Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Welcome to September. The kids are back in school, football is starting, and award season is bearing down on us like the Huns invading Rome. Meanwhile, the streaming wars will have their first battles, “The Invasion of Netflix-Land” by Disney’s 4th Army across the land will be joined Apple’s Airborne
One of the goals of my website is to try to hold myself to a process. A process means I let the data guide my opinions, not fit new data or anecdotes into preconceived narratives. A good example of this comes from last weekend’s D23 Expo. This picture circulated widely
If the streaming wars were a medieval war, original content are the mounted knights. Especially the pricey TV series. Like knights of the medieval ages, these extremely expensive weapons will likely win the war for one side or the other. This would make the siege engines the tech stack and
When a company beats quarterly expectations, the CEO usually celebrates it. When the company misses–as Bob Iger’s Disney did this quarter, well–the CEOs say they don’t care about expectations. I agree with the latter position, though I wouldn’t celebrate beating expectations either! For box office or earnings, it’s what’s actually
The best lingering question from the Disney presentation has nothing to do with Disney: How long until we get these type of details from Comcast-NBCU, AT&T-Warners or Apple? The wild enthusiasm that accompanied Disney’s parade of content is what Apple was going for two weeks ago. But Disney actually did
Last week, Bob Iger said in an interview with Barron’s that Disney had no plans to start releasing new Star Wars films—by which he means the ones that will come after Episode 9, releasing later this year—on Disney Plus, their soon-to-be streaming service. I agreed with this move. Some didn’t.