<\/p>\n
Scrolling through links over the last week, <\/span>I stumbled across this fun headline<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Wow. Formula 1 (the sport, not the docu-series) is the perfect \u201c<\/span>dog not barking<\/a>\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n As a reminder, each week in my Streaming Ratings Report, I call out the shows that miss every viewership chart. I dub them \u201c<\/span>dogs not barking<\/a>\u201d\u2014<\/span>like the Sherlock Holmes mystery<\/a>\u2014because without any data, we forget they even exist. This is in contrast to something like, say, a film flop\u2014cough <\/span>The Mandalorian and Grogu<\/em> cough\u2014where even underperforming at the box office is widely discussed here, there and everywhere.<\/span><\/p>\n In the US, Formula 1 is now in \u201cno public viewership data, so not discussed\u201d territory. After moving to Apple TV from its former home of ESPN, basically no one talks about it. Apple did publish an initial, unsourced, unsubstantiated, (dare I say unserious) datecdote <\/span>claiming more folks are watching Formula 1 on Apple than ESPN<\/a>, but we haven\u2019t gotten any updates since.<\/span><\/p>\n This stands in contrast to when the sport streamed on ESPN, and ESPN PR provided weekly viewership figures. Formula 1 was, at best, a niche sport in America\u2014averaging 1.3 million viewers in the Big Data Plus era\u2014but now it\u2019s basically anonymous. (And yeah, after moving to Apple, I very, very, very much doubt its ratings increased.)<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that story isn\u2019t quite big enough to warrant a section in today\u2019s \u201cMost Important Story of the Week\u201d column, but I wanted to call it out, because otherwise, no one else will! Certainly, no one will write articles about the silence\/ratings decline, unlike when they wrote breathless articles connecting the rise in viewership to Netflix\u2019s <\/span>Drive to Survive, <\/em>including Reuters just last month<\/a>. (This is <\/span>a topic<\/a> I\u2019ve tried to provide a <\/span>moderate<\/a>\/<\/strong>nuanced<\/a>\/non-hyped <\/span>take<\/a> since 2022.)<\/span><\/p>\n Anyway, on to this week\u2019s issue. I was a bit worried I didn\u2019t have a juicy topic, then the Murdochs went out and did their Murdoch thing: buying Roku. So that\u2019s the story of the week, and it happens to touch on quite a few themes of the streaming wars and the disruption therein. I\u2019ll cover that, plus why more consolidation in Hollywood media looks likely, more good news on the Hollywood labor front, whether we\u2019ll see an uptick in production in Los Angeles, some Broadway and theme park news, cellphone prices going up in the third world (and possibly everywhere), and more.<\/p>\n The story of the week is clearly Fox is buying Roku <\/span>for $22 billion<\/a>. I read a lot of good strategy takes on why Fox bought this streaming TV device maker\u2014and I\u2019ll have mine below\u2014but what fascinates me more is how this deal connects to quite a few themes of the streaming wars, linking to everything from the pace of <\/span>M&A <\/a>to \u201c<\/span>aggregeddon<\/a>\u201d to Netflix\u2019s recent M&A actions\/inactions to the shift to advertising from pure play streaming and more. The only topic I can\u2019t really connect it to is my old theory, \u201cnever bet against Rupert Murdoch\u201d because he isn\u2019t the one who did this deal; his son Lachlan inked it. (Do I think he provided advice, even at his 95 years of age? Sure.)<\/span><\/p>\n That plus I have one additional piece of strategy for all entertainment players, inspired by this deal. So let\u2019s dive into all those topics, starting with why I like this deal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source entertainment.substack.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Welcome to the \u201cMost Important Story of the Week\u201d, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I\u2019m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Scrolling through links over the last week, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2472453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2472452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Roku-May-Help-Fox-Avoid-Aggregeddon.com2Fpublic2Fimages2F0a35f2b4-fa47-4233-b44f-9f9b4.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2472452"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2472454,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472452\/revisions\/2472454"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2472453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2472452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2472452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2472452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}