Welcome to TheGrill!
We don’t live in normal times. That said, define normal.
I think everyone can agree that, business-wise, we are in the middle of a changing weather pattern. Not just a single storm but a shift in the system. And since we don’t know what that new system looks like, it becomes really hard to predict or plan around it, let alone get ahead of it. Some days you just feel like you’re hanging on.
What Hollywood has been through in the past five years would be enough for a few decades, at least. A global pandemic. Two labor strikes. The arrival of AI. That alone would be plenty to navigate, but there’s also a war in the Middle East that has unleashed global reactions affecting media and entertainment. And a right-wing swing in our government that has meant profound pressures for media companies.
The structures of 50 years are being reshaped, reconstituted. Whether that’s kids turning to YouTube instead of “Sesame Street,” or creators replacing movie stars as brand favorites, or sports eclipsing every other kind of programming, the new models are being formed.
In the past year we’ve seen a major studio, Paramount, change hands, and in the coming months we will see other legacy studios break apart – Warner Bros., NBCUniversal – to split off their declining cable assets. Which means we’re about to see even more consolidation.
And while, yes, tech has come to dominate entertainment, even the giants like Google and Apple are not impervious to the challenges of the breakneck shifts brought about by AI.
In short, simply nothing is as it was even a few years ago.
That’s the purpose of TheGrill – to make sense of all of this. We know by now that change is not only a constant in the world of content, but that its velocity has only increased. Those of us who are here for this conversation are the intrepid, the rock-ribbed and the fearless. The community here today is made up of people energized by change, not in retreat from it. We’re here to adapt, learn and grasp the moment.
So let’s look at some of the topics we are going to discuss at today’s conference:
- We will talk about the latest in artificial intelligence: Has this tech made the entertainment business stronger, more efficient? AI is taking longer to implement than was initially thought; we will explore that.
- Sports is probably the fastest-growing, most desirable category of entertainment; at the moment it feels like there’s no limit.
- We’re going to talk about exciting new concepts in live entertainment, some using drone technology.
- On our theatrical panel we will take a hard look at why that business has not yet climbed back to 2019 levels.
Please ask questions and introduce yourself to strangers. It’s a day full of rich ideas and solutions, and we want to hear from you.
One final note: I want to talk about stories for a moment. However much change disrupts this industry, ultimately we rely on stories, story-telling and story-tellers to make sense of our world. At this moment, our world does not really make sense to so many of us, and the ways we tell stories is dramatically shifting. So that makes the job that all of us do here much more urgent. The privilege we have here today is to make sense of the emerging trends from the people shaping the future.
