Amazon’s content-hungry lion eats MGM

The wait was not as long as for the next Bond movie to hear last week’s reports about Amazon wanting to buy MGM were true.

Agreement has been reached and Jeff Bezos is now the man with the golden gun, with the Bond franchise studios bought for $8.45bn including debt.

This latest acquisition in the streaming wars pushes media dealmaking so far this year to its highest level since the turn of the century, with more than $240bn worth of transactions announced. It’s Amazon’s largest since the $13.7bn purchase of Whole Foods in 2017.

Our analysis suggests MGM has a rich library of award-winning movies, including classics such as The Usual Suspects, The Good the Bad and the Ugly and Silence of the Lambs, but its creative prowess as a film studio is widely considered to have peaked.

“It’s not the biggest studio in town,” said Thomas Hughes from film and TV rights platform Vuulr, and a former MGM executive. “Does it change the face of Hollywood because MGM is being bought? Not really. Does it change the face of Hollywood because it’s Amazon doing it? Maybe.”

With Warner Bros having been operating within AT&T, Fox under Disney, Universal within Comcast and Paramount inside ViacomCBS, there is not much left to mop up in Hollywood. Sony’s chief executive said on Wednesday its film and television studio is not up for sale and will remain as an independent. Kenichiro Yoshida said Sony Pictures was crucial to the group’s strategy to become a global provider of content across music, films, games and animation.

The Internet of (Six) Things

1. UK’s health service to share patient data
Privacy campaigners are outraged at plans by England’s NHS to scrape the medical histories of 55m patients, including sensitive information on mental and sexual health, criminal records and abuse, into a database it will share with third parties. The data pool will be available to academic and commercial third parties for research and planning purposes.

2. Facebook classified anti-competitive
The European Commission is set to open a formal probe into Facebook’s alleged anti-competitive practices in classified advertising, reports Javier Espinoza from Brussels. Up to now, Facebook has been the only US Big Tech company to have escaped such an investigation, which could come in days.

3. Uber to allow UK unionisation
Uber is set to strike a landmark agreement with one of the UK’s largest trade unions, the first time it has recognised a union of its ride-hailing drivers anywhere in the world. The GMB union will be able to represent tens of thousands of Uber drivers in the UK, giving them collective bargaining powers.

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4. US banks cautious on crypto
The chief executives of Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have expressed caution about dealing in cryptocurrencies in testimony released ahead of their scheduled appearances today before a Senate committee. In the UK, cryptocurrency app Luno has fallen foul of the UK’s advertising watchdog for posters displayed at bus and Underground stations seen as underplaying the risks of investing in digital assets like bitcoin.

5. WhatsApp sues Indian government
Facebook-owned WhatsApp is suing the Indian government over new regulations that it says could allow authorities to conduct mass surveillance. A suit filed in Delhi’s high court argues new “traceability” rules, which required tech companies to hand over details about senders of private messages, violate citizens’ rights to privacy. Andersen Cheng of Post-Quantum writes for the FT about the messaging app it unwittingly provided to Islamic State as a communications tool. This week’s #techAsia looks at Myanmar’s apparent banning of Facebook and Twitter.

6. Nissan in British battery factory talks
Nissan is in advanced talks with the UK government to build a battery gigafactory, under a post-Brexit plan to make Britain the company’s largest electric car production hub outside Japan. The new factory in Sunderland would support the production of 200,000 cars a year. The UK government is in talks with several other potential gigafactory investors, with Nissan’s project the most advanced, Peter Campbell reports.

Tech tools — ZTE Axon 30 Ultra

First launched in China last month, the ZTE Axon 30 Ultra 5G smartphone is available for pre-order globally ($749, £649) on Thursday and its distinctive feature is the four cameras on the back — three 64MP ones and an 8MP periscope. UHD 8K video shooting is possible and there are several filters and special visual effects available. GSM Arena likes the Hitchcock-inspired Dolly Zoom effect in particular.