Explaining the Business of Entertainment
HBO Max launched last week! A $4 billion endeavor that required a monumental merger to make it happen. Can one measly column capture all my thoughts on HBO Max’s launch? Of course not. So here are my extra thoughts, strategic insights and, in a first, a mail bag of questions/comments
Since May kicked off, I’ve been back to writing two articles per week and have had my highest traffic month since launch. So thank you to all the readers and supporters. If you want to stay on top of all my writings, the best method is to either subscribe to
Hopefully everyone enjoyed the annual football spectacular known as the Super Bowl. Instead of parsing which ads did the best–we don’t have a data driven way to do that–or reviewing the half-time show–that’s what critics are for, I guess–we need to look for business lessons. Since we don’t have the
Whoever writes the book on the (hashtag) streaming wars may call this week the seven days that truly started the fighting. Sort of like how Germany and Japan were doing bellicose things like building navies and mobilizing armies before World War II truly kick off in earnest. Disney started the
Between a host of streaming TV news–Peacocks, Portals and Seinfelds oh my–and old fashioned business news–AT&T!!!–this week felt like we had a lot of options for the biggest story of the week. But let’s avoid the big conglomerates to talk about the behind-the-scenes heroes, the writers. (Programming note: between a
This week, The Starters (an NBA talk show and wildly popular podcast) was cancelled by…well we don’t know who. The Washington Post identified a few potential suspects. It could have been Turner or NBA TV–for the usual ratings reasons–or it could have been their corporate overlord, AT&T, mandating cuts across
Let’s get this update out on a Friday like it is intended. Most Important Story of the Week – Mergers and Acquisitions in 2018 Update (Finally!) For some reason, PwC never released their 2018 update for Media and Telecommunications merger & acquisitions update. Or if they did, I never saw
Since I took off two Fridays ago, I had a lot of content to sift through for this week’s update. If you have to know, I took off to see Avengers: Endgame (loved it), then, my wife and I threw a baby shower (she threw it; I cleaned), and then
My goal when I started this week’s column was to avoid having another monster long column. We’ll see how I do this week, but I’m not optimistic. There was enough news for two weeks last week, and next week heralds much, much more. Before our most important story, let’s look
Early last week, I had an easy leading candidate for the “Most Important Story of the Week”. Then, on Thursday. AT&T had their “I am Spartacus” moment. Should I change just because that story took over Twitter and would get me more traffic? Nope, but it’ll be a contender. Most