Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Someone sent me the headline about the flurry of House antitrust bills last Friday and said, “Story of the week?” That’s close. It was a big, important move, but it finished just shy from being “actual” news since it hasn’t passed the Senate yet. (And most bills go to die
Ever have a sense of deja vu? That’s one of my takes following the “massive month of M&A”. Because weren’t we just here? If I can take you back three years, to the summer of 2018. In the age before Covid, in June, a single judge in D.C. approved the
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
Well, living through the last two weeks of news has shown that the pace of news in 2021 isn’t slowing down. The most notable story for entertainment—though it was pushed off the front page within 24 hours—has to be the Democratic Senate wins in Georgia last Tuesday. This week, we’re
Disney is a marketer’s marketer. With the biggest brands in entertainment, they can serve up an investor day—an investor day that is for Wall Street investors!—that gets regular folks to turn in and trends on Twitter. Yet, for all the buzz, the basic story was that Disney is releasing Disney
Honestly, it’s either feast or famine with news in entertainment. Some weeks, I look at all the stories and can’t figure out what is the most important. Then other weeks, I have a plethora to choose from. This week fell on the “plethora” end of the spectrum. Two stories led
Seeing this Sonny Bunch tweet over last weekend was probably the most disappointing news I’ve seen in a while: Is this the final nail in the theatrical coffin for 2020? Probably. So let’s once again check in with theaters. (As always, if you want the Entertainment Strategy Guy in your
The first thing to know about the streaming wars is that it is really multiple wars simultaneously. One war is between the streamers. They compete fiercely against each other, with Netflix in the lead. (This is by far the most covered battleground.) If those are the established powers, the upstarts
In his very good book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, professor and globe trotting strategy consultant Richard Rumelt makes a key point about how evolving industry trends impact strategy. After describing why military strategy is obsessed with “the high ground”, and how companies often focus on the technological high ground, he makes
This week felt important for the news. Sure, we didn’t have any official announcements of new streaming services or any giant mergers, but between censorship, antitrust and trade wars, the world of politics is smashing (back) into the garden of media/tech. And the biggest government intervention was far away from