Speaker 1 0:02

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

Speaker 2 0:20

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn, Long Coast, Mark Donegan. We are back now, week two back from the NAB show.

Speaker 3 0:27

That's right.

Speaker 2 0:28

Which is nice resting up here. A lot of news to get out, though, with earnings Meta, alphabet, comcast, microsoft, roku, charter, harmonic, paramount, verizon, yeah. And if that's not enough for listeners, next week we'll have Amazon, samsung, fastly Altice, apple, cloudflare, fubu, vimeo and Disney.

Speaker 3 0:49

So there you go back, to back. Is that enough earnings for you? Some earnings are us.

Speaker 2 0:54

Earnings are us. I like it. Yeah, that's right. Come up with that URL there you go Go take it now. Real quick on the streaming summit. Just sort of close that out. All the videos are up. Thanks again to Mobion for getting those up really fast this year.

Speaker 3 1:06

Yeah, yeah, they were fast this year.

Speaker 2 1:08

It was great. I really asked hey, just as quickly as you can, we have so many people requesting it. So go to nabstreamingsummitcom, scroll down, you'll see the link. You'll see the links to all the past shows. A lot of people don't know we make all the kind of content available for free. Also, if you were there, even if you weren't there, and you want to see presentations used during the videos, we didn't sync the slides, just not enough time. But for anyone who allowed us to make the slides available as downloads, those are under the video links as well. Almost every single presenter did. There's one or two that just couldn't get compliance to do that from a legal standpoint, but the majority of them are up there. If there's one that's missing, reach out to me. I'll see if I can get it, but everything is up. I also just, mark, I'm going to say I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten over the last week from attendees, sponsors.

Speaker 2 2:01

I've been doing a lot of calls with sponsors to ask what do they want to see next year and, as I mentioned in the last podcast, we've got a long list of things we want to improve on. Just fine tune it, make it even better. So I'm already excited for next year, which is kind of funny, considering this one just ended. I do want a break, but I'm excited to just improve upon it next year, so we'll have more coming than just finally for people already asking hey, how do I get on the list to potentially speak next year? I will open the call for speakers in November. Flip the site at nabstreamingsummitcom. I'll start really looking at submissions come mid-December, but that's the timeline November. And if you're really bad at checking a website and you want to be notified when the call for speakers goes up, just send me an email. I'll put you on the list. It's that easy around sports licensing, some new content. But let's jump into net neutrality real quickly.

Speaker 2 3:05

I had one or two people ask me at the show hey, during previous net neutrality you did so much coverage on it I haven't seen you write about it. Yeah, I don't plan to. Frankly, I don't think it matters. I don't think anyone cares, except politicians and some members of the media.

Speaker 3 3:22

Well, you sort of got yourself in a little bit of trouble there too, Dan I did.

Speaker 2 3:26

How did I do that? Who was the trouble with?

Speaker 3 3:31

Wasn't there one particular streaming company that didn't like what you were saying?

Speaker 2 3:36

I mean, yeah, netflix didn't like the fact that I was putting so much content out there tied to it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that didn't surprise me at the time, but right now, really, I don't think it matters in the industry, and here's why. So for those that don't know what's going on, okay, net neutrality is back, as the FCC voted to regulate Internet providers again, so they restored the rules that were rescinded during Trump's administration.

Speaker 3 4:03

They restored the rules that were rescinded during Trump's administration.

Speaker 2 4:05

Now the broadband industry, I assume, will still do some legal fighting against that. The FCC also said it would step into to override state or local policies that conflict with federal net neutrality rule, which some states have done.

Speaker 3 4:21

Yeah.

Speaker 2 4:21

But the thing I thought was funny, mark was the FCC chairwoman added that the vote would also prevent Internet providers from quote selling Americans personal data or sharing it with tech companies to train artificial intelligence models, and I just find that so funny, because all of our data is already out there. Yeah, it's getting leaked every single day, because every single day, I am getting a letter from somebody saying sorry to inform you, our information has been leaked and, as a result, you can sign up for free credit monitoring.

Speaker 3 4:54

Exactly, I'm like I already have six subscriptions to credit monitoring services for my other six credit cards or whatever you know accounts that got hacked or something you know.

Speaker 2 5:05

It's already out there, so frankly, I think that's just a bunch of nonsense. The other thing she said was quote the action we take here is good for consumers, public safety and national security what on earth is she talking?

