YouSaid · the spoken record

David Ellison

lines on the record: 65
first: 2026-03-19
most recent: 2026-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Accelerating the reach. I mean, I think that's one of the things you're seeing. The hits are getting bigger than ever before. The problem is they're fewer and farther between. The reason Netflix has been successful more so than everyone else is they take a lot more shots on goal. And so this all comes back to if Ellison wants to be successful, he's got to take a lot more shots on goal because this is a You just got to take a lot of shots on goal and create a ton of content that keeps people engaged every single day.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're right On the other hand, It's actually a relatively simple answer. Make content people want to see. I mean, look at K-pop demon hunters. Probably not the artistically most amazing movie you've ever seen, but you create content that has good music, interesting storytelling, something fresh and new that sort of look different than what they've seen before. And you had a hit that is, I mean, the biggest movie of last year by a wide margin never played in movie theaters. I mean, yes, I know it was in movie theaters for a couple of weekends. But by far the biggest movie of 2025 was a Netflix movie. Like that's something that Hollywood really hasn't adjusted to. And look, the reason it was as big as it was, I believe, sure, the movie was good and all of that, but I actually think YouTube's and social media had a huge and Spotify had a huge impact on blowing the content up and making it far more really”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A universe of talk shows on YouTube now that have figured out how to make a thing that looks like a late night talk show with that cost structure in those economics when the distribution is not paying you money. How does anyone solve this? How do we get movies when I can open up TikTok and see most of a few good men for free in a way that it just doesn't seem to matter when I can open up Instagram and the IP theft is so rampant that creators are making AI videos with celebrities left and right and it doesn't seem to matter and no one's shutting it down like the distribution problem is so big”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everyone's still doing there's an army of teenagers who are going to work for free, and that's what you're up against, no matter what. And a lot of people have figured out ways to build different kinds of businesses in that environment, some of which are scaling, some which are the production quality is increasing, right?”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is where I want to end. This is the big idea that we've been coming around this whole time. When you talk about the big businesses collapsing, my thesis is their distribution collapsed, right? And it all ended up on distribution platforms that basically don't pay you money. Right. Netflix is the last great distribution platform that pays high rates for content. Everything else pays you nothing. Like YouTube might pay you a couple dollars because they started with a creator program and they can't turn it off. But like YouTube Shorts pays it a rate that is effectively nothing. And that's they.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think you're going to get more people to go to movie theaters. You're not going to get more people to subscribe to linear TV. You can't fix the endemic problems to this industry right now. The question is, can you build the new business big enough and have it grow fast enough to outrun the melting ice cube?”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I don't think investors care about the geopolitical as much as they care about one thing, which is actually growing this business, right? The debate from investors is really one thing. We all know these companies are fat and they can cut tons of cost. Like everyone has proven that. What no one's proved is that you can actually grow, sustainably grow these businesses. That's what investors want. Like, can you make great content that people want to see that drives subscribers, that leads to a good long-term streaming business that can overcome the collapse of the legacy businesses that you own, that you can't do anything about, right? Like you can't.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disused F14 base F14 sitting on base, like this, like I literally see that you can point this problem at CNN, and I think a lot of people have pointed this problem at CNN, but if you want the blockbusters that Allison seems to want, you actually are waiting in a geopolitics of another very specific way. And you might have an investor base that does not want you to wade into it in that way.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reality is one, they won't even comment on who the investors are actually going to be. So we don't know the answer to that. So let's see who the investors are. Supposedly these investors have no governance or no ability to vote on anything or have any influence, whether their soft influence is obviously an issue of much debate that I'm sure regulators will have a field day with. But look, at the end of the day, there is a lot of content that needs to get created. There's plenty of content that doesn't have any of the issues that you're talking about.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My other very tactical question about all this. Tom Cruise makes mission impossible movies, he makes top gun movies. He's done it with Skydance for years. I'm confident he's very excited about having a big studio partner and David Ellison. He's not allowed to shoot anyone who appears to be Chinese in those movies because that's a big market for those movies. And this has been a culture war issue for years, right? Is that we make the big blockbusters and maybe we're standing off the edges to avoid offending the Chinese audience. These investors are going to be Middle Eastern. Who's Tom Cruise going to shoot in these movies? Because that seems like another hot button culture war issue that the Ellison family is running right into.