This week, we discuss the key numbers from Disney's latest earnings, including subs, ARPU and D2C profitability projections. We detail what the ESPN brand could look like with their comments that they will bring its ESPN DTC app to the market in the fall or late August of 2025, including integrated fantasy betting. We debate what their newly announced plans to offer a joint sports streaming service with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery means for the streaming and pay TV industry and why they made a $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games.
Finally, we break down all the cord-cutting numbers from Comcast, Charter, and Verizon, highlight YouTube TV's subscriber count of 8 million and discuss MLB's goal of introducing a DTC streaming package that would include, at a minimum, roughly half of the teams, by 2025.
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
This week, we discuss the key numbers from Disney's latest earnings, including subs, ARPU and D2C profitability projections. We detail what the ESPN brand could look like with their comments that they will bring its ESPN DTC app to the market in the fall or late August of 2025, including integrated fantasy betting. We debate what their newly announced plans to offer a joint sports streaming service with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery means for the streaming and pay TV industry and why they made a $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games.
Finally, we break down all the cord-cutting numbers from Comcast, Charter, and Verizon, highlight YouTube TV's subscriber count of 8 million and discuss MLB's goal of introducing a DTC streaming package that would include, at a minimum, roughly half of the teams, by 2025.
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 2:Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn long-co-host Mark Donoghan, here for the end of the week, a long, busy week. As usual, We've got some Disney news which I believe everybody probably knows about by now. If you don't know about the Disney news then you've had a busier week than Mark and I.
Speaker 3:We could have almost made this the Disney episode Dan.
Speaker 2:We could have. I was thinking of that, but we've got some other quick earnings hits that I want to get to Comcast, verizon Fox. A couple interesting things there, charter. But let's start off Mark, with a quick correction. One of the things we are obviously always talking about is getting the numbers right. Listening to I think it was two weeks ago the podcast we did, I mentioned that Zoom is cutting about 150 jobs and that it was 9% of their workforce. That is incorrect. It's about 2% of their workforce.
Speaker 2:Paypal's was 9% and eBay's was 9%, so unfortunately, we have a lot of layoff news. We also just had another one come out that Cisco is going to be laying off a portion of the workforce. It's not said how many yet, but that news is already broken. So let's jump right in here to Disney Mark. Let's go through earnings first, really quickly. So this is Disney's Q1, fiscal year 24, but as we would think of it as calendar Q4 2023. So what's pretty amazing here is their DTC business is getting to profitability, and they said that they still expected to get to profitability by fiscal Q4. So another three quarters for them. The operating losses for their DTC business were 216 million. Now this is down from 1.05 billion in the same quarter year over year. So they've done a great job in terms of cutting costs. But I think the key thing we have to look at here and just remind ourselves is it's easy to cut costs when you lay off a lot of people. That's right, and you also remove content from your catalog.
Speaker 2:That's right, and you can't do that every year. So in order to truly get to profitability, going forward without doing more cuts, they're going to have to continue to get more subs and, more importantly, they're going to have to get the higher RPU which we're going to talk about here. So they lost 1.3 million subs, disney Plus globally. So they ended with 149.6 million. So almost 150 million Disney Plus subs, which they really kind of had predicted just in terms of the quarter and seasonality, the way it works. The positive side is that they expect Disney Plus Core subscriber net additions between 5.5 to $6 million next quarter. So that would be good because we'd see growth there. Now. Hulu gained 1.2 million subs. It ended the year with 45.1 million. Interesting that Hulu Plus Live TV had no gains or losses, completely flat. Espn Plus lost 800,000 subs to end the year with 25.2 million. So, just to round this up, disney ended 2023 with nearly 150 million Disney Plus subs, just over 45 million Hulu subs, 4.6 million Hulu Plus Live TV subs and just over 25 million for ESPN Plus.
Speaker 3:It would be interesting down if Hulu. Obviously there's churn, there's people that just, for whatever reason, they need to cancel, they do cancel. But it'd be interesting is there a really high churn number and they're doing a great job of attracting new subscribers, which equals a net zero gain if your churn or is it that churn actually churn is quite low and I don't know.
