Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Here’s a funny feature of NBC’s Olympic coverage: Everyone is the greatest athlete in the history of athletics. I don’t want to call out specific athletes. That’s not nice. But if you watched the introduction, featuring The Rock, you’d be forgiven for thinking that not only were these American athletes
Chatting with Kasey Moore of Whats-on-Netflix a few weeks back, I mentioned that I was thinking about redesigning the Entertainment Strategy Guy website. In my humble opinion, websites should update their look about every three years or so, so I’d been noodling on what it could look like. Kasey mentioned
I’m a sports fan. Usually, come July, this is a bummer. Because nothing’s on. It’s a barren wasteland with only some baseball to occupy my time. This year, though, what a wonderland of competition. The delayed NBA Finals filled the sports itch in early July and now I’m binging the
– Netflix only released four “datecdotes” for film for Q2, one of the lowest totals on record. – In TV, Netflix released 8 datecdotes, and they were generally lower than past quarters. – Luca has the most viewership, according to Nielsen, of any film through its first two weeks, with
When Netflix releases their quarterly datecdotes (Click here for my explainer on that term, my phrase for any Netflix data point about households watching 2+ minutes of a film in the first 28 days), they tend to come in two flavors. Like, for example, this tweet: Or this quote in a
If you pushed me, the most “fun” story this week would be the fact that streaming in 2021 finally had a better week than the same time in 2020. But I covered that in my streaming ratings report. Fortunately, when Netflix leaks that they may radically expand their business, that’s
– For the first time in 2021, weekly top ten viewership surpassed the same week’s viewership in 2020. – Manifest, the recently cancelled NBC series produced by Warner Bros., is a hit for Netflix and has the third biggest single week of viewership since 2021 started. But it does benefit from having
Last week gave me “gut thinking” whiplash. What started as a brilliant strategic move one day turned into a muddled mess by the next. Let’s explain why Comcast’s decision to split its feature film rights between Peacock and Prime Video is such a confusing move. (Sign up for my newsletter
Sometimes, in a midst of lots of disruption, we—the proverbial we being “society”, “business analysts” or just people on Twitter—forget that as much as things change, they mostly stay the same. That’s the lesson for today. Two lessons actually. While streaming ratings use new terminology, the business principles underlying them
One of the casualties of 2021 was my newsletter edition that featured links to my favorite stories, podcasts and newsletters every so often. Adding the “Streaming Ratings Report” every week was enough extra work that something had to go. Add that lots of other newsletters curate entertainment business news better,