We’re already back to Friday, FutureParty people. Last night, the 2024 NFL season kicked off with a game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens. Fast Company has a great guide on how to watch the games for those who’ve cut the cord. With so many options, the streaming transition is just a few plays away from being complete.

In other news… WBD doubles down on experiences, Amazon semi-acquires Covariant, and Stagecoach unveils a buzzy lineup.

Want to discover even more newsletters? Here are some of our favorites

• YouTube – Caddo Lake

• X (Twitter) – Linkin Park 

• Google – NFL

• Reddit – Michael Keaton

• TikTok – “No Rentals (feat. Big Yavo)” - Lil Rae

• Spotify – “Connection” - Constant Smiles 

.ENTERTAINMENT.

Warner Bros. Discovery eventizes itself with a new experiences division

Warner Bros. Discovery is merging its owned and operated experiences division with its licensed entertainment division to form the new Global Experiences division — an attempt to exert greater creative and financial control over the experiences built from the studio’s IP.

The Big Picture: Younger consumers are spending more money on experiences than any previous generation. Now, every studio and streamer is either expanding or launching experience-driven divisions in order to capitalize on the trend and further build out valuable IP.

Between the Lines: WBD believes that it’s time to level up its experiences business.

• The new division, run by WBD Studios COO Simon Robinson, will house studio tours, retail destinations, location-based experiences, theme parks, and touring exhibitions of props and costumes from movies and shows.

• It has two directives: expand its experiences (like the famous Warner Bros. Studio Tour around the world) and find more opportunities for lucrative licensing of its IP (like The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios).

Closing Thoughts: Disney’s and Universal’s events and theme park business have always been the envy of Hollywood, but that has really ramped up the past few years. Netflix, Sony, and Lionsgate have all broken out the checkbook to dive further into the experience economy. WBD CFO Gunnar Weidenfels recently said its experiences group is “about a half billion dollar revenue business.” Considering the company’s recent financial woes, upping that revenue could help cut down on debt and make WBD a more attractive acquisition target.

Go Deeper: While WBD may turn Scooby-Doo and Looney Tunes into hit experiences, it hasn’t recently felt confident about doing that with its movies.

50.7% of you voted Yes in yesterday’s poll: Do you feel heard when talking to customer service reps?

“Humans are better than bots, but both are robotic.”

“Most of the time, in most cases. In the rare event of not getting a problem solved, I find the company at fault — not the customer service rep.”

“It’s difficult to work with a customer service representative who does not have command of the English language. So many times you have to repeat yourself and ask the same question over and over, and the response you receive is unintelligible.”

Let’s keep the conversation going. Join our Poll Of The Day newsletter so your opinions can shine. Discover how your views line up with your peers’, check out cool insights, and have some fun. It’s data with personality.

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Media, Music, & Entertainment

• Stagecoach announced its 2025 lineup, which includes performances from Zach Bryan, Jelly Roll, Luke Combs, Lana Del Rey, Shaboozey, and Sturgill Simpson. [Read More]

• Ticketmaster is in the crosshairs once again, after its dynamic pricing ticketing for Oasis’ reunion shows led to chaos. [Read More]

• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will officially be the controlling shareholder of Paramount Global once Skydance’s takeover of the company is complete. [Read More]

Fashion & E-Commerce

• Pharrell is adding LEGO Designer to his very busy dance card. Is this his masterpiece? [Read More]

• LVMH’s Phoebe Philo DTC label is heading to select brick-and-mortar stores in a strategy shift. [Read More]

• Foot Locker is kicking off its 50th anniversary with a collection of limited-edition footwear from Nike, Puma, Adidas, Converse, and New Balance. [Read More]

Tech, Web3, & AI

• Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup founded by former Open AI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion from investors like a16z and Sequoia Capital. [Read More]

• Miami may be losing its luster with the tech and VC crowd after a16z closed its office because not enough employees were coming in. [Read More]

• ZipRecruiter has launched a tool that will match job positions with potential candidates on its platform and schedule an intro call. [Read More]

Creator Economy

• A Pew study found that now only one-third of Americans support a TikTok ban — down from half of Americans 18 months ago. [Read More]

• YouTube racked up 40 billion minutes of watch-time for Olympics content, beating out NBCUniversal’s 23.5 billion minutes. [Read More]

• Speaking of YouTube, the platform teased a new tool that will be able to detect when a deepfake of a creator or actor appears in a video. [Read More]

.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

Amazon may one day roll out a robot workforce

Amazon has “acqui-hired” robotics startup Covariant for an undisclosed amount, setting the stage for the retail giant to turn its network of fulfillment warehouses into robot-employment epicenters.

The Big Picture: Ecommerce requires a huge headcount to keep the shipping machine running… but companies that figure out how to make actual machines the backbone of the physical labor could order up a lot of cost-savings.

Between the Lines: Amazon’s Covariant acquisition-in-everything-but-name-only could program a new era for the company.

• Covariant has been focused on leveraging AI to train robots how to pick up and handle various physical objects — one of the few skills that has evaded robotics makers because of how many factors are used in grip.

• Covariant’s three founders and several research scientists will now become Amazon employees, and Amazon will license the startup’s models and data… for an undisclosed amount.

• It’s a win for Covariant — which has the tech but has been unable to commercialize it (it needs more money) or level up its algorithm (it needs more data). That’s no longer a problem at Amazon.

Closing Thoughts: Amazon has already partly automated many of its warehouses, thanks to tech from Kiva Systems, but Covariant could provide the final piece to one day make warehouses fully autonomous (with a few human overseers). That’ll surely optimize Amazon’s operations even more than they already are but will likely anger the many flesh-and-blood people who rely on Amazon warehouses for employment, especially during the busy holiday seasons.

Go Deeper: Acqui-hires — hiring a startup’s team and licensing their tech — is quickly becoming the biggest trend in Big Tech to avoid government scrutiny.

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• Read: WSJ profiles Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland, who, shockingly, is trying to make Fyre Fest II happen… despite the first one landing him in prison and saddling him with $26 million in debts.

• Listen: Decoder chats with Wayback Machine director Mark Graham about how the organization is trying to save the internet from dead-link decay.

• Post: “Age Yourself with a Commercial” is the most charming X trend we’ve ever seen. And now we feel old.

Institutionalized by the internet.

LATEST PODCAST EPISODE

Today, on an extra special bonus episode of Future Forecast, our hosts Boye and Chris sit down with Andrew Kenward, the President and COO of Almost Friday Media. Andrew was an agent at WME in the digital media department at WME before being brought into the Almost Friday universe in 2021. We chat with him about his career, his goals for the brand moving forward, and what it's like working in media today.