Speaker 2:And there's just no way I know we have zero churn details from them whatsoever. We do have some RPU numbers though that we'll go through. So let's go through some of the other news quickly. They announced Disney Plus will be the exclusive home of the Taylor Swift Aristotle of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah, boy, she is just incredible because then it was released. Today it was leaked. We don't know if it's true, but that supposedly Disney paid $75 million for that. If that's the case, that tour in the movie theater and plus Disney, you're talking $350 to $400 million in gross revenue. It's amazing, incredible ESPN broadcast. Espn revenue grew 1% year over year. I don't think that surprised any of us that it's flat, but ESPN had a $255 million net profit. Espn is not losing money and we saw that previously when they put out financials on ESPN for the first time.
Speaker 2:Now all the news that came out in terms of these partnerships news, the JV Sports thing that we're going to get into. So let's go into three core things that they announced here. So first is that they're entering strategic partnership with Epic Games. They're investing $1.5 billion in the company and they're going to create what they're calling as a Disney gaming universe that lives alongside Fortnite. They're already doing a bunch of Fortnite, so none of that is surprising. What I wondered is just, mark, how much this was going to impact the balance sheet positively coming up in the next couple quarters. When the CEO was on CNBC, he was pushed about okay, when does this really go live? When do you start seeing material revenue? And he said it might take quote a couple of years. So they're definitely playing the long game here.
Speaker 2:I think it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3:It's a sizable investment, though.
Speaker 2:It is. I think it makes sense for what they're looking to do, because they said it'll include shopping some digital things as well for shopping. So you're talking about creating an experience which their fans are going to want, especially depending on the demographic they age they're talking to here, which is definitely obviously younger than us, or probably most of our listeners so I think it's a smart move. No launch date was given of any kind.
Speaker 2:Many CEO also said the company is still going to bring its ESPN DTC app to the market in fall, or quote late August of 2025.
Speaker 2:And he did lay out what is going to make this app different compared to ESPN plus or the other news they announced with Fox and Warner Bros Discovery and what he said this ESPN direct consumer app is going to include integrated fantasy betting shopping in some form, deeper statistics and more personalization. So, interesting to think, the strategy they're going there to me it sounds more of like a really a betting, sports betting app, even though maybe they don't want to call it that, but it sounds like that's who they're targeting is somebody who doesn't just want to lean back and watch a sporting event. So that's another piece of the news. Now, as far as Disney plus ARPU it grew from $7.50 to $8.15. So they lost subs but revenue went up because of ARPU. They said due to increases in retail pricing they saw a better quarter. But they also said it was partially offset by a higher mix of customers taking a promotional offering. And remember we're talking about Q4 and Q4 Disney ran a D plus special for $2 a month.
Speaker 2:So my guess is that's the impact there. Internationally, if we're excluding Disney plus Hotstar, the ARPU actually went down from $6.10 to $5.91. And again, that's because of promotional offerings. Disney plus Hotstar increased from $0.70 to $1.28. So quite a big jump there. Hulu SFOD barely went up at all about 10 cents, 15 cents. But Hulu plus live TV increased from $90.08 to $93.61. And there's the impact of the increase in pricing that they did in the quarter. Yeah, interesting, at 4.6 million subs it's not going to impact revenue. So now let's get into the whole joint venture, espn Fox and Warner Brothers, which they all jointly announced. Mark, I heard from multiple sources that none of these companies were planning to put this news out and that the news was leaking, and so they rushed to get releases out.
Speaker 2:They were not planning to put this out, which I thought was interesting. So they're looking to bring together all the content from their different sports networks, which, combined, would be 14 linear channels. All they're saying is that it's going to launch sometime later this fall. We don't have a date. It'll be owned by a newly formed company with its own leadership team. None of that has been announced in terms of who's going to lead it. There's no name for this service as of yet. There's no price, nameless faceless.
Speaker 3:I'm guessing it's $40 to $50. Is that leaked Any of the business model?
