FRESH CLIPPINGS

Disney Opens El Capitan to Creators

Disney held an event called Created in LA last week that effectively functioned like the unveiling of a creator operating strategy. Monica Kahn and Josh Lawson each gave a solid breakdown.

The event itself was built by Jon Youshaei, a former YouTube and Instagram executive turned creator, who pitched Disney on the idea of premiering creator-made videos as actual feature films on the big screen. Night one took place at the El Capitan Theatre, where The Sticks and Zach King premiered new work in a setting usually reserved for studio releases.

Dana Walden, Disney’s President and Chief Creative Officer, told the room that creators understand their audiences intimately and adjust in real time in a way traditional production never could. Asad Ayaz, Disney’s Chief Brand Officer, made an even more pointed observation the next day on the studio lot: Disney itself was started by a creator, a storyteller who began with shorts and expanded into movies, products, and an entire theme park world. A century later, the same studio is applying that same model to today’s creators.

Sounds like a lot of marketing. And it is…

But there was some substance too.

The following day on the lot, Ayaz laid out actual pathways into Disney projects for creators, spanning scripted series, features, and brand campaigns. Dhar Mann broke down what it actually takes to run his operation, 65 sets and 10 crews shipping five TV-length episodes a week.

When Open Gardens first started almost two years ago, I remember trying to reframe the conversation from creators as a distribution channel to creators as the media itself. And now, here we are.

It will be interesting to see how Disney puts all of this into action moving forward.

101 Studios Bets on the Next Bourdain

101 Studios, the company behind Yellowstone and Tulsa King, is getting into the food content business. The studio is launching Yes Chef Studios in partnership with Yes Chef Group, founded by Jack Goldburg and Liam Henning, and committing up to $25 million to the venture. Goldburg is the creator behind Jack’s Dining Room, a food and travel program with over a million YouTube subscribers and three million Instagram followers.

101 CEO David Glasser was direct about what he was looking for. He has scripted TV, feature film, and unscripted all covered, but had never cracked food. He had been hunting for the next Anthony Bourdain, and found a creator who was not a one-hit wonder, but someone building a loyal audience.

Yes Chef Studios will produce long-form scripted and unscripted programming around food, culture, travel, and hospitality, with the goal of eventually selling projects to major streamers or networks. But just as important, finding and developing the next generation of food creators. Glasser described wanting to identify who the other Jacks are and bring them into the fold the same way.

Goldburg’s own framing of the partnership is interesting, though, because it’s always the legacy studios that have something to gain, and the question of does the creator even need legacy always comes circling around. He sees 101’s production expertise, directing talent, and Hollywood relationships as the missing piece that turns a loyal YouTube following into something that can truly stand out in a market where everyone has access to everything. Together, as he put it, it’s game over for competitors trying to do this piecemeal.

What makes this particularly interesting is Glasser’s framing of it as a test case for more creator deals. Jack’s Dining Room could become the template for how the studio (and other copycats) approaches creator-led deals more broadly. So instead of pitching one idea to a streamer and hoping it lands, he’s inviting creators to come be part of a factory built specifically to cross them over into long-form content.

Cracks in Netflix's Creator Push

Lucas Shaw reported in his newsletter that YouTube has successfully gotten at least one major creator to reconsider a deal with Netflix. Nick DiGiovanni, the chef with more than 46 million YouTube subscribers, has told Netflix he wants to revisit the agreement they announced just a couple of months ago.

DiGiovanni was one of the first big YouTube stars to agree to post new videos simultaneously on both platforms, a day-and-date arrangement that we have covered as one of the more aggressive moves in Netflix’s creator push. According to Lucas’s reporting, YouTube has been actively pushing back against these deals, offering creators financial incentives to keep YouTube as their primary outlet, alongside other kinds of consequences such as reduced visibility at events like Brandcast, loss of preferred advertising access, and so on.

DiGiovanni has not made a final decision it seems. Netflix, for its part, is caught in an uncomfortable position. It does not want to let talent out of signed deals and risk an exodus, but it also does not want to launch this entire creator strategy surrounded by partners who already feel burned.

This is worth keeping tabs on. If DiGiovanni successfully walks back his Netflix deal, it becomes a real test case for how much leverage YouTube’s retention strategy actually has, and whether the big checks and implicit threats are enough to pull creators back from deals they already signed.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"NFLX has lacked big original series and it's showing."

— Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall

As we’ve covered here in the past few weeks / months, Steven sees the recent push into YouTube-style podcasts, short-form video, and influencer content as a potential distraction from the thing that actually drives subscriptions in the first place. His framing is blunt: if the ambition is to turn Netflix into a broader content hub, the risk is losing sight of the watercooler moments that built the brand to begin with will affect is.

He recently downgraded the stock…

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Openness as Strategy

We covered Wesley Wang launching his production company a while back. Well, this week he announced their first project:

A YouTube competition series where one creator wins $100,000 to make a movie. Wang is funding the prize and production costs through the studio’s angel investors, and applications are open now. Creators can submit a one-minute pitch on TikTok or Instagram, of which ten finalists will get flown to New York where the audience votes on the winner.

Wang’s own path through the traditional studio system shaped the idea. He has openly described running into creative friction and bureaucratic inefficiency there, not because of any one person’s fault, but as a byproduct of it simply being a large system. This competition is his attempt to give other young filmmakers a different way in.

The competition is of course interesting, but the mindset behind it matters more. It represents a kind of openness that has never really existed in legacy media, which has always been a closed system by design.

Franklin Leonard makes the analogy all the time about why he started The Black List. He says: imagine someone told you that if you want to play basketball in the NBA, you should move to Los Angeles and play pickup basketball next to the Staples Center. If you're really good, someone will see you and put you on the team.

Sounds crazy, right? Yet that’s how Hollywood has operated for decades.

Legacy studios could take a page from Wesley. Dedicating even a small portion of their annual budgets to fund new movies from new creators is a great way to find what might otherwise never surface.

A24’s Next Creator Bet

A24 is teaming with Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios to bring the SCP Foundation, one of the largest fan-built horror and science-fiction universes on the internet, to theaters for the first time. The project is an untitled extension of the V/H/S found-footage franchise, with worldwide rights secured and a 2027 theatrical target.

