A wise man once said in this world, nothing can be certain except death taxes and your boy

Johnny Bananas.

Welcome to the brand new Death Taxes and Bananas channel where we'll be recapping season

41 of the challenge every week with all your favorite cast members.

I'm going to dive deep into the drama, get every side of every story, and tell stories about behind the scenes on set antics.

So follow Death Taxes and Bananas on Spotify, where you can watch every episode or subscribe

to YouTube.com at Death Taxes Bananas on YouTube.

It is Friday, September 26th.

Amid all the disaster talk in Hollywood over the past few years, the question you hear

all over town is, who's buying?

Put another way, who's spending, who's investing?

Most importantly, what are they investing in?

After all, the film and television business is a sales business, convincing the people with the money and the ability to distribute to pony up for a creative product that, for the most part, can't be made without deep pockets, or at least not the most ambitious projects.

That's why when you pull back and look at Hollywood from 30,000 feet, it's all about the content spend.

And everything I've read recently shows that overall content spend among the major players has declined in the past couple of years, leading to the current content recession and some existential questions about the business.

But a new study from KPMG, the big four accounting firm, caught my eye.

They argue that annual content spend by the 12 major players, that's traditional media

companies like Disney and Comcast, but also streamers like Netflix and Amazon, that annual

spend now totals more than $210 billion. And that number has been growing at a 10% compound

rate since 2020, with only slight moderation recently. Some nuances there, of course. The number

includes sports rights, which of course has been getting more expensive, and it includes $32 billion

spent by YouTube, which for the most part doesn't pay for content up front, but splits ad revenue

...