Speaker 2 5:19

about. What is she defining as national security? Because there is no current law tied to the FCC that I'm aware of that is preventing our agencies or military people from doing what they need to for national security. So I thought that was kind of odd. And then she also brought into the fact of like, well, this will keep companies from doing deceptive advertising? No, actually it doesn't. Companies from doing deceptive advertising? No, actually it doesn't. You can see announcements all the time where an ISP has to stop advertising because it's already being regulated. So I don't know where that came in either. And then, finally, for those that don't know, just remember, there are no penalties included in the 400 plus pages of regulation none in the 400 plus pages of regulation, none. So if you actually are an ISP and you do something against net neutrality, how are you penalized? We don't know, because there's no actual definition. That's clear, that's concise, that says what the outcome will be for doing this. It'll just be looked at on a case-by-case basis. So, come on, that's pretty weak.

Speaker 2 6:29

Same thing we complained about when we were talking about this. I can't believe it was that long ago. Yeah, so you know, for years, consumer advocates have always said without net neutrality, isps are going to charge websites and consumers extra fees, toll lanes for the Internet. Some websites will be delivered faster than others. So in the last six years did that happen? No, no. Were we not able to enjoy the Internet over the last six years? Yeah, no. Was your daily use ruined after net neutrality was repealed? No, no, yeah, reality. So I did hear someone say well now mobile carriers will no longer be able to degrade streams to 480p automatically. Actually, that's not true, as long as all video streams are throttled, if you want to use that term it doesn't matter Now if an ISP limited or throttled just YouTube but not Netflix.

Speaker 2 7:27

that would break net neutrality rules.

Speaker 3 7:28

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 7:30

The other thing to note here is that and that was a comment which I loved that a carrier posted online Also.

Speaker 3 7:39

it's interesting in that some mobile carriers say that the highest rendition mark that they're given to deliver is 4dp yeah, that's just a fundamental lack of understanding still, of how video streaming actually is implemented is still amazing to me. Um, is that a lot of this quote? Throttling, and boy, isn't that a? Um, you know a word that just charges everybody up. You know, um, but the throttling? There is no need to throttle, because the highest profile that exactly what you just said is 480.

Speaker 2 8:15

P yeah, and if that's all the ISPs given, that's what they're given yeah, exactly, exactly so. I don't know the breakdown of percentage of all content given to ISPs in terms of how they deliver. It is what renditions and what bit rates. I've never seen anything on that, but some carriers do tell me. You know, 480 is the max that we're getting.

Speaker 3 8:36

Yeah, I know that. A shocking high number of services, shockingly high number of services and and I mean premium. Uh, if you look at their mobile profiles, they have a mobile profile and it does not matter if that's a new iPhone 15, or if it's a you know, seven or eight year old Android device. They're all treated the same and seven, 20 P is the highest.

Speaker 1 9:02

It's the highest. They are not setting.

Speaker 3 9:04

There's no 1080p, you know there's.

Speaker 2 9:09

So fortunately I haven't seen much. Mark, I don't know if you have noise about the neutrality.

Speaker 3 9:13

No, not much.

Speaker 2 9:14

Not much. It really is a political. It didn't come up once at.

Speaker 3 9:17

NAB. Yeah, no, no, exactly yeah.

Speaker 2 9:20

Which was awesome.

Speaker 3 9:20

Nobody brought it up. Well, and also, you know, if you think about it, everybody is way down the path of implementing their own content delivery strategies. And you know people have either diversified they're using, you know, multiple CDNs they have, you know, built their own, They've deployed, you know, in the case of netflix, why does netflix care at this point? You know, open connects, fully deployed and, uh, working incredibly well.

Speaker 2 9:51

So, yeah, so I'm glad that we're not really talking about that. So with that, let's move on. Let's go to comcast and peacock. So we've got earnings out q1. Peacock added 3 million subs to end Q1. With 34 million subscribers, they had a loss of $639 million. This is Peacock now $639 million in losses, which is down from $704 million year over year. So it's great they added 3 million subs. Now it was real interesting, mark, was the quote that they used when they talked about how the wildcard game helped increase their subscriber count. But what was interesting was the quote. In the quote they didn't say gain and retain subscribers. I noticed members of the media said gain and retain. Well, define retain Over what period of time?

Speaker 1 10:51

Yeah.

Speaker 2 10:52

Because remember when the game took place, and they're only talking about having to report up until the end of March, so the game took place in what? January? Yes, and you're talking March, so you're took place in what January yes. And you're talking March, so you're in about middle of January, right? So you're talking about they gained some level of subs because of it, no doubt, and kept some level of subs, but it's over a six-week period.

Speaker 1 11:17

Yeah.