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no doubt about it. So, you know, if there was a studio lot for sale, I have no doubt that a player on the up and coming would love to own a studio lot because they're scarce resources. So I think the real question is just if they don't sell the lot, they keep it, do they actually keep making as many movies as they say. Now look, the right answer should be whether or not you're making movies for movie theaters. You need to make a lot more content than Paramount and Warner Bros. collectively make. If you want to be a player in streaming, they need to be creating double the content. Now, maybe not all of that in California, like, right, like Netflix is all about global content. They're building a huge studio in New Jersey. This is less about keeping specific jobs in California than is there going to be a massive ramp in content? Paramount says there will be. They need to make a lot more content than they're making today.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you didn't want to own two lots, I mean, yes, I've heard the stories of building a theme park on one of them, but leave that aside. There are plenty of companies that are in this space that would love to, I mean, Netflix would love to own a studio a lot.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can think of a bunch. I think particularly California wants to make sure a bunch of labor stays in California and not turn into AI labor. I think they will find some way to extract that concession. I think there's a lot of questions about whether they're going to close the lots, which they keep talking about but never quite confirming that they're not going to close one or two of the Paramount or Warner lots. A lot of people work at those lots. There's like a lot of there that you can at least.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's hard. There's union issues that no one's, I mean, Les Moonves used to talk about merging CBS and CNN. People thought that was going to happen for years. Union labor is a huge issue, one being union and one not. So how that works out and how you combine those, I honestly don't know. I do think this transaction closes. I don't think there's a regulatory way to stop this transaction. But the main question answering your question is how soon does it close? Paramount thinks this closes before the end of September. I think the way the stock is trading with a, you know, sort of a double-digit spread to where the $31 is would tell you investors are worried this is a Q4 or even a Q1 2027 event. And so, you know, how long this actually takes to close is still an issue of major debate.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's too many. 3,000 people three thousand my guess is in two years after this transaction is closed that number is less than half They're gonna just gut CNN. It's gonna be a much, much smaller business than it is.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd be surprised if this transaction didn't close. Again, I don't think there's monopoly issues here. Is there a lot of scary aspects to Hollywood combining two studios? And is there going to be mass bloodshed on the cable network side?”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask you some tactical questions about what happens next in a steel, and then I want to zoom out to one big idea to wrap up because we've touched on it several times now, and I'm curious for your take on it. But tactically, you know, Allison made an appearance on the Warner lot, and he said, this has been a turbulent process, but it's over now. And I thought to myself, it's not over. Like the Trump administration might rubber stamp this, but some of the states are going to sue. I think the European Union has a point of view on mergers is very different than the Trump administration's. What is actually next? Is it? Is it over? Are we gonna have some fights?”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the narrative that certainly I've seen people talk about. I don't think that was the reason why this deal fell apart. I think Netflix would have ultimately, I mean, look, the Trump administration could have sued them. Remember, just go back a little bit in time. The Trump administration tried to stop AT&T from buying Time Warner. And actually, it went to court. And thankfully, we're still a nation of laws, as my partner Walt Pisick likes to say. And ultimately, who won? Time Warner in AT&T and the transaction went through against the government and actually against the DOJ's obviously lawsuit. And so I think Netflix would have won and ultimately could have gotten this transaction because there was no monopoly at Netflix. But you know what? It doesn't matter. Netflix walked away. And I do think that Ellison being willing to buy all of it was an advantage and ultimately was deterministic for the board.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ellison and team don't deny that. Like, these are secular declining assets. They need that cash flow. The math on this transaction actually wouldn't work without those assets. Like you couldn't lever up to this leverage without buying those assets. And so I think it is very much solving a math equation and knowing you had to have those assets, plus the view that, hey, you'd be in a better position to buy this company because Netflix didn't want them. And so they actually, and I think in the end, I think their willingness to buy it all helped them relative to Netflix's bid.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, when Comcast and Netflix were looking at this, because you remember you had effectively three bidders, they only wanted to buy the studio and streaming business. They had no interest in the global linear networks business. So Ellison thought he was advantaging himself by buying assets that nobody else wanted. But then the other piece of this is go back to where we started much earlier on this podcast. We were talking about the leverage in this transaction, that this is effectively a very highly leveraged buyout. You're levering up seven times. Like there is a ton, ton of debt in this transaction. These linear cable networks, well, not good businesses, they do throw off a lot of cash. So they're in secular decline.