Geoff Manne on Hollywood Consolidation

Bloomberg Law – ICLE President Geoffrey Manne quoted in a Bloomberg Law story about the striking Hollywood guilds asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate consolidation among the Hollywood studios. You can read full piece here.

But the issues with the “feedback loop” are inherent to the new paradigm of streaming and have nothing to do with concentration, said Geoffrey Manne, the president of the nonprofit research group International Center for Law and Economics.

“It’s just that there is no good data anymore,” Manne said. Streaming services are struggling to determine how much their profits—mostly generated via subscribers—are attributable to any given TV show, he said.

“It’s not because the companies are trying to take advantage of anyone,” Manne said. “They may also be doing that, but that’s the Occam’s razor”—the simplest—assessment.

… Regardless of future FTC investigations, Manne predicted, the knowledge that Khan has taken a personal interest in the strikes will have a deterrent effect on industry mergers.

“It’s impossible to think that if any studios are planning a merger, they’re going through it with same assessment of potential risk they were before,” Manne said. “At the margin, some mergers that were being contemplated might be affected by this tension.”