Digital Social Hour
The Rise & Fall of Cable TV – What’s Next for Media? | Larry Namer DSH #1224
Fri, 07 Mar 2025
🔥 Larry Namer on Building E! Entertainment, Hollywood’s Future & The AI Revolution 🚀 In this eye-opening episode, we sit down with Larry Namer, the co-founder of E! Entertainment Television, to discuss his journey in media, the future of Hollywood, and how AI is revolutionizing content creation. We dive into: ✅ How E! Entertainment was built with just $2.5M ✅ Why AI is changing Hollywood faster than ever ✅ The decline of traditional TV & the rise of digital platforms ✅ How social media & streaming are reshaping entertainment ✅ The truth about content creation & why storytelling still wins This episode is packed with insider knowledge, industry secrets, and expert predictions for the future of media! 📲 Follow Larry Namer & Learn More: 🔗 Website: Lhttps://www.ljnmedia.com/ 🔗 Facebook: Larry Namer 🔗 Amazon Book: Off Script: A Business & Life Memoir ⏱ CHAPTERS 📌 00:00 – How AI is Changing Hollywood for Writers & Creators 📌 03:15 – The Creation of E! Entertainment & Early Challenges 📌 07:30 – How Streaming Took Over TV & The Death of Cable 📌 12:10 – Social Media’s Influence on Entertainment & Film 📌 15:45 – The Rise of International Markets & Media Expansion 📌 20:20 – How AI is Disrupting Screenwriting & Film Production 📌 24:10 – The Future of Holograms & Virtual Entertainment 📌 28:40 – Why Hollywood is Losing Viewers to Digital Platforms 📌 32:15 – The Power of Short-Form Content & Why It’s Exploding 📌 35:00 – Larry’s Advice for Entrepreneurs in Media & Entertainment 🔥 Apply to Be on the Podcast & Business Inquiries: 🎙 APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application 📩 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected]
Chapter 1: How is AI changing opportunities for writers over 50 in Hollywood?
Writers over 50 in Hollywood don't get work. They're heavily discriminated against. Really? But I took 10 writers and trained them in how you prompt. So when the strikes finally got settled, everybody was like, now, okay, there are rules for how you employ AI related.
So all of a sudden, the writers over 50 were the only ones who really knew how to use all the AI tools and stuff, and they found themselves working more than ever.
Nice. Yeah, because AI can probably come up with some crazy scripts.
Yeah. At the end of the day, it's still storytelling. You have to be a storyteller. I mean, I don't care what platform you're producing for. You're telling a story. And these guys were fabulous. It's just they were, you know, Oscars and Emmys and Golden Globes and stuff. But yet once you hit 50 years old in Hollywood, they kind of put you out the pasture.
But now they're bringing them back because they know how to use the tools that are now available.
Yeah. All right, guys, got a legend here today. We got Larry and just dropped a new book, right?
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Chapter 2: What inspired Larry Namer to write his new book?
Yeah, I finally after people bugging me to write it for a long time, I finally did it. And it literally just came out on Amazon last week.
I love it. And what was the core messaging of the book?
Well, it's kind of unusual because people have been asking me to do the book, and I've always refused because I said I'm not ready to write a last chapter yet. But I've been a foodie literally all my life, so if I didn't do television and stuff, I would probably be a cook in a restaurant. So it's a combination of a bio and a cookbook.
Those are the recipes that inspired me in different phases of my life and then anecdotes of things that happened in my life then. But it's a good book for entrepreneurs. I love it. it's kind of you know i i was in school i was the boy least likely so oh yeah you got voted that oh god yeah i got voted that too most likely to fail and i would i was definitely that and were you really shy introverted
Um, yeah, I played sports. Um, but yeah, I mean, pretty much.
Yeah.
Very shy, introverted and stuff. Uh, the family were immigrants and, you know, they, they, they kind of kept a close rein on the kids and stuff. So just in growing up.
Which is ironic because you ended up making a living in the entertainment industry.
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Chapter 3: How was E! Entertainment created with minimal funding?
