How Music Labels Have Stayed Dominant in an Infinite Content World — In recent months, I’ve been writing about “infinite TV,” which I first laid out in Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV. The idea is that several technologies, particularly virtual production and AI-assisted tools, are set to dramatically reduce the barriers to create high quality video content over the coming…

Why the TV Business Needs to Tackle Rising Risk — The value of any business, or any financial instrument for that matter, is a function of two things: growth and risk. It has a direct relationship with the former and an indirect relationship with the latter. It’s widely understood that in the past year growth expectations have declined in the…

Why Hits Will Persist in an Infinite Content World — Almost 20 years ago, Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail, which accurately predicted that the Internet would fragment attention and consumption would shift into the “tail.” But Top Gun Maverick generated over $700 million at the domestic box office last year, Bad Bunny had 18.5 billion streams on Spotify last…

How Entertainment Companies Can Capitalize on Infinite Content — Last month, I published a post called Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV. It made the case that over the next 5–10 years, several technologies (including virtual production and AI) will cause the quality distinction between professionally-produced and user-generated content to blur, resulting in effectively “infinite” high-quality video.

Exploring possible structural changes in TV — The streaming wars have not gone as planned. From the beginning, very few people thought that every streaming service would “win.” It was never realistic that most consumers would subscribe to seven or eight separate general entertainment services. What is newly evident over the last year is how hard it…

The Four Technologies Lowering the Barriers to Quality Video Content Creation — I recently posted an essay called The Four Horsemen of the TV Apocalypse. I got a lot of feedback that the piece raised important ideas, but also that, at >10,000 words, many would be put off by the time commitment required. …

What Happens When Barriers to Entry Fall in Content Creation Too? — For a revised and shorter version of this essay, please see Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV. “Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star And everybody’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are” — The Kinks, Celluloid Heroes Apologies, this is a long one. …

How Churn Became Streaming TV’s Biggest Surprise and Biggest Problem — In recent months it’s become clear that the streaming business is tougher than a lot of people thought. (For a sense of how thinking about streaming profitability has evolved, see One Clear Casualty of the Streaming Wars: Profit, Is Streaming a Good Business? and Media’s Shift from Growth to Optimization.) …

Is Global Scale the Only Path to a Successful Streaming TV Business? — Tl;dr: I recently posted an essay arguing that in light of growing evidence that streaming will be neither as large nor as profitable as many expected, the streaming TV companies will need to shift their focus from subscriber growth to optimization. I received a lot of feedback, including some thoughtful…