Explaining the Business of Entertainment
What a difference a year makes. In 2020, when trying to write who “won the year”, I had to parse multiple data sources, plus Covid-19’s lockdowns made everything tougher to judge what truly did well and what folks happened to stream for a few weeks in March. In 2021, with
It’s the end of the year, and I’m feeling charitable. When you write on ratings and strategy, you toss out a lot barbs, snark and sarcastic comments. Today, I want to make amends and issue some (half-hearted and heavily-caveated) apologies. Before that, I just had an article published on Whats-On-Netflix
I’m always on the look out for a good story that I think matters but that barely registered in the media coverage. Over the last few weeks we got a perfect example. If instead you want to worry about Disney’s subscriber additions—and I may do just that in another outlet
I know what you’re here to read this week: my analysis on Squid Game launching from 3.4 million hours in its first weekend to 31.8 million hours in its second week. Yikes, that’s a jump! Well, I’m going to disappoint. My Squid Game thoughts were so good, I sent them
As The Stranger told The Dude, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. Such was last week’s weekly column for me. (By the way, check out this great article on the origins of the quote above.) I had a lot of thoughts percolating about the most
(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
The biggest story of the last two week’s is “Apple v Fortnite”. Yet, for the second week it hasn’t made this list. Like the AT&T-Warner Bros. merger or the Disney-Fox merger, this is a seismic event we can tell will change things in the moment. However, that “moment” will last
July was a big month for straight-to-streaming films. With theaters still shut down in the United States (and in large parts of the world) streaming is where the action is. A couple of weeks back, I started dabbling with Google Trends to look at the big streaming movies in July
Some weeks, you barely have any news to cover. Then, other weeks the deluge comes. Buzzy stories. Executive movement stories. Sneaky scoops. And then Barstool drama. To help settle the issue, I polled the audience. Everyone wants to talk about Joe Rogan at Spotify. But that’s a $100 million dollar
My latest article is up at Decider. The simple answer to the headline is, “No, not really.” I had mentioned in my weekly column a few weeks back hearing rumors that, well, no one was watching Apple TV+. This article allowed me to dive a bit deeper into the subject