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're missing the core reason for why they bought the linear TV assets. There's two reasons one They really believed, and I think ultimately approved correct. They were the only ones willing to buy these terrible assets. These are such shitty assets, I think I can say shitty, right? These are such shitty assets nobody else on planet Earth wanted to buy these assets.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CNN, he made some promise that sweeping changes would come to CNN to the White House, but there is a war in Iran. His investors are going to be Middle Eastern, it seems like. That all seems like a puzzle that is such a big distraction from the problems you've already laid out in the core streaming business. Why pick that up too?”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need some other money to do it, right? You cannot just distribute everything on YouTube. And maybe if CNN did distribute everything on YouTube, they would have way more audience. So they're stuck in a distribution puzzle that maybe no one will ever solve, right? Unless you own lucrative enough distribution, you cannot afford to run a thing the size of CNN. This is why their business is shrinking, because to go get CNN, you have pretty much have to watch linear cable and no one's going to do that anymore. And that thing is under a lot of pressure. Ellison wanted this business, right? He was like, I'm going to buy the whole thing. I'm going to buy the linear business. The only linear asset of any value.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He has figured it out and his rates are so high that no one else can afford to pay his brand deals. Right. So he had to move into physical products so that he could market his own products at a high enough margin because no one could afford the rates he wanted to charge rats. This is incredible. This is another, this is like a PhD thesis of the Dakota episode. No one can make money on YouTube alone. If you want to run a newsroom at CNN scale, of which there are vanishingly few in the world right now and they're getting smaller,”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you want to distribute content to the biggest number of people, you would just go to YouTube. You would just put the stuff on YouTube. We put our stuff on YouTube. YouTube pays you nothing, right? Effectively, you cannot run a business on YouTube's partner. They pay you a few sheckles.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about the you mentioned in the context of cable news and sports. News and sports are also incredibly sticky. People just stick around for those things. They will literally tune in on time for those things. A big piece of the Paramount deal that Netflix didn't want. And CNN is still sticky. There's a war in Iran going on. This is when CNN proves its value to everyone. They're just good. I sort of disagree.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the problem. They don't have enough. This keeps coming back to one core problem. Sure, the algorithm, sure, the technology, but not enough content, not enough content that keeps you there. You don't look at, you don't get immersed in the world of HBO Max. You don't get immersed in the world of Paramount Plus. These are lightly used applications. And look, their time spent figures show that.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go it alone. I think that's going to be a huge signal to how big his ambitions are. Is he really willing to go out, as you just said? It's very expensive to go out and market, retain. And again, it's not just getting the subscribers. You have to have enough content and a good enough underlying technology to keep people coming back every single day. Otherwise, they churn. The enemy of this business is churn. I think one of the things that Netflix was most excited about when they were looking at HBO at the Warner Brothers acquisition is they were stunned by how high churn was in every single market around the world for HBO.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't use your app. I mean, you could log into your app, but most people just use the Amazon Prime Video app and watch their HBO. They're watching the PIT on Prime Channels or they're watching, you know, 1883 on prime channels, like they're never using their app. I think one of the huge, huge issues that is not getting enough attention in technology circles and media circles right now is David Ellison and team going to pull off of these channel stores, whether it's Amazon's channel store or Roku's channel store, like, you know, even Google has YouTube Prime Time channels, like these channel stores have sort of been solving the issue that you just raised. Like it is really hard to get subscribers, it is very expensive and difficult, and they've relied on these channel stores, and Amazon's built a monstrous business. I give them a lot of credit.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, look, the single biggest way both of these companies, Warner Brothers and Paramount, they're actually not very good at marketing their own service themselves, both of them actually rely on another company to do most of their legwork. Both of them rely on Amazon channels heavily. Paramount even more so than Warner's, but a huge portion of their subscriber bases reside on Amazon channels. Remember, when you're on Amazon channels, Amazon handles the marketing.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, but I'm just saying like needle moving compared to Sam Altman is right, like you can collect every smaller streamer in the world and your AI workload is still going to be a huge part of your profit there. So again, the arguments here for Oracle, they all seem to land on, well, David is Larry's son, and maybe that's fine. Like you said, maybe it's just a trophy asset. But when you talk about content production will go up at higher efficiency because of AI, that's an efficiency argument, right? We're going to lower costs. When you talk about technology, it's still an efficiency argument. And then you get to marketing. And marketing just feels like pure cost because breaking through in a world where there's ever increasing supply of content and saying, watch this show and not that one through marketing alone seems impossible. I'm not sure how you do it. The amount that you might have to spend to get people to open this new app and spend more time there to watch new ideas.