Speaker 2: 0:02

Welcome to this week's edition of the Dan Rayburn podcast, the show that curates the streaming media industry news that matters most, unvarnished, unscripted and providing you with the factual data you need to know, without any of the hype, the pulse of the streaming media industry.

Speaker 1: 0:20

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I'm Dan Rayburn, along with co-host Mark Donaghan for today. I guess, mark, I guess we could call this a special podcast, special edition, kind of. I mean, it's still just us, but for listeners that are interested in sports, you found the right podcast to listen to this week.

Speaker 3: 0:39

That's right, Dan.

Speaker 1: 0:40

This is just sports, all sports, all the time. So Mark and I figured there's so much going on in the streaming world of sports from a licensing standpoint, Some of the way services are being packaged, some of the numbers We've got a lot of numbers today that have been given out, which is great that we're just going to focus this entire episode on sports. Not only the technology side, what some of these streaming platforms are doing but also some of the metrics around viewership, and not just on the streaming side but on pay TV as well. Mark, you noticed I threw some of those stats into our notes.

Speaker 3: 1:15

I like it.

Speaker 1: 1:15

I think that's important. We all know a lot of people have the bundle and live TV, pay TV, because of sports, so it's important to keep an eye on what's going on there with viewership. So let's jump right in here, mark, with Amazon news. So we're recording this November 16th.

Speaker 1: 1:36

Amazon just dropped a blog post, just a few minutes before we started here, giving out a few more details on their NFL Black Friday football game. So this will be the first ever NFL Black Friday football game exclusively on Prime Video. But, note, you can still get it OTA and you can still get it in your area. All NFL games are always available OTA. So even if it's quote exclusive to streaming, it's still available over the air. So Amazon didn't give out that much in the way of details, mark, but they did talk a little bit about two key things here. One you don't have to be an Amazon Prime member. Unlike the rest of their Thursday night football games, this one completely free to everybody. You just have to register for a free Amazon account, which is great, but you know how many old people are not the younger crowd I should- say, are still going to have a problem creating an Amazon account, even a free one, so I expect some issues there.

Speaker 1: 2:41

But you know that is what it is. It starts at 1 30 the game pregame show and all that and then it kicks off at 3 pm Jets versus dolphins and Mark. Interesting because when Amazon was thinking about this game at the NFL, they were obviously thinking jets because of the jets quarterback at the time, right being such a big deal to have that jets quarterback and if the jets did during really well during the season you'd have. You'd have a really good game here in terms of two teams, potentially with some good records, but with Aaron Rodgers getting hurt the first week. I'm sure Amazon's not happy about that. I'm sure it hurts viewership to a degree. But the other thing to note here is that they did talk a little bit about how they're going to tie in commerce.

Speaker 3: 3:29

Yes, I found this interesting.

Speaker 1: 3:32

Yeah, yeah. So they're going to provide, during the game, limited quantity of products available for people to buy, and they mentioned some of the brands. Who who they're actually going to do that with and what was it? It was Lego.

Speaker 3: 3:51

TCL, so you can assume televisions.

Speaker 1: 3:56

Dyson makes sense. Okay, so get a vacuum for all the crumbs your friends are making during the game.

Speaker 3: 4:02

Yeah, and buy another game console.

Speaker 1: 4:06

Oh, nintendo yeah.

Speaker 3: 4:07

Nintendo.

Speaker 1: 4:10

So they said there's going to be deals on the screen. I'm curious if it's going to be like last time, where it's you can have an email pushed to your account if you're interested, If you don't have the app on your phone. They also said deals are going to be available each quarter as well as before kickoff and after the game ends. So I'm curious to see just how they integrate that.

Speaker 3: 4:31

Yeah, that'll certainly be interesting. Yeah, and because it said here in the, you know, in their announcement let's see where it was it. Yeah, be sure to keep an eye out for exciting deals appearing on the screen as you watch. So I wonder, you know everybody has an account, so I wonder, could it be a QR code? You know, like QR code comes up and you, you know like, well, no, that could be kind of neat.

Speaker 1: 5:04

Yeah, I'm curious to see what what the actual implementation is, because it has to be seamless and so far what they've done for Thursday night football has been seamless. I didn't have the prime app on my phone, so immediately sent me an email saying oh, you were interested in this water during the game.

Speaker 3: 5:18

Here's where you can buy it.

