This week we discuss, how in a blow to Amazon and DAZN, pay TV broadcaster Sky won broadcast rights to show a record number of Premier League matches in a new four-year deal. We also break down Paramount’s balance sheet to refute the reports they are nearing bankruptcy and highlight Peacock’s latest data of 30 million paying subscribers, their $10 ARPU, and their two upcoming exclusive NFL games. We detail Twilio’s announced layoffs and the shutting down of their Programmable Video product, a 17% workforce reduction announced by Spotify, along with Netflix's recent outage and the lack of transparency in their "What We Watched” report.
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
This week we discuss, how in a blow to Amazon and DAZN, pay TV broadcaster Sky won broadcast rights to show a record number of Premier League matches in a new four-year deal. We also break down Paramount’s balance sheet to refute the reports they are nearing bankruptcy and highlight Peacock’s latest data of 30 million paying subscribers, their $10 ARPU, and their two upcoming exclusive NFL games. We detail Twilio’s announced layoffs and the shutting down of their Programmable Video product, a 17% workforce reduction announced by Spotify, along with Netflix's recent outage and the lack of transparency in their "What We Watched” report.
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
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 3:Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn, along with co-host Mark Donaghan, and we are back for another episode. Apologies to listeners. Some travel took me out for about a week there and wasn't online much. A lot went on Mark this last week and a half that we didn't do a podcast, so we've got a lot to cover today. Let's start off Mark with. I mean, we've got a lot of some numbers here too, which is really good. We've got some financial information to break down as well. I would say let's just really quickly highlight Netflix's data report. Anyone listening has probably already read quite a few posts from others on this. I've seen some good posts. I've seen some absolutely terrible posts. The members of the media that are calling this report unprecedented detail, comprehensive stats. I saw one person. I almost want to start calling these people out by name Mark. I'm not going to. There are analysts in our space who charges money for people to buy reports. To say, netflix's recent report on viewership status in unprecedented detail is a game changer for the industry Game changer, really.
Speaker 2:Come on.
Speaker 3:It doesn't break out geographic distribution. It doesn't break out completion rate. It doesn't break out unique viewers. It doesn't talk about percentage of hours versus ads delivered. Also really important Netflix treats each title individually.
Speaker 3:That's right Movies as a standalone and series only by every season. You also have and Netflix rightly points this out some of these shows are only available for a few weeks in a certain limited number of territories. I am not surprised Netflix put this out, because we also have to remember that, because of the writer's strike and the strikes going on, part of the deal was Netflix has to provide total number of hours viewed of certain titles based on what their budget was. Now, they didn't have to do it publicly, but isn't really surprising that they put it out?
Speaker 1:No, because you know that was going to be a little bit of a gamble anyway.
Speaker 3:For sure they have to give it out to enough studios and everybody else. I think it's really important. This is just total viewership. Popularity does not equal profitability. And what I love here, mark again, it's just Netflix setting proper expectations. In the blog post where they announced that they were doing this new report twice a year what they're calling what we watched they made it very clear that total number of hours viewed should not be the only metric and is not the only metric they use to determine success with a movie or series. Of course, smarter that is not the only metric.
Speaker 1:It's unprecedented. We certainly have seen across. It is unprecedented. It's unprecedented.
Speaker 3:Depending who you ask, everything's unprecedented these days though that word. I think that was the word of the year.
Speaker 1:We live in unprecedented times. Well, that actually may be true, but anyway.
Speaker 3:I think that was the word of the year.
Speaker 1:Mark, was it really Okay, I think?
Speaker 3:so, yeah, you can Google it while I'm looking up some number. I think it was so the hype around that. But I also love how some analysts broke it down differently and said hey, listen, this is not based by region. It doesn't say when it came out. You got to go figure out what show came out where and what region. This isn't completion times, so not everybody fell for that, which is really good. Is there a downside to Netflix putting this out? No More data is great, but it's very limited and it's very high level. That is the whole point here. Maybe this is a start in Netflix detailing it a little bit more down the line.
Speaker 2:Okay, great.
