The Ankler interviews an anonymous exec at Apple’s streaming service. He gives the industry’s view on AI and outsourcing, which we don’t hear much. We hear from AI boosters, and we hear from the writers and artists who are losing their property. The actual USERS have a hardass attitude, tempered by knowing what works.
Hardass and unsurprising:
This isn’t a matter of not wanting to pay writers what they’re worth. But when we are trying to watch budgets, you cut anywhere you can. And the truth is that includes writers and other support staff. Which gets back to my point about the strike. The only way writers will get more money or time or anything else is by getting what they want into a contract.
Here’s the counterintuitive part:
I do think that directors tend to think they can’t be replaced in the entertainment assembly line. What they don’t get is that they can be replaced. The golden ticket for every major streamer is to be able to produce a show that looks like it was produced in the U.S., shot overseas with non-union crews and only a handful of American actors. Despite all of their other issues, American writers are tough to replace. We’ve found — and I think Netflix has had the same experience — that writing is a very culturally specific thing. It has a vibe that is nearly impossible to recreate without having grown up in that culture.
In most industries the physical skills are harder to offshore, while the abstract skills are easy. He says it’s the other way around in entertainment.
And metaspeaking of culturally specific:
I’m only half-joking when I say that every time Zaslav (Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav) makes an appearance in that fucking vest thing, he adds another two weeks to the strike. He’s like the Marie Antoinette of the streaming world.
That fucking vest thing? Google finds ‘Zaslav vest’ easily, but the cultural meaning is totally opaque to outsiders!
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