Weekly Roundup – June 4th, 2024

"“Without a shadow of a doubt, sport is the next battleground among streamers, especially in the U.S.”
Netflix has continued its foray into live sports broadcasting with an announcement that it will show two NFL matches on Christmas Day, a move that has shifted the dial and highlights how streamers are now targeting live sport as a way to retain subscribers.
That NFL deal followed the news that Netflix had paid $5billion (£4bn) to stream Raw, WWE’s flagship weekly wrestling show, for 10 years, starting next January.
And it’s not just Netflix getting busy in this area.
In what’s becoming an increasingly crowded field, Apple is close to an agreement with FIFA to show next summer’s inaugural expanded Club World Cup in the U.S., the UK’s Sky Sports is rolling out a new streaming service that will show up to 100 live events concurrently, Amazon Prime is eyeing up the NBA and will broadcast 17 Champions League matches in 2024-25, while Walt Disney Company-owned ESPN is joining forces with Fox Corp and Warner Bros in a new service called Venu Sports that launches later this year."

"FanDuel, the sports-betting giant, is close to an agreement to put its brand on 18 regional pay-TV networks owned by Diamond Sports Group.
A multiyear deal between the companies would also involve FanDuel-related programming for the channels, according to people familiar with the terms, which are still being finalized."

"The NBA media rights negotiations for deals beginning with the 2025-26 season are well into the fourth quarter, but trying to assess how the final packages will look is difficult. Commissioner Adam Silver will deliver his State of the League speech before Game 1 of the NBA Finals in Boston on June 6.
The only certainties at the moment is that ESPN will retain the top package and Turner Sports’ 40-year relationship with the league is in jeopardy.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav sounded an ominous note, as well as giving competitors something to shoot for, when he said during an RBC Investor Conference in November 2022 that Turner and WBD “don’t have to have the NBA” once their current deal expires at the end of next season."

"Digiday’s survey found that the vast majority of publishers make money from programmatic ads, and that a good number of them make a significant amount of money from the channel. Eighty-two percent of publisher pros said in the first quarter of this year that they get at least a very small portion of their revenue from programmatic ads.
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However, one-third of publisher pros (33%) said in Q1 2024 that programmatic accounted for a large or very large portion of their revenue — so even if slightly fewer publishers are including programmatic as a piece of their revenue pie, for many, programmatic ads are the largest piece of that pie. In fact, that 33% represents the largest group of respondents in Digiday’s survey, and it’s a slight increase from the 29% of publisher pros who said they got a large or very large amount of their revenue from programmatic ads in Q3 2023."

"In early May, Aspen Digital—a program of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to the discussion of social issues—convened nearly a hundred news executives, editors, representatives of tech companies, and others for a full-day meeting to discuss the role of artificial intelligence in the news industry. They convened panels on everything from copyright law to newsroom tools, and heard case studies on newsrooms experimenting in the face of explosive growth and the adoption of AI technologies by the public. The Aspen Institute hired me to produce a report on the findings. This newsletter is a prelude to that.
One thing that became clear from the discussions with industry experts, both at the conference and in a series of small group discussions prior to the event, is the free-floating anxiety in the media business about the impact of AI. In some cases, the concern is about AI tools scraping copyright-protected content to replace referral traffic with search-based results (a problem I wrote about last week for CJR). In others, the fear is that content created by AI will swamp the internet and overwhelm fact-based reporting with synthetic text, images, and videos.
While we are still in the early stages of the AI revolution, these concerns clearly have some basis in fact. Every new technology comes with risks; it’s how those risks are dealt with that determines how (or whether) we will prevail in changing the information ecosystem. A framing principle for the AI discussion was that while the challenges are real, these technologies also represent a huge opportunity, just as the internet itself—or the telegraph or electricity—once did. It’s a tool that news companies can turn to their advantage, if they approach it in a strategic way."

"Spotify is hiking the prices of its premium plans for the second time in a year, a sign that streaming inflation is still running hot.
The music streaming giant said Monday that it is adjusting the prices for all of its premium plans, with the individual plan rising by $1 per month to $11.99, the duo plan rising by $2 per month to $16.99, the family plan rising by $3 per month to $19.99. The student plan, which is offered at a discount to verified students, remains at $5.99.
The prices go into effect immediately for new subscribers, with existing subscribers getting an email explaining the new prices over the next month, after which the new prices will be in effect.
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Streaming services, both audio and video, have been aggressively raising prices over the past year. While historically many services have gone a couple of years in between price hikes, the move by Spotify suggests that companies may be more aggressive in 2024 when it comes to charging more."

"MrBeast has overtaken T-Series as the biggest YouTube channel in a long-running battle for the most subscribers.
Indian music label T-Series, which uploads trailers and music videos, held the record for the largest YouTube channel for five years, before it was toppled on Sunday.
MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, was already the individual with the largest following.
But the 26-year-old has now made history on the platform with a seemingly unassailable 269 million subscribers, dethroning T-Series and putting him head and shoulders above everything else.
Across nearly 800 videos MrBeast has made a name for himself with massive stunts - including giving away private islands, being buried alive, and staging a real-life version of the Netflix hit Squid Game."