This week, we cover infrastructure news and Q4 and full-year earnings from Akamai, Fastly, and Broadpeak, highlighting overall CDN industry revenue growth, pricing trends, and Akamai's continued dominance of the content delivery market. We also discuss the Super Bowl stream on Paramount+, my 8.5 million AMA viewership number, and reported news that Amazon secured an exclusive NFL playoff game for Prime Video in 2025.
We detail why Roku's stock is getting hammered, even with the company beating all of the street's expectations in their Q4 earning results with revenue up 14% year-over-year, active accounts growing 14% year-over-year to 80 million, and their achievement of positive adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow for the full year 2023, ahead of schedule. Finally, the plot thickens as we examine the Disney, Fox, and WBD streaming partnership, the DOJ's potential scrutiny, and predictions of how giants like the NFL might play their hand next.
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
This week, we cover infrastructure news and Q4 and full-year earnings from Akamai, Fastly, and Broadpeak, highlighting overall CDN industry revenue growth, pricing trends, and Akamai's continued dominance of the content delivery market. We also discuss the Super Bowl stream on Paramount+, my 8.5 million AMA viewership number, and reported news that Amazon secured an exclusive NFL playoff game for Prime Video in 2025.
We detail why Roku's stock is getting hammered, even with the company beating all of the street's expectations in their Q4 earning results with revenue up 14% year-over-year, active accounts growing 14% year-over-year to 80 million, and their achievement of positive adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow for the full year 2023, ahead of schedule. Finally, the plot thickens as we examine the Disney, Fox, and WBD streaming partnership, the DOJ's potential scrutiny, and predictions of how giants like the NFL might play their hand next.
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'm Dan Rayburn, along with co-host Mark Donaghan, back for another week, friday February 16th. A lot of news to cover here. We're going to jump right into some things. We've got a lot of numbers to cover. We've had some earnings Roku stocking and hammered that's not good. Some other stocks taking hits based on earnings. We're going to talk through that. Unfortunately, some layoffs as well. Not surprising there either. But, mark, let's just jump first into let's just go into the Disney Fox Warner streaming deal real quick, basically, there's been some additional news coming out that the DOJ is reviewing this. I don't think that surprises anybody, but from the legal experts out there who know way more than both of us combined, certainly more than me Laws and DOJ.
Speaker 2:Definitely more than me as well. It doesn't sound like there's anything legally that prevents Fox, Disney and Warner Bros Coverage from doing this. That doesn't mean that the DOJ can't review it, it won't review it.
Speaker 2:It sounds like they will. But someone made interesting comment the other day. I won't say who it was because I don't think they want me to say they're tied to the industry. But they said if the sports leagues are really in particular NFL, are really upset at what these guys are putting together, what happens if the NFL gives Fox and Disney a really bad schedule lineup?
Speaker 3:next year.
Speaker 2:I didn't even think of that, because then what happens is they're going to do terrible viewership, which means their ad revenue is going to not be great for those games. And what if you do that for the entire season? So I totally forgot that the NFL is in the driver's seat when it comes to the schedule and where they give the games to what broadcast networks.
Speaker 3:But why would they do? I mean just thought exercise here why would the NFL do that they don't need to play games with a distribution partner?
Speaker 2:No, but I think that they would, if they feel that the distribution partners are not including them in conversations where they're going to repackage their content and if what we've heard is accurate that the sports leagues are not happy with this and they were not aware of it and they were not consulted about it, as we talked about in the last podcast. Just not even giving them a heads up is, I don't think, smart business, and they're the ones that create all the content. Your license.
Speaker 3:And so I'm answering my own question, because the corollary here is the early, early, early days of when, you know, vod streaming rights were being negotiated and you know I was a part of that at Voodoo and you know we used to get hammered a lot Like why do you have? You know, so there would be, like you know, a three part movie franchise, for example, and we we might have the first and the third, but not the second one, you know.
Speaker 3:And they were, and you know, look, it was at least that I was aware of no studio ever said, hey, we're doing this to kind of, you know, you know, not give you a full advantage, but at the end of the day, in some cases, you know, conjecture was, was it? Look, the studios are like, you know, because this is early, early days, and they were trying to protect their Blu-ray revenue, you know, and so they were legitimately concerned like, well, shoot, if everybody just goes to renting on Voodoo for $3.99, you know, $4.99, depending on the title, this is really bad. We're not selling Blu-ray discs, you know. And so they would do things like that or only give stereo soundtracks, not 5.1, you know.
Speaker 2:Oh, stereo, that's right.
