Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Sometimes you can immediately recognize certain strategic moves as game changing. The big, obviously huge moves, like AT&T buying Time-Warner. Like NBC announcing Peacock. Like Bob Iger stepping down. You don’t need me to tell you those news stories matter. But if a company is a “collection of decisions”—strategy is
College football returns this week. Will it impact streaming ratings? Probably not. If anything, it’s the reverse: football comes back and broadcast ratings go up! But it got me thinking. Because college football is boring now. The seemingly same four schools go to the College Football Playoffs every year. Boring!
When you go long writing about OnlyFans, some stuff winds up on the cutting room floor. But let’s not leave it there! Let’s pick it up, dust it off, and give you a bonus 1,200 words of my thoughts on the entertainment strategy of last week. (Sign up for my
Folks, this week I’m writing outside of my comfort zone. Because sex is on the agenda. And frankly talking about sex is tough. Folks have moral objections to it from the right, moral objections to it from the left, and moral objections from nearly every other perspective too. (Pretty much only
In the middle of July, teenage vampire dramas had a moment: Like all things Netflix, the “Twilight takeover” caused a kerfuffle between the warring “Netflix bears” and “Netflix bulls”. Is the online war of words as fierce as the battle between vampires and werewolves à la Twilight? You bet. So
Last year, the big question after Covid-19 shuttered theaters, stopped productions and generally upended the movie industry was, “What comes next?” Specifically, how long would the around-90-days-of-theatrical exclusivity last? With some recent news stories, I think we have an answer. (Sign up for my newsletter to get all my columns,
– Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale is their biggest show, but that’s only good for the 18th best streaming season among all streamers. – After a great year of action films in 2020, 2021 has seen a few Netflix action films underperform their predecessors. – Loki is the biggest series by
– Disney and Netflix are in the “top tier” of US streaming subscribers, with 69.1 million and 66.8 million respectively. Disney just passed Netflix for top streaming subscriber in the US. – HBO, Prime Video, and Showtime/Paramount+ make up the next tier of streamers. The latest issue of the
– Private equity group Blackstone bought Reese Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine for $500 million in cash at a $900 million valuation. – The best analogy to this deal is Maker Studios, another big payday for a “next generation media company” that failed to deliver on its high payday, leaving
– The Boss Baby film (on Peacock) drove additional viewership to the Boss Baby TV series (on Netflix). This shows the value of marketing in driving awareness. – Black Widow surpassed Mulan for PVOD viewership in its first weekend. – Virgin River did very strong numbers for Netflix, with 24.2