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. This is an attempt to convey the same ideas…

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. I’ll get right to…

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…

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…

Why it Was Inevitable and What Happens Next — Note: After posting this I got a lot of feedback, including pushback. For a summary and my response, see here. I ran Investor Relations at TimeWarner from 2008–2013, the period when Netflix emerged as a disruptive force in TV. In investor meetings, our CEO Jeff Bewkes was invariably asked about…

For most of the media companies, 20% margins are out of reach— and it’s not just about content costs — In the wake of the recent slowdown in streaming subscriber additions, media investors have turned their focus from streaming subscriber growth to streaming business profitability. About two years ago, I posted an essay called One Clear Casualty of the Streaming Wars: Profit. In a nutshell, it argued that the profit…

Exploring the Far-Reaching Implications of Open Data — Tl;dr: The web3 debate often overlooks a fundamental question: what can crypto do better than other technologies and will this create value for a lot of people or not? The pro-web3 narrative doesn’t adequately address this question because it emphasizes how crypto redistributes value, not how it creates it. The…