Speaker 3:No and and and we quickly moved past that. And in reality, I just want to make sure I finished my thought because, you know, especially some of my colleagues from Voodoo might jump in and go well, mark, there were actually were some technical reasons and in some cases there were like they, you know, they didn't have. Now all this stuff is packaged up and available. And there were cases where we were asking for 5.1. They're like we literally don't quite know where to go get it. We're like, yeah, but in the theater you have 5.1. They're like yeah, yeah, that's a totally different workflow, you know. So early days. Anyway, my point is is that I have seen where you could do something like that, where content rights holder could decide hey, wait, you know, I can kind of tilt this one way or the other. You know, we're going to know once the schedule comes out.
Speaker 2:We're going to see where those games are. Talking about NFL, let's go into the Super Bowl real quick. I'm not going to break down a lot about the Super Bowl Mark, because it's it's already. By the time people listen to, this is probably nine or 10 days after. But let's just go through. Paramount has not put out any numbers yet tied to streaming. The number I'm putting out is about 8.5 million average minute audience for 20, 24 on Paramount plus only. Doesn't include MVP, virtual MVP.
Speaker 3:Where did you get that number? Is that their number?
Speaker 2:It's just the number.
Speaker 3:I'm putting out. That's all I'll say 8.5 million.
Speaker 1:We trust you, Dan About 8.5 million. Yeah, I won't go any further into that.
Speaker 2:The 2023 number with Fox was 7 million AMA. I did see two separate folks reporting numbers that, when they add in what they think streaming AMA is across Peacock and across virtual MVPD is. Once said it was 30 million, another said it was 20. Right, this just makes no sense. You add up how many virtual MVPDs they are between YouTube, tv, sling, hulu, right, the services out there You're at about 17 to 18. So even if a hundred percent, what I've heard from these guys in the past.
Speaker 2:Yep, is that 25% at any, 30% at any given time we're watching. So just call it. Call it 16 million total and out of that, even if you take a third right and you say just over 5 million, you add that to the 8 million number. You're talking about between 13 to 14 million. So to suggest it's 30, your methodology is really poor. So that's why I put the number out real quick on LinkedIn. There'll be some more details coming out on that, I suspect, and I'll be having a blog post going up that gives stats for all previous 13 years of the Super Bowl. He's also explaining who is reporting AMA versus back in the days it was simultaneous stream. First Super Bowl ever produced was for streaming, was talking about total viewers, which is not same as AMA. So I'll put that post up on the next couple of days.
Speaker 2:Also, the Paramount Plus stream was in 4K, was not in 4K. Sorry, it's 1080p, 60 frames per second. There were some issues. I documented that myself. I believe the issue has impacted the less than 1% of total streams delivered. The issue primarily resulted before the game started. I'm not going to go into the technical details of the cause of that problem, but overall I thought they did a good job. The upscaled 4K stream on YouTube TV really looked very good. Hdr looked really well for me, so overall I think it was a good job. We obviously don't know what the potential upside is for Paramount Plus as far as subs go. We're going to have to wait until we get some of that information, obviously in the next earnings.
Speaker 2:Other Paramount News people have probably heard already, but they did announce that they were going to be cutting employees. They announced that this week. They did not say how many. Everyone reporting this as the numbers around 800 or roughly 3% of the workforce don't know if that number is accurate, but that seems to be what everybody's going with. I've heard that the cuts are across many different divisions, companies, brands globally. It was reported that they're shutting down Nickelodeon's screen subscription based service, noggin, and that laying off that entire team. Now they've they've not come out confirmed that that I've seen. So no surprise, I think, to anybody that Paramount is looking to cut costs and get to DTC Profitability as quickly as possible across Paramount Plus. But there's also some cuts across other content divisions of the company not tied to streaming. So we should get some more information on that for the next few months, especially with earnings.
Speaker 2:Next one with NFL. Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon's gonna get an exclusive NFL playoff game in 2025. So for anyone who didn't like playoff game being on peacock, well yeah, you stood. It's going to Amazon because another one's coming Now. No, no details were given on this one, but it's. It's really not surprising. Nfl's cutting as many deals as I can with as many distribution Platforms or providers, whatever you want to call them. So YouTube, espn, fox, cbs, amazon, peacock you know, I said online marked that the NFL is running out of places the license their content. There's not that many left, so they're definitely doing a money grab, getting as much as they can. We've not heard a supposed number that Amazon is paying for the stream For this exclusive game. Sorry for streaming. It was reported peacock was paying anywhere between 100 to 125, depending on whose report you looked at. That was never confirmed by either company, so we truly don't know. But another another NFL playoff game going exclusive. So we'll see. Is that the only one? Next year does another one crop up as well? It's gonna be interesting to watch.