Speaker 1: 5:19

Interesting, so we'll see. So we'll watch that one. Let's jump into Netflix, mark. So Netflix had their live stream of the Netflix cup this week, their golf event. I gotta say it looked incredible for me on all the devices I looked on cross mobile desktop and something just looked a bit different for me in terms of quality, from a positive standpoint because also just you know, remembering what it's like to be an event producer on site they had to deal with a golf course. You're dealing with clouds and sun and shadows, and they had the big sphere in Vegas that was putting different things on it and it looked incredibly clear and crisp. The colors were on point and even on my Mac book it looked good, and video on the Mac book it's okay, but when you're playing it in a browser it's usually not the best quality compared to everything else. So it looked really good.

Speaker 1: 6:16

I didn't see anybody having any issues. There was 18 or 20 comments on my blog. One person said they had an issue, but they didn't say what it was. I was scouring Twitter constantly during the event. I didn't see any complaints. Now we have no traffic stats. They put out a press release afterwards with, like the score or something I frankly don't even know who was playing who, and even if it was a real golf tournament, I wouldn't know. I know nothing about golf except that I don't play it or watch it. But it was. It was interesting, mark, because I did reach out to some ISPs I know and will not give out the name and just said hey, did you see any additional netflix traffic more than usual during these times? And they're like no, why would we so? I don't even know if they knew the event was taking place. Shocking.

Speaker 3: 7:04

No, it's 3pm Pacific time Exactly, but they were serving that over the open connect CDN Right, correct.

Speaker 1: 7:14

Like they do everything else.

Speaker 3: 7:14

So, yeah, and you know this, this also is a benefit. I mean, I guess the benefit, the reason why they can pull this off, is G pack. You know their their whole rearchitecture. That has been more than a year ago now that that was launched, but that gives them very, very good live streaming capabilities.

Speaker 1: 7:39

So yeah, we talked about that on one of the one of the podcasts, and Netflix came and talked about G pack specifically at the streaming show this past April. They did a presentation on also how that helped them for live. I did invite Netflix out to the Vegas show in April next year, 2024, and asked if they'd like to do a presentation on what they built out for live. They're currently evaluating that. We'll see if they do. They've certainly been putting out more technical information over the last few years, so hopefully they do?

Speaker 3: 8:12

Yeah, a lot of people would like to know, hear them talk about it.

Speaker 1: 8:18

Let's jump into Disney. Disney this week announced that they did 53 million quote concurrent viewers for the ICC World Cup semi-final match between India and New Zealand on November 15th, so just yesterday. Now, little confusion, because originally they announced 51 million and I published that and then they updated their LinkedIn post and just swapped out the one with the three. But they didn't say they updated the number. So everybody reached out and was like, hey, your numbers wrong. I said what I know, I've read that right and and so I looked in the news and yeah, so they they ended up updating it later in the day. So the numbers now 53 million. Again, concurrent viewers, that's their term. I did confirm In another way that the bit rate still was under a meg on average. So not surprising. We have we've seen this before. Good news mark is Disney plus. Hot star folks are gonna come to the Vegas show next year and talk about in a case study how they deployed this, how they rolled it out with the video stack looked like. So that's cool, they've agreed to do that. That'll be interesting to see.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Now some other Disney news to note. On Q3, espn plus gained 800,000 subs. It's 26 million total. But if you don't know. Big key takeaway is that ESPN plus was profitable in the quarter, generating 33 million. So Definitely a stat to know. Also, disney now breaks out their revenue differently. There's now three divisions called sports, entertainment and experiences, so they're now breaking out revenue completely differently. Also, they broke out ESPN revenue for the first time. The revenue came mostly from affiliate fees, which was just over 8 billion this is for the first nine months of fiscal 2023 and Advertising was 3.2 billion and subscription fees was 1.1 billion. So what does that tell you? Well, what we already know they're getting the vast majority of their revenue the largest percentage, I should say from MSOs who are selling pay TV 8 billion. Some news that just came out today LG announced that the ESPN app, including ESPN plus, is Now available in LG smart TVs, including OLED. What on earth took?

Speaker 2: 10:49

so long.

Speaker 1: 10:51

What is going on here's? Lg slash Disney. I don't know whose fault it was on this one. I didn't. I didn't look into that, but yeah, you're only just now getting the ESPN plus app. Oh, and then also marked this week another PC ESPN news. Espn has launched ESPN bet. So they teamed with Penn Entertainment, which provides sports content and conceit casino gambling experiences, and they previously launched the sports book for barstool sports. So Penn said back in August it was paying ESPN 1.5 billion for the rights and to operate the betting platform under a 10-year deal. So they're really using the ESPN brand. Let's just make it what it is. And then ESPN is also going to receive about 500 million to purchase shares and in Penn Entertainment and they're going to promote ESPN bet across its online and broadcast channels. Now you could sign up for it this week, but it still needs to get approval from gaming commissions in every state individually. So they've they've got some work to do, but it's it's on its way.

Speaker 1: 12:06

Interesting let's jump into peacock. So this is news that has been out, but just reminding people because it's gonna be here before we know it, the new year, peacock is gonna be the home to the first ever exclusive live streamed playoff game. So different than Black Friday NFL playoff game. You'll be a wild car playoff, a game in pride time prime time on Saturday, january 13th. Now the Wall Street Journal Said that NBC Universal paid a hundred and ten million dollars for the rights. When that was asked about with management, they said pretty much that it was too high, but it was. It was still expensive and it was in the ballpark, so I'm hearing it was 90 to 100 million. Frankly, whether it was a hundred million or 110 million to be seen a reversal doesn't matter, but just to give everyone an idea of how much money the NFL gets for their content. That's just incredible single game Okay.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Now the other thing, Mark, is. Without going to details here, let's just say that a lot of work is going on in the back end right now. Amongst the entire video stack of CDNs and ingestion and everything you can think of to support this, there are some pretty lofty numbers that NBC Sports thinks this potentially could do. I don't agree with those numbers, but let's just say you know they're making sure that they're ready. Right? Well, there's a difference between being ready and being realistic.

Speaker 3: 13:48

So are you saying that they're I mean, are you insinuating that they are overbuilding, you know? Or what do you mean by they're optimistic on the numbers?

Speaker 1: 14:00

Well, they're not building right. They don't own the content distribution network.

Speaker 3: 14:03

That is true.

Speaker 1: 14:04

Like we've seen in previous years, sometimes the companies think, okay, well, if the Super Bowl did this, you know number, call it five million. Right, and this is now exclusive only to us not on pay TV except again OTA and, I think, local markets. So it'll do 10 times the Super Bowl, right? And it's like guys, you know nobody's doing that, you're not getting that many people to come. So you know numbers have changed quite a bit over.

Speaker 1: 14:33

The last year. But also you have to be realistic because there are not infrastructure providers out there who today are going to say to a customer yeah, we'll take on all the capex costs to build you up capacity. That is not.

Speaker 3: 14:48

Well, that was my question. You said there was a lot of back-end work being done, and then you said the numbers were lofty, and so I was just wondering if they're building.

Speaker 1: 14:59

The numbers have been corrected a bit, but let's just say they're still as far as I'm concerned about Got it.

Speaker 3: 15:05

I'll leave it at that Got it.

Speaker 1: 15:07

Let's put out some other numbers here. The AMA Average Minute audience for the Sunday Night Football game against the Chiefs and Jets a couple weeks ago was 1.8 million viewers across Peacock, nbc Sports Digital Platforms and NFL Digital Platforms. Reason I bring that up is NBC Sports says it's the largest streaming audience ever for a regular season NFL game in NBC Sports 1.8 million. Here's another stat NBC Sports just put out I believe this was just today or yesterday, no, maybe not, but it was recent. So Ohio State's victory over University of Notre Dame was the most streamed college football simulcast within AMA on Peacock and NBC Sports Digital Platforms, of 605,000 viewers. Oh yeah, this is from a couple weeks ago. So there you go from NBC Sports, two of the highest streamed games for both NFL and for streamed college football. So interesting to see how those two numbers compare. And then for the college football the overall viewership peaked at 14.2 million when combined with TV. So look at those numbers. Streaming made up 4.2% of total viewership, and that is the reason why the NFL and the sports leagues are getting so much money still for their content, because the vast majority of viewers are still watching on TV. That's reality of it. These are the numbers to back it up. So for the people who are still thinking pay TV is dead, it's not going to work blah, blah, blah. Like we know the numbers. Also, someone left a comment in my blog about oh, just give it a time, the NFL will come in and bid for the next Super Bowl. The Super Bowl rights are locked up for the next 10 years. Yeah, I saw that, and it's all pay TV providers. So that's not going exclusive to streaming in the next 10 years.

