Diana Williams’ Post

The poster Evan Shapīro is spot on here. The way we engage with content is drastically shifting. Legacy networks and traditional content creators are convulsing and have no idea what the future will bring. Not only is the question: how can the content producers get to where the eyeballs are, but how can they get those eyeballs assign true value to a particular show? Further, the only reason the writers strike was settled at those terms was because the corporate types knew a majority of the writers and actors weren't going to be returning to work amid all the corporate consolidation. It is not unreasonable to fear similar challenges to other industries. (Pick any industry and think about how that is changing). #media #tv #advertising

TODAY IN BAD REPORTING This piece in The New York Times about a “small bump” in TV series buying is just plain bad. Gift link/no paywall: https://lnkd.in/e7XBxbP2 They have all the right facts, but John Koblin buries the truly important ledes under a mountain of misdirection. Yes, TWO PLAYERS - Netflix & Amazon - have increased their series orders recently. Woot? BUT, HUGE CAVEATS: This is ONLY compared to strike times in 2023/2022. MOST of the orders are international productions. And, I cannot stress this enough: “The whole industry volume is still down considerably from the highs of just a couple of years ago.” The gatekeeper content economy is not yet done contracting and reconfiguring. Not only has money been cut from the scripted content ecosystem, a good deal of it will NEVER come back. These are the facts. Part of this is due to the new austerity and focus on streaming profits over streaming scale. Part of this is due to funds being permanently MOVED from scripted content into Sports. And part will be due to the elimination of whole sets of buyers via mergers and acquisitions. The writer blames the strike as the catalyst for the shift, thus hinting that an industry-wide return to normal could be in the offing. This is because he does not look at the entire landscape, but rather just at the scripted cul de sac. IMHO, that’s truly irresponsible. Yes, the industry WILL make MORE scripted content than during the strike. Also, I was taller in third grade than in kindergarten. But, in the larger context, these are NOT useful metrics. I am still short in the context of all humans. And we will still make WAY less scripted content than we did at the peak of #PeakTV - for the foreseeable future. I do NOT want to be only a harbinger of bad news. But when I look at misguided “trade reporting” like this, I do feel responsible for translating it into reality. Sorry. Not sorry.

One client can generate your monthly revenue. One post can generate your weekly views. One stock can generate returns greater than all the other stocks combined. One show can make Netflix's year. The key is to fall in love with the unpredictability of finding that one egg. You never know what will work. Fall in love with: - Pitching clients - Posting consistently - Investing in stocks - Making shows ( Well that's an advice for Netflix🤫) The results will take care of itself. As Seth Godlin said, "The elements you're pretty sure are wrong, are the ones that end up being right." 8/30.

This is a very important read if you are suffering under the weight of the strikes. Once again Professor Galloway lays it out cold. For example: "Analysts are even cautioning against too much optimism, as the “resolution of the writers’ strike will bring higher costs” and thus depress profits. Put another way, investors don’t want the strikes to end." and: "Netflix has invested heavily in diversification, in the form of international content. The company is shifting spending away from Hollywood and increasing investment in local-language productions. In the past two years, spending in Asia has increased to $2 billion and European investment has doubled. More than half of Netflix’s scripted titles are being produced abroad. Compare that to Warner Bros. Discovery (a third) and Paramount (a quarter). The effect has been protection against supply chain interruptions (i.e. content shortages), because while American actors and writers went on strike and TV series orders declined 25%, the foreign production gears kept grinding." Understanding the wider implications of the strikes is critical. Nothing is ever going to be the same again no matter when or how the strikes end. #strikes #bronzeagecollapse

In the Netflix show Ozark, there's an opening line in season 1: "You see, the hard reality is how much money we accumulate in life is not a function of who's president or the economy or bubbles bursting or bad breaks or bosses." I think it resonates deeply with stock market wisdom, emphasizing that true financial success in the stock market hinges on our decisions and actions rather than external circumstances. Those who get stuck in these external factors might be overlooking the real key to financial success in the stock market. #BehaviouralFinance #stockmarket #investment

DO THE HUSTLE Variety has yet another profile on Hollywood's least successful CEO, which details the many ways Disco Bros has run aground with Zas at the wheel. https://lnkd.in/gYMU--6U These are writers I really like and appreciate. And yet... "Given the storm enveloping, a management shake-up has got to be coming, right? Wrong. Zaslav is unlikely to exit anytime soon. The company’s overall financial health is better than it appears, with executives committed to maintaining an investment-grade rating." ? The company's overall financial health is BETTER than it appears? By what measure is this talking point true? The company has $35 billion in debt. They just took a $9 billion write-off on a property THEY THEMSELVES valued just two years ago. Free Cash Flow is down -43% YoY. When Zaslav merged the companies, they were worth $60 billion. Today, Disco Bros aka Warner Bros. Discovery is worth $17 billion. The Variety piece talks about the many wounds Zaslav has inflicted on WBD, one of which is incredibly telling and important: This is a company in free fall. Their champion banker called for them to be dismantled. They've been slashing to the bone to save a buck. You'd think they'd be HYPER solicitous towards every dollar of revenue they could get. And yet they are, still, TERRIBLE at selling advertising. "Advertisers have groused about WBD’s sales tactics. During the most recent upfront market media-buying executives say Warner has been particularly unrealistic. 'I don’t think Zaslav understands that it’s a different kind of negotiation,' one buyer says. 'Warner makes it difficult across multiple layers. I can’t say that I enjoy dealing with Warner Bros.'" There's a reason no one from WBD would go on the record about their actual upfront take. This has been a pain point for WBD for years. Read their earnings the last few years. Despite good inventory and great IP, they lag behind their competitors in TV in transitioning to the next generation of TV advertising. The sales stink at the head it seems.

