Barry Diller is calling on the legacy Hollywood studios to end the dual writers and actors strikes, otherwise it’ll be “catastrophic” to the industry.
The media mogul, speaking on the podcast “On with Kara Swisher,” said the strikes would only strengthen streaming giant Netflix during a tumultuous time for legacy media.
“The strike does one thing, and one thing only, it strengthens Netflix and weakens the others,” said Diller, the chairman of IAC and Expedia, who once held top roles at Fox, Paramount and ABC Entertainment.
He also advised studios to cut Netflix and other streamers out of the negoations with the unions.
“They should certainly get out of the room with their deepest, fiercest and almost conclusive enemy, Netflix, and probably Apple and Amazon,” he said, noting their different business models. He said the legacy studios, actors and writers should be “natural allies” given their century of working together.
The remarks echo comments Diller made earlier this summer on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” in which he said the strikes could cause a domino effect that could produce “an absolute collapse of an entire industry.”
Writers Guild of America members have been striking for more than 100 days, while the actors’ union joined the picket lines in July, halting production of TV shows and movies.
In recent weeks, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has gone public with its latest contract proposal to the writers. It was quickly apparent talks between the studios and writers remain heated.
“There was a very recent attempt to get it on track with the WGA, which I gather collapsed in the last couple of days,” Diller said on Swisher’s podcast, which was recorded in late August. He added it “looks bleak” that the strike could end by September.
Representatives for SAG, WGA, AMPTP and Netflix didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Recent discussions with the writers union included a sit down with top media brass including Disney CEO Bob Iger, NBCUniversal film head Donna Langley, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
In recent earnings calls, Netflix and its media peers have said they hoped to come to a resolution quickly with the writers and actors.
Diller said for the “old majors” like Disney, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Paramount Global, if the strikes last through the end of the year the lack of fresh content by the spring or summer of 2024 on their streaming services will lead to subscriber cancellations and revenue losses.
“When they have to gear up to make more programming to get back subscribers, they won’t have the revenue base to be able to produce,” Diller told Swisher. “So that is kinda catastrophic.”
He goes on to call Netflix “an evil genius” that was able to dominate and leave legacy media scrambling to notch profits on their streaming businesses.
While making streaming a profitable business has been an ongoing focus for media companies, Diller said these companies should shift back to focusing on their broadcast and pay-TV networks. While cord-cutting of traditional pay-TV bundles continues to accelerate, the business still remains profitable.
Diller said legacy media should take some of its “shows and creativity and build our networks back up. It’s there for the take.”
Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC. NBCUniversal is a member of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
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Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.
Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.
The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.
“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.
In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.
“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.
A worker sorts packages on Amazon Prime Day in New York on July 8, 2025.
Klaus Galiano | Bloomberg | Getty Images
U.S. online sales jumped 9.9% year over year to $7.9 billion on Tuesday, the kickoff of Amazon‘s Prime Day megasale, according to Adobe Analytics.
At that level, it marks the “single biggest e-commerce day so far this year,” Adobe said. It also eclipsed total online spending during Thanksgiving last year, when sales on the holiday reached $6.1 billion.
Amazon’s Prime Day bargain blitz began on Tuesday and lasts through Friday. The event, first launched in 2015 as a way to hook new Prime members, has pushed other retailers to launch counterprogramming.
Home and outdoor goods showed signs of strong demand during the first day of Amazon’s discount event, said Kashif Zafar, CEO of Xnurta, an advertising platform that serves more than 20,000 online businesses.
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Other historically well-performing categories such as beauty and household essentials saw softer demand early on, but could see demand pick up as Prime Day continues, he added.
“Early Prime Day numbers might look soft compared to last year’s surge, but it’s too early to call the event a miss,” Zafar said in an email. “With four days instead of two, we’re seeing a different rhythm, consumers are spreading out their purchases.”
Adobe expects online sales to reach $23.8 billion across all retailers during the 96-hour event, a level that’s “equivalent to two Black Fridays.”
U.S. online shoppers spent $14.2 billion during the 48-hour Prime Day event last year, according to Adobe.
This year’s Prime Day is landing at an uncertain time for retailers and consumers as they grapple with the fallout of President Donald Trump‘s unpredictable tariff policies.
U.S. consumer confidence worsened in June after improving in May as Americans remained concerned about the tariffs’ effect on the economy and prices, according to the Conference Board.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said last month the company hasn’t seen prices “appreciably go up” on its site as a result of tariffs.
Some third-party sellers previously told CNBC they were considering raising or had already raised the price of some of their products manufactured in China as the cost of tariffs became burdensome.