Silicon Valley has long been said to be a disruptive force. In its infancy it disrupted tubes with chips. Then it disrupted mainframes and minicomputers with personal computers. Eventually it tackled the printed media and communication worlds with the Internet and smartphones. And today we see that the Valley Whale is actively swallowing the visual media (e.g. TV and film). Netflix consuming Warner Brothers, et.al. is just another snack for the Silicon Valley Boys.

It's not as if you couldn't see this coming. If you look at each of the things in the first paragraph you can see that each begat the next in some fashion. The Valley Whale dominance over dictating what happens on the Internet (the so-called WWW 2.0 that crashed the stock market in 2000), has led us to the present situation, where Amazon (Prime), Apple (Apple TV), Google (YouTube), and Netflix all are streaming to their hearts content, while the Big Media folk that were left behind--TV networks and Hollywood Studios--are all playing catch up. Scratch that, they're playing hold on for dear life.

Too late. Turns out there was more money to be suctioned in streaming, and the Valley Whales gobbled that up faster than the slow-moving lizards in NY and LA. Heck, put in a gut-wrenching plethora of ads, as Prime is now doing, and the streaming income should now far exceed the outgo, something that Hollywood has long struggled with and which required a constant flow of investment money funding big hits to stay afloat. With Internet streaming you don't even need to split the proceeds with someone whose building (theater) or transmitter (TV) you're temporarily occupying (though this requires capital costs up front; see next).

Let's face it, you don't see Disney, Comcast, Paramount, Warner Brothers or any of the others building massive server farms everywhere on the planet where there's some flat land to better serve their customers. In Silicon Valley, if you don't already wrangle a conglomeration of servers located and operating worldwide, you either need to pay a fortune to catch up (e.g. ChatGPT's trillion dollar investments) or you're just going to be second or third fiddle at best.

We now have Amazon owning the James Bond franchise. And soon Netflix will own the DC, Harry Potter, and yes, Looney Tunes franchises. It's only a matter of time before all the known franchises will be scooped up. It's a good thing that Disney got into that action early (Star Wars, Marvel, etc.), as keeping those franchises hot will have to be their primary weapon needed to keep the Valley Whales from completely swallowing every video monitor in sight.

Meanwhile, Hollywood talent is in the second stage of grief (Anger). Petitions are circulating, and we all know how powerful those are(n't). How fast the Woodians all turned. When the Valley Whales came in offering quick money for new shows to fill their streams, the Woodians were not only happy to oblige, but also sang positive Whale songs to the point where they just awarded all their little golden statues only to those that worked for the Whales. One acquisition later, and those same Whales apparently are all evil. It's Götterdämmerung, baby, the world you live in is being renewed.

And a curious footnote: The day after the Netflix agreement to purchase Warner Brothers was announced, Netflix customers got an email from the mothership: "Nothing is changing today...you'll hear from us when we have more to share. In the meantime, we hope you'll continue to enjoy watching as much as you want, whenever you want."

In other words: we know we already won the war, no need to fret over the battle.