SCP started the same way Backrooms did, as a creepypasta posted to 4chan in 2008. What began as a single short story evolved into a sprawling, collaborative mythology built by thousands of contributors, involving a secret organization protecting humanity from anomalous entities. Along the way it spawned games, short films, and web series, all built by fans with no studio involvement and largely no financial return for the people doing the building.

Internet lore has become a source of new stories for horror precisely because of the rabid built-in audiences they carry. The plan, it seems, is to keep tapping into the most compelling of them.

It’s worth noting that SCP has always operated under a Creative Commons license that requires derivative works to carry the same open terms. That detail has not been addressed in this announcement, and it remains one of the more interesting unresolved questions in the entire internet horror gold rush. A community built collaboratively under an open license is now being adapted by one of the most brand-protective distributors in the business. Just recently, I wrote about A24 getting in trouble for going after Backrooms creators for making inspired artwork.

We’ll see what happens this time.

Netflix's Is Reshaping its Catalog

Per Ampere Analysis, Netflix’s short-form offering in the US grew from 8% to 13% of its total TV catalog in just three months following the rollout of publisher content from Condé Nast, BuzzFeed, and Hearst. Roughly 300 short-form seasons and more than 1,200 hours of content have been added to a catalog that has historically been dominated by traditional 21-to-60-minute episodes. This type of change confirms that the platform’s short-form push is more than just an experiment.

Meanwhile, Netflix signed another major YouTube star. Drew Binsky, the travel creator with 7.3 million YouTube subscribers and 22 million followers across platforms, is bringing a curated collection of his travelogues to Netflix, with new episodes going forward releasing day-and-date on Netflix alongside YouTube.

Now that Netflix is combining publisher-produced short-form programming with individually signed creator talent, are they just YouTube? And is that even the right strategy? Short-form could attract new viewers in the short term, but as Matt Belloni and others have argued, fighting YouTube at its own game is a losing bet. Differentiating through premium content might serve it far better in the long run.

This also ties back to the exclusivity conversation from last week. Binsky’s day-and-date arrangement means the content is no longer YouTube’s exclusively, and his 200 million monthly views represent exactly the kind of built-in audience Netflix wants living inside its own ecosystem rather than sitting entirely on someone else’s platform.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"12 years ago, creator / fan events stood alone. A roomful of youtubers was enough to entice people to attend. But today that’s different. The most successful events seem to be “Creators Plus” or “Plus Creators”"

— Media Strategist (and so much more) Jim Louderback

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

A New Theatrical Pipeline

AMC Theatres announced the launch of Leawood Films last week, a new distribution label built specifically to bring more small and mid-sized movies into theaters. The company is targeting fully financed or already completed films, the kind that often play well at festivals and then struggle to find a real theatrical home. Variance will handle North American bookings, AMC will handle marketing, and Piece of Magic Entertainment will handle distribution overseas.

The logic behind this is simple. Movie theater chains need more movies. The theatrical business has recovered in fits and starts since the pandemic, but it remains dependent on a relatively small number of major releases to fill an enormous amount of screen capacity. AMC has thousands of screens and not always enough compelling films to put on them. And though they’re part of Fathom, a joint-venture with Regal and Cinemark, Leawood Films is a more direct response to that excess capacity for AMC specifically. The chain has been explicit that this is meant to complement its studio relationships rather than compete with them.

What makes this interesting, though, is the potential pipeline it could create for those outside of the Hollywood system, i.e. creators. AMC already has direct experience distributing outside the traditional studios, having worked with Taylor Swift on The Eras Tour and with Beyoncé on Renaissance. Those were massive theatrical successes built on the fandom of two major music stars. Leawood Films formalizes that infrastructure into something that’s repeatable. And critically, it is not exclusive to AMC. The label plans to work with rival theater circuits both domestically and internationally.

Thinking about everything happening in the creator-to-theatrical space right now, it will be very interesting to see how, or if, audiences built online will show up to theaters now that presumably more shots will be taken in the space.

Because what’s been missing for a lot of creators and independent filmmakers is not necessarily the audience, but the infrastructure to get from a finished film to actual screens.

It is early, and the first titles will not be announced until next year or even 2028. But if AMC executes this well, it can become a genuine path alongside traditional studio distribution and the self-distribution model.

That is a meaningful new door.

An Inside Look at YouTube’s Creator Deals

Natalie Jarvey got the scoop on how YouTube is paying creators millions of dollars just to keep them from leaving. As we know, the Netflix incursion into creators has only accelerated in recent months, and YouTube’s response has been quite the story since.

According to Jarvey’s reporting, the platform is currently making offers to roughly 15 creators, with deals ranging from the low seven figures up to around $10 million, all to keep their content exclusive to YouTube for a defined period. The offers reportedly come with both a carrot and a stick. Take content to a competing platform, particularly Netflix, and a creator risks losing their spot at Brandcast, YouTube’s advertising showcase, along with billboard promotion and access to the preferred advertising program reserved for top-tier creators.

One dealmaker described YouTube executives as “scared shitless”, which is a remarkable posture for a company that still dominates streaming by every meaningful metric. The fact that YouTube feels compelled to pay millions to retain talent it helped create in the first place says a lot about how leverage may be shifting.

Digital talent has never carried more power than it does right now, and YouTube writing eight-figure checks to keep people from leaving is the clearest evidence of that yet.

What Exclusivity Really Means

Speaking about exclusivity, Steve Raizes wrote a piece last month about the importance of being clear on what that truly means.

On August 13, Disney+ and The Overlap announced a one-year deal making Disney+ the headline sponsor of Stick to Football and a new show called Stick to United with Wayne Rooney. Both companies put out press releases the same day.

The releases did not describe the same deal.

Disney’s version says 20 of the 40 Stick to Football episodes are exclusive to Disney+ for a limited time, along with six commissioned specials, and stops there. It never says what happens to any of it afterward. Global, which holds a majority stake in The Overlap, says both the windowed episodes and the specials return to YouTube once the exclusive period ends. Global’s CEO said the same thing on LinkedIn.

Neither release states how long the exclusive window actually lasts. Neither confirms or denies the other’s account of what happens to the specials once that window closes. As Raizes points out, both versions can technically be true at the same time, because exclusivity can now mean at least four different things: here first, here only, here only for a while, or here only in certain territories. Each company simply picked the reading that serves its own audience. Disney is writing for someone deciding whether to subscribe. Global is writing for advertisers and for the YouTube audience that does not want to feel like it is being locked out.

