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…
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…
HBO has been a premium service since its national launch in the mid-1970’s, a distinction from the broadcast or cable networks that still comprise the basic multichannel video bundle. In essence, limited distribution was a feature, not a bug, with HBO programming appealing to a subset of the US population. As HBO has evolved into…
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…
While multiple industry sources have told us Disney and Charter hope to reach a deal before the kick-off of Monday Night Football this evening (link), we have been getting a lot of investor questions on the underlying popularity of ESPN. Disney released a stat last week that 71% of Charter subscribers tune into a Disney…
In our analysis yesterday of the Charter/Disney blackout, (Can Chris Winfrey Destroy the Sports Media Death Star?), we highlighted how Charter was seeking something new beyond the normal rate/penetration asks that are customary in carriage battles. Charter is demanding that Disney provide its subscribers with the ad-supported versions of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ at no…
In mid-July 2023, Disney CEO Bob Iger sat down with CNBC’s David Faber in Sun Valley (link) and said the “inevitability [of] taking ESPN direct to consumer…I think I’m much more certain about when, but not prepared to say when that is…I’m enthusiastic about it.” All signs point to ESPN evolving into a direct-to-consumer service…
We are now at Day 121 of the WGA Strike and Day 48 of the SAG-AFTRA strike, with the two sides not even at the negotiating table. All signs point to dual strikes that will last well into fall 2023. It increasingly looks like Hollywood will not be back in business until the beginning of…
Last week, FTC Chairperson Lina Khan joined The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield and Janice Min for a podcast discussion on the state of competition in the media world titled: “Hollywood ‘Red Flags’, ‘Doom Loop’ & the Future of M&A.” You can read the entire transcript via The Ankler (here) and/or listen to the podcast via Spotify…
T-Mobile announced a new rate plan today called Go5G Next. The company highlighted the annual phone upgrade feature. But it’s hard not to see the resemblance to something out of a legacy carrier’s playbook. Annual phone upgrade offers by operators bring back memories of a time when consumers actually cared about upgrading their iPhone every…
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