Unlike Apple TV, Apple’s streaming television and movie businesses isn’t a hobby. Apple’s latest hire, Kelly Costello, helps drive that point home. Variety reports she’s serving as business affairs executive reporting directly to Apple’s head of business affairs for worldwide video, Philip Matthys. She previously served as executive vice president of business and legal affairs for Broadway Video, and served stints at Viacom and NBC Universal Television, too. With each new hire Apple is showing it’s playing for keeps in the streaming entertainment market.

A court granted AT&T the right to acquire Time Warner, which makes sense because the Trump Administration’s blocking of that deal was political, rather than a true issue of antitrust. But when combined with the death of Net Neutrality, which ended Monday, Danny Crichton at TechCrunch had a sobering observation. In a piece arguing the merits of Alphabet and Netflix becoming ISPs (I’d throw Apple on that list), he noted that the world of video is effectively closed to startups. It’s a good read, and here’s a snippet:

One sad note though is how much the world of video is increasingly closed to startups. When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just beginning.