The larger point is that if you are negotiating any kind of distribution or sponsorship deal in this environment, there is a real chance the other side is reading exclusive as “here only” while you are reading it as “here first,” and nobody has to be acting in bad faith for that gap to exist.

Raizes’s advice is practical: when exclusivity shows up in an agreement, make the document answer five specific questions.

How long?

In which territories?

For which specific episodes?

What happens the day it expires?

And who is responsible for making that happen?

As legacy platforms and creators increasingly share the same content, the old assumptions baked into contract language may not hold like they used to.

Windowing used to be a relatively simple concept. But it no longer is, and the Disney and Overlap situation is proof that even sophisticated companies with experienced legal teams are not immune to the ambiguity.

GARDEN VIEW

Is M. Night the first traditional director to become a creator? Excited to see where this channel goes…

HARVEST QUOTE

"Executives at creator economy companies face unique challenges. These businesses are built around a creator (or in some cases a group), who are personally and often inseparably tied to the businesses."

— Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg, discussing the recent exodus of executives at creator companies

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Craving Simplicity

We’re all familiar with just how fragmented audiences have become in the creator economy. Niche corners of the internet have won over mass media (generally).

How this translates to TV is a nightmare we all as customers grapple with to some degree. As industry vet Caroline Giegerich describes it, “Nobody wakes up wanting to manage ten thousand apps, ten thousand logins, ten thousand bills.”

And even within social apps, think about how difficult it is to consistently track those creators you love and follow. Since our algorithms are designed to keep us engaged, they’re constantly feeding us new stuff, making it hard for communities to stay engaged.

All of which has lead to what seems to be the next wave of disruption (yes, at this point, many of the disruptors have become traditionalists) that affects both legacy and creators.

It was described in this recent NY Times piece, the gist being that platforms are now competing for people to use their app and only their app.

Because as it turns out, Amazon has been playing a different game all along. Lucas Shaw reported that the retailer’s best video business is not Prime Video, but its channels program, i.e. they sell other streaming services (mainstream and niche) and take a cut of the subscription revenue / get advertising inventory in exchange.

And although Amazon is leading the charge with 67% of sign-ups for specialty services in the second quarter of the year (more than Apple, Google, Roku and everyone else combined), the NY Times coverage tells us that Netflix and YouTube are in the same race. They, too, are betting to make things simple for consumers and become the everything app.

How does this all relate to creators / legacy, though?

Perhaps this is crazy speculation, but bear with me.

Using Amazon as an example, it’s playing a game in which it’s really the best. If it’s the central home of retail, then it can also presumably become the central home of media. Sure, they’ll have Prime Video, but the true win is the interface where you can get every other channel and service. And for the other big platforms, it will be a big hit to have to shave off revenue off the top to be a part of that singular ecosystem.

For creators, we’ve seen big ones like Mark Rober, etc. put up content on Netflix, but in this new landscape, why not have the Mark Rober Channel on the Amazon interface and keep 100% ownership? (More on ownership in the next story).

If you have a strong audience, then you can build your own infrastructure around it. Just look at what Angel Studios has built.

Oh, and in case it hadn’t clocked until now, this crazy new system that’s starting to dominate the conversation is… pretty much an iteration of basic cable.

The more things change…

The Ownership Debate

Matt Belloni travelled to the Edinburgh TV Festival, where he held a panel with several top TV producers in the UK. The conversation proved to be a microcosm of what’s happening in the broader market.

The speakers were Matt; Patrick Holland, executive chair and C.E.O. of Banijay UK, (MasterChef, Big Brother); Jane Root, founder and C.E.O. of Nutopia (Limitless With Chris Hemsworth, WWII With Tom Hanks), and Dimitri Doganis, the founder and chief creative officer of Raw (The Tinder Swindler, Trainwreck).

And the crux of the discussion was IP ownership.

For all the gripes producers face about Youtube funding original productions (that has started to change recently given Netflix’s competition), one of the great things that they do have to offer is ownership. If you post something on YouTube, you as the creator own it.

Streamers like Amazon and Netflix, on the other hand, do the opposite. They buy out your show upfront and you don’t any of it for future exploitation.

This is especially important in the UK because, by law, BBC funded shows have to let the producers keep the IP (which one can argue has led to the plethora of brilliant British productions over the years). As Doganis said: “You show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.”

However, the BBC money has dried up as of late, and streaming platforms have happily come in to fill the funding gap.

Producers are tired of not owning anything anymore in legacy media. For that, they must turn to YouTube or the broader creator economy. But, as everybody knows, Youtube economics are really hard. Also, the scale of shows is inherently smaller and they are brand funded.

For a TV producer, this is truly a Catch 22. Own it and sacrifice scale, or sell it and lose all future rights.

The way people are working around this is: launch on YouTube small scale, own it with the stars / creators, and then find secondary places for it where you can increase the scale.

Somehow, I think that as the convergence continues, we can come up with a better solution.

Speaking of Launching on YouTube and Scaling

Disney has struck a deal with Dhar Mann Studios where the creator will produce 20 episodes of original content for them.

The specifics of the format are TBD, but the deal fits into Disney’s stated goal of turning Disney+ into a comprehensive ecosystem that includes both creator content and traditional programming.

We’ve covered Fox’s moves in the recent past. Dhar Mann Studios itself signed a deal with Fox Entertainment earlier this year for 40 narrative-driven vertical videos.

But it now seems that Disney is taking big swings in the creator space as well.

The numbers behind Dhar Mann Studios are pretty insane: 170 million followers globally; nearly 300 million views per week across platforms. Which kind of proves the point of convergence since Dhar is one of the creators who can geniinely say, “I don’t need legacy media.”

It’ll be really interesting to see how different Dhar’s Disney content is vs. what they normally publish on YouTube.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"I fear that, as can often happen in Hollywood, the lessons from the year might be the wrong ones – all that talk and hype and bluster about the YouTube effect and YouTube creators because of Backrooms and Obsession. It’s a gold rush mentality of anything that works on YouTube can do that. I don’t believe that’s the case. If you look at those movies, they are different. Neither of those is tied to the specificity of YouTube audiences crossing over to theaters."

— Focus Features Chairman Peter Kujawski

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

The Audience Gave the Greenlight

A horror anthology series called Welcome to Exotic Foods is in production, and the way it got made is pretty interesting.

