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Is it just me, or have the last five years seemed like about fifty years? Looking back at this blog, it was five years ago this month that AT&T rolled out its rebrand of the TimeWarner empire. Henceforth, and I expected it to be for quite some time, the business unit would be called "WarnerMedia." It was in late 2016 that AT&T announced its purchase of what was then known as TimeWarner. The deal took a long time to work its way through the courts, partially because of investigations by the Justice Department. Now, as I'm fond of saying, this is not a political blog. I won't go into the reasons and the feelings at the time. But, if you search your memories, you may remember a bit of the political climate of late 2016 and early 2017.

No matter. By June 2018, the deal was done. The company that had started as Time, Inc. and Warner Bros. Studios, and had gone through ownership by AOL, was now just another business unit of AT&T.

Look, we all hoped for the best

I know I did, and my sentiments about AT&T are well documented on this blog. I wish they weren't, because frankly I was wrong about a lot of them. AT&T wasn't always a good steward of the brands it bought. The world was both surprised and (frankly) a little relieved when the company started divesting its purchases in the early 2020s. DIRECTV regained its independence, and WarnerMedia was sold to Discovery. Discovery's buying spree had taken it from a small cable operators to one of the major player in the entertainment world in just five years. They took custody of one of the most significant media companies in history when they subsumed WarnerMedia, and well let's be honest things haven't been exactly smooth sailing since then.

Too many big players in entertainment?

It's true that just four companies: Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Netflix, and Amazon, own a massive share of the entertainment we enjoy. Add companies like Apple, Comcast, Paramount, and Google and I bet there's very little you don't get from this group. There are some folks who say that this amount of consolidation is too much, and that there isn't enough diversification in media.

I have to say, I don't have an answer for that. 100 years ago there were literally thousands of small companies vying for the attention of the consumer, but most were small and local. They only served a local area. Then again most people only looked locally. Back in 1923, we were just beginning to see national companies like movie studios and magazine companies come into play. It would be another 10 years before there were national broadcasting companies (one of which was, of course, the National Broadcasting Company.) So while there were a lot of different voices in media back then, your average person got their information from one or two local newspapers and maybe one movie studio. So I ask, is the flow of information in more danger today than 100 years ago? I'm not sure it is.

What will I be throwing back to in five years?

When I do these articles, I tend to look back to this date five years ago. This blog has been around for 16 years and I hope it continues at least another 16. So with luck I'll be writing another Throwback Thursday article in 2028. What will I say?

Some people think that by then, Google will own at least 90% of everything. They will control the flow of information almost completely. Looking back at the last 20 years, that seems like an easy bet. But then easy bets are the ones that almost always fail. It's more likely, if you really take a look at the trends, that the major player of 2028 will be a company we barely think of today. They may not even be in business. It would be no surprise at all to find out that a company like gotw3 owns most of the media outlets in the world. It could be any small company. After all, Google and Microsoft were small companies once too. Apple was famously just two people, and they've done pretty well for themselves.


The post THROWBACK THURSDAY: WarnerMedia appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.

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