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Kilar said he saw new opportunities at the
intersection of storytelling and technology although he declined
to discuss his next pursuit.
The veteran tech executive said he had no plans to retire after
announcing his departure from AT&T Inc unit WarnerMedia ahead of
its merger with Discovery Inc in a deal expected to close this
month.
Kilar's career has straddled Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and
he sees blockchain, the digital ledgers that keep track of
transactions across computer networks, as transforming the
entertainment business, especially as the process of acquiring
unique digital collectibles such as Non Fungible Tokens becomes
simpler.
"I think that's going to be a potential wave that's going to be
coming to Hollywood, in the same way that the DVD wave came to
Hollywood in the '90s," Kilar told Reuters in an interview after
he announced his departure to staff on Tuesday.
"Obviously, that changed the economic fortunes of a lot of these
companies, WarnerMedia included."
The blockchain may also open up new forms of financing, Kilar
said.
STREAMING WAR
Kilar has a long track record of pushing technology and change
in entertainment.
The former Amazon.com executive was recruited to lead Hulu,
because he did not rely on a set of assumptions about the way
television should work, according to executives who were
involved in the creation of Hulu.
Within two months of Hulu's launch in March 2008, the site, once
dubbed by critics in the blogosphere as ClownCo, surged in
popularity.
Kilar left Hulu in 2013, following disagreements with the
company's owners, the former News Corp, NBCUniversal and the
Walt Disney Co, which had pushed for more advertising and an end
to the free version of the service.
Kilar launched his own subscription video service for social
media content, Vessel, which was subsequently sold in 2016 to
Verizon, and four years later he joined WarnerMedia, just as the
COVID-19 pandemic was spreading.
That experience led him to changes which threaten to reshape
Hollywood. Faced with closed movie theaters and surging
competition online, Kilar shattered the traditional release
"windows" for films, which have always brought movies into homes
after lengthy showings in theaters.
Kilar premiered new films in theaters and on the HBO Max
streaming service on the same day, during the pandemic. The
experiment began with the premiere of "Wonder Woman 1984" on
Christmas Day 2020, and continued through 2021.
The move provided a steady flow of new entertainment to the
service at a time when the pandemic had disrupted production
schedules throughout the industry. It also helped the fledgling
HBO Max, and the HBO cable TV network, to add 73.8 million
subscribers.
“History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that
challenge established ways," to their detriment, Kilar wrote in
a 2011 blog post.
(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in New York; editing by Peter
Henderson and Stephen Coates)
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