As Jeff Clanagan explains it, Producer Malik Davis and the team at Upscale Productions spent months building the project the right way around: story first, then the workflow. The series uses a hybrid production model where real actors and live direction sit at the center, with AI constructing the environments around them.

The distribution and marketing side came next, and the first move was a test. A hundred Gen Z viewers across five markets watched the trailer and pilot episode and were asked whether it was worth making. The response came back strong. That was the greenlight for the full season.

Not a studio executive’s instinct. The actual audience.

The traditional model develops for executives and meets the audience at the end. This model puts the audience in the room before the full season goes into production.

For independent filmmakers specifically, the implications are significant. one of the barriers that has always constrained independent work is path to audience. Audience testing before full development addresses this. Creators working this way are not waiting on permission, but rather arriving at development conversations with market validation in hand.

The series is still in production, with distribution details to come. But the process is the point.

Producers Are the Missing Piece

Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios, reflected on the time he left the C-suite at MTV, Discovery, and Bertelsmann to go work for a YouTuber.

People thought he had lost his mind.

AdWeek recently published a piece called Creators Are the New Media Moguls, and Atkins is quoted alongside the CEOs of MrBeast, Babish Media, and JesserCo. His argument is not that the creator economy is overhyped. It is that most people are looking at the wrong part of it.

The headline is easy to read. MrBeast at 500 million subscribers, $21 billion in brand spend projected by 2026, CAA and TPG launching a $250 million fund for creator businesses, YouTube directors grossing hundreds of millions at the box office on shoestring budgets.

What his piece gets at, though, and what Atkins thinks most people skip past, is that the hardest part of turning a creator into a company is operationalizing and building governance. Getting the books clean enough that institutional capital can actually come in. Building the kind of internal structure that survives a platform shift or a deal falling through. None of that is glamorous, and none of it gets written about much. But it is where creator businesses actually succeed or stall.

That is why legacy media experience transfers into this space in ways that are genuinely useful, even if the day-to-day playbook does not look the same. Years of building businesses at scale, managing institutional relationships, and understanding what financial health actually looks like from the inside give you an advantage.

No single business line at Dhar Mann Studios accounts for more than 40% of revenue. That is not an accident. When Atkins builds around a creator, key-man risk is the thing that keeps institutional partners up at night. The answer is building a business diversified enough that no single algorithm change, no single platform shift, and no single deal collapsing can break the whole thing.

The creator economy has plenty of hype. What it needs more of is operators willing to do the less exciting work that makes the exciting stuff last.

Brands Are Devouring Hollywood

The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece this week on something we’ve talked about before, which is the line between advertising and entertainment being essentially dissolved.

The story starts with a meeting between Brian Grazer and GE’s CEO a decade ago. GE wanted Imagine Entertainment to make TV spots. Grazer passed. But when the conversation turned to an anthology series inspired by Thomas Edison and the lightbulb, Grazer was interested. The result was Breakthrough on Nat Geo, with GE as a producing partner. Not an ad. An entertainment program that happened to reflect well on the brand. That project seeded Imagine Brands, which has since worked with Nike, Ford, and Coca-Cola, and is currently developing something with SpaceX.

In the early days of television, brands did not just sponsor shows. They owned them. The Colgate Comedy Hour, Texaco Star Theater, Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Over the following decades, advertising became something Hollywood talent kept at arm’s length, with the occasional foreign market exception for a check too large to turn down. Now the brands are back, and they are coming with genuine creative ambition and A-list relationships.

What has changed is partly financial and partly cultural. Studios are squeezed. Brands are not. Companies like General Mills and Gap are sitting on marketing budgets that dwarf what many independent productions can raise, and they are increasingly willing to spend those budgets on real entertainment rather than traditional spots. The talent, for their part, has started to recalibrate what participation actually means when the creative quality is there.

Will branded entertainment leave its place as a “lesser version” of the real thing given the roster of talent and studios now involved in this space?

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"Hollywood was never going to greenlight Technology Connections. They were never going to feature a guy getting a million views for taking apart toasters. That wasn't going to happen on HGTV."

— Creator Hank Green

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The Peacock x YouTube Bundle

In what some are calling a landmark deal, YouTube has agreed to include Peacock in its premium subscription tier.

There’s a few ways to look at this.

Doug Shapiro frames the deal primarily as a bet on advertising for NBCU. Peacock currently pulls in around $8 a month from subscription fees and $5 from ad revenue per user. Taking on the cannibalization risk to subscription income only makes sense if you believe advertising, along with lower marketing costs and reduced churn, can more than fill that gap.

But from the YouTube side, Samir Chaudry (from Colin & Samir), argues that although YouTube has over 125 million Music and Premium subscribers, it has almost nothing in the way of original programming sitting behind that paywall.

Samir’s take goes as follows:

Last quarter, Google’s subscriptions revenue grew 15% while YouTube ad revenue grew 13%, meaning subscriptions are now outpacing ads, and subscriptions only hold if you give people a reason to stick around.

Netflix has spent the past year signing YouTube talent. YouTube is not going to outbid Netflix for those creators. As Samir says, it does not need to.

What it can offer instead that Netflix cannot is a subscription-funded tier on the platform where a creator’s audience already lives. The path back to original programming is not rebuilding YouTube Originals as some have proposed, but rather financing arrangements with partners like NBCU, where creator-led shows can sit behind the Premium paywall without YouTube having to take on the studio risk or the branding.

Samir’s bet is that YouTube eventually consolidates into a single app covering live TV, a Premium tier with exclusive and licensed programming, and the classic ad-supported experience everyone currently has. One ecosystem, three tiers, the whole consumer in one place.

Instagram’s Scripted TV Boom

It seems that the new indie pathway to finding audience first and nailing that streamer deal is to go through IG first.

Natalie Jarvey recently posted a great story about the Instagram TV boom.

The example she highlights is pretty great:

Aaron Karo and Michael Doneger had multiple projects stuck in TV development, until they decided to stop waiting. Their new show idea was a buddy comedy about a lonely guy who builds a robot best friend, and rather than taking Friend Material around Hollywood, they made it themselves. With a thousand dollars, a camera Doneger already owned, and a few friends willing to help. Twelve episodes, posted straight to Instagram.

