Last week, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced plans to sell Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Studios and streaming service HBO Max to Netflix, following a bidding war that also ended with a hostile takeover bid by Paramount. The planned sale would create a mammoth streaming and production giant with intellectual property rights to beloved franchises including Batman and Harry Potter. It's also sure to draw scrutiny from antitrust enforcers at the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The site was launched "January 1st, 2002, on a whim," founder Scott Lapatine told The Verge. Originally, this early staple of the music blog era was focused almost entirely on music discovery and posting MP3s. "It was the early days of like Windows Media Player and Real Player," Scott remembers. Today, the site is focused on music journalism and has just relaunched to keep up with a media landscape being overrun by AI.
We want to reach 200 million paying customers. How can you use AI to improve user engagement by providing AI-powered products? How can you use [AI to] help newsroom and businesses to improve their operations? And then at the same time, how can you use AI to optimize subscription revenue and advertisement revenue? That's the core mission of [chief] AI officer,' Han said.