Speaker 1: 17:16

Let's jump into Max. So for those who don't know, warner Bros Discovery did add a live sports tier in October. It's called a Bleacher Report Sports add on. It costs $10 a month. Current Max subscribers get it for free until February 29th next year. It's got NBA, nhl, ncaa, usa soccer. It's got some good content.

Speaker 1: 17:39

So I checked it out, mark, not that long ago. I was super impressed. Also, I was getting a little bit of technical details in the back end of what they were doing. I've always, for a long time, been super impressed with the whole Max team over there from a technical standpoint. They're really good about just staying on top of what the user experience looks like. So I'm going to take a deeper dive into the application, specifically the new application on Roku, because they did rebuild it for Roku. So I'm going to spend some time during the holiday really looking at that, but they've done a good job there.

Speaker 1: 18:16

The question I have is just how many of their subscribers are going to stay on the sports package and want to pay $10 a month, and that right now is complete unknown. So I'm hoping Warner Bros Discovery will. Let's see this January, february 29th, so hopefully they will say something for Q1 earnings and Q2, maybe about what they're seeing. But also it will only be We'll only be going pay two months out of the quarter, so 30 days probably won't be a great indication. So will they say something? I'm doubtful that they will, but I'm hopeful. Let's go into Amazon. So, according to Nielsen's national TV ratings, prime videos of live streams, live stream of the Panthers bears that was last week average 9.6 million viewers, which is up 41% versus last year's comparable gain, which was the Falcons versus Panthers. There's a lot of caveats here, as we've talked about before, in terms of what's being measured and how. Also, notice it says viewers. It doesn't say average minute audience. That's right.

Speaker 3: 19:39

It also doesn't say concurrent viewers, that's right and no definition of what a viewer is.

Speaker 1: 19:44

So either None, so I've pushed Amazon on this and all they keep saying is listen, we're getting it from Nielsen. You got to push Nielsen on definitions. Yeah, good luck, that's not going to happen. I mean, there's more chance of anything happening me singing on this podcast, which you don't want, but then Nielsen actually saying what some of these definitions are. So the whole viewers it's up 41%, is it? I don't know, I don't know. They also say season to date. There's a night football is averaging 12.2 million viewers, which is an increase of 26% versus last year's eight season game average on Prime Video. So those numbers are what they are. I wish we had more insight into them, but we just we don't Interesting. What do we got next here? Mark Fubo, yeah.

Speaker 3: 20:44

Actually, I caught something interesting there. You did an interview at the streaming summit which I thought, yeah, I thought was really interesting. Let's see. Yeah, yeah, yael Wang, that's who you talked to.

Speaker 1: 21:00

Right.

Speaker 3: 21:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:01

Yeah. Yeah, it was a good conversation because he was very open about he's the SVP head of North American marketing. But he was very open about what they're seeing from consumer adoption and what consumers want from pricing and bundling and packaging and how they work with RSNs. And I like the fact that he really started off the conversation mark by saying we are not going after the lowest common denominator of the sports fan. We're just the sports fan that just doesn't want to, doesn't care enough about sports to pay for it. It's not who we're targeting. That's a good thing. I don't think that's a bad thing. So he brought up a lot of really interesting points about what consumers are looking for and how they're thinking about the user experience, and also we talked about some things tied to DVR. Also, mark, I found it interesting that he talked about how they're always thinking about packages. If you know Fubo, they're constantly changing their packages.

Speaker 3: 22:10

That's what you can stand up for. In fact, I noticed we sort of stopped updating on. It seemed like every week there was a new update from Fubo on a package. Maybe it settled down a little bit.

Speaker 1: 22:24

It has. But they're still doing a lot of experimentation, and some in the industry view that as well. They don't know what they're doing, but know what they're doing is collecting feedback on what's working, and not and, by the way, just you also talked about personalization.

Speaker 3: 22:37

Yeah, just a quick note as to who Yell Wang is he's SVP of marketing at Fubo. So I think that also is interesting, because, of course, normally you're talking and streaming some at host technical executives, which is great, but there is the business side, and so here we've got someone who wakes up every day at Fubo TV thinking about how do I drive more revenue, how do I put a more compelling offer, how do I get people to watch our service longer?

