Individual Brands are the Key Story in Media

The whole “streaming wars” story is constantly debated. Netflix is my biggest holding and up to about three months ago, I thought it was going to take over the world! I even think there was a Barry Diller quote from that Allen & Co. conference where he said Netflix had already won.

But then BAM! Overnight everything changes, and I sorely wish I’d sold my $NFLX at 350.

Now suddenly everyone is producing good content and even the Death Star has seen the light and has a very good product in ATT TV. When I use ATT TV on my iPad it feels just like the Netflix experience (I don’t have to constantly re-login with my cable credentials for instance) and the interface looks and feels exactly like Netflix except with the different channels being like the different movies.

Then I see something like this on Twitter:

Look I think Disney and Netflix are going to have great brands and businesses for years to come. Who else could write the check for “The Irishman” and or the rights to College and Professional broadcasts.

But aren’t individual brands as in the case of Bill Simmons above in sports “broadcasting” the biggest, most exciting thing happening in media? Someone on the other side of the media spectrum is Bob Lefsetz in music. People like this are the top, but right behind them are hundreds of others, and behind that are thousands and so on.

So, from an investment perspective how does one capitalize on this trend. Well, for one, Bill’s twitter post prompted this blogpost. So Social Media obviously. I have Twitter and Facebook. But should definitely consider Snapchat and if only TikTok weren’t a Chinese company! Even Cramer said a while back when SNAP was re-awakening from the dead that there were “just not enough of them” meaning to me that the different social media channels, Twitter, FB, Insta, Snap, Youtube, Tiktok are simply what cable channels were in 1980.

Also if this is about the personal brand then it’s hard to go wrong with the web hosting companies like Godaddy, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace. The growth of money flows into these entities over the coming years should be enormous. Etsy as well.