Speaker 2 11:18

So let's see how this shakes out. The rest of the year is the point I'm getting to here, Still losing $639 million in the quarter. So that's something they obviously need to improve on. They also announced today that they're going to raise the price of Peacock by $2 per month for new subscribers, just before Paris Olympics kicks off. So clearly they're thinking with the Olympics if they get more subs, they can make more money reduce losses.

Speaker 3 11:46

Get a nice lift there.

Speaker 2 11:48

Makes sense. Let's see if it happens. So a Peacock Premium with ads will cost $8. Now Peacock Premium Plus, which is almost ad-free, will cost $14 a month and then the annual prices go from $60 to $80 for Peacock Premium and Plus goes from $120 to $140. Now the price change is going to affect on July 18th for new subscribers, so just before Olympics, and August 17th, which is during Olympics, for existing subscribers.

Speaker 3 12:20

Yeah.

Speaker 2 12:22

In addition, on Comcast, they lost 478,000 paid TV subs, which is actually an improvement.

Speaker 3 12:33

Year over year they lost 614,000.

Speaker 2 12:35

Mark 10 years ago. Did we ever think that losing 478,000 paid TV subs would be considered?

Speaker 3 12:40

an improvement.

Speaker 2 12:44

Wow, that's a big number. Yeah, uh, comcast ended the quarter with 13.6 million domestic video subscribers. Uh, one thing that is interesting of earnings of everyone we're going to go across today is almost no change in stock price mark based on earnings, positive or negative. So Comcast stock is down $2 since earnings it's priced in.

Speaker 3 13:09

You know, I think that's one of the things that the market, those who are just sort of observers, you know, the armchair analysts in our industry, in our industry, uh, may maybe don't always get is, uh, you know, everything's reported on. As you know, this is the end of. So, you know, comcast yet again lost half a million subs, and it, you know, oftentimes anyway, you know, it's said in a way, like you know, comcast is over. The market has long priced in this. Investors are savvy generally, especially institutional, and they know where the trends are.

Speaker 2 13:53

I think I would agree. Many has been priced in. I think for a few that we don't know because there's so much uncertainty. For instance, Paramount All right, that's a free for all.

Speaker 1 14:02

Sure For those listening.

Speaker 2 14:03

Mark and I usually record on Fridays. We're actually recording this Monday, april 29th. Paramount's earnings just happened 22 minutes ago, yeah, and you have late breaking news, yeah, so we're going to go through their earnings. Bob the CEO is out stepping down, we'll get to that in a minute, but we will go through Paramount's earnings and that, mark, is where I think clearly there's uncertainty.

Speaker 3 14:23

Yeah, exactly, also around Roku as well. Sure sure, but my comment here is around Comcast, you know, as an MVP.

Speaker 1 14:32

Yeah.

Speaker 3 14:35

It's been long priced in. I mean many, many, many, many quarters ago. So I think that's why you see the decline and the stock barely moves, you know.

Speaker 2 14:46

Well, and also, frankly, if it's already priced in too, hey, we expect you to lose the same amount you lost same quarter last year but you lost less.

Speaker 3 14:53

Hey, that's actually better, We'll take it.

Speaker 2 14:57

Now let's talk about more cord cutting. Charter. It accelerated with Charter. They lost 392,000 video customers compared with the loss of 237 a year ago quarter. So they finished with 13.7 million video customers, of which 13.1 million are residential, so almost the same size as Comcast. Interesting stat here, mark, was revenue from residential video customers fell 8.1% to 3.9 billion. So even with the losses, they can't make it up, at least in this quarter, with additional higher prices. Yeah, also interesting, the programming cost decreased 8.2% in that quarter. Not surprising considering the way program flows in and out throughout the year. Yeah, sure, so they had lower programming costs, fewer subs. Video revenue fell 8.1%. They did launch also something this was a little over a week ago called Spectrum TV Stream, which is now a virtual ESPN-less skinny bundle. So it includes 90 entertainment and news-themed channels. Let's call it. For $40 a month it includes Disney Channel, but it doesn't include ABC or ESPN.

Speaker 3 16:11

Got it.

Speaker 2 16:12

So that's brand new in the market. Let's go on to more cord-cutting Verizon. Verizon lost 68,000 residential pay TV customers. They ended the quarter with 2.88 million residential pay TV subs, which is down from 3.16 million. So, as I said on LinkedIn, when does Verizon completely exit the?

Speaker 1 16:31

pay.

Speaker 2 16:31

TV business.

Speaker 3 16:32

Like they are literally writing this down to zero. It's only a matter of time.

