Andrew A. Rosen

2026 will be the year of "MOAR content"—$NFLX and $PSKY bet volume beats YouTube (spoiler: it won't), power laws accelerate so top 1% captures even more attention, and the Disney-OpenAI deal proves consumers don't need official IP when fan-made competes with studio releases.

@shadihamid @parryravi @washingtonpost And you never use photo evidence. It’s always words. Why? Because in none of the historical instances of genocide were there mass graves of people who had been used as human shields by their own people. Hamas innovated that. It’s not genocide. It’s murder.

@shadihamid @parryravi @washingtonpost Like every other phony making this argument you gloss over Rwanda and Bosnia—and there was genocide across the former Yugoslavia committed by Croats, Serbs and Bosnians—and fail to mention Cambodia. And you don’t because the precedent doesn’t apply. If it did, you’d include it.

What Israel has done in Gaza clearly and easily meets the legal definition of genocide as described in the UN Genocide Convention. I lay out the case in detail here in @washingtonpost: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/… Words have meaning. Even if it offends some people, we need to call things as they are. The idea that Israel is somehow immune from judgment is itself an application of a double standard. It is anti-semitic to hold Israel to a different standard than other states. And that's what Israeli is: a state. Sometimes, states do really awful things. And to conflate American Jews with the Israeli state is yet another example of anti-semitism, which the AJC seems to be doing here.

@Sullyish Thank you!

@aagave Love your Substack Andrew it's a solid read, might be the best one on the entertainment sector 👏

Bob Iger leaves The Walt Disney Company $DIS with a giant database—or “monolith”, like the "Mad Men" episode from Season 7—at the center of its business. The newly announced reorg splits that database in two—one for streaming, one for theme parks. Nobody has explained how both drive the company’s famous flywheel. Bob Chapek tried to fix this and got fired. New CEO Josh D'Amaro has to solve the same problem without the “antibodies in the system” pushing him out, too. My bet is that D’Amaro will figure it out. He has to. But the past is precedent and it will not be pretty. open.substack.com/pub/parqor/p/a…

The Civil Rights Movement as we know it would have died in the cradle without Jewish Americans. Fact: Jews co-founded the NAACP in 1909. Fact: Jewish money kept the lights on (sometimes over 50% of the budget). Fact: Jewish lawyers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Black lawyers in every major case, from Brown v. Board to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They didn’t just “help.” They bled, marched, got arrested, and wrote the checks when most white America wanted us both gone. So when I see people online spewing “Jews are the enemy,” I remember who had our back when literally nobody else did. As a Black conservative, I will NEVER forget that debt. I stand with Israel. I stand with the Jewish people. History didn’t stutter, and neither will I. 🇺🇸✡️🖤

Seedance 2.0 and Google's Veo 3 now produce video so good you cannot tell whether it was made by a fan messing around or a creator building a business. That is the real problem. No platform — not ByteDance, not Google, not OpenAI — can write IP rules that work for both groups at once. The tools erased the middle ground. Lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters are tactical interim solutions, at best. I walked through what this means for The Walt Disney Company, IP holders, and licensing in the AI era. open.substack.com/pub/parqor/p/b…

The creator economy is authenticity, authenticity is what was behind the scenes entertainment. Another notch in the belt for the creator economy

@ViralNewsNYC They pushed Spitzer out in 14 months for a LOT less.

We are in a lot of FUCKING trouble.

Anybody remember Coffee Shop at Union Square, circa 2018?

@KirbysLastSnack @Adweek @MarkStenberg3 Yes and Super Mario did well on Netflix. But why would Roberts family sell now? That motivation isn’t clear.

@aagave @Adweek @MarkStenberg3 Universal’s film library and potential future lineup is very strong too. Nolan’s films. The Mario/Nintendo animated stuff is likely best to explode and already delivers heavy engagement on streaming with just the one film. The sports rights component. And so on.

