The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies (studios) made stuff (TV shows and movies) and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers.

Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it’s making its own stuff, too, and it’s selling it directly to consumers. That’s one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. Disney, for example, bought much of 21st Century Fox — though much of the early success of its Disney+ streaming service looks like it’s a result of earlier purchases of Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar. Meanwhile, distributors like AT&T, which bought Time Warner, and Verizon, which bought AOL and Yahoo, thought they wanted to become media companies — and have now done an about-face and are bailing out of those acquisitions.

Giant tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple that used […]