Technology, Capital Markets, Corporate Governance, Leadership, Entrepreneurship
Category: Media & Entertainment
When considering enterprise technology purchases – regardless of industry – corporate buyers would do well to think like investors. There are three legs to the technology evaluation stool: 1.) What is the technology provider’s value proposition? 2.) Who is the technology provider? (corporate buyers often pay insufficient attention here) 3.) What is the total cost … Continue reading Technology Buyers Would Do Well to Think Like InvestorsPremium
Investors Allocate Premium Valuations to That Which They Understand My theory is that institutional investors implicitly penalize complexity. I base my theory largely on 23 years of capital markets experience and intuition and admittedly have little data to support it. I believe that investors will invest a dollar in Company A assuming that "A" has … Continue reading Don’t Give Investors A Reason to Say “No”
Bundle Pricing Negotiations Are Preferable to Product Pricing Negotiations Vendors have far more leverage with customers when negotiating pricing for a bundle/platform of products and services as opposed to an a la carte negotiation. There's a reason why cable providers sold content bundles for years - it was the optimal revenue and profit model - … Continue reading Have A Bundle Discussion with Customers, Not A Product DiscussionPremium
Things Will Get Worse for Facebook Before They Get Better. A Second Act Is Required. Our thesis is simple. User growth has slowed and in the recent June quarter declined. We expect this trend to continue in the near-term as the following factors negatively impact Facebook’s business. Declines in User Trust and Engagement: The Cambridge … Continue reading Facebook – Things Will Get Worse Before They Get BetterPremium
Content Is King Content is King to quote Sumner Redstone. At CEORater we spend a fair amount of time thinking about content. Over the past 24 months we have considered the following for our platform: 1.) video streaming of earnings calls with associated analytics 2.) employee video reviews 3.) business news (original and third-party) and … Continue reading Original Content Disclosures Are Lacking. Introducing “Content Yield”Premium
Technology news items that caught our attention this week: Waymo to launch robo-taxis in Europe: Link Phoenix AZ as petri dish for autonomous driving: Link Kroger is launching a fully driverless delivery service: Link In the “Service, Maintenance, Repair” category: the US Army is using machine learning to predict when combat vehicles need repair: Link … Continue reading Technology News from the Week: June 25th 2018
Technology news items that caught our attention this week: Google’s AI can now lip read better than humans after watching thousands of hours of TV: Link Instagram takes a shot at YouTube, further distances itself from other social media platforms by rolling out long-form video: Link One million people use Bank of America’s AI-powered virtual … Continue reading Technology News from the Week: June 18th 2018
Viacom founder Sumner Redstone once said that "content is king". The time was the 1990s. Whether to own content assets or distribution assets was the question of the day. Technology, Media and Telecom ("TMT") companies were positioning themselves for the "information superhighway". Today, content assets enjoy premium valuations. Look no further than Netflix (although the … Continue reading Content Is King – Or – The Rate of Decline Is Always Underestimated
Yes if You Ask Us While AT&T moving to acquire Time Warner and Disney (and Comcast?) moving to acquire Fox are interesting deals, it’s more interesting to us what the next chess move may be in a world that increasingly values content (live sports and premium original content in particular). We recently wrote about and … Continue reading Is Apple Disney’s End Game?Premium
Everyone Wants Their 15 Minutes of Fame It’s a primary reason why Instagram “Stories” are so popular. That and the feature’s ease-of-use. Instagram has created an engaging, almost frictionless user experience that enables anyone to vlog their life in a series of micro videos with a 24-hour shelf life – i.e “Stories”. Stories is the … Continue reading 15 Minutes of Fame: The Intersection of User-Generated Video, Social Media and Mobile Devices
