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From in-car entertainment adventures to a strangely harmonious blending of AI and Hollywood craft-workers, it was a busy event day in Los Angeles. Here are the highlights:

Commandeering generative AI’s largest B2B event, Amazon tried to assure 2,000 film and TV creatives packed onto its Culver City lot Wednesday that the economics of this highly disruptive transition will work out just fine for them

CULVER CITY, Calif. — Started in 2023 as a one-day, non-profit event at an an ancient Downtown Los Angeles indie film and TV production studio, with 650 attendees focused on the intersection of generative artificial intelligence and media, AI on the Lot has steadily grown in stature.

On Wednesday, it had a moment, unfurling nine miles to the west, on Amazon MGM Studios’ historic Culver City lot, as a full-fledged three-day conference, charging around 2,000 attendees as much as $700 each for tickets. In an austere era for new live business-to-business events, it’s an indisputably impressive feat.

On Stage 15, where It’s a Wonderful Life was filmed 85 years earlier, emcee Todd Terrazas, the self-described “nerd herder” who started all this a decade ago when he also co-founded the event’s parent 501(c)(3), kicked off Wednesday’s proceedings by stating AI on the Lot’s core mission — shepherding this down-on-its-luck company town of ours through yet another dramatic technological transition.

It’s hard to second-guess Terrazas’ intentions, but perhaps a little easier in the case of Amazon and its AI chief, Albert Cheng, the former ABC digital executive who appeared on the stage next for the keynote. In addition to serving as AI on the Lot’s host for a second consecutive year, Amazon MGM Studios is also the event’s largest financial benefactor.

And that changes how the message hits.

Cheng had happy news for the standing-room-only Stage 15 crowd — three new Amazon Studios animated kids series had been green-lit under new grants for indie makers, allowing them access to Amazon AI’s soup-to-nuts “Project Nara” platform. This advanced, end-to-end production workflow mixes software tools including Blender, Maya, Nuke, Unreal Engine and the Adobe Creative Suite.

For the previous three iterations, A on the Lot tracked the steady coalescence of this once ragged technological ensemble. Cheng’s presentation seemed like coronation of what is now a fine-tuned working model.

Among the green-lit was Cupcake and Friends from BuzzFeed Studios, which was just purchased last month by Byron Allen, controller of CBS’ largely forsaken post-Colbert late-night schedule.

“I think we gave them only like five weeks to make something,” said Cheng, noting the dramatically truncated production timelines enabled by Project Nara.

To Cheng’s view, long productions with massive teams are out. In their place will be a higher volume of smaller, more nimble, far-less-expensive projects, allowing Amazon to take many more “shots” on goal in search of hits.

Shorter projects with fewer jobs, sure, but a lot more of shows, with many more ideas and scripts in play.

“Right now, you can review a great script with an awesome story, but you're like, ‘This is not producible. The space battle scene alone is going to be $20 million an episode, so forget it,’” Cheng said, who claims that AI would make a series like this viable.

The powerful AI tools being developed by Cheng’s team will “allow voices that may not have been able to get in because of the fundamental economics tied to the hard cost of making things,” he added.

The disinclination by big entertainment companies to take creative risks and their over-reliance on established IP will be mitigated, as AI drives down costs, Cheng also noted.

Heartening as that may be, at least a few Stage 15 visitors Wednesday morning had to be painfully aware that a company with a noted anti-union reputation, that just laid off 30,000 workers, and which remains an oft-cited OSHA target for its often poor workplace health and safety conditions, was telling them that their careers were going to be just fine.

“It’s just a tool,” as Cheng put it, the speaker seeming to assume that Amazon will keep spending more than $22 billion a year on video and music content if it can avoid it, merely re-allocating its spending instead of fattening its margins.

Part of AI on the Lot’s core mission is one of accepting inevitability — love ‘em or hate ‘em, film and TV companies are already deploying these transformational work tools. Get busy livin’ with a scary, unpredictable future, or get busy dyin’.

And Cheng was right when he scolded any militantly AI luddite who happened to be hiding amid the mild-mannered crowd that they should at least sample and familiarize these advanced tools before they harsh on them.

But the message seems more valid message from from shepherd to sheep, not from the wolf.