Speaker 3:But just take it for what it is. A couple other things on Netflix. Netflix, mark, I don't know if you saw, I had an outage for a few hours last week.
Speaker 2:Shocking Now that is somewhat unprecedented, although it's true but it happens.
Speaker 3:Now it wasn't globally. I saw someone reply and say it was globally. It was not globally. Like geez, look at Netflix status page. I would have liked Netflix to have updated it a little bit faster than they did. They said it is impacting some, but not all, users. What percentage of some and all, we don't know. It was for some users it was a couple of hours. I don't have an exact time. Netflix didn't say the total length of the outage, but they did have an outage, which is pretty rare. It seemed like a routing outage to me. I don't have details on that. I was away so I didn't try and talk to them on it, but there was unfortunately a bit of an outage there.
Speaker 3:Some other news from Netflix they plan to do a live tennis match between Raphael Nadal and Carlos Alcarez Certainly not a tennis guy here, I don't know those two very well. Obviously, another second one. This is going to be when is this? March 3rd next year. It's going to be coming from the Mandalay Bay Resort Casino in Las Vegas. So one thing I was thinking with the hat mark is production value will obviously be excellent.
Speaker 3:It's inside a controlled environment in a facility compared to a golf course, and yet their golf course event was produced very, very well, but certainly this will be much easier for them, which is very good. Then the final piece of Netflix here. We all know about the Netflix bundle that you can get through Verizon with Max, just reinforcing. Here again, we still have members in the media and analysts talking about how Netflix, max, disney are teaming up.
Speaker 1:They're not happy.
Speaker 3:We also have competitive SVOD services. Netflix and Max are working together, not accurate to Verizon bundle. To be clear, there is no contractual relationship between Netflix and Warner Bros Discovery. As far as packaging goes, yes, wbd licenses some content to Netflix. It's not a bundle. So just reinforcing that, because I still keep seeing people comment on that. The other piece of news we have from Netflix is they will do Q4 earnings on January 23rd, so just a little over a month away. Netflix tends to do earnings earlier than anybody else in the industry, so great.
Speaker 3:The one thing I want to see mark and earnings. I'd say Actually three things I'd really like to see. See what you want to hear, but I want to hear An update on avod. How many subs do they have? Last time they talked about users but they didn't say paying subscribers. I'd love to know how many paying subscribers they have To do. They think anything changes with their content spending next year? It doesn't sound like it will. They've already projected that they think They'll do about 18 billion dollars in content spend, but would love to hear if that's adjusted at all which last year was about 17 billion 17.
Speaker 3:This year was 17.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly this year, yeah, so due to the writer strike.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then the third thing I'd love to hear a little bit about is just how are these one-off events, how are they thinking about one-off events and do they have an idea in their head of would like to do one every quarter, twice a year? Maybe it's just as content comes up, but for me that would be most interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for me, I am super interested. Anybody who follows me on LinkedIn knows that I post a lot about cloud gaming and that's something I'm really watching. All right, they haven't given us much data, no, but you know they have been quietly and it's not exactly quiet. It's not like a secret, but they're not shouting from the mountaintops Um, rolling out. You know they start in the UK and then it went to Canada, came to the US. It's now rolling out. It's the really starting to grow some momentum.
Speaker 1:And there was an interesting blog post and that the head of games, mike Verdu. Oh, right, yeah, he, and this is up on my profile as well, so if you want to catch this, it was the 13th of December, so five days ago. We're taping on the 18th and, and he has some really interesting Stats up here, more about content, about games, but they have launched number of games. Yeah, but you know they've launched 40 games. Something that I think really is it has gotten kind of missed is that they have acquired, over the last couple years, a number of studios, and I've taught my head. I don't have the exact Number and I'm looking. He didn't mention it, but they are really going into this, you know not just of licensing content and putting it up on a platform, which would obviously be one strategy. They're creating IP, so I think this is gonna be and it was more games than I realized.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and in fact, by the end, 90 games Yep by the end of the year?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Yep.
