Weekly Roundup – Week of November 18th, 2024

"One of the most powerful companies in entertainment has become the king of podcasts because we don’t just listen to people talking into microphones for hours. We watch them.
One of the most powerful forces in entertainment has become so pervasive in so many ways that you probably don’t even realize the full extent of its reach.
But the latest way that YouTube is taking over the world might just be the unlikeliest one yet."

Our Take: YouTube is the dominant digital platform. It is a one-stop-shop for all content-types.

"The worldwide television market is splitting into three as the consensus around the shift from CRT displays to flat panels gives way to opportunities from emerging operating systems and targeted advertising.
“The business model is shifting away from making money on TV sets and instead to making money on ads and data that is delivered by those TV sets,” said Paul Gray Omdia’s Research Director, Consumer Electronics and Devices told last week’s HBBtv symposium in London.
Gray told delegates the business was turning into one of the installed base, similar to that of pay-TV. “People are happy to sell TVs below cost, you just have to look at the finances of Vizio or Roku to see they’re selling TVs at somewhere between -3 and -7% margin, just in that scramble for users.”

Our Take: Consumers are increasingly savvy and know to disconnect their SmartTV from the internet to avoid these data collection practices. Seems like a risky business model that a consumer can easily circumvent.

"Shohei Ohtani walks up to home plate at New York’s Citi Field, and the L.A. Dodgers fans, who are well in attendance on this Wednesday afternoon, are up on their feet.
“So, ideally you get a pop-up, right? You got like five seconds in the air. God forbid the guy drops the ball.”"

Our Take: There is way too much private investment and government-sanctioned support of Sports Betting for the 'bubble' to burst anytime soon. It's also insanely profitable.

"Bob Iger returned to Walt Disney as CEO in 2022 with a bold promise of making streaming profitable.
The latest quarterly results have shown signs of a turnaround at the storied media company, suggesting that Iger may be getting the House of Mickey Mouse in order by focusing on its streaming business.
Disney on Thursday reported its second straight quarterly profit for the streaming business, riding on cost-cutting measures and a 4.4 million jump in subscribers after it started cracking down on password-sharing by users."

"...Pollsters this year may have leaned too heavily on bets that people would behave roughly as they did in 2020 - failing to anticipate the depth of the swing among Latino and young voters toward Trump.
"These models that assume so heavily that we're going to get a repeat... they're a disaster when there's a big change," he said.
But pollster Nate Silver, founder of the 538 polling analysis site, said there were signs of peril for those who were looking.
Writing about the election results, he noted a poll from New York City last month, which indicated Trump making major inroads in the traditional Democratic stronghold.
"This is a problem the party should have been prepared for, because there was plenty of evidence for it in polls and election data," he wrote.
Debate about the polls is sure to continue in the months ahead."

Our Take: A lot of the major polling firms are guilty of weighting data to fit what they believe voters feel vs. merely reporting results as they fall. There will be noise that 'Trump supporters are more likely to not trust the media and therefore more unlikely to respond to opinion polling on election matters.' This is a reductive argument and is an easy way to avoid fault in their own methodologies.

"A significant number of young adults get their news from social media “news influencers” that generally don’t have traditional journalism training or news experience, according to new data from Pew Research Center.
Nearly 40% of young adults under 30 rely on these news influencers to stay updated on current events and politics, Pew found. The vast majority of those influencers – 77% – aren’t affiliated with a news organization or have never worked in the news industry."

Our Take: This is completely unsurprising. Young demos have no inherited attachment to establishment/legacy media and view influencer status as a sort of conferral of credibility and legitimacy. After all, the number one preferred vocation of the 'youth' is to be a social media influencer.