Weekly Roundup – Week of November 6th, 2023

"ESPN Bet, the partnership between the sports media giant and Penn Entertainment, announced Thursday that it is set to launch on Nov. 14.
Penn, whose CEO Jay Snowden believes that editorial associated with a sportsbook reduces the customer acquisition cost, ditched Barstool this summer and latched on to ESPN at a cost of $1.5 billion over the next 10 years."

"National Basketball Association (NBA) commissioner Adam Silver has reaffirmed its commitment to linear TV, despite noting that the “decline of cable has disproportionately impacted” the league reach.
Silver is preparing to negotiate the NBA’s next domestic media rights deal as the current agreement with Disney and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) expires at the end of the 2024/25 season."

"A survey by strategy consulting firm Altman Solon of 2,500 global sports fans and 150 sports executives says fans crave more sports video content but have trouble accessing it due to the fragmented nature of the sports video market.
59% of participants in The Altman Solon 2023 Global Sports Media Survey say they currently have trouble finding or affording sports content they want to watch, while 56% would watch more sports video content if it were available."

"When streaming services initially hit the market, part of their allure was eliminating the advert experience. Many consumers ditched linear television so they could watch programmes uninterrupted...
Now, however, eager to boost revenue, streaming companies are pumping adverts into their products.
...
This shift comes as many streaming services are facing massive amounts of debt, says Anthony Palomba, a professor at University of Virginia Darden School of Business, US. This is due to the cost of content investments, licensing fees and other expenditures these companies have made to expand their libraries and compete with other services on the market."

"Americans are following the news less closely than they were a few years ago, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. This comes amid changes in news consumption habits, declining trust in the media and high levels of news fatigue.
In 2016, 51% of U.S. adults said they followed the news all or most of the time. But that share fell to 38% in 2022, the most recent time we asked this question.
In turn, a rising share of Americans say they follow the news only now and then. While 12% of adults said this in 2016, that figure increased to 19% by 2022. And while 5% of adults said in 2016 that they hardly ever follow the news, 9% said the same last year."

"News publishers have argued for the past year that A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT rely on copyrighted articles to power the technology. Now the publishers say developers of these tools disproportionately use news content.
The News Media Alliance, a trade group that represents more than 2,200 publishers, including The New York Times, released research on Tuesday that it said showed that developers outweigh articles over generic online content to train the technology, and that chatbots reproduce sections of some articles in their responses."

Sean Bos, co-founder of Crowd React Media, walks through the findings of CRM's "The State of Sports Media - 2023" report and what we learned about Sports Bettors. This year’s State of report tracks everything from sports preference to sports betting habits, from viewership methods to sports-adjacent social media consumption, and from sports news apps/websites to sports audio. The report is based on interviews with almost 1,000 sports fans.