Explaining the Business of Entertainment
It’s been a minute since I’ve written a pure strategy column. Between adding new databases for my streaming ratings report, writing columns for the Ankler, and preparing some other stuff, I’ve been busy. And my weekly call out of the most important story in entertainment fell by the wayside. Frankly,
– The Boss Baby film (on Peacock) drove additional viewership to the Boss Baby TV series (on Netflix). This shows the value of marketing in driving awareness. – Black Widow surpassed Mulan for PVOD viewership in its first weekend. – Virgin River did very strong numbers for Netflix, with 24.2
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
Listening to a recent podcast, I heard a common refrain: we have no idea what is doing well in streaming! Frankly, this is soooooo 2018. (Just like “soooooo” is so 2000s.) We’re in the “streaming ratings era” now (™ EntStrategyGuy) and have been since March of 2020. Between Nielsen, Google Trends,
I leave for one week of vacation and come back to not one, but two big merger announcements. If all the merger news of the last two weeks shows us anything, it’s the value of top tier content. And what’s the easiest way—allegedly—to do that? By mining “IP” to make
Folks, we’re on the cusp of a big moment for our data analysis. For the first time, I’ll be able to compare the latest week’s Nielsen’s rankings to the previous year’s trends. Combined with the fact that we have more than years worth of Netflix Top Ten data too—I use
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
If you’ve been reading my “Steaming Ratings Report” for the last few weeks, you might have noticed it has been fairly Netflix-centric. Netflix is the 600 pound gorilla in the streaming wars. Heck, it’s more like a Mighty Joe Young or Rampage-sized super gorilla, marauding over the globe, buying sequel
When I sit down each week to pull data for the “Streaming Ratings Report”, it honestly feels like Easter. (Why Easter? Well, we’re closer to that than Christmas, and my eldest child is excited for candy delivered in plastic eggs.) This week, my chocolate-filled egg was a new color on
Week to week, other stories may be the “most important”, but that doesn’t mean that Covid-19 isn’t still the biggest story. As I wrote in a very long article on February 19th, we’re moving away from “lockdowns” as the story to “the reopening of society”. However, that article was limited