Speaker 2:Moving on to some additional football here college football playoffs, espn, and ESPN has agreed to a almost eight billion dollar six-year deal for exclusive rights. They've been showing a lot of this content since 2014, so it's really just a contract extension which was due to expire in 2026. But apparently this is what it's being reported is that it doubles the existing agreement. Previous agreement was 608 million dollars a year and this is 1.3 billion a year. So, if that's the case again, sports licensing and the amount of Deals we're seeing in the market where the cost is so much higher than the last time they did this deal. Also, if this JV deal goes down for the sports streaming service, naturally ESPN is gonna continue to want great content and college football does really well.
Speaker 2:Does online does Some of the streaming numbers that I've heard that they've not been put out, but they are some big numbers simultaneous streams or AMA. So here's one mark. You were talking before about features and functionality of particular services back in the voodoo days. So Amazon Prime video with ads, users are no longer getting Dolby vision or at most.
Speaker 2:Max is now offering Dolby vision To all its live sports and it's live tier, so doubly vision HDR is now supported in all their live sports. Just in time for some NBA stuff they announced. I don't know, something with the NBA is coming up. I don't know basketball, but apparently something important. So that is default in their live platform. So a little bit different than Amazon mark. I have asked Amazon for an official on the record comment as To why some of that functionality has been taken out of the platform with ads. Some were speculating online. It had to do with the workflow or it's technically hard or whatnot, and actually it was max who chimed in.
Speaker 2:They're like no that's not the reason, it's not that hard, it's simple.
Speaker 3:It's called the Dolby tax.
Speaker 2:Could be. Could be.
Speaker 3:That's what I was thinking was the revenue you have to pay for, but it is expensive and the end of the day, you, yeah, and does it keep? Does it keep customers? I mean yeah, and and that was the very first thought that I had when I, when I read this, this press release in the news, I you know, I went, oh hey, they just simply said, okay, dolby, we can't get the deal we need. Well, and we'll just take that out. And you know and and people have to pay for it. That's it and.
Speaker 2:That's, that's what I was thinking. I have no confirmation. Yeah, no, I don't either, and firm it, but I did ask yeah and and guess what?
Speaker 3:if that's what it is, they're not gonna comment because you know that would.
Speaker 2:They may not comment, but they made a roundabout way, say you could speculate.
Speaker 3:It was the following there's certain technology get a lot of, so you know cost us and if we remove those technologies Reduces cost.
Speaker 2:I'm hoping you get an answer that I can share and if I do well, I'll stick that up on LinkedIn. We've got, before we get the earnings. We've got the Wall Street Journal report that Walmart is discussing buying. Visio and valuing the company at 2 billion. I Don't think we have to get two in the weeds here. A couple things to state right off the bat. This is a rumor.
Speaker 2:Yeah and we don't know that they're actually discussing to where there's a deal on the table or it's serious. We have heard about Visio being potentially purchased in the past with other companies that did not go through. Naturally, some are saying this will better help Walmart better compete with Roku and Amazon on TVs and its existing brand. We all know you don't make a lot of money on TVs or the hardware. If anything it's, it's the Trojan horse into the living room. So will Visio enable Walmart if they own them to sell more ads and make more money from a content Revenue sharing ad standpoint?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely it would this, this deal in my mind, you know, assuming this is legit, or you know, even if, if they're just In early stages, this is about eight or nine years later than I would have predicted it. In other words, they already sold voodoo, um, you know, I would have thought that they would have done this Shortly after, around the same time as they acquired voodoo and and do a roll-up so that you've got the service, you have the device, you know, so I'm, and then they ended up selling, you know, voodoo to Fandango.
Speaker 2:So yeah, one more strategy over the last 15 years, to your point, it's been all over the place. It's never been consistent. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and, by the way, you know, like back in the time frame I'm talking about they, there was some coherence there and they had a team in place that I think really could have executed On this. So you know, I don't want to say it's a fumbled ball. I mean, you know they have a lot of other things they're doing I don't know about, but in my mind, in my mind, um this a lost opportunity and it's it's. It doesn't make sense now, you know, but we'll see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say you know price versus the value they're getting in return. So if you look at what Visio stock was back in 2021, it was over $25. And their market cap was what?
Speaker 1:five plus billion back then.
Speaker 2:Their market cap today closed at $1.8 billion, right, and their stock is just under $10. And their stock is just under $10, with the rise going from $7.42 to $9.58, just on the rumors. So if you strip that out, their stock's down at $7. Their market cap is more of about $1.4 billion at that point. So maybe the they're looking, maybe Walmart's looking, at the deal now simply because it's more affordable, but also we just we have no idea that this is even legit Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just a rumor. I also thought what's interesting about this rumor, mark, is I didn't see any other news outlet follow up on the rumor and also get confirmation. That's yeah, that's interesting. We tend to get that, so not discounting it. I don't know if the Wall Street Journal is right or not right. I don't know if this discussion was a year ago. I don't know if it was last week. We just we don't know.