What should be the business objectives behind any future M&A deal by Netflix $NFLX? @Adweek s Mark Stenberg (@MarkStenberg3) asked me for specific deal predictions. A few of my answers are in the On Background newsletter below, alongside some other smart and provocative takes. But, as I told Mark, Netflix's business objectives are key to understand why they would pursue any deal in the first place. 1. Engagement: Netflix is always solving for driving a “growth flywheel of more and better entertainment, delivers more engagement, more revenue and more profit.” 2. Mobile games: Four years ago, iIt bet on mobile games to drive this flywheel—acquiring studios. It has recently pivoted (you can see why in a recent analysis I wrote with AppMagic data). My take on this is in Mark's newsletter. 3. Video podcasts: It is now betting on video podcasts to drive engagement. Its CFO recently shared at the Morgan Stanley conference that video podcasts are over-indexing time of the day—"morning and afternoon"— and on mobile devices. As you'll read in Mark's newsletter, Netflix's UX is conducive to video podcasts Both mobile games and video podcasts also solve a pain point for Netflix—both offer value on a platform that relies on legacy media production timelines of months or years (the next K-Pop Demon Hunters is due for 2029) for the storytelling model. Games and video podcasts offer different means of engagement on much shorter timelines. the-medium.co/p/can-video-po…? 4. Library: The bid for Warner Bros. was a big expensive bet on a “strategic accelerant”—feeding Netflix's engine with one hundred years of IP, an incredible library and prestige television from HBO. I've argued in recent essays on The Medium that it was also a defensive maneuver, if not moreso: HBO and WB shows are in the top 3% to 7% of most viewed shows. There are no obvious replacements in the marketplace. 4a. Local Library: Growth for Netflix is increasingly outside of the U.S. There are studios with libraries of local language IP out there. Netflix has proven it can scale local language IP. It's not clear from what I've read how valuable other local language IP could be to Netflix. In theory, it should be more valuable in the long run as the rest of the world moves from Free to Air to Netflix streaming consumption. 4b. Hollywood studio library: The key question is which library offers something similar to A few folks in the newsletter suggested Lionsgate. What's the market equivalent to HBO or WB network content which could make an impact in the Netflix interface? That's the likely answer. links.adweek.com/s/vb/kkfHD5I30…

Learn more about the implications of #Sora on #OpenAI here: open.substack.com/pub/parqor/p/s…

#OpenAI is putting #Sora inside #ChatGPT. Existing data suggests consumer demand for AI video may underwhelm relative to ChatGPT's 920 million weekly chatbot users. For Disney, its licensed 200-plus characters will be available to these audiences under strict conditions that may prove too restrictive... or too loose for Disney's liking. Whether Sora scales better than it did as an app, every other studio with unprotected IP is watching to see what happens next. Every insurer, investor and creator is watching them. The only thing growing faster than the market is the uncertainty.

@donsteele Oh grand mère Alistair knows I don't like a spicy bibambop. But he gets it anyway to try to impress the waitresses. He makes so many friends and gets so many massages. If it wasn't for cooking our meat like savages over a fire, I would be so mad at Alistair!

@aagave And Grand Meré Alistair loves going there for therapeutic massages. He buys me an ice lolly and I am told to sit in the park and he returns in a wonderful mood

It’s the exits from those trains in the herald square station which are suboptimal entry points into the neighborhood. Other use agree with this 110%

Read the full essay here: the-medium.co/p/nobody-knows…

Nobody knows who owns what in AI. Creators face high and complex bars to prove they own their work. Studios reject deals they cannot evaluate. Insurers will not cover what they cannot price. Everyone is making the right call for themselves—and nothing moves towards better market coordination or clarity. My latest essay explains the coordination failure trapping billions of dollars in the AI media market, and what I am building to fix it.

$CMSA @comcast needs to act quickly to fix this at the local level. This is Soviet Union levels of disinformation

The NYT have sacrificed being “the paper of record” and exchange for games, cooking and a great direct to consumer business