtext was there — since technology relies on a massive library, Netflix’s AI efforts just got a big boost.
Disney threw down the gauntlet several weeks ago when leader Bob Iger announced that the company will soon allow Disney+ subscribers “to create user-generated content and to consume user generated content — mostly short-form — from others.” The conglomerate has a slew of franchises that users would want to meme-ify, from Star Wars to Pixar to the MCU. Warners offers a comparable set, from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings to Looney Tunes. Heck, Netflix could even let people play with Casablanca and Citizen Kane, two library titles it shouted out to.
Netflix also brings another advantage: technical machine-learning experience, honed by more than 15 years of gathering data on customers and building algorithms to serve them. Now armed with a content library, their Sora-like AI product, should they launch one, could be a juggernaut. And the company has been making a new push into games, which are a sort-of digital cousin of user-generated tools.
Training would be trickier. While Netflix owning Warner Bros. would allow it to feed models with its thousands of titles uninterrupted by legal challenges, it remains to be seen what mechanisms the company would have to stop other studios or tech companies from feasting on them too, given the Wild West nature of training and lack of clear legal restrictions thus far. Conversely, Netflix might not want to limit itself to just WB titles.
When Disney planted its flag on AI last month it was seen in part as a desire not to repeat the sins of the past, when it let Netflix get way too far in front on streaming before launching its own service in late 2019. That kind of territory-cede, Iger telegraphed, would not happen with this phase of the tech revolution. His company had the content and soon would have the tech, unlike Netflix which only had the latter.
With one stroke of the pen (and $82 billion), Ted Sarandos just flipped the script.
