The EntStrategyGuy’s Entertainment Industry Dictionary

  • Your Complete Guide to all the Terminology and Jargon in the Business of Entertainment and Streaming
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.)

Between the endless acronyms I came across when I served in the U.S. Army, the stream of jargon in my MBA education, and now the proliferation of new ideas to explain the streaming wars, I’m well acquainted with the fine line between terminology—which elucidates concepts—and jargon—which trends toward obfuscation. The difference between helpful and Orwellian. 

(The U.S. military is guilty of the latter. Most consultants are, too.)

Yet I, too, am guilty of the sin of confusion via terminology. Like when I write my weekly “Streaming Ratings Report”, it’s not that I want to overwhelm my readers with jargon; it’s just that I can’t help it. Lots of industries have their own specific terminology that provides a greater level of understanding and specificity. Often, I wish I could just link to an easy-to-understand definition and then keep writing. Heck, I prefer the word “viewership” to “ratings”, but I call my weekly report a “ratings report”. Even I struggle to keep my jargon straight.

But you know what? I don’t want to just complain about a problem; I want to solve it. 

Today I’m unveiling a list of definitions for commonly used jargon, terminology, acronyms and unique EntStrategyGuy phrases in one place. This list includes entertainment and streaming terminology, common business/economics terms, and streaming data terms, arranged alphabetically.

In some cases, I also provided the industry standard definition and my personal definition, in case those two things diverge. (You’ll see what I mean.) Also, I have some links within the definitions. Here are some other notes on how to use this dictionary:

  • () Leads to other definitions on this same page.
  • [] Leads to other articles by me or other websites with longer explanations.
  • If I’ve written an in-depth explainer, I’ll link to it as well.
  • There’s a navigation bar on the side of Substack articles, and I’ve tagged each letter of the alphabet as a header to help you move around the page.
  • I included the acronym (along with its meaning), but I included the definitions under their spelled-out name. For example, CLV stands for “Customer Lifetime Value”, but I defined that term in the entry for “Customer Lifetime Value”.

Let’s get started. But first…

Want To Help? Send Me Words, Jargon, Acronyms or Your Thoughts

This article is long—once I started defining terms, I couldn’t stop—but probably not comprehensive. It’s hard to remember every term someone in this industry probably needs to know. 

If you have any terms you think I should add to this list, send them my way. (Find my contact information here!) 

By the way, if you think I got a definition wrong, send me that too, and I’ll update this resource. Honestly, I won’t be mad! Some of these terms are confusing or used differently than in my previous experience, and I want to make this a shared resource for the community.

The Definitions

A

Above The Line – “Above The Line” or “Above The Line talent” refers to writers, producers, directors, and principal actors. (This term comes from daily call sheets for television or film productions; these are the people whose names are/were “above the line”, historically, on that call sheet.) 

 

Adult TV – Get your head out of the gutter; I’m not talking about X-rated or NC-17 content. “Adult TV’ refers to television/filmed content produced for teenagers or older. Movies and TV shows geared “for adults”. In the broadcast or cable era, we would have called this “primetime”, but with streaming, there’s no primetime versus daytime distinction. (The opposite of “adult TV” is “kids TV” or television intended for kids.)

Advertising – One of the three core business models in Hollywood/entertainment. Yes, most of you know what advertising is, but for those who don’t, it’s running short video or audio clips before, in-between, during and/or after a piece of video or audio content. Since the goal is to generate the most eyeballs for the content, often advertising-supported business models are provided free to users. (In streaming, ad tiers are usually cheaper, but they can be more profitable.)

  • (See “Three Core Business Models”.)

Advertising Video-on-Demand (AVOD) – Websites, apps or platforms that host videos which users can access “on-demand”, for free, funded primarily by advertising. The single best example is YouTube, which provides many videos for free and is primarily supported by advertising during those videos. 

Aggregator (traditional definition) – Often used interchangeably with “bundler”, an aggregator collects multiple goods or services in one place. Simply put, they “aggregate” content, goods or services.

Aggregator (EntStrategyGuy Definition) – In entertainment, I distinguish between aggregators and bundlers, so bear with me, as I really do think the words should describe two separate types of entertainment businesses. I use it to mean companies collecting multiple pieces of content in one place. For examples, cable channels, streamers and theaters are examples of aggregators, since they collect similar pieces of content. I distinguish this from “bundlers”, who collect multiple aggregators together. Bundlers, in contrast, collect multiple streamers in one place. I’ve called this the most important battle of the streaming wars.

  • (See “Bundlers”)
  • [Read more here.]

Aggregeddon – A theory of mine that, as the streaming wars shake out, the winners will be the bundlers controlling the television video experience. Think of companies that make TVs, sell streaming devices, or control TV operating systems like Amazon, Apple, Google or Roku. Through 2024, this theory has NOT panned out, but we’re seeing early warning signs of aggregeddon in 2025. 

Algorithm – Despite being one of the most common words in entertainment, you’d think more people would have a better grasp of what it actually means. An algorithm is simply a formula or equation (designed by humans or via machine learning) that automates complex data tasks. While they sound complicated and mysterious—and they are indeed hard to build, especially a good one—an algorithm is often just a regression formula (albeit a complicated regression formula) which ultimately shows that certain behaviors or trends are correlated with other behaviors or trends. For example, most search algorithms recognize that if someone searches for “Adele”, that query is correlated with wanting information about the singer Adele. Examples in entertainment include user experience algorithms that surface videos based on previous genres or types of content someone has watched before. That said, “the algorithm” is often blamed for low-quality TV shows and films when, frankly, that’s not how it works. 

  • (See “The Algorithm is a Lie”, next.)

The Algorithm Is a Lie – This phrase is the Entertainment Strategy Guy rebuttal to anyone who blames “the algorithm” for making bad streaming films and TV shows. In reality, Hollywood has used data like this for years. Moreover, people decide to greenlight, renew or cancel shows, not machines/an algorithm.

AMA – See “Average Minute Audience”.

Analytics – This refers to the process of analyzing data, often to make better decisions. It became famous after the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis described how the Oakland A’s used data/analytics to optimize player personnel decisions and then by Nate Silver, who used election models to forecast election outcomes.

Apples-to-apples – One of the most important terms in data analysis, when a comparison is “apples-to-apples”, it means that almost every categorical variable is held as similar as possible to make the best analysis. At its best, this data analysis will produce the most reliable results. At its worst, non-apples-to-apples comparisons will lead readers/decision-makers astray. Examples of bad apples-to-apples comparisons are when global viewership numbers (like YouTube views) are compared to US-only ratings (like Nielsen’s). Or when unique viewers are compared to total viewership.

Anecdata – The best data analysis comes when a consistent set of data is analyzed over time. In contrast, anecdata is when a company or news outlet publishes a one-off data result (usually a survey) without context. I feature anecdata regularly in my newsletter, but don’t value it as highly as consistent data collection and distribution.

