(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)
August is supposed to be a dead zone, news story-wise, because everyone is on vacation, so it’s probably a good idea to not put out your best work in August…but I swear, the interesting topics just won’t stop coming all summer!
- Of course, I’ve been writing about the NBA’s new media rights deal. (The first article is here, part two is here, and my Ankler article on the winners and losers is here) And I’ve got one more article on it coming out soon.
- This week, I’m going to be writing about antitrust (The Google trial!), politics (Kamala Harris and Lena Khan!), and Hollywood. But before I write about that, I need to write about markets, competition, antitrust and more…hopefully I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew.
- The WGA just released their annual report, which means that I need to write up another issue of “What I Got Right/Wrong” to see how some of my big calls from last summer held up.
Plus it’s flops, bombs and misses season! And a bunch of Hollywood earnings reports just came out…and I don’t think the headlines match the results. As I’ve been doing all month, we’ll kick off the week with another streaming ratings report, then keep hitting the big ticket topics all throughout the next couple of weeks.
Before that, over the last little bit, a number of outlets have been kind enough to quote me or my research.
- Both the Hollywood Heretic and Vulture had very, very nice things to say about me while citing my work on why films should go to theaters first.
- Anthony Crupi cited my work on the NBA media rights deal back in May.
- Scott Mendelson had a great write-up on Argylle and mentioned “The Argylle Effect”. Let’s make this a thing! And he cited me again last week after Apple pulled Wolfs from theaters, as did The Bulwark’s Sonny Bunch.
- Looper used my data in an article on “Netflix Movie Flops That Are Actually Worth Watching”. I loved this!
- Ted Hope cited my article on streaming film’s lackluster May.
- And David Dayen quoted me in an article on the declining cable bundle last week.
All in all, it seems like more and more journalists are increasingly aware—especially those outside the trades—that we have a ton of data on what actually does and doesn’t work in Hollywood, and what is and isn’t popular on streaming. We know the box office numbers, but we’re still learning it for streaming. And yes, I wish even more journalists cited my analysis so we had fewer bad takes.
Speaking of what does and doesn’t work on streaming, the theme of the week is disappointment. We’ll start with two TV series that probably should have performed better, look at two new family films on streaming that did “just okay”, the battle to become this summer’s “Suits” and whether anyone is close, this year’s shark week showdown and what it says about linear versus streaming, a few foreign TV shows that made the charts, the latest on adult animation, how much time kids actually spend with social media, all of this week’s flops, bombs and misses, and more.
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, and Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of July 8th to March 14th.)
Television – Disappointing TV Debuts…
Sometimes a new show comes out and its numbers feel fine, maybe verging on poor. (A lot of shows come out nowadays and they can’t all be hits.) Toss in a little bit of expectations—always a dangerous game—and you get disappointing results.
Two shows fit the word “disappointing” to a T this week. Let’s start with Netflix’s latest sports docu-series, Receiver. Apparently, Netflix ran out of quarterbacks to feature in its NFL series Quarterback after just one season, so they just shifted to the guys who catch the ball. Any show opening below 10 million hours counts as a disappointment for me, and Receiver had 9.6 million hours on Nielsen, which looks even worse compared to Quarterback, which opened at 14.2 million hours. Both shows also opened on a Wednesday, which means they should have easily cleared that 10 million hours bar.
As I’ve written a lot about multiple times now, sports docu-series just don’t tend to do that well in the ratings. Historically, documentaries and docu-series can do well in library viewing—it’s “new” to someone later on—and docu-series are cheaper to make than other types of shows, but they don’t have tremendously high ceilings either. (Receiver also didn’t travel well globally, with only one week on Netflix’s global charts.)
The third season of Vikings: Valhalla also disappointed. This series has slid in the Nielsen charts over time, down to only 9.3 million hours this time around:
Now, credit where credit is due, Vikings: Valhalla has put out new episodes three years in a row. That hardly happens nowadays. Yet that consistency seems not to have been rewarded for this show.
At least, of course, those two shows made the Nielsen charts. The next genre missed it entirely…
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