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Why are Iger, Redstone, Roberts & Zaslav Forgetting the Importance of Reach?

Legacy media was late to streaming and tried to rapidly attain global scale through massive spending on content and marketing. Wall Street gave them the leeway for a short period of time. However, subscriber growth slowed, losses ballooned and the capital markets environment shifted dramatically. Today, investors are focused on whether these less ambitious legacy…

Jason Kilar’s Advice to Legacy Media: Get to Scale or Bust

Hulu’s original CEO and the former WarnerMedia CEO, Jason Kilar wrote a column earlier today in Variety titled Hollywood Needs to Create Its Biggest Hit Ever. Here’s How the Industry Can Make That Happen. It’s worth remembering/re-reading Kilar’s now-infamous “bad boy” memo from 2011 on the future of TV (link) that was incredibly prescient, despite…

Ten Questions for Netflix’s Q3 2023 Earnings Interview Tonight

Here are our ten key questions for Netflix management on Wednesday’s Q3 2023 earnings interview (our Q2 2023 questions can be found here). 1) Are You Shifting Animation to a Licensing Model? You have talked about the long-term importance of building franchises in animation that can compete with the industry leaders Universal Studios and Disney. Curious…

LightShed Earnings Scorecard: Ninth Edition

Welcome to the Ninth Edition of the LightShed Earnings Scorecard – our stats on the quality of earnings calls. We also continue to monitor mentioned concerns about a recession and inflation, interest in AI and yes, even the Metaverse. This quarter we tracked the earnings calls of 72 companies, adding Sphere Entertainment. Overall, we listened…

The Bundle is Back and Now “Comes With Streaming”

Understanding Legacy Media’s Problem As legacy media companies have launched streaming services over the past several years, they pushed their most consumer desirable content and a wide array of library content onto their direct-to-consumer streaming services detached from the legacy multichannel video bundle: Note: Max includes HBO and Paramount+ now includes Showtime, which were always…