The Argylle Treatment – When a film goes straight-to-streaming and no one watches it, no one really notices. But if a film goes to theaters and bombs, everyone knows about it, since all the trades write about it and, if the bomb is big enough, they write think pieces about its failure and what it means to the theater business. Thus, these film flops have gotten the “Argylle Treatment” named after Apple Studios’ film Argylle.

Average minute audience (AMA) – A term from Nielsen’s linear ratings, dating to the dawn of (TV) time, Nielsen measured the average audience of a TV show program at every given minute of a program, then converted that to deliver the ratings and viewers. They still measure this for streaming and on-demand video viewing, though they convert it to total hours viewed, given that AMA makes less sense in a streaming context.

AVOD – See “advertising video-on-demand”.

B

Basic Cable Channel – The channels delivered via cable (or satellite/broadband) that tend to be offered in a majority of cable packages. This is different from “premium cable” channels like HBO or Showtime, which often require an extra monthly subscription fee. Examples of basic cable channels include the USA Network, MTV, the Disney Channel or AMC. Basic cable channels make money by collecting a fee for every subscriber who receives the channel from the cable providers and also by selling advertising during their programming.

Batch Release – When a TV show comes out in two or three batches of episodes, like Love is Blind on Netflix, or when the new episodes are spread out a month or so apart, like Stranger Things in 2022, Bridgerton in 2024, and Wednesday and Squid Game in 2025.

Below The Line – Referring to film and television call sheets, below-the-line workers are any worker whose name doesn’t make it on a movie poster but are still vital to movie-making. People like grips, wardrobe, PAs, and so on. The opposite of “Above The Line”.

  • (See “Above The Line”.)

The Big 8 – My shorthand for the most important streamers in the streaming wars, roughly…

Netflix

Prime Video

Disney+/Hulu

HBO Max

Paramount+

Peacock

Apple TV+

Binge Watching – When a customer watches a TV show, one episode after another, straight through. This became a thing in the early 2010s when customers started catching up on cable TV shows via streaming, most notably Breaking Bad and other HBO shows.

Binge Release – When a streamer releases all of a TV show’s episodes at one time, so customers can watch them every episode at once. Netflix pioneered the binge release model in contrast to broadcast and cable TV’s weekly release schedules and has primarily continued to release shows this way, except for rare popular returning shows. Other streamers switch between weekly, binge and batch releases. There have been many words written on which release style is “better”—including by me—but really, both have their uses. (Though too many streamers initially copied Netflix instead of developing their own strategy.)

Binge Release Curve – An EntStrategyGuy term, this refers to the traditional curve/shape a TV show’s viewership tends to have when it’s binge-released. Since all episodes are available immediately, most consumption happens during the first week or weekend, and then declines after that. However, since Nielsen releases public top ten lists on a weekly basis, that week starts on Mondays, and most shows premiere on a Thursday or Friday, a binge-release curve shows a slight jump into a second week, then a significant decline into the third. It then slowly decays after that.

Biz Dev – Short for “Business Development”, this is what B-school kids say to try to sound cool. 

  • (See “Business Development”)

Blame Pie – Unfortunately, reality is complicated. As much as we’d love to simplify the world into “this caused that” narratives, more often, it’s impossible to credit any outcome to just one cause. Instead, multiple factors are to blame, hence why I like using “blame pies” to explain the multiple factors that cause things to happen. 

BLUF (Bottom Line, Up Front) – Putting the point/thesis/decision of a given article, speech, or whatnot right at the beginning of that article, speech or whatnot. The term comes from the U.S. Army.

Bomb – Basically, this is the worst type of box office or streaming failure, the lowest level you can get. Examples of bombs include, most famously, Ishtar, Waterworld, Heaven’s Gate, The Lone Ranger, John Carter of Mars and recently The Electric State. Less well known are the streaming bombs like Citadel, Peter Pan & Wendy, and Pachinko. Miss < Flop < Bomb. In short, the equation looks like this:

Flop + Big, Big Budget = Bomb

Broadcast – This term has a few different usages in entertainment. Let’s define the three big ones…

Broadcast (distribution) – Technically, “broadcast” means distributing video signals through the air via radio waves, thus, early TVs had broadcast antennas to receive these transmissions. This has mostly been replaced by cable or satellite distribution, though recently over-the-air broadcast—which still reaches something like 10% of homes in the US—has shifted to digital transmission, which results in a remarkably clear picture.

Broadcast (type of channel) – When TV first started, radio bandwidths limited the number of channels that the new TV stations could “broadcast” over the air, and this resulted in a “big three” broadcast channels of NBC, CBS and ABC. Later, Fox and The CW would join as broadcast channels. So “broadcast” can also refer to these five major channels/broadcasters. 

Broadcast (type of show) – Broadcast can also refer to TV shows “airing” on broadcast channels. Given that broadcast TV initially meant to reach the largest audience and folks couldn’t catch up on old episodes, “broadcast TV” came to mean sitcoms or episodic dramas. Now, it is usually used derogatorily, as in something feels “like broadcast TV”, meaning lowbrow or for the masses.

Bundler (traditional definition) – Often used interchangeably with aggregator, a bundler offers a bundle of different services or similar products for one fee. Historically, cable providers were bundlers, bundling multiple cable channels (owned by different companies) into one cable bill. Currently, some large technology and device companies are trying to bundle streamers, including Roku, Amazon and Apple. 

Bundler (EntStrategyGuy Definition) – On my website/newsletter, I use “bundler” to only mean companies bundling multiple aggregators, not one. In this case, streamers like Netflix and Disney+ are aggregators, whereas Apple TV+, Roku, Google, and Amazon Fire TV/Amazon Channels are bundlers, bundling streamers like Apple TV+, HBO Max, Paramount+, Starz or AMC+.

Business Development (or “biz dev”) – In entertainment, business development can mean a range of job functions, but is most often synonymous with sales. It can include negotiating strategic partnerships, managing sales relationships, or even developing new lines of business. Some companies call this either “corporate development” or “strategic planning”.

  • (See “Corporate Development” and “Strategic Planning”.)

B2B (Business-to-business) – When the end customer is not an individual consumer, but another company, the business is called B2B. The opposite is B2C, business-to-consumer/customer. Apple is B2C, since they sell iPhones and laptops to people. But enterprise software companies like Oracle sell to other businesses. In entertainment, companies can have both B2B and B2C components. Theatrical distribution is primarily B2C, since customers pay for tickets, but selling/licensing TV series to other streamers/channels is B2B.

C

C+3/7/x – Shorthand for the viewership time period measured by Nielsen. Initially, Nielsen measured live viewing or “C”. As DVR shifted viewing even further, Nielsen began measuring folks who watched a program either live, live and same day, live and three days after (C+3), and beyond (C+7 for the first week, C+30 for the first month and so on.) Samba TV often reports data in “L+3” for “live plus” the extra number of days.

Cable (communications) – In entertainment and communications, this is a company that lays fiber optic cable in the ground to deliver television or information to customers. Initially, a cable company provided service to rural communities which couldn’t receive broadcast signals, but later expanded the number of potential channels and the quality of delivery.

