Julia Alexander

I think he's a guy who deeply does love technology.

If you read through the letter he sent to staff when the Paramount deal was first done with Skydance, he used the term tech and technology more than film, television, entertainment, streaming.

He loves technology.

What he thinks he's going to accomplish by loving AI beyond the enterprise side of it, beyond the like, you know, use this for your Microsoft Word or whatever, and including it in more original content at a time when there was the longest writer's strike in a very long time and actor's strike because of artificial intelligence less than two years ago.

I don't know what he's going to think that he's trying to accomplish.

But he's, again, he's a guy who's making a lot of manic moves very publicly.

And I think that's off-putting to a town very well known for kind of keeping up a very stoic face at times and kind of moving slowly through technological changes.

The word that gets passed around a lot in different executive meetings is quality and not in the sense of we need to protect quality, but more from the nihilistic point of view of just quality matter.

The question of no one thought YouTube was TV.

A lot of these Hollywood executives still thought it was just cat videos up until like the Nielsen gauge started breaking out YouTube consumption on TV sets.

People are worried that if quality doesn't matter and it's just scale, then how do you play into this?

And it wasn't a concern until, as you just perfectly outlined, the ad dollars were going across all these same platforms.

It used to be that Netflix or even back in the day, Disney and CBS and whatever it might be had one level of ad spend.

And then there was, you know, search ad spend, right?

And there was like social video before we called it that ad spending YouTube video and whatever it was.

And now all of these companies have started to realize that where the real money is going to be over the next few years outside of the mobile social space and kind of the e-shopping space happening inside these different apps is on connected TV sets.

We're spending more time with our connected TV sets.

And so the amount of dollars that is left over from linear as they move over to CTV is very, very, very high.

It's why the Nielsen gauge has become this big problem in Hollywood, because YouTube can use it to say, we want these bigger

TV brand or ad deals and we can work with our creators on that and the brands on it with the podcasts because those are playing out on TV living room sets, all that stuff.