Speaker 3:So that was. That was interesting. So yeah, you're right, that would be an interesting point to see. And from them what? How it's?
Speaker 1:driving the business. I think it's way too. Even if they do talk about it, it's just way too early for them to like really talk specifics about driving the business, but more of the strategy, something else. Just make a comment. So I saw some of the very first games and, you know, was able to get access and Because I was in Canada and and you know and played around and it was simple, it was a different type of gaming experience and I think Maybe some people would have expected it was very story driven, fun and quite addictive. But you know, not first-person shooter, you know driving games.
Speaker 1:So I heard some comments that, well, you know this isn't like serious gaming. We'll make no mistake, those more kind of traditional, maybe action-oriented games, those will be coming and you know I don't Over time. Yeah, exactly. So I think anybody who's looking at this and if they've looked at some of the first few game, you know some of the initial IP and felt Underwhelmed or just like, well, you know that's not that exciting. No, they're not trying to replace the console, you know, it's very clear. But it's just interesting when you think 200 million subscribers plus Are eventually gonna have access to gaming. You know that previously they did not. That's it's interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I'd love if they would break down what they've spent on that as well. We haven't got that number either. What's the cost to actually do this?
Speaker 1:But to your point, it's still early, it's still early, but I think again in Netflix yeah, the way that they operate, they're very measured, they're very disciplined, I think, very much like Apple, they're incredibly intentional. So this is not just you know, we'll give a shot and we'll kill it if it doesn't work. Far from it.
Speaker 3:True, true two other points here in Netflix mark on the Verizon bundle side I pulled up some numbers. So the last seven of eight quarters Verizon has lost Wireless retail postpaid subscribers. Sorry, six of the last seven quarters They've lost. So why is this bundle be being put together? Because Verizon's trying to keep reduced churn.
Speaker 3:Subscribers reduced well, yeah, retention more than anything. The other thing is, I see some people talking about just how many new subs potentially Netflix can get from this, but keep in mind that the bundle is only available If you're on the unlimited welcome, unlimited plus or unlimited ultimate plans. Now, if you're a subscriber of Netflix or max, you have to cancel your accounts and you have to resubscribe through Verizon. That's kind of a pain to some people. So we don't know what percentage of Verizon customers have moved to what this plan is. You have to be a what they call a my plan customer only. Well, don't need launch that whole New way of pricing and bundling. It only launched on May 18th of this year. Also, verizon's pricing for these bundles is higher than T-Mobile and others.
Speaker 3:Interesting so what actual percentage of Verizon wireless customers Postpaid phone subscribers actually have access to this plant? Verizon won't say so. Really unknown there. The other thing I'll bring up mark is that I can't believe it's. It's already been 10 years, but Netflix and Comcast right now are Talking about a new interconnect deal. Right, they're interconnect deals due to expire next year. I can't believe it's. It's been 10 years.
Speaker 1:You got a little blowback for for waiting into those waters. Who did right? Oh For bringing up old wounds.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was a busy year and a half of my life, writing a lot, talking to a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Remember sitting at some of those sessions and it's any way looking around going oh.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, no transparency in terms of what was really. Yeah you know, being asked to testify in front of Congress and Senate, which I refused to do because they were gonna use me.
Speaker 3:But it just showed how it was totally political. Yeah, now the businesses have changed. I did do a little blog post on this, you know. The bottom line here is I don't expect any public drama here. The two companies work very well together. Comcast and Netflix understand how to deliver great video quality across the last mile. You know they've had 10 years to just work together. They've expanded the relationship in 16 and 18 when when Netflix came on their X1 platform. So I don't expect any sort of drama here. I Don't expect any big change in terms of the way the infrastructure is being done. I do think there'll be some changes in the CTS separately, outside of Netflix, but.
Speaker 3:Believe it or not, it's been 10 years when?
