A quick glance at Hollywood balance sheets, or Nielsen’s monthly Gauge report, underscores just how challenging the current moment facing Hollywood is.

On the Gauge, YouTube and Netflix dominate, with seemingly every other streaming service fighting for scraps, perhaps resigned to an ever-so-slight increase in viewership during a good month. In their earnings reports, YouTube and Netflix are seeing their revenue and cashflow accelerate by double digits (YouTube ad revenue alone closed in on nearly $10 billion last quarter), while most legacy media companies were either flat, down slightly, or perhaps saw single digit growth if they had a good quarter.

Consider Paramount Global. Last week it reported that it had managed to grow revenue year over year … by 1 percent. A challenging market indeed.

Since that earnings report, Paramount now finds itself in new hands: David Ellison, the Skydance founder and son of tech mogul Larry Ellison, and Gerry Cardinale, whose RedBird Capital helped finance the deal.

Speaking to reporters Thursday morning in Paramount’s New York headquarters, it was clear that Ellison, Cardinale and Paramount’s new leadership believe that the success YouTube and Netflix are seeing as traditional media flounders is less about content, and more product.

“Unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t compete,” Ellison said bluntly. “And that has been one of the big problems that’s been facing legacy media, is they don’t actually understand that skill set and how critical that is, and that it is actually a combination of great content working with tech product hand in hand, that is how you actually get this business growing and scaling again, and you need both.”

“The most important thing a modern media company today needs to do is stop keeping its head in the sand,” Cardinale added. “The world’s not going to come to you, you better go out and grab it.”

There are signs that at least some in traditional media are aware of the problem. Disney CEO Bob Iger, for example, has made no secret of his admiration for Netflix’s technical prowess, telling investors on earnings calls that he was focused on building out Disney’s product side of the business.

But Ellison and his team think they can do one better, though the specifics of that plan remain tantalizingly out of reach.

“The way he’s approaching this will be the pace car for how these kind of assets need to be run,” Cardinale said of the plan. “This is not a nice to have, this is a need to have moment in Hollywood. You have a balkanized situation between technology and content, between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and the opportunity to actually start to blend that, that’s what needs to happen.”

He went on to shade the late Sumner Redstone, whose motto “content is king” was memorialized by his daughter Shari Redstone in her last earnings call as the owner of Paramount. As many media executives will grudgingly admit, despite the talk of content being king, the last few decades have been about distribution being king, with pay-TV transforming the entire media business. Cardinale believes that technology can shift that balance of power back to creatives.

“Everyone talks about content being king, I would tell you, doing this for 35 years, we’re just now at the point where content has a chance to be king,” Cardinale said.

That starts with a philosophy that embraces change. “We’re not going to be afraid of technology, we’re going to embrace it,” Ellison says, but it is also an acknowledgement of the cold hard reality of modern media. Or as Jeff Shell, Paramount’s new president explained: “We all believe that you can’t cut your way to growth in this business. You have to invest.”

Where that investment flows will be the key thing to watch as Ellison and his team roll out their plan over the coming months. Streaming is a big part of it, and so is gaming, though the executives also said that some “block and tackle” things need to be addressed first, like merging the company’s streaming services onto a single tech stack.

“There is a lot of plumbing,” Shell adds, noting that it may not be as sexy as movies or TV shows, but is in many ways more important to the future of the business.

Ellison was coy about his plans for Paramount+, but suggested that the company would be open to dealmaking.

“When you think about how streaming applications evolve over the next year, they’re not going to look identical to what they do today. We’re going to always look to create long term value in the future, and want to be on the forefront of that. We will be opportunistic,” he said. “So it is critical for the success of the business to be able to scale Paramount+ into a truly direct, global scale streaming product. What I would say is we’re open for business to explore everything.”

And he seemed excited about the prospects of artificial intelligence to turbocharge production while lowering costs.

“I don’t think AI is a replacement for creativity. It’s actually quite the opposite,” Ellison says. “The thing that has been really problematic from my perspective in media, is people thinking that technology is something to be feared. It’s not. The artists and the filmmakers that we work with are first, second, third, fourth, fifth on our priority list, we are a storytelling company first.”

And Cardinale, the veteran investor behind Artists Equity and other media and entertainment ventures, believes that Ellison has unlocked the vision necessary to actually execute on that.

“The thing that was so interesting to me was he is skating where the puck’s going on technological sophistication and the application of that for monetizing content in the new world,” Cardinale said. “News flash, from my standpoint, I don’t think the Silicon Valley guys are the guys that should own original content production, I think it’s the guys that have been around for 113 years. Just don’t buy something and sit there and think it’s going to take care of itself. You gotta re-underwrite it. You gotta break it apart. You gotta go innovate it.”

Ellison, for his part, appears prepared to break Paramount apart in order to put it all together again.

“We’re putting our money where our mouth is,” Ellison said. “We’re not focused on where are we in three months. We’re focused where we are in three to five years, and we’re long term in that horizon, because if you think short term right now, it’s not going to be a great result.