STREAMING POWER, CREATIVE LOSS: The Fight for Hollywood’s Future
Watch Hard Reset's panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival
For more than a century, Hollywood has weathered economic shocks, technological revolutions, and recurring predictions of its demise.
What confronts the industry now, however, is different in scale and speed: the concentrated power of a handful of global streaming platforms, the rapid advance of generative AI, and a business model increasingly detached from the human labor that sustains it. As financing evaporates and creative work grows more precarious, the future of Hollywood has rarely felt so uncertain.
This past week we hosted a panel discussion on these topics at Sundance. Watch the full video here:
The conversation featured:
Keri Putnam, film and television producer and executive, former Sundance Institute CEO, Miramax President, and HBO Films EVP
Shane Boris, producer, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
Lee Hepner, American Economic Liberties Project
Ted Tremper, Executive Producer at Comedy Central
Moderator: Richard Rushfield, The Ankler
The concentration of streaming power has fundamentally altered creative economics. When platforms control both distribution and production, they externalize risk onto artists while capturing value at scale. The parallel to AI's advance is striking - both represent shifts where technology transforms industries faster than economic models adapt. The real question isn't whether change happens, but whether it preserves sustainable pathways for creative work to continue.