Weekly Roundup – Week of May 20th, 2024

Netflix has joined the NFL’s lineup of TV partners, making its much-anticipated move into the world of live-sports streaming. In an announcement made today, the league revealed that Netflix will stream two Christmas Day games starting this year.

"College sports are approaching a moment of reckoning.
Multiple sources suggest a joint settlement in the House, Hubbard and Carter antitrust cases regarding direct revenue sharing with athletes could be reached as soon as this week. A source briefed on the talks told Sports Business Journal that Notre Dame had until last week to sign off on the settlement, while the deadline for presidential approval from the Power Five leagues (the Pac-12 is involved in the lawsuit) is this week.
The deadline is prompted, at least in part, by a May 23 hearing in Fontenot v. NCAA — a separate antitrust case being heard in Colorado — setting up one of the most consequential weeks in the history of college athletics that could see the sport forge a path forward, or risk going belly up."

"People in North Carolina have bet over $1 billion on sports through several gambling operators authorized under a state law to begin taking online wagers two months ago, according to a report released Friday. The customers’ early losses are resulting in tens of millions of dollars in state revenue.
The North Carolina State Lottery Commission, which regulates the betting, said that gamblers wagered $1.026 billion on sports activities from smart phones and desktops from March 11 through April 30. That rises to $1.308 billion when “promotional wagers” — incentives offered by companies for new customers to gamble — are included.
Customers have generated winnings of $1.129 billion, although the paid winnings for all of April were $53.3 million less compared to winnings from the three weeks in March when gambling was permitted, the commission report said."

"Disney, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery’s (WBD) sports streaming joint venture (JV) will be known as ‘Venu Sports’ when it launches later this year.
Venu will combine linear and digital feeds from all three broadcasters into a single subscription, application and technological foundation, attempting to apply cable bundle economics to the digital world, targeting cord cutters and ‘cord nevers’.
Subscribers will also have access to linear feeds of major channels, including ESPN, Fox and TNT, as well as the ESPN+ direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform. Indeed, it is the first time the main ESPN and Fox channels have been available via streaming without a cable subscription."

"Television “upfront” advertiser presentations this week in New York City were hardly about TV at all.
The annual week-long affair where media executives have traditionally pre-sold TV advertising featured many familiar trappings: pop stars Alicia Keys and Billie Eilish dazzled packed auditoriums with live performances; celebrities Kevin Hart, Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Reynolds hawked their latest projects, and Super Bowl star Tom Brady joined other pro athletes on stage.
But it was ad tech and artificial intelligence that was getting all the attention.
Warner Bros Discovery talked up shoppable ads on its Max streaming service. Google’s YouTube introduced a new AI-powered format to place non-skippable ads on videos streamed to internet-connected TVs. Netflix advertising chief Amy Reinhard said the streamer would develop its own in-house ad technology that would give advertisers new ways to buy and gain new insights."

"What answer does ChatGPT, the program that can generate text or answer questions based on prompts, give when you ask it why journalism is so often used to train generative artificial intelligence?
ChatGPT will tell you that the news is factual, includes language variation and cultural awareness, comprises complex sentence structures, includes quotes that convey real-world conversations, excels at summarization and condensation, and can help a model improve information retrieval. In fact, the news is so valuable to this endeavor that it makes up half of the top 10 sites incorporated into one of Google’s datasets that is being used to train some of the most popular large language models, according to a recent analysis. That includes content that was put behind paywalls with the intention of being restricted to paid users."

"The Department of Justice and TikTok asked a U.S. appeals court on Friday to expedite its consideration of legal challenges to the new U.S. law requiring parent company ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban, multiple outlets reported.
The big picture: It's the latest in a potentially protracted legal fight over the popular social media app's fate in the U.S., after President Biden signed a law forcing TikTok's sale or ouster.
The company has vowed not to go down without a fight.
State of play: The DOJ was joined by TikTok, ByteDance and a group of content creators in asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to make a decision by Dec. 6 to allow time for a potential review by the Supreme Court before a Jan. 19 deadline to sell."

"Most Americans say it is not important that the news they get comes from journalists who share their political views, age, gender or other traits. But people are more likely to say it is important for journalists to share their politics than any other characteristic we asked about. And certain demographic groups place more value than others on the personal traits of their journalists.
A 2023 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans how important it is for the journalists they get news from to have six personal characteristics that are similar to their own.
About four-in-ten Americans say it is at least somewhat important that they get news from journalists who share their political views (39%). That is nearly double the share who say the same about getting news from journalists who share their religious views (22%) or who talk or sound like them (20%)."