Speaker 2 16:39

So they'll bundle it with YouTube TV. They already have that offer for Verizon wireless and home internet playing customers.

Speaker 2 16:45

Yeah sure, it's only a matter of time. I wouldn't be surprised if I get a letter in the mail hey, your cable cards need to be turned in. We're turning off the service. Uh, let's go to roku. Uh, roku had q1 earnings. They added 1.6 million active accounts, so they ended the quarter with 81.6 streaming hours rose third to 30.8 billion, which is up from 29.1 million uh in q4. So somewhat flat there in terms of streaming hours, which isn't great for Roku. Obviously, since they're in the business of advertising. That's where they're getting the vast majority of their revenue revenues advertising the platform fee.

Speaker 3 17:30

Yes.

Speaker 2 17:31

Uh, now they they really improved their net loss. Their net loss for the quarter in Q1 is 50.9 million versus $193.6 million. So that's good Mark. This is an interesting number. Device sales totaled $126.5 million. For all the talk of them being a platform and advertising platform and a platform for our smart TVs, they still got $126.5 million in 90 days over hardware. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 18:05

That's incredible. That's half a billion dollars roughly a year.

Speaker 2 18:10

In hardware yeah in just hardware Now from the shareholder letter. This is the quote, one of the quotes From the shareholder letter. This is the quote, one of the quotes. Looking ahead, we face difficult year-over-year growth rate comparisons within streaming service distribution activities. This headwind is due to past price increases and a higher mixed shift towards ad-supported offerings. So initially their stock was up when earnings came out. Then it declined. It's down $3 now since earnings For Q2, they're projecting net revenue of $935 million with a net loss of $65 million.

Speaker 3 19:01

So if their net loss ends up being $65 million.

Speaker 2 19:03

they'll have gone from 193 net loss to 50.9 and then up a little to 65. But the key thing there is going to be getting the advertising business to grow, which we know is still stagnant across the industry right now for the most part, until we get to the next one, alphabet YouTube had $8.1 billion in ad sales, which is its highest Q1 total to date and was up 21% year over year. Yeah, that's amazing. Now a little bit of obviously different content than Roku's got there. Overall, alphabet revenue is up. 15% is up 15%. The company expects YouTube and Google Cloud to finish with 2024 combined annual run rate of $100 billion this year. Wow, $100 billion. Now for listeners, the YouTube number that they give out does not include YouTube TV or anything tied to music. That $8.1 billion is just in advertising sales, Just advertising yeah.

Speaker 2 20:01

That's very important to realize that Alphabet also announced the company's first ever cash dividend of $0.20 per share, and they say they plan to pay more of them in the future. On the cloud side, google Cloud generated $9.57 billion, which was, in revenue, up 28 percent from a year ago. Mark tying into ai here, because we're going to hear this from microsoft and google continuously. What they said was their google one offering, which bundles cloud storage, ai capabilities and other google features in one shareable plan, has crossed more than 100 million paid subscribers. Wow, what that tells you. Right, there is there are plenty of companies using cloud services that are really, really, really small. Yeah, because think about that you have 100 million paid subscribers just for that one Google One offering, but your revenue is 7.45 billion. So it's growing, which is great.

Speaker 2 21:05

28%, it's up year over year, but got to keep the numbers in perspective. Google Cloud delivered operating income of 900 million and it now accounted for 12% of Google's total revenue. Wow, alphabet, let let's see. They're up ten dollars since earning last week, so a little bit of a bump there. Moving into more cloud uh, microsoft, they got earnings out their intelligent cloud segment, which includes azure. They don't break that out separately. So azure, windows server, github, they put it all together it was $26.7 billion in revenue, so hard to compare to Google's. It was up 31%. Another comment here, mark, on AI. Inside of the Azure growth, seven percentage points were related to AI, which is up from six percentage points in the previous quarter.

Speaker 3 22:03

Wow.

Speaker 2 22:04

And part of that reason is Microsoft provides cloud services for chat, GPT, also the startup open AI. So what I think is interesting is, in many cases here you see someone like Microsoft saying thanks to AI, here's the percentage points we are up, but then the services they're actually providing in many cases are not AI services. It's like storage. Okay, it's storage for an AI company. Should that really be classified as revenue from AI?

Speaker 3 22:35

Okay, yeah, that's a little strange, but it's not AI revenue.

Speaker 2 22:38

That's right, so you know. And they didn't say it's AI revenue. They said related to AI, so they said it properly. But I'm sure a lot of people don't read that quite accurately.

