No one ever programs for the audience they don’t have. Yeah, I think there are a few different ways to unpack that. Multiple brands, right? You could basically watch, with some exceptions, like Game of Thrones, you could watch a show ... An HBO original with a three-year holdback. That, I think, is going to be fundamentally successful. Half of that is captured by Best Buy or Walmart, it’s not going to Disney. It was very strange to have two of our first three shows be Greek letters. I’m thinking you were more skeptical about the company we used to call Time Warner. And the forward plan, Lord of the Rings inclusive, Wheel of Time, suggests that they have properties that audiences will love too. You think creatively in a different way. I believe there’s a trademark issue. And if there’s something I want to watch that’s specific, I’m choosing it. Music is an even more modest $33B. Yeah. I don’t want to judge. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. So, they’re bringing a fundamentally better consumer value proposition to a market that will bundle all the best content in the world, and is fundamentally about asking audiences to take existing spend, and not make room in their lives for more spend, for another video service, but instead to just change the channel, from Walmart to Best Buy, or iOS or Disney. That, if you were watching something, right below the search bar will say, “Finish watching Man in the High Castle,” or rather, “Go watch Patriot. In this Twitter thread Kenan Malik offers a persuasive case against the term “white privilege”. In the simplest way, I think what they’re trying to do is replicate what Amazon has been doing for several years. NBCUniversal is making a very similar argument. It’s not Downtown Abbey. Let’s go through some of the other big media companies. I think that it’s going to be very difficult for a lot of these services to survive because people aren’t going to say, “I want this and this and this and this.” They’ll say, “I want these two things, and the rest of it I can live without.”. Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of Fire TV users. They know that their brand can attract top-tier creators, and so the idea that they can take some of their cash reserves, put out about a dozen or a half-dozen TV shows per year, and use that to become an anchor asset around that video content, is a very plausible strategy. I think that’s right. So isn’t some of it just demographic? It is about how you package or go to market. That means programming differently, that means spending differently, that means building a service arranged around different principles, and so when companies look at Netflix and they say, look at what they’re acquiring, look at what they’re not acquiring, look at the volume of spend, it’s all oriented around that massive pie of video. Right. Right? I believe there was a livecast, but those of us listening at home not attending in person couldn’t see the trailer. But there are a lot of Americans watching a lot of it, right? There’s still going to be demand for it. I’m Canadian. It’s true that many media businesses achieve decades of high margins and reliable revenues. a $100MM show costs $100MM irrespective of how many users you have, but the per user cost goes down). Along the way they dropped a three-minute preview of one of their Apple+ TV shows. Even advertising reflects a desire to access the largest TAM of all: the overall economy. The music industry is growing faster than it has in decades, but at only $33B in consumer spend, it could double and still feel anemic. Apple, Amazon, AT&T and Hulu are using their networks to then sell other networks and in doing so, collect a commission against the TAM they don’t personally operate. It’s choose your adventure video. It essentially deflated. That means 100 million homes have access to a very large catalog of Prime Video, for zero. And then finally, no matter how important product and technology is, like any technology, it is getting easier at the basics level each year. — technologist Matthew Ball Tapping remotely into all that computing power could let people play games that look better and move faster. Many of us insist on filling every available moment with media of some sort, regardless of whether we’re working, driving, cleaning, exercising, lying in the bathtub or trying to sleep. Now it doesn’t really matter as much if you’re getting it direct mail, if you’re getting an Amazon.com reminder. What’s more, most expect this sum to shrink as the bloated and barely competitive pay-TV ecosystem gives way to lower cost or free substitutes such as Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and so on. That delineation between those two on extremes is continuing to meld. I entered management consulting with this perception of the halcyon days that probably ended in ’97, where you do two years of management consulting and everyone wants to hire you. In Canada, is an undergraduate job. Today, every studio is part