Disney has been a wannabe tech company for the longest of times. They started the streaming Wars with Disney+ and have had massive spend on AI already. There is virtually no creative or artistic talent left in the company.
Isn't Disney on of the oldest tech companies of all time?
The engineering that goes into their parks is insane, and they have been consistently pushing live experiences. The logistics that goes on in the background to let as many people as possible have a good experience is also insane.
And that's just Disneyland. There's a guy on youtube who makes fascinating hour-long documentaries about every aspect of Disneyland.
If you’re a Disney+ subscriber, be sure to watch The Imagineering Story miniseries. Fun fact, it was directed by Leslie Iwerks, who’s the granddaughter of Ubbe Iwerks, the co-creator of Mickey Mouse alongside Walt Disney.
Pixar was acquired by the current CEO of Disney. The same guy that purchased all the other large brands and saw them wither away. Heck, half of the Disney board comes from biotech companies.
Disney likes to use their past image of animation and artistry and the current way the company works couldn't stray father from it.
When music piracy was facilitated by corporate entities like Napster, the rights holders sued them out of existence, after which piracy evolved into a highly distributed problem that was too costly to prosecute (you can’t sue everyone using BitTorrent one by one). Yes, eventually the music rights holders did facilitate commercial distribution, starting with the iTunes Store, and it was successful because they satisfied the market’s key demand that customers be able to buy one song as a time for 99c, as opposed to the whole album, which would often cost upwards of $10. Also, they didn’t let customers modify the songs or make derivative works.
Generating Disney-derived content with AI, on the other hand, requires massive resources that most individuals don’t possess, thus making corporate entities all but essential players in the game. (This may change in a few years as technology improves, but we shall see.) And we’re talking about derivative works here, not mere copies.
Buying GPUs and RAM is a bit of a barrier right now, but renting a cloud instance at Modal and running a model off hugging face is relatively affordable
Are they losing control though? OpenAI did sign a contract with them and that presumably gives them some power. Maybe less than the power they had over, for example netflix, but still more than nothing.
Maybe the negotiations established that the rights were worth $X, but Disney wanted $X + 1 billion worth of stock?
While many startups will take anyone's money, it can be hard to invest in some. And the most desirable are the hardest. So maybe Disney was using the IP negotiations to open the door?
