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🔥 YouTube to get more Playable

🔥 YouTube to get more Playable

Plus: Hollywood's golden goose and the UK's TikTok election

Oli Thomas
June 04, 2024

🎮 YouTube rolls out mobile gaming

📺 The 80s revival continues

🎬 Hollywood flirts with AI

💼 The UK election leans into the media

➕ Best of the rest

What can Hollywood learn from an Aesop’s fable?

How about the one about the Goose and the Golden Egg, in which a farmer gets so greedy for more golden eggs that he ends up killing the goose that lays them. He failed to connect the dots: without the goose, there is no golden egg.

But what about if you could use AI to manufacture those golden eggs? This is where we find ourselves with Hollywood right now.

The golden egg? High quality content.

The goose? Actors, writers, producers, directors.

The farmer? The Studios.

Right now the farmer is doing deals with Alphabet, Meta, OpenAI and others to let them train their LLMs on his goose. And get a nice bit of cash in the process.

He’s hoping these AI tools will, in time, enable him to produce loads of these golden eggs without the goose and therefore at much lower costs.

Clearly the goose is at risk.

But so is the farmer: What happens if these AI models enable other farmers to create golden eggs? And not just farmers, but everyone with access to a computer? Suddenly there are golden eggs everywhere. And his golden eggs no longer have any value.

The big question is therefore - will AI ever get to the point of creating high quality content?

Oh - and one of the emerging players in this field is none other than a new AI-powered streaming service called…Fable !

In related news, 80s IP is making a comeback with a whole host of iconic movies lined up for remakes and spinoffs (dusting off those golden eggs…) and YouTube is scaling up its mobile games.

Vamos 👍

YouTube rolls out Playables gaming

Forgive me if I sound like a boomer, but I don’t get the appeal of playing games in YouTube. Or Netflix. Or TikTok. I’m fine with switching apps to a dedicated mobile game (eg. Clash of Clans) or platform (eg. Roblox).

But it seems that YouTube’s Premium subs think differently, as they’re now rolling their mobile gaming trial out more widely.

‘Playables’ consists of over 75 games and is being rolled out across the wider YouTube Premium tier over the coming months.

This is, of course, about building more value into the Premium subscription and keeping users in the app for longer. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out….

2024 × The 80s

1980s nostalgia + Hollywood’s craving for IP is fuelling a whole load of new installments of iconic movies from the decade.

Top Gun Maverick proved that movies could still command great box office money making $1.5bn worldwide.

2024 has already seen the return of Ghostbusters, and still to come we have new Beverly Hills Cop on Netflix, another instalment of Mad Max, and Beetlejuice sees a second turn of the 1988 classic.

There are many reasons for this nostalgia - not least driven by Stranger Things - but this previous Mckinsey report may have been onto something when it pondered “When looking ahead seems scary, it can be easier to look backward.”

Source: Netflix

Best of the rest

GAMING: Discord pivots back to gaming roots, in a clear U-turn from its 2020 move to embrace broader communities

CREATORS: Influencer marketing is driving more consumer purchasing decisions than digital advertising, according to a recent Ernst & Young survey. At least 61% of people said they bought a product based on an influencer’s recommendation vs only 21% who clicked and followed an ad on social media.

CREATORS:Fresh off the back of their big funding round, Dude Perfect is launching its first game - “Dude Perfect Dodgeball” on Fortnite. Another example of creators growing their IP into new media verticals.

TV:Concerns have been raised about the future of jobs in the UK TV & Film Industry which is not great for the Government given a target to create 1M jobs in the creative sector by 2030. Might not be their problem soon though…

AI vs Hollywood

Old media and new media have got quite comfortable in the ‘frenemy’ zone. Its definitely worked out better for the new media giants but, after a slow start, there’s been signs of some settling in the status quo.

Cue the AI grenade.

This has the potential to blow the whole thing up.

And its interesting to see how the different players approach it.

This week we saw Alphabet and Meta courting Hollywood studios, offering (presumably) big money to train their LLMs on the Hollywood content. Netflix and Disney have spurned these advances but knowing how short-term these studios think, its likely the majority are going to snap it up: a ‘bird in the hand’.

Add to this the fact that Meta is training its LLMs on Instagram images and videos, and you can see how Zuck is building his AI empire from both ends of the content spectrum.

In the same week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that it will be debuting short films made using Open AI’s Sora model; it kicks off on the 6th June.

AND…Fable Studio announced a new streaming service which will allow users to create their own animated shows with text prompts.

The first TikTok election

I’m not sure if this can be described as news - but we found out this week that ITV are going to air the first head-to-head debate between Sunak and Starmer.

I think head-to-head is a gross oversell. Gladiators used to fight to the death in a head-to-head. Usyk and Fury smashed the hell out of each other in a head-to-head. Real Madrid beat Borussia Dortmund in front of 90,000 screaming fans in the Champions League final head-to-head. But 2 politicians arguing over how they will improve public services without raising taxes….?

More importantly, given the reach of social nowadays vs a broadcast programme, there are signs that Labour is winning the TikTok wars.

Source: Guardian / Observer Design