Meanwhile, whenever I talk to music people or book people, very quickly the conversation becomes a music industry conversation or a book industry conversation. What matters for music are artists and touring and labels and so on, and what matters for books are writers and publishers and rights and Amazon’s bargaining power in books and so on. These aren’t tech conversations.

Tech needed content to make their devices viable, but having got the content (by any means necessary), and with it of course completely resetting the dynamics of the industry, tech outgrew music and books and moved on to bigger opportunities.

All of this of course takes us to TV, the industry that’s next on the tech industry’s content journey. Just as new technology unlocked massive change in music and (rather less so) in books, it is now about to break apart the bundled, linear channel model of the TV industry (this is especially the case in the USA, which has a hugely over-served pay TV market). As this happens, there are all sorts of questions that follow on: what happens to channels that might be able to make more going direct to consumer (HBO, perhaps); what happens to channels that might benefit from being in a bundle and lose from having to go direct (ESPN, perhaps), where the syndication model goes, and so on, and so on.

Just as for music or books, though, these are all fundamentally TV industry questions. What viewing distribution, what rights structure, what exploitation chain, what relationship between creatives, financiers, aggregators and distributors - these are all southern California questions, not northern California questions. So, what are the northern California questions, and will this end up being any more strategic than books or music?

Amazon and Netflix have entered TV content creation and ownership in ways and on a scale that no-one from tech ever did for music or books. Amazon did try to get into book publishing and has a significant self-publishing arm, but it had little success recruiting existing mainstream authors; neither Apple nor Spotify created a record label.

Netflix, of course, is a TV company, in the context of this conversation - it isn’t using content for leverage for some other platform (Spotify is the same, without the commissioning). But Amazon clearly is using content for platform leverage - as something else to speed up the Prime flywheel. Prime has become a third pillar to Amazon’s business, next to logistics and the ecommerce platform, and Amazon is always looking for ways to add more perceived value to it, preferably with no marginal cost - TV content that it owns outright is exactly that.

You don't close your Facebook account - you just go there less. You might stop paying for the Youtube TV service, but that won’t cut off your access to any other part of Google - nor would anyone want it to - the purpose of these businesses is reach. Nor, really, will you fundamentally change your search behaviour if Google discovers the next Game of Thrones. That is, cancel Prime and you'd lose Amazon, but what do Google & FB have to cancel? Without some platform decision to lock you into, content is marketing, and revenue, but not a lever.

Apple has always preferred a very asset-light approach to things that are outside its core skills. It didn’t create a record label, or an MVNO, and it didn’t create a credit card for Apple Pay - it works with partners on the existing rails as much as possible (even the upcoming Apple Pay P2P service uses a partner bank).

Part of ‘content is king’ was the idea that (at least in theory) content companies can withhold access to their libraries entirely, and in the past one might have presumed that that meant they had the power to kill any new service at birth. In reality, rights-holders have always had too strong a need for short-term revenue to forgo broad distribution, and few of them individually had a strong enough brand to extract a fee that was high enough to justify exclusivity. They always have to take the cheques - individually to meet their bonus targets, and collectively to meet their earnings estimates.

This is a multi-sided market place with too many players on both sides for anyone to exert dominance: Apple dominated purchased music and Amazon dominates ebooks (thanks to the DoJ), but there is no such dominance on the buy or sell side for TV, for now.

The reason Apple TV, Chromecast, FireTV and everything else feel so anti-climactic is that getting onto the TV was a red herring - the device is the phone and the network is the internet. The smartphone is the sun and everything else orbits it. Internet advertising will be bigger than TV advertising this year, and Apple’s revenue is larger than the entire global pay TV industry. This is also why tech companies are even thinking about commissioning their own premium shows today - they are now so big that the budgets involved in buying or creating TV look a lot less daunting than they once did.

All an “Uncharted” movie had to accomplish — all that it possibly could accomplish — was to capture the glint and derring-do that helped the series port the spirit of Indiana Jones into the modern world. And while it’s true that the best moments of Ruben Fleischer’s thoroughly mediocre (if not unpleasant) adaptation manage to achieve that goal for three or four entire seconds at a time, this generic multiplex adventure falls so far short of its source material because it fails in the areas where history says it should have been able to exceed it. The areas where movies have traditionally had the upper hand over video games: Characters. Personality. Humor. Humanity! You know, the things that films get for free, and video games have to create through witchcraft. The same things that someone up the ladder decided to leave behind when they took a solid-gold brand like “Uncharted” and turned it into an IMAX-sized chunk of cubic zirconia, resulting in a movie that isn’t just less playable than the game on which it’s based, but less watchable too.

