Explaining the Business of Entertainment
When Netflix releases their quarterly datecdotes (Click here for my explainer on that term, my phrase for any Netflix data point about households watching 2+ minutes of a film in the first 28 days), they tend to come in two flavors. Like, for example, this tweet: Or this quote in a
If you pushed me, the most “fun” story this week would be the fact that streaming in 2021 finally had a better week than the same time in 2020. But I covered that in my streaming ratings report. Fortunately, when Netflix leaks that they may radically expand their business, that’s
– For the first time in 2021, weekly top ten viewership surpassed the same week’s viewership in 2020. – Manifest, the recently cancelled NBC series produced by Warner Bros., is a hit for Netflix and has the third biggest single week of viewership since 2021 started. But it does benefit from having
Sometimes, in a midst of lots of disruption, we—the proverbial we being “society”, “business analysts” or just people on Twitter—forget that as much as things change, they mostly stay the same. That’s the lesson for today. Two lessons actually. While streaming ratings use new terminology, the business principles underlying them
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,
Last week, I used Nielsen’s top ten list to track their total viewership in April 2020 to April of this year. The question I raised, but couldn’t answer, was whether the decline in total top ten viewership applied to the rest of Netflix’s catalogue. Enter Nielsen’s The Gauge! (Which I
A few years back, working at a major streamer, I tried to make the case that at some point Nielsen (and others) would tell the world how many folks were watching our shows. As a company, we were focused on preventing that; the currency of viewership would be a highly
Spielberg. The Supreme Court and NCAA. Conan ending his TV show. This week in entertainment didn’t want for big names. But were any of them truly the “most important” story of the week? No. For that, let’s pull back and look at a slightly longer view. (Sign up for my
One of the craziest parts of the streaming wars is actually how forward-thinking the traditional media companies were. Way back in 2007, they teamed up and created a joint venture that became Hulu, a streamer featuring TV episodes the day after they aired on broadcast. (But only, inexplicably, five episodes
We’ve hit an exciting point in the “streaming ratings era”: We can now compare 2020 to 2021. Meaning we have better “context” than ever before. In 2020, we had to speculate if year-over-year viewership was up or down. Now, we know. Visual of the Week – Streaming Was Down 40%