More producers launching shows on YouTube
Plus what F1's box office tells us about Apple's future content strategy
At the Edinburgh TV Festival this week, there has been much noise about broadcasters getting into YouTube and looking to the creator economy, and so this week’s post includes two instances of producers launching very different shows on the platform.
In addition, I’ve covered:
The lessons we can learn from the biggest strategic mistakes Hollywood has made in recent years
What does F1’s box office performance mean for Apple’s content strategy
Kpop Demon Hunters is not just a massive hit, it has real franchise potential.
Before getting to all that, I’ve several free subscriptions to
’s publication to give away - send me a DM if you’d like one:Just a little reminder: there is one week of school holidays to go, so writing is being squeezed in first thing or late at night until the first week of September. Apologies if I’m slow to respond as a result.
Freelance producers getting into YouTube
Back in April, I wrote a piece pondering why more TV freelancers haven’t been getting into YouTube, considering its the world’s video platform, never mind the state of the TV industry.
Well, turns out, some freelancers are making the move. This week, right after pressing send on a post about creator gameshows, I saw the following example on LinkedIn (thanks to
).Development producer Ben Justice has spent his career working on a whole host of hit gameshows and entertainment formats, and has had a go (working together with a Marvellous Machines the graphics company) at creating his own TV quiz show, spending a grand total of £50.
He’s done a fun explainer video below, and has also included a little request for people to like and subscribe to his channel to improve his chances with the YouTube algorithm, if you fancy helping him out:
Each week an episode of the show is going out ou YouTube - the first episode is below - and he has a full run including a grand final to find the winner.
Where will this go? Assuming the dream scenario is to build an audience and become known as a purveyor of fine game shows, and perhaps then formats might be picked up by TV channels or streamers.
There is bound to be so many more examples of this type of activity, and do send me a DM if you are exploring this direct to consumer space in a similar manner.
Zandland launches series on YouTube
Speaking of producers and YouTube, this week it was announced that Zandland is due to launch a new series called Human, starting September.
Ben Zand is quoted in the above Broadcast article saying:
Human is a significant milestone in Zandland’s story. We’re not waiting around to be commissioned or asking for permission from gatekeepers, we’re commissioning the content we want to see ourselves and delivering it straight to the consumer.
They have seven episodes in the can, and the series starts going out monthly in September.
Zandland is one of those production companies that has always had YouTube and direct to consumer baked into their approach from the outset, as well as getting commissions from broadcasters like Channel 4. As a result, they have an existing subscriber base that will be alerted when each episode is published (YouTube - 28k subscribers, TikTok - 82k, Instagram - 11k).
Learning lessons: the 10 worst things to happen to Hollywood (recently)
and Lucas Shaw did a really insightful episode of The Town this week, where they ran through the 10 worst things to happen to Hollywood since 2010. Meaning what are the big strategic mistakes that has brought us to where we are today. They’ve chosen a solid list of both familiar and fairly obscure examples. Overall, their insights have relevance to all of us thinking about the future.
To give a few highlights:
The major error of studios licensing their shows to Netflix in the 2010s; chasing short term cash over long term investment in their streaming businesses, and enabling Netflix to grow much like a cuckoo in the nest
The AT&T Time Warner deal in 2018, and specifically how it distracted the organisation from the effort and investment required to transition HBO into the streaming world (they also run a Sliding Doors what if scenario where Fox bought Time Warner instead)
The amount of money taken out of Hollywood by the NFL deal of 2021, leaving little room to fund the necessary transition to streaming as well as regular TV and film production.
They also included a set of deals which are important to remember and learn from - the buying up of various YouTube multichannel networks (MCNs) such as the purchase of Maker Studios by Disney.
This was seen at the time as studios getting into YouTube, however many of the companies they bought didn’t own any IP or have consumer facing YouTube brands.
As Lucas Shaw says:
Instead of investing in IP ownership, instead of investing in brands, they went after these networks that didn’t have anything. And not only was that a problem because they wasted a bunch of money … but because those didn’t work, they chose to basically ignoring YouTube for the next 5 years other than using it for promotion.
Anyway - the episode is worth your time, and has a lot to chew over….
What does F1’s box office performance mean for Apple’s strategy?
Back in May I wrote about the upcoming Apple movie F1, and how its box office performance is important for the wider film production industry:
… there is a good reason to keep an eye out for whether it flops or hits, because as analyst Brandon Katz said: “… if it flops, Apple is likely done with theatrical, which is bad for the industry.”
The reason for the skepticism about its ability to turn a profit is because of the size of the budget - rumoured to be $250m. The Vulture article below gave a flavour of the pre-release sentiment around the budget size and chance of profitability:
Using
’s visual below outlining the profits of a blockbuster, we can see that the production costs for F1 were 60% higher than the average of the 2024 top 10 most profitable films. However, F1 was rumoured to have offset around $40m of these costs thanks to product placement within the movie.The P&A (print and advertising, or marketing) costs are reported to be around $175m, so this film needed to do somewhere over $1bn at the box office to be profitable - although a caveat around the release schedule and forecasts for streaming and home entertainment (rental and DVDs) due to it being an Apple Original.
