Weekly Roundup – Week of January 9th, 2023

"As e-commerce sales slow, Amazon is reportedly looking to squeeze more revenue out of its growing sports content business.
Last week, the Information reported that Amazon has discussed releasing a separate sports app, to supplement its Prime Video streaming service. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Modern Retail about its sports streaming ambitions. But Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy seemed bullish about its digital media offerings at a media event last year. “I do think over time we have opportunities to make our Prime Video business a standalone business with very attractive economics,” Jassy said, according to a report by the Hollywood Reporter.
Rolling out a separate sports app could give Amazon another place against which to run advertisements, generating another revenue stream at a time when the company’s core e-commerce business is growing more slowly. However, this could also be a costly proposition for Amazon, given that sports rights have become even more expensive. Analysts say that the move by Amazon could be a step in the right direction, as the tech giant has deep pockets and the support of its AWS infrastructure to build this out overtime.
“It’s not a surprising rumor to me. We’ve seen Amazon continuing to get more and more into sports, specifically live sports, and it’s another way to grow and retain Amazon Prime members,” said Brad Jashinsky, director analyst at research firm Gartner’s marketing practice."

"Pete Rose's bets on the Cincinnati Reds in the 1980s got him banned from baseball. His latest on Sunday got him the VIP treatment.
State of play: Ohio's long-awaited foray into legal sports betting launched as the clock struck midnight to ring in the new year.
Rose placed the first bet at the Hard Rock Casino in Cincinnati, helping kick off a rush of wagering in casinos, restaurants, bars and around two dozen flashy apps.
The big picture: We join a majority of states that have legalized sports betting since the federal ban was overturned in 2018.
Legalization has become a domino effect as states chase what has been an eye-popping tax revenue stream.
How it works: The bulk of statewide wagers will be placed on one of 25 online apps, most of which are already up and running.
There's also retail betting at casinos, some sports arenas and at licensed restaurants and bars.
What they're saying: Ohio is unique in licensing so many phone apps and for allowing betting kiosks at local businesses, Covers.com analyst Geoff Zochodne tells Axios."

"From her sister’s home in Katonah, N.Y., Amy Rosenfeld was overwhelmed by a way-too-familiar familiar sense of dread as she watched the on-field scramble to revive the Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin on Jan. 2.
Just 18 months earlier, Rosenfeld faced a similar situation as she oversaw ESPN’s coverage of the UEFA European Championship. Denmark’s Christian Eriksen collapsed on the field after a heart attack during his team’s first match of the tournament.
“That was a trigger for me,” said Rosenfeld, who left ESPN last summer to become NBC Sports’ senior vice president of production for the Olympics and Paralympics. “There were a lot of feelings that came rushing back. Obviously, I had deep concern for Damar Hamlin’s health. But I also had a very vivid and horrible memory of what happened at Euros.”
Rosenfeld said that after the Monday night game, she was in touch with several people who worked that Denmark game, and they experienced similar terrible emotions and flashbacks.
Those feelings are familiar to anyone who has had to deal with a tragedy while working on a sports telecast.
The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics happened more than half a century ago. But as he was watching the scenes play out from Cincinnati’s Paycor Stadium on Monday, legendary sports TV producer Geoff Mason said he experienced the same nervous feelings in the pit of his stomach that he had back then.
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The way television networks handle these types of situations has not changed much in the past five decades. During the Monday night game when Hamlin collapsed, ESPN producers followed rule No. 1 when it comes to dealing with injured players on the field, Mason said.
“Don’t show anything grislier than you have to,” he said. “Generally speaking, I would come out to a medium shot, stay there until I’m sure that a tight shot won’t get anybody in trouble or hurt anybody’s family unnecessarily. That’s what ESPN did.”
A problem during the 2020 European Championship, which was held in the summer of 2021, is that ESPN used a world feed, which meant that it did not have full control over the way attempts to revive Eriksen were covered.
The world feed shared video of attempts to revive Eriksen on the pitch — video that was criticized by many, including Rosenfeld, for being too graphic and invasive."

"Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t announced he’s running for president yet. But among the right-leaning voting blocs that are pulling for him to enter the 2024 primary field are some of his biggest fans: Hispanic evangelical Christians.
It’s not that they’re opposed to the one Republican who has already declared himself a candidate, former President Donald J. Trump. But a showdown between the two titans of the right wing could turn Latino evangelicals into a decisive swing vote in Florida — supercharging their influence and focusing enormous national attention on their churches, their politics and their values.
“If there is a primary, there’s no doubt there will be fragmentation in the conservative movement, and there’s total certainty that will be true of Hispanic evangelicals as well,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor in Sacramento, Calif., and the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “We know the values we keep and the policies we want. The question that arises is, who will really reflect those?”
Mr. Rodriguez’s group held a gathering last month in Tampa, Fla., with hundreds of pastors from across the country, where attendees said the hallways buzzed between sessions with more chatter about politics than about Scripture.
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Much of it, they said, came down to a choice: Trump or DeSantis?
Few have settled on an answer yet, not surprisingly given that the first votes of the 2024 campaign are over a year away. But the talk of 2024 — of Mr. Trump, who spent years courting evangelicals, and of Mr. DeSantis, who has leaned into the cultural battles that appeal to many conservative Christians — showed both the heightened expectations among Hispanic evangelical leaders in Florida and their desire to demonstrate the potency of their now unabashedly politicized Christianity."

"As the podcasting universe has matured in recent years it has picked up many of the trappings of more established media industries, ranging from a flourishing trade press to its very own awards show circuit. This past year, podcasting finally achieved one of the ultimate signifiers of middle age — an unsettling realization that the best days of its high-spirited youth may now be behind it.
While overall podcasting revenue and listenership continue to grow, the runaway exuberance many felt about state of the medium has dissipated lately, even among some of its most ardent practitioners. “At what point do you have to just call it, and say that rather than being a ‘big thing’ in waiting, it’s just a run-of-the-mill ‘medium thing,’” Nick Hilton, a podcast entrepreneur, wrote in a recent blog post, entitled “2022: The Year That Podcasting Died.”
It was illustrated with a gravestone.
Comic hyperbole aside, there is an unmistakably dour vibe now permeating podcast land — and for good reason. Following a prolonged buying spree, some of the industry’s biggest spenders are now pulling back due to growing concerns about the economy and the possibility of weakening advertising sales in audio.
Sirius XM Holdings Inc. has slowed down its dealmaking, and Spotify Technology SA is freezing its US budget for new podcasts, according to people familiar with the situation. Amazon Music has pulled back on new deals and instructed its team to reduce offers that were already on the table but unsigned, said two people who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. In some cases, all three companies are offering smaller upfront payments to new shows and seeking to keep more of the resulting advertising revenue, according to several people familiar with the matter. Shows that used to be able to claim 80% of advertising sales are now often forced to settle for 50%, two people said."

"Media ratings consortium OpenAP and and the Video Advertising Bureau, have formed a joint committee with TV giants Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount, TelevisaUnivision, and Warner Bros. Discovery, with the goal of pushing alternatives to Nielsen numbers.
In an announcement, the committee said the goal is “to enable multiple currencies with the primary focus of creating a measurement certification process to establish the suitability of emerging cross-platform measurement solutions in advance of the 2024 upfront.”
The new body said it has already begun to utilize the collective efforts and progress being made across its members to develop measurement certification standards, which will be formalized and officially announced on March 1. On April 25, it will host an event to share progress being made toward accelerating the multi-currency future and upfront readiness of measurement partners.
In a joint statement, CEOs Jeff Shell of NBCU, Bob Bakish of Paramount, Wade Davis of TelevisaUnivision and David Zaslav of WBD expressed optimism about the potential of their collaboration. “The sustainability of the premium video advertising model depends on an ecosystem for measurement that is transparent, independent, inclusive, and accurately reflects the way all people consume premium video content today – across multiple screens, connections, and devices,” the statement said. “By coming together to establish this JIC, we can collaborate and accelerate the efforts to implement a new multi-currency future that fosters more competition, inclusivity and innovation and will ultimately better serve advertisers, agencies and consumers.”"