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The War for Warners: Annotated Timeline

This is a constantly evolving, annotated timeline of key events and reports that led to Warner Brothers acquisition by... someone. Combined from WBD, Netflix and Paramount Skydance filing, great reporting by Bloomberg, WSJ, Puck, and others, analyst reports and some first-hand observations. I want it to be as thorough and well-sourced as possible, but I can't possibly cover every detail. If you feel there's something that needs to be added, corrected, contextualized, or credit due, please reach out contact@owlandco.com.

2026: What I'd Do, Part I

12/17/25

“Why don’t you do a Predictions issue?" Because plenty of smart people already do. And Streamonomics readers probably don’t care about who I think will end up owning WB. You care about what you can do regardless of who wins to build enterprise value for your business, your investments and yourself. I've sat in a lot of chairs...

Advertising is Inevitable. How Streamers Can Get it Right.

12/3/25

This weekend, after an eagle-eyed developer discovered references to ads in the latest test version of ChatGPT, expert Eric Seufert reposted a now nine-month-old Tweet: “Obviously, OpenAI will monetize with ads”. Eric was referring to his March 2025 post predicting that would be the case—the same day Sam Altman had been asked if advertising was in the future and responded, “I hope not”. (And just as I was writing this, Sam Altman issued his now-famous Code Red memo, which, among other things, said they would delay the implementation of ads.) Streaming only fully embraced advertising in the last three years. Sure, there were exceptions:

My $100B Advice for Anyone Not Winning WB

11/19/25

Many Streamonomics® readers work for Paramount/Skydance, Comcast or Netflix, the companies most often cited as potential winners of the WB auction. Add in their bankers, advisors and suppliers, and the circle gets wider.But only one will end up owning WB, and whoever does, won’t get the keys until early 2027. That’s roughly 15 months from today—not an eternity, but plenty of time for everyone else to activate new levers of revenue growth, driving Streaming Enterprise Value™ (SEV). With the ‘streaming seven’ making a collective $7.4B in profits in Q3, of which “only” 44% came from Netflix, streaming has become more competitive and profitable than ever.

Meta's $50B Video Revenue Surprise

11/5/25

When I first started including YouTube in Streamonomics® comparisons with Netflix and other streamers, people often asked: “Why? They’re apples and oranges.” The simplest answer was that Netflix itself drew that comparison in their investor letters, calling both companies ‘the clear leaders in direct to consumer entertainment.’ I expect louder reactions to today’s newsletter, which analyzes YouTube’s and Meta’s Q3 numbers. Meta made a comment almost in passing during their Q3 earnings call that caught my attention...

Netflix and WB: Yes or No? Would a Spotify Tie-Up Make More Sense?

10/23/25

Netflix reported Q3 earnings on Tuesday, and behind an impressive 17% y/y revenue growth, there were a few surprises. Operating income came in at $3.25B vs guidance of $3.6B, due to a $0.6B four-year catch-up accrual of disputed Brazilian taxes. Adjusting for it, OpInc would have grown 33% y/y. The company did not quite brag about engagement growth. Greg Peters said it had grown ‘a bit faster’ in Q3’25 than in 1H25 (when it rose 1%), adding they expect ‘steady growth in viewing hours over time’. But there was a bigger question in investors’ heads: Would Netflix try to buy Warner Bros?

Netflix's $1,600 Subs, Q3 Earnings: The SEV View

10/15/25

Netflix kicks off the Q3 Streaming and Social Earnings season on October 21st. As of last Friday, its Enterprise Value stood at $524B, or about $1,650 per subscriber, based on Q3 consensus estimates of 317M subs. When the company stopped reporting subscriber numbers, it explained that “memberships are just one component of our growth.” More importantly: “as we’ve evolved our pricing and plans from a single to multiple tiers with different price points depending on the country, each incremental paid membership has a very different business impact.” Since then, I’ve been wondering: can we quantify “very different”? And what are the implications for the entire streaming ecosystem?

How Streaming Let the Day Slip Away And How to Get it Back

10/1/25

In May 2025, streaming hit a historic milestone in the U.S., eclipsing linear television’s share of viewing for the first time, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge: 44.8% for streaming vs. 44.2% for broadcast and cable combined. Compared to May 2022, streaming gained 13 share points, driven by more services, more shows, and more subscribers. But one service grew faster than all others...

The Short Report, Ep 1: The Long View on Short Form

9/17/25

Short drama apps are on track to make $3 billion this year outside China—nearly triple last year. That’s still small compared to Netflix or YouTube, but it marks the creation of something that’s never existed: a functioning marketplace for short form scripted storytelling. Shorts have been around for more than a century. The Oscars first recognized them in 1932. The Emmys added a Short Form category in 2011. And yet, for most of that history, short form was second-class—stuck between pure art and proof-of-concept. Theaters and TV networks didn’t buy it. Streamers didn’t want it. YouTube finally built a system to monetize short form—but for everything except scripted drama. It works for how-to’s, unboxings, comedy skits, dance videos, and even elaborate productions like Mr Beast’s. But serialized storytelling?