Cable (TV) – Cable also refers to the channels, and has been linked with “broadcast and cable” to define content that isn’t on streaming. “Basic cable” is also a pejorative for lower quality content.

  • (See “basic cable channels”.)
  • Cash Flow – See “Free Cash Flow”.

Categorical Variable – A technical term in statistics, this means a variable that isn’t numeric (think height or weight) but a category that can be defined into a number of terms (think color, like blue, red or green). In terms of movies or TV shows, examples of categorical variables include genre, scripted vs. unscripted, animated vs. live action, MPAA rating, and so on.

Churn – The number of folks who decide to cancel a subscription in a given month versus the number who initially subscribed. In general, the lower the churn rate, the better for any subscription business. That said, a subscription business will still grow in “net subscriber additions” if it has more folks join than churn in a given month. If not, it will shrink over time. Technically, churn is calculated by:

Cancellations / Starting Subscribers = Churn Rate (for existing subscribers)

CLV – See “Customer Lifetime Value”.

The CNBC Caution – I literally just coined this term (as of October 2025) to define the idea of coming to a hot new trend too late. If you get a stock tip from someone on CNBC, it’s already too late to make money. The same thing happens to hot new genres in entertainment; once everyone’s talking about something, that genre or IP’s price has already gone up. In 2018,  if you bought the rights to anime, you were ahead of the curve. Nowadays? It’s much pricier.

Co-production (or co-pro) – One of three types of ownership for filmed content. In a co-production, two major studios both claim ownership of the profits of a television show or film. This arrangement occurs more often in TV, often when a TV studio sells a TV show to another major channel or streamer. One studio will pay the bulk of the costs—usually the studio airing or streaming the show—while the other develops and produces the show. The latter studio usually charges a distribution fee. A prominent example was the series Manifest, which NBC and Warner Bros co-produced. NBC paid the bulk of the fees, but Warner Bros. controls the distribution. Currently, Amazon-MGM and Netflix co-produce the smash hit Wednesday.

Completed Viewing Equivalents or Complete Views Estimate (CVEs) – See “Views (Completed)”.

Content – Huh. That’s a good one. In the dictionary sense, “content” is the material inside a container. In the entertainment world, this means the stuff people watch, listen to, read or play. For Hollywood, that’s video in the form of TV or films. It can also mean music, podcasts, news stories, video stories, games and anything else folks consume. Some people really, really, really hate this word/term—and I hate when it refers to the output of journalists—but it’s a much tighter way to write “TV shows, films, specials, live programming, short films, sports, and so on” every time I describe the content on a streamer. (Same goes for “titles”.) For an example of how often I use this term, I used it 50 times in this dictionary alone!

  • [Read my defense of using “content” here or here.]

Content Planning – A job in entertainment, “content planning” refers to the job of buying, renting or programming content for a streamer or network. Sometimes this also includes the job of planning when content will come out, which was historically called “programming”.

  • (See programming/programmer.)

Consumer Products – In business, this term means goods that folks actually buy. In entertainment, this is a catch-all for any toys, apparel, furniture and other things folks can buy related to a given piece of content or IP.

  • (See also “Merchandise” and “Licensing”.)

Cord-cutters – Cord-cutters or “cord-cutting” refers to people who no longer subscribe to cable television or watch broadcast television using an antenna. They get all of their television through digital services, either SVOD services (Netflix, Disney+, etc), AVOD (YouTube) or FASTs (Tubi, X). Does this include people who watch vMVPDs? It’s unclear. 

Corporate Development – In entertainment, “corporate development” is the most common description for the job function that analyzes future mergers and acquisitions. However, sometimes it is used as a synonym for business development or strategic planning.

Cost of Capital – A core finance term, this is a simple way of saying, “the percentage lenders charge based on the riskiness of an investment”. In other words, the rate of return typically expected for a given industry, combining both the “cost of equity” and the “cost of debt”. It can also be called the WACC—weighted average cost of capital. The most frequent use is to judge whether or not a big investment will pay off, and the cost of capital/WACC is the discount rate. I typically discount future cash flows at 8%. For example, when I analyzed the NBA’s new media rights deal, depending on how you calculated it, the NBA’s growth rate is actually below their cost of capital.

The Covid Caveat – What’s the “Covid Caveat”? It’s the exception that you have to apply to countless graphs and charts after the Covid-19 pandemic. Since Covid-19 distorted the entire economy and society, many trends just don’t look the same for those two years. Hence, many people have to refer to “pre-2019” when talking about business trends. This is perhaps best illustrated by US box office numbers.

Creator Economy – The catch-all term for YouTubers, live-streamers, influencers, podcasters, Substackers or any “creator” who makes money outside the traditional media/Hollywood ecosystem.

Critic – Back in the day, folks needed some way to know if a movie coming out was any good, so the role of film critic was born, to judge which movies folks should go see. Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel are probably the three most popular movie critics of all time. Since everyone can share their thoughts now, film critics are legion. One way of evaluating films and TV shows is to judge how popular it is according to critics, also known as “critical ratings” or “critical reviews”.

Criticism – Just to clarify, in the realm of art, “criticism” refers to analysis of art, not just a review of whether it’s any good or not, which is what most modern film critics did, especially back in the day of the newspaper. Thankfully, with the advent of the internet, blogs, YouTube and newsletters, criticism is back!

Critical Ratings or Critical Reviews – “Critical ratings” refer to what a specific group of people—the amorphous, loosely-defined group of film, TV and cultural critics—think of a movie or TV show. And these ratings are collected and averaged by Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. (I prefer Metacritic.)

Curse of the Mogul – The name of a book from authors/professors Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald, and Ava Seave, it describes the idea that top talent in media or entertainment can often extract the value of their creation, if they know how much a distributor can make from it. As such, the owners of content stand to make less from their entertainment investments. For example, when Judge Judy renewed her wildly successful syndicated show, she could almost calculate exactly how much CBS made by selling it into syndication based on the ad rates and Nielsen viewership.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV, lifetime value) – In subscription business models, CLV is the projected total value of a customer, after estimating the projected number of years or months a customer will subscribe to something, subtracting the costs (like customer acquisition costs). CLV is arguably one of the most important strategic innovations of the last fifty years. It powered the rise of cable TV and drives streamers today. The formula looks like this:

Customer ratings – In the past, it was hard to know what customers thought of a film versus critics. Now, thanks to the internet, customers can leave reviews on websites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd and more. In my datasets, I call these “ratings”, in contrast to “viewership”. “Ratings” historically also meant “viewership”, though I try to avoid using that word in that fashion. One of my pet peeves is when customer ratings on sites like IMDb are confused with critical ratings on sites like Rotten Tomatoes. The two are not the same.

  • (See “Critical Ratings” and “Viewership”.)

D

Dad TV – The term that defines shows that, roughly, target 50-year-old or older men, or your dad. Examples include Bosch—a Prime Video cop show—and anything by Taylor Sheridan. Prime Video, in particular, has been attached to this genre.

