Explaining the Business of Entertainment
A “Most Important” column on a Thursday? What’s going on with the Entertainment Strategy Guy’s usual Friday column? Well, an out of town wedding, which means I’ll be on the road tomorrow. So enjoy an early bite at the entertainment biz apple. Also, next week, with a birthday, Fourth of
Here’s a fun factoid about the news: JJ Abrams hasn’t actually closed his deal with Warner Media for $500 million. By the news coverage I read, I assumed he had. And by coverage, of course, I mean Twitter and Linked-In headlines. It’s only when you read Lesley Goldberg’s actual story
As you probably know by now, when I write a long article for another website, I inevitably have some leftover thoughts that I put up on my my own website. So first, head to Athletic Director U to read my framework for looking at revenue growth and then read my
When Athletic Director U asked me, “What do you think of college baseball?” I’ll be honest, I didn’t have an angle. Sure, it could grow, but how much? And compared to what? Then, I read an article about eSports. Apparently the NCAA–technically a consultancy hired by the NCAA–was exploring whether
This week, The Starters (an NBA talk show and wildly popular podcast) was cancelled by…well we don’t know who. The Washington Post identified a few potential suspects. It could have been Turner or NBA TV–for the usual ratings reasons–or it could have been their corporate overlord, AT&T, mandating cuts across
Today, is the “sanity check” of my Game of Thrones article guessing how much money it made. I’ve explained where the numbers came from, the high and low cases and all my math. But does this make sense? Can we double check my work? Sure. Again, this is in an
This week felt important for the news. Sure, we didn’t have any official announcements of new streaming services or any giant mergers, but between censorship, antitrust and trade wars, the world of politics is smashing (back) into the garden of media/tech. And the biggest government intervention was far away from
There’s a fun tidbit in this massive must-read article on Kotaku about eSports. Here’s the quote I love: A 2017 Morgan Stanley report leaked to Kotaku claimed that, in its first year, the Overwatch League could conceivably generate $720 million in revenue, about the same as World Wrestling Entertainment. By
When I worked at a studio, I found it funny that we referred to our development execs as the creatives. Not that they were creating the shows, but compared to finance or strategy folks, development execs were way more creative. They read scripts all day, took tons of pitches, provided