Speaker 1:when did Netflix launch open connect? Was it as a result of all this? No, no, it was never Netflix, right was before that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they were. They were using multiple third-party CDNs for For many years and then just decided it made more sense to do it. But no, it was well before. Yeah, well before this deal. Okay, let's go into Disney real quickly, because Disney is. Disney is Delivered a little bit of a confusing message, I think, over the last two quarters on what they're gonna do in India. So at one point it was like, oh, maybe we'll get out, and they're saying maybe we'll stay invest.
Speaker 3:Well, we don't have the cricket rights anymore. We know that they went to buy a comm 18, so they were losing Disney plus hot star subs. It's being reported that reliance industries, which is led by Asia's richest tycoon, are expected to merge their media operations in a cash and stock deal and, apparently, reliance would own at least 51% of the merged entity. That's if the deal goes through. We have not seen that, have announced as of yet. Would be interesting, though, because reliance did get the streaming rights to the Indian Premier League for 2.7 billion in 2022 and they also have a deal now multi-year packed with Warner Bros Discovery For H2 show HBO shows in India. So interesting if that's what happens with Disney.
Speaker 3:Disney does seem to be looking for some sort of partnership in the India side, but that the rumor that came out. There was a lot of details on it in terms of numbers, so little more than you usually get from just a rumor of two people talking to one another two companies. So that's good. We'll see what happens there. Apple has a new Apple TV interface and if you saw that mark, it rolled out a little over a week ago. I believe it was last Monday.
Speaker 1:Monday before I've not seen it.
Speaker 3:I like it. It makes it much easier to find live sports. It includes a short cuts to third-party streaming apps because they now have this sidebar.
Speaker 3:There's a new home section and store tab, so I'd like it. The one thing I would just say is you know there's a difference between bundling and aggregation, as you and I know, and a few too many people in this, when they rolled this out, said oh look at, you know Apple bundling and it's like no, they're not bundling, it's really aggregation. But interesting to think of what Apple did there. Naturally, they are highlighting major league soccer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course much more than they were before. I would expect it would do the same with Friday night baseball, with MLB, when that comes back. So so that's a good thing I do like. I do like the interface a lot more. Let's jump into paramount mark.
Speaker 3:So there were some comments from some folks on CNBC and others that just said well, paramounts running out of cash, it'll go bankrupt next year. It has no choice but to sell. An S&P global analyst said that paramount didn't have the cash on the balance sheet to make the two billion dollar payment to the NFL Next year. So I did a blog post and I published it on LinkedIn. Pretty interesting on LinkedIn it's about 30,000 30,860 impressions in the last four days and it's just separating facts from opinions. So you know the bottom line is paramount had 1.8 billion of cash as of the end of Q3, so that's good. Now is that enough to make two billion dollar NFL Payment plus 555 million in interest payments? No, but what all these analysts seem to be missing is that the company is going to receive Approximately 1.3 billion in that proceeds in this quarter from the sale of Simon and Schuster. On top of that, the company amended and extended its 3.5 billion dollar revolving credit facility which doesn't mature until 2027. They have a 555 million debt maturity in 2024. Now they have a lot of overall debt, no doubt 15 billion in net debt. So could their balance sheet be better? Absolutely there's, there's no doubt. But they are not on the verge of going bankrupt. In Q3 they reported a profit of 295 million and they generated 377 million in cash flow. To other key points, because they integrated showtime into paramount, they expect to exceed the previously forecasted 700 million of future expense savings. That's a big number and they also was reminding wall street that they raised pricing. They expect to see the full ARPU benefit of the recent price increase in the fourth quarter.
Speaker 3:The NFL payments as well. You know, and I love how this analyst just says they can't make their 2 million dollar, billion dollar payment. Well, it's not a single payment. The payment is spaced out over the course of the year. It's not one lump sum. So bottom line, will paramount get sold absolutely. But my key takeaway here is for listeners If you're a buyer of paramount, there's no hurry, there's no reason to buy them now. Paramount is creating a sense of urgency in the market Because it benefits them. But why would you buy them now you would. You'd wait exactly, and if you bought them now, the amount of just regulatory scrutiny it's gonna have to go through.
