Eric Peckham, Author at Monetizing Media

Old media giants turn to VC for their next act

Read my post on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/18/old-media-giants-turn-to-vc-for-their-next-act/

MasterClass is mastering scale as a media business

MasterClass’ $80M Series D announced last week marks a triumph in validating the potential venture-scale of content businesses in an era when many are founded with equal parts tech and media DNA. READ MY POST ON TECHCRUNCH.COM »

MoviePass, AMC, and the Era of Cinema Subscriptions

AMC Entertainment announced a $19.95/month subscription last month called the AMC Stubs A-List for movie-goers to see up to 3 movies per week at its theaters (Stubs is their rewards program). This is a big experiment for AMC – the largest exhibitor chain (aka cinema chain) in the world – not least because its CEO Adam Aron […]

Next steps for the LA Times

The Los Angeles Times officially traded hands yesterday from Tronc to biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who named Norman Pearlstine as the new Executive Editor. Pearlstine had retired as Vice Chairman of Time Inc as it closed its sale to Meredith Corp, following 50 years in roles across Time, Bloomberg, the WSJ, and Forbes. In the announcement, […]

Is CBS the next media acquisition?

CBS is perhaps the most obvious media company to be the next target for larger acquirers. The $21B company has the leading TV network in the US and over 5M subscribers between two OTT platforms (CBS All Access and Showtime) in addition to a leading book publisher (Simon & Schuster), deep content libraries, numerous digital media […]

2018 FIFA World Cup

Today is the start of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia (ending July 15). In the US, FOX has the English-language TV rights while Telemundo has the Spanish-language TV rights; fuboTV is streaming the games via its FOX partnership. Here’s the list of all the broadcast, streaming, and radio rights by country: link. Team USA didn’t qualify for the […]

21st Century Fox’s valuable position in India

Here’s an interesting data point: 21st Century Fox dominates OTT market share in India through its Hotstar subsidiary, which has 150M MAUs. According to new data from internet service provider Jana, Hotstar accounted for 70% of video streaming app downloads in Q1, compared to 13% for SonyLIV, 11% for Voot (owned by Viacom 18), 5% for […]

US podcasting market size was $314M in 2017

According to an IAB/PwC report, the market size for podcast advertising in the US was $314M in 2017, an incredible 86% yoy increase from $169M in 2016. It predicts the market will reach $659M in 2020. One stat of note: 38% of podcast ad spend in 2017 was via annual upfront buys (compared to 27% in 2016).

Spotify starts signing artists directly

The big news today is that Spotify is offering advances (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range) to select indie musicians and talent managers in exchange for licensing their music directly to Spotify. By direct licensing, they will get up to a 50% share of royalties plus retain all rights to their work. (link) The […]