This sounds like old TV exec logic. Disney IP is not “premium” any more thanks to relentless overuse in their garbage movies and shows.

My teenage kids watch YT and TikTok (which gets highly relevant UGC daily) and couldn’t care less about Mickey Mouse or Kylo Ren.

Because they are too busy coming up with new “features” that nobody needs or wants so they can talk about delivering value in a yearly review.

Fixing broken UX is not a priority at Apple any more. They stopped enforcing HIGs for 3rd party apps a long time ago, and their own apps violate many principles that used to matter. Music app on iOS is a great example of slop UI.

That all sounds great but with CARIAD now being involved at Rivian I won’t hold my breath on that roadmap being executed.

I assumed it was just me getting worse at typing but combined with aggressively wrong autocorrect and mysterious blue lines under everything I type they seem to have ruined yet another perfectly good UX.

Yeah, the blue lines under a random word in a perfectly correct sentence is such a waste of time ... did I mistype? Nope.

Nothing of value is my prediction.

Exactly - Disney sees this as a cheaper way to produce the same slop.

Probably worse slop, but now no human will be paid. What a marvelous future we've invented for ourselves.

To be fair the humans working at Disney had their chance and blew it.

It's our own fault. Apparently we find Jake Paul screaming "I'M GEEKED" into the camera highly entertaining.

I would argue AI going to be a good thing because more creative risks can be taken at lower sunk costs.

Judging by how bad recent Marvel movies were, I wouldn't be surprised if fans plop out far better quality.

Not an AI slop (I think?), but looks an order of magnitude better than any Marvel crap released in the last 3 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9b7BOJyE9A

Thats a business agreement not a moat. And you might have rights to generate the characters but they still need to do something. You only have to look at the repeated Disney flops to see they themselves have no ideas.

And if you're the only company with that business agreement. As long as you still have it, it's a...moat.

Well that’s the thing with moats - they don’t just disappear one day.

These kinds of parternships also throw in free inference with MFN clauses, which make a mutual moat.

A moat doesn't have to be a feature, and equity stakes have been fairly successful moats (eg. Much of AWS's ML services being powered by Anthropic models due to their equity stake in Anthropic).

A moat is a permanent feature protecting a castle against attack. That’s the metaphor. If it’s not their own device intrinsically protecting them then it’s not a moat in my book.

That is not how we use the term "moat" in this context, because competitors eventually converge on offerings within 1-2 years.

I don't need some stuck up HNer telling me about stuff I deal with in my day-to-day job.

Edit: can't reply

> a business deal that can be transferred to a new partner the second it expires is much more temporary

Generally, these kinds of equity deals include an MFN clause.

> That is not how we use the term "moat" in this context, because competitors eventually converge on offerings within 1-2 years.

Then I guess we need a new term because that's not how I interpret the term moat either. To me, ChatGPT chat history is a moat. It allows them to differentiate their product and competitors cannot copy it. If someone switches to a new AI service they will have to build their chat history from scratch.

By comparison a business deal that can be transferred to a new partner the second it expires is much more temporary.

> To me, ChatGPT chat history is a moat.

Every service has a chat history. You are talking about stickiness, which is (roughly) the same for every product.

ChatGPT wins a bit with stickiness because their AI personalizes itself to you over time, in a way that others don't quite do.

A moat is something unique. It can't really be a moat if all services offer it.

No business moat is permanent.

Disney only exists now to exploit the IP it has bought. They just want to join the circle of OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft et al making meaningless deals with each other.

Problem with that statement is some of these “foreign low-cost” countries are building great cars while American vehicles have a global reputation for being garbage.

The only American-made vehicle that sold in any volume outside the US was Tesla and that is already over.

That is the result of automakers trying to push everything into the HMI so they can eliminate physical controls.

They are doing to cars what electronics manufacturers did to TVs - taking an already-solved UX problem and destroying it with poorly made software in the name of progress.