Speaker 3:I would be willing to bet 18 months. The interesting thing is the rules change when one comes out of the market. The thing is, the rules change when one company of that size buys another. If another company's assets are more in distress, they're financials because they want the deal to go through quicker, so one company doesn't go under Interesting point. And then, finally, there's some really interesting things taking place with their bonds, which we won't go into details. But basically, if there's a change in the controlling stake of the company because there is rumors that the investor could come in as well if that happens, holders the bonds could make out really well because there's a provision in their terms. So watching what's been going on with their bonds has been pretty, pretty interesting.
Speaker 3:Let's jump on to candle media mark. So candle media, which is the Blackstone based Back entertainment company and it's it's led by, you know, former Walt Disney executives. They've been asking lenders to restructure some of their debt. No surprise article that posted details said that earnings at candle media are expected to fall about 50%. Shy forecast With hello sunshine expected to be off by 90% of what they projected in moonbug, another one of their properties off by 30%. So we already discussed previous podcast.
Speaker 1:They over yeah, we talked about these guys.
Speaker 3:They didn't evaluate it, but you know the fact that you're now talking about one group being down by 90%, if that's accurate. Whoo, that's not good. Couple quick pieces of information. Pay-per-view sports are coming to prime video, so Amazon and the premier boxing champions have announced a multi-year rights agreement. So pay-per-view events in the US you can purchase, whether you're a prime member or not, it doesn't matter. Also, select countries outside the US. They're gonna stream a few exclusive boxing series. This basically replaces the showtime deal that premier boxing champions used to have. Another interesting thing mark is YouTube. Tv rolled out a new feature which allows you to reduce the broadcast delay on your TV. Pretty interesting. They posted it in their reddit Board and what they said was you have to turn it on manually. When you do, it'll only last 48 hours, and of course, users are like this is why can't I keep?
Speaker 2:on.
Speaker 3:They were cool. They were cool. They said 48 hours. We just are collecting data to make sure it actually works, it's doing it properly, before we just enable it on your account forever. I Was like, okay, that's cool. Now I Give YouTube so much credit here, so much credit for saying quote they want to point out the lower the broadcast delay, the less buffer the video player will have, so you may be more likely to experience playback interruption. There's a trade-off for some users, so I love the fact that they came out and Talked about the experience you might have if you do turn this on so do you know, dan, are they simply just switching to low latency?
Speaker 1:HLS or low latency, I guess, is what it would be.
Speaker 3:But yeah, being away when they announced it. Yeah, I just didn't have.
Speaker 1:I am guessing yeah, it'd be interesting if any listeners know you know, know some more details, of course, if you.
Speaker 3:I'll reach out. Yeah, yeah, it would be. They're very good about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it'd be interesting, you know, to know how much of this reduced delay was just switching to low latency HLS and low latency Dash and how much, you know, are they just playing around with the buffer model? You know they can. They can reduce the segment size. They can. Yeah, there's yeah. There's, yeah, there's lots of ways to tweak, but.
Speaker 3:They also didn't say mark what devices it was supported on exactly, and that's where which you kind of need to know.
Speaker 1:And that's where my question about low latency comes, because it it could be that they want to do this in two steps. They want to just really heavily optimize, you know they're, they're streaming configuration, in which case then that's why they're basically saying, hey look, you could get some buffering, you know. In other words, that's the trade-off you might, you know you might, or because not all devices would support low latency.
Speaker 3:You know HLS and right, that's what I was thinking, yeah yeah, I'll dig in that one.
Speaker 1:Interesting that you know it would be an interesting and and relevant technical To know, yeah, detail.
Speaker 3:Amazon has exclusive light. They've secured exclusive live rights to international cricket council tournaments in Australia. There's another thing for for Amazon more, more content coming.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no surprise.
