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 0:24

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn, Back for another week, Mark Donegan who is going to debate with me. Politics right, no.

Speaker 3 0:35

Are they going to recap the debate last?

Speaker 2 0:36

night. Oh boy, that was something. That was something, Mark, they say in our space. Obviously, content is king. I don't know what kind of content that was last night.

Speaker 3 0:48

I don't know what that was. A new category was created, Dan.

Speaker 2 0:51

Oh, what's it called Garbage. I have no idea, but it's an all-new category. Yeah, that was something. Well, let's get right into the debate because we actually got some numbers, the only one I've seen on the streaming side are from CNN.

Speaker 2 1:06

Cnn said they peaked at 2.3 million concurrent live streaming viewers. I haven't seen any stats from other news sites as of yet. We did see early Nielsen numbers, so these numbers are supposedly supposed to grow. I think Nielsen calls these like. They're quick numbers, so you could have some sort of idea, which to me again, really Nielsen. Yeah, so they're not a hundred percent accurate, you know that, but you're putting them out anyway.

Speaker 3 1:31

Yeah, really Like, how does that work?

Speaker 2 1:33

So Nielsen says a combined 47.9 million, so call it 48 million people viewers turned into TV. Okay 8.7 million on CNN. The bulk of the viewers watched somewhere else. 8.8 million on Fox, 8.7 on ABC, 4 million on MSNBC. So these are the only numbers I've seen so far. Mark, I did put up on LinkedIn if you saw a screenshot of I was having issues with CNN's live stream throughout it.

Speaker 2 2:02

Yeah, that's right. I was getting a drm related error. Someone left a comment saying they were. They were getting the same error as well, so don't know what that was and that was on a, on a macbook that was on a macbook. Yeah, macbook pro six months old, that's actually strange, because what? Not for cnn, it's not.

Speaker 3 2:22

Why would they use DRM?

Speaker 2 2:25

I have no idea. I was trying it in. Safari and I also did it in Chrome, but also, was that really a DRM?

Speaker 3 2:31

error Exactly.

Speaker 2 2:39

The error seemed a little too specific, but CNN is not great when it comes to live streaming events. I've put on linkedin before screenshots of just hey, this isn't working, so I don't know why that is. But those are the numbers. That's all we've got for now. Let's jump into paramount global. So we've got. We've got a couple things from paramount global. Yeah, so they announced a price hike come august 20th no surprise yeah, no, no surprise there.

Speaker 2 3:07

Uh, so ad supported paramount plus essential will be eight dollars a month, up from six dollars. Ad free paramount plus with showtime will be 13, up from 12. So one to two dollars. They're not changing the current Central's monthly price of $6. Let's see those. On the legacy limited commercial plan so many plans here We'll see the price rise by $1 to $8 per month. So that's what we got. On the price raise, no-transcript. Naturally we're thinking BET is going to be one of them. I think that's pretty much a given if someone will pay for it. Now, this was interesting as well, they said. Regarding Paramount Plus internationally, the exec said they are quote advancing talks with potential partners that will significantly transform the scale and economics of the service, making it profitable and driving long-term value. This approach could also serve as a model for the US. So they didn't say anything else beyond that. But, mark, I would be shocked if Paramount Plus is not bundled with Peacock. Think of who has bundled up so far and who hasn't.

Speaker 3 4:40

Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 4:41

These are the two.

Speaker 2 4:42

Those are the two yeah, it makes sense to me that's going to happen. I don't have any inside baseball on that, so this is speculation on my part, but look at who's already bundled and who hasn't. I would not be surprised. The company aims to recap $500 million in cost savings annualized. Now we know that includes a round of layoffs. It's already been discussed. That came out during the town hall when employees asked about the timeline for job cuts. There was no details provided. The CEOs did point out that Paramount's overall revenue grew 13% between 2018 and 2023, operating income sorry. Operating income declined 61%.

Speaker 2 5:28

Yeah, I saw that that's um, they called that figure, quote unacceptable. You think, yeah, and that they need quote to act now to reverse this trend. Yeah, agreed, but you know you really want to act before you see it get to that number. So I definitely feel, in the case of Paramount Global, they're being far too reactive instead of they should have been proactive. Unfortunately, at some point we know cuts are coming, so how many employees that's going to impact we don't know. But I think we said in the beginning of the year Mark I know we did multiple times the idea that layoffs are over. They're not for our industry. There will be more. Sadly, that's true and it's just going to happen. I mean, it's consolidating business, dating business.

Speaker 2 6:26

Uh, youtube tv filed. Users filed a lawsuit against disney november 2022 saying that they were overcharging for live tv streams online. Uh, tuesday there was a decision by us district judge and he denied disney's motion to dismiss the uh dismiss the antitrust action and he ruled that disney may have inflated the pricing of live TV through the marketplace by taking advantage of its acquisition of Hulu. So interesting, what's going on here? The court also determined that Disney might have established an industry-wide price floor for ESPN affiliate payments using most favored nation terms, so unknown here, but you got to watch this one. It's kind of a big deal, yeah. So the judge partially approved and partially denied Disney's most recent bid to have the antitrust action dismissed, which is a very similar decision that he already made in October of last year. So he's removed the plaintiff's claims for damages from the proceedings and the case will proceed in a more limited form, but the case is going forward.

Speaker 3 7:34

Yeah, I haven't, I haven't dug in at all. But this, this reference to the MFNs, the most favored nations, that that's sort of interesting to me because that's a very common in fact. It's used in every single contract in Hollywood. And you know that, hey, you know, you're going to not give someone else more preferable you know terms than you give me. If you think about it, that does give amount of pricing control, right, you know, that's the point of it. Yeah, exactly, and so, but hey, you know what, if down the road somebody else you know wants to be able to strike a better deal, or there's, you know. