Stream-fil-A sauce

Cristiano Ronaldo’s new YouTube channel broke the world record for the fastest channel to hit 1M subscribers (within 90 minutes of launching). The soccer superstar’s channel, started on Wednesday, has 26.7M subs and counting. Social-media #goals.

Stocks dropped yesterday, dragged down by a tech selloff. Today, all eyes are on Fed Chair Powell’s speech at Jackson Hole, which could shed light on future rate policy.

🧠 All up in your quizness: Try to go 7 for 7 in our weekly Snacks Seven quiz, which covers this week’s biggest biz news. Here’s question #1:

Another one, thank you… While major Hollywood streaming services bet on live sports, a possible upstart is putting its money on waffle fries. Chick-fil-A is reportedly planning to launch a streaming platform this year. The 3K-restaurant chicken joint is apparently working with production companies to create “family-friendly” reality shows, game shows, and scripted content. Chick-fil-A tapped an exec behind “X Factor” and “Top Gear” to lead programming that will (probably) feature folks eating nuggets.

Going multi-hyphenate… corporation/aspiring filmmaker. With audiences fractured across TV, web, and mobile, ads aren’t hitting like they used to. That has companies trying to grab attention by making content that looks more like TV. Starbucks debuted a content studio in June, and Coke created short films for Amazon last year. Airbnb produced an MTV doc, Lyft made a game show, and last year Bud maker AB InBev rolled out an entertainment division. Even hospitals are calling action: Northwell Health just intro’d a TV-content division.

Streaming doesn’t have to be the main course… It can just be a tasty side hustle. It’s a notoriously difficult business, but it’s probably easier if you’re only making a few game shows about chicken sandwiches, and looking at it as more of an advertising and customer-data play. While it took companies like Paramount and Disney years to make their streaming units profitable, smaller streamers like Dropout TV have managed it much faster. It helps that Chick-fil-A has the money to burn: it pulled in almost $22B in sales last year.

That’s bananas… “Black Myth: Wukong,” a Chinese PC-console game where you play as a mythical Monkey King, set a record on the Steam game store for most first-day plays. More than 2.4M gamers played it concurrently after its debut, making it Steam’s most-played single-player title, beating “Cyberpunk 2077” and “Elden Ring.” It’s highly rated on gaming sites too. The $60 game took six years and a reported $50M+ to make, but it seems to be paying off for China.

Comin’ for consoles… China’s a major player in the global gaming industry, but mostly on mobile. “Black Myth: Wukong” signals a shift to PCs and consoles, and experts say its success could encourage Chinese companies to develop more games to rival hits from Take-Two Interactive and Microsoft-owned Bethesda. But China’s not just looking to nab a “Game of the Year” nom. “Black Myth: Wukong,” which is based on a classic Chinese novel and features Chinese landmarks, expands the country’s cultural clout, aka its “soft power” (think: the prevalence of Hollywood flicks in foreign theaters).

Soft power is hard to control… China doesn’t seem to think that any press is good press. Streamers told The New York Times that a company affiliated with “Black Myth: Wukong” gave them a list of topics to avoid chatting about while playing the game live (like “quarantine,” “feminist propaganda”). China’s censorship could make global gamers wary of Chinese titles (some streamers refuse to play “Black Myth: Wukong”).

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Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Alphabet, Amazon, Disney, Microsoft, Starbucks, Tesla, and Walmart

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