Speaker 3:We also have a number mark from president of Comcast announced that peacock is 30 million paying subs Roughly $10 monthly. Arpu At the end of September they had 28 million subscribers. That said, peacock is expected to have 2.8 billion in losses for 2023. So they certainly have to work on that. Two interesting things here on layoffs so Twillow is gonna lay off Approximately, they say, 5% of their workforce, which is about 300 people. The cuts are gonna impact also their data and applications business. Now, as part of the cost savings, they're also end of life in their programmable video product. So if nobody knew who that what that really was, unless you're a developer for developers, it allows you to add video chat functionality to web, ios and Android applications. Now, interesting that the reason they're end of life again Is they said that the video product was quote such a niche area and a relatively small part of our portfolio Makes sense. You got to focus. They now say they'll partner with industry leaders and video.
Speaker 1:I don't know which one didn't announce it. It's zoom actually. They've announced it. Yeah, they have okay so I've missed that.
Speaker 3:All they say is by removing video from their portfolio, they will now be able to quote more effectively. Focus on our pillar products, which are messaging, voice and email, not video videos, not one of those three, which I think makes total sense. It's just not a big enough opportunity for them. In addition, spotify this is really important here. What Spotify is doing with laying off people is Important to take note. So even companies that are reporting positive earnings are striving for operational efficiency Every day.
Speaker 3:Right in Spotify made some very interesting comments. So they've announced a third round of layoffs this year 17% workforce reduction, so it's about 1500 employees. So letter from the CEO couple things to call out here. He talks about the cuts having to be done because a quote capital has become more expensive, like we've been talking about all year. Also, they need to substantially Action to right size our costs. He says in 2022 and 2023,. The company was quote productive but less efficient. Think about that Now.
Speaker 3:Final comment here, which I found very relevant Quote in Spotify's early days, our success was hard won. We had limited resources and we had to make the most of every asset. Our ingenuity and creativity were what set us apart. As we've grown, we've moved too far away from this core principle of resourcefulness. That is extremely well said, and I love how open and brutally honest the CEO is with some of the challenges they're seeing to their business. Good news for employees they're going to receive approximately five months of severance. Nice of Spotify. To do that, obviously, you don't have to, but taking care of the people, that's good. What other evidence do we need in the market about productivity and operational efficiency?
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, we're seeing it all the time. Do you know the product base camp? It's OG of the project management software. The company was founded in 1999. I just listened to a fascinating interview with the co-founder, jason Freed. He explains how he's built his company and his whole platform is resourcefulness, efficiency, small teams, for example. Their engineering groups are comprised. Obviously they have. I think they're about 70 people and I don't know if he said exactly how many are engineers. But they have an engineering team, of course, but a group that is working on a feature is no larger than two people. It's an engineer and it's a designer. He just said some super fascinating things. Like he said, they optimize for profit, not for revenue. He doesn't even really care about his top line revenue. All he cares about is growing profit. He makes all decisions based on profit. It's just a really amazing interview that you can easily find if you go search.
Speaker 3:Profitability and productivity.
Speaker 1:It's rule business? Yeah, exactly, especially now. Yeah, he makes a comment, money's too, expensive. If you gave me $20 million and I think he said 100 people I wouldn't even know what to do with them because I'd waste them just like everyone else is doing, and I thought that was so interesting. Just such a fascinating comment Anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's been a lot of ways, that's for sure. A couple more things here. Mark Nielsen numbers the Seahawks and Cowboys Thursday Night Football Game and Prime Video averaged 15.26 million viewers and was the most watched game on Prime Video to date. Again, that's viewers, not average-minute audience, not simultaneous stream. We don't know what viewers is, so take that for what it's worth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but they're showing. But Amazon is showing consistent growth on the Thursday Night Game.
Speaker 3:Yes, depends on who the teams are, of course, the Friday game, black Friday it's on a Friday, it's during the day. Teams are really going to be going to determine a lot here. Man, there's some bad teams in the infield this year. Some bad teams.
Speaker 1:I'd take it you're not a football fan, or you are.
Speaker 3:And I don't watch a lot of football. No, I mean just being on the road 100 days a year.
Speaker 3:I don't have a lot of time either, but we'll stick with NFL games here because we've got some interesting things coming up with Peacock. So Peacock has two exclusive NFL games. The first one is just a few days away, december 23rd. Second one is Wild Card Playoff Game in January. Now again, let's stick to facts here because I see people getting this wrong. Yes, peacock is calling these, the NFL is calling these games exclusive to Peacock. But just to be clear, the games will also be broadcast on NBC stations in the competing team cities and available on mobile devices. With NFL Plus you can also get it over the air.
