A Business Affairs Exec: How to Bring TV Back from the Brink
An exclusive excerpt from Ken Basin’s updated industry bible, ‘The Business of Television'
Happy Monday, Series Business crew. What are our favorite beach reads this summer? Got a good one for you today — a sneak peek of the new edition of The Business of Television, a book written by Harvard law grad and longtime business affairs executive Ken Basin, who has been part of business affairs leadership at Amazon, Sony and Riot Games over the past decade.
When I first started covering the entertainment industry as a cub reporter, I did so in somewhat backward fashion, writing about the quarterly earnings reports of Disney and other publicly held TV and film studios for an investing journal. I got to know their balance sheets before I knew their executives or met their staffers. While I had no experience with business jargon prior to the job, I left nearly five years later with a pretty solid understanding of free cash flow, revenue guidance, all that sort of thing. Then at the trades, I learned more about the intricacies of dealmaking from talking to the people who made them.
But the thing about learning from immersive experience is that it’s like being plopped into a foreign country — you can learn the local language to the point where you’re thoroughly conversational, but you’ll likely have certain gaps in your knowledge base, having skipped the fundamentals. The first edition of Basin’s book was a great resource in learning the grammatical building blocks of Hollywood.
Since it was first published six years ago, however, a lot about the business has changed. (See: Streaming.) Basin believes that dealmaking has become “less creative and more calcified,” and has suggestions for ways the business can help itself in a post-strike, mid-contraction environment.
During a time when uncertainty abounds, it can be rather useful to hear from someone who has been in the thick of dealmaking for so many years, as we all figure out what the new normal looks like and what the future might hold.
And with that, I turn this newsletter over to Ken, where you’ll learn:
The current state and future of cost-plus deals
Why there likely will be no new dealmaking models — only old ones we revisit
How to align the incentives of all parties in a deal
What WBD is actually doing right
The 3 essential TV business strategies that studios need to re-embrace
What the rise of advertising-based streaming services will do for the industry
The next phase of windowing
How bundling is the business model that consumers love to hate (but in reality, not really)
What the legacies are finally going to do about the tech companies
How leaders mortgaged their own futures in real-time to the industry’s detriment
Herewith, let me hand this column over the Ken’s. The following words are excerpted from his book: