Member Mailing #254: How Will We Define A "Hit" With Less Transparency?
Recent market trends are pushing the streaming marketplace *and* legacy media away from transparency
After I wrote “Investors See More Data Transparency, Creatives See Less in Streaming”1, I had a few conversations with different readers about whether a lack of transparency from streaming services not-named-Netflix is indeed a negative.
It is a fair question, made all the more relevant by articles from the past week also asking questions about why we are seeing more limited transparency from more streaming services. It was made especially relevant by a bunch of social chatter in my feed on Monday about why CBS’s Oprah with Meghan and Harry - the “most-hyped event of the year” - was not on Paramount+ the next day, and may not end up on the streaming service at all, despite both being owned by ViacomCBS (AllYourScreens’ Rick Ellis tweeted a helpful thread on just how complicated the distribution rights are).
My previous post focused on the growing lack of transparency between streaming services and content creators:
More media companies offering more streaming data to investors moves legacy media companies away from Curse of the Mogul-type issues (which in many ways they were moving away from already). But in not sharing performance data about particular content, we find ourselves in mirror universe Curse of the Mogul, where investors have transparency into the performance of the business but content creators know less and less about the performance of their content and receive returns for their work. Maybe this can be called an emerging Curse of the Streaming Creator – whatever it is, it is a dynamic that is shaping up to hurt creators more than help them.
But, all streaming services not-named-Netflix continue not to share performance data about major tentpole events with the broader public. We still do not know how Wonder Woman 1984 performed on HBO Max, and Apple TV+ recently avoided sharing any data about the Billie Eilish documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry, other than the film drew “a record-breaking 33% new viewers to the service, with young adult audiences fueling the momentum”.
Also, yesterday Amazon shared some data on Coming 2 America via “a statement pointing to The Digital Entertainment Group/Screen Engine/ASI’s VOD weekend rankings”. The statement is summarized in these two tweets from Observer’s Brandon Katz, below:
Effectively, both Amazon and Apple have opted to tell the best possible stories about the success of their movies without sharing any actual data about how many people consumed those movies. One month after my last post, nothing has changed.
Coming back to the readers’ questions, does it matter if nothing has changed? Do these services need to be transparent? Investors only care about churn and growth - they have proven to react more strongly to those metrics than to a press release about the success of an individual series or movie.
The question of whether services need to be transparent has an obvious business answer: all streaming services not-named-Netflix have no marketplace incentives to be transparent if the story they tell is not as good as Netflix’s story.
Over the past few months, we also have seen Hollywood studios start to move towards opacity as a market standard. When studios and networks feel less of a need to be transparent, the quantitative and qualitative aspects of “what is a hit?” become more difficult to answer, and have surprising consequences.