Neil Freiman

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Yeah, a lot of ways to look at this deal.

I think the first one is that it's a signal to the marketplace that Disney is on the cutting edge of technology.

technology.

Yes, it may be a company that's over 100 years old, but it's constantly looking to the future.

And it has done that with its partnerships with Apple.

And then recently, a couple of years ago, invested $1.5 billion into Epic Games to get its characters into that company's game of Fortnite.

Now it does $1 billion into OpenAI and it gets its characters into Sora.

And Bob Iger said this was a play for the youth.

We know that

America's kids, international kids are increasingly looking to YouTube and user-generated content instead of maybe Disney's longtime characters.

This is a way that whatever technology the youths are using, that Disney's characters will be front of mind.

So what does it mean for OpenAI?

Well, many analysts were looking at this as perhaps OpenAI coming from this from a defensive posture wasn't that advantageous of a deal for OpenAI because if you look at Sora, a few months ago, Sora came to the App Store and it was being downloaded

Crazy, like it was the number one app and all those videos were going viral on other social media platforms.

But if you look at App Store downloads on Apple and Google in the past few weeks, it had been declining.

And perhaps that's because all these media companies were cracking down on the IP being used on Sora on that platform.

So it is an admission that perhaps people won't use Sora unless they can do weird stuff with Mickey Mouse or Mike Wazowski.

And so they have to come to the table to this deal and actually pay content creators for the use of their characters.