by Jared Gudnason 

This week, an inkling of an end came for the ongoing battle between two of the biggest streaming services currently in existence. Approximately six months before the cancelling of CBS’ The Late Show franchise, its parent company merged with what is now Paramount Skydance. Paramount Pictures is the rights holder to thousands of American classics, which include Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’ Indiana Jones franchise, Top Gun, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Mean Girls, and what is contested as the greatest movie ever made, The Godfather and its sequels. This past week a bidding war for Warner Brothers Studios indicated an end sooner than later, the opponent being Netflix, Inc.  

According to Netflix’s “about” page, the prime reason they opted not to up their current bid is due to their current investment in upcoming content. Roughly four paragraphs down, they give the sum of at least $20 billion this year. Obviously, this is due to their millions of monthly subscribers worldwide, I being one of those millions of subscribers. Unfortunately, when the Paramount Skydance deal goes through it means they will be the parent company to one of the biggest news networks, CNN. I hesitate to say that the acquisition of CNN is the sole purpose of yet another merger with a media titan, the first being CBS last year. However, there have been echoes between the head of Paramount Skydance, and the joke of our current federal government, about making at the very minimum CBS produce more conservative content. It’s a bizarre scenario to be in. The reason Netflix has staying power is due to their ability to produce, well, an infinite amount of relatable content, regardless of country, policy implementation, etc.  

This merger has more to do with the regulation of American media literacy, which has not been great overall, as social media becomes more-and-more invasive and predatory. Keep up with your localized media outlets, regardless of ownership.