Speaker 2:So that takes us into Roku, where some of this news is impacting. So first let's go through Roku's earnings. Roku added 4.2 million net new active what they call net new active accounts, not subscribers so they ended 2023 with 80 million globally active accounts. 2023 total revenue of 3.5 billion was up 11% and for the entire year, users streamed 106 billion hours, which was up by almost 19 billion hours from 2022. Their ARPU, which you and I love to talk about, mark was $39.92, trailing 12 months basis, which was down 4%. I love that they give out streaming hours per active account per day, which was 4.1 hours in Q4, not for the year Q4. But it's up from 3.8 hours in Q4 in 2022.
Speaker 3:It just continues to notch up. I mean four hours, wow, that's a lot.
Speaker 2:Now they say they saw continued signs of rebound that's their quote In the advertising market. It's good. They also achieved positive adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow for full year ahead of schedule. Now, all that said, their stock closed down almost 24% today, dropping $22.50. So why is this? Well, everyone's saying it is well. Some are saying it's because they gave out guidance for Q1 and it was quote weak, but it was only 3.4 million below what the street expected. That's it. That's not a big number.
Speaker 2:And if you look at Q4, their Q4 revenue is up 14% year over year. It beat Wall Street expectations by 2%. Their platform revenue beat the Wall Street expectation by 1%. Their active accounts grew 14% year over year and it beat the estimate by $1 million that the street had. And their adjusted EBITDA came in well above the street's expectation of 17.6 million. They're a beat across the board. And yet their stock took a hammering so that Walmart Visio News really impacted them. Because they also said they saw quote continuous signs of rebound. In reference to the advertising market, there was nothing negative about their earnings and yet look what happened. So interesting to see what they do, I think, in the next day or two after the holiday, on Monday see if some of that shakes out. Or people got scared away. Now I also saw Mark. This was funny. A couple of news outlets say that the CEO, roku CEO, declines the comment, stays quiet on the Visio Walmart news. Yeah, he stayed quiet because he said we don't comment on rumors. What?
Speaker 2:do you expect him to say? He can't say anything, it's irrelevant, it's not news. But some saw that as a negative, implying, because he didn't say anything, that somehow Roku was scared of it. So I thought that was just odd that they even put that in the headlines. That's kind of weird to me. Let's jump into cord cutting Altice. They lost 62,200 residential pay TV customers in Q4. For the entire year of 2023, they lost 266,700 residential pay TV customers, which is actually down from the 293 million they lost in. Sorry 293,000, they lost in 2022. Again, arpoomark for full year 2023, all residential services combined was $136.80, which was down from $138.80 in 2022. So, as we keep talking about, if you're going to have fewer subs for something, that's okay, if your Arpoom is going up, but when?
Speaker 2:you got fewer subs you got lower revenue every month that they're paying you. This is a problem.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:That's no good. Some other things here. Unfortunately, in the workforce space, SiriusXM is eliminating about 160 jobs. That'll impact just under 3% of their workforce. I don't view that as really a big deal. Again, as we've talked about, any company, good company, end of the year, beginning of the year, between 1% to 5% of their workforce. They're just, they're working on optimizing, so 3%. I don't think that's bad news. Now Cisco, in the other hand, Cisco is going to cut about 5% of its workforce, or 4,255 jobs. It's a lot. We do know Cisco has been refocusing their business again, so I don't think that surprises anybody, but that's over 4,000 people that are going to be out of work.
Speaker 2:According to layoffsfyi, so far, just this year, january, february combined 144 tech companies have laid off almost 35,000 workers. So interesting perspective, mark, when you see CNBC two days I believe it was two days ago calling out the jobs report and saying that it's decline in terms of the number of people. And yet that's overall, industry specific. In certain industries it's clearly higher.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and also you think about the concentration in terms of these are generally mid to even higher end salaries, and it's a generalization, but just the tech industry and perhaps slightly more specialized people. But I wonder if this is going to be a net benefit to the startup ecosystem and to maybe not so much startups but more of the middle tier companies. There are a lot of very solid tech companies that are like 200 people, 400 people, 500 people. They're actually making money or they're not losing money and they've never been able to there's more of those in big companies.