Speaker 2:price targets. We've seen a lot of analysts just say, based on they're guessing right, they're guessing, but at least they're guessing is based on the cost of the content in the package, what it costs to license it and based on what the margins would need to be that these companies make. They're coming up with the average of about $40. Mm-hmm. When it does launch, we know there's going to be discounted pricing. Well, I shouldn't say that. I think.
Speaker 3:The odds are really. It's a safe bet. I was going to say the odds are good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, discounted pricing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's going to be a very attractive for some period of time and then it has to be.
Speaker 2:So some other background information here. Everyone was online. They're like this is crazy. Paramount wasn't asked to be in, neither was Comcast or Peacock. The story I heard back channel was that if they added a fourth content partner now of a sudden the cost of license the content inside this package consumers wouldn't be willing to pay the price that they'd have to charge.
Speaker 3:Wow, you know, it makes sense. Because those, because people look at the absolute price, that it costs, meaning like the final price. They don't, they're not factoring oh, but I get four services or I get five services or I getthey. Don't look at it that way. And Cost and cost, yeah and so no, I mean I'm talking the consumer mindset is, I'm looking from the what's it cost.
Speaker 1:What do you get?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so if it's like $39 or $40 or $44 or something psychologically that's different than it's $59 or maybe even $55. I mean, there really is I mean, there's people who have studied this for their entire career pricing psychology. So yeah, well you know Roku.
Speaker 2:Roku is an example. I remember asking Roku once where he was like guys, you have a device at $14.99 and then you have one at $20.
Speaker 3:Just get rid of it. Yeah, really like why? What's the point?
Speaker 2:Makes no sense. Who's saving $5? And they said you would not believe. You would not believe, you would believe. How many times right that $5 difference means we move the product.
Speaker 2:That really surprised me. So the pricing on this is going to be really interesting. Now, note that this is missing NFL Sunday football. It's missing NFL games from Paramount Sure. Yeah, you're definitely missing content here. So I've seen some online say, hey, this is finally the Holy Grail bundle, get all your sports in one place. That is not happening. It's definitely not With Peacock. You're missing all kinds of content as well. Now, warner Bros Discovery has no NFL rights, so I thought it was interesting that they're in this package instead of, say, paramount. And I'm wondering I'm speculating this, mark, but I'm wondering if this means that WBD landed, the rights continue with the NBA, because they already have TBS and TNT. So if all of a sudden you have Warner Bros.
Speaker 2:Discovery in here.
Speaker 3:Does that mean they got some of the rights in the package and you know what, if they weren't ready to announce this? There's a reason. Could be that those agreements are still being short up. They want to announce it.
Speaker 3:That's what I wanted, you know, I mean, again, we're guessing as well. But yeah, these companies are smart and they're intentional, and these executives that work on these deals, they're not out there freewheeling it. So I would guess that there was a communications plan that was very well funded, I mean founded sorry, around you know. Hey, look, we need to. We want to make you know an explicit announcement of the content, of the content that's available in the bundle, but we can't do that until the deals are final. Deals aren't final, so well, can't announce it.
Speaker 2:It was interesting. A lot of people reported that the NFL Major League Baseball wasn't aware of this. Yeah, and they were in the NBA. I didn't catch that.
Speaker 3:I thought that was really interesting, interesting.
Speaker 2:So we'll have to wait to hear more, not only the cost, but bundling options, so you'll be able to bundle this with Disney and WBD's other DTC services. So you wonder about that? Obviously, this isn't Thursday Night Football either, because that's on.
Speaker 3:Amazon, yeah sure.
Speaker 2:Sunday games are on CBS or NFL. Well, global has rights to NFL and CA, men's basketball, PGA tour, soccer's champions league, so there's, there's a lot missing from here. The other thing I wonder, Mark, is is there enough sports content every month to keep people paying for this throughout the year? Or if they're like me and they're interested in one sport and one team, do they only buy this service to see the content they want for one league during that season, which then means you're really only buying the service six months?
Speaker 1:out of the year.