Speaker 1: 23:12

Not sure, and part of that discussion was how does personalization tie into that. So we talked about personalization and also what do you thought bundling looked like going forward? So right now it's it's really old. You pay for Fubo and you get everything. Sure.

Speaker 3: 23:28

Sure.

Speaker 1: 23:29

What if I just want baseball and golf but I don't want hockey? So interesting how he was saying what they hope to do down the line in terms of making packages more personalized, especially potentially as more RSNs come into the fold. Because they work directly with RSNs, they see that as an opportunity. But a really good, good conversation. I got a lot out of it. The video is now up online. So if you go to NABstreamingSummitcom, just scroll to the bottom and click on 2023 New York City videos. Yeah, there were a lot of, you can see it. I'll also be posting in our link to that it's great.

Speaker 3: 24:08

There's really it is important to look at, to watch this interview. But you know, there's one thing that really jumped out at me, dan, is you know we've talked a lot about whether 4K and video quality from the consumer perspective matters, and it was interesting because what did he say? You know, according to him, there was a third party survey and these were not just Fubo subscribers and they said that they do care about 4K and video quality. You know now what that means and how the question was asked. You know that's always, that's always what I think about when I when I see survey results. But fascinating, right, you know.

Speaker 1: 24:54

Yeah, but not surprising, because he's also saying that we're going after a higher end of the tier of market who cares more about sports.

Speaker 3: 25:01

That's right. Yeah, these, these are the true fans, the enthusiasts you might say. You know they're. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1: 25:09

But it's a good point, right. It's where where's 4K valuable and where's it not for the consumer.

Speaker 3: 25:14

Yeah, yeah, and he. He also said that. You know this is no surprise. People don't want to jump between five different services to get sports content. So it appears like Fubo is going to be a very interesting sports content aggregator and, and increasingly aggregators right, we're moving forward, you know really.

Speaker 1: 25:36

So yeah, yeah, and they're improving their balance sheet. They're improving in terms of what their losses are. They still have to get to better progress on that. They have talked about wanting to get to a free cash flow by I don't remember the dates, I won't give it out, but they are working on that, like everybody, so it's no surprise at all. Let's jump into Foxmark and the reason Fox, fox Sports.

Speaker 1: 26:01

So Fox has come out and said their chief executives come out and said that they've no intention of taking its premium sports content direct to consumer. And they said I'm going to read two quotes here. So quote our focus on being good partners with our distributors and wanting their business to succeed. Because cable and pay TV distribution remains our largest and most important revenue stream and we believe it will remain our largest for years to come. We are not interested in, at this stage, moving premium content away from our cable distribution partners. That would be, I think, a mistake for us and for them. So end quote Now. At the same time, fox did acknowledge that the cost of premium sports rights is eating into its profitability. No question, they're paying $2 billion a season for rights to the NFL's NFC package deal which lasts until 2033.

Speaker 1: 27:00

And then one final point on Fox. This is also the chairman saying we don't envision any kind of significant live sports on to be in the near or, frankly, medium, perhaps even long term future. And the reason I point that out is everyone's talking about all this fast growth and fast this, and that you can't compare fast to pay TV services that have sports. And you can't compare it because it's a different type of content and premium and it's expensive. And we know that because we know what this is costing Fox.

Speaker 1: 27:34

And what benefit does Fox have by putting live sports on to be to sell advertising against it? Well, it's not going to be enough advertising and enough CB CPMs to make up for the $2 billion a year it's costing them to license just this one package, the NFC package, and the amount of money that they're making from distributors. We already heard ESPN is getting $8 billion in the first nine months of this year. So these are real numbers, listeners. These are solid, real numbers directly from the companies, and it just reinforces a lot of the nonsense that some people are putting out there that the idea that we'll just everything on pay TV will go to streaming, including sports that may. By the time Mark and I are out of the industry. It's possible. Okay Right, we're getting up there in age, but it's not going to be in the next couple years.

Speaker 3: 28:26

Well, we're not that old. A lot of these deals are locked up for 10.

Speaker 1: 28:29

Well, I don't know.

Speaker 3: 28:31

It's 28 years in this industry for me, so it seems like I'm getting old. Retirement is looking more attractive by the year, right?

