The Portal Becomes the Venue
Institutions move inside platforms. Production turns into infrastructure.
This is the last System Alert of 2025, which feels slightly unreal given how fast this year moved. Thank you for joining me while I’ve been building a way to track media tech and AI with a cultural lens, not just a product lens.
The goal has been simple. Stay close to what actually ships, follow where power quietly relocates, and name the new defaults before they harden.
Over the past year, I’ve come to think of that system as a Cultural OS. Not a company, not a platform, but the operating environment that decides how culture is made, routed, rewarded, and remembered.
This week’s stories all point to the same shift inside that OS. Institutions are moving into portals, and production is becoming infrastructure.
The Oscars move into YouTube
Source: The New York Times, December 17, 2025
Starting in 2029, the Academy Awards will stream exclusively on YouTube under a new deal with Google, ending ABC’s long run as the Oscars’ primary home. The agreement also expands the package beyond the ceremony into surrounding content and global access features like multilingual tracks and captions.
Why it matters
Hollywood has spent a decade fighting streaming, or at least treating it like the thing that cheapens movies, flattens windows, and breaks the old economics. That’s what makes this moment so revealing. The industry’s most tradition-bound legitimacy machine just chose a streaming portal as its primary home.
This is a portal migration, not a platform partnership. ABC was a venue. YouTube is an environment. An environment comes with routing, formats, identity, sharing mechanics, and feedback loops baked in. The Oscars are not just going “online.” They are becoming a first-class object inside the world’s largest video portal.
And YouTube isn’t just bigger, it’s more global by default. The deal is explicitly framed around worldwide reach, live access, and multi-language support, which means the Oscars can be something people actually experience in real time, everywhere, not something they mostly absorb secondhand the next morning through clips and headlines.
Two details make the strategy legible:
Year-round engagement becomes the product. The Academy and YouTube are explicitly packaging the Oscars as more than a single-night telecast, with plans for ongoing programming tied to other Academy events and surrounding coverage.
Cultural memory becomes infrastructure. The partnership includes Google support for digitizing the Academy’s massive collection and expanding access to its film history, making preservation and archives part of the distribution deal itself.
If you want the Cultural OS translation, it is this: the Oscars just changed portals, which means the OS around legitimacy, discovery, and relevance changes with it.
Disney turns creation into a licensed product layer
Source: Reuters, December 11, 2025
Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and licensing Disney characters for use in OpenAI’s Sora, with Sora and ChatGPT Images set to generate videos featuring licensed characters starting early next year. Reuters notes the agreement excludes any talent likenesses or voices, and quotes Bob Iger framing the partnership as an effort to extend Disney storytelling through generative AI while “respecting and protecting creators.”
Why it matters
This is production becoming a product, but in a distinctly Hollywood way: permissioned creation. Disney isn’t just experimenting with AI internally. It’s treating generative output as a consumer-facing surface that can be licensed, governed, and monetized.
That flips three things at once. IP becomes an input, not just an output. Characters stop being only the thing you watch and start behaving like building blocks inside an interface, with the deal terms defining what’s possible. Control moves upstream. Reuters is explicit about what’s excluded (no talent likenesses or voices), which is the point. This isn’t “anything goes.” It’s a bounded sandbox where rights and risk are designed into the product. And Hollywood’s relationship to streaming and AI keeps flipping. The industry spent years treating streaming as the threat to the old order, and now its most valuable IP is being positioned as licensed fuel for the next creation layer. The fight doesn’t end. It just moves from distribution to authorship: licensed versus unlicensed creation.
Five things that changed the media in 2025
Source: The New Yorker, December 16, 2025
Jay Caspian Kang’s year-end list is a valuable system check because it reads like a scan of the pressure gradients inside the Cultural OS: where trust is thinning, where formats are mutating, and where old routing assumptions stopped working.
Three points connect directly to the two stories above:
The routing layer fractured. X no longer functions as the default media square, which means attention no longer funnels through one shared discourse engine.
Trust is under active attack. The “AI scammer” story is less about one con and more about the coming ambiguity between human reporting and synthetic output. Once that line blurs, portals and brands become the trust proxy.
Economics keep collapsing underneath local news. Traffic declines are not just a business problem. They are a governance problem. When institutions weaken, portals become the venue by default, even when nobody votes for that outcome.
If you want a single sentence summary of Kang’s list in your framework: the old distribution subsidies are gone, the old routing square is gone, and the system is reorganizing around portals that can offer identity, engagement, and monetization as one bundle.
Closing note
A bundle is no longer “channels in a package.” A bundle is formats, routing, monetization, and memory inside a portal. That’s really the story of 2025. Institutions followed the audience into portals, production followed the money into systems, and the routing layer that used to glue media together, the old village square, has fractured into smaller rooms with different rules.
The Oscars moving to YouTube is the legitimacy signal. The ceremony isn’t just changing distribution, it’s relocating into an operating environment that’s global by default and engineered for continuous engagement. Disney licensing characters into Sora is the creation signal. IP isn’t just something you ship anymore, it’s something you expose as a governed input layer inside someone else’s interface. And Kang’s year-end scan is the baseline reality check: trust is thinning, local economics keep collapsing, and the old assumptions about where conversation “happens” don’t hold.
So where does that leave us in 2026? If you work in media, the priority is not to “embrace AI” or “win streaming.” Those are slogans. The priority is to decide which parts of the Cultural OS you actually want to own, and which parts you’re willing to rent.
Own the relationship or rent it. Own the archive or let it be indexed elsewhere. Own the production pipeline or let creation happen inside someone else’s box. Own the rules or inherit them. The portals are happy to do all of it for you and they’ll even call it partnership.
Architecture is destiny. If we don’t treat these moves as structural, we’ll keep acting surprised when the defaults start making decisions for us.
Brilliantly stated! - - - "Architecture is destiny. If we don’t treat these moves as structural, we’ll keep acting surprised when the defaults start making decisions for us."