The 2024 Hollywood Tech Nerd Year in Review

A look back at some of my favorite posts of the year!

Author

Steve
December 31, 2024

Happy (almost) New Year Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

Subscribe to get Hollywood Tech Nerds magically delivered to your inbox every Tuesday!

The 2024 Hollywood Tech Nerd Year in Review

Dear readers: It’s the last Hollywood Tech Nerds newsletter of the year! I won’t do the writer cliché where I list my resolutions… in part because I never learn from my mistakes. I’m going into 2025 the same way I went into 2024: convinced of my own correctness and blaming everyone else when I turn out to be wrong!

However, I will continue our tradition here and look back at the things we published over the past year that I think were particularly interesting, popular with readers, prescient, or just plain fun!

This one holds up and was right. There’s a reason why television was founded upon the advertising model and lasted for years: significant scalability. SVOD has a ceiling, advertising doesn’t. You’ll continue to see ad implementation across all streaming services, eg Paramount Plus throwing up a fullscreen QR code ad when you press pause!

I’ll just quote myself here:

As I’ve said again and again (and again), general tech overhype around AI results in dubious AI products functioning as a tool for grifters to separate marks from their money. It’s important to get in the habit of recognizing the spaces where artificial intelligence will be useful and where it’ll just be a way to scam cash from the overly credulous.

Update: the most recent Instagram post from Soul Machines has a whopping two likes. Wow! That’s almost as good as a regular post on my Aunt Joan’s Insta about her elderly, incontinent cat.

Again I will simply quote myself:

Will it be an industry-changing device like the iPhone? That’s less certain to me. Until the technology can be worn like a pair of sunglasses instead of a heavy, clunky headset with limited battery power, it won’t achieve any sort of mass adoption, price point or not.

That pretty much sums it up, as I mentioned just one newsletter ago!

This is me at my grumpiest, taking issue with a golly-gee Variety article expressing enthusiasm over a Roku-funded survey suggesting streaming didn’t necessarily stop people from going to the theater, notable mainly for its questionable survey group and all the relevant detrimental parts of streaming it ignored. I love being annoyed!

Here are a few other pieces from 2024 to check out:

OK, that last one is our reader survey. Please take it if you haven’t done so already! It’s a brief four questions and your opinions are so important to me as we move into 2025.

Thanks again for your continued readership and I’ll see you next year (OK, I had to do one cliché).

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

How Disney made streaming profitable. (link)

An editor’s brutal review helped Jesse Eisenberg’s new film. (link)

They’re selling AI art now. (link)