of a much larger enterprise. Right. I think that’s really profound. We’re speaking a day after Apple’s WWDC conference. “In India, people do not pay for video. And so I think when you take a look at this apparent strangeness of being bullish on both, that’s because the market says it’s distribution, it’s content. One is, as with the Netflix pieces, it’s a frustration with a narrative that I think is wrong and I have the selfishness to want to correct it. It’s about access. And then again, you put that within the market context of where we are. I do take it seriously, and I think to some extent, that focus does explain why the company has been so resilient. There’s a company with more cash with a longer time horizon.”, I mean, Netflix would say, “We take Amazon very seriously.”. So, what you’re seeing is whether that’s coming from the traditional game makers or the mobile game makers trying to make more of a leaned-back passive gaming experience or you see the video-related companies — and again, Soderbergh made Mosaic with HBO a year ago. Netflix is just in the $300B business of selling content. I think there are a number of people in the marketplace who have said that Disney would be better off just selling their content to Netflix, and of course there are going to be many consumers who sit back and they say, “I kind of preferred when I could see Black Panther on Netflix and now you’re saying I have to go pay for it on Disney.”. Microsoft’s Mixer is now spending more on talent than the market has ever seen, but this strategy too seems focused on driving Microsoft’s Xbox gaming ecosystem overall, rather than the video game streaming category itself. Even when we look at online games, the gaming companies that primarily thrived in the ’90s and the early 2000s are very different than those that really struggled in the online world or rather thrived in the online world. 1/ I'm stunned, but not surprised by AT&T's decision to extended their #Friends licensing deal with Netflix through 2019. Netflix is in the crossfire of this ecosystem war and will need to excel through specialization and a first-mover advantage to be sustainable. Yeah. But you think it’s a pretty good bet to think that they’re going to spend $10, $13, $15, $16 a month on Netflix, and watch a lot of stuff there, and for another $7 they’re going to watch less stuff from Disney, but stuff they really value. My Blog for 'The Economist': Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? At the same time, I think that there is a very valid argument that consumers, that families and parents, would prefer a dedicated Disney-branded service. We dive into the streaming wars to find out. The point is, we were looking at do we renew this? So it’s a company that spent $85-100 billion dollars on this thing, and you might consider them underdogs in this race? The answer to that is twofold. I don’t want to keep talking about ballerinas. And then, a few months later, I went to work for The Chernin Group, specifically at Otter Media under Sarah Hardin. The notability was a little bit too high. Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a marvelous show. Tens of millions of AT&T households will get HBO Max for free, as will tens of millions of Verizon Wireless customers receive Disney+ or Quibi, with millions of Disney theme park customers getting Disney+ free, while Comcast customers will get Peacock, and so on. But who owns that screen? It was the perfect example of a company that has strong convictions, incredible assets, but is new to the space. Then you have those like Disney, who are just need-to-haves. The impulse kind of comes from one of three areas. Sign up for the And Jason had discovered the blog at one point and curated it in his Media Redef newsletter. However, this model slowly started to return as pay-TV was discounted to drive broadband and/or landline phones, with deep discounts applied to HBO, Showtime and Starz in order to increase pay-TV customer retention. There was a general rigor towards reevaluating prior decisions that were being made. At least 70MM US homes have Amazon Prime, so they get Prime Video. People take for granted now that Prime Video is going to be one of those. Which is to say, the Fire TV is now in, I think they said 36 million homes in the United States. He also said it’s no accident that Amazon Prime Video’s original content offerings have changed over the years. Was there anything where they said, “We think we’re going to go this way,” and you said, “I looked at it, let’s try this instead.” And they actually listened? As Benedict Evans has said, companies like NYT were “actually [in the] trucking & light manufacturing businesses”, something few companies could do let alone quickly replicate. The global theatrical box office is only $41B, a surprisingly low sum given its share of the watercooler. We have Warner Bros., the actual movie studio. And while it sold to Disney, it’d be imprudent to call The House of Mouse a “content” company. The