Speaker 3 22:49

Yeah, and you know everybody's so desperate to attach AI to revenue.

Speaker 2 22:57

Now their stock took a little bit of a hit and is actually down ten dollars as a result. Since earnings, now let's jump into paramount. So paramount had earnings exactly 30 minutes ago.

Speaker 2 23:11

Yeah, uh, ceo bob, uh, he, he is out, he's stepping down, effective immediately. Uh, so he's going to be replaced by what they're calling an office of the CEO run by three executives the head of Paramount Movie Studios, chief executive of Paramount CBS division and the president of Paramount's entertainment and youth brands. It was rumored a couple days ago Obviously the word had leaked out. Some were reporting that. Some other things that have come out since then is apparently Bob was discussing a bundling of Paramount Plus with NBCU, which again that news had come out a while back. It's being reported that he didn't keep Paramount's board directors or the controlling shareholder, sherry Redstone updated and shareholders, sherry redstone updated, uh, and apparently once he, when he presented that to the board, um, it was uh, basically executives felt it wasn't in, uh, in their, their best interest and it was actually in the best interest of of comcast. So apparently they say the terms are negotiated by him badly on behalf of paramount. Also, that potentially would hold up complications to the if they're doing the merger with Skydance. So that was interesting to hear that come out.

Speaker 2 24:28

We're not listening to the call, obviously, which starts, I think, probably about now. There are additional details coming out about the Skydance Media offer. Apparently more has been thrown in from a cash standpoint. A new offer has been made that came out earlier today. Apparently it's the final offer, so we'll have to see what they say potentially in the earnings call. Yeah, I was going to say If they actually can say anything.

Speaker 3 24:58

Yeah, if they can, but boy, they sure are going to be quizzed from every direction, I would think.

Speaker 2 25:05

Yeah, I'm not sure what.

Speaker 3 25:06

About the Skydance deal and also Bob leaving in the new.

Speaker 2 25:14

Yeah, the Bob leaving. I don't think they'll care about as much. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, the Bob leaving.

Speaker 3 25:17

I don't think they'll care about as much.

Speaker 2 25:18

Yeah, it's true the terms of the new deal was basically that Skydance offered a $3 billion cash infusion, which would allow them to pay down debt and buy back stock at Paramount, which is something that obviously they would like?

Speaker 2 25:35

Sure, but there's also just so much going on day to day inside that company. Now, with Paramount's numbers out, mark, let's go through that, because now we have Paramount Plus numbers. So Paramount Plus revenue increased 51% year over year. They ended the quarter with more than 71 million global subscribers. They ended the quarter with more than 71 million global subscribers. They generated 260 million of net operating cash flow and 209 million of free cash flow in Q1. That's the key takeaway number there 209 million of free cash flow, wow, so that's good to see. Second, they added 3.7 million net subscribers in the quarter to end with the 71 million I mentioned. Global ARPU was up 26% year over year. Advertising revenue grew 31%, but again, that's and they mentioned this right that's the huge benefit of the Super Bowl. So you have to take that into account. Breaking out some other numbers here, mark, real quickly, just looking through their Excel sheet. So revenue Q1 2024, 1.8 million. Breakdown of that revenue 520 million came from advertising and of the $1.8 billion, $1.3 came from subscription. So advertising is making up about 25% now of the revenue Interesting Paramount Plus, yeah, tv and media. We won't go through. There's a lot here about Super Bowl and the impact on that. Let's see if they added anything else. No, they didn't, so not surprising. They're probably not going to make too many more comments around that. That's right.

Speaker 2 27:34

Let's jump into Max. I've got an email here that Max nicely sends out. This is from two weeks ago where they talk about just some of the things that they've done. So they launched February 27th in Latin America, in the Caribbean. So 39 territories and 26 platforms. Platforms uh, let's see what they do. They added multiple language support. Currency support for 25 currencies across 39 regions uh. Functionality to do roaming so those traveling can get access to it. Uh, but there were some numbers here I wanted to call out mark. Here we go as of april 15th, 92 percent of existing hbo max customers in latin america have downloaded the new max app and signed in. Of those migrated subscribers, 94 percent have already watched an asset on the app. Wow, that's a big 92% have already in that short period of time. So to me, that's a kudos to the team, because if you authenticate wrong, if your content choices don't come over you can't figure it out.

Speaker 2 28:51

you're going to have a lot of issues, so that's good to see. They also said here and I asked them for a number but they wouldn't give it. They said they hit record concurrent viewers for live sports in the US during the NCAA Division I Basketball Championship on April 8th.