Well, the film is coming to the end of its cinematic release, and so far it has generated $592m at the box office. A solid performance, however not in the realm of what was guessed to be needed to be profitable thanks to the costs. Below is an Business Insider article outlining the performance of Apple’s other cinematic releases:
This week it has been announced that subscription fees for Apple TV+ are going up again by 30%, to $12.99 a month in the US. The news was pretty poorly received (although when are price increases well received?), and despite people’s appreciation for individual titles, much of the online buzz was indicating that the size of Apple TV’s (small) catalogue makes the price not good value for money.
of nScreenMedia shared the graphic below comparing prices for various subscription VOD services in the US, and noted Apple has nearly doubled its price in two years.
Plus right now the rights to Major League Baseball are being renegotiated, with all sorts of rumours flying around. We’ll have to wait for the dust to settle on this one to see where the rights end up - ESPN, Netflix, NBC are all reportedly in the running for various packages. However at the moment it appears that the relationship between Apple and MLB might be coming to an end.
Equally, Apple is reported to have bid $150m for the US rights to F1, which currently sit with ESPN:
I’ve been doing talks and workshops on streamer strategies for producers for years, and when it comes to talking about Apple, it has been easy to outline some of the challenges they have, especially around their relatively small catalogue and the history of download to own or rent rather than subscription or advertising VOD rights. Plus of course it is easy to also identify the growth in their overall content spend which has resulted in individual hit shows and a truckload of awards, even though the service is reported to be losing $1bn a year.
However, it is much harder to articulate what exactly Apple’s big ambition is, and what success looks like for the company: both for Apple TV+ overall as a service, as well as their originals and acquisitions strategy.
I’ve written before about how you could see the Apple TV strategy as an attempt to encourage people to spend more time (and money) within the Apple ecosystem. However, interestingly, back in June, ahead of the release of F1, CEO Tim Cook said:
We’re into it to tell great stories, and we want it to be a great business as well. That’s why we’re into it, just plain and simple.
If it is about being a business, then this indicates some sort of big move is required: the buying of another streamer with a solid catalogue has long been suggested, or some big licensing deals to make the subscription fees more appealing to a bigger audience for example.
With the consequences of the antitrust cases still working their way though, some are questioning whether Apple will continue its current content spending strategy depending on what remedies are imposed by the US courts.
As noted previously, Google pays Apple around $20bn a year to make its search engine the default on Apple browsers on iOS and Mac devices - this fee makes up around 20% of Apple’s services business. And as
outlined previously, Apple is relying on this services operation due to fairly flat performance by its wearables, iPad and iPhone businesses.If this $20bn payment stops as one of the antitrust remedies, then this would cause quite a significant hole in Apple’s income, and may have a knock effect on their wider business. If we then look at the performance of F1 at the box office, and the $6bn spent each year on Apple TV+ original programming, well, it isn’t crazy to assume that originals investment could be examined.
Kpop Demon Hunters not just a massive hit, it has real franchise potential
I wrote earlier in the week about the massive social phenomenon around Kpop Demon Hunters - indeed, the video I shared by Chris Mann has now been viewed 30m times and has been picked up by other media:
The movie’s performance on Netflix is pretty jaw-dropping. As Kasey Moore from What’s On Netflix noted:
If it continues with this ridiculous 0% viewership drop week on week, KPop Demon Hunters could top out at 340M views (Red Notice did 230M views) Honestly it's gonna be somewhere between 260M to 320M I think. We'll see if theatrical boosts/hinders.
Others are observing that they consider this to be Netflix’s first proper title with serious franchise potential - although as
notesThe real question is “what now?”…. KPDH has been a fantastic launch of a *potential* franchise but we need to see a multi year plan of content and fandom moments.
Simon Pulman wrote on LinkedIn (and the full discussion is worth reading as others in this spaced weighed in), KPDH is a brand with the potential to be commercially viable in at least five channels - movie, merch, music, games, live/experiential, going on to say:
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that KPDH is one of the only NF movies to launch with multiple touchpoints. Launching on (and being exclusive to) streaming makes it really difficult for an IP to establish itself in culture. You don’t have the marketing push and multiple launches that come with traditional windowing, and the movie can have a short shelf life on service. KPDH succeeded in part because its phenomenally good, but also because its well-publicized music release campaign gave audiences both another entry point into the franchise and a means of deepening connection. Moreover, while fans have expressed their desire for more and more diverse merchandising, KPDH was one of the first NF Originals to have merch available at launch.
And others are also making suggestions of what are good - and not so good - franchise options (in the example below, TV series and games are great, less keen on a live action version):
And yes, this Saturday I am going to the Kpop Demon Hunters singalong with a big bunch of nine year olds…
Meanwhile, there is one kids IP I know of that I’m surprised has yet to explode onto our screens. That is Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey comic book series. This is an IP that has it all: 17 books in the series, a crazy world that (sort of) hangs together as a narrative, merch potential for all the characters, a natural fit for games, a spin off with his series Looshkin. Plus the new book is coming out in October, and already tickets to the special superfan launch event are sold out (much to my six year old’s devastation).
Perhaps there is a Bunny vs Monkey TV series or movie in the pipeline, but I can’t find it. A comparison could be made with the Dogman movie, which did $145m at the box office with a production budget of $40m.
If the primary school aged kids I know are anything to go by, Bunny vs Monkey is way, way, way more popular than Dog Man.
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