Guest Opinion: The Media Wars Are No Longer Creative. They’re Financial and the NFL Will Decide the Winners.

"As artificial intelligence accelerates, owning vast libraries of film, television, and sports content isn’t just about monetization—it’s about training the next generation of models."

By Jonathan Miller

About a decade ago, Netflix made a realization that quietly but permanently rewired the media business: the future of entertainment would not be won by creativity alone, but by capital.

Netflix didn’t just invest in content, it flooded the zone. It leveraged its balance sheet to spend at a scale no traditional studio or network was prepared to match, producing programming at a pace the industry had never seen. The result wasn’t just market leadership in streaming; it was a structural shift. Every other player was forced into a frantic game of catch-up, competing not only for subscribers, but for sheer volume of content. Most were never financially positioned to win that race.

Historically, Hollywood was a creative battleground. Studios competed on taste, judgment, and talent on who could identify the next “Star Wars,” “ER,” or “Law & Order.” You didn’t hear executives lamenting that a rival simply had “too much money.” You heard names like Brandon Tartikoff, Fred Silverman and Warren Littlefield, not sovereign wealth funds.

Netflix changed that. It turned entertainment into a capital-intensive arms race; “good enough” content for everyone, everywhere, backed by unprecedented spending. Creativity still mattered, but money mattered more. Now we’re seeing the next, more consequential, phase of that transformation.

The clearest signal is the extraordinary amount of capital lining up behind Paramount Skydance’s pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery. This isn’t just another merger. It represents a financing model we’ve never seen fully assembled before: sovereign wealth funds, private equity, extreme family wealth, and operating cash flow all deployed together, at speed. When you combine that firepower with assets like UFC and a bid price far above recent trading levels, you create a competitive reality few others can match.

And this dynamic is about to collide head-on with the most valuable asset in American media: the NFL.

When the league triggers its next major rights negotiations, likely in 2026, the industry will confront a stark divide between haves and have-nots. Unlike scripted programming—where creative excellence can still occasionally compensate for smaller budgets—NFL rights are purely financial. You can’t outsmart your way into them. You either have the capital, or you don’t.

This puts once-dominant players in precarious positions. Fox, despite decades of successful NFL coverage, may not be able to afford either losing the rights or paying what they now command. NBC, constrained by Comcast’s balance sheet and shareholder exposure, faces similar risks. Even ESPN, long considered untouchable in sports, may find itself undercapitalized in a world where Amazon, Apple, Google, and YouTube can decide, almost casually, to enter the bidding.

The likely outcome is further consolidation and forced partnerships. The NFL won’t just be a rights negotiation; it will be a catalyst. By the end of this cycle, there will be fewer players on the field, aligned in clearer and more rigid blocs than ever before. Think about the different positions. The landscape has completely changed. The result, in addition to the consolidation we’re seeing now, are partnerships catalyzed by the NFL.

I don’t see how any other players in the rest of the world can compete with US companies. These changes are possibly to the detriment of other parts of the world with the exception of say, Bollywood.

This shift also exposes a deeper truth: many of today’s biggest tech companies aren’t in the media business because they love media. Tech giants have ulterior motives—subscriber retention, ecosystem lock-in, data acquisition, and increasingly, AI model training. Content isn’t the end product; it’s a strategic input. “We’re also seeing a reason why tech companies like Oracle are interested in the media business because it relates to training new models and having the best data and content to train them on. AI based companies, which are some of the highest market cap companies in the world will each have their own media assets and divisions.

That reality helps explain why traditional media companies increasingly face existential questions. It’s no longer unthinkable to imagine legacy studios becoming divisions inside technology or AI-driven conglomerates. As artificial intelligence accelerates, owning vast libraries of film, television, and sports content isn’t just about monetization—it’s about training the next generation of models.

The dam is breaking. Hollywood has been able to drag its feet reluctantly into the AI era. The Disney announcement about OpenAI is Disney giving everybody permission to do something. We’ll see in 2026 that it’s changed from foot dragging on AI to a deployment race.

There are really two bidders for Warner Bros. Discovery. That has significant implications for film making. Netflix has tried to indicate its support for theatrical exhibition but it’s not there. It’s never been in their DNA, but I think it’s in David Ellison’s DNA. The stuff that’s produced for streaming and YouTube and TikTok is meant to be disposable, it’s meant to come and go, there’ll always be more which is very different from a major theatrical release, something of significance that you change your appointments for.

Yet for all this spending—likely north of half a trillion dollars over the past decade on streaming content alone—something is missing. Where are the generation-defining great franchises? Streaming has produced hits, but very few cultural pillars on the scale of “Star Wars,” “Marvel”, or even long-running broadcast franchises. Theatrical exhibition, the shared, event-driven experience, still plays a critical role in creating enduring intellectual property. If that ecosystem erodes, something valuable may be lost that money alone can’t replace. Netflix’ “Stranger Things,” has done well but it’s not “Star Wars.”

Whenever Hollywood has had declines, there’s always been folks outside of the US interested in being in the business. It was the Japanese with Sony Pictures and India’s Reliance Entertainment and Steven Spielberg. The Middle East has been involved in film financing for some time. But what we’re seeing now is the scale of it. It’s not an adjunct to the business overall, it’s becoming determinative. If Paramount gets Warner that money from that region is determinative.

Layered onto all of this is the rapid rise of the creator economy. YouTube has always been my favorite thing on the internet since day one. Powered by AI-driven tools and algorithmic discovery, platforms like YouTube and TikTok are becoming the dominant mode of media consumption. Content creation is cheaper, faster, and more personalized than ever. This sector may soon dwarf traditional media in volume and attention, even if not immediately in revenue.

Which brings us to the most troubling implication: news.

The financial and technological forces reshaping entertainment do not naturally support journalism. Fragmentation, algorithmic amplification, and the economics of scale favor hot takes over sustained reporting, virality over verification. While a few elite institutions may survive, the broader risk is a loss of shared reality - a society consuming infinite content but trusting very little of it.

By the end of 2026, the media landscape will look fundamentally different. Capital, not creativity, will define power. Sports, especially the NFL, will determine alignment. Tech and AI will blur the boundaries of what “media” even means.

The genie is out of the bottle. The only open question is whether we can manage what comes next or whether the industry, and the culture it shapes, will simply be reshaped for us.

Biography: Jonathan F. Miller is currently the CEO of Integrated Media Co., an investment company backed by TPG, a leading private equity firm. He is also an advisor to Advancit Capital, focusing on early-stage companies at the intersection of media, entertainment, and technology.

Miller has served in positions of senior executive responsibility in both traditional and digital media for 25 years. At News Corporation, Miller drove the company’s overall digital strategy which included Fox Interactive Media and Hulu. Prior to News Corp, he was the founding partner of Velocity Interactive Group, an investment firm focused on digital media and communications.

As Chairman and CEO of AOL, he led an industry-defining turnaround by restructuring the company’s core business lines, in addition to focusing the company on online advertising, which included the successful 2004 acquisition of Advertising.com.

Earlier in his career, Miller was CEO and President of USA Information and Services — now IACI and Expedia — and also served as Managing Director of Nickelodeon International, a unit of Viacom’s MTV Networks. He also served as Vice President, Programming and Co-General Manager of NBA Entertainment, where he was responsible for league-wide brand management and programming.

Miller has served on the boards of the Interpublic Group and Lee Enterprises.

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