Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Starting last August, Nielsen began releasing a weekly American top 10 most watched list for streaming video. I’ve been using it ever since. Nielsen mixed together TV and movies, and new (“originals”), second-run and library (“acquired”) titles on the same list. In their year-end top ten list, though, Nielsen flipped
It’s rare–though not as rare as it seems–for a company to compete not just for the top spot in my weekly judgement of the most important story in entertainment, but to have two different stories compete. HBO Max has actually done that a few times, and so has Netflix and
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
How many folks bought Mulan? That’s the buzziest question in the streaming wars right now. Since we don’t know, we’re left to pick at the analytics tea leaves. Fortunately, as each day passes, we’ve got more tea leaves to pick through. (Partly, the question is relevant because it gets to
We’ve ended the “Asterisk Extraordinaire Earnings Season”. Giant tech companies did well; lots of other folks did poorly; what happens in the future is up in the air. One company that did particularly poorly was The Walt Disney Company, which wasn’t much of a surprise, given that all their theme
Do you remember last year before Disney+ launched and I had this series of recommendations for how they could catch up to Netflix? They were… 1. Go dirt cheap on the prices. [Check] 2. Schedule weekly releases for adults [Check] 3. Bundle with other streamers [Check] 4. Get all your
Tis the season for subscriber numbers. DAZN has 8 million subscribers! Hallmark Movies Now has 750K! And CuriosityStream has 10 million! Wait, what’s CuriosityStream? How can something I’d never heard off pass 10 million subscribers? Well, that mystery, and the rising importance of subscribers for evaluating success or failure combine
Is content is king? After this week, how could anyone doubt it? Disney+ showed what having the biggest movies of the last few decades can do for a streaming launch. But that’s not all! Apple landed one of the biggest free agent producers in former HBO chief Richard Plepler, for
I hope any of my readers impacted by the ongoing wildfires in California are okay. This is a problem as a community California/America/the globe needs to address, but that’s not the subject of this column. The Most Important Story of the Week – The Streaming Revolution Will Be Metricized The
Disney+ started the week off with a social media bang! A massive Twitter scroll of every film coming to their platform organized chronologically. This became the topic of the week for the Screengrab crew and led exhaustive articles like Julia Alexander’s at The Verge. I’d been mulling doing an update