Americans Are Watching Fewer New TV Shows and More Free TV

When it comes to entertainment, we live in an era of asymmetrical information. Technology companies are sitting on more data than they know how to use, and yet the average person or business partner has access to very little of it.

Talk to any Hollywood producer, agent or lawyer, and they will gripe about how much harder it is to measure success and how little they know relative to Netflix Inc. or Amazon.com Inc. They don’t know the exact value of Stranger Things to Netflix, for example.

We do have enough information to understand what’s working, what’s not and what’s ...