Less than three months later, the show has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times, and brands have already reached out about backing a second season. The goal is still to adapt the three-minute episodes into a half-hour series for a streamer or network, but the point is one we’ve talked about for a while here: that they no longer need permission from an executive to prove the concept works. As Karo puts it, when they sit down with producers now, they can show exactly how many people have already watched.

Natalie explores if this is becoming a pattern. She spoke to writer-producer Jon Stahl, who has been tracking the growth of vertically-shot scripted comedies and recently counted more than two dozen, with the number still climbing. Brooklyn Coffee Shop, the epitome of IG TV, has been running for three years and built a real audience around its workplace humor.

There’s more she brings up.

But the lesson is that these shows occupy their own corner, distinct from microdramas, even though they share the vertical format. They are closer in spirit to indie film than to the platform-produced, algorithm-dictated micro-series model.

As legacy media continues to de-risk, it’ll be interesting to see whether shows emanating from Instagram rather than YouTube (like the recent horror hits) will take off.

HBO Goes… Vertical?

HBO just announced HBO Max Shorts, a feature that drops users into a vertical, scrollable feed of clips and scenes pulled from the existing HBO Max library. It’s designed to help people find something to watch rather than spend ten minutes staring at the homepage.

Users who find something they like can then tap through to the full show or film, add it to their list, or simply keep scrolling.

Now, this is not original content (at least not yet?). These clips are existing programming reformatted into vertical clips, processed through an in-house AI tool that uses scene-level metadata to identify high-impact moments, with human editors involved in the final selection.

Netflix is doing something similar with its own short-form clips feature.

The question here is whether this is simply surface-level adapting that ultimately doesn’t move the needle in the great convergence.

Sure, this might be a better way to figure out what you want to watch, but wouldn’t this also be a better way to figure out what HBO wants to make?

Commissioning lower-cost new content for this format and analyzing data to see what works to then scale it up to full TV shows seems like sensible logic. But perhaps trying to compete with TikTok on its own terms is not worth the fight.

Either way, moves like this are worth keeping an eye on.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"If I read or hear one more report about how “Backrooms” and “Obsession” have changed Hollywood forever, or how YouTube is the new New Hollywood (or the new Sundance), I’m going to gag."

— Film programmer and journalist Anthony Kaufman

Love grounding takes like these. It’s worth reading Anthony’s full argument, which includes sobering stats such as the discovery rate on YouTube being 0.000005%.

His full post here.

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Before we start, an announcement for our LA-based subscribers. ​Ben Odell (CEO, 3Pas Studios) and Akshay Mehta (CEO, Lighthouse Studios) will be in conversation on building at the collision of legacy Hollywood and the creator economy this coming Tuesday, July 28 at 5pm. The event will take place at The Lighthouse Campus. Make sure to sign up here.

FRESH CLIPPINGS

Hollywood’s New Role in Culture

Reid Litman, the Global Director & Lead on Ogilvy Pulse, and Warner Bailey, the Founder and Host of Assistants vs. Agents, recently wrote a great piece together on bridging the gap between Hollywood and creators. Most importantly, they did it with a genuine focus on finding where the opportunities lie for the next generation.

It starts with data: Gen Z now makes up about 40% of moviegoers, up from 34% in 2019. They’re the largest audience segment, with attendance among the group up significantly over the last year. However, this is not really growth, but a shift in share of what’s becoming a smaller market.

In this environment, where one demographic has such an outsized impact on the success of a title, how do you operate?

Reid and Warner concentrate on discovery. 63% of Gen Z now discovers long-form content through social clips before engaging with the actual movie or show. As they explain, the clip is the new trailer, review, and often the recommendation, all in one.

Hence, the new role of Hollywood.

Since legacy media can’t create cultural relevance any longer, i.e. young audiences don’t look towards studios to tell them what matters, the job shifts from creating the cultural capital to building alongside it.

They go on: Gen Z assigns the meaning through clips, commentary, edits, memes, and shared language. As we know, all of that technically happens outside of the traditional system.

The role then becomes “recognizing that momentum early and building with it instead of trying to manufacture it.”

Ok. But what does that look like in practice? Warner and Reid have some examples:

Bringing creators into campaigns as partners, hiring fan editors, and building alongside communities rather than marketing to them.

In other words, the people who are best suited to create this cultural capital are not executives, but the fans who are participating in it already.

They leave us with some advice:

• Prioritize participation over passive viewing

• Build worlds audiences can help shape long before release

• Invest in fan communities as creative partners, not just marketing channels

• Design every release to feel like a moment worth leaving the house for

Yes, this requires a different way of thinking. But building for convergence is a better bet than fighting over audiences.

Case In Point

Something happened recently related to Backrooms which is an example that illustrates this new reality. And no, this isn’t another post about why the movie succeeded. Here, I want to focus specifically on the nature of the IP itself.

In short: nobody owns it.

If you’re like me and work in legacy media, you’ve probably optioned material. For those who are less familiar, those deals, in simple form, are you as a producer exclusively purchasing the option to produce the material from a writer, etc. And in that same deal, there’s a determined purchase price (typically a range based on budget) which the buyer will pay the writer for the rights to the material.

In even simpler terms, a writer creates something. A studio buys it off them. And then the studio charges an audience for access to the thing.

In certain cases, this can work similarly with creators, but whom do you buy Backrooms from? The audience itself?

This story is incredible: A Reddit user posted that someone had pulled their Backrooms-inspired artwork after a complaint filed on behalf of A24 Films LLC. Kane Parsons, the director himself, saw the thread and commented that he was looking into it and that it should not be happening (imagine that!). By Friday, A24 had issued a public statement, sharing on the official Backrooms X account that online creators "have every right to tell their own version of the story."

The kicker: “A24 clarified that it claims no ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post that started it all, or the community works built around it since.”

Going back to what Reid and Warner wrote about, the new Hollywood studio has to build alongside the fans, not cut them out. A24 could still do movie after movie on Backrooms, and fans would 100% go see them. But the nature of the partnership is collaboration, not buying the creators out.

Once again, this doesn’t mean it’s over for studios. It just means their role is a bit different than before.

Is This an Opportunity for Producers?

Yes.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the new producer class emanating from the creator economy. Today, it feels as relevant as ever.

I was reminded of it because this week, Colin McRae, the Director of Content at Viral Nation and Founder of CMAC Media, published a really interesting post about what the creator economy is missing.

