Explaining the Business of Entertainment
After a few weeks without a lot of news, we finally got a week with some stories to sink our teeth into. But how to choose? The late breaking story that Disney is ending it’s Disney Channel in the UK is a pretty big deal, but then what about Microsoft
(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
Some weeks, you barely have any news to cover. Then, other weeks the deluge comes. Buzzy stories. Executive movement stories. Sneaky scoops. And then Barstool drama. To help settle the issue, I polled the audience. Everyone wants to talk about Joe Rogan at Spotify. But that’s a $100 million dollar
My most popular article of the year is clearly this buzzy headline titled, “Netflix is a Broadcast Channel” Why? Since Netflix is the sexy topic in entertainment—a titan of digital subscriptions—my article probably got some clicks because it’s an “aggressively moderate” take on Netflix. (A lane I’ve decided to lean
Welcome back to my weekly column! Each week I try to suss out the most important story in entertainment. Since I have several weeks worth of news stories to cull through, this week I’ll have to take care of some house cleaning to start. First,I’ll cover my thoughts on the
One of my big frustrations with the “debate” over Netflix is how little we know. That’s a gripe I share with a lot of folks. One of my big frustrations with coverage of Netflix is how seldom folks try to step into the gap and estimate data points for Netflix.
As I stared at the list of stories I wanted to put in my weekly column last week, I couldn’t help but notice that they all connected back to some previous article I’ve written before. So here’s an “All Update” column, starting with a distribution story that hits on the
With the Oscars airing on Sunday, it seems appropriate to join the crowd asking, “What will happen to the mid-budget theatrical film?” This seems to always come up this time of year as folks–usually critics–bemoan that Hollywood doesn’t “make these types of movies any more”. But what types of moveis?
The Los Angeles region, and the entire basketball universe, is reeling from the death of Kobe Bryant, the legendary Lakers basketball player. If you’re looking for the “Hollywood” connection, I have two. First, the Lakers and “showtime” basketball have always been an influential part of the entertainment ecosystem in Los
In the olden days, the real value in a TV show was the long tail selling to syndication. A network, say NBC, would pay for the first run, but then constant reruns would make the true owner, say Warner Bros, all the profit. When streaming came, say Netflix, that was