Speaker 3:To your point, there's more, yeah, there's more of those. And again Cisco, and I don't know if they disclosed kind of what level and what types of jobs, but I mean, typically Cisco is a pretty good gig, benefits, etc. And so sometimes those middle tier companies you just can hire someone like getting offered from Cisco, getting offered from and now because the reason I'm raising this is at the same time we're seeing some surprisingly solid economic, positive economic signals. I know there are some areas of the country that might be a little bit more under pressure, but gee was where I am and in a lot of the major cities I mean, people are buying houses. They're like the economy is kind of strong a little bit.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I would not necessarily agree or disagree. I think that's depends on the methodology you're looking at, how you're defining strong, which data points you're looking at.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but we're not seeing like some sort of a recession where, all of a sudden, people who normally would have never had to worry, or now houses, are being foreclosed. That's my point is we're not seeing that and I hope we don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I haven't looked at housing foreclosures in quite some time. I have looked at credit card debt and how they talk about that. Credit card debt is rising Credit.
Speaker 1:And that is yeah, that's not good and that can be early morning. It depends on the metrics you're leading.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I've also heard oh, what is it? Maybe not helox or second mortgages, but you know, in other words, people are taking oh, it was 401Ks. They're taking a lot more. Yeah, they're taking money out of 401K, you know which normally you kind of do that as a last generally a last resort, you know so yeah, I mean, there's a lot of metrics.
Speaker 2:you could look at Housing alone, we could have a whole conversation on Not that I'm an expert there, but I do watch a lot of that. Let's jump into some infrastructure numbers here. So Fastly had Q4 2023 earnings in full year. Q4 revenue is just over $137 million, which is up 15% year over year. So the full year number for 2023 calendar year Fastly at $505.9 million. So they're now over half a billion dollar a year size in terms of revenue. That revenue is up 17% year over year. The two downsides here is their gap. Net loss for the year was $133.1 million, losinga lot of money. Their stock got absolutely hammered. So this entire week their stock is down 34.75%. So just before earnings their stock price was just over let me tell you exactly?
Speaker 2:it was $23.54. Closed to date $15.80. So down just under 35%. And the primary reason for that is they gave out full year revenue guidance for 2024 estimate obviously just estimate of 580 to 590 million. At the midpoint of that call it 585, they would have 12 to 13% year over year revenue growth, but 2023, they had 17%. So they're forecasting revenue growth but declining revenue growth year over year. Wall Street doesn't like that. At the same time, you have a gap net loss of $133 million. So those are the two reasons I believe that their stock was really hammered and pushed down.
Speaker 2:Let's go into Akamai. So some really interesting numbers here from Akamai. Let's just go to their full year 2023 revenue $3.8 billion, which was up 5%. Security and compute now represent 60% of their total revenue in 2023. Delivery revenue in Q4 was up 18%. Compute revenue was up 20%. Delivery revenue was down 6%.
Speaker 2:If you follow those CDN market, that shouldn't surprise anybody. Also, please note it's very important Akamai does not break out CDN revenue. I don't know how many times I have to say this to people online when they reported incorrectly. Akamai calls it delivery revenue. There's a difference. So I wrote a blog post. Mark, people should read more in the blog if they want to see some of the numbers around Akamai. But what I made clear is Akamai is still the largest leader in the market when it comes to CDN and for talking video specifically the most revenue, the largest set of customers, the largest amount of bits delivered, the most capacity globally in the regions they're in. They still dominate the market by their largest competitor three to four times just in revenue alone. If you're comparing same traffic and type of customer. Their entire revenue for 2023 of delivery was just over 1.5 billion 1.54. I think the CDN market last year Mark grew 1% to 2% on a compound annual growth rate. It does not include China Got to take all the China stuff out of the market. So some interesting numbers in terms of what they were talking about.
Speaker 2:They also publicly discussed that they are charging more for delivery in regions where it's more expensive. That makes sense. For instance, in India, akamai is one of the only games in town, if not the only one in town, with any real capacity, so it's more expensive to deliver there and they have a competitive advantage. They're naturally going to charge for it. So I'm really not surprised by any of that. They also came out and they talked about the fact that they need to take on the right size customers at the right pricing and cost structure. They did say that they're going to continue to focus on reducing unprofitable traffic. They're saying whatever the other CDN is saying we've got to have better efficiency. Traffic growth is not accelerating at the rate you needed to with pricing declines. We talked about multiple times how bit rates are getting cut, videos getting optimized more, fewer bits to deliver. So the fact that Akamai said they'll start charging a premium to deliver traffic in harder to reach places as it right sizes its delivery costs, that's just smart business.
Speaker 2:Couple other numbers to note. Here is Stackpath and Luma accounted for about 20 million in revenue.