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the other two players at scale that would meaningfully move the needle for Oracle are Netflix, which is deeply tied with AWS. And I don't think ever leaving AWS, and YouTube, which for very obvious reasons is not going to leave Google. Like, who cares? Who cares smaller platforms?”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are confident that Oracle can do it. But maybe this also speaks to why this transaction is occurring, right? Like, hey, if Oracle can do this and prove that they can actually achieve this, even if there's growing pains, can they start to attract other players onto their platform? I have no idea, but I guess that's maybe an open question.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And again, I think the experience we're seeing as Oracle tries to become a big hyperscaler player in AI and as Oracle tries to run the TikTok platform that it's trying to run, you can see the seams. It is just obvious where the seams are. It is obvious how their architecture, you mentioned Netflix is ahead. Like Oracle's architecture is older than everyone's architecture in specific ways. I'm very curious, right? I think these are big questions too.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, nobody in the streaming sports? Streaming live events, news, live TV. Nobody is using Oracle's Cloud. This is going to be the first company ever to use Oracle's Cloud for this purpose. And they're doing it this summer for Paramount. And then obviously I would assume next summer for Warner Bros. They say it's going to be 50 faster at half the cost than Google and Amazon's cloud. Everyone should have all eyes are going to be on Oracle and can they actually mean.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is so outdated in terms of like what the technology stacks of these companies are. And so I think that the recognition at Paramount is we need to first unify this all. They believe, and again, I think one of the big tells on this whole transaction, right, is can the Oracle Cloud actually handle this? Because I don't believe, and check me if I'm wrong on this, I don't believe there's anybody in the streaming media space. That uses the Oracle Cloud. Like TikTok does, but that's short form vertical video.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I do think that if you have any hopes of driving engagement, you need a great platform. And the paramount and Warner Bros. platforms are both not good. Like they are not competitive with where Netflix was three or four years ago. The dirty little secret that no one's talking about is if you look at Netflix's platform now, it's completely dynamic. There isn't a set platform. It completely changes based on time of day and how you're using it. It is a constantly morphing platform. All of these companies, including PowerN, are trying to build what Netflix was like three or four, five years ago. Yeah, I mean, open up any of these apps. They can't even make the cover art play video.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, if you look at Disney Plus as just a starting place, you know, they brought on Adam Smith, who came from Google. Adam, you know, he's CTO and CPO, chief product officer. The New Disney Plus does look far better. Like there's actually a recommendation algorithm now. It actually has trending. It's personalized to you. It's still early days.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is, you mentioned the three phases, right? They're going to invest in production. Maybe they'll have more content because production will cost less because of AI. Then there's technology, which you talked about. They're going to invest a lot in technology. And then you talked about marketing. I do want to come to marketing because the marketing piece seems really important to me. The technology piece, you know, this is my universe. I'm looking at David Elson talking about migrating everything to one platform and then building on that platform. And I think, well, Warner tied itself in knots trying to do this. It accomplished effectively nothing. Have you heard a good argument for why you would immediately incur this cost other than all of the content will be on one app”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meaningfully move the needle on daily engagement because the internet is historically winner-take most. Pick your category, you know it better than I do. The question is, honestly, even if you do all of those things, have we already, has the world already picked their winners? Like Disney tried, right? Like Disney really went at this. They ramped up content to an incredible level. There was like a new series on Disney+ every few weeks. Like there was lots of content. And it didn't really move the needle enough. And so the question is, can Paramount do what Disney couldn't? Can they actually break into a daily use application? I mean, Prime Video, even with all the sports that they've spent on, hasn't really achieved that. I'll be honest with you, Neilie. I'm not sure it's possible. Because people have chosen, they have sort of their behavior is they open up Netflix or they open up YouTube.