From the NYT: Zaslav may not yet have saved #Hollywood, but he has saved a lot of money. Nineteen months into his leadership of Warner Bros. Discovery., he has long since blown past the $3 billion synergies target. But for all this corporate creativity, anyone hoping to get in on the ground floor of something big with W.B.D. has lost more than half his money. The challenge Zaslav faces is nevertheless acute. W.B.D. issued its latest earnings on the morning of Nov. 8. The company lost over $400 million in the last quarter. The market’s reaction was swift and severe: W.B.D. stock immediately dropped 18 percent. The company’s cable networks, which are still responsible for nearly half its revenues, are melting down faster than anticipated, and streaming does not look like the answer it once did. There’s too much competition for subscribers, and keeping them is its own challenge, requiring a lot of big swings on new content. W.B.D. #streaming services lost 700,000 subscribers in the most recent quarter and lag far behind Netflix . Results from the movie studio were discouraging too. Even with the huge success of “Barbie,” revenues increased only 4 percent over the previous year. The ever-optimistic Zaslav seemed uncharacteristically discouraged on the earnings call: “This is a generational disruption we’re going through,” “Going through that with a streaming service that’s losing billions of dollars, it’s really, really difficult to go on offense.” Together, the two strikes, which had shut Hollywood down for months, had saved W.B.D. a lot of money. Wiedenfels told us that the free cash flow from the strike — from basically not making any entertainment for months — will ultimately total nearly $1 billion in pretax cost savings. It was good news, at least for now. But the company still needs to grow, and it still has many billions of dollars in debt to pay down. Making money by not making #entertainment is a short-term proposition at best. Zaslav inherited a pipeline of movies from AT&T but hasn’t yet launched many of his own. With the strikes at an end, Zaslav says he’s excited to get the studio back to work. But it won’t be easy. After the dismal performance of “The Flash,” followed by another DC Comics flop it’s fair to wonder if the great comic-book-movie boom might have finally run its course. Live #sports remain a strong business, but the rights are getting more expensive all the time, and he’s now competing for them with Amazon and Apple . There’s certainly money to be made in video games — “Hogwarts Legacy,” the company’s popular action role-playing game, has earned more than $1.3 billion The latest earnings aside, Zaslav says he is rebuilding W.B.D. for the long term. “We’ve got great assets here,” “Great artillery in this incredible fight. And during moments like this, maybe more than any other time, everything is possible. Everything is possible.” One thing that’s possible is that he’ll just flip W.B.D. to its next buyer.

Literature with deep seeded knowledge and message yielding tremendous success in future.

#1 in a series Disclaimer: I don’t have any deep inside information, nothing you couldn’t read or watch online. This is not my beautiful house; well, how did we get here? 1. In 2020, Covid caused a big slowdown/stoppage of film and tv production. Post production didn’t get hit as bad at first because we were able to switch a lot of work to remote, and we still had stuff to work on that was already in the can when the pandemic hit. So our post production hit was somewhat delayed compared to everything else in the world that shut down. But it eventually did hit, and because it was delayed it went on for us after most other things had restarted, leaving a lot of people in a deep hole by the end. Many of those people spent 2021 and 22 getting out of that Covid hole and trying to fill it back in. 2. Also during Covid, streaming exploded since so many people were staying home a lot. Studios noticed that and saw dollar signs. Why let Netflix get rich on their IP? They could just start their own service, how hard could it be? Unfortunately, this put studios in the tech space figuring they could build a platform for their content, along with tech companies who figured they could enter the studio space and build content for their platforms. Everybody caught disruptor fever, and bought into the tech company idea that the way to make money was to generate huge amounts of content, offer low introductory subscription fees, use infinite subscriber growth to drive their stock price up, and thus “profit.” They moved fast and broke things. Unfortunately, one of the main things they broke was capitalism. I’m sure some people benefitted, probably handsomely, from bubble bonuses. Every time there’s a bubble, somebody thinks they’ve figured out something new, even though every bubble ends the same way. They inevitably burst because they don’t contain any real value, just a lot of air. 3. Right about the time the titans of industry were realizing they broke capitalism, the writers and actors strikes came along. I’m not going to get into the specifics of that here, that’s its whole own thing. I support the actors and writers trying to get better treatment, I just hope it wasn’t a Pyrrhic victory. (Spoiler warning, it was.) Whatever else it did, it gave studios and their equity partners a get out of jail free card to stop spending money on content while maintaining their revenue in the short term, to artificially keep their bubble inflated, let them force majeure their way out of some expensive contracts and rethink the whole ‘just keep spending billions, it’ll work out’ theory of content production and delivery. Plus they got to blame the collapse on the writers and actors. So now they’re all about cost cutting, making less and/or cheaper content while claiming to be refocusing on quality, employing fewer people and shopping extra hard for maximum subsidies around the world. (Continued)

The main theme that seems to be emerging in a post strike Hollywood is quality over quantity. This quote from Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency rings true for most major studios “In a weird way the strikes have been a mask for the deeper issues we’re struggling with — the costs of content, the quality of content and the eradication of several revenue streams.” While estimates says that the work stoppages will produce about $10 billion in additional free cash flow over a 12-month period across the largest conglomerates. It hasn't stopped a couple of the major studios shedding nearly 10,000 jobs and slashing billions of dollars in production and marketing costs. While some are saying we may be entering a period of austerity in the entertainment industry, and the impact of the strikes will definitely be felt by consumers with less content all round over the next 12 months and long waits for series returns. I'm personally hoping after the devastation of COVID and the strikes these new measures being bought in by studios will bring renewed focus on great storytelling, high quality productions and the opportunity of new talent to shine.