“It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life,” said the actress Riley Keough, while her co-star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley added, “You could have made another movie on the making of it.” As for Hardy? “It left me irrevocably changed,” he said.

COLIN GIBSON (production designer) I was in Namibia in 2003 when I got the call to stop spending money. I don’t know whether [the studio] decided to reroute their money back to the Iraq war, or if it was the email I got from Mel Gibson’s wife asking me how many Muslims there may or may not be in Namibia and, therefore, how interested she may or may not be in the whole family coming to visit.

MILLER I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.

KRAVITZ When they cast me, I was brought to a room that I wasn’t allowed to leave, and I sat there and read the script. It was one of the strangest scripts I’d ever seen, because it was like a really long comic book. JOHN SEALE (cinematographer) I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, so I gave up. I thought, “They’ve been in preproduction for 10 years, let’s just go make it.”

KRAVITZ We would do exercises like writing letters to our captor, really interesting stuff that created deep empathy. I’m glad we had that, because it was such a crazy experience — so long and chaotic — that it would be easy to forget what we were doing if we didn’t have this really great foundation that we could return to. KEOUGH I thought it was amazing that George cared so much. It could have just been like, “This is a big Hollywood movie, now put on your bathing suits and get outside.”

THERON The biggest thing that was driving that entire production was fear. I was incredibly scared, because I’d never done anything like it. I think the hardest thing between me and George is that he had the movie in his head and I was so desperate to understand it. SIXEL It was very difficult for the actors, because there’s no master shot, no blocked-out scenes. Their performances were made of these tiny little moments.

HUNTINGTON-WHITELEY There was a lot of tension, and a lot of different personalities and clashes at times. It was definitely interesting to sit in a truck for four months with Tom and Charlize, who have completely different approaches to their craft. HARDY Because of how much detail we were having to process and how little control one had in each new situation, and how fast the takes were — tiny snippets of story moments were needed to make the final cut work — we moved fast, and it was at times overwhelming. One had to trust that the bigger picture was being held together

THERON In retrospect, I didn’t have enough empathy to really, truly understand what he must have felt like to step into Mel Gibson’s shoes. That is frightening! And I think because of my own fear, we were putting up walls to protect ourselves instead of saying to each other, “This is scary for you, and it’s scary for me, too. Let’s be nice to each other.” In a weird way, we were functioning like our characters: Everything was about survival. HARDY I would agree. I think in hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced, partner in me. That’s something that can’t be faked. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.

KRAVITZ We were behind schedule, and we heard the studio was freaking out about how we were over budget. SEALE The president of Warner Bros. flew to Namibia and had a gold-plated fit. MILLER Jeff was in a bake-off with Kevin Tsujihara about who was going to head the studio, and he had to assert himself to show his superiors that he was in command and a strong executive. I knew what he was going through, but it wasn’t going to do anybody any good at all. [Robinov could not be reached for comment.] MITCHELL He said, “The camera will stop on Dec. 8, no matter what you’ve got, and that’s the end of it.” We hadn’t shot any of the scenes in the Citadel yet, where the opening and closing book ends of the film are set, and we had to go into postproduction without them. It was almost incomprehensible.

SIXEL When we actually finished the film and it was a success, that was the best year we ever had. We’d repeat the stories of making the film to each other over and over again: How did we get to the other side? We still kind of marvel at it.

MILLER Not for a moment did we think “Fury Road” would be anything like an Oscar movie. SIXEL Half the time, I thought I was going to get fired off the film, and then I win an Oscar! How about that? We were just disappointed that George didn’t win, but basically, they were all his Oscars in a way.

MILLER When the ideas that you start off with are then comprehended by an audience at large out there, that’s ultimately what redeems the process for you. The Swahili storytellers have this quote: “The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault, because I am the storyteller. But if it was good, it belongs to everybody.” And that feeling of the story belonging to everybody is really the reward