Do We Have Too Much Serialized TV?: Netflix Viewing and Content Spend

9/4/25

Over the last few months, my team and I have been poring over four years’ worth of Netflix top-10-weekly viewership data, two-and-a-half years of What We Watched reports, 10-Qs as well as content spend estimates and title-level metadata licensed from Ampere Analysis. And we also built our own model to categorize shows as serialized, episodic, or anthology. To benchmark how Netflix converts content dollars into Viewing Hours, we use a raw average, “Cost Per Thousand Viewing Hours.” Think of it as the flipside of Revenue Per Thousand Viewing Hours, a measure of how Netflix turns its engagement engine into revenue.

Streaming Enterprise Value Part 3: Why Paramount Spent $7.7B on UFC

8/20/25

Should we have been surprised when David Ellison, the new CEO of Paramount, announced a $7.7B, seven-year deal for all U.S. rights to the UFC? Like many, I thought it was a bold move. He outbid ESPN, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Warner Bros, Dazn, and YouTube. And he did it just days after taking control of Paramount through the merger with Skydance Corporation. But it is a move not without precedent. A new CEO looking to make his mark and break into an industry. A big price tag. A deal that would change live sports for decades to come. We’ve seen this before...

Streamonomics®: The Q2 Streaming Earnings Scorecard (So Far)

8/6/25

Tension had been building throughout the Spotify earnings call last week. “We’ve now seen a full year of single-digit growth in ad-supported constant currency, while competition is reporting faster growth rates. Is the advertising business really core to Spotify?” “Of course it is, otherwise we wouldn’t be in it,” Alex Norström snapped back.

YouTube vs Netflix: Engagement vs Profit

7/24/25

Netflix reported Q2 results and H1 “What We Watched” last week. YouTube parent Alphabet reported yesterday. While Alphabet doesn’t break out subscriber revenue, profits or engagement for YouTube, I have been modeling all three using third-party data, to give you a sense of how the top two streamers stack up, and what that foretells for all market participants. The good news: combined, they generated $10BN in operating income from streaming in 1H25. Here’s what else stood out.

The Forces Shaping Q2 Streaming and Social Earnings

7/9/25

“The real threat when they organize themselves is YouTube.” These were the words of Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, way back in 2018. And organize themselves they have. Seven years later, as Netflix kicks off the Q2 earnings season—a year after calling YouTube “the other clear leader in D2C entertainment”—that prediction continues to play out: YouTube’s audience growth is on a tear. However, Netflix’s earnings this quarter should continue to be far ahead of YouTube’s. I also anticipate a good print from Spotify, which enjoyed MAU growth throughout Q2, as well as Max and Disney+, both of which should deliver good results—but for different reasons (more on that below). And, in a full circle moment, Instagram (which is growing mobile Time Spent as fast as YouTube) and TikTok are hoping to follow YouTube’s playbook that Hastings rightly perceived as a threat in 2018: they also want to be on TV. Can they make the switch?

SEV Part 2: Netflix, TF1 + The Race to Become The Anchor Bundle

6/25/25

Barely a week after I published Streaming Enterprise Value: Part 1, Netflix did something it had long signaled it wasn’t open to. It struck a deal with TF1, France’s largest broadcaster, to integrate both TF1’s live channels and its AVOD service TF1+ into the Netflix UI, all included with your Netflix’s subscription. “C’est pas possible!” competitors and analysts observed...

Streaming Enterprise Value™: A New Business Intelligence Service from Streamonomics®

6/10/25

When I first launched Streamonomics® last year, I defined it too narrowly—just the unit economics of TV and film in the streaming era. But quickly, it was obvious: streaming had reshaped music and gaming too. YouTube, for many intents, was a streamer. Netflix in fact called it “the other leader” in D2C streaming . And unit economics, while still key (not just for understanding but for growing, competing or negotiating), are only a subset of Economics. Economics itself has evolved. It started as the study of how people, companies and nations allocate limited resources to satisfy unlimited wants and needs. But over the last decades, Behavioral Economics added psychology—accounting for how people and companies often make...

The Global Podcast Economy: A Complete Picture

5/7/25

So, How Big Is Podcasting Really? This was the question I couldn’t shake. Not just ad sales in the U.S., or what a platform reports in a quarterly letter — but the full picture. Ads, subscriptions, branded content, even tipping. Across audio and video. In the U.S. and around the world. Four months, a hundred conversations, and countless spreadsheets later… here’s what we found:

Streamonomics® 25: Netflix, YouTube, Meta, Spotify Q1 Earnings

4/14/25

This Thursday, Netflix kicks off the Streaming and Social Earnings Season with its Q1’25 results. For the first time, they won’t be reporting subscribers—which might be for the best...

