Entertainment · Decision brief 02

Starz discloses that 29.0% of its revenue runs through Amazon. The six majors publish no number.

Six decisions your executive team is making right now — and the evidence on each

Written for the executive team at a streaming service, deciding about their own company. Each decision names the seat that owns it and the seat that contests it, carries sourced evidence, and states what would have to be true for the answer to flip.

Walk into planning with all six calls made, the evidence on each, and what your CEO, CFO and board will ask already answered.

11 pages · Evidence as of October 20, 2026 · PDF

Buy the brief, $495 →

Every quantified concentration disclosure in the sector comes from a company small enough that the exposure became material. The brief also gives the market-level figure that will be offered to your board as reassurance, and why it measures nothing about you.

What is in it

  1. Originals, or licensed libraryDomain 3 · CPO, contested with CEO on category entry and CFO on the investment case. Licensed content is 37% of Netflix's asset base and 54% of its amortization — it turns over twice as fast per dollar of book value.
  2. The ad tier, price rises, and account sharingDomain 2 · CRO, contested with CFO on margin and CPO on packaging. For the category an ad tier recruits. At Netflix, 40% of ad-tier sign-ups are its own ad-free subscribers trading down, against 6% elsewhere.
  3. Consolidate, acquire, or be acquiredDomain 11 · CEO, contested with CFO on valuation. A signed definitive agreement with Netflix lost to a hostile tender ten weeks later. No multiple was disclosed on any transaction in the cycle.
  4. Stand alone, or distribute through bundlesDomain 4 · CRO, contested with CEO on sequencing. Bundles retained 80% against 54–56% for the same services sold alone — and every net US subscriber the category added in 2025 came through one.
  5. Where viewers now decide what to watchDomain 12 · CRO, contested with CEO on public stance. Across 25 AI answers, one site from the streaming trade corpus was cited — twice. A competitor's Finnish press-release server was cited more often.
  6. Content and licensor concentrationDomain 9 · Risk, contested with CFO on economics. Including the one measured case of a licensor pulling out, and what it cost: five million customers, fewer than one in ten back direct.

It closes with the executive decision matrix — CEO, CFO, CRO, CPO, Legal and Risk — each with something specific to do in this category, not a generic lens.

Two sample pages: the opening and the leadership close

Sample page 1 of Entertainment Decision Brief 02 — The Streaming Service Final page of Entertainment Decision Brief 02 — The Streaming Service

Read two of the questions in full, free, before you buy: Should a streaming service launch an ad-supported tier? · How long should a streaming service keep a show exclusive before licensing it out?

$495One brief · PDF · delivered on payment
Buy the brief →

14-day guarantee. If the brief does not change or sharpen a decision on your desk, reply to your receipt within 14 days for a full refund. One refund per organization.

For comparison: the US average for a general management consultant runs $1,500–$4,000 a day. This is less than a third of one of those days, with the evidence already sourced.

Stripe receipt for expensing · card, Apple Pay, bank, Affirm or Klarna

Written by Ipalibo Da-Wariboko, founder of CULT+MATH. Fifteen years building consumer brands including Smirnoff, Xbox and Pillsbury. Every brief is researched against the decision first, then the evidence. About →

What it is not

How the evidence is handled

Every figure is sourced. Where a number could not be sourced, the brief says so and gives none. Where two sources disagree on direction, it says that rather than picking the flattering one. Where a widely quoted statistic comes from a party with a commercial position, it is flagged — including where that flag weakens a point the brief is making.

The decision-maker and every decision were fixed before any source was read, and were not revised to fit what came back.

None of these your decision?

The catalogue briefs answer the decisions a category shares. A custom brief answers yours: one decision, one decision-maker, your market, with the question and what would prove it wrong registered before any data is pulled. See the custom brief, $995 →

Buy the brief, $495 →14-day guarantee · PDF on payment
← All entertainment briefs

Licensing. A brief is sold for use inside the buying organization — read it, quote it internally, build on it in your own planning. It may not be resold, published in full, or redistributed outside your organization. Quoting a figure externally is fine with attribution to CULT+MATH and the as-of date, which is the part that makes the figure meaningful.