There is a tectonic shift underway across the media landscape this week. AT&T announced they would be spinning off WarnerMedia and merging it with Discovery. This new entity would form a pretty massive content platform to compete on the scale of industry titans like Disney and Netflix. But that’s not all! Just a couple days (hours?) later rumors leaked that Amazon was in talks to acquire MGM Studios for ~$9B.

What can this week’s news teach us about the competitive markets of content & commerce? A lot. All the way down to us microscopic managers.

Two commerce companies teaming up in WarnerMedia & Discovery? Ok, that makes sense. Bails out AT&T in the process for some questionable un-synergistic moves too which Ben Thompson @ Stratechery does a better job of explaining than we can ever do. But a commerce company in Amazon making a big bet on broadening their content offering? Very iiiinteresting..

Content, to the surprise of no one, is a fiercely competitive business in the market of eyeball seeking and screen gluing. As Reed Hastings of Netflix has famously said “we actually compete with sleep”. Amazon Prime Video is not quite realistically in the top #1 (Netflix) or #2 (Disney) streamers. Now with Discovery jumping into the mix you have to wonder what is their strategy exactly?

It could be about competition. Playing offense to force some defense.

Amazon knows content complements their commerce offering. More visibility in streaming helps them sell more books, ads, Alexas & Kindles. But more importantly competing in content makes it harder for the largest media players to enter the commerce arena, the home, or the cloud. Aha!

Competitive markets, after all, destroy profits as we have learned from Mr. Thiel in Zero to One. Controversial politics aside that guy knows competition! Competition is brutal. Yet competing to suck the profits out of a market so that you can promote your complementary more entrenched businesses is…potentially brilliant.

The learning really ends up being competition is bad UNLESS you don’t care because being in the arena builds your business portfolio’s strength anyway! Pretty cool when ya think about it.

Now for us littler people in various stages and levels of competition…what are you doing? Why are you competing? What is the brutal world of competition preventing you from doing that is actually original and differentiated? When you find yourself in the most competitive of situations with peers or across departments are you really focused on the right things? Or are you participating in miniature M&A that likely won’t work while your “adversaries” are playing a different kind of game that harms you to their benefit. Something to think about.

Everyone’s playing a game! From the highest levels to the ground floor. Understand the game you’re playing better so that you can compete in the right conference rooms. Or walk away. But win in the end either way!