Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Deep dives into Nielsen and other data that provide insights into streaming.
For the first time this year, the streamers finally released a lot of new seasons of television. But unlike next week, it was a fairly underwhelming crop of new series. The third seasons of Netflix’s The Upshaws and Hulu’s Wu-Tang Clan: An American Saga came out, but neither has been
We’re still working our ways through a relatively quiet period in the streaming wars, but these things are relative. I mean, I still tracked eighteen new streaming releases this week! That’s low for streaming, but still a lot of shows to analyze. (And I have a cool, cool, cool chart
On a whim, last October, I started collecting news stories about which TV shows were getting renewed or cancelled, though I wasn’t quite sure what I’d do with the links. Mostly, I wanted to know if the TV shows I cover each week in the Streaming Ratings Report had already
One of the questions I have about feature film distribution is whether all the (traditional) studios have it backwards. Right now, the studios are in a rush to shorten their feature film distribution windows—especially theatrical—as much as possible to take advantage of the marketing buzz of the initial window to
I hope you enjoyed the deep, deep, dives into streaming ratings of 2022 I put out over the last two weeks. Not to brag, but these were far and away some of my most successful articles I’ve ever written, and I couldn’t be happier, not just that the articles did so
The dog days of January. If the last week of Christmas is “Sweeps Week”, that might be the term for the month of January. As we saw (somewhat) last year, the start of a new calendar year tends to be slow in streaming. (BTW, the theatrical calendar has long considered
If I thought last week was “light”, then this week is a feather. Sure, we had one big hit (Ginny & Georgia), but after that, the streamers released barely any notable titles. Which is actually a good thing! (For me, at least.) It gives me space to opine/revisit other topics
I try to keep track of everything that comes out each week, and man, some days still surprise me. Like the Friday after Christmas. Check this out: What do Netflix and Discovery+ know (or not know) that everyone else doesn’t? (Note: They Cloned Tyrone was delayed until 2023.) This was
This week is the calm before storm, with the “storm” being the last week of the year “Streaming Sweeps Week”. For those who don’t know, historically, “sweeps” months were a time period where Nielsen collected paper diaries four times per year. Knowing this, broadcasters put on their best programming to
I spent the last week deep in the “data trenches”. (For those curious, the data trenches are next to my Excel bunker.) I updated my estimates for U.S. streaming subscribers for each streamer, the most “apples-to-apples” look I think you’ll find for US subscriber counts in America. Then, yesterday, I