Netflix walks away from its deal to buy Warner Bros. after Paramount came back with a better offer

The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid. We believe we would have been … Read more

Trump says Netflix will ‘pay the consequences’ if it doesn’t fire Susan Rice

Donald Trump threatened that there would be “consequences” for Netflix if it didn’t fire board member Susan Rice. Rice served in both the Obama and Biden administrations, and recently appeared on Preet Bharara’s podcast, where she said corporations that “take a knee to Trump” are going to be “caught with more than their pants down. … Read more

Star Search is Netflix’s biggest live bet yet

Two hours before one of the most important live events in Netflix’s history, LA’s sprawling CBS Radford Studio Center is abuzz with the strangest combination of things. As I walk through one cavernous soundstage on a Tuesday afternoon, I hear multiple people warming up their voices to sing. I pass a man carefully waving a … Read more

Republicans attack ‘woke’ Netflix — and ignore YouTube

When Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos entered the Senate office building on Tuesday, he got thrown a curveball. What started as a standard antitrust hearing relating to the Warner Bros. merger quickly devolved into a performative Republican attack about the spread of “woke” ideology on the streaming service. At the same time, arguably a much more … Read more

How Anthropic trained its AI models on millions of books

When ChatGPT launched, in November of 2022, it started a race that almost immediately consumed the tech industry. OpenAI didn’t invent the concept of AI, but most of the state-of-the-art technology was confined to research labs at companies and institutions around the world. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. And better than anyone expected. So many … Read more

Netflix is eating Hollywood — because it has to

On today’s episode of Decoder, I’m talking about the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is the biggest story in the entertainment industry right now, and for good reason. It has pretty much everything you could want in a buzzy Hollywood saga — big names, big money, and big drama. Right now, the winning … Read more