(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.)
Is there anything I love more than finding a dose of conventional wisdom and smashing it to pieces?
My job is to spot trends and spot them before the traditional and source-based newsletters see them. That often means crushing the conventional thinking I read and hear in the press. And today I have two or three new, spicy trends I’ve spotted…
But before I unveil those, it’s been a minute since I ran down shout outs to this newsletter/my work, so let’s quickly hit some of those:
- First off, last week’s article on how I’m using AI seems to have really resonated with readers, which I love. Even Sean McNulty gave it an “above-the-fold” shout out in “The Wakeup”! Nice!
- Alex Rollins Berg of Underexposed (which just celebrated its 50th newsletter anniversary) tossed me two shouts outs recently, sharing my article on Google’s antitrust case and my article on why movies should go to theaters, a streaming ratings mini-dive that also resonated with readers.
- Jen Topping of the Business of TV newsletter cited my work on tax credits, my Ankler article on the cable business, and my argument for a Google/YouTube breakup. Her newsletter is rocketing up my ranking of must-read industry Substacks.
- Friend of the newsletter, Brandon Katz, wrote a great Observer piece about Trump’s proposed tariffs. Kasey Moore, another friend of the site, gave my “No news is bad news” theory a shout out as well. And The MMA Draw recommended my newsletter as the go-to for streaming ratings news.
- Matt Price of Too Much Film School cited my article on the all-in-one streamer being dead.
- Finally, Across the Movie Aisle cited the streaming ratings report when discussing whether there is a religious films bubble. More people need to follow Sonny’s lead and cite actual viewership data!
Now let’s dive into this week’s big topics, including recapping the viewership of of a few major TV series finales, including The Last of Us, MobLand, Your Friends and Neighbors, and The Handmaid’s Tale, breaking down a somewhat obvious connection between box office and streaming viewership (via Captain America: Brave New World, Fountain of Youth and Mickey 17), a quick check-in on Andor, Prime Video’s latest star-studded drama, a big weekend for sports ratings, the return of a favorite pundits, all the flops, bombs and misses for the week, and a whole lot more.
But before that, let’s look at how competitive the top ten charts have become…
(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 May 26th to June 2nd.)
Competition – I’m Staking a Claim: The Streaming Content Wars Are Getting More Competitive
I’m starting out with a quick check-in on the “original content” battlefields of the streaming wars, because I want to stake a rhetorical claim. And…yeah, I’m going to throw up a paywall pretty early today because, well, it’s subscription renewal time, plus this is the type of analysis you can’t get anywhere else.
Anyway, here’s the claim:
The original streaming TV business is ABSOLUTELY getting more competitive each year.
This topic is so juicy, I’ve already started work on a longer article on it. And I’ll try to get that look to you after the July 4th weekend. That’s basically a warning that I’ve got some big, fun articles/data dives coming. (A lot of which will be saved for paying subscribers…)
Still, I want to show what inspired me to make this claim. First, I was pulling the data for Samba TV’s top ten chart, and a whopping seven different streamers made their combined top ten chart, with only Peacock missing out:
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