Speaker 2:It's expensive. Whatever the price is going to be, it's expensive compared to every other service in the market today. So is there enough sports content to keep the average, the average fan, in there, not the one that maybe you know is betting nonstop and anything they want they can. So, interesting in terms of the demographics these companies have said that the demographics are targeting as core never's people who've never had pay TV, and they throw a number out there, but a lot of those people have never had pay TV. It doesn't mean they're sports fans.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it does those two to go together. A couple other things, Mark. We don't know anything about ad formats. We don't know what type of personalization is going to be there. I'm also wondering what tech stack this is going to be built on. Max is real busy right now. I don't see how Disney has the time for this being. They're also working on, obviously, another app. Yeah, that's right. So pretty sure Fox is going to take the lead on this.
Speaker 2:We don't know how data is going to be shared, so reminder to listeners there's no regional sports networks in this bundle. Yeah, that's right. So initially I was wondering the list I put online, are they going to add regional sports bundles? Well, we know the answer is no. The answer is no Because Fox had their own?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and isn't that? Where isn't ESPN going to be a destination, potentially, for some of the regional sports? The ESPN Direct to Consumer app.
Speaker 2:I don't know, we don't really have any idea there. We know that.
Speaker 3:Amazon potentially Amazon, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, through Diamond, but they have to get out of that package first.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly Still many questions, so that's an unknown.
Speaker 2:But Fox's CEO came out on the earnings call and they said does not plan to add more content partners saying quote it's not something we're considering at this time. When he was pushed and asked a second time earnings call about that, he said they were quote, not contemplating adding partners to it. He said, of the 14 linear networks the service offers it quote gives people tremendous amount of content, so doesn't sound like there's going to be any RSNs added.
Speaker 3:Yeah, certainly not anytime soon.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So a lot of unknowns about this. I really wonder what churn is going to be on a service where you can turn it on and off all the time, especially tied to sports. The other thing, mark is is Max going to strip out sports from their DTC option? Now? I don't think they are, but I also wondered if maybe that's the reason that they recently postponed charging users for the Bleacher Report Sports add-on. Is there any tie?
Speaker 1:in there.
Speaker 2:I don't know. So there's so many unanswered questions here. We had some members of the media actually doing a pretty good job just laying out hey, there's a lot we don't know. We obviously had others that said this is a game changer and it's changed everything overnight.
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course, everything's a game changer.
Speaker 2:So I'm not even out yet. The other thing to note here is Fox's CEO said that he's already seen the product. So that was a little confusing as well, because he talked about seeing a. He didn't use the word demo. Actually, here we go. So he said quote seeing some of the prototypes. So I don't know what is defined as a prototype by him. Does that mean a working product? Does that mean you saw a slide deck? Don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:But that's interesting that he specifically called that out on their earnings call. So a couple of other things on this let's go to. So let's go to Fox. What else did he say about this? Gave no other specific details on the prototype. Did say he thought this was enough content to keep people engaged. However, on it, we'll go through Fox earnings really quickly. Not that there's much here, but I did think it was interesting that not surprising.
Speaker 2:They didn't give out any revenue numbers on Tubi, but they did say Tubi's revenue growth was quote slightly less or somewhat less than last year, so Tubi growth slowed. That won't say by how much or what percentage of revenue of any kind. They did have advertising revenue decrease by 20% across Fox. Some people call that number out, but not really a fair apples to apples comparison because he didn't have FIFA men's World Cup, he didn't have the 2020 midterm elections, so year over year, just very, very different. So that's Fox Mark.
Speaker 2:Let's run through a couple other earnings lines gate they added 700,000 subscribers, so they ended 2023 with 27.92 million subscribers, so they're nearing 30 million. It was just announced or wasn't announced, but information was put out today that Twitter assigned a deal with the WWE for a new exclusive weekly video series, or calling WWE speed, and the concept here is they're going to have featured time matches that are going to be completed in five minutes or less. Yeah, five minutes or less. Now, interesting, it's not going to be live. Yeah, it's going to be recorded to tape, but the content will be exclusive, but you can watch it in five minutes.
Speaker 3:So it's that snackable format. You know, short which?
