Explaining the Business of Entertainment
(For the last few weeks, I’ve been debuting a series of articles answering a question posed to me by The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield: Will The Irishman Make Any Money? It’s a great question because it gets as so many of the challenges of the business of streaming video. Read the rest here, here, here
(For the last few weeks, I’ve been debuting a series of articles answering a question posed to me by The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield: Will The Irishman Make Any Money? It’s a great question because it gets as so many of the challenges of the business of streaming video. Read the rest here, here, here
What happens when one week has so much news and the next has very little? Well, you roll one topic over. So the “most important story” this week is last week’s runner-up. The Most Important Story of the Week – Game of Thrones and Star Wars Franchise Lessons Last week
(Before you start, consider signing up for my newsletter! Yes I know you have too many already, but this is the best way to help support independent writers such as myself. Sign up here.) If you ever found yourself in the armed forces, you may be familiar with the phenomenon
One of the goals of my website is to try to hold myself to a process. A process means I let the data guide my opinions, not fit new data or anecdotes into preconceived narratives. A good example of this comes from last weekend’s D23 Expo. This picture circulated widely
I’m not writing a “year end roundup” article this month. I do want to do one of those next year, but I’ll write it in August. Why August? Well it makes a lot more sense than January. The box office peaks in summer, so we can judge it at the
My dad didn’t like the ending of Empire Strikes Back. His felt that it didn’t finish the story, it left off with a, “See you next movie!” conclusion. That irritated him. He hasn’t seen Avengers: Infinity War yet, so you know he won’t like that. My article yesterday probably did
You want to know a secret? The underlying secret to all media and entertainment? The peak behind the curtain that explains all you see in film, TV, music and more? Here it is. “Logarithmically distributed returns.” Once you learn it you can’t forget it. Like how to do a magic
I try to write these updates to post by late afternoon on a Friday. Often–most weeks actually–I miss that optimistic target and finish them over the weekend/first thing Monday morning, then back date them to the week they cover. Obviously the biggest story of entertainment was Les Moonves being fired,
A few weeks back, I explained why “small sample size” dooms any effort to use big data to predict box office performance of feature films. But what about TV shows? What about streaming services? Can’t they use advanced algorithms to predict success there? Nope. As “No, Seriously, Why Don’t You