Crypto News: Streaming’s slow start, good podcast data, Miley’s return

Happy Sunday before the Oscars. Everything Everywhere All At Once is the prohibitive favorite for best picture, an unlikely but welcome turn from a group of voters that tends to favor familiar names and ideas. I will be in Washington DC on Thursday and Friday of this week so please holler if you're around.

Three things you need to know

Two years ago, Reese Witherspoon sold Hello Sunshine for $900 million. Now, Hollywood production companies are grappling with a challenging deal market. I wrote about some companies that have explored a sale without success.
The work phone is back in a big way. Read more from Scott Moritz.
Creed III has already eclipsed $100 million globally — a strong showing for first-time director Michael B. Jordan.

The biggest streaming services are light on new hits.

Ratings for the most popular streaming originals dropped about 8% from a year ago through the first six weeks of the year. In the first week of February, viewership of the top 10 originals dropped to the lowest point since December 2021. That's 15 months (and tens of millions of new customers) ago.

You can notice the dearth of new hits in Nielsen's top 10 for the week ending February 5. Almost all the most popular streaming programs that week were reruns. People watched New Amsterdam, Grey's Anatomy, NCIS and The Walking Dead more than the second season of Amazon's Hunters, Hulu's How I Met Your Father or Disney+'s "Star Wars: The Bad Batch."

To state the obvious, if there are a bunch of reruns in the streaming top 10, it means new shows aren't breaking out.

Disney+ and Hulu have yet to deliver a new hit show this year (at least in the US), while Netflix has one smash (Ginny and Georgia) and a few other smaller titles. Amazon's biggest show is Jack Ryan, which came out in December. The two buzziest shows of the year are HBO's The Last of Us and Peacock's Poker Face and The Last of Us doesn't technically count as a streaming original since it debuts on HBO.

Netflix viewership is down globally

This isn't just a US phenomenon. Viewership of Netflix's most popular movies and TV shows globally is down about 8% so far this year.

Viewership in February dipped to its lowest point since May of 2022. That was when Netflix was losing customers and caused all of Wall Street to freak out about streaming's future.

The company averted disaster thanks to the new season of Stranger Things, which dropped at the end of that quarter. It then released a bunch of popular shows in the back half of last year to reassure investors.

Any new slowdown would also be troubling for investors given what happened a year ago. The total number of new subscribers to major streaming services hit new lows. Here is what it looks like combining Netflix, Disney+ and Paramount, the only three companies that report reliable numbers:

The trajectory is similar for revenue and profits.

Now, this isn't all doom and gloom. Just because there aren't a lot of new hits doesn't mean people aren't streaming. The amount of time Americans spent streaming TV in January is up 31.8% from a year ago. Streaming's overall share of TV viewing in the US jumped to 38%.

This may well be a blip. All the services have big new shows coming. Outer Banks, a pulpy teen romance, is a huge hit for Netflix and should boost the company's numbers. Disney+ just dropped the first episode of a new season of The Mandalorian, which will compete with Amazon's Daisy Jones & the Six.

But this slow start to the year could be a little glimpse into the future. We've become so accustomed to having lots of new material to watch every weekend and feeling behind the deluge of new releases. As companies cut back, most of them are realizing they may not need to pump out quite as many shows as they once did. If you give people a good new show every month and space out the episodes, you can still thrive.

(Netflix remains the exception to this. The company's leaders have said they want to have a Squid Game every week and release more projects than any of their peers.)

While it's too soon for viewers to feel any slowdown in buying, the writers strike may intervene first. Ask yourself: Are you ready for a little less TV? – Lucas Shaw

Mea culpa: While writing about streaming services funding original ideas last week, I mentioned Orange is the New Black, The Boys and Bad Sisters. Those are not original ideas! Orange is the New Black is based on a memoir, The Boys is based on a comic and Bad Sisters is based on another show.

Asia has been Netflix's fastest-growing region, and that's not going to change this year. The streaming service is actually going to increase its growth rate, according to Media Partners Asia.

The media consultancy identifies three factors: Netflix's strength in South Korea and Japan, accelerated growth in South Asia and Southeast Asia and a resurgence in Australia.

It's easy to tease Netflix for being stubborn. It refused to embrace advertising or limit password sharing — and then it did. But another way of looking at its approach is that it is willing to be flexible when it proves necessary.

Netflix struggled for a few years in India, so it lowered prices. That has started to have an impact. Netflix is now aping that model in dozens of countries all over the world, which should boost its overall growth.

The company's growth slowed to a crawl in the US, so it introduced advertising to appeal to cost-sensitive customers. That ad tier now accounts for about one-fifth of all new sign-ups in the US, according to Antenna data. And it's proven to be a hit in Australia, per MPA.

What's one secret to Netflix's success in Asia? Korean TV.

Podcasting — it's not dead!

It's been a rough few months for the podcasting industry.

The biggest buyers of new shows all fired staff and/or vowed to cut costs. They did so due to macroeconomic concerns, but also because they realized they weren't making money from a lot of the shows they bought.

One story led to another, and soon enough several major news outlets wrote stories about the podcast industry's woes. The best way to summarize everything that happened came from Eric Nuzum: "The dumb money era is over."

This doesn't mean that podcasting is over — or even in decline -- as the latest report from Edison Research reinforces. The number of people who say they listen to a podcast every month in the US is up this year (after falling in 2022).

A rising audience should attract advertisers. So it's up to the distributors to figure out how to make more money from their listeners.

The No. 1 song in the world is…

Miley Cyrus' "Flowers." It's the top song on both Spotify and YouTube and is Cyrus' second No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 (following "Wrecking Ball").

Cyrus is signed to Sony Corp.'s Columbia Records, which has had the strongest 14 months of any label in the world. It had the top song in the US for 25 of the 52 weeks last year thanks to Harry Styles, Beyonce, Adele and Mariah Carey. (If you include its sister label RCA, Sony had the top song for the majority of last year.) Columbia has also had the top song all but two weeks this year thanks to Cyrus and Mariah Carey.

While Universal Music Group is still the biggest record company in the world, Sony has the hot hand right now.

Netflix's first play

The creators of Stranger Things are adapting their hit TV show into a play for London's West End. Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours) will direct it.

This is all part of Netflix's strategy to turn its popular TV shows into franchises that span experiences and consumer products. The company has moved slowly because it doesn't have a deep well of projects that make sense as theme parks rides or plush toys. But theater is a natural extension. (It is somewhat ironic that Netflix sued to stop an unofficial Bridgerton musical, which they could have made themselves.)

Deals, deals, deals

Paramount turned down an offer of $3 billion for Showtime.
The world's largest movie theater chain lost $287 million in the final quarter of last year
The EU is going to bless Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision, per Reuters.
Paramount is paying investors $122 million to settle a lawsuit over the merger of Viacom and CBS.
The frothy music market might be back. Lyric raised $800 million to buy copyrights.

De La Soul is on streaming. Get to it.

Listen: Foundering: The John McAfee Story is a new six-part podcast series retracing the life, the myths and the self-destruction of a Silicon Valley icon. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get Tech Daily and more Bloomberg Tech weeklies in your inbox:

Cyber Bulletin for coverage of the shadow world of hackers and cyber-espionage
Game On for a playthrough of the video game business
Power On for Apple scoops, consumer tech news and more
Soundbite for reporting on podcasting, the music industry and audio trends

Like getting this newsletter? Subscribe to Bloomberg.com for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and subscriber-only insights.

Looking for a group subscription? Help your team stay on top of today's business landscape with our discounted group subscription options.

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can't find anywhere else. Learn more.