Streamonomics® 25: The Rise of Media Super-Apps

3/5/25

In 2024, people watched 188 billion hours on Netflix globally, the company revealed last week, a 3% growth year-on-year. Spotify had reported 190 billion streaming hours, up 15%. You can say these are not apples-to-apples: Spotify has a popular free tier, plus you can multitask listening more easily than watching. But if I asked you how many streaming hours YouTube generated in 2024, would your guess be a little bit more than Netflix… double… triple?

Streaming Has a Mobile Opportunity

2/13/25

In 2024, consumers worldwide spent 3 trillion hours on social platforms including YouTube on mobile, according to Sensor Tower. In contrast, they spent only 69 billion hours on streaming video (including SVOD, AVOD, both global and local) on mobile, out of an estimated 600 billion hours...

Squid Game Delivers 1B Hours: Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits Jan25

1/30/25

Squid Game is massive: Season 2 and Season 1 held the top 2 spots on our Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits for January of 2025, collectively delivering 1billion viewing hours. No other show has...

The #1 Streaming Originals Of 2024 + Netflix Top 20 TV Hits Dec

1/13/25

Does a show on Netflix have a higher chance of breaking through compared to the same show on Apple TV+ or Paramount+? It depends. While Netflix has more subscribers, compounded by higher time spent...

The Streamonomics® of NFL on Netflix: Post-Game Analysis

1/2/25

“We’re not anti-sports, we’re just pro-profit”, said Ted Sarandos at the UBS TMT conference just two years ago, explaining Netflix did not see a path to profit in “renting big-league sports”. While caveating with “never say never”, he reinforced what many in the audience already believed: the economics of major sports are traditionally built around Pay TV and don’t make sense for streaming. Or do they?

Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits: November 2024

12/2/24

Netflix wants you to know that the Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson fight was a success. A record-breaking night! The most streamed sports event ever! The most streamed professional women’s sports event in US history! So, it won’t surprise you to hear that it was the # 1 show for our November Top 20 Global TV Hits, with 233 million viewing hours. But was it enough to make it the most successful of the year ...

Q3'24: An Inflection Point for Streaming

11/14/24

This past quarter marked a pivotal moment for streaming: at least six major players have hit profitability and growth, either reported (some with asterisks) or based on our estimates. Today, Disney delivered, posting 15% YoY revenue growth and $320m in streaming operating income across Disney+, hulu (including Live) and ESPN+ for the September quarter. They further pleased investors by guiding to $1bn in streaming operating income in their new fiscal year, which started in October. Disney's revenue growth rate aligned closely with YouTube (16%) and Netflix (15%). Netflix reported...

US Streaming Originals (Beta) + Netflix Top 20 TV Hits Oct24

10/30/24

Reportedly, every streamer but Netflix passed on Nobody Wants This —making its title feel very meta. And yet, the 20th TV romantic comedy created by Erin Foster was one of the most watched shows in two of our monthly rankings. (If you haven’t watched it yet—do yourself a favor!) A New Type of Ranking Ever since we started sharing our Netflix’s Global Top 20 TV Hits, the question keeps coming: “What about the other streamers?”. ..

Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits: September 2024

10/2/24

If you found yourself humming along to the catchy “Criminals”, from The Perfect Couple’s title sequence, you were not alone: the show delivered nearly 300 million viewing hours globally for Netflix in September, equivalent to 59 million views. But did it beat Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story? Yes and no; “Monsters” delivered 251 million viewing hours but it was only available for 12 days, while The Perfect Couple was available the whole month. Such is the unfairness of calendar-based rankings, but they also present an opportunity: if you want your show to rank highly in Netflix’s “What We’re Watching” half-yearly report...

The Streaming Four

9/26/24

I bet every time someone writes “the streaming wars are over, Netflix won”, Ted Sarandos rolls his eyes. Sure, it’s flattering —but is it productive? Just two months ago, Netflix surprised Wall Street by proclaiming that they and YouTube were “the clear leaders in direct-to-consumer entertainment”. YouTube and Netflix do compete —for time spent, consumer dollars, and now advertising dollars. Their revenues and profits are comparable. Both have global scale and enviable tech. But they approach streaming from vastly different positions, leveraging unique and hard-to-replicate strengths. The streaming wars are evolving into multiple battles. Through the lens of Streamonomics®, we can analyze which weapon is suited for which fight. But to get a more complete picture we must, at a minimum, look at two other large global players. While they started their journeys later, and thus still have to grow into the economics of the top 2 players, each of them also has unique strengths that will be difficult for the others to replicate. I’m talking about...