Speaker 3:Hey Dan, I have a question about Akamai. Can we go back real quick? I read something and maybe you even posted this that I think it was in Europe. They are talking about striking some deals where if a customer takes compute, they will I think it was even offer free delivery or even more subsidized. What do you think of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I published something I don't know an hour ago it's real name Specifically on that. So a report that was published I'm not naming the report, I'm not going to bring any attention to it Claimed that Akamai was in talks with some very large media customers about offering quote free delivery of video traffic in exchange for giving Akamai more cloud computing services. That's inaccurate. Akamai went on record for me from my blog post saying it was inaccurate and that giving away anything for free quote never makes sense, Okay.
Speaker 3:Well, that's why I wanted to clarify that, because you know somebody's not a people are going to pick that up.
Speaker 2:And I turned the comments off on the post I put up, so no one can start arguing or debating Akamai went on record for this. Now Akamai, like all vendors tied to cloud infrastructure, are willing to discuss additional discounts for customers who increase their aggregate spend Bundling.
Speaker 2:That's the way this works, but that doesn't mean they're offering it for free or they're using it as a loss leader to get other business. That is not something any content delivery network can afford to do in the market. It's not happening. I also disclosed, mark, that Akamai didn't talk about this on the Wall Street call, but I disclosed in my blog post that they were the majority of the traffic for both the Super Bowl of Paramount Plus and also the Peacock NFL wild card game Not surprising there as well.
Speaker 2:And then finally, the Stack Path Lumen contracts. That select contracts, I should say that they acquired accounted for about $20 million in revenue in Q4, which is right in line with what they'd previously told Wall Street that they thought they would be at when they acquired the contracts. And then I stole one more post to do, mark, because some other interesting news they talked about is they announced their plans to push generalized compute out to the edge and what they're calling their Gekko Edge compute initiative, and initially they were in 25 more regional locations I don't want to call it super pops, but that idea and now by the end of this year they want to push into 75 additional locations out at the edge closer out. So they're in a very unique position to do very few, if any other CDN providers can do, which is truly bring the cloud and edge together in a single platform for computing. Very interesting, so I'm going to do a separate post on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm actually very, you know, but maybe even bullish on this whole initiative. You know, with Linode and just leveraging all of these edge, you know, server, this edge, server capacity, it makes a lot of sense architecturally, you know. No, you know it doesn't mean everybody's just going to move from AWS, you know, to that, because you know AWS has a pretty amazing lock in that we all know about. But I, you know one company I'm involved in, we're. You know we're working around this and it's super exciting, you know it really is. So, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:And they put out some good. What I love on this, too, is they put out use cases of how it's actually being used once it's deployed. Not this idea of just like you should take it, because it's cool, yeah, this vision and then. Right, what am I using it for?
Speaker 3:Well, because it's the trend.
Speaker 2:Great use cases. So I'm going to I'm going to highlight that separately. I just I didn't get around to that one. Let's go back to infrastructure numbers. We have one more here. So broad peak had their full year 2023 earnings. Their revenue was down 6.8% year over year. So if we calculate pounds to their year sorry, pounds, euros to dollars today it's just under 50 million US dollars that that they had for 2023. Their revenue fell 19.1%, the company said quote this disappointing trend reflects tighter business conditions, with a marked weight in Seattle and the part of TV and telecom operators that accounts for over 80% of their revenue. They say, against this backdrop, they're going to begin to implement cost saving measures quote through the stabilization of the workforce and efforts in R&D after an intense investment phase.
Speaker 3:What does stabilization?
Speaker 2:As a result they yeah layoffs?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Now.
Speaker 2:They're not that big of a company, so at least it's not going to impact a huge account, which is great, but it's still layoffs. They also said because of this, they're going to have to quote adjust its financial targets for 2026 when it publishes its annual results, which they just did, I believe, last night, which I've not been able to see as of yet. So not a lot of revenue there in a market that's not growing at the rate they needed to. I don't know what broad peaks going to do there, but definitely some challenges. And then, mark, let's go to a final piece of information here this company you've never heard of, called Beamer.
Speaker 3:What do those guys do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, Beamer Imaging Well depends who you ask in the media, but the AI insanity continues with anything tied in the video arm. So Beamer had 1.4 million in revenue from Q1 to Q3 of last year, 1.4 million Now. Its stock shot up over 1,500% on Monday, hitting a high of almost $35 after it put out a press release with the video saying it was presenting some joint research at the my Ohio Video Show, which I'm sure many of our listeners know about, or maybe were at.
Speaker 1:I was there.
Speaker 2:You were there, okay, yeah, yeah, it's near you, it's in. Denver. So to think all it took was a press release saying hey, we're going to put out some joint information. The stock ended up closing up 371.5% for the day and it gave them a market cap of $128.1 million on 1.4 million in revenue for the first nine months of the year, and the final stat here is 149.5 million shares traded hands that day. The average is 236,000 shares.
