(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.)
I hope everyone around the world suffering from record heat waves is doing okay. The temperature is already up in Southern California, but obviously not nearly as bad as parts of Europe. With a super El Nińo coming this year, I worry it will get even worse. Yes, we know what’s causing this heat—it’s the carbon, duh—but we really aren’t making enough progress.
I’m not “environmental strategy guy”, but if I were, I’d have some ideas of what I’d try. Honestly, for years I’ve been intrigued by the work of the folks at MEER—whose plan, super simply, is to put up mirrors to reflect heat (while continuing the important work of decarbonization)—but I’m frustrated this idea hasn’t made more progress. (Other geo-engineering groups seem to get better press.)
With heat like this—cancelling events, hurting economies and, most importantly, killing people—it seems like the time to push solutions! The “mirrors on the ground” solution has barely been tried. While entertainment companies may not “feel the heat”, lots of outdoors/experiential industries—concerts, theme parks and so on—will. Even movie theaters could benefit, since mirrors could help lower AC costs, which I imagine is not an insignificant expense, especially in the hotter areas of the country. So I do think the entertainment industry should prioritize this issue.
Anyways, let’s get back into the entertainment strategy. I was about to write, “Hey, this week we don’t have any mergers and entertainment news to dive into,” but that’s not really true, since we had more updates on Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. But the big story of the week involves a streamer and a Big Tech platform bundling their respective streamers. So I’ll write about the updates on Paramount buying Warner Bros., Versant making some moves, and a whole lot more.
But we start with a surprising deal: Peacock licensing their content to YouTube Premium.
Let’s dive in!
Most Important Story of the Week – Peacock’s Pricey Premium Partnership
The story of the week is Comcast’s NBC-Universal’s Peacock making a deal with Google’s YouTube’s YouTube Premium subscription product to embed their content. And I’ll say this up front:
Someone made a terrific deal.
The question is who. And I’ll be honest: I don’t know. Let me explain why, including why this deal exists, the pros and cons for each side, the biggest unknown, and what that says about the streaming wars.
Customers Love Bundles (But YouTube Has Its Own Issues)
We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out…
- Why customers love bundles…
- But why I’m worried about YouTube’s integration…
- How Peacock is trading scale for control…
- And the reason they likely made this deal…
- The odd budget math for this deal…
- Whether or not I think the Paramount-Skydance/WBD deal is more likely after the latest settlement…
- Versant making moves and why that’s good for Hollywood…
- Another distributor going out of business…
- …and a whole lot more!
…please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