Yeah. And people ask, they say, was that something designed? And no, it wasn't. It was just I couldn't get a job in New York. So I ended up getting a temporary job in a cable company when nobody really knew what cable was. And.
um it was kind of odd because i was working under the streets of new york putting the wires together and um i just kind of grew up in the cable business and then uh i came out to la to build the first 61 channel cable system ever built and um uh the company that i worked for moved back to toronto and uh you know you're a brooklyn kid you're here you're in la everybody's going to
parties and premieres and all of this stuff so me and my friend alan came up with an idea for a tv network called the um you know the rest is history yeah reminds me of just timing right because like you didn't really have direction but you were just right place right time yeah well right place and right time and um it was kind of interesting because when alan and i started the company the going rate to start a tv network was somewhere around 100 million dollars holy crap um
Yeah, TV networks are expensive. And after three and a half years and nobody giving us any money, we realized that we might have to settle for less. So we actually found someone who was willing to put in $2.5 million. And people look at E! now and it's a monster. It's in 142 countries. But E! started with 11 employees and 31 interns.
Humble beginnings. You've seen the decline in television numbers, right?
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Chapter 4: Why is traditional TV declining and what role do digital platforms play?
Yeah, but not in viewing visual entertainment. I mean, I'm not one that says that you got to watch television, but to me it's all the same. It's storytelling on a screen. So if you want to watch my stuff on a TV set, great. And if you want to watch it on your iPhone, that's cool too.
Right. Yeah, that's a good point because people aren't not watching stuff. They're just transitioning to other platforms. Yeah.
I mean, for me, it's always been simple, and people used to hate when I say that. But you kind of can predict the fall of linear television. I mean, it's real simple. Do you want to watch what NBC wants you to watch when they want you to watch it? Or do you want to watch what you want to watch on the device you want to watch it? I mean, we all know the answer.
Other than sports and news, nothing has to be time anchored.
Yeah. Did streaming disrupt your industry a lot when Netflix started gaining some traction?
It disrupted, like, the broadcast folks. But for me as a producer, no. I mean, the demand for storytellers was great. And then I had international experience, a lot of it. I mean, like I say, he's in 142 countries. Right. We really focused on building out, you know, the international markets. And... So we found ourselves in incredible demand.
Yeah, the international markets, I just had Chef Rush on. He's like a big chef. I don't know if you've heard of him.
I've heard of his name, yeah.
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Chapter 5: How are international markets reshaping the media landscape?
Yeah, but he crushes it in Korea. Like he's got the top shows there. So it's just fascinating that a lot of people focus on U.S. markets, but you can really dominate in other countries.
Yeah, and it's one of the reasons why E! grew as big as it did and as quickly as it did was when I first got involved in the business and if I would do a business plan, And you get the financials, I'd rate them 95% U.S. and 5% other. I mean, because that's kind of where it was then. 95% of all the revenue from media was coming out of the U.S. Now, if I do a business plan, it's 30% U.S. Oh, wow.
And then there's China and then there's Russia and then there's Brazil. Literally all the countries have names now because what's really happened is technology has changed the business so much. It used to be you used to have to go to Hollywood to make visual entertainment because you needed big sound stages and equipment was really expensive.
Now I could go to Nigeria tomorrow with my iPhone and make a movie. So you really began to find visual entertainment hasn't declined. But for the ability for it to be local to the communities that it appears to is really bigger than ever, actually.
No, it is. I mean, Beast Games just broke record numbers.
Yeah.
Highest cash prize giveaway and highest viewership, I believe.
Yeah. And technology changes. I mean, we've been great proponents of AI from the very beginning of... I use literally AI all the time. Really? Oh, yeah. Since even before GBT. No way. And stuff. Of course, it saves you so much time. I mean, we all are here on this planet with a limited amount of time. So the most valuable asset thing we have is time. And I don't like to waste mine.
If somebody would ask me to do a... Kind of a summary of a new TV series. It used to take me five days to do the research, write it up, whatever. Now, I mean, I use GBT-4 a lot. Yeah. Takes me 30 seconds.
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Chapter 6: What are the future trends in media, including AI and holograms?
Yeah. What are the next trends you're seeing coming up out of Hollywood? Do you think the live streaming thing is going to last?