question is like any other. Parler begins to come back online with the help of a Russian tech company. Had you said you were coming? If you’re not hanging out in LA, it’s the Brooklyn of LA. I think the key thing to keep in mind is what’s always interesting when you have a delivery change or a technology and distribution change is not so much how that content moves from one device to another device, but what new content is created, to begin with. Are we soliciting money for a fund right now? And what was that experience like working there for you at that time? Can you help me find a job?” And he had a very reasonable response that should have been the one that I went in with at the time, but I was too young and naïve. Matthew Ball. And then, at some point, you end up at Amazon. Previous. You can listen to Recode Media wherever you get your podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast. I don’t know whether or not they do or don’t to make it work. The tweetstorms get longer and longer, and then you retweet yourself, periodically. The full pardon of Anthony Levandowski came out of nowhere. Despite the intensity, frequency and size of our media appetites, consumers worldwide don’t really spend much money on content. Well, as you just heard, I’m not the best judge of how to monetize my own work, and certainly, as the CEO of Disney and owner of ESPN, Bob knows quite well, so maybe you should go with him. Podcast with "Morning Brew": Matthew Ball Dissects The Streaming Wars. Yeah. No. Because I just watched The Sopranos over the last few months through my Amazon Prime sub. Okay, so you’re consulting for them, have been consulting for them? There’s this thing where people will talk about the fact that Amazon was doing Silver Lake programming. And so, I think the real question is, as that business starts to expand, as your audience expands, and to some extent, Prime itself grew so much more than most of the Wall Street estimates believed it was going to, that you have to start growing your base. How do we make sure that we’re making the right decisions, that we’ve learned from the prior decisions, that our data, which was originally hypothesis-driven and oriented around first seasons, is now being data-driven around multiple seasons? They weren’t doing Ashton Kutcher shows until well after that. It is not going to drive first-time Prime subscribers in Malaysia, in India, in Brazil. By the way, you can already buy HBO and Showtime, etc., and the thought is we’re going to spend maybe billions of dollars to create content that we’re either going to give away or give away for a very little fee in order to get people to hang out and buy more stuff. That’s a reflection of the base. The NBCUniversal stuff is going to come off Hulu, go to somewhere else. Their catalog is believed to have shrunk by anywhere from 40 percent to 60 percent. It’s stuff that he would pay millions of dollars a year for, but he can get for free. Everyone hates their pay-TV bill, but $80 per month is an incredible deal for the average family (who will watch 450+ hours monthly). There are two things that are important there. Jason talks about going to lunch with Kevin Mayer, a big-deal Disney executive, and Bob Iger, the biggest-deal Disney executive, and this is what Jason says about you: “We’re having lunch at Disney and Iger says, ‘You know you’re an idiot,’ and I’m like, ‘Why is that, Bob?’ And he goes, ‘You give away for free what we pay tens of millions of dollars a year for from management consultants.’”. If you take a look at the company overall, the primary competitors that are identified are the HBOs, are the Amazons, are the Hulus. I connected with a guy, Ted Hope, who now runs original movie production at Amazon. I mean, I think it’s guaranteed to be one of those enduring platforms. The gaming companies that led in the arcade era struggled to move over to the console era. Yeah, I think that’s right. We’ve gone over Disney, Netflix, Apple, I’m going to save Amazon for a second. One is, they have bought BAMTech, which is the market leader that has been in the business for 20 years, supporting most of the most-scaled transmissions globally. Their price point is low, but even if it were twice that, it’s not going to convince someone who’s watching, on average, 60 hours per month of Netflix, “You don’t need it anymore, because now you’re spending $8 on Disney.” They’re complementary. What were you doing prior to writing for Jason Hirschhorn? I don’t want to pre-judge. What’s different is, Netflix overall is going after what we would today consider pay TV. Yeah. The Mining of Media (or The "Streaming Wars" are Just a Battle) But what’s important is even more academic – if media matters to consumers, but they won’t spend a lot on it, the efficient use of content is actually to drive other industries, categories and products that have better (and bigger) economics. Yeah, they’re phenomenal characters. 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