Speaker 2:is, of course, yeah, they'll have new episodes 52 weeks out of the year. What I want to know there is just how that deal works. I'm really wondering if Twitter is buying that content or vice versa. Opposite WWE is paying Twitter to really promote this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:I'm knowing the nut Elon is.
Speaker 2:I'm sure that somehow that information is going to come out.
Speaker 3:He's just going to tweet it. He's going to exit. Probably it's going to exit out.
Speaker 2:It's going to happen. Other news coming out today MLB's commissioner. He said that he's targeting a direct consumer streaming package that would include, at a minimum, roughly half the teams with no blackouts at some point in 2025. That's what he wants to do.
Speaker 2:The problem there is he says he thinks he has to get at least 14 teams to create a package, and the Diamond Sports Group bankruptcy could keep that from happening based on where the rights already are and I won't even break down where the rights are because it's complicated but he's got a couple teams already, but he thinks unless he gets to 14, he can't offer that package. But, interesting, they want to go direct to consumer. I think that would be smart with baseball Now, would they do it through mlbutv? Would they go with a partner? Don't know? So that's another one to keep an eye on. Now, another big number that came out.
Speaker 2:Youtube CEO announced that they have quote, more than 8 million subscribers to YouTube TV, so important to note. That is subscribers. That's not paying subscribers includes free trials. I've previously heard in the past that YouTube TV free trials can be as high as 20%, especially leading up into something like the Super Bowl, which we've got in two days. So don't know the paying number. In July 2022, youtube said they had 5 million subscribers, again not paying. So we've definitely seen some growth there. We've got some cord cutting numbers. Verizon lost 62,000 pay TV subscribers. So, mark, this is interesting. Verizon now ended the year with the less than 3 million pay TV subs 2.95 million so I don't have any information on this, but I'm going to go on record and say this is going to happen, because I think it's very clear. Well, verizon, it's only a matter of time before they get out of the course.
Speaker 1:There's no reason to be in it, they're going to end up reselling YouTube or something else, just like the other smaller ISPs have done.
Speaker 2:It's going to happen. Verizon gave out no details in their plus play online platform that you can bundle subscriptions together. They also gave no update on the uptick let's call it of those who might have signed up for the bundle that includes Netflix and Max. They didn't answer any questions on that. So no numbers there at all, which is unfortunate.
Speaker 2:Charter this is another one. So Charter now has the most pay TV subs in the market at 14.12 million. Comcast has 14.10 million. But what I pointed out in LinkedIn is the average monthly revenue per customer relationship at Comcast is $130.32. Charters is 105. So I'd rather have a few smaller customers fewer customers, I should say but have a $25 average revenue per customer. In addition, I looked this up and ran the math 47.4% of users who use Comcast for broadband also take their pay TV service. That number is only 39% when you look at Charter. So Comcast makes more money per subscriber than Charter. They have a larger install base easier to upsell to. So I don't think we should be using just the number of subscriptions a company has for pay TV broadband, ott, as we've highlighted.
Speaker 3:Mark, obviously many times you have to look at it.
Speaker 2:Now, in that article too, I didn't like this. The Wall Street Journal said YouTube TV, fubu TV and others, which have about 18 million subscribers combined, according to whom? Well, they didn't say so. I reached out to the author. The author said the number comes from a third party analyst firm. Yeah, but the third party analyst firm is that's an estimate, but the Wall Street Journal wrote it as a fact which have about 18 million subscribers confirmed. It didn't say it's estimated they have 18 million. The author did agree with me that that should have been in there, but note, it's been a couple of days and they still haven't corrected it, which is really disappointing.
Speaker 2:Yes, this is a good one, mark, because we keep hearing about Netflix and sports. Netflix, in conjunction with MLB Studios, announced that their film crews are going to have access to follow the Red Sox for the 2024 season, from start to finish. It will be a new docuseries that will debut in Netflix in 2025. The interesting piece, mark, for me in this is the Red Sox actually came out publicly and said that neither their team nor their players are being paid for the access. I thought that was interesting. Are there some rules? This is exactly the title.
