Weekly Roundup – Week of April 29th, 2024

"YouGov’s research found that 65% of sportsbook users in the U.S. in the last 12 months are aged between 25 and 44 with the majority of bettors being male. Males also make up 57% of prospective bettors with females coming in at 43%, a significant jump from the 28% of active female bettors. Age also correlates to the number of sportsbooks used."

"In what will be a landmark move in sports media history, the NBA and Amazon Prime Video have the framework of a deal that will make the streaming service one of the main homes for the league’s games, executives with direct knowledge of the talks told The Athletic.
It is expected that Prime Video’s package will include significant regular-season and postseason games, perhaps even some conference finals. The anticipation is that the final contract will be for at least a decade and begin the 2025-2026 season."

"Twenty-five former University of Iowa and Iowa State athletes and a former community college player sued state law enforcement leaders Friday, accusing investigators of illegally inspecting their cellphone use in a high-profile sports betting probe."

Our Take: Sports betting is relatively new in the US and it will take a little while to strike a fair balance between overly lenient and overly punitive in rule enforcement for athletes.

"The Financial Times has struck a deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI that allows its content to be used in training artificial intelligence systems.
The FT will receive an undisclosed payment as part of the deal, which is the latest to be agreed between OpenAI and news publishers.
Under the arrangement, ChatGPT users will receive summaries and quotes from FT journalism, as well as links to articles, in responses to prompts, where appropriate."

Our Take: News outlets are starting to realize they will be part of AI whether they like it or not. The Financial Times is smart here conceding that they might as well be paid for AI language models training their systems on FT's journalism.

"After failing to stop a bill that could ban TikTok in the US unless it separates from its China-based owner ByteDance, the company now faces two big hurdles: the US judicial system and the Chinese government.
TikTok has promised to bring a legal challenge against the law that was signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday, which requires ByteDance to divest the app within a year or face an effective ban in the US. Experts expect its main arguments to center on alleged violations of its own First Amendment rights and those of its 170 million US users. But it won’t be an easy fight since judges often hesitate to make decisions of national security importance where the legislature has so forcefully weighed in."

Our Take: It's all about the secret sauce that keeps users hooked - TikTok's algorithm. Our guess is that the Chinese government would rather take an 'L' on the TIkTok property in the US than divulge the inner machinations of its recommendations system to the highest bidder.

"You can't understand November's election — or America itself — without reckoning with how our media attention has shattered into a bunch of misshapen pieces.
Think of it as the shards of glass phenomenon. Not long ago, we all saw news and information through a few common windows — TV, newspapers, cable. Now we find it in scattered chunks that match our age, habits, politics and passions.
Why it matters: Traditional media, at least as a center of dominant power, is dead. Social media, as its replacement for news in the internet era, is declining in dominance."

Our Take: News outlets nowadays know that is not just news they are offering their audiences. They are also selling identity: What does the news that I consume say about me as a person?