Data 5Ws – The same 5Ws as journalism (who, what, when, where, how and why) but applied to data. For any chart, table, graph, or statistic you read—be it in media, academia or business—you should ask yourself, “What are the 5Ws?” Often, hyperbolic or shocking statistics are comparing different “Ws” leading to exaggeration, hyperbole or outright falsehoods.

Data Hierarchy – A framework to understand the level of data at a given company or in a given industry. First, you start with “descriptive” statistics, which describe what the data historically has looked like. Then, you build models to make “predictive” statistics, which forecast the future. Finally, in the ideal case, you leverage “prescriptive” statistics to optimize decision-making.

Descriptive —> Predictive —> Prescriptive

Datecdote – A term that I invented, a “datecdote” is a one-off pronouncement (usually from the streamers) about the performance of a piece of content. Usually, this comes in the form of describing some piece of content as “the most watched over the weekend” to sound impressive. A portmanteau of data and anecdote, since it has numbers, it sounds impressive, but it isn’t better than a random anecdote.

Day and Date – A film that premieres in theaters the same day it arrives on streaming or PVOD. Prominent examples include Five Nights at Freddy’s and Black Widow. This was more common during the Covid-19 pandemic. I don’t know how the industry settled on these two words to describe this phenomenon, but they did.

Demand Metrics – Some streaming ratings companies don’t measure actual viewership, but calculate what they call “demand”, or the value of a given show, sport, actor, genre and streamer in terms of how much customers want to watch the show or film. While the exact calculations are proprietary, they usually include some combination of viewership, interest, and customer ratings.

  • (See interest metrics.)

Demand Side Increasing Returns – See “Network Effects”.

Descriptive Statistics – The basic counting statistics for a given data set. Think of the arithmetic average (the mean), the middle (the median), and the distribution of results. Slightly more complicated numbers include the minimum, maximum, quartiles, correlation and standard deviation. Any good data effort starts by understanding the descriptive statistics, including the shape and nature of the data being collected.

Development Executive (or Creative Executive) – In a network, production company or distributor, a development executive is the exec in charge of finding, developing and making TV shows or films. They “develop” the shows or films from pitch to script to finished product. Some companies divide development into ongoing (shows that have already been made) and development (making pilots).

Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) – Companies that sell their products to customers, without a distributor. With the rise of digital technology, more companies can have a direct relationship with customers and skip any middlemen. Examples include the rise of mattress firms that ship foam-rolled mattress pads to customers. In entertainment, the most prominent example is streaming services that sell subscriptions directly to customers. (For the most part. Even streamers can have middlemen!) In contrast, the studios use the theatrical chains to sell to the customers, so it is not direct-to-consumer.

Discounted Future Cash Flows – Similar to “Free Cash Flow”, the discounted future cash flows of a business are the amount of money a firm will make in the future, but converted into current values. A dollar in the future isn’t worth the same as a dollar today, and different investments/industries have different risk profiles. To account for this, you “discount” future cash flows by reducing them by the accumulated risk. The sum of discounted future cash flow is the net present value of an investment, company or opportunity. If you take a finance class, that’s the most important thing you’ll learn, the core principle of modern finance. For a terrific, super-long example, read one of my first series judging the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm/Star Wars, where I evaluated the acquisition over time by discounting their cash flows.

 

Distributions – The shape of a given data set, which is about 1,000 times more valuable than the most often provided number, “the average”. The question with any data problem isn’t “Where is the middle?”; it’s “What does the data look like?” The fact that most news stories ignore the distribution while focusing on the average is the biggest failing in media, academia and business. Common distributions include the normal, uniform, logarithmic, exponential and more.

Dog Not Barking – Inspired by a Sherlock Holmes short story (where Sherlock cracks the case when a witness doesn’t mention any dogs barking), on streaming, a “dog not barking” is my term for films or series that never make any of the streaming ratings/viewership charts that I track. But unlike the past—when almost every primetime TV show received a rating, even a low rating—most streaming viewership charts only report top ten shows, so we don’t know how low the ratings are for many flops, bombs and misses. 

D2C – See “Direct-to-Customer”.

E

EBITDA – Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Deductions and Amortization. This is a common metric to value entertainment and media companies, an accounting term that shows a firm’s “profit”—which can mean multiple things—before subtracting financial items like interest on debt or taxes due, and as such, can be a more accurate measure of a business’ actual profitability. This is in contrast to “net profit” which does account for those other factors, and is a firm’s “earnings”.

EST – Electronic Sell Through. See “Transactional Video-on-Demand”.

F

FASTs – Free, Ad-Supported, Streaming TV. Coined by Alan Wolk, this term refers to the rise of advertising streamers that mimic linear TV services, such as Pluto, Xumo, Tumi, Amazon Freevee and The Roku Channel.

First Run – A film or TV show premiering on TV, theaters or streaming for the first time. 

  • (See “Windowing”.)

Flop – I use “flop” to mean any movie or TV show that doesn’t do well on the ratings charts, but I consider a “flop” to be more notable or expensive than a “miss”. In terms of the size of the miss, I roughly rank things like this: Miss < Flop < Bomb.

  • (See “Bomb” or “Miss”.)

Flywheel – A true flywheel in engineering is a wheel that stores up kinetic energy and then releases it later. I liked to remind folks of this actual definition, because the point is that the flywheel spins itself. In the mid-2010s, in business strategy, flywheel came to mean an (often overly simplified) set of business processes that “spun” a business to great heights. Common examples included Amazon, Google and Netflix. Nowadays, frankly, “flywheel” is the new “synergy” and often just means any business with multiple related lines of business.

Foreign Film Failures – After the success of Squid Game on Netflix, many folks predicted that foreign-language films and TV shows would then thrive on streaming TV. Instead, most foreign films (and TV shows) wildly underperform compared to English-language shows in America. I catalogue these as “foreign film failures”, because I love alliteration.

The Four Horsemen of Hollywood Media-pocalypse – My term for the four biggest factors hurting Hollywood’s top and bottom lines: piracy, AI, the erosion of the cable bundle, and the death of theaters.

Free Cash Flow (FCF) – The amount of cash a firm makes over a given time period, usually the quarter or year. The sum of a company’s free cash flow discounted over time is—according to finance theory—the value of a given firm’s stock, though, due to accounting quirks, companies don’t actually have to report FCF each year, though some do. Free cash flow differs from profit by counting only the actual cash a firm accumulates or loses over the year. This differs from profit—an actual accounting term—because it subtracts capital expenditures, taxes and changes in working capital, while adding amortization and deductions.

  • (See “Profit”.)

G

Greenlight – To approve a show or film to go into production. This is the goal for any writer, director or producer hoping to make a movie or show. Many word processing applications refuse to acknowledge that this should be one word and insist on telling me that I misspelled it. 

H

Hits for Them – All streamers, networks, channels, etc, have different viewership goals, thus a “hit” for one company might be a flop at a different company. You don’t expect shows on Animal Planet to get the same ratings as primetime CBS, or Paramount+ and Peacock shows to get the same ratings are Netflix shows.