Speaker 3:I wonder if there's some rules around that I mean players, don't forego MLB. Don't forego opportunities to get paid for appearances generally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't know if this was considered an appearance or I also wonder because it's going through MLB Studios? Mlb already has the rights to the teams.
Speaker 2:It's a great question but I just don't know. There was no additional details. I do like, though, that this is a type of content that Netflix. We've previously heard them say that they want to have sports adjacent programming, not live sports streaming. And man, this is exactly what it is You're going to have a documentary in the Red Sox. The Red Sox also said in the press release it was interesting. They said that this will be their most expensive marketing campaign in the club's history, so they're going to clearly help promote this documentary. Netflix isn't paying the team or its players.
Speaker 3:Sounds like a good deal. Yeah, and let's go through sort of a thought exercise. If you will no-transcript, you could almost see how Netflix could make the argument to a team hey look, by us putting you on our service, you are going to get hundreds of millions of dollars of earned media exposure. I'm choosing hundreds of millions as a placeholder, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's in that quantum, in that range, certainly tens and tens of millions of dollars of earned. It's got to be in the hundreds. And so, all of a sudden, now Netflix is in a position and not that they suddenly don't have to pay, but they're in a very different position where it's kind of like hey look, do this deal with us. Oh, by the way, we're not going to pay you, but here's what you're going to get. And the teams go yeah, that works for us, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting you brought that up, mark, because we didn't pre-plan this, but I was going to use the example that you just used to put a little different in that the Super Bowl halftime show. Yeah, yeah. That's right, that the Super Bowl had to pay someone to come play halftime, and then, once the show got so big and the internet also came along and helped now, all of a sudden, I was like wait a minute, do you know how much money they're making the artist by?
Speaker 3:getting the Super Bowl. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly Now.
Speaker 2:many times it's been written that the artist has to pay the NFL. Yeah, that's right. Very interesting how that's switched yeah.
Speaker 1:So yeah, similar I think, your thought process is right there.
Speaker 2:The amount of exposure it's going to bring to the Red Sox is incredible. Here's an interesting thing that was sort of it wasn't really put out in a press release, but I did find it if you track some of the legal side of what's going on. So the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board has declared two patents by a company called Wag Acquisition invalid in a suit they brought against Amazon, google, youtube, disney and Hulu. So the Wag suit is over three patents. It's all tied to quote streaming media delivery system. Of course it's vague and generic and high level, but the Appeal Board said that the claims of both patents are unpatentable and obvious over prior art. So interesting for the streaming services there, they get a win on two of the three patents. Wag is not so far commented on whether or not that means the suit's now dropped if two out of the three are no longer valid. But some good news there for the streaming services Snap, mark they had a bad week Not that we really track Snap, but talk about layoffs.
Speaker 2:They're going to lay off 10% of their workforce, around 500 employees, and you can probably guess what they're doing. They're going to reorganize their team, as everybody else has said. Now, mark, this I thought was an interesting one. Not only are they going to reorganize their team, but they're going to promote in-person collaboration. So I didn't understand how laying off people promotes doing things in person. I didn't see the correlation there, unless they're going to start some sort of you have to come back to the office a few days a week.
Speaker 3:So you know, and I have no, you know, certainly no knowledge, I have no feelings one way or the other towards Snap, but there are some very well-founded, you know insider reports from a lot of these major not just tech companies, from major companies where they are, shall we say, sort of using this return to the office as a cloak for cutting folks. You know, and making cuts.
Speaker 3:And you know, because, hey, you can kind of come up with this. All tourist take. Oh, you know, we're going to be so much more productive. We'd love for you to rejoin our home office, but if you can't, you don't have a job. And you know, look, they know very well what percentage of folks are going to say, hey, you know I moved. I'm not moving back to San Francisco, you know, I like Austin or wherever they, you know, move to. Well, I like Phoenix, I don't know. It's just curious, like okay, so how does this reorganization encourage in-person collaboration? You mean your previous organization like discouraged it, like explain how that works.
