bobdysm

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Netflix has never removed an original because it was low watched.

The debt WBD has is solely on Zaslav and his team for making a bad deal with AT&T.

From Matt Belloni's newsletter. Wonder what that last part means

He is to blame for their debt. The amount of debt Discovery took on from AT&T was part of the negotiation. They could have taken on less debt. But they might not have been able to get AT&T to agree to a deal if that were the case

A combined NBCU/WBD would own 11 of the 20 most viewed cable channels (as of 2021). No other media company would own more than 1. They would also have more than 40% of total viewers on a nightly basis, the next closest being Disney at 10%. While I'm sure spinoffs of certain channels might change those numbers a little bit (you wouldn't need both CNN and MSNBC, or E!/Oxygen and some of the Discovery nets), that's still an insane amount of power to have over one of the largest consumer industries in America.

I might be mistaken, but I believe we haven't seen any worldwide numbers for HOTD. To my understanding, the 10M it did in its first day and 20M it did in its first ~6 days were only based on US viewing. ROP's 25M viewers in its first day was a worldwide number

The original newsletter says nothing about cutting the characters, only that the original voice actors will not be back. That is added speculation from the playlist.net.

They are highly levered, but the extent of their financial troubles is wildly overstated. Slightly more than a billion is due in the next 12 months. WBD has over $2.5B of cash on hand and just last quarter was able to drive ~$800M of free cash flow (which should only improve as time goes on) and last quarter repaid $3.5B of long term debt. I'm not saying they are in good financial shape but the idea that they have some sort of cash crunch coming up soon or that they don't have enough money to release a movie like Shazam 2 in December has no basis in reality.

Paramount+ has 40m subs worldwide. They didn't break out US vs international in their last earnings report. They 62m total DTC subs, so including Showtime, BET+, Noggin, Nick Hits etc.

Their sales team works with them for cross platform advertising campaign attribution and measuring marketing incrementality across linear + Hulu with ads, not Disney+ (at least they haven't said so publicly). It's used more of a measure of purchase behavior and foot traffic vs. an understanding of competitor's streaming results. And I still don't think that answers questions around the examples I pulled earlier and how off they are compared to first party providers such as Netflix or gold standards (that still have some of their own problems) such as Nielsen (especially for things such as linear TV and Netflix shows/movies).

You are arguing against a different point than the one I making. There is not enough proof that Samba TV is an accurate measure of streaming viewership and I don't think they should be posted at all or used as a measure of success or failure on here or from sites like Deadline. I'm saying SambaTV numbers shouldn't be posted at all. If you want I can also make up numbers based off of unrepresentative samples and claim it as fact. Ok? Does that make the numbers accurate? Netflix (at least to the public) measures viewership by hours watched. What's flawed about that?

"De-facto" might be a strong choice of words, but it the streaming metric source that gets posted here the most and for the past couple of months I've rarely seen any hedging in terms of its accuracy when it does get posted. Netflix's top 10 lists don't even get published here every week. And headlines like this one from Business Insider and threads from this guy that get thousands of likes on twitter are certainly implying that SambaTV is the accurate measure of viewership on HBO Max when, like I said earlier, there's no real reason to believe they are representative of streaming viewership at all. And in regards to James Gunn, I would tweet about Samba numbers too if they made my movie look successful. But from his tweets he didn't mention that the number was accurate or even in the right ballpark (I'm also not sure if he even knows the number himself tbh). He just said that his movie was the biggest DC project on Max. I wouldn't say that shows the Samba numbers are "credible". And if the fact that they don't capture mobile, tablet, and computer viewing is an argument is meant to justify Samba's obvious inaccuracies, maybe they shouldn't b releasing any data? If I captured 70% of a sample's datapoints but that other 30% was crucial in understanding the full impact of what I was measuring I know I wouldn't just release anything.

Why has Samba TV become the de-facto source of truth for streaming metrics on here and on Twitter? To my knowledge there has been no Nielsen-esque stamp of approval for any of the streaming services, and some of the numbers they get are very odd and do not match up at all with sources like Nielsen or Netflix (like their Witcher numbers or the fact that they claim more households watched Mortal Kombat in its first weekend on a significantly smaller streaming service than watched Don't Look Up which is gonna end up as Netflix's biggest film ever).

They added more non Hotstar subs (i.e subs that actually drive revenue) last quarter than they did in fiscal Q3 or Q2. I wouldn't really say growth has slowed in core D+ markets, at least compared not compared to when Luca came out or really the rest of the 2021 Disney + Subs Core Hotstar Total % Hotstar Δ Subs Core Δ Subs Hotstar Net Adds total 2021 Q1 66.4 28.5 94.9 30% 11.9 9.3 21.2 2021 Q2 68.5 35.1 103.6 34% 2.0 6.7 8.7 2021 Q3 70.5 45.5 116.0 39% 2.0 10.4 12.4 2021 Q4 74.5 43.7 118.2 37% 4.0 -1.8 2.2