Speaker 1: 28:40

No retirement's, no good That'll be boring. Always going to have to do something to hide the screen Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 28:48

Now let's go to immediately baseball, because as much we're talking about the viewership and football, and also, actually, before we do that, let's just jump into one more stat from ESPN, because they just put out a stat saying Monday night football delivered 17.7 million viewers for the Monday night Broncos and Bills game. And let's just say that, said in MS, espn, espn Monday night football record. So it was its most watched week 10 game, up 38% year over year as well, and it peaked at 19.8 million viewers. So NFL is just rocking and rolling on TV, no surprise. Now let's go to major league baseball. I hate to say it, but, man, it doesn't seem like anyone cares about baseball these days. The two 2023. So this year's World Series became the least watched on record, with the Texas Rangers winning, you know, five game series at average 9.1 million viewers on Fox. That's it. Now, okay, that's not the Yankees playing. Major market, major city. We obviously would have had more, more numbers like that, higher numbers. But, yeah, not good for baseball, no.

Speaker 1: 30:20

And then, mark, let's just close this out with some rights.

Speaker 1: 30:23

You know there's some rights discussions going on here, so a couple that will just sort of recap. So, mba, so, as we know, the NBA is going to enter into its first media negotiations in a decade and we hear that Disney's ESPN, warner Brothers, discovery, because they've got TNT. They're already in the in play here because they pay about 2.6 billion dollars a year for the TV rights. But the rumors are that they're not looking to spend a lot of money and really up their spend. And Yet obviously the NBA is going to be looking for a lot more money 10 years later. But with the companies under pressure from investors to trim costs cable TVs, you know declining the mergers that are weighing on their balance sheets, you know you're gonna have some, some interesting Conversations here, because some have said oh well, you know, an Apple, youtube, someone like that's gonna come in and just Go over the top to grab these rights. I'm not so sure about that because YouTube CEO already came out and said that they weren't interested. Their focus is football right now.

Speaker 3: 31:32

That's right.

Speaker 1: 31:33

Paramount CEO came out and said we really don't need, nor we active in looking at, any more sports. Okay, espn can only spend so much because we know they're in a cost-cutting mode right now. Amazon and Apple have indicated apparently they find it more appealing if the NBA could package National TV rights with local market rights, which makes Total sense if you could see the games in your hometown and the league supposedly is looking at doing that. And especially with the bankruptcy of Diamond Sports, that's gonna accelerate those efforts. Now including Diamond Sports in this conversation, diamond Sports Group in the NBA agreement Would guarantee Diamond Sports Groups NBA coverage the end of the current season. But then those rights are gonna refer back to the league. So that's great for the NBA and apparently that's also being talked about with hockey and baseball right now. But the the one big us we should say mark rights negotiation going forward is NBA. That's the one left To really See what's gonna taste take place with that sports league in the market. How are they gonna divvy up those?

Speaker 1: 32:57

That's right yeah and then after that there's there's definitely some renewals down the line next year, in the year after, for some Some smaller things, but the NBA is the big one. Apple will end on Apple here, mark, there hasn't been too much an apple Lately, sports wise. They did not come out and talk about MLS on their earnings call. We got no numbers from them. They also haven't talked any Numbers from Friday night baseball. Now that that's over. There was mentioned a few months back that they are ironing formula one, supposedly which is in Vegas, numbers being floated.

Speaker 1: 33:38

Yep Vegas. Interesting to see a report CNBC did on a Detailed documentary hour-long documentary into the business of F1. I thought that was pretty interesting. You can find that online. So the rumor is apples considering an offer of two billion dollars a year, which would be double what formula one league currently gets from its its global TV rights. But the current US rights are tied up with ESPN until 2025. So even if Apple did a deal, it would be after that. The deal would be seven to ten years and global rights become available in about five years. So it would definitely be a little more complex deal. Apple wouldn't have everything at once in 2025 globally. We know they love global rights, like they have with MLS, so we'll have to watch what happens there.

Speaker 1: 34:28

A keep in mind Apple was also Talked about very heavily with Pac-12 and that fell through. That just didn't didn't end up working out. And then there was also news this week that Apple is looking to pick up streaming lights for League one, which is the French equivalent of the Premier League, but all we have in that is is a rumor. So as of now unknown, but interesting to see what what Apple might do in In the new year. Now Apple's name has also been floated around with the NBA.

