Explaining the Business of Entertainment
It’s tough to stand out in the crowd of reporting this week on the Viacom-CBS merger. I was primed to pass strategic judgement on the merger, but don’t feel quite ready to do that (yet). Instead, let’s try the good ol fashioned Entertainment Strategy Guy slightly different take. The Most
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
This sub-bullet in CNBC’s “prepare you for the earnings report” article caught my attention: On the surface, it’s clearly true. One bad earnings report won’t power Disney+ or HBO Max to 150 million subscribers. But as I reflected on it, the key variable is “when is soon?” By the end
Back in the halcyon days of April, Netflix had just crushed another quarterly earnings report and it was riding high. In Decider, I said their report had something for both sides—for the haters and the lovers, skeptics and the supporters, bears and the bulls. Well, Netflix finally had a bad
I love Netflix earnings report day. It’s the one day of the year where Netflix has to go “off-background”–read this Columbia Journalism Review article by Brian Merchant on the insidiousness of that practice–and has to give real numbers. That doesn’t, though, make it the most important story of the week.
A “Most Important” column on a Thursday? What’s going on with the Entertainment Strategy Guy’s usual Friday column? Well, an out of town wedding, which means I’ll be on the road tomorrow. So enjoy an early bite at the entertainment biz apple. Also, next week, with a birthday, Fourth of
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
Distracted by a new birth in my (extended) family, and a big article that will launch next week, I didn’t get to write a lot for this website this week. But I’ll be back in a big way next week. In the meantime, I had lots of stories to choose
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
Last week, I was thrilled to announce that I had a guest article at TVRev, and I’ve followed it up with an article over at Decider. The folks over at Decider asked me about the Hulu price decrease a few weeks back—which as I mention, was really a promotional price