Speaker 3:Now I'm not going to talk capacity numbers Peacock is putting into place here, but I don't expect the first game to really set any records. The December 23rd game is on a Saturday night. It's against the bills and the chargers. Bills may be interesting there a little bit on the playoff side. Nbc Sports is good about putting out streaming numbers after the fact, so I do expect to get them. I came out, mark, and said I think the AMA on this is going to be in the 6 million range. To put it in reference, the largest non-exclusive NBC Sports NFL game this year had an average minute audience of 2.3 million. Now it's across Peacock, nbc Sports digital platforms and NFL digital platforms. So I think a game like this on a Saturday I'm thinking 5 to 6 million is the AMA Now for the wild card playoff game in January. So much of that is going to depend on the teams and what do we get? Okay, what are the teams and are they big in big markets? So I'm not putting out exact numbers there, but I do.
Speaker 3:I have gone on record and it said I expected to be below 10 million AMA and I don't usually put out numbers, of projections of how many viewers. But the only reason I'm doing it is I saw a few references to because it's exclusive and it's playoffs. It could do 20, 25 million. It could do half of what the cricket 15 million number was and it's not gonna do that. It's just not. I'll bet anyone who's listening, I'll bet everyone who's listening right now, dinner, if I lose right, it's not doing 20 to 25 million. I think it's under 10 million. But that's coming up first one December 23rd, so that's only a couple of days from when we're recording now. And then two other things. Mark was interested in see Fortnite had a big outage, so they were struggling to cope with demand. Many users were trying to see an M&M concert that they had.
Speaker 3:So Epic Games actually had to take Fortnite servers offline. Wow, yeah, to temporarily to recover.
Speaker 3:So I knew something was wrong when five hashtags on about Fortnite was everything that was trending on Twitter. And then just finally here, mark, this is a big, big deal here. So, in a blow to Amazon and to Zone, sky has won the broadcast rights to show a record number of Premier League matches in a new four year deal starting in 2025, 26. So Sky has retained rights to four out of five packages Wow, the other one being retained by TNT Sports. Sky now says that their exclusive live coverage will increase by 70%. It will cover at least 215 Premier League matches up until 2029. And the agreement will deliver total 6.7 billion euros in revenue across the four year period.
Speaker 3:There was an additional article on ftcom. You have to be a subscriber to read it, so if you go look for it, you can't see it. That's why. But, mark, it was fascinating. Sky went on record and said we've now locked up so much content sports related for pay TV over the next 10 years between everything they've locked up, that we now believe that we can figure out what the best strategy is going forward for pay TV, knowing that we have the best content in the market. Wow, so we're gonna figure out how to package it, how to produce it, how to present it. We no longer have to jump every other year to try and get content. So basically they're saying we're putting a lot of money up front and think we can now guarantee success with a strategy over 10 years, with pay TV.
Speaker 1:This is an interesting yeah that's. I missed that specific quote, but that's really fascinating to think about, because the party line is is a pay TV is dead because everything everybody says content, it's too expensive, it's not available, it's locked up, et cetera, et cetera. So Sky clearly had a strategy that started years ago. You know you can't do this stuff overnight to say wait a second, if we have the content, then we now can craft the bundles and create the experiences that our customers are looking for that meet the needs of the market, rather than just sort of being bounced around to and fro, grabbing up you know renewing licensing deals kind of when they come up and being stuck with either getting a good deal or not or needing to pass because you know you can't make the numbers work on that particular you know set of rights. That's super fascinating.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and very, very interesting To the set of rights. It was also reported, mark, to your point, that Amazon elected not to be, for the new packages when it got to a certain amount. Also, quick correction I said 6.7 billion euros in revenue. Sorry, I didn't mean revenue. I meant in terms of rights. Agree.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in other words, that's what they're paying. That's what they're paying.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, right, and it was reported. The previous deal from 2022 to 2025 was five billion euros, so you're talking 6.7 billion euros. It's about 8.5 billion US dollars. Tnt sports will have 52 games across that time period and Amazon will have 20 matches per season under the current deal that they have, which runs through the end of the 2020, 2029 season.