Speaker 2:That's kind of weird and you know, in 2022, they laid off 20% of their employees. So now, in two years, you've laid off 30% of your entire company.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like you know, so I don't know. The conspirist in me reads that and says, okay, this is just a cloak, for you know, some lawyer said, hey, we got to make sure that we, you know, add this Well, there are certain rules about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, I don't know Again. Hey, I could be totally. I could be totally out to lunch, but I know enough about these things that I wouldn't be surprised. Well, let's we'll see.
Speaker 2:Let's unfortunately throw another one out there. Warner Music is laying off six more employees.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I saw that too.
Speaker 2:Wow, about 10% of their workforce. They said it's going to be concentrated in teams such as the in-house ad sales business and other various support functions. So not not sure where all that's coming from. I don't really track music too well outside of Spotify, but you know, as we've been talking about, these layoffs are not going to stop until companies really get much better discipline with their balance sheets. It's crucial. Yeah, vizio did put out a press release saying that their fast streaming service saw quote record growth. Of course they declined to give out any numbers, but I'll give Vizio a pass on this only because they are the only company that every quarter puts out revenue numbers for their fast service.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:From an advertising standpoint, so I'll give them a pass. They also announced they have over 300 fast channels, now 15,000 on-demand titles. Now how many of those channels you can see, depending on the region of the world you're in, varies. It may not be 300.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's something to keep in mind. We also saw some information from who was it? I don't remember this one? Oh, Samsung. Samsung put out a release talking about how they're now at 350 fast channels in the US. For Samsung TV plus they had added two additional channels. That puts them over, that puts them just at 350, they say, but again no usage. So don't really know what that means. We've certainly still have a lot of hype around fast related content services but but almost no information to judge the success of the market.
Speaker 2:What else do we have this week, mark? We've got, let's say, one other piece is Cloudflare. Cloudflare stock today was wow, let's actually look now that the market is closed. Cloudflare stock was up. It closed up 19.35%, so closed up $17.50 today. So why did it do that? Well, they announced their Q4 earnings and full year. Full year revenue was 1.29 billion, which was up 33%. Can you imagine companies growing 33% Incredible? Now, of course, it's not video, it's mostly cloud security.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Non related video services but 33% still. Yeah, now they also project full year 2024 total revenue, so this year, between 1.64 billion to 1.65 billion. So you're talking about growing another 300 million on top of your revenue of 1.29 billion. So pretty incredible there.
Speaker 3:They also made an executive announcement, which I mean since I think he literally joined I don't know earlier this week or maybe not even yet, you can't say it's because of this, but this person, his name is Mark Anderson, he was on the board previously and he has been rejoined as president of revenue. Really impressive background, I mean. This guy is built heavy, heavy heavy duty companies and I don't know. I think that there's some really really good days ahead for Cloudflare.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so he was at Ulterics before. Yeah, and Palo Alto, palo Alto Labs.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or Networks, sorry, yeah, palo Alto Networks. He certainly has the background in this space and for me, mark, this isn't a surprising hire because Cloudflare has also talked about how they have to move up the stack in true enterprise.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right yeah.
Speaker 2:Hire reoccurring larger customers and it was interesting in their slide deck presentation to investors they did break out how their business is growing specifically in that size customer which makes sense. So to bring somebody in who has that experience to go after that segment of the market, true, what I would call enterprise, even though that term is what it actually is. Yeah, that's right. But yeah, it's good of you to point it out. It's definitely somebody with that background.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and interesting, he's replacing the former president of revenue, whose name is also Mark, but spelled with a C.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't see where. I didn't say where he was going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know, and it's all the polite, it's all the polite, I don't know. Yeah, it was a very polite first place. Reading between the lines, I would assume that maybe he got replaced, but we don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hard to know. That's about what we have this week. Mark, A couple of the things real quick. He was on the move former HBO PR exec, Chris Willard. He launched a new communications group himself independent now, so good luck to him. I dealt with him a lot when he was over there at HBO Warner Bros Discovery. He was there a long time, so now he's in San Francisco running some comps for other companies, so that's great for him.