Speaker 1: 35:02

But again, you know Apple's been quiet, of course, or everything they do, but but they did come out when they talked about the MLS deal and they made it very clear that when it came to deals like that, those were the types of deals they were looking for from sports weeks with global rights and no blackouts. So if they can get that Over time even saw not right away with formula one, potentially that's, that's the type of deal that falls into the sweet spot of what they want. The other thing I'm thinking mark formula one. Could you imagine how many other Apple branded products they could integrate into the race? Give a lot of people there with a lot of money.

Speaker 1: 35:47

Absolutely you could do a really nice experience tied to Apple hardware and I don't mean inside the cars and Apple's not offering, say, a cloud service that the race cars use, like Oracle and others. But I just see those two brands as a nice tie-in. I, yeah, and it would be interesting to see with apples you know creative power that they have how they might Put those brands together if they did do something.

Speaker 3: 36:13

So that'd be interesting to see. Yes, okay, it's an interesting thought because an F1 Fan is highly engaged and very passionate. You know, they, right, they wear all their favorite driver and team gear and you know, and, and, and, it's Excited, your favorite driver mark? I don't actually have one, I, I actually don't follow F1.

Speaker 1: 36:38

I was gonna say I don't know a single driver. I didn't know if you know I.

Speaker 3: 36:41

Well, you know, let's see you know who. Who do I? Who do I know? Yeah, I don't know. There's you know, I'm sure there's some name. I'd be like oh, I think that guy's an F1 driver or whatever. But no, but they're. You know, but they're. They're super, super, super engaged. And you know, when I'm traveling Europe, it's one of the things that, you know, always strikes me, as you'll see people, just you know, there's no race going on, there's nothing, but they're walking on the street, dress head to toe in their favorite fan gear.

Speaker 3: 37:09

Yeah, I mean their favorite team gear, you know.

Speaker 1: 37:12

Serious sport and they spend a lot of money.

Speaker 3: 37:15

Yeah, they spend a lot of money. And and then the corollary, though, is is it? You know? Apple users are maybe not draped head to toe in Apple logos, but if you think about how many Apple products the average person who's you know really likes the brand. You know you got an Apple watch on, you got an iPhone you've got, you know, in your bag. You know MacBook Pro or tablet, and pretty soon you'll have vision.

Speaker 1: 37:42

And also, what could they potentially do with the new app, a different app, right? How could they tie that in ticketing Maybe?

Speaker 3: 37:47

I don't know exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's. I just feel like there's a lot of time. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1: 37:52

Yeah, we'll watch it. Kind of cool, watch it close. Yeah. Yeah, I think we'll know pretty soon on that one, it sounds like. So, mark, that's good. We're at like 35 minutes. We're out of time here. We covered a lot today. All these numbers are up on LinkedIn. They're across different posts, though. So what I'm gonna do is, over the weekend, I will condense all this into one blog post, put it on LinkedIn, put the link there All sports stats all in one place and then, mark, I like this idea you know we've talked about it for a while of just doing podcasts where it's tied to a particular topic. Yeah, we're not always jumping around, so we're definitely gonna do one on the content delivery market soon. I'm still working on a lot of data there that I want to bring to that conversation, and I was thinking we should also do one in the new year around TV OSes, because we now have five, five companies.

Speaker 1: 38:40

There's gonna be another one launching in January, of course, to be a press release out January.

Speaker 1: 38:44

So that'll be six companies all vying to be the OS of TV manufacturers, mostly outside the US, latin Europe, a pack India but interesting what's starting to shape up there and some of these Manufacturers that have already announced deals the TVs are actually gonna start shipping next year, so actually have some product in the market.

Speaker 1: 39:06

So I think that's gonna be another one that we're gonna do. And then I would just say you know, listeners, just hit mark or I up on LinkedIn and be like hey, we'd love for you to talk for 30 minutes about this particular segment of the market vertical industry application use case and we'd love to do it because, like this, we'll just pull a lot of industry data, because I think that's what fuels the conversation is hard numbers we can look at and we can see where the industry is at and where it's going with facts as opposed to just a whole Bunch of different opinions. Yeah, so going forward, we'll do some more of those. So Appreciate everyone listening mark, thanks for being here, reach out to mark and I if you need anything. Otherwise, everyone, have a great week and we will talk to you in the next podcast. Thanks very much.

Speaker 2: 39:53

If you enjoyed the show, send it to a friend, have questions for Dan or mark, connect with them on LinkedIn at any time and be sure to check out dance blog at streaming media blog calm.