Latest.
Fifty Years in 50 Minutes.
The Good, The Bad, and The Stupid.
UCLA Entertainment Symposium June 18, 2026.
Tom Wolzien was asked to open the 50th anniversary symposium of the Entertainment Bar at UCLA for 700 Hollywood attorneys. Click the pdf below for his look at a half century of the media industry including 50-year revenue models and vignettes of ten major developments during the period and back stories.
THE GOOD
-- Cable Modems & Broadband Streaming
-- Ted Turner and His Superstation
-- Google Gets YouTube
-- Rupert Murdoch Comes to America
THE BAD
-- Regulations & The Death of Newspapers
-- Piracy, Death and Resurection of Recorded Music
-- The Fight over DVDs and Divx
-- Rough Road to the iPad
-- 25 Years of FinSyn
THE STUPID
-- The Disney Sublicense That Got Netflix Started in Streaming
Adobe Acrobat document [1.7 MB]
Boom & Board.
Newsweek Opinion
Demographic Reality: 85+ seniors will increase radically over next decade as baby boom ages; dementia patients will jump by millions. Lack of nursing facilities outside hospitals means seniors in hospitals will have no where to go, backing up system to put everyone going to an emergency room at risk of being "boarded" in the ER hallway until beds open up.
Speech & Presentation Archive
<More than 20,000 pages of Wolzien's research from his time as the Senior Media Analyst at the Wall Street firm of Sanford C. Bernstein (Alliance/Bernstein) is now housed in the archives of The Cable Center on the campus of the University of Denver. His work there spans the period from 1991 to 2005 including the introduction of cable broadband and telephony, digitization of media, and the first work on streaming video.
Following is a sampling of public speeches and presentations subsequent to Bernstein.
Adapted text of opening video, 2023 Entertainment Bar Symposium, UCLA Law Ziffren Institute, first streamed May 31, 2023. Industry status and studies including:
--52% of domestic box was from the top ten movies, all sequels or franchise films.
--radical downturn in Q1 SVOD subscriptions corresponded in 28% reduction in original seasons aired in Q1 from Q4 ‘22, raising question of whether into vicious cycle of austerity, original reduction, churn, and subscriber reductions… and so on.
--five percentage point FED rate hike across $150b debt (as comes due) of major players could total $7.5b additional annual interest payments, translating to job risk of 50k jobs @$150k all in per employee.
--divergence of best picture and box office over last 20 years in 40 year study and relationship
2023 Wolzien UCLA Ent Bar Web Pix Versio[...]
Adobe Acrobat document [5.7 MB]
Trained to 2021, the ChatGPT knows HBO's Succession, but doesn't know where Logan Roy died, so perfect chance to test how many iterations it would take to surface the bathroom in Roy's private plane. Short answer is that it couldn’t, and then, even worse, ChatGPT claimed credit for HBO's bathroom idea after I suggested it 15 iterations in.
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ChatGPT and the Death of Logan Roy.pdf
Adobe Acrobat document [93.1 KB]
Having devalued content to get subscribers, marketing and price-base from a return to wide theatrical release is now essential if SVOD companies (Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Paramount Plus, Disney Plus) expect to increase price. Text of opening video presentation for 2022 Entertainment Bar Symposium, Ziffren Institute, UCLA, including industry status report. Transmitted June 8, 2021.
Wolzien EntBar 2022 Text Distribution.pd[...]
Adobe Acrobat document [2.5 MB]
Wolzien 2021 UCLA Ent Bar Video Text Pri[...]
Adobe Acrobat document [5.5 MB]
Wolzien opening presentation for 2020 Entertainment Bar Symposium at UCLA Ziffren Center.
2020 ENT BAR WOLZIEN WEB.pdf
Adobe Acrobat document [2.2 MB]
Wolzien 2019 UCLA Ent Bar Web.pdf
Adobe Acrobat document [2.1 MB]
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