Speaker 2 29:12

But they wouldn't give me what the number was, which is certainly what I wanted to know. Some other things here that they've called out Live events are now in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos in the US, so they talked about that in February. Also, for select events, within 15 minutes of the live event conclusion, it's already available for replay. This is global, not just in the US. They also talked about how this is interesting for CNN max. They're doing DAI, so dynamic ad insertion has now been rolled out for CNN max live programming.

Speaker 2 29:53

March madness, some stuff. We don't have to go there. So just some some good information that they're constantly pushing out. And the reason I bring up Max is Bloomberg had a story out yesterday. I'm not really sure why it was made such a big deal, but they say that Max plans to start cracking down on password sharing as soon as this fall. We know that they already told us that in an earnings call, so I'm not really sure how that's news all of a sudden. Yesterday or today when it came out, but they've already told us this Bloomberg was saying it's going to look a lot like Netflix. Okay, what else would we expect it to look like? Netflix has been very successful and they're like well, you're going to be able to add another person, if you want to, of course Netflix has been very successful and they're like well, you're going to be able to add another person if you want to.

Speaker 2 30:40

Of course you're going to be able to. Of course I don't really think this is news, yeah, but yes, we know it's coming, it's going to be happening, of course. Let's move on to Amazon Prime Video was rumored to be home in the National Hockey League Monday night games in Canada. It is happening.

Speaker 3 30:57

It Hockey League Monday Night.

Speaker 2 30:58

Games in Canada. It is happening, it's happening. It's now official Two-year deal.

Speaker 2 31:01

You must be a Prime member, so not too surprising that came out. It's going to be for the 24-25 season, so that's interesting in terms of Amazon getting into that. This came out today. Mark, the Major League Baseball Pittsburgh Pirates and the NHL's Penguins are now offering a combined streaming service in their market. So Sportsnet's Pittsburgh streaming offering is going to cost $18 a month. It's called SMP360. Viewers with pay TV subscriptions will also have access to the app. So that's cool. Subscriptions will also have access to the app. So that's cool. It's managed and built by uh nesn and I didn't know this mark. But the pittsburgh penguins are the number one nhl team as far as viewership goes really huh, I mean it said that in the release.

Speaker 3 31:53

So I'm assuming it's accurate hopefully.

Speaker 2 31:56

Yeah, but yeah, that was a new. So they're following the footsteps of remember the Red Sox. Yeah, that's right. The first team and then the Yankees did one, so now you got baseball and hockey combining. Some more content news here. Geo Cinema this was about a week and a half ago. I missed this during the NAB show, but it introduced a monthly subscription plan with the lowest tier costing just 35 cents. So pretty interesting here in terms of how they're going after Netflix in that regard, and I believe this was only for mobile.

Speaker 3 32:44

Yeah, let's see. Yeah, because wasn't netflix? Don't they have like a dollar 99 plan or something in india? I forget what it is really low but it's mobile, only that lowest one, uh, lowest so this is two tiers.

Speaker 2 33:00

There's a dollar featuring support for four simultaneous screens and then the 35 cents is for a single screen. No, it actually says available to stream in 4K. So no, it's not mobile only. That's kind of surprising $0.35. So Netflix is $2.40, Mark and Prime Video is $2.15.

Speaker 3 33:33

Yeah, interesting.

Speaker 2 33:34

Yeah, $0.35. Wow, that seems a little ridiculous. That's a land grab right there. Yeah for sure. Wow, that seems a little ridiculous. That's a land grab right there. Yeah for sure. A couple more things Vimeo they've hired Philip Moyer as their new CEO, replacing their interim CEO. He previously came from Google Cloud, before that Amazon Web Services. Doing banking in capital markets for them and insurance payments Seems like an odd choice to me. But what do I know? He's going to get a salary of $600,000, a signing bonus of 300K and he's being granted 1.68 million restricted stock units. Mark, I put this up on LinkedIn, I guess about a week and a half ago. When it happened, I thought it was odd. Someone reached out to me and was like you shouldn't really put out what someone's getting paid. Like, how would someone like, if you know they put out your salary? And I was just like, okay, that's an odd one. It's a public company, it's in the regulatory filing. Yeah, like, they're required to give that out.

Speaker 3 34:38

I don't work for a public company. It's not a secret. Yeah, no, that's yeah. That is a strange one because and then, especially when you're a senior executive at a public company, your compensation is fully disclosed. It's not a secret. Yeah, to a certain level, well, that's yeah. I guess fully disclosed may not be completely accurate, but it is disclosed.