Speaker 3:Insane. Yeah, so you want to know where they are. As of close of business on February 16th. Close of the market they are at $13.57 with a market cap of $200 million.
Speaker 2:So I mean and it, so this week they still saw a growth of 124% of their stock price.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, wild, it's amazing.
Speaker 2:And there's just no justification. Beemer simply using the video's hardware. There's a lot of other companies doing that as well. There's nothing special taking place here. It was Mark. I thought it was great and no surprise. But the media obviously picked up on this. It was a big story when the stock jumps that much. It was pretty funny how a lot of them were literally saying we're not really sure what Beemer does, but they're a content adaptive video company. Yeah, as if they know what that is.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Well, they went to the website. It's a great thing. And of course, to some it's not the business.
Speaker 3:I mean, shoot any of our websites should kind of be like I guess these people are in video.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say them in particular the conversation on CNBC at about 8 pm that night. There was a debate between three people on CNBC and they talked about what was going on and then after five minutes, someone basically said so I know we've been talking about these guys for a bit.
Speaker 1:What do they do?
Speaker 2:I still don't have any understanding of what we're talking about here. So funny to hear them talk about it, but man in our industry, obviously, mark, a lot of us understand what's going on from a high level here, but think about all the people who shorted that stock, or just the amount of shares traded hands. There's a lot of people who lost a lot of money. That day that stock hit a high of almost $35. And now it's closed far down from that high. Someone's losing a lot of money. It's down to under $14. So don't fall for that AI-like insanity. There's another Amazon package at the door.
Speaker 1:So pause for that noise.
Speaker 2:But man, this AI, it's incredible. It's continuing. And I'll give one more point, Mark was? Nvidia recently published some SEC filing where they talked about some companies that they've invested in. Those companies' stock prices shot up that day, and here's the thing that wasn't the first time NVIDIA disclosed it, so again, let's see what checked it out in the next section.
Speaker 2:Sorry about that. Okay, Okay, they had already talked about the companies and yet I guess investors who didn't know or read off sudden was like, oh my God, they invest in these companies we better go buy stock, yeah, yeah. So this AI hype? It's getting out of control, but it's not going to last.
Speaker 3:It's just. This is no way. Well, I think the challenge is that the companies now have to grow into this new valuation, and can they do it quickly enough? That's really what this is about?
Speaker 3:I don't see how Well and when I say grow into, there is a component of actually proving the revenue that would go along with such a, but also just informing the market as to what is the value. Where is how is this technology worth, whether it's 100 million, 200 million, 500 million? Because there's different companies that have also popped, putting a valuation, yeah, and guess what? That now is the challenge, and I am way, way, way outside of Beemer, so I'm not in any way speaking for them. I have no idea what their strategies are, but whether it's Beemer or any of these other companies that have also popped either around the same time or before or will, and now the management teams have their work cut out for them. It's like, okay, great, we got there and look, there's a lot of excitement around Silicon, there's a lot of excitement around Nvidia, there's a lot of excitement around AI, but you got to turn that into value for the customer, value for the ecosystem, applications are key.
Speaker 2:I'll let what you just said lead into our final thing here as we exit, which is there's a whole reason why I added an AI track this year to the NAB Streaming Summit in Vegas in April, we'll have an entire day first day of track of demos of AI. I actually want to see this stuff. I don't want to hear you have something. Show it to us. Where does it fit in the ecosystem? What does it do? What is the use case? Ai is a technology. It's not a product. So how is AI tech bundled into your larger platform service hardware, whatever?
Speaker 2:it may be, so I'm super interested to see that. That'll be good to show it's going to be fun.
Speaker 3:And, of course, I'm a part of one group that'll be doing a demo. The point that I've been making is, look, we should not be treating and it's not. But it's like. This isn't like a POC, like, oh, we're going to go do a technology stunt, like we are showing something that can and will be going into production and so, yeah, it's real. Exactly that's my point. To what degree?
Speaker 2:size and scale yeah sure.
Speaker 3:And I think for all of us, there's certainly going to be a fair share of demos that are not quite ready to fully go into a big network. But the point is, I hope also that what we're going to see and the group I'm working with is certainly going to be showing something that's quote real and that's going to be exciting, because then it moves this whole. We can take shots at AI, but the reality is there's some really great applications. It does prove value, provide value, and it can have a meaningful impact meaning positive impact in our workflows, and then there's various ways it's going to provide value. But that's certainly my hope. So I hope that not only people are going to see cool stuff from those that are demoing, but they're going to walk away and go, and this is all, for the most part, real. It's not just stunts.
