Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Folks, let’s call it. This is the week that Netflix won the streaming wars. Last week, Netflix owned almost every spot on the TV lists. This week they went even further: they have every TV series on the top Original and Acquired Nielsen lists. This war is over. Kidding! The
College football returns this week. Will it impact streaming ratings? Probably not. If anything, it’s the reverse: football comes back and broadcast ratings go up! But it got me thinking. Because college football is boring now. The seemingly same four schools go to the College Football Playoffs every year. Boring!
In the middle of July, teenage vampire dramas had a moment: Like all things Netflix, the “Twilight takeover” caused a kerfuffle between the warring “Netflix bears” and “Netflix bulls”. Is the online war of words as fierce as the battle between vampires and werewolves à la Twilight? You bet. So
– Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale is their biggest show, but that’s only good for the 18th best streaming season among all streamers. – After a great year of action films in 2020, 2021 has seen a few Netflix action films underperform their predecessors. – Loki is the biggest series by
– Disney and Netflix are in the “top tier” of US streaming subscribers, with 69.1 million and 66.8 million respectively. Disney just passed Netflix for top streaming subscriber in the US. – HBO, Prime Video, and Showtime/Paramount+ make up the next tier of streamers. The latest issue of the
– The Boss Baby film (on Peacock) drove additional viewership to the Boss Baby TV series (on Netflix). This shows the value of marketing in driving awareness. – Black Widow surpassed Mulan for PVOD viewership in its first weekend. – Virgin River did very strong numbers for Netflix, with 24.2
Here’s a funny feature of NBC’s Olympic coverage: Everyone is the greatest athlete in the history of athletics. I don’t want to call out specific athletes. That’s not nice. But if you watched the introduction, featuring The Rock, you’d be forgiven for thinking that not only were these American athletes
– Netflix only released four “datecdotes” for film for Q2, one of the lowest totals on record. – In TV, Netflix released 8 datecdotes, and they were generally lower than past quarters. – Luca has the most viewership, according to Nielsen, of any film through its first two weeks, with
– For the first time in 2021, weekly top ten viewership surpassed the same week’s viewership in 2020. – Manifest, the recently cancelled NBC series produced by Warner Bros., is a hit for Netflix and has the third biggest single week of viewership since 2021 started. But it does benefit from having
Sometimes, in a midst of lots of disruption, we—the proverbial we being “society”, “business analysts” or just people on Twitter—forget that as much as things change, they mostly stay the same. That’s the lesson for today. Two lessons actually. While streaming ratings use new terminology, the business principles underlying them