Speaker 2 35:04

Yes, yes. So just looking up real quickly here, Mark. If anything else from Paramount as of now, nothing else has come out, Although the call is probably currently taking place, let's take a look at their stock, it's probably bouncing all over the place. So let's see, wow, after hours it's only down six cents okay so that's surprising. So the earnings?

Speaker 2 35:34

call started what 10 minutes ago, so we haven't gotten too much yet from the earnings call. So that's probably the issue there. I think the tricky thing here is that you have to think about is just whatever deal they do, however they do it. The fact that they have about 650 million outstanding shares just anything they try and do is going to be tricky. You also have to wonder, as we mentioned before, what's going to happen if shareholders file a suit saying, hey, you didn't get the best deal you could. For us as a shareholder, that could cause some issues as well. In addition to them putting out all of the information on Q1, they actually put out a separate release on the CEO stepping down.

Speaker 3 36:24

I see.

Speaker 2 36:26

So not surprising there. The other thing they're saying is they want to come up with a long range plan to accelerate growth and develop popular content, streamline operations, strengthen the balance sheet and continue to optimize the streaming strategy, which is what you're doing every quarter. So that doesn't really sound anything different there. So nothing else from them. As yet, we've got harmonic earnings. We'll do those next week because our call is not for another 15 minutes. I'd say the final piece here. Mark is Nielsen put out a blog post on Fast and ah God, nielsen.

Speaker 2 37:09

It's atrocious, ah God. So their title is Fast has Made Linear TV Cool Again. Personalization Will Make it Cooler. Now, hey, nielsen, are you looking for companies to be cool or are you looking for them to make money? Because if you're looking for them to make money and, more importantly, become profitable, how about you give more insight into actually what's taking place with engagement, which of course you don't, which is something I mentioned at the streaming show, nielsen would not come and talk about their methodology, so if you haven't read their blog post, I'm going to put it up on LinkedIn and put some comments to it. What they're saying is there's lots of individual fast channels over 1,900 of them, thanks, we know they're talking about. The number has grown 30% in eight months. Okay, thanks, we know. So they give out all these stats around Pluto, tubi and Roku, where 3.5% of total TV use in February Okay, again, depends how you define use. That's obviously important. They're not seeing everything on every single device. That's the other thing as well.

Speaker 2 38:21

A motley fool survey yeah, because those are the guys that you should trust with a survey found that 62 percent said there's too many streaming options. Ok, that we know. But then they said 39 percent of them reported pulling back on the services they subscribe to on a year-over-year basis. Again, not surprising. But define pullback, that's the term they use. Yeah, now, deloitte, in their survey found that 19% of consumers has switched from a paid subscription to a fast service. Well, you didn't say canceled, you said switched. Say canceled, you said switched. So that's not exactly you know defining what they mean by switch.

Speaker 2 39:07

Nielsen also says that 70% of respondents say they're familiar with fast. Okay, cool, I mean, there's a lot of things people are familiar with. So, as I've been saying all the time, fast is all about business economics, ad revenue, which we don't know. None of these companies put this out. Popularity without profitability is meaningless. These companies are not the size of Google and others who can take 10, 15 year risks of where the business is going Now.

Speaker 2 39:43

Can Paramount? Yes, can Fox who owns Tubi? Yes, yeah, selling services related to fast. And you know what? The number one thing I heard Mark from well, okay, I'm not going to say the vendors here, but I sat with four or five vendors in one day and the amount of them. That said we are no longer going to commission these ridiculous and silly fast reports from all the names you know and I know where literally they're charging $30,000 to $40,000 to put out another report that says we surveyed a whole bunch of people and fast is popular. So they're like we're not going to spend that money anymore. I'm like what were you spending it in the beginning?

Speaker 3 40:30

Like why'd you do that to?

Speaker 2 40:31

begin with.

Speaker 3 40:49

Yeah, so I think it's good that they're cutting back LLM. This was written by chat GPT um, you know, indicator red lights. But I mean immediately I'm like, okay, this was chat GPT.

Speaker 2 41:05

So I don't know that it was okay.

Speaker 3 41:09

So I copied and pasted the text and here's the prompt that I used in chat GPT and I'll tell you what it said. I used in chat GPT and I'll tell you what it said. You're going to laugh. I said, uh, was this post written with an LLM question mark? And then I copied the entire text, all the texts.

Speaker 3 41:28

Chat GPT four told me this post is likely written with assistance from an LLM or similar AI technology, given its structured, detailed, data-driven content. That aligns well with the capability of blah, blah, blah. Okay, then several clues. And it says one comprehensive coverage. There's a wide array of data and statistics.