— Daniel Frankel

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Your head of product opens Slack. There's a GitHub summary in private channel: PRs merged, PRs stale, Linear tickets that moved. He didn't ask for it.

Your marketing lead opens Slack. There's a Google Ads performance comparison in private channel, with a note: "Meta CPA crept up 18% this week. Might be worth pausing the broad match campaign." She didn't ask for it either.

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For TV OEM makers, the exact spot where car OEMs sit right now feels familiar, rather like three or four years ago when the companies controlling TV operating systems suddenly realized they’d become gatekeepers over the entire streaming ecosystem.

Need your app marketed? Trying to spotlight a show? Creating new kinds of experiences? Talk to the TVOS, and they’ll try to work you in. And where TVOS-es have been, car OS-es likely are heading, eventually.

For car-based experiences, according to a panel I moderated today at CarApp World (at the still-futuristic Westin Bonaventure Hotel downtown), they’re still at the point of ensuring people are enjoying the ride, rather than extracting every dollar of revenue of ad and subscription money from semi-captive audiences.

That’s the case with Waymo, a division of Alphabet, which otherwise is one of the greatest ad-revenue generators of all time.

Waymo is operating in 11 U.S. cities now, and accumulates half a million miles a week in rides, said Melanie D’Achon, Waymo’s strategic partnerships director. The key for Waymo is how to make a better experience for riders while they’re taking a ride in a Waymo-controlled vehicle for, say, 15 or 20 minutes at a time. Protecting that experience includes not allowing ads for its partner apps with Spotify, YouTube Music and others.

BMW has similar concerns for its upscale audiences, said U.S. partnerships chief Joo-Hyung Maing. Given the German automaker’s luxury brand, it has to make sure its vehicles, especially that luxe electric i7 it rolled out earlier this year, offer experiences commensurate with owners’ expectations and tastes.

“With a BMW car, you own it, you create this thing you come back to,” Maing said. “You can kind of configure your experience for what you need. The car is smart enough.”

Indeed, smart cars are now getting smarter about what’s happening inside the vehicle as much as what’s happening outside. The i7 will serve different kinds of apps to screens in the front of the car – no distracting video unless the vehicle is parked – versus the back, where video, games, and much else is available. And when the car notes that Junior has fallen asleep in the back, it will turn off Bluey and dim the rear lights.

Maing likes to invoke a statistic from Chinese EV owners, who spend an average 40 minutes in their cars after they’ve arrived home. Maybe they just aren’t ready to see the kids yet, but they’re interacting with music, podcasts, news, games and more in their parked cars, even after the commute is done.

That kind of behavior may be extreme in China, but make no mistake: lots of apps are on the way, said Mattjis de Valk, whose Forvia division Appning distributes apps from 300 companies to the dashboards of 16 carmakers with millions of owners.

Meanwhile, Berlin-based RadioPlayer is focused on what remains the most popular app in cars, good old radio, the original mass medium, said Laurence Harrison, the company’s partnerships head. A bit more than half of time spent in cars still involves radio, he said.

For her part, D’Achon said she hopes to see Waymo explore new kinds of experiences as it adds new kinds of vehicles to its fleet beyond the Jaguar F-Type compact SUVs that populate the streets of Santa Monica and beyond. More recently the company has begun added Zoox minivans, which can hold up six riders. It’s not hard, she said, to think about turning some of these into rolling yoga studios.

— By David Bloom

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The FIVE SPOT
A few other stories you should know about…

Now controlling the primary visibility layer for more than 100 million streaming households, there is no one — not even all-powerful YouTube and Netflix — that has more UX control over what Americans choose to stream than Roku.

Roku controls the most widely distributed TVOS interface in North America, and all of those connected TV users have to go through it before they get to their apps. So it’s strange that Roku, up until Wednesday, was still working with the same homepage UX design first implemented in 2013, when the company had only around 8 million devices in the market and had yet to establish its first smart TV partner.

As shown in our recent extrapolation of data from media merchandising specialty company Looper Insights two weeks ago, the Roku UX has remained a powerful influencer, with M&E homepage ads driving obscure content, including the 20-year reunion special for MTV reality show Laguna Beach, to outsized performances.

