What we call Hollywood is a 1917 industrial template the US inherited from Europe. The creator economy is a return to what came before.
New piece co-written with @SethHallen of Hallstone Ventures. Free to read.
enginesofchange.ai/p/the-clu…
Anthropic shipped its newest model twice this week.
For requests aimed at building competing models, it degrades its own output and tells you nothing.
It's protecting market position.
open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
Every Deep Cut in Engines of Change ends with a cocktail. Not as decoration, more like a pairing. The essay carries the argument and the drink carries the aftertaste. 20 drinks. 20 arguments. One small attempt to make media infrastructure more drinkable.
enginesofchange.store/produc…
"AI" went from a word that sells to a word that repels.
Tom Merritt on Future Frames: the capability keeps advancing, but the label is now a consumer trust liability. Watch for companies quietly pulling the word off products they're keeping.
open.substack.com/pub/future…
The synthetic production debate has been stuck on the wrong layer for three years.
The question is no longer who makes the asset cheaper. It's who makes the asset remember more.
Part I of The Control Layer: enginesofchange.ai/p/product…
"C2PA is not gonna argue if I say that my wall is pink."
— Olga Kornienko, COO of EZDRM
The closing piece in the Human Layer series is on what observability does, what it doesn't, and what default would look like. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
The asset has had a resolvable identifier for 15 years. The performer in it has not.
AI didn't create the identity problem. It made visible an asymmetry that's been running quietly in the industry's infrastructure since 2010.
open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
ALT “DTNS for Thursday May 7, 2026" in white text on two lines across the top, "Andy Beach tells us why streaming platforms should be more wary of slop fraud, plus Google’s new fitness tracker erodes the Fitbit brand more, and why Anthropic bought all of SpaceX’s data center capacity." in black text on three lines on a light grey box below date, "Tom Merritt, Huyen Tue Dao, and Andy Beach" in white text on one line below black text paragraph, photographs of Tom Merritt, Huyen Tue Dao, and Andy Beach centered in a row below names, the DTNS logo in the top left corner. All on a black rectangular background.
A VC firm just discovered its staff were burning $1,000/day per Claude account. Fewer than 10% of its portfolio companies track AI spend. Per-seat economics meet per-token reality.
open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
The next moon landing won't be a broadcast. It'll be a global streaming event with hundreds of millions of concurrents on a feed originating near the Moon.
What that actually demands of our industry, in a new Sidebar on Engines of Change... open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
A judge cuts AI extinction talk from the trial.
The FCC reviews Disney's licenses over a joke.
A $1B legal AI vendor gets named in a court filing.
Warner-Paramount shareholders vote yes anyway.
Four rooms. One pattern. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
NAB ate my week so I never promoted Ep 005 of Future Frames. Fixing that now!
@DarrenCross on why the creator economy has no middle class and why AI reinforces that, not fixes it.
Episode 005 - Power, Platforms, and the AI Floor open.substack.com/pub/future…
ALT “DTNS Wednesday April 22, 2026" in white text on two lines centered across the top, "Framework introduces the modular MacBook for Linux users, and at Google Cloud Next, Google splits its TPUs and unleashes more powerful workplace agents. Plus, did Anthropic’s Mythos escape containment?" in black text on three lines on a light grey box below date, "With Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, and Andy Beach" in white text on one line below black text, photographs of Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, and Andy Beach below names, the DTNS logo in the top left corner. All on a black rectangular background.
Two weeks ago Anthropic released its frontier model to ~40 critical infrastructure organizations.
Yesterday OpenAI launched its own into ChatGPT for hundreds of millions of consumers.
This week's System Alert:The End of the Beginning open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
This year marks 30 years since my first NAB. I wrote a short Sidebar ahead of NAB 2026 on why the show floor is usually a lagging indicator, and why the real signal tends to show up in the hallway, over dinner, and after hours.
open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
New Future Frames episode is live. Provenance is the trust layer media hasn't built yet. I talked with Renard Jenkins and Olga Korienko about what it actually takes to track and validate content through AI workflows.
open.substack.com/pub/future…
Most large media catalogs are not underutilized. They are structurally unreadable.
New Deep Cut: The Memory Economy. What changes when that gets solved — and who controls it. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
The Farrow investigation into Sam Altman is getting framed as a personality story.
That’s not what it is.
The Robber Baron Who Believes His Own Story enginesofchange.ai/p/the-rob…
Episode 3 of Future Frames is out! Huge thanks to Brian Brushwood and Jim Louderback for jumping on. Honestly, I could’ve just let them run. Half the job was figuring out when to interrupt.
Listen here: futureframes.media/p/episode…
Data that arrives after the decision window closes isn't an asset. It's an artifact.
Adam Husein wrote a sharp piece on what it actually means to be data-driven. Hint: it has nothing to do with how many dashboards your team built. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…