Streamonomics®: Unit Economics Matter More Than Ever in Streaming

9/20/24

How much is a subscriber worth? What about an hour of viewing? And how much do you need to spend to get that subscriber or extra hour of viewing? How much cheaper is it to retain an existing subscriber than acquire a new one? And how many viewing hours per month are needed to prevent churn? If I create a TV show or a movie, how can I better understand, then predict how many subscribers, ad dollars or viewing hours it will generate? Who’s better positioned to monetize them, and how do I maximize the my return? All these questions go the heart of Streamonomics®...

Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits: August 2024

8/28/24

In August 2024, The Umbrella Academy (Universal Content Productions) emerged as Netflix’s most-watched show globally, with 110m viewing hours. Closely behind was Emily in Paris: S4 (MTV Entertainment/Jax Media/Darren Star), despite being available for only two weeks of the month. What’s interesting is that both shows delivered significantly fewer viewing hours than July’s top performer, Desperate Lies, which amassed 185m viewing hours. Collectively, the Top 20 TV hits were down 11% from July’24 and 22% from August of 2023 in global viewing hours. This decline mirrors the trends we observed in July....

UMG and Sony Q2 Earnings Raise Red Flag for Music Streaming

8/10/24

When Spotify reported 21% revenue growth for Q2’24, investors were impressed. Spotify is the best-known pure-play proxy for streaming music, commanding a third of the market and possibly a higher share-of-mind. Less reported was the fact that their cost of revenues (a closer proxy for what they pay for music rights) only grew by ...

Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits: July 2024

8/7/24

“Desperate Lies” (“Pedaço de Mim”), a 17-episode prime time soap produced by Banijay-owned A Fábrica was Netflix’s most watched TV show in July globally, making it the first ever Portuguese-language show to reach the top of the chart since we started tracking them in January 2023. (So far, only shows in English, Korean, Spanish and French had reached # 1 globally in any given month). It was a slow July overall...

Streaming Wars: YouTube vs Netflix

7/23/24

“Netflix and YouTube are the clear leaders in direct-to-consumer entertainment”, said Netflix while announcing strong results for the first half of 2024. After throwing roses at YouTube and darts at its premium rivals, it curiously went on to say:“We believe our biggest opportunity is winning a larger share of the 80%+ of TV time (primarily linear and streaming) that neither Netflix nor YouTube has today.”

Streamonomics®: Engagement vs Churn, Quantified

7/14/24

It's obvious. Higher engagement with streamer services leads to lower churn. But how much of an increase is needed for a meaningful reduction? How strong is the correlation? Is the relationship linear, or is there a ‘magical threshold’? ...

Romantasy Books are on a Roll. Is TV Next?

7/11/24

'Dragons and sex' book sales nearly doubled in the US from Jan-May '24

Streamonomics®: Mid-Year 2024 + Netflix Top 20 TV Hits June

7/3/24

The Streaming Wars are giving way to multiple battles.

Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits: May 2024

5/30/24

Shondaland’s “Bridgerton: S3” topped our May 2024 ranking of Global TV Hits on Netflix, despite launching mid-month with only 4 episodes currently available. Viewers also binged on prior seasons and the spinoff “Queen Charlotte”, bringing the franchise’s total viewing hours to half a billion worldwide.

Netflix Releases 2023 Viewership Data

5/28/24

On May 23rd, Netflix released viewership data for 16,0o00 titles globally for the second half of 2023. We combined those numbers with other data sources we’ve been aggregating over the last six months to look at the bigger picture.

Streamonomics®: The Netflix-NFL deal edition

5/17/24

Among all the announcements Netflix made this week, few generated more headlines that their deal with the NFL to license two Christmas Day games, for a fee reported at ~$75m each.

Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits: April 2024

5/1/24

Korean drama is back at the top of Netflix’s global TV viewership charts, with “Queen of Tears” (CJ ENM’s Studio Dragon/Culture Depot) delivering 279m viewing hours in April 2024.

Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits: March 2024

4/3/24

"The Gentlemen", Guy Ritchie's thrilling, action-packed dramedy led by Theo James (Netflix/Miramax) was Netflix's most viewed TV show globally in March 2024, delivering 346m Viewing Hours. Today (April 3), we're unveiling the beta version of our new monthly ranking: "Netflix Top 20 Global TV Hits".

The Six Superpowers Of Business

3/9/24

In 2023, 5.5 million businesses and 3.7 million babies were born in the US. You might have given birth to one of them, and I bet yours is the most beautiful of them all.And just like no two babies are born alike—not even twins—no two businesses are born alike. We all bring our strengths and weaknesses, our heritage, and our baggage. Some of them are beyond our control, but most are not. This is true of a business you started, or the one you came to lead. Large and small, and everything in between...

The Price of Engagement: How Streamers Make More With Less