Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Deep dives into Nielsen and other data that provide insights into streaming.
Here’s a funny feature of NBC’s Olympic coverage: Everyone is the greatest athlete in the history of athletics. I don’t want to call out specific athletes. That’s not nice. But if you watched the introduction, featuring The Rock, you’d be forgiven for thinking that not only were these American athletes
– Netflix only released four “datecdotes” for film for Q2, one of the lowest totals on record. – In TV, Netflix released 8 datecdotes, and they were generally lower than past quarters. – Luca has the most viewership, according to Nielsen, of any film through its first two weeks, with
– For the first time in 2021, weekly top ten viewership surpassed the same week’s viewership in 2020. – Manifest, the recently cancelled NBC series produced by Warner Bros., is a hit for Netflix and has the third biggest single week of viewership since 2021 started. But it does benefit from having
Sometimes, in a midst of lots of disruption, we—the proverbial we being “society”, “business analysts” or just people on Twitter—forget that as much as things change, they mostly stay the same. That’s the lesson for today. Two lessons actually. While streaming ratings use new terminology, the business principles underlying them
Listening to a recent podcast, I heard a common refrain: we have no idea what is doing well in streaming! Frankly, this is soooooo 2018. (Just like “soooooo” is so 2000s.) We’re in the “streaming ratings era” now (™ EntStrategyGuy) and have been since March of 2020. Between Nielsen, Google Trends,
A few years back, working at a major streamer, I tried to make the case that at some point Nielsen (and others) would tell the world how many folks were watching our shows. As a company, we were focused on preventing that; the currency of viewership would be a highly
One of the craziest parts of the streaming wars is actually how forward-thinking the traditional media companies were. Way back in 2007, they teamed up and created a joint venture that became Hulu, a streamer featuring TV episodes the day after they aired on broadcast. (But only, inexplicably, five episodes
Not since the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact—a 1982 sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey for those not versed in obscure 1980s science fiction—has something Jupiter-related caused this much consternation. On the one hand, Netflix is touting Jupiter’s Legacy as a success that will birth an entire universe
I want to assure you, good readers, that this report is not becoming “bi-weekly”. And “bi-weekly” in the sense that it comes out every other week. (If folks keep subscribing—and want it—I could see a world where we publish twice a week. Man “bi-weekly” is a confusing term.) If you
I leave for one week of vacation and come back to not one, but two big merger announcements. If all the merger news of the last two weeks shows us anything, it’s the value of top tier content. And what’s the easiest way—allegedly—to do that? By mining “IP” to make