Explaining the Business of Entertainment
I love when a weekly column like this ends up having a “theme”. This week, that’s the difference between “actual” and “potential” news stories. The former are things that happen: a movie opens, a company launches a new product, or a studio head steps down. “Potential” news stories are all
Last week got away from me. Fine, I got away from it by diving down a data hole. Specifically, a Covid-19 data problem. For all the forecasting being done, few people are answering the query, “Hey, when will all this end?” I’ve seen answers ranging from “Never” to “2022” to
Jeff Bezos ending his run as CEO of Amazon is certainly neé clearly neé absolutely the biggest story in business this week. Is it also the biggest story in media, entertainment and communications broadly? Sure. Bezos is a man who built Amazon to be “the everything store”. That includes your
Ah, for the olden days of evaluating content. In 2019, if you wanted to know, “What was the most popular film?”, you just looked at the box office and saw that the answer was (very clearly) Avengers: Endgame. Even TV was relatively simple: Game of Thrones set global records for
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
Well, give 2021 credit for trying to catch up with 2020 in terms of monumental new stories. This is absolutely one of the craziest weeks in my lifetime and I assume many of the folks who read. (Though, for historical hindsight, we tend to forget how absolutely chaotic the 1960s
Disney is a marketer’s marketer. With the biggest brands in entertainment, they can serve up an investor day—an investor day that is for Wall Street investors!—that gets regular folks to turn in and trends on Twitter. Yet, for all the buzz, the basic story was that Disney is releasing Disney
In 2020, Netflix lost the rights to Friends. In 2021, they lose the rights to The Office. How much do those big shows impact viewing on Netflix? Quantifying that via Netflix’s data is fairly hard, though, since they focus overwhelmingly on their original series, as that’s the key to “building
In what is now a recurring column, over at Decider I took a look at all the ratings data I could find to declare the streaming winner in the US for November. This one is packed with with charts, tables and data. (If you’re curious for the older editions, here’s
(This is the last article in a three part series estimating how many US paid streaming subscribers there are in the US. Read the numbers here, and the first half of the explanation here.) If you’re wondering, yes, I deliberately wrote three (almost) contradictory headlines for the last two days. In