With Wednesday’s rollout of a new Roku home screen, the surging streaming company aims for overall quicker access to content, with enhanced surfacing of apps you use more regularly, and also shows you’ve watched or might want to start, the machine learning about your tastes as you go.

Home screens are “one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in streaming right now,” said Preston Smalley, VP of viewer product, speaking at a Roku presentation of its new UX Wednesday in New York.

Roku realizes that speeding you into an app and a show has consequences to its booming advertising business. But the company insists accommodations have been made.

Now, as it learns about your viewing tastes, Roku will even more precisely target you with home screen ads. Marquee ads used to only appear after you clicked on something, but they’ll now live on the right side of the UX and stay there.

— D.F.

As we wrote about in April, Roku’s subscription streaming channel reseller business is a boomin’.

On Wednesday, the streaming company announced the addition of Fox One to its Roku Channel Premium Subscriptions marketplace, with the SVOD set to stream 104 World Cup matches both live and on demand starting June 12.

The addition of Fox One expands the premium entertainment, news and live sports available through Premium Subscriptions head of the biggest global sports moment of the year,” said Gil Fuchsberg, president of subscriptions, partnerships and corporate development at Roku.

— D.F.

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The technological edge of American-made AI is now up for debate, but its pricing disadvantage relative to China’s DeepSeek remains undisputed.

The least expensive large language model in the world, 10 times cheaper than OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is now also the most used, according to weekly data published by OpenRouter.

For the upcoming mega-IPOs of American LLM giants Anthropic and OpenAI, a global price war could signal trouble, particularly in the enterprise market, where AI tech is starting to cut into margins.

Ali Ghodsi, CEO of cloud analytics company Databricks, told CNBC that a trend is emerging whereby companies are deploying cheap, open-sourced models like DeepSeek as default for the bulk of their tasks, bringing in Claude or ChatGPT only when that solution proves insufficient.

“You can curb costs really well this way,” Ghodsi said."

— D.F.

In case you haven’t been following, there’s a war going on between incumbent wireless giants AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, and Starlink, the satellite company backed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and buoyed by the not-so-invisibly corrupted hands of the current federal government.

Starlink can go to hard-to-reach places Big Wireless can’t. Among its 10 million users spread across more than 100 countries are many rural residents who get their own satellite antenna to receive data directly from Starlink satellites.

What Starlink needs now is a mobile virtual network operator partnership with one of the big three wireless companies, so it can lease terrestrial network infrastructure, including towers. That will enable the SpaceX division to much better infiltrate more urban markets.

During their respective Q2 earnings calls, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verzion each said they had no interest serving as Starlink’s MVNO partner.

But analyst Andrew Besen thinks it’s all part of a negotiation. Armed with $17 billion worth of premium spectrum recently purchased from EchoStar, Starlink has leverage over the spectrum-starved wireless giants.

Disclosing highlights of his latest research report to Fierce Network, Besson noted that with just one MNVO agreement, Starlink will be off to the races. And with it, he predicts, the company will amass 20 million subscribers, just in the U.S., by 2031.

— D.F.

Widely considered to be one of the world’s most universally liked celebrities, Keanu Reeves is using some of his charismatic capital to help out a friend, writing the judge overseeing the sentencing of filmmaker Carl Rinsch, asking for leniency and mercy.

Rinsch was convicted of defrauding Netflix of $11 million, money given to him to produce a series that never got made, the money going instead to personal benefit, including an extraordinarily expensive bed. In fact, Netflix ended up writing off more than $55 million tied to Rinsch’s White Horse (later renamed Conguest) in 2021, the year after it fired the former content chief, Cindy Holland, who hired the first-time series maker.

Reeves, who starred in Rinsch’s best known work, 2013 film 47 Ronin, concedes in the letter to New York Federal Judge Jed Rakoff that while he doesn’t know the specifics of the case, and that he isn’t a “therapist or a psychologist,” he sees Rinsch as an “extraordinary artist” who can, on occasion “self-sabotage by amplifying the scale, scope and landscape of what had been negotiated, accordingly placing himself and his counterparties at odds.”

Not an “excuse,” just some “insight,” the actor claims in the letter, intercepted by TMZ.

Reeves would like Judge Rakoff to give Rinsch a “non-incarceratory” sentence.

— D.F.