Explaining the Business of Entertainment
[Hey, you may be thinking, this isn’t a Streaming Ratings Report! True. I spent almost all of this week (and some of last week) updating my “U.S. Subscriber Estimates for Q1 of 2021.” Given that I just published a sneak peek at the Ankler yesterday, I wanted to put up
Sometimes you can immediately recognize certain strategic moves as game changing. The big, obviously huge moves, like AT&T buying Time-Warner. Like NBC announcing Peacock. Like Bob Iger stepping down. You don’t need me to tell you those news stories matter. But if a company is a “collection of decisions”—strategy is
May was truly “media merger madness month”. On May 17th, Discovery announced they were merging with Warner Media. (I was on vacation.) On May 26th, Amazon announced they were buying MGM. (Then it was Memorial Day weekend.) Then last week I had a consulting gig I couldn’t say no to.
Two and a half months back, I made a bold call. Looking at the pace of vaccinations, the growth of that growth and the incredible effectiveness of vaccines, I said, “By May, theaters will be back!” Since the only thing more valuable than making predictions is checking to see if
Last week, the NFL media rights story went from “potential” to “actual” news. (The latter happens, the former is rumors.) Not to toot my own horn, but I wrote last week that the Disney-NHL deal would set the template for the NFL deal (and all future rights deals). And I
Jeff Bezos ending his run as CEO of Amazon is certainly neé clearly neé absolutely the biggest story in business this week. Is it also the biggest story in media, entertainment and communications broadly? Sure. Bezos is a man who built Amazon to be “the everything store”. That includes your
(This is the last article in a three part series estimating how many US paid streaming subscribers there are in the US. Read the numbers here, and the first half of the explanation here.) If you’re wondering, yes, I deliberately wrote three (almost) contradictory headlines for the last two days. In
Let me tell you a pet peeve of mine. It’s folks citing how many Amazon Prime Video subscribers Amazon has. Because they don’t know. What you know, or have been told once, is how many Amazon Prime subscribers there are. With Prime comes access to Prime Video. We don’t know
Over the last six weeks, Nielsen has released a top ten list of the most streamed series/films by total minutes viewed. I’ve been taking this data and adding a layer of detail on top, specifically who produces and who distributes what shows on Netflix, Amazon and so on. Now that
(This is another entry in a multi-part series answering the question, “Who will win the battle to make the next Game of Thrones?” Read the previous articles here.) Two weeks ago, we checked back in on the news about the contenders vying to be the “next Game of Thrones”.