The Suite Life: Why These Hollywood Executives Are Suddenly Hot Commodities

variety.com:

Discovery chief David Zaslav to see what he has planned once his company’s merger with WarnerMedia is consummated, and speculation is running rampant about who deep-pocketed streamers Apple and Netflix may be planning to hire.All of this jockeying is coming as the industry is experiencing a “once-in-a-generation seismic shift in the power structure of the business,” according to one former studio chief.

As major media companies have launched in-house streaming services, their hunger for buzzy shows and movies has become insatiable.

At the same time, the traditional ways of gauging success, such as ratings and box office, are fading in importance as Wall Street looks to subscriber growth as the ultimate barometer of a media giant’s relevance. “The stakes are high, the investment is huge, and the cultures are much different,” the former studio chief notes. “The tech people, they look like us and talk like us, but the gods to which they pray are different than the gods to which we pray.”And yet even as the metrics shift and the players change, the ways to build an audience still require many of the same skills that were honed in legacy studios and television companies.

Newcomers need veterans with connections in order to lure top talent to their service and they need executives well versed in the language of the greenlight committees of yore to find the right movies and series to make.