Yeah, I think live streaming is good. I think, you know, the international markets still have a lot of room to grow. I mean, everything, you know, Netflix is now doing local stuff all over the world and showing that the economics works and now seeing the other guys follow. I'm a...
a big believer in AI being able to bring the prices down so that more talented people can get involved because the entry points are much cheaper to get in. I'm also a big fan of holograms. Using holograms, maybe not so much for entertainment, although there's some great applications in entertainment, but I think it's a huge opportunity for education.
to be able to take the best teacher of whatever subject in the world and beam them all over the world and combine it with AI so they can speak any language and kind of levels the field of playing of education all over.
Yeah, that's cool. I didn't even think about it that way. I've heard about potentially AI actors in the future. Have you seen that?
Yeah. Yeah. People talk about AI being new and so we've been using this kind of stuff for years, maybe not calling it generative AI, but, you know, backgrounds and stuff. I mean, we've been using digital technology for a long time. So for me, it's not really a big change.
You know, the problem that everybody goes through, they think that, you know, you're going to take people's likeness and put them in other movies and stuff. And that's not going to happen because there's a body of law that prevents it from happening.
Right.
And, you know, just like in anything, if there are consequences for doing bad things... People tend not to do it. And then there's a way to fix it if somebody does do it. So you can't shoot a movie with Tom Cruise and then put him in a porn movie next. I mean, there's laws and contracts and stuff. There's a body of work there that protects that kind of stuff.
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Chapter 7: How does storytelling adapt to changing human attention spans?
However people want to consume it, I don't care. It doesn't make a difference to me.
What made you want to focus on China? That's an interesting approach.
I started doing a lot of stuff in Russia. And for me, I was cracking up going, yeah, I'm in Russia doing TV, which is weird. But I ended up starting a... a concert series that we raised money for the Children's Hospital in the orphanage in St. Petersburg. And I would work with the vice mayor of St. Petersburg on putting these concerts together. And the vice mayor is a guy named Vladimir Putin.
And... So when Putin kind of went up the ladder and ended up in the Kremlin, he asked me to work with his minister of communications to rewrite regulatory policy for media, saying Western marketers are going to come in here and they're going to want stuff that looks a little bit familiar. So I worked with the Russians on that.
And some years later, the Chinese realized that they needed to do media reform too. They liked the Russian model. They went to the Russians. The Russians sent them to me. So I started helping them with media reform. Then they asked me to work with young TV executives, help put quotes around this, teaching them the process of creativity for profit.
Because when you worked in the 100% communist system, if you knew the right guy in the party, you just did whatever you want. Right. So I started doing stuff there. And we have a pretty robust company there in China now. Right. We do TV, film, internet content. We do a lot of immersive stuff in China, which is great because we get to try stuff in China that we then can apply to US markets.
Like we own in China, we've been doing, excuse me, immersive Van Gogh and Klimt and 100 years of Disney animation.
That's cool. Yeah, I think that could be the future. Immersive content like virtual reality.
Yeah. It started in this country. It really started, took off with Van Gogh and stuff, which was so... It's only four years ago, but it's so outdated. Yeah. The technology is shot by it. Now when you combine it with... With live experiences with AI, it's gotten real sophisticated. We just actually bought with China. We're doing Shrek the musical now. And so we do the Harlem Globetrotters there.
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Chapter 8: What impact does Larry Namer see from immersive content and international collaborations?
That's impressive. Yeah, it's interesting to see what trends stick and what don't. I remember when 3D came out, people were excited. That kind of flopped. Same with 4D, right?
Well, people get enamored with technology and they overdo it. There's a place for that sometimes. But, you know, for the most part, it really falls back to storytelling. Is the story going to hold people's interest over time? You could dazzle them with special effects to a degree, but it wears off.
You still need good content at the end of the day. Yeah. That's why Squid Game just crushes it, man.
I love Squid Game.
The storytelling is, like, I don't even know what's going to happen next season.
No, Squid Game is one of my favorites and stuff. You just look at it. I mean, some of the stuff that's popped up there, yeah, I loved Wednesday.
That's a good one, too.
Yeah. There's just so much good stuff out there.
Who's your favorite storyteller, director of all time?
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