Explaining the Business of Entertainment
[Hey, you may be thinking, this isn’t a Streaming Ratings Report! True. I spent almost all of this week (and some of last week) updating my “U.S. Subscriber Estimates for Q1 of 2021.” Given that I just published a sneak peek at the Ankler yesterday, I wanted to put up
We’re switching things up this week. Since Nielsen delayed this week’s streaming ratings data, you’ll get the “Most Important Story of the Week” column today, and the “Streaming Ratings Report” on Monday. Sound good? If so, then onto the big story of the week, which I’ve been itching to write
Jerry Seinfeld had a terrific joke about the news: somehow there was always enough for the daily newspaper. Never more, never less. Well, the internet blew that up by magnitudes. It turns out we–as a society/community–can crank out tons of words on anything. But is it all “news”? Maybe? Probably
Hollywood can have a short memory. All it takes is one good weekend, and suddenly Hollywood is back! Since we went long on Wednesday writing about Apple, app stores and distribution fees, here’s all the other stories that caught my eye in the realm of entertainment business strategy. (Apologies for
Last year, the big question after Covid-19 shuttered theaters, stopped productions and generally upended the movie industry was, “What comes next?” Specifically, how long would the around-90-days-of-theatrical exclusivity last? With some recent news stories, I think we have an answer. (Sign up for my newsletter to get all my columns,
– Private equity group Blackstone bought Reese Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine for $500 million in cash at a $900 million valuation. – The best analogy to this deal is Maker Studios, another big payday for a “next generation media company” that failed to deliver on its high payday, leaving
If you’re reading this article, you read the trades. You subscribe to multiple other newsletters. So when Scarlett Johanson sued Disney last week, every Rich, Matt and Lucas (the entertainment journalist equivalents to Tom, Dick and Harry) provided the simple explanation: The big studios are prioritizing stock price over film
Last week, I used Nielsen’s top ten list to track their total viewership in April 2020 to April of this year. The question I raised, but couldn’t answer, was whether the decline in total top ten viewership applied to the rest of Netflix’s catalogue. Enter Nielsen’s The Gauge! (Which I
For the second week, we have another “first”! This time, the first Hulu Original to earn a spot on the Nielsen top ten “originals” list. At some point, we’ll run out of firsts, but for now setting new records is fun! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report compiles data from Nielsen’s
Last week was my most viewed streaming ratings report to date. I guess that’s what happens when you write about WandaVision! (And as a result get featured in WordPress’ reader application.) The theme of the week is “slow”. We didn’t have a lot of buzzy new titles, and as a