Speaker 2:And then also a quick update, mark, because I did start publishing officially to the NAB show website today some of the content. I'm super happy to announce that on day one, the fireside keynote chat that I'm going to do in the morning is going to be with Phil Weiser. So Phil is the executive vice president, cto and head of multi-platform operations of Paramount Global, so that's going to be really interesting to have Phil talk about what he's seeing in the market. He's a Paramount Global, not Paramount Plus, right? So he's got everything underneath him. And what do you think the topic is, mark, that he's going to talk to?
Speaker 3:Oh boy, there's many options.
Speaker 2:It's a topic you're going to like it's got to be AI. It's a topic that you do like it's got to be AI. Yes, he's going to talk about AI. That's right, yeah and hey, we'll be there doing some demos, so you know yeah. Yeah, that's right, you will be. So we're going to talk about AI in terms of how it's impacting and, potentially, down the line, impacting the media industry. Specific to you. Know what it's taking place with video, how content is created how it is processed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great. That's the key in terms of what it's actually doing in the stack. So that's one, and then another one, super happy to announce. This one is not up on the website as of yet, but another fireside keynote chat is going to be with Matt Strauss. So Matt is the chairman of direct to consumer international for all of NBCUniversal, so Peacock Fandango all falls under him. I have to look up when I sat with Matt last on stage, because, wow, it's probably five years ago now, mark, but when he was in charge of the oh Xfinity services for Comcast we had a fireside chat about X1.
Speaker 2:And I think that was in 2019. Yeah, that's how long it's been. So those are the first two fireside keynote chats Super excited to be talking about. I've got a couple other executives of that caliber as well that are confirmed, but until they go up on the website and I have the official, hey, here's their headshot of bio, I don't consider it confirmed.
Speaker 3:You won't even talk about me before I get my headshot to you. No, not, no that's right.
Speaker 2:Until it's official, until.
Speaker 3:I've sent you an approved description. It doesn't exist. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yep. No existence until it's real, as far as I'm concerned. We will, though, also have and these are confirmed we'll have NFL media, we'll have Disney plus Hotstar, we'll have Peacock, we'll have Max. We've got a lot of great end user broadcasters content, ott platforms, some of the manufacturers on the TV side, so we're going to have a great lineup. Content just started going up today, friday, february 9th.
Speaker 2:I'll start promoting a lot of the speaking selections in the next couple of days, so we're really just now going to start pushing out a lot of who's speaking, what the topics are. I think the website will be updated by the time listeners actually hear this podcast, so I'm excited for April. There's going to be a lot to talk to, just with all the news out in this last week. Just on the sports side alone, there's a lot to talk to, and we're going to have the Super Bowl this Sunday, which I really don't think is that big of a deal, because this will be the 13th year that we're streaming the Super Bowl, but naturally, as we know, our industry gets a lot of exposure from the Super.
Speaker 1:Bowl streaming.
Speaker 2:So there'll be more to talk about. But with that, mark, we're good here. What are we at? Not bad, we're at 38 minutes. I'm trying to keep these a little shorter for people.
Speaker 2:But next week, just to let people know what we have coming up, we've got a couple earnings next week mostly vendors. We've got Fastly, we've got Broad Peak, we've got Akamai, but we also have Roku earnings on the 15th, so that's definitely one that will break down. That's going to be an interesting one. And then the week after that we've got Vimeo, braco of Kaltora, and then the one at the end of the week that we really want to know about is Warner Bros Discovery. And then the week after we've got Paramount and Fubu as well. So we've still got a couple weeks of earnings here, but they're slowing down a little bit, which is great.
Speaker 2:Mark and I will get back to some of the other topics we want to get to. In the meantime. You have any questions? Reach out to Mark or I If you have any questions about the NAB show coming up. I do have discount codes If somebody wants them. Reach out to me directly, dan at DanRibbercom. I'll be happy to send you one. Everything Mark and I talked about today is up on my LinkedIn. For all these numbers. I know we went through a lot and it's kind of hard to remember all of them, but I did recap them all nice short and sweet on LinkedIn, so go check those out. Any other questions, let us know. We appreciate everyone listening. Have a good rest of your week. See you next week.
Speaker 1:Thanks very much. 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 StreammediaBlogcom.