The Entertainment Strategy Guide to 20-Sep-2019
Hamburgers, WGA Fight, Malcolm Gladwell and Subscription Newsletters
Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy Newsletter! The best reads, listens, socials and more to keep you informed on the business of entertainment, with the links to my recent writing across platforms.
Last week was light on total articles from me, but high on quality, if I can judge my own work. I’ll be back on full-time this week after some family distractions (Disneyland!) last week.
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The Best of the Entertainment Strategy Guy
“Netflix Is Five Guys and Hulu Is McDonald’s: How Hamburgers Can Help Explain The Streaming Wars” at Decider.
My latest article starts with a fun anecdote about foie gras burgers, but makes a serious point about how prices impact customer perceptions. In the streaming wars, every company is making tradeoffs in streaming, whether they realize it or not. Plus lots of tables and charts, including my new favorite:
“Most Important Story of the Week: The WGA Keeps Their Power” at my website.
I debated whether the WGA would make the top slot, or whether the AT&T series of news events (activist investors, DirecTV sale?, impending departures, lawsuit over DirecTV Now subscribers) would dethrone it. Ultimately, I went with the WGA because of how much the election results strengthen the Guild’s position. And that meant that “Peacock” and BET streaming only got quick shout outs.
The Best of The Rest
Long Read of the Week - “A Fight in Hollywood (and Why It Matters for Everyone)”
I don’t plan to usually do this, but I found three articles/listens really informative on the WGA/Agency fight that I linked to in my column, and I’m reemphasizing them here.
Alessandro Camon’s article links the WGA-Agency fight to larger trends in the economy—including inequality—and trends in Hollywood—like the move to IP-driven properties. It’s also just a good perspective on the WGA and why they’re committed to this fight.
Listen of the Week - KCRW The Business “The Battle for the WGA”
The best part of this episode of The Business is that the WGA challenger slate didn’t even send someone to defend their position on what I have to assume is one of the most popular podcasts for people in the industry. Still, a good listen to hear the WGA’s perspective on the negotiations and power.
Other Long Read - “Why the WGA-Agents Battle Has Yet to Significantly Impact TV Dealmaking” by Michael Schneider in Variety
Michael Schneider checks in on how the fight has impacted actual dealmaking, which is to say not much. Yet. (I’ve been holding onto this read until I did my WGA check-in.)
Other Long Read - “This TV Network Built a Massive $50 Million Studio Mostly to Take on Netflix” in Ad Week by Chris Ariens
One fact of the streaming war is that it is a world war, with battlefields from America to Japan to Brazil. Which is what this article is about, particularly the huge battleground of Latin America and the mostly unknown (for US readers) Globo. As I wrote a few weeks back, while Netflix, Amazon and the new entrants will have global scale as an upside, part of the downside will be a lack of focus territory by territory. Also, hat tip to the PARQOR newsletter for spotting this read. (And shouting me out in the last few issues!)
Non-Entertainment Read - “Malcolm Gladwell Reaches His Tipping Point” in the Atlantic by Andrew Ferguson
If nothing else, Ferguson shows how a statistic can be created, repeated and then popularized even though it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Moreover, if you love data, this is a case study in why you should read the footnotes to see if the data/statistic holds up to scrutiny.
Newsletter of the Week - Cybercultural “Exclusive data: email newsletters & monetization” by Richard MacManus
In his last article in a series on newsletters and blog, Richard MacManus explores whether folks will pay for newsletters using original survey data. I’m probably a bit more interested in this than most—I just launched a newsletter and last year launched a website that I’m trying to monetize—but his whole series on the role of blogs/Tumbler/newsletters in the era of social media is worth a browse.
Newsletter of the Week - “Big Tech Meets Its Pecora Commission: Why Google's Toughest Opponent Is Now Congress” by Matt Stoller
If nothing else, investors should scroll down to the lines of business list that the House of Representatives subpoenaed from Google. I’ve long believed that the Googles and Amazons of the world should have to break out financial information for way more lines of business. In Google’s case, this is Youtube and Android and Waze and maybe more. Also a good read for how the antitrust case against big tech will proceed.
Twitter Threads - Clair Atkinson asks about churn
Atkinson asks about some of the numbers that I care about most in streaming, and she got a who’s who to chime in on Twitter. After monthly active users—the number I care most about—subscriber churn probably best correlates with how subscription streaming services are actually doing, as opposed to randomly selected data points. This article by David Pakman from the replies is a good read on churn too, with the caveat that until we get self-reported churn numbers, we should take any churn estimates with a grain of salt (or assume a healthy margin of error).
(If this email was forwarded to you, and you’re wondering who I am, The Entertainment Strategy Guy writes under this pseudonym at his eponymous website. A former exec at a streaming company, he prefers writing to sending emails/attending meetings, so he launched his own website. You can follow him on Twitter or Linked-In for regular thoughts and analysis on the business, strategy and economics of the media and entertainment industry.)