Welcome to my first “weekly news round up”!
This isn’t a comprehensive list of every story that premiered this week or last week or whenever it came out. (I may have just found it and wanted to share.) You have Twitter and access to Variety/Hollywood Reporter/Deadline so you don’t need me for that. (Or try out MediaREDEF’s feed.) They do it better than I can, so I won’t compete.
My goal, instead, is to provide a bit of commentary on the news. Like calling out the news that might be slightly misleading or over-exaggerated in its importance. Just because something gets the most clicks doesn’t mean it will have the biggest impact in the future.
The Most Important Story of the Week – AT&T and Time Warner deal
I’ve been writing “test updates” for the last few weeks to see how long these would take to put together. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t over-extending myself by committing to one per week. I bring this up because I was tempted to refer to a now unwritten update, and I realized I needed to explain myself.
My goal each week is to call out the most important news story. Not the biggest. Not the flashiest. The one with the longest term impact on the business we call entertainment. The other sections of this update will rotate, but I’m going to try to call this out each week. The story I think will have the biggest impact on the future of entertainment.
The success or failure of the AT&T and Time-Warner merger is clearly the biggest news story of the week, and only dwarfed by Disney and Fox acquisition as the most important story of the last year or so. The ramifications of further media consolidation will force every other player to consider how they react, and will likely spur further mergers.
Also, regulatory context is always important, especially in media and entertainment. Trump’s regulatory environment is, frankly, unprecedented in American history. I don’t like consolidation in most industries because I believe it hurts consumers. This is ostensibly why the DoJ is pursuing the anti-trust lawsuit in the first place as they wrote in their final post-trial brief. If that were the whole reason, I’d be really excited because it would mean the next step is breaking up Comcast-NBCUniversal and forcing other content makers to divest their distribution arms. (I’ll have a post on that in the future.)
But Trump’s Department of Justice isn’t pursuing action against AT&T for that reason; it’s likely pursuing it because Trump hates CNN, which is owned by Time-Warner. They said mean things about him in the election and he calls them fake news. That’s why Trump is okay with the Disney-Fox acquisition, because he likes Ruper Murdoch and Bob Iger hasn’t gotten on his bad side. Again, unprecedented.
(Notice, the Michael Cohen and AT&T payment/consulting story isn’t important in an entertainment and media sense, but it is salacious.)
Fun idea
I’ve said before I’m a sucker for frameworks. Well I looked, and I haven’t said that before. Well I’m a sucker for frameworks. (A professor once said this about me; he was so right.)
So when I see an HBR Ideacast with a framework for launching a start-up, man, I’m probably going to recommend that to my audience. And here I am doing just that. Take a listen to “Choosing a Strategy for Your Startup” by Sarah Green Carmichael interviewing Joshua Gans.
I’ve always thought that entrepreneurship is overrated from the standpoint that most companies should be constantly thinking about entering new lines of business. All companies should launch news businesses or business units. Thus, the lessons from this podcast apply just as much to people in big companies as small ones.
Long Read of the Week
One final caveat, I recommend long reads, even if I disagree with the ultimate point. My favorite type of articles are ones that inspire ideas. Sometimes that’s really good articles that I can apply elsewhere (see the podcast above); sometimes that’s articles that make me so upset, I have to write a rebuttal.
The article I’m recommending this week falls somewhere in the middle, “The Revenue Stream Revolution in Entertainment and Media” by PwC’s strategy+business. Let’s start with the negative. In the title. “Revolution”. France in 1789 was a revolution. Russia in 1917 was a revolution. (America is 1777? Depends who you ask.) New revenue streams are a change, they aren’t a revolution.
There are three ways to make money in entertainment: sell ads, sell subscriptions, or sell product. I call these three–and I didn’t come up with this, I learned this in class–advertising, subscriptions or transactions.
And a quick look at the “revolution” is really just different forms of those three things. “Platform” is basically owning the distribution channel…much like every studio already owns TV networks. (Subscriptions.) So yes, the platform is changing, but it’s not a new business model. Or take “the Omni-brand” which recommends moving into different revenue streams for successful IP. I’d say, “What are you, Walt Disney in 1930?” (Transactions, advertising and subscriptions.)
My other criticism is the use of qualitative descriptions that could be quantified but aren’t. Take these sentences from the opening:
“The competition for user engagement and spending has never been more brutal. All these developments have significantly disrupted the flow of E&M revenues. Gone are the days when TV networks, film studios, or companies of any kind could thrive on one, two, or even three reliable revenue sources. Today, profitable growth increasingly depends on having five, six, or even more revenue streams.”
I think I could take each one of those sentences and interrogate it with data. Now I don’t have it all, but I’m sure PwC does. So are entertainment revenues being disrupted? Does that mean they are down year over year? If so, by how much? Competition for spending has never been more brutal? How do I quantify that? Compared to what time frame?
It’s not that the sentences are wrong, just that I don’t see any proof. Otherwise, it could be conventional wisdom that may not be true. If it isn’t true, and you’re making decisions off of it, you might be misled.
Final point, this is a good article and I like trying to define new business models. The idea I had is to take their framework and try to pin additional companies into their buckets. Not just using successful businesses, but all businesses.
