Julia Alexander

2 weeks ago | puck.news | Julia Alexander

Perhaps the most important thing we learned last week, when Jimmy Pitaro formally announced ESPN’s new streaming service, is what this long-awaited product is not. For one, it won’t be called Flagship. More importantly, it won’t be the next Netflix. Indeed, the decision to simply name the new service ESPN befits Disney’s appropriately cautious ambitions for its new direct-to-consumer product.

3 weeks ago | puck.news | Julia Alexander

On Thursday, while fielding softballs at MoffettNathanson’s annual media conference in New York, Comcast C.F.O. Jason Armstrong made a notable, if offhand, remark. He had arrived well prepared with answers for the audience of media analysts and investor types who filled the Gershwin Ballroom at the Westin Times Square, who asked about everything from residential broadband to Peacock’s new NBA deal.

3 weeks ago | puck.news | Julia Alexander

Among the many anxieties coursing through media C-suites right now, the challenges of international expansion in streaming is top of mind. Most other countries are more price sensitive than the U.S., and their broadband isn’t as reliable—and, obviously, they speak other languages, too. And then there are specific complexities. In parts of Greece, for example, 17 percent of people didn’t even use the internet in 2023, per a recent E.U. report.

3 weeks ago | puck.news | Julia Alexander

Late last week, just days before NBCUniversal tried to sell a roomful of advertisers on Versant, the company’s new name for its cable network spinout, CNBC reported that Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav was finally getting serious about his own, similar breakup—the parameters of which my partner Dylan Byers previewed last December. Now, as then, relegating these once very-profitable assets to their own bin of unappealing leftovers kind of makes sense.

1 month ago | puck.news | Julia Alexander

When Dish Network launched Sling TV and introduced consumers to the “skinny bundle,” in 2015, the concept was dismissed by analysts and industry watchers as a panicked reaction to cord-cutting disguised as innovation—a less expensive, if imperfect, product to keep price-sensitive digital natives in the fold. A decade later, the skinny bundle endures, but it has hardly proven immune to the erosion impacting its more robust brethren.