In Hollywood, Big Tech is the one ‘Breaking Bad’

LAST week, Hollywood’s woes claimed a local casualty: the Singapore operations of Disney’s Lucasfilm. The studio will shutter after nearly 20 years, a long-distance reverberation of larger problems back in Tinseltown. But even as writers and actors go on strike against The Mouse and its fellow studios, it is Big Tech that has moved the industry’s cheese and threatens to swallow it whole.

It is a tale as old as Old Media. For decades, Big Tech rampaged through newspapers, record companies and bookstores, upending business models and distorting markets with its bottomless pockets and disregard for bottom lines.

Now, it has come for Hollywood and the incumbents are outgunned. For starters, it is hard to win a fight if battle lines are poorly drawn. Netflix might be aligned with traditional studios in the ongoing union strikes, but it is as much Big Tech as its brethren who have muscled into media – Apple and Amazon. Its core offering isn’t Orange Is the New Black, but its streaming plumbing that has snaked into devices everywhere.