I

Intellectual Property (IP) – I honestly wonder which word is the most hated in this dictionary: “IP” or “content”. “IP” in Hollywood refers to characters, worlds, franchises, true-life stories, podcasts, shows, books, video games, films and more that are used to make other films, show and merchandise, or remake and reboot shows and films. I define IP into five categories:

Type 1: Sequels, prequels, and spinoffs of existing film and TV franchises/universes.

Type 2: Reboots, remakes, and re-imaginings of films and TV series.

Type 3: Based on published material (books, video games, comics, etc) that is very popular.

Type 4: Based on published material that isn’t popular.

Type 5: Original stories.

Interest Metrics – Some streaming analytics companies measure customer interest in a given show or film. These sources don’t depend on the cooperation of the streamers and can apply to any show or film. The drawback is that they don’t tell you if customers actually watched the show or film. Examples of interest metrics include Google search data, Wikipedia page views and IMDb reviews. Some companies track piracy, which I oppose on ethical grounds.

J

K

Kids TV – The opposite of “adult TV”, this is TV programming created for kids specifically. This is different than “family” films, which means programming that can be enjoyed by the entire family. Compare Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie (which adults only saw with their children) to Pixar films like Inside Out 2 (a film that drew in some adults).

L

Launch week/weekend – See “opening weekend”. This term was used more at the start of the streaming wars, but has fallen by the wayside.

  • See “opening weekend”.

Licensing (video) – After the first window for a show or film, a distributor rents (licenses) the rights to a given title for a specific period of time. During the age of cable, licensees typically bought a set number of airings. In the video-on-demand era, studios usually license shows and films for a set time period. Unlike wholly-owned or co-produced titles, a “licensed” show is rented for a given time period or number of airings. Usually, the licensor has limited input into creative decisions and production budgets, and often the series or film is finished before the licensing deal goes into effect.

Licensing (consumer products & merchandise) – Any third-party deal where the rights of a film or TV show are used to make other media, like books, video games or sometimes other filmed entertainment, often used in conjunction with merchandise or consumer products. Most often, the IP owner licenses the rights for a set period of time and doesn’t actually make the product themselves, collecting a set fee. (Typically 10% of wholesale or 5% of the retail price.) This is why I often call it “licensing and merchandise”, though this is distinct from video licensing. (News articles tend to overstate the value of selling consumer products to monetize video, since 5% is actually a fair small share of total sales, though it has less risk for the licensors. Also, even for hit movies and films, licensing and merchandise accounts for well less than 10% of all expected revenue.)

Logarithmic Distribution – I’ve called it the “most important shape in entertainment”. While most folks are familiar with the “normal distribution”, which peaks in the middle, a “logarithmic distribution” has many very small values, with a few extreme outliers. Think of how hundreds of films are made each year, but only a handful gross more than a billion dollars. This distribution can contribute to “winner-take-all” economics. This can also be called “Power law distributions”.

Linear TV – This phrase actually means two different things, depending on usage. In strict definitions, “linear TV” means programming that has been “lined up” on a feed or series of feeds. Typically, this meant broadcast programming or cable TV, but it can also refer to digital services like FASTs. Recently, “linear TV” is often used as a stand-in for traditional distribution via broadcast, cable, or satellite TV. 

Lifetime – Used in streaming viewership, a “lifetime” measurement means all the folks who have watched or all the hours viewed in total for the time a streaming series or film has been available. For example, if a show premiered on January 1st, 2023, and you added up all the viewership from 1-Jan-2023 to today, that’s its “lifetime” viewership. Other common time periods include opening weekend, first 28 days, the first 90 days or by calendar year.

Live TV – “Live TV” refers to content that has a little-to-minimal delay before it airs (or streams) on TV or streaming. On “linear TV”, local news is usually live, along with sports and awards shows. On digital, Twitch and YouTube offer live streams. And now on SVOD, the streamers are (slowly) adding in live capabilities. 

L&M – Licensing and Merchandise, a catch-all for any consumer products or licensing

M

MAUs (Monthly Active Users) – The number of unique accounts that use a platform on the internet over a monthly time period. While this number can be gamed, I wish we had it for more streaming platforms, as it can often show usage better than total subscriber numbers. 

Merchandise – Related to licensing and consumer products, merchandise is the slightly narrower category of consumer products branded with a specific film, TV series, or character. I often combine this term with licensing to call it “licensing and merchandise” to refer to all efforts to sell products for TV shows or films.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) – When companies either buy or sell other companies (or business units) or join forces. Over the long arc of Hollywood history, the town has slowly consolidated, first combining studios with broadcasters, and then cable channels, and now streaming.

Metadata (traditional) – Data about data, usually metadata describes who made a piece of information and when. Think of calling up the date a Word document was created or edited last versus the information inside the document. That’s the metadata, while a document’s content is the actual data. 

Metadata (Entertainment Strategy Guy) – I use this term slightly differently than most, to mean data about the content, not its performance. Currently, I update thirty different pieces of metadata for every title in our database, and my team double-checks every entry to ensure accuracy.

Metaverse – Like “synergy” and “disruption”, “metaverse” is a hot corporate buzzword referring to…virtual spaces? The question mark is because the term really does have multiple meanings. Some folks define current interactive environments like Roblox and Fortnite as “the metaverse”, whereas some folks conceive of it as a full-on immersive environment that doesn’t exist yet, as depicted in science fiction like Neuromancer or Ready Player One.

Miss – Any film or TV show that underperforms on the ratings chart, especially from the perspective of the streamer. In terms of the size of the miss, I roughly rank things like this: Miss < Flop < Bomb.

  • (See “Bomb” and “Flop” and “Hit for Them”.) 

MVPD (Multi-Channel, Video Programming Distributor) – This is the rare case where an acronym is used more often than the words it stands for. Historically, an “MVPD” is a platform that distributes a bundle of linear cable channels. At first, this meant cable companies, but it expanded to satellite and broadband. Examples of those companies include Comcast, Time Warner (now Spectrum), DirecTV, Dish, AT&T and Verizon. The concept of a linear bundle has also gone digital—on services like Fubo/Hulu Live TV and YouTube TV—and is called a vMVPD. This term is often used as a synonym for “cable TV”.

  • (See “Linear TV”, “Bundlers” and “vMVPD”.)

N

Net Present Value – The value of future discounted cash flows of a given company. That’s a lot of jargon, but it’s the business term for judging what a future company, initiative, endeavor or investment is worth right now by estimating adding up the expected future revenue then subtracting costs (like the initial investment and ongoing operating costs). That’s then converted to current dollars.

Net profit (or Net income) – In accounting terms, this is the bottom line of an income statement, and is where the phrase ‘the bottom line” comes from. This is also a synonym for a firm’s earnings, which are reported most frequently in the business press, and half of a firm’s earnings per share or price to earnings multiple. In general, I prefer free cash flow, since that’s how we value stocks overall, but both profit and cash flow matter.