Speaker 3 41:50

Now, when you quote Motley Fool or you know some of these, it is all indexed by all these tools. They, they are. They're basically just, you know, I don't want to call them spam engines, but you know, let's face it. They publish a lot of stuff. A lot of it is either common sense, well-known, it's easily accessible anywhere. There's absolutely nothing that's really proprietary. Then it says complex terminology and consistency and it points out that it used terms that are commonly found in specific studies and surveys, along with consistent use of these terms aligns with the pattern recognition capabilities of AI models. Then it says a data-driven narrative. It says it's a common feature in AI-generated texts, especially those aimed at providing industry insights. And then the last point is lack of personal touch. This post lacks a personal narrative or subjective opinions, which are often less common in AI generated content. Now, look, I have no idea, and it's perfectly fine if Nielsen wants to call and prove that it was handwritten by a human. But the point is is that it's a low calorie?

Speaker 2 43:12

It's really low calorie content. I don't know if it's who. It's written by right.

Speaker 3 43:16

It doesn't say and, by the way, they don't attribute it. There's no writer attributed it, but in a lot of cases.

Speaker 2 43:22

that's what companies do, that's what Nielsen and others do. The other thing is the results you got back. They used words like likely commonly, especially those words that have no concrete meaning. So it's not definitive at all. What I care about most is I don't care where they got the content from. Some of this is their own data.

Speaker 3 43:41

Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 43:42

But the title is Fastest Made Linear TV Cool Again. Personalization Will Make it Cooler. Now where do they talk about personalization? Yeah, Okay, the last one. Three sentences in the post talk personalization. That's it, and all they say is you need to have some comprehensive metadata.

Speaker 3 44:01

Yeah, comprehensive metadata.

Speaker 2 44:03

Okay, that's not personalization that doesn't personalize it for me with metadata. How about when I turn on a fast service, they automatically bring to the forefront, or start playing for me, a channel that they know that I'm going to like Yep, and not recommend other content? That's personalization me a channel that they know that I'm going to like and not recommend other content? No, I'm not. That's personalization, so nowhere in here. The biggest problem I have, mark, is does this post talk about personalization? And we don't need it to be cooler. We need it to actually make money from a profitability standpoint and make it easier to find the content we want.

Speaker 2 44:36

When, even to their point, there's over 1,000 fast channels in the US alone to choose from, what was it? Plex recently announced that they have more than 1,100, of which I think 700 of those, or over 700 with the US alone. So it's just more fluff from Nielsen. This isn't the stuff we need. Give us some actual, useful content. Yeah, but you know that's nielsen, that's kind of how they play that so, uh, mark, just looking again here, nothing so far.

Speaker 2 45:09

Let me do one last check here. Uh, paramount helps if I spell it right if anything else has come on from the board based on the call. Okay, 18 minutes ago, no, okay, live blog here, no, no, so nothing else as of yet. So we'll we'll have to see what the final takeaway is from the call. If anything yeah, and they may not be able to say takeaway is from the call if anything yeah. And they may not be able to say anything else at this point or give any updates.

Speaker 3 45:41

Yeah, exactly, they may just be preempting all the questions and say, look, folks May have no choice, even legally, what they can and can't say.

Speaker 2 45:48

So that's what we got this week. We're actually pretty good, mark. We got through this in 45 minutes, sorry folks, than we want to go usually with you. But a lot of numbers here. Mark and I will be back in about a week a little over that, and we'll break down. The biggest ones we'll break down, mark. Next are going to be Amazon, fubo, disney. Those are the three DDC ones, and then we have some vendors in there with Fastly Vimeo. Those are probably the two others. So we have half a dozen more with Fastly Vimeo. Those are probably the two others. So we have half a dozen more that we'll break down next week. Those are the next ones to do, but in the meantime, if you have any questions, let Mark or I know. Everything you talked about today I have not put up on LinkedIn. It's usually the opposite of what I say.

Speaker 2 46:31

But the NAB show kept me busy, all the follow-ups, so I will get a lot of this up today. Denny, our producer, is going to turn this around very quickly, so I'll get up all these posts as quickly as I can. But in the meantime, questions about the numbers? Remember, just put in any public company's name in Google and put in the word IR, after that investor relations. It'll take you right to what you're looking for. But any questions that Mark and I know we appreciate everyone listening and we will be back next week. Everyone, have a good week. We'll talk to you soon, thank you.

Speaker 1 47:01

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.