Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Sometimes, it turns out you can’t predict the future. Which doesn’t stop us from trying, all the time, whether we realize it or not. That’s basically the theme of my latest article at Linked-In. It shows how small sample sizes and a lack of data make some efforts at predictions
(Before we start, I launched a newsletter! It’s weekly and it’s short, and I explained my logic here. Sign up here.) My goal is to try, as best I can, to explain the complicated parts of the entertainment biz, trying to walk readers through what I’m doing and how I’m doing
As soon as you start learning about the business of entertainment, you learn this aphorism. “Content is King”. I yell this from the rooftops too. I learned it so early that I can’t even credit one specific class or book or article with it. Searching my articles, I found that
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
Let’s get right into Part II of my a quest to find SuperCBS’ competitive advantage. (Reminder: SuperCBS is my nickname for ViacomCBS.) Competitive Advantage: Become a Content Arm’s Dealer Why? I’ll be honest, I didn’t come up with this on my own. I first read it on Twitter by Rich
When I worked at a studio, I found it funny that we referred to our development execs as the creatives. Not that they were creating the shows, but compared to finance or strategy folks, development execs were way more creative. They read scripts all day, took tons of pitches, provided
Welcome back from the quiet period. Hollywood’s traditional two week break that starts early and ends late, turning two weeks into four weeks of time off every year. Since no one was doing anything, we had a pretty quiet period. Which means we can linger on a longer story… Most
My dad didn’t like the ending of Empire Strikes Back. His felt that it didn’t finish the story, it left off with a, “See you next movie!” conclusion. That irritated him. He hasn’t seen Avengers: Infinity War yet, so you know he won’t like that. My article yesterday probably did
You want to know a secret? The underlying secret to all media and entertainment? The peak behind the curtain that explains all you see in film, TV, music and more? Here it is. “Logarithmically distributed returns.” Once you learn it you can’t forget it. Like how to do a magic
With this update, we’re officially out of the slowest, dumbest month of news, August. Here’s my round-up of the “Most Important Story of the Week”, a few days late because of that blasted long weekend. (I’ll save my rants on how much better America would be with more 3 and