WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar said that the future of Hollywood is in the blockchain as he prepares to leave the media company that he helped lead into the streaming era. Kilar said that he saw new opportunities at the intersection of storytelling and technology. This is even though he declined to discuss his next pursuit.
The veteran tech executive said that he had no plans to retire after announcing his departure from AT&T Inc unit WarnerMedia ahead of its merger with Discovery Inc in a deal expected to close this month. Kilar’s career has straddled Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and he sees blockchain, the digital ledgers that keep track of transactions across computer networks, as transforming the entertainment business. This is especially as the process of acquiring unique digital collectibles such as Non-Fungible Tokens becomes simpler.
Kilar told that he thinks that it is going to be a potential wave that’s going to be coming to Hollywood, in the same way that the DVD wave came to Hollywood in the ’90s. Obviously, that changed the economic fortunes of a lot of these companies, WarnerMedia included. The blockchain may also open up new forms of financing. Kilar has a long track record of pushing technology and change in entertainment. The former Amazon.com executive was recruited to lead Hulu. He did not rely on a set of assumptions about the way television should work.
Within two months of Hulu’s launch in March 2008, the site, once dubbed by critics in the blogosphere as ClownCo, surged in popularity. Kilar left Hulu in 2013, following disagreements with the company’s owners. Kilar launched his own subscription video service for social media content, Vessel. This was subsequently sold in 2016 to Verizon, and four years later he joined WarnerMedia. That experience led him to changes which threaten to reshape Hollywood. Kilar shattered the traditional release windows for films.
Kilar premiered new films in theaters and on the HBO Max streaming service on the same day, during the pandemic. The move provided a steady flow of new entertainment to the service at a time when the pandemic had disrupted production schedules. It also helped the fledgling HBO Max, and the HBO cable TV network. This is to add 73.8 million subscribers.