Network Effects (technically “Demand Side Increasing Returns”) – One of the drivers of both winner-take-all economics or flywheels, this more precise economic term refers to the unique situation where having more users makes your service more valuable. The best example is social media; a social media platform with very few users has very little value, but the one everyone is on gets even more valuable.

Neverflix – My nickname for Netflix’s adherence to a strict strategy that includes a lot of “nevers”. For example, Netflix had previously stated they would never offer ads, wouldn’t stream sports, and would never have live TV. They do now. Other examples include never releasing series weekly or in theaters. It remains to be seen if Netflix will ever release shows weekly (though they do increasingly space out the releases of big returning shows) or send their films to theaters, but we’ll see!

NonDē – Non-Dependent Cinema. Ted Hope coined this term since he found “indie film” didn’t deliver on its goal for filmmakers.

O

The Obliterated Line – I coined this term to describe a new Netflix hour-long drama that gets ratings below 46 million hours in America in the first four weeks according to Nielsen, or what the Sony television show Obliterated got when it came out and got cancelled. I’m, roughly, trying to determine the line where Netflix will cancel a show. (Which is always changing and has tons of caveats and factors.)

Opening week/weekend – The opening time period for a given piece of content. Given the focus on binge viewing, the majority of streaming titles debut on Thursdays (for Netflix shows) or on Fridays (especially for Apple TV+ and Prime Video), meaning there is an extra emphasis on the opening weekend. Many first-run streaming films come out on Fridays as well. For feature films, most folks focus on the opening weekend, which now can start as early as Wednesday.

Over-The-Top (OTT) – OTT refers to services that are sold directly through a device to customers, essentially going around traditional providers like cable, hence “OTT”. Of the terms on this list, it’s one of the most wide-ranging, and I’ve seen it used for everything from devices (Roku) to streamers. But basically anything that isn’t old school cable is OTT.

P

Pay-Per-View (PPV) – The OG digital transaction, during the age of cable, customers could rent movies for a set period of time or “pay per view”. Cable operators also used the pay-per-view method for large one-time sporting events, like boxing. Nowadays, PPV still exists on cable, but more customers buy or rent through digital platforms (called either TVOD or EST) from over-the-top distributors like Amazon, Apple, Google, Fandango or Roku.

  • (See Video-on-Demand or Transactional Video-on-Demand.)

Performance – A tricky term, this basically means “How well did a piece of content do for a streamer?”

Profit – The amount of money a company makes from its business or a specific business unit. At its core, it describes how much money you have left, subtracting your costs from your revenue. The situation gets complicated when you factor in what costs and other financing decisions. If you don’t count general business costs, then it’s called “gross profit”. If you don’t count financing, it’s called EBITDA. If you count all that, it’s called “net profit”, and is reported as the bottom line on an income statement.

Porter’s Five Forces – One of (if not the) first strategy frameworks, Harvard professor Michael Porter redefined business strategy with his framework for how to think about an industry’s given profitability in the context of the larger strategic situation, specifically the competition within an industry, the ease for new entrants, supplier power, buyer power, and threat of substitutes.

Power Law or Power Law Distributions – See Logarithmic Distribution.

Procedural – A drama TV show that has “episodic” plots, or plots that are usually wrapped up within that week’s episode. Think Bonanza, Law & Order, E.R., CSI, FBI and so on. For a long time, this was the dominant type of television (and dominates on streaming in terms of total hours watched). Occasionally, these shows have two-part episodes or longer plot lines running through each season, but you don’t have to watch the episodes in order. For the most part, the streamers have not made many of these shows. 

Programming – Back in the day, TV schedulers had to schedule TV shows to air at a certain time, so they made these schedules, and that became the “program” for the network. As such, sometimes TV content is called “programming”. In addition, broadcast and cable channels had programming execs who scheduled when all the shows would go on, also known as “programmers”. This role has been minimized in streaming, but is fulfilled in some form by content planning executives.

Premium Cable – The original subscription video services, HBO, Showtime and Cinemax required an additional subscription to access their early window theatrical films and originals, which contrasted to “basic cable”, which was included in most TV packages.

Premium Video-on-Demand (PVOD) – In digital home entertainment, PVOD films arrive very early (within 18 days) and cost more than TVOD films (which also typically arrive six weeks after theatrical debut). These theatrical-to-home entertainment windows have shrunk over time.

Prestige – I (and most people in town) use “prestige” to refer to movies or TV shows that are trying to win awards or critical acclaim. Though they tend to mainly be dramas, some genre shows can be more prestige than others. Aimed at more elite audiences, the audience for prestige shows tends to be smaller, but not always. (Think Game of Thrones or Oppenheimer.)

Prestigural – A new genre term that combines aspects of a procedural TV show (episode, weekly “solve the mystery plots”, usually about police, lawyers or doctors) with more prestige elements. Think Poker Face and The Pitt.

PVOD – See Premium Video-on-Demand (PVOD).

Q

R

Ratings (Traditional Definition) – Historically, “ratings” meant “how many people watched a show” because Nielsen published “ratings points” that meant the percentage of Americans watching a given program out of all the people watching TV at the time. Hence, “ratings” means viewership, though they don’t refer to the actual number, but a percentage. Nowadays, it’s used colloquially to mean “viewership”.

Ratings (EntStrategyGuy Definition) – Since streaming deals with on-demand viewing, accounting for the number of TV viewers makes less sense. As such, I very much prefer the word “viewership” to “ratings”, but many folks still colloquially refer to viewership as ratings (and it occasionally slips into the Streaming Ratings Report as well).

S

Second Run – A term of my own creation, this refers to the second distributor of a TV show after its “first run” on broadcast or streaming. I use this to categorize any TV show that heads to a different streamer. It also stands in contrast to “syndication”, which specifically referred to broadcast shows syndicated to local broadcast channels (and sometimes cable), though syndication is often used colloquially. Examples of second-run shows include The Blacklist, which streamed second-run on Netflix, and Mr. Robot, which streamed second-run on Prime Video.

  • (See “Windowing (TV)”.)

Sitcom – Short for “situational comedy”, this term traditionally refers to self-contained half-hour comedies, usually but not exclusively multi-camera comedies filmed on a sound stage, like I Love Lucy, All in the Family, Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, and How I Met Your Mother. “Single camera” sitcoms include The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Modern Family. And some sitcoms are animated, like Family Guy or The Simpsons. Today, many half-hour “comedies” on streaming aren’t actually sitcoms (or all that funny).

Social Video – If SVOD is the streamers and AVOD is the FASTs and YouTube, then “social video” is all the other video on the internet, mostly though driven by social media platforms. Often, social video is powered by algorithms that surface popular (and sometimes engaging/addictive/enraging) videos. Many folks would call YouTube (especially their shorts) social video, though TikTok has been the biggest platform in recent years, along with Instagram Reels. 

