☀️ How DIS+ Will Help ESPN Break the Bundle in ‘25
SEARCHLIGHT joins comedy revival / MAX adds 'Channels' / College Football's big wknd
Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LinkedIn here if ya like), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on THURSDAY, December 5, 2024.
Where, my apologies if the newsletter is a little late this morning — I was too riveted by the I wanna say at least 20 minutes (if not longer) of late-morning TV broadcast time that ITV gave today to . . . picking baby names for folks calling into the show.
It was followed by a breakdown of 2024’s “Hottest festive fashion trend: Bows!” (Janice, your Christmas present is now all set.)
U.S. morning TV > U.K. morning TV
BUT: Good news — your dreams of owning Tom Brady’s DunKings tracksuit are finally coming true!
Yes, Tommy is putting your fall garage sale to shame by getting rid of about $6M (🤞) worth of his crap memorabilia in a new GOAT Collection: Watches & Treasures from Tom Brady (eye roll not included) SOTHEBY’S auction. TB — seriously . . . why so many watches, bro??
So if you have about $10k to $20k left over from your fossil buying — have at it!
THEN: Here are your National Board of Review award winners, with Wicked taking the top slot.
AND: Your Independent Spirit Award nominations.
YEAH: Look out Grisham! The T-Swift book sold 814k copies over the Thanksgiving weekend at $40 a pop at TARGET (it was only available IRL in stores), according to CIRCANA data.
Obama’s book The Promised Land did 816k copies in its 2020 debut, but that was a full week’s worth of sales across all outlets (not including audiobooks).
PLUS: HBO is adding good ol’ linear TV channels to MAX for a “small subset” of ad-free subscribers. So — lucky few customers, feel free to enjoy the HBO PLEX world like it’s 2002!
HBO, HBO 2, HBO Signature, HBO Comedy and HBO Zone are now there for your enjoyment in a “Channels” section.
Themed channels will be added next year.
MI DISPIACE: Thanks to the Gilmore Girls — The Jess Years fan who reminded me that indeed WALMART figured into the series in season 3, when Jess took a job there (I personally stick to the college years in my rewatches, hence my blind spot).
Although curiously the show didn’t include any WALMART branding in the show so . . . I stand by my assessment about the brand association.
TODAY IN AI
As part of AMAZON’s AI announcements this week — it’s introducing the ability for folks to create a 6-second video using an AI text-to-video tool to help sell their products on Amazon.com.
That’ll increase to 2-minute videos sometime in 2025, thus reinforcing that as much as Hollywood will be affected by AI — the creative advertising industry will likely be hit harder.
ALTHOUGH: Ad buying . . . maybe not so much. Gotta love this quote from a Digiday piece surveying ad buyers using AI to do their ad buying for them, and the, uh, challenges it’s presenting:
“We have to explain to our clients what we’ve done, why we’ve made the decisions that we’ve made and what it means for their business. And the inability to do that no matter how we got to the endgame is what’s going to get you in trouble.”
Read: We can’t make up our BS for our clients to show why they’re paying us so much . . . because the AI won’t tell us the BS it used to decide where it bought ads and why when we used it to do our jobs for us. 🙄
Apparently add weather forecasters to the jobs AI will be taking. GOOGLE’s DeepMind AI system is now beating traditional modeling on 15-day prediction accuracy.
Add Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Tyson to the list of celebs being used in fake AI ads on YT, this time hawking boner pills according to 404 Media.
GOOGLE CEO Sundar Pichai did his best Silicon Valley version of trash talking that we can probably expect, at the NYT DealBook conference yesterday when discussing MICROSOFT’s AI development so far:
“I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of MICROSOFT’s own models and our models — any day, any time.” See you on the playground after school.
He also alluded to the fact that the next round of AI development leaps are gonna require a lot more time and work, but that search will “continue to change profoundly” in 2025.
CHATGPT now has 300M folks who use it at least once a week globally, according to OPENAI CEO Sam Altman.
10M (3%) pay to use it.
📽 THE SILVER TV 📺