And it’s obviously not creators. It’s builders. The producers and operators who will help turn creators into the next generation of entertainment companies.

Colin explains that the industry doesn't need producers in the traditional sense, but rather producers who think differently, simply because the job is changing.

Before, it felt like you could make a great piece of content and that was that. But, as he explains, it’s no longer enough. Now, you have to think about what it can become.

The producers who thrive will know how to build an audience around the work, grow the IP beyond a single release, and help turn stories into full blown businesses.

At the end of the day, there will be more and more creators, increased platform competition, and money flowing into entertainment. And in that environment, the people who know how to help creators build something bigger than just content are then ones who will win.

GARDEN VIEW

Unusual, but decided to repost last week’s video in case you missed it because it perfectly complements the Backrooms story above.

HARVEST QUOTE

"While it is fun to pit companies against one another — I am guilty of this as anyone — Netflix and YouTube can thrive operating in their respective lanes"

— Bloomberg entertainment journalist Lucas Shaw on the increasingly talked about Netflix vs. YouTube rivalry

Who would have thought?

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The Desperate Race for Creator IP

The hunt for the next Backrooms or Obsession is underway, almost to a comical point. Though the people who have been watching this space for years are suddenly finding themselves with a lot of leverage they did not have six months ago.

Multiple producers and creators held off on taking their projects to market until after Backrooms hit theaters in May, sensing that studio executives were about to develop a powerful appetite for internet-derived IP. The instinct proved correct. Projects that had been sitting in development conversations suddenly attracted bidding wars within days of the box office results coming in.

Internet horror, whether found-footage YouTube series, viral creepypastas, or fan-built fictional universes, has been generating massive audiences for years with essentially no financial return for the people who made it. Backrooms and Obsession demonstrating to studios that the audience was already there and willing to show up in theaters effectively changed the negotiating position of everyone sitting on similar IP overnight.

The ownership questions the piece raises but does not fully resolve are going to become increasingly important as this rush accelerates. It talks about the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction collective where hundreds of authors have spent more than a decade building an interconnected universe of supernatural horror under a Creative Commons license.

Well, it is now reportedly being targeted for adaptation. Creative Commons licensing, which requires derivative works to carry the same open license, is not a framework Hollywood’s IP-hoarding infrastructure was designed to work with. How those contracts get structured, and whether the original creators of these collaborative universes retain anything meaningful when the machine comes for their work, is a question the industry will have to answer.

Now that Hollywood has arrived to monetize Creator IP, the question of who benefits, and on what terms, will be a central point on the convergence timeline.

The Deals

Trevor Henderson, the creature designer whose viral internet creations have now accumulated billions of views, landed two major studio acquisitions in the span of a week. Warner Bros. won a five-studio bidding war for Siren Head, with Brian Duffield directing and Zach Cregger co-writing. Duffield and Cregger, mind you, are two of the hotter creative forces working in Hollywood horror right now, which tells you how seriously WB is treating the IP.

Then, before that deal had even settled, Sony’s TriStar moved pre-emptively to acquire Cartoon Cat, Henderson’s other viral creature, before anyone else could bid. Henderson had made essentially nothing from either character for years despite their ubiquity across YouTube, games, and fan communities. Two weeks later, he is a millionaire with two studio deals and his original rights largely intact on Cartoon Cat.

The Mandela Catalogue went even bigger. Alex Kister’s analog horror YouTube series, which has accumulated over 100 million views across its official episodes alone, sold following an 11-studio bidding war to United Artists, Amblin Entertainment, and Amazon MGM Studios. Steven Spielberg is producing. Kister, who is 22, will direct the feature from a screenplay he adapted himself.

What these three deals have in common is that none of these properties were discovered by Hollywood. They were built by creators over years with audiences that chose to show up without any marketing budget or institutional support behind them.

YouTube Formalizes the TV Format

Elsewhere, YouTube announced that creators can now organize their video playlists into shows and seasons, complete with episodes, consistent branding, and series-level metadata. The feature lets creators either restructure existing playlists or build new shows from scratch through YouTube Studio.

The platform’s own definition of a show is interesting: “a collection of high-quality episodes with a clear connection across them, consistent hosts where possible, a uniform look and thumbnail style, and higher production quality for both video and audio.”

Sounds a lot like the language of a television network describing programming standards and not very much like a social media platform describing user-generated content. After all, they’re winning Emmys now.

This is a pretty meaningful step in the continuation of YouTube’s push to the living room. Giving creators the tools to present their work as a “show” rather than a “playlist” (words matter) is how you get audiences to change their perspective on what the platform is.

GARDEN VIEW

A little more on internet IP. While studios chase creator horror and creature lore, Italian Brainrot is getting its moment. This video captures a fascinating battle playing out in real time over brainrot internet IP.

HARVEST QUOTE

"Netflix is never going to beat YouTube at its own game, no matter how many food influencers or quack psychologists it signs up for shows."

— Entertainment journalist Matt Belloni on Netflix’s recent short-form video ambitions

I wrote about this topic last week, and the conversation has only gotten louder since. Simon Owens recently wrote about the dilution of the Netflix brand, and the argument gaining traction among analysts is a simple one: better, more premium, and more curated is the winning position for Netflix, both with advertisers and on Wall Street, while also delivering the most attentive audience in subscription streaming.

Trying to out-YouTube YouTube seems like a lost cause for legacy media.

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Netflix Wants You to Stay Longer

Netflix announced this week that it is bringing short-form video from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst, People, Tastemade, and a slate of Penske Media brands including THR, Variety, Rolling Stone, and IndieWire onto its platform. The content ranges from three-minute shorts to 20-minute episodes covering travel, cooking, fashion, celebrity profiles, and home and gardening, discoverable directly from the Netflix homepage.

The initial read from most people is that Netflix is trying to become more like YouTube. Julia Alexander’s take in yeterday’s open conversation with Matt Belloni cuts closer to what is actually happening, and it is worth going through carefully.

Her argument is that Netflix does not actually need to become YouTube, and there is actually no reason it should try. If YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels on TV end up looking mostly the same with a similar batch of non-exclusive creators, neither platform has differentiated itself. Netflix’s strength has always been exclusivity and brand, and that is where it should stay.