Sponsorships – A subset of one of the three core business models (see below), sponsorships are like advertising on steroids. At the dawn of radio and television, entire programs were created and financed (“sponsored”) by corporations to sell a given product, like The Colgate Comedy Hour or Kraft Television Theater. In its current incarnation, sponsorships can run from naming buildings (think stadiums) to promoting a given TV show (think Top Chef and its endless tie-ins) to funding specific shows (think podcast promotions). This business model is alive and well on YouTube. 

Straight-to-Streaming (S-to-S) – A film that premieres first and exclusively on streaming. While a descendant of the “straight-to-video” from the 1990s, many streamers spend a lot of money on these films, particularly Netflix.

Strategic Planning – For recent business school or business undergraduates looking to enter entertainment, jobs with this description come up frequently, though it can be hard to pin down exactly what “strategic planning” means. It typically means an analysis-heavy role that usually isn’t in the finance department.

  • (See “Content Planning”.)

Streaming – Any form of television, audio, film or media that’s distributed through the internet digitally rather than physically. Essentially, the internet dis-intermediated the need for companies to control the distribution of content, freeing many more entrants to compete with traditional companies. Unfortunately, a number of acronyms have arisen to essentially say “streaming”, but I prefer the simpler term.

  • (See “OTT” and “D2C”.)

Streams – In the early days of streaming, sometimes companies reported the number of “streams” for a given show. Often, they calculated this by how many times any customer started watching a video. This term is (thankfully) no longer frequently used much.

  • (See “Views”.)

Streaming Ratings (or Analytics) Company – Any third-party firm that measures customer viewership behavior. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from building viewership panels and tracking customer viewership (Nielsen), to collecting viewership on smart TVs (Samba TV), to building panels and collecting viewership history directly from streamers, to estimating customer viewership based on other metrics.

Streaming Ratings Era – My bespoke term for post-March-2020, when both Nielsen and Netflix started releasing weekly top ten viewership charts. Before, there were almost no streaming ratings. And now we have a lot of ratings, getting more and more each year. 

The Streaming Wars – The ubiquitous—and controversial—phrase to describe the battle to gain a foothold in streaming video, which is replacing the old broadcast/cable television model. 

Streamer – The Entertainment Strategy Guy’s preferred term for any video provider on the internet. Sure, some folks want to call them SVODs or vMVPDs or FASTs, but at the end of the day, they’re all services that provide streaming video, either for a subscription fee or advertising (or both), or on-demand or in a linear feed (or both). But they’re all streamers.

Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) – When you combine “video-on-demand” and “subscription,” you get SVOD. Specifically, a company that distributes video entertainment for a fixed fee per month, and customers watch (usually unlimited) programming on demand by selecting a show or film to watch when they want to start watching. Really, “SVOD” and “streamer” are interchangeable. In practice, this refers to the eight major streamers: Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount+, but also smaller services like AMC+, Sundance Now, Shudder, Crunchyroll and others.

Subscription – One of the three core business models (see below), a “subscription” is a recurring payment that is either obligated (due to a monthly contract, think your electric bill or rent) or standardized (meaning it recurs without additional work by the customer). For financial reasons, Wall Street loves subscription business models. They’ve been at the center of entertainment for years, going back to magazines, continuing through cable television, and now powering the current streaming/SVOD business model.

T

The Taylor Swift Data Fallacy – When the most popular celebrity, creator or piece of IP in one genre or medium switches to a new genre or medium, and then their work succeeds in that new medium/genre. That success usually represents a peak that few others in the previous field/genre can also reach, despite news reports to the contrary. The primary example is Miss Swift herself, whose concert films obliterated concert film records. Many observers thought this heralded a new film genre, when she was actually the ceiling.

Time Value of Money – The economic principle that a dollar tomorrow is worth less than a dollar today, due to uncertainty. Imagine I said, “Hey, give me a dollar and I’ll return it to you in a year.” You don’t know if I’d actually give you the money, so you’d make me pay extra to hold onto that dollar. That extra (interest) is what drives inflation, and hence why money now is worth more than money tomorrow.

Total Hours Viewed or Total Viewership – This is the core metric of the streaming wars and my streaming ratings report. Simply put, it’s the amount of time a streamer’s customers spent watching a given show, season or film on streaming, added up. Some companies report this in minutes (like Nielsen), but I prefer reporting it by total hours. It can also be divided up by time periods, either by a calendar week, from the start of streaming or over a lifetime. It can also be called “watch time”.

The Trades – The historic term for the entertainment industry specific newspapers like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, then the websites Deadline Hollywood and The Wrap. Currently, the three biggest traditional outlets (excluding The Wrap) are owned by one media conglomerate. Newer “trades” include The Ankler and Puck. 

Transactional Video-on-Demand/Electronic Sell Through (TVOD/EST) – These terms are used almost interchangeably, so if the acronyms mean something different in super precise terms, oh well. In short, these are digital services (like Prime Video, Apple, YouTube or cable providers) that sell or rent movies and TV shows for a fixed one-time fee.

The 3.5 Core Business Models – Oh, did you hear there were dozens of business models related to video? Technically, every business has its own business model, but despite tweaks and changes, entertainment as an industry only has three, each with its own definition here:

Transactions – Selling content one time

Subscriptions – Selling access every month

Advertising – Giving content away for free, but running ads

Merchandise – Selling products or other media related to content.

(This is the 0.5, since it technically is a transaction and is usually small)

U

UCAN – U.S. and Canada, which are lumped together in a variety of entertainment reporting metrics, like domestic box office or streaming subscribers. 

UGC – See User Generated Content.

Unique Viewers – While the streamers have more data than ever, the limit of their data ends at the screen. They know how often a user/log-in/member picks something to watch and for how long, but they don’t know how many people are doing the watching. Typically, then, a “unique viewer” count is a count of the number of unique accounts who access a piece of content. This is superior to just “view” or just “viewers” which could count the same individual multiple times. Note: in digital ratings, most “unique viewers” metrics can’t determine the number of individuals watching a piece of content outside of the customer log-in or profile. For that, ratings companies must estimate the number of unique viewers based on collected demographic data or survey results.

User Generated Content (UGC) – Videos, shorts, podcasts, social media posts or audio produced by users of a social media platform, often used to describe YouTube videos and their ilk. While previously UGC implied low quality, increasingly UGC can be high quality production.

UX (User Experience) – Short for “user experience”, UX is how a person uses a platform. In entertainment these days, this is mostly used to judge an individual streamer’s UX. (Netflix is considered to have great UX, Prime Video traditionally has not, then everyone argues about everyone else.) I don’t love arguments about UX, since most people just reveal their biases towards a given company. And most of the arguments/complaints aren’t based on data. UX also applies to any way a customer interacts with television or digital media, from old-school cable bundles to newer FASTs. 

V

Value Capture – The opposite of “value creation”, this is when a company changes its business model to extract value from either customers or suppliers, without adding more value to the value chain. For example, if a supplier of fertilizer charges more to farmers because they’ve become a monopoly provider, that’s value capture. They didn’t make the fertilizer more valuable; they simply charge customers more because they don’t have other options.

  • (See “Value Creation”.)