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're not even going to find an existing show. You're turning it on because you know you're going to be entertained. You open up Paramount Plus because there's an episode of Yellowstone you want to watch or you open up HBO Max because the new episode of the Pit hit last night at 9 o'clock and you want to watch that new episode. And then you turn it off until next week when that next episode comes out. They are not places where you just go to be entertained. The question is And here is like the multi-billion dollar like success or failure of this transaction is even if you throw far more content, far better technology and a ton of marketing, which is what the plan of Paramount is, right? Like that is the plan is to do all three of those things over the course of the next two years as they integrate Paramount with Warner Brothers. Even if you do that, can you mean”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I could bottle what you just said because it is singularly the most important thing that everyone in this business needs to understand. This is all about time spent, right? Like daily use activities. You open up Instagram every day. You open up TikTok multiple times every day. You open like the goal is can you, you know, the reason Netflix is as successful, the reason YouTube are as successful is that when you come home from work,”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say there's a conventional wisdom thesis, right? That all of this technology will be used together in a way that maybe Hollywood was not smart enough to do or smart enough to invest in, and that's why Netflix cleaned their clock. And that's why YouTube is starting to eat them alive. Right. And I know you've made that point many times. I've talked to people who have built the streamers. I know you have too. And they're kind of like, this problem is more solved than you think. Like there's not more to get out of the core technology of video streaming. There might be more to get out of recommendations, but you need all the people opening the app and then taking the recommendations and spending more time in the app for that to actually work. And we haven't solved the problem of getting more people to open the app. And I don't know. I haven't heard that from any of the Allison pitches around Warner.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back with Rich Greenfield, co founder and analyst at Lightshed Partners. Before the break, we were discussing the structure of the Paramount deal to acquire Warner Bros. and how so much of it depends on some really risky financing and some major gambles on unproven technology. Like using generative AI to produce large volumes of cheaper film and TV. Now I want to really dig deeper into the strategy here because it involves a lot more than just David Allison placing all of his hopes and dreams on AI. As you'll hear, Rich get into. This is really about figuring out how to do three things in sequence. Make more stuff, build a better platform to distribute that stuff, and then market all of it better to bring a new subscribers and keep them around. Paramount wants whatever super app that's going to bundle all this content into to rival the platforms we default to opening on our smart TVs and phones every day, Netflix and YouTube. But getting someone to open an app every single day is no easy feat.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dumping Google Cloud, they're dumping AWS. They're moving everything to Oracle Cloud. So maybe that's also part of the answer here. Is there an element of training and sort of leveraging what Oracle can do by having all of this content and user information?”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of people that wanna be in the media business, that want to be in the entertainment business, want to be in the sports business. Do you own sports teams because they're incredible businesses or do you own sports teams because they're trophy assets? Without a doubt, there is a trophy asset aspect to this. But then, you know, and again, I don't know, I can't prove to you that this is Larry Ellison's thinking, but I do think that there is sort of a bet on David, right? He's 43 years old, and there's a bet that someone can do Hollywood different. You know, time will tell whether this is successful or not, but there's a belief that through the use of technology, they can achieve what nobody else has done. That's a very, very aggressive view, but that's where they're sitting. They think their technology will be better than Netflix, better than YouTube's like they're going to move off of Google.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Debt is a strong word. I don't like using dead from the standpoint of any of these companies. Maybe there'll be smaller companies. Certainly there's more competition would point to that. But I think the answer, honestly, is we've seen a list of We don't have enough time on this podcast”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask you the question again because I think you've actually raised the stakes on this question. If you are Larry Ellison and you are in the business of AI infrastructure and that is your wealth and your legacy at Oracle, why would you trade one share of Oracle stock for Warner Bros discovery, which might be dead because of AI?”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if that content is multiple times better in quality and there's even more of it being created because it's so much easier and faster, what does that do to the value of any of this existing content? That's the real worry, the thing that keeps me up at night.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The creation of great content on its own? Like, do you need to go out and buy this much in the way of studio assets? Does it just make studio production cheaper? Like, you know, if the average movie big movie costs a couple hundred million dollars, can you take 30, 40, 50, 60% of the cost out of the production because so much of it can be achieved through AI? I think we don't know those answers yet. What worries me, I'll tell you, is I do believe that the world of user generated content. We spend a lot of time thinking about YouTube. YouTube content is going to get dramatically better with AI. I mean, there is no doubt about it. Everyone on planet Earth is going to be able to make far better content than they can today. Play around with any of the models today. You're getting an early look. And sure, it's only a few seconds of video, but within.”
2026-03-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT