Big Tech’s takeover of the media has begun.
Cloud-scale capital, data and AI-native execution are converging with the film, news and entertainment industries. This shift won’t wait for incumbents to embrace AI on their own terms — it’s arriving from outside the industry, faster and more radical than expected.
Consider the following, David Ellison at Paramount, and further consolidation on the horizon. This is the strategy that infrastructure owners are using to fuse production with distribution, compress time-to-content, and reroute monetisation. There will be fewer $200M bets and more agile slates, and pressure on every legacy cost line. This is not just happening in cinema, but in news too.
This is bigger than studio economics. It’s about sovereignty — not only in terms of chips and models, but also in terms of media and news. Who sets the narratives, who owns the audiences and (most important) who controls the channels.
Europe’s response cannot be further discussion or theory. It must be action.
In the spirit of cooperation between rivals, our next step is to establish a shared European direction:
• A privacy-first login and distribution system that operates across borders and returns leverage to European publishers and broadcasters.
• This will be a co-owned, AI-native media champion that treats content as a product. It will be multilingual by default, provenance-first and export-ready.
• It will be a trusted ecosystem where creators and newsrooms can thrive, with transparent licensing and fair revenue flows.
This aligns with Clemens Pig’s ( CEO APA – Austria Presse Agentur) vision “Modus Co-Operandi” a cooperative media system for the AI information age, incorporating shared platforms, provenance and cross-newsroom initiatives. It’s a practical blueprint for working together rather than waiting alone.
No 900-page strategies. 90-day momentum. First comes the vision, then the pilots, coalitions and shipping of real products.
pic (c) CNBC