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Timby posted:Ad sales, selling off their content for streaming and syndication. One of the issues, I'm not sure if it's being highlighted here though, is how a studio handles a show and it's various sales. Example: Universal Television made Brooklyn 99, initially sold the show to Fox for a set licensing deal, then NBC after Fox passed following Season 5. Universal Television then sold the show's back catalogue to Peacock. Peacock has world wide streaming rights for the show. In effect an NBC unit (UT) sold an NBC property (B99) to another NBC subunit (Peacock), but because there wasn't an open competition for the show's catalogue there is an air of monopolistic practices at play here artificially lowering the price paid and thus impacting residuals of all parties involved. This strike isn't going to change that, but they are the best way to highlight the practice and how shady it is.
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May 4, 2023 15:44
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 06:43 |
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:
Not really. It's 66% own by Disney and 33% owned by Comcast. Both sides can force the sale of the Comcast stake of Hulu with a minimum valuation of ~$28B (meaning ROUGHLY Comcast's share is worth $9B) in Jan 2024. Following that magical date in Jan 2024 Hulu's value will be assessed by an an independent third party, and given Hulu is second only to Netflix it's likely that $28B valuation will only go up. In 2020 and 2021 Disney tried to exercise the sale, however valuation could not be agreed upon between the companies. Rumor have it that Comcast wanted ESPN in lieu of a full cash payout. And that's kind of the crux of the issue, come Jan 2024 Disney either comes up with $9B - after laying off 7K workers and targeting $5.5B in savings - or risks watching Comcast pull their content and sell to someone else. Pinterest Mom posted:The tax write off thing never makes sense. You spend $100 million on something, okay sure you lower your taxes owed by 15 million, but you're still down 85 million! Sort of... two equally plausible scenarios that come to mind based on my limited recollection of College Finance / Accounting course: 1) you an carry those losses forward for x years, so that $100M write off can be carried forward like 5 (???) years against future profits. 2) you can write off a subsidiary's losses against the parent company's profits. So Bad Movie Co is wholly owned by Major Studio. That $100M Bad Movie Co production can be used against revenue of Major Studio But it's been forever since I thought about it, but this is largely what CPAs and the like get paid to do. Maybe we need a Business of TV thread? I think the 2008 strike had something similar and it was very enlightening to me about the economic realities of the business at the time - things like a season 3 renewal is also in effect a season 4 renewal as well due to how syndication worked at the time.
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May 5, 2023 16:08
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Pinterest Mom posted:Right but even in those two cases you're only "saving" whatever the corporate tax rate you pay is. It's worse to lose money than to not lose money, and making a vague hand-wave about "tax writeoffs" doesn't change that. We're both over simplifying the tax code quote a bit, however my understanding is that the big numbers being tossed about largely go against corps with revenue in the Billions so it can be realized immediately / near term. Amazon spending $300M on a TV show likely encompasses internal transfers such as marketing costs to amazon.com for ads / FireTV placement / boxes and AWS for whatever production technical infrastructure is required and therefore not a "real" loss. But even if if it's a total loss - $300M against $500B in 2022 revenue likely means it will all be realized in year 1.
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May 5, 2023 16:42
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Comcast made a huge bet on Peacock. It started shortly after they bought NBCUNIVERSAL from GE in what 2013 or so? They immediately built a streaming team to build Peacock and sunk 5ish years of development into the product. The logging is there in some kind of huge data lake and the tools are the best the team could develop at the time. The ad sales team demanded that as they were doing this whole Nielsen numbers are bullshit thing at the same time citing set top box data from the cable companies not jiving with the Nielsen numbers for the NBC shows. Source: I was in NBCU’s IT team from 2013 to 2018, working with, but not on, the Peacock dev team. But most of this should be online by now. So I’m leaning heavily on the data exists but would not be advantageous to release specifics in light of the current corporate landscape. Looking at how Disney and Comcast are handling the Hulu situation with Comcast basically forcing Disney to buy them out at something like a $9Bn valuation, it genuinely seems like maybe the numbers are not where the owners hope. But the embarrassment of having a streaming platform that is a loss leader may open the company to a shareholder lawsuit for tanking the stock valuation through mismanagement. But I don’t have any solid data supporting that, just projections based on random data that may be nothing at all.
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Jul 22, 2023 04:39
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So here’s one thing that stood out to me:quote:”For the first time, viewership data in the form of quarterly confidential reports is to be provided to the WGA that will include total SVOD view hours per title. This increased transparency will enable the WGA to develop proposals to restructure the current SVOD residual regime in the future.” Source: https://deadline.com/2023/08/wga-strike-amptp-deal-revealed-1235525636/ That would be a hard no for me - the whole purpose of this strike is to resolve issues like this today not some random date in the future. Going back to the 2008 strike there was a thread here in TVIV by a WGA member who helped inform me about the goings on behind the scenes and the business of TV that I really found informative. Now most of that is via other channels, but SA remains a high quality aggregator of news which I enjoy. Thank you guild members for sharing your unvarnished thoughts on the matter.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:13
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Argyle posted:There’s also a lot of actual writing. My partner works in “unscripted” and she does as much writing as I do on my scripted show. Probably more, tbh. Does her work fall under the “Story Editor” title that IIRC was a topic in the 08(??) strike and the WGA eventually dropped? It always bothered me that the WGA did that back then and I hope situation changed for those not in the Showrunner level.
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Sep 18, 2023 20:17
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 06:43 |
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My read of the situation was that the shelved projects were meant for streaming which would drive subscriptions and under the old model pre-Strike effectively could be replayed for free due to Hollywood math making it impossible for those owed residuals to determine what those rates should be. The new regime had a choice given they did not believe in streaming only projects and non-Ad supported Video on Demand shows. They could pony up additional dollars to fund a marketing campaign or shelve the project and write off as a loss today with an eye towards releasing it at some future date after “additional editing time”. The cast and crew got their money and that money would have been pushed into the economy already. The only thing that WB is doing is limiting any residual payments which, as noted above, are functionally nothing. And in all honesty probably still in the rounding error range post strikes. Which sucks. It also makes it less likely that talented artists will be willing to work with companies that do this to going forward however that’s a tomorrow problem not a today problem from the fuckers in the C-Suites. Then you have the whole “muddies the new DCU” thing that is happening over at WB post reset. The powers that be there don’t seem like they give a gently caress pissing off anyone at the moment. Which now that the boom on comic movies is finally over is quite fitting to relaunch into a market that is less interested then ever in the product.
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Nov 29, 2023 21:17
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