Happy Friday, folks
Survey: which fast-growing private company in media/entertainment/gaming (worth $500M+) would you most value reading a really in-depth analysis of?
Not much big news today. Have a good weekend. My weekend goal is to finish reading the John Malone biography Cable Cowboy. One fascinating tidbit I hadn't known before: when Malone was CEO of cable co TCI in 1978 and fighting to reduce a massive debt burden, the company discovered it owned long-forgotten shares in an aviation startup that were worth $31M. This was at a time when TCI's market cap was $100M. Talk about insane luck.
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Crunchyroll surpassed 2M subscribers
Crunchyroll, the SVOD service for anime and other Japanese content that's part of Otter Media (now 100% subsidiary of AT&T/WarnerMedia), passed 2 million paying subscribers.
Its content is available on a free ad-supported tier and an ad-free $7/month tier, plus it is part of the bundle for those who pay $10/month for VRV (also part of Otter). Crunchyroll has 10M DAUs overall and an avg daily watch time of 45min for paying subscribers. The SF-based company also has a 75-person team (in LA and Tokyo) developing Original Series that will premiere next year.
As AT&T works to consolidate its numerous OTT services into one central offering that can better compete with Netflix, Hulu, etc. it will be interesting to see if/when Crunchyroll gets rolled into that. I can image Crunchyroll retaining its independent offering giving the powerful brand it has established, but also be available through the new service AT&T is creating (which VRV may merge into).
Congrats to Kun Gao and the team.
( Learn more)
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TikTok gaining US adoption
Bytedance's social video app TikTok, that counts 500 million MAUs worldwide, is gaining a foothold in the US. It surpassed daily downloads of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat in the App Store on some days and had just shy of 4M downloads in October.
Those other apps already have much higher saturation in the US, so it's not surprising that a popular new app could surpass them on new downloads, but it shows TikTok could be breaking through. None of the major social apps in Asia has broken into the US market in a mainstream way.
Bytedance merged Musical.ly into TikTok in August after buying it for about $1B last year.
( Learn more)
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Smart Reads
- Tom Dotan at The Information interviewed Reddit COO Jen Wong about the platform's growth plans. (Read it here)
- Andrew Ross Sorkin interviewed Lachlan Murdoch about his plans for "New Fox" at the Dealbook conference yesterday. (Read it here)
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Video/TV/Film
- JJ Abrams, the iconic film director, is in talks with several studios for a massive (mid 9 figures) deal that would encompass first-look or exclusivity across his film, TV, music, gaming, consumer product, and theme park projects and include guaranteed slots in the studio's film slate. (Read more)
- According to Variety, Disney and Comcast/NBCU are the frontrunners. But Apple and Netflix could also afford to play ball.
- SlingTV, PlayStation Vue, Hulu with LiveTV, YouTube TV, and other live OTT services in the US have collectively seen a 292% increase in plays and 212% increase in viewing hours over the last year. (Read more)
- Meanwhile, live streaming apps directly operated by publishers have declined.
- ESPN is spending somewhere in the low $ hundreds of millions per year on its OTT service ESPN+, which earns $5/month from its 1M+ subscribers. (Read more)
- Hulu launched a $5/month add-on to its live OTT service HuluTV for subscribers who want access to a bundle of Spanish language channels. (Read more)
- CBS board chairman Richard Parsons (who just stepped down) had approached HBO's CEO Richard Plepler about his interest in the open CEO role at CBS but Plepler declined to pursue it. (Read more)
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Publishing
- Recode, the tech and media industry news site led by Kara Swisher, will merge into Vox.com as Vox's tech section rather than a standalone property. It'll still retain the brand Recode. (Read more)
- Vox Media acquired Recode in 2015.
- Recode's web traffic has dropped by 50% in the last year. It has seen growth in its podcasts and newsletter though.
- Swisher will maintain her podcast and serve as executive producer of the annual Code Conference. She has separately begun writing a column for the NYT as well.
- Tribune Publishing (fka Tronc) has received acquisition bids from McClatchy, AIM Media, and PE firm Donerail. (Read more)
- A study published in academic journal Information, Communication & Society found that trolling comments attacking the author of news articles do cause other readers to trust the author and publisher less and be less inclined to seek news from them. (Read more)
- There's really no benefit to publishers to leaving their comments section open to anyone and completely unfiltered/un-curated. Many feel obligated to include it, then ignore it. Very few publishers meaningfully invest in their comments section to make it an asset, which is a big missed opportunity.
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UGC Social Apps
- Kuaishou, the live streaming app with 150 million DAUs that's most popular in China's fifth-tier cities, is raising funding at a $25B valuation. (Read more)
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AR/VR + Other Tech
- Tencent will launch its own Weishi augmented reality glasses, similar to Snap's Spectacles, on Nov 11. (Read more)
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