Weekly Roundup – April 29, 2025

"Earlier this month, The New York Times hired a full-time director of photography—primarily for podcasts. It might sound like a surprising move for a podcast, unless you’ve clocked what’s been happening at The Ezra Klein Show. Klein, once a disembodied voice, is now a bona fide millennial onscreen hottie, staring straight into the camera and engaging a new kind of audience. The message is clear, and in this case, the medium really is the message: Podcasts aren’t just going visual; they’re becoming television. And YouTube is the network where it’s all happening."

"Alphabet’s stock gained 1.7% on Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL’s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”"

"What, exactly, does a social network do? Is it a website that connects people with one another online, a digital gathering place where we can consume content posted by our friends? That’s certainly what it was in its heyday, in the two-thousands. Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of A.I.-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible. The people we follow and the messages they post increasingly feel like needles in a digital haystack. Social media has become less social."

"The NCAA will start selling data from its championship events to sportsbooks around the country, part of an expanded partnership between the college sports governing body and Genius Sports.
The move, announced Friday, represents a notable departure from the NCAA’s prior arms-length relationship with legal sports betting. While the major pro U.S. leagues have built lucrative commercial partnerships in betting—including data deals like this one—the NCAA has stayed almost entirely on the sidelines. Instead, its executives have been outspoken about the industry’s effect on athletes, and pushed legislation that would limit the types of college bets that are permitted.
Under the new partnership, Genius Sports (NYSE: GENI) will have the right to sell live data from all NCAA championships through 2032. That includes the men’s and women’s March Madness basketball tournaments, the most valuable assets in the NCAA’s portfolio. Regular season contests, and FBS football postseason games like the College Football Playoff, are not included."

"Charter Communications, the US telco and mass media company, has reported that it slowed losses of pay-TV customers in Q1. The company, led by president and CEO Chris Winfrey, shed another 167,000 residential video customers during the quarter, compared to a year-earlier decline of 392,000.
Charter had 12.7 million pay TV subscribers at the end of March 31st 2025, which follows the company rebundling video services with new Spectrum pricing and packaging and a ‘Life Unlimited’ branding in September 2024. It also introduced its Xumo streaming platform joint venture involving Comcast to stem the loss of video customers amid continuing cable cord-cutting."