Category: Essay
The Great Irishman Challenge – Appendix: How Confident Am I?
(For the last few weeks, I’ve been debuting a series of articles answering a question posed to me by The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield: Will The Irishman Make Any Money? It’s a great question because it gets as so many of the challenges of the business of streaming video. Read the rest here, here, here and here.) On Twitter, TV ...
The 2019-2020 NBA-to-Entertainment Translator: The Update
Basketball, in my opinion, is a great testing ground for theories on strategy, valuing assets and data analysis. That’s why I developed my own “Value Over Replacement Executive” theory last fall. Or why I used the NBA to explain the misleading statistics here. Or compared overall deals to NBA trades here. Or why I’ll roll ...
If “Content is King”, who is everyone else?
As soon as you start learning about the business of entertainment, you learn this aphorism. “Content is King”. I yell this from the rooftops too. I learned it so early that I can’t even credit one specific class or book or article with it. Searching my articles, I found that I wrote it on 5 ...
Our Incredibly Consolidated Future, Part II: My Thoughts on Mega-Corporations
(To read my vision of a super-mega-conglomerated future—where six companies control all media, entertainment, technology and communications, click here.) Maybe I spent too much time on Wednesday’s essay. While I haven’t been working on it non-stop, I’ve been dabbling with it since December. Planning the next 12 years of mergers and acquisitions is fun. And ...
Our Incredibly Consolidated Future: What if all Media, Entertainment and Tech Companies Merged into 6 Mega-Conglomerates?
It’s been two weeks into the new year, but M&A is back! Well, not officially. As I wrote about in December, despite the first six months of movement (with all its tricky ways to calculate), the last six months were relatively quiet in M&A in media and entertainment. (The biggest deal was Pandora getting snapped ...
NBA-to-Entertainment Company Translator: Part III “The Rest”
(Read Part I and Part II here and here. The only downside of my NBA-to-Entertainment translator was that I only had 30 NBA teams to unleash my snark. In entertainment, we have many more companies that just couldn’t make the cut. So I had to expand the world of the NBA just a little bit ...
NBA-to-Entertainment Company Translator: Part II “The Western Conference”
In the heyday of Grantland, they featured a piece from the good people at Men in Blazers to develop an “NBA to English Premiere League” translator. It helped novices to soccer pick a team in the most popular sports league in the world. It worked so well, I adopted Chelsea as my premiere league squad ...
NBA-to-Entertainment Company Translator: Part I “The Eastern Conference”
Basketball is back! And the town of glitz and glamour, the home of showtime—Hollywood—is back! The stars aligned this off-season and the Lakers lured the biggest star in basketball, possibly the world (if you’re an American and ignore soccer), to the greatest franchise in sports history, the Los Angeles Lakers! Here’s The Hollywood Reporter basking ...