The more interesting point is about how YouTube actually works versus how Netflix works. YouTube is a platform built around compulsive viewing across formats. Someone who watches a two-hour podcast might get pulled into a five-minute sports clip about the same topic, then a 45-second short, then something else entirely. The algorithm feeds viewer obsession without requiring any action from the user. Netflix is not built like that, and trying to graft YouTube’s logic onto a premium subscription platform designed around appointment viewing is a structural mismatch.

What Netflix is actually doing, Alexander argues, is something more specific and more defensible. It is trying to deepen fandom around its own premium content rather than compete for general browsing behavior. After a Jennifer Lopez film ends on Netflix, having her Vogue 73 Questions episode available keeps the viewer inside the app and inside the world of that property. After an NFL game on Netflix, a Bill Simmons podcast feeds the same audience without requiring them to leave. The short-form content is not the product. It is the connective tissue around the product that thus increases the fandom.

That’s a pretty coherent strategy, and a meaningfully different one from trying to out-YouTube YouTube. The question is whether the publishers Netflix has partnered with will produce content specific enough to serve that fandom function, or whether it ends up feeling like a general content library that competes with the premium shows rather than extending them.

Shifting credentials

IndieWire ran a piece out of VidCon & Cannes Lions this week that gets at something which is rarely stated this plainly.

The story that opens it is about French YouTube creator Inoxtag making a documentary about climbing Everest. He released it for a single night in theaters across France, and it sold 350,000 tickets in one day across 1,000 screenings, crashing every exhibitor’s website in the process. The next day it went up on YouTube and hit 10 million views in 24 hours. Disney+ later came calling and asked to license it exclusively, which would have meant taking it down from his channel. Inoxtag said no. Disney came back with a deal that left it on YouTube. As his manager put it, Disney wasn’t used to that kind of answer.

The article’s broader argument, though, is an uncomfortable one. Indie filmmakers have traditionally carried festival pedigree, critical esteem, and institutional backing as their proof of worth. As we all know, that system is under pressure not because anyone decided to undermine it, but because the metrics that increasingly matter for legacy studios are bleeding into every content conversation.

A major platform executive told the VidCon audience that the data he weighs most heavily when deciding whether to develop something is accumulated watch time on a creator’s existing content. Filmmakers don’t have that number. Even actors are already submitting social stats alongside their audition reels.

So, what's clear is that indie filmmakers find themselves more and more holding credentials in a language fewer people speak. A Sundance premiere, a strong critical reception, some awards here and there. These things still matter within the institutions that were built around them. But as creators become more central to how Hollywood actually operates, the people making greenlight decisions are spending more time looking at watch time, audience size, and community trust than at what a jury of ten people thought.

And the further the convergence goes, the more the question becomes unavoidable: in a room full of people who speak the language of audiences, what does a festival pedigree really say?

Studios are hiring for convergence

Sony Pictures Entertainment posted a job listing recently that gives a pretty good blueprint for how legacy media is actually adapting to the creator economy. The title is EVP, Head of YouTube and Social Platforms, Strategy and Operations, and the scope of the role is worth walking through.

The person Sony is looking for will be responsible for building and scaling a channel ecosystem across SPE’s entire portfolio of IP and franchises, with a mandate that touches content strategy, monetization, marketing, licensing, legal, consumer products, and cross-functional coordination with Film and TV Chairmen, Studio Presidents, and Marketing leads. Of note, it reports to the Co-Presidents of Global Distribution and Networks, which places it at the highest level of the company’s distribution strategy.

A few specifics from the job description that give us some more color: The role includes developing first-party FAST channels, building direct ad sales capabilities, co-developing IP enforcement and creator engagement policy, and identifying opportunities to integrate Sony Music and PlayStation into the platform strategy.

This is what studios taking the convergence seriously actually looks like in practice. Not a press release about embracing digital, nor a partnership announcement, but a C-suite hire designed to make YouTube and social platforms a core part of how they manage their IP and generate revenue. The role exists because Sony has concluded it can no longer treat these platforms as just a bolted on marketing channel, but rather see it as a core part of the distribution strategy.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"JUST GOT NOMINATED FOR A F***NG PRIMETIME EMMY"

— Kareem Rahma, host of Subway Takes

This is just awesome.

Have a great weekend…

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Instagram Wants to be TV

Instagram announced that it is testing horizontal video and long-form episodic storytelling on Instagram for TV, its connected TV feature that is now expanding to Samsung devices after previously being limited to Amazon Fire and Google TV products.

Instagram’s VP of product Tessa Lyons called television the next frontier for the app, and it doesn’t mean it is reinventing itself. It is Instagram following its creators, who have already been using the platform to promote extended content they were sharing elsewhere. So in essence, it’s the platform catching up to behavior that was already happening as creators expand.

Jen Topping flagged something that ties all of this together. Meta is running an annual ad revenue rate of $50 billion on Reels alone, more than every company except Disney made on video advertising last year, and yes, that includes YouTube. The push into connected TV opens up a new surface for that advertising machine, and for produc…

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Editorial note: A shortened version today due to the holiday weekend in the U.S.

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What the Roku deal means for creators

Fox Corp announced a $22 billion deal to acquire Roku this week, and the initial read from most of the industry was straightforward: a distribution play. Tubi plus the Roku Channel equals the largest free TV platform in the U.S., reaching around 100 million streaming homes and sitting in more than half of all broadband households.

That read is not wrong at all. But it undersells what Fox is building on the convergence thesis.

Sean Atkins explains that when Fox sold its entertainment assets to Disney years ago, it gave up the content infrastructure that would have made it a serious streaming competitor. What it kept was sports, news, and Tubi, a lean operation built around free ad-supported content rather than expensive original programming. The Roku acquisition does not change that strategy at all. It extends it, and gives Fox a platform capable of somethi…

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Private Equity Has Entered the Chat

CAA and TPG’s Integrated Media Company announced this week the formation of Compound Creative Holdings, a $250 million holding company built to acquire, operate, and grow a portfolio of creator-led businesses. Although this might seem like just another creator economy investment, the implications of TPG getting involved are worth thinking through.

The rollup strategy is well understood in private equity. You identify a fragmented market with strong individual businesses, acquire several of them under one roof, and create value through operational infrastructure, shared resources, and commercial synergies that none of the individual businesses could build alone. PE has done this in tons of industries, and it seems that the creator economy is next.

