Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary
For the week ending December 23, 2023
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As part of my own holiday rush, I inadvertently missed a line in my note about Amazon investing in Diamond Sports which an eagle-eyed reader thankfully picked up on.
Writing about the period between 2018 through 2022, according to my estimates pay TV revenue fell from $106 billion to $103 billion while the number of households with pay TV subscriptions fell from 95 million to 79 million. Over the same period, Diamond’s total households fell from 74 million to 40 million and its revenue (mostly affiliate fees) fell from $3.8 billion to $2.8 billion. Quarterly data is included in the following charts:
Source: Madison and Wall, Company Reports
Although the role of sports is uniquely important to the broader video ecosystem for as long as looks like it does today, the bigger near-term story in recent days was news related to M&A in the media industry involving Paramount. Catalysts and consequences of further M&A in the sector was captured in a post last week.
Beyond that, this past week I also wrote about agencies in context of a study that focused on marketers in-housing agency services. The TLDR: the scale of in-housing remains modest, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other threats for agencies to always be mindful of.
Happy holidays!