Explaining the Business of Entertainment
In December of 2018, Netflix let loose with their first datecdote™. They told us this… Took off my blindfold this morning to discover that 45,037,125 Netflix accounts have already watched Bird Box — best first 7 days ever for a Netflix film! pic.twitter.com/uorU3cSzHR — NetflixFilm (@NetflixFilm) December 28, 2018 But
As of Wednesday, I was flailing for a story of the week. Well, thank you Thursday! And happy Halloween to everyone. Stay safe. Lots of stories, but we have to go with Netflix… (As always, sign up for my newsletter to get all my writings and my favorite entertainment business
In lieu of a big article this week—I was a pinch busy on some other projects and I’m also digging through a lot of viewership data from Nielsen—I wanted to shout out two guest articles that I never linked to on this website. – First, I wrote about Netflix’s viewership
Honestly, it’s either feast or famine with news in entertainment. Some weeks, I look at all the stories and can’t figure out what is the most important. Then other weeks, I have a plethora to choose from. This week fell on the “plethora” end of the spectrum. Two stories led
It’s fairly clear Netflix is cancelling more shows sooner than they have in year’s past. The latest victim is the space epic Away. This move is more than a streamer cancelling an expensive show that underperformed, it shows that Netflix is embracing (some) cost discipline as it enters its third
One of the big questions every quarter is whether or not Netflix will hit its quarterly subscriber growth estimate. This leaves analysts scrambling to read the tea leaves from app downloads and what not to try to figure out if they are on track or not. Tomorrow (Tuesday Oct 20th)
This felt like a light week on the big stories. In entertainment at least; in politics, well good luck keeping up. My eye was drawn, then, to the Disney news of Tuesday that they’ve re-organized to focus on streaming. Meanwhile, another Netflix executive left the original side of the house.
Over the last six weeks, Nielsen has released a top ten list of the most streamed series/films by total minutes viewed. I’ve been taking this data and adding a layer of detail on top, specifically who produces and who distributes what shows on Netflix, Amazon and so on. Now that
(Welcome to my series on an “Intelligence Preparation of the “Streaming Wars” Battlefield”. Combining my experience as a former Army intelligence officer and streaming video strategy planner, I’m applying a military planning framework to the “streaming wars” to explain where entertainment is right now, and where I think it is
Reed Hastings is famous for declaring his competitors to be anyone that isn’t a fellow streamer. Famously, he said a couple of years back that Fortnite is bigger competition than other streamers. (He’s previously mentioned sleep.) If you think about competition using Porter’s Five Forces, then Hastings is obviously right,