HITS

Journalists from the newsletter “The Ankler” provided a wake-up call to the global media and entertainment (M&E) industry on May 22, at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) at the Hollywood Innovation & Transformation Summit (HITS), during the panel session “EES KICKOFF: The Truth is Out There.”

The speakers brought their unique perspectives on how disrupted the M&E business really is now and where we can find our center as Hollywood reacts to the game-changing technologies that are on our doorsteps.

On a daily basis, “The Ankler” reporters bring the M&E industry’s daily conversation online and have their ears to the ground across so many communities (greenlighting, creative, tech, packaging, etc.) and their insights into what the heartbeat of Hollywood is saying are grounded in truth.

“I’ve been at ‘The Angler’ for a little over a year now [but] I’ve been covering the entertainment business for years at other publications,” including Variety, “where I really got a sense of the balance sheets of these major entertainment companies,” Elaine Low, reporter at The Ankler, told attendees.

“I’ve really enjoyed learning more about the industry since then and, you know, it’s been a crazy year or so,” she said. “Last year, I covered the strikes. I was out on the picket lines talking to writers and showrunners and producers and studio side folks all through the WTA and SAG AFTRA strikes. And now we’re just trying to figure out what this new normal is.”

Speaking to the audience remotely from New York, Sean McNulty, creator and writer at “The WAKEUP” and “The Ankler,” said he provides “probably a little more of the snark than Elaine, but “Elaine and I can debate that topic.”

He added: “The idea is to give executives across media and entertainment the information they need to know to start their day in the morning, whether that be what’s coming out of the Cannes Film Festival [or] what’s coming out of earnings season. Elaine and I were both at [the TV] Upfronts last week. [And there is] a lot of sports media.”

When it came to artificial intelligence (AI) discussions during the recent round of M&E industry earnings calls, “Warner Bros. Discovery was the one that spent the most time on it,” according to McNulty. That contained a “very broad conversation about kind of optimizing engagement in the streaming app. Not a lot of details in terms of how that might be incorporated. But they certainly gave it probably three to four minutes of time in their earnings call, which is quite a bit of time,” he said.

The company was “leaning into the ways that new technologies like data-driven systems and AI can improve our consumer offerings and enable us to run our businesses more productively and effectively,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said during his company’s first quarter earnings call.

Disney CEO Bob Iger, meanwhile, recently spoke at an investor conference recommendation, McNulty said. “They’re, you know, seemingly looking to AI to improve their streaming business without a lot of detail at this point as to exactly what that means for users.-

To view the presentation, click here.

HITS Spring was presented by Box, with sponsorship by Fortinet, SHIB, AMD, Brightspot, Grant Thornton, MicroStrategy, the Trusted Partner Network, the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and EIDR, and was produced by MESA in partnership with the Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business.