Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Any big news stories this week? Let me check: Oh dear, that will inspire lots of noise and coverage. (Want my thoughts? I don’t value executive shifts as much as some, which I’ve explained before and in this Twitter thread today.) How can I tie this to the streaming ratings? Some
We continue with the “sweeps week” theme in this edition of the streaming ratings. As I mentioned last time, streaming was up the last week of the year. Wayyyy up. As such, so are all the ratings. Today we continue our streaming ratings report for the week starting 27-Dec-2022, this
Sometimes you can immediately recognize certain strategic moves as game changing. The big, obviously huge moves, like AT&T buying Time-Warner. Like NBC announcing Peacock. Like Bob Iger stepping down. You don’t need me to tell you those news stories matter. But if a company is a “collection of decisions”—strategy is
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
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%
The theme of the week is “context”. For the second week, Netflix is spending hundreds of millions of dollars for film rights. To put that in context requires “ent-splaining” everything from “content arms dealers” to “portfolio theory” to “Pay 1 theatrical films”. (And if you don’t know what those terms
Starting last August, Nielsen began releasing a weekly American top 10 most watched list for streaming video. I’ve been using it ever since. Nielsen mixed together TV and movies, and new (“originals”), second-run and library (“acquired”) titles on the same list. In their year-end top ten list, though, Nielsen flipped
This year marks a pretty significant upgrade in the amount of data we have available about streamers. At the start of the year, we had to rely on Netflix to tell us during the quarterly earnings (or selectively on Twitter) how well their content is doing. Since then, we’ve gotten
Well, living through the last two weeks of news has shown that the pace of news in 2021 isn’t slowing down. The most notable story for entertainment—though it was pushed off the front page within 24 hours—has to be the Democratic Senate wins in Georgia last Tuesday. This week, we’re
December was a big battle in the streaming wars. Christmas Day/end of year is becoming increasingly important to the streamers since it’s the last time to grab subscribers before annual reporting. This is why the latest installment of my “Who Won the Month” series at Decider may be the most