Value Chain – The group of suppliers, companies, producers and consumers who together build, make or use a product. For example, a farmer grows a potato, which he sells to a bulk supplier, who sells it to a potato chip company, who makes a bag of potato chips, who sells it to a distributor, who sells it to a store, who sells it to a customer. Ideally, each step should add value to a product, applying the unique skills to create a finished product. So it takes five steps to get a customer their chips, each of whom makes revenue or profit off that sale.

Value Creation – This is the purpose of free enterprise capitalism: to create value. A firm “creates value” when it finds a way to lower costs (without charging suppliers less) or finds a way to increase consumers’ willingness to pay (meaning their demand) for a good. When a consumer values a good more, but doesn’t have to pay more, then that means they have increased their consumer surplus. This chart summarizes “value creation”.

Value Web – A business term of my own creation, I needed a way to visualize “value chains” within industries where there are multiple suppliers and buyers of similar products. Like, say, entertainment.

Video – A series of moving images often accompanied by sound. (Sure, this is about the most basic definition ever, but there you go.)

Video-on-Demand (VOD) – The opposite of linear, “VOD” is when you can start or stop a video at your choosing, the great innovation of the internet and streamers like Netflix. It comes in various flavors depending on the business model, including Transactional VOD, Subscription VOD, Advertising VOD, Premium VOD and I’ve even seen “cable VOD”. Some folks use VOD to mean both TVOD and PVOD sales windows.

Video Value Web – My layout of the video portion of the entertainment industry, to capture the various players in each part of the digital video value chain and how they interact. 

View – A term with no standard definition, it might be the single worst word going on the internet. Almost every website and streamer defines this differently, so a view can mean anything from “a person watched a whole season of a TV show” to “a person watched one second of a free video”. A “view” can also be called a “stream” or “session”. So I’d break this term into two parts.

View (social media) – Usually watching just one second of a video, and sometimes not even that. Views are wildly inflated on social video and AVOD platforms.

View (completed view equivalents or CVEs) – Also known as “Completed Views, Estimated” (CVEs). To account for the run-time of films and binge-released TV shows in streaming, some analysts use “views”, where they divide total hours viewed by the run time. Some streamers, like Disney, also use this.

Viewers – See “Unique Viewers”.

Viewership – The volume of total consumption of a given piece of content. Since the bulk of streaming is on-demand, and not in a specific time period, “viewership” or “total viewership” more accurately describes TV consumption than “ratings”. Historically, “ratings” was shorthand for the average minute audience for a given show, which translated into the number of people watching a given ad out of all the people watching television at the time. Since streaming measurement usually takes place over a week or more, this look makes less sense.

  • (See “Ratings”.)

Virtual MVPD (Or vMVPD) – Whereas old school MVPDs (Multi-Channel, Video Programming Distributors, basically cable or broadband providers who offer linear TV) required a cord that connected to the cable grid or a satellite dish on your roof, vMVPDs use your already existing internet connection to connect you to a virtual cable bundle. Think YouTube Live TV or Hulu Live TV. 

  • (See “MVPD”.)

W

WACC – Weighted Average Cost of Capital. (See “Cost of Capital”.)

Watch Time – See total viewership.

Weekly Release – A TV show whose episodes come out weekly. This used to be the standard on television until the last decade or so. For data collection purposes, I refer to any show that isn’t binge-or-batch-released as “Weekly”, which could include daily shows, or TV shows that release three episodes in their first week, then come out weekly. 

Wholly-Owned – One of three general types of ownership for content on a broadcast, cable, premium channel or streamer. When a streamer, broadcaster or studio “wholly-owns” a piece of content, it means they paid the upfront production and marketing costs, meaning they’ll control 100% of the future profits and distribution of a piece of content. 

Windowing (film) – A film typically goes through a series of exclusive or non-exclusive “windows”, a specific distribution method for a set period of time. Historically, this meant going from theaters to home entertainment to premium cable and then beyond. In the streaming era, there’s a lot more variety. Here are the typical windows streaming:

  • Theatrical – When a movie goes to movie theaters, which almost always happens first.
  • First Run (straight-to-streaming) – When a film premieres on streaming first, exclusively.
  • First Run (day and date) – When a film premieres on streaming the same day as in theaters.
  • Early – When a film goes to streaming shorter than 45 days after the theatrical premiere.
  • Pay 1 – When a film goes to a streaming or premium cable platform, starting 45 to 90 days after theatrical premiere. Historically, films waited much longer, but the window has shrunk over time.
  • Pay 1b – When a film switches streamers during the Pay-1 window. For example, NBC-Universal kids films go to Netflix after four months on Peacock, and adult films go to Prime Video.
  • Pay 2 – When a film goes to a new platform one to two years after theatrical release on a streamer. Technically, a film getting viewership after its first year on streaming is in the Pay-2 window.
  • Library – Any window after the first three years.

Windowing (TV) – TV shows have fewer windows than film. In the olden days, this meant moving to syndication, then home entertainment (DVDs) and cable licensing. Nowadays this can mean multiple windows on streaming. Here’s how I define them for my weekly streaming ratings report:

  • First Run – A TV show premiering on a broadcast, cable or streamer.
  • Second Run – A TV show appearing on a second broadcast or cable channel, or streamer. Many broadcast and cable shows appear simultaneously on streaming.
  • Pay 2 – A TV show appearing on a streamer one year after initially debuting.
  • Library – A TV show appearing two years after initially debuting.

Winner-Take-All – When one firm or company takes the majority of profits from a given industry. For example, in ride sharing, most observers believe every city will end up as “winner take all” since the benefits to a company as their network grows will help them outpace rivals. In search, Google won in a winner-take-all market. In streaming, many analysts think it is “winner-take-all” but many others do not. (Like me.) Since this is my set of definitions, I’ll add that there is also a habit of assuming that firms trying to monopolize industries are just benefiting from “Winner Take All” economics, when sometimes they create those economics. For example, Google bought several companies that sold internet ads, and then used that to cement its dominance in internet advertising.

The Winner’s Curse – One of my favorite concepts from economics, in an auction, often the “winner” loses because they bid the most, which by definition means that they’re most optimistic buyer. This means, ironically, that the winner often loses money. For example, if folks are bidding for an oil well, the odds that the well becomes a gusher are low, but probably normally distributed. Thus, the person who bids the most has the most optimistic forecasts, which is unlikely to come true.

X

Y

Z

#’s

3C-STP-4Ps or Marketing Framework – One of my favorite frameworks, this tool (created by the Harvard Business School) helps you analyze a product to bring it to market. It is summarized as the “3C-STP-4P”, which represents these categories:  

Customers
Competition
Company
Segmentation
Targeting
Positioning
Product
Pricing
Placement
Promotion

This tool can be modified by industry. For example, I like to add “context/financials” to the 3Cs, and for streaming, I break “product” into “product-content” and “product-user experience”.

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The Entertainment Strategy Guy

Former strategy and business development guy at a major streaming company. But I like writing more than sending email, so I launched this website to share what I know.

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