This newsletter's mission is to help make sense of a dizzying media and content landscape for busy people. We'll serve up-to-the-minute analysis, guidance and curated news, aiming to be the fastest way to find the platforms, creators and content people are staring at right now. We hope you read on and enjoy!
Not A Pretty Picture
The media picture over the summer wasn’t pretty: Facebook and Snap are running out of humans and pay TV usage declined again in Q1 2018 for every demo except +65. Peak social media and peak pay TV are very real worries as privacy crises plague the former and the arms race for streaming scares the living shit out of the latter. People are not going to spend any less time with content and media; where they do spend that time is only going to keep shifting, though.
Making Us Dizzy
“Bob Pagani isn’t sure why hundreds of people tune in to watch him sleep every week.” So begins this dizzying explainer on the phenomenon of the world’s first sleepstreamer celebrity (we’re guessing). What could possibly make people watch this? Our hunch is that it provides a feeling of community for the lonely and the alienated: nights are long, why not spend it in the company of your close-knit community of the host and the chat?
What We're Staring At
The Go Off Kings is the first-ever critically acclaimed Twitch show (go ahead, check. We just made it up). It’s the cool kid comedy podcast updated in groundbreaking form for the streaming medium. We’re predicting they’re the Velvet Underground of streaming: not many people watched, but every one who did started their own Twitch stream. On Sunday night the Kings hosted their second roast and it was not only hilarious but a creative breakthrough for streaming. It’s a brutal roast of traditional media itself. The Go Off Kings proves that streaming is much more than video games and is the future of content, entertainment, talk shows, comedy, interviewing and what was once known as late night TV.
The Next Cure For Boredom
People are spending more time inside Instagram than ever before. Why? Stories, according to Kurt Wagner. “Instagram Stories has kind of become the world’s greatest cure for boredom,” said BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield, who covers Facebook and the rest of the media industry. Fullscreen, engaging video seems like the future of Facebook’s business - the new TV. Instagram has moved to make the format professional, with IGTV and big-time creators. Will ad dollars follow? This is gonna be fun!
Links
Whitman and Katzenberg's new streamingTV company will be called Quibi —They temporarily called it "NewTV," but announced the new name, Quibi, which is short for "quick bites."Internal Facebook Note:Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens—Facebook bought TBH last October and eventually shut it down, but an internal note shows that the company learned a way to target high schoolers through the viral polling app. How ‘Succession’ Became the Best Show on Television—The HBO series was a true summer phenomenon—though it took a little while for everyone to catch on. Go90 or bust—How AwesomenessTV’s fate was tied to Verizon