Speaker 2:That's the goal. I think we're going to have about 10, 10,000 views.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's amazing, wow Doing demos.
Speaker 2:And then also Mark, I can announce officially now. I couldn't in the last podcast, but I can announce official the day one keynote I announced last time is going to be Phil Wiser, evp, cto and head of multi-platform operations at Paramount Global, which is awesome. And now day two, I'm super happy to announce. Day two's keynote is going to be Matt.
Speaker 1:Strauss.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's awesome, matt.
Speaker 2:Strauss is chairman director, consumer and international for NBC Universal. Obviously, that includes Peacock, so two really key executives seasoned executives Phil and I are actually going to be talking about AI more than anything else, which should be interesting. There's also two other really great brands.
Speaker 2:Everybody knows by name, including my mom, that I'm working on for two additional keynotes. But on top of that we've already got Max, we've got Peacock, we've got NFL Media, we've got Disney Plus, hotstar, sirius XM, satellite Radio. There's quite a few folks that are coming in, are in and confirmed doing some great presentations. There's over 25 sponsors now I think we're almost at 28. So if you go to nabshowcom slash streaming, that's an easy way to get to the program because I know the NAB site is complicated, but nabshowcom slash streaming will take you there. I've put up Mark, about a third of the program already. A lot more going online in the next couple of days, but check it out online. If somebody wants a discount code, reach out to me because I think the discount ends in the middle of March, maybe in about a month. So if you want a code, get it for me now before the discount expires.
Speaker 2:But look forward to the show this year. A lot of good conversations that we're going to have around packaging, bundling, sports, fast monetization, the ad stack. There's also a great panel mark, which you'll love from the nerd side, where it's going to be talking about strategies for streamlining video processing, packaging and playback on an engineering level. Great line up there. So a lot of really good content. I'm excited. I'm a little not excited that it's going to be here so soon, because I still have a lot to do. But it's going to be a good show and it's definitely going to be larger than last year and are you doing the demo area again?
Speaker 2:I'm not doing the demo area in the show floor this year Just a little too much, plus adding a third track this year on day one, and we moved the sessions to the first floor of the West Hall from the third floor.
Speaker 1:So, yep, you walk in, we're right there.
Speaker 2:So organically growing it, which is great.
Speaker 1:So that's enough to work on without devices on the exhibit floor.
Speaker 2:So that's what we got this week. I know it's a lot of numbers, as always, but everything's up on LinkedIn. You have questions? Reach out to Mark and I Happy to chat with you anytime. Mark, next week we've got one more podcast before we take a week break as I jump out of town. But next week we've got earnings from Warner Bros Discovery, so it should be real interesting to hear what they might talk about there. And then, vendor-wise, we also have Brecov, kaltora and Vimeo, so we'll cover some of the vendors as well. Full year 2023 earnings from them, important to see year over year growth. So we've got that coming next week. In the meantime, we appreciate everyone listening. If you have any questions or just want to harass Mark or I, feel free to on LinkedIn, we're always there, dan.
Speaker 3:I got some very good feedback in my all-high video on the podcast. I had multiple people come up and say, hey, I listen, I'm an avid listener, I love Dan's podcast. I like what you guys are doing. So, yeah, well, it's our podcast.
Speaker 2:So tell them that Well, yeah, you know I mean yeah, and also ask them what else they want to hear about. Right, that's the feedback you want?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. So thank you to the avid listeners. Yeah, we're always appreciative for feedback.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course, of course. But you have any questions for us? Mark and I are always available. We take pride in the fact we're always available to the industry at any time pretty much Me, maybe a little too often with the way I answer my phone.
Speaker 3:You know funny, you say that Dan. I had one person actually say you know how did Dan is always available, like I don't know how that guy does it.
Speaker 2:So sometimes I don't either, with all I have going on. I mean, it was said in a very appreciative way, but it was also said like you know, like what kind of personal life?
Speaker 3:Number one question I'm asked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, number one question I'm asked, Mark, even at the shows, is do you ever sleep? Yeah, I do ever sleep yeah, and I say yes, I sleep well. I think balance in life is key. It's not about business, right, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that at the show Mark, where I'm going to talk about in my opening and the first day about this isn't about business. That we're in. We're not in the streaming industry, we're not in the content industry, we are all in the people industry. I totally, totally believe that.
Speaker 2:You invest in people over ideas and you do it right. So I'm going to talk about that the show because for me, this isn't about revenue, stock earnings, this isn't about a paycheck, right? I think there's a bigger thing here, but we're going to talk a little bit about that. Great, it should be interesting. So, thanks everyone for listening.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoyed the show.