What makes this particularly interesting is what the portfolio actually becomes if executed well. Each creator business is its own franchise with its own audience, its own IP, and its own reven…

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The New Director Mindset

With Obsession and Backrooms dominating the conversation, most of the industry discussion has focused on the larger implications for film, specifically the sudden realization that YouTube-native directors can make movies.

What has been mostly overlooked, though, is the mindset that this new generation of directors brings to filmmaking itself, because it’s genuinely different from anything that came before.

Blumhouse founder Jason Blum spoke about this at the Produced By conference. His argument was simple: YouTube creators are so obsessed with and connected to their audience that it fundamentally changes how they approach the filmmaking process. His example lands well. For a traditional director coming out of film school, test screenings have often been a painful exercise, something to survive rather than embrace. YouTube filmmakers treat them as a data source. Blum described them sitting in the front row, cameras out, recording audience reactions…

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What Teens Actually Think About Movies

In light of this week’s deep dive article about recent creator to theatrical successes, this felt like a good moment to zoom out and look at how young people actually think about movies right now.

If you’re a reader of Matt Belloni’s What I’m Hearing newsletter, then you’re probably familiar with his annual (and very unscientific) survey of LA teens to get a sense of the movie theater world.

Well, in response to it, Kevin Goetz, the CEO of Screen Engine, recently performed an actual study of 200 teenagers aged 17 and 18 from across the country, and the findings are worth sitting with for anyone thinking seriously about the future of theatrical entertainment.

A few things stand out:

• Franchise fatigue is real, but not in the way studios might hope to dismiss it. Established IP remains the primary draw to theaters, with the highest anticipation this summer around Toy Story 5 and Minions and Monsters. But these kids are increasingly voc…

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YouTube’s Victory Lap

Streaming is now an advertising game. So it’s no surprise that at its Brandcast presentation in New York last week, YouTube announced that brands can now buy ads directly against specific shows on the platform. Alex Cooper, Trevor Noah, Kareem Rahma, and others are the first wave of programming where this is available.

That is exactly how traditional television advertising has always worked, and after years of “no ads,” effectively every streamer has an ad tier (the more things change…). You buy a slot against a specific show, in a specific context, in front of a specific audience. YouTube just built the same infrastructure, but then soon after did something many people might have missed at Google’s I/O conference.

Puck’s Julia Alexander broke down the analysis in a newsletter this week:

Three billion monthly active users globally. Nearly 245 million adults in the United States, roughly 91 percent of the country’s adult population. About 9.5 times the…

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Cannes Opens the Door

If there is a single institution that represents the old guard of independent cinema, it is the Cannes Film Festival. Which is what makes this week’s announcement genuinely worth pausing on. For the first time in the festival’s history, the Marche du Film is hosting a Creator Economy Summit, a half-day forum explicitly designed to bridge traditional cinema and the creator economy, taking place just around the corner from where the world’s finest auteurs are premiering their latest work.

The framing from the organizers is careful but direct: The creator economy is reshaping how stories are developed, financed, and distributed. Creators are expanding into long-form storytelling and film production, and Cannes is acknowledging that this is no longer a peripheral conversation.

The symbolism matters as much as the substance. I’ve spent a year and a half tracking the convergence of creators and legacy media and seen it accelerate week after week. And when …

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Everybody Is Doing It Now

Clipping isn’t a new conversation, but recently it’s been in the limelight thanks to several factors. You may have seen or heard about certain stories, like the one of N3on spending over $1 million in just a month on an army of clippers to flood your feed and, similarly, Clavicular building an entire clipping machine to manufacture viral fame.

Creators have been doing this for a while, and as Jim Louderback says, “When it’s not just the cool kids doing dope stuff, it’s dead.”

Well, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The “uncool kids” (a.k.a. traditional companies) have joined in,

Netflix is redesigning its mobile app to introduce Clips, a vertical video feed built for discovery, i.e. sharing highlights from original Netflix programming. And it’s not just Netflix. Peacock, Disney, and pretty much everyone else are doing more or less the same thing.

It makes sense, too. As Josh D’Amaro put it, he wants to make sure their …

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Legacy Expertise in a Creator Ecosystem

Underscore Talent, one of the more prominent creator-focused management companies, has hired Lital Spitzer and formally launched a theatrical division. Spitzer brings serious legacy credentials, with tenures at Miramax, The Weinstein Company, and A+E before spending over a decade at 3 Arts Entertainment representing actors, producers, and filmmakers.

The instinct might be to read this as just another legacy media exec moving over to a creator company to help them institutionalize, or as a creator company trying to diversify, but that’s not quite what’s happening here.

The theatrical division they’re building isn’t being built to operate separately from Underscore’s creator business. It’s being built to work through it, using the company’s ecosystem of creator-led talent to open up opportunities that wouldn’t exist through traditional channels alone. The phrase in the announcement worth holding onto is “use Underscore’s ecosystem o…

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Animation’s Independent New Wave

YouTube recently published a Culture and Trends report on independent animation, and while any report a platform publishes about itself deserves appropriate skepticism, there are genuine signals worth paying attention to.

The headline finding is one legacy media should sit with: 61% of Gen Z animation fans say they enjoy watching independent YouTube animation as much as, or more than, series from major studios. That’s a generation actively redefining what quality means, on their own terms.

What makes animation interesting from a convergence standpoint is how deliberately its best players are building for community participation from the start. For example, The Amazing Digital Circus released a scene with a green screen background specifically so fans would turn it into memes. They did, helping spread awareness of the show organically before it had any traditional marketing behind it.

Another telling shift in the report is what's happened t…

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An Opening for Creators

Rockwater Capital, a specialist in M&A / strategy advisory within the creator economy, published a sharp piece of analysis this week that shows a significant structural opportunity for creators in Hollywood.

The logic is as follows:

If and when the Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery combination closes, the new entity will almost certainly prioritize filling its own platforms, i.e. Paramount+, Max, and PlutoTV, with its own IP before licensing premium titles to competitors. That means less Friends, Game of Thrones, and Criminal Minds type content available to Netflix and Amazon, at any price. The pool of proven third-party library content shrinks, and what remains gets more expensive.

That leaves the streamers with a genuine choice: pay more for less, or redirect that capital toward more cost-efficient programming alternatives.

You guessed it: Creators.

Library content like Harry Potter retains subscribers through comfort and familiarity.…

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