Speaker 3:Interesting, so you still have multiple places to get all of this content, but man Skye's now gonna have more than 100 matches a season Incredible than it currently does. And key thing here is it's keeping hold of the Super Sunday 430 PM slot, which is a big deal there, and also it's gonna broadcast all 10 final day matches for the first time Wow.
Speaker 1:And that's great for fans. So you know now, all of these games are in one place. So, or I?
Speaker 3:guess almost all, almost all, yeah, the vast majority. God, if only the other sports leagues would do that. Of course they're not going to. I wish, as a fan, I certainly wish they would, but that's a big deal, because as much as we've seen Google, amazon, apple and other tech companies step up with big money you know here, dizon didn't take it, amazon didn't take it, skye took it so talk about solidifying rights for the next 10 years of sports and being thought of as a sports platform on pay TV. It's pretty interesting. Pay TV is not dead. No, it's not no, thanks to sports, and if sports wasn't on pay TV, we'd be having a whole different conversation, but it's not dead.
Speaker 3:So, mark, that's what we've got here right, about 35 minutes. That's good. This week has actually been pretty quiet, which is not surprising leading up to the holidays here, so we're going to might do one more podcast before the holidays. We'll take one week off and then we'll do some sort of a wrap up end of year Not sure what exactly, as of yet. I think maybe Mark will. Let's each bring three or four stories that we think are the most important for this year that are going to impact the industry next year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's the criteria.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah, we don't do prediction pieces. It's a complete waste of time. I've seen some prediction pieces online. My God, they're funny, Just ridiculous, the ones I'm seeing Mark for next year. The prediction pieces are video is going to grow in 2024 with higher viewership, and I'm like, really dear Lord, like you're calling yourself an analyst and that's your prediction Video's going to grow.
Speaker 1:Hey, I got news for you Video's going to grow next year.
Speaker 3:So funny to see some of these prediction pieces. I haven't seen anything really solid. There was one or two where I was like, well, what if this company bought this company and bundled it?
Speaker 1:Okay kind of interesting. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, there's like some intellectual thought exercises about how the market could get reshaped, but that's you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The issue, though, is it would be five years of regulatory approval to acquire three companies together. It's just not going to happen. So interesting, but not going to happen. Everything Mark and I talked about is up on LinkedIn. It's definitely up on my LinkedIn everything we talked about today. Some of it's also streamed at blogcom. We appreciate everyone listening. If you have any questions, reach out to us. Mark and I will be back in about a week. Also, mark, I dropped by the time people are now listening to this I did drop my interview with the CTO and CPO of Warner Bros Discovery about the Max platform yeah.
Speaker 3:So listeners can check that out. We did make reference to that in the last podcast, saying it would be up, but it actually wasn't up as of yet. It is up now so you can check that out. But if listeners have any questions of any kind, reach out to Mark and I. We will talk to you one more time before the holiday. But if we don't, everyone have a safe holiday, get some rest.
Speaker 3:Business is not the most important thing out there. Never has been right. Spend time with your family, your friends. Yeah, we used to say early on Mark in the podcast Facts Over Fear. I think even more so going into the new year. Focus on the facts. What's taking place in the market. Don't worry about the nonsense that everyone's getting all riled up about or companies going under that are not gonna go under. But Mark and I will bring you a lot more in the new year, focused on what you've listened to so far this year, which is what are the numbers? What's actually taking place, how hard is it to get money. And then Mark will also do a wrap up to end of the year in the stocks as well, just so people have an understanding year over year, but we appreciate everyone listening.
Speaker 3:Have any questions, reach out to us. Otherwise, mark and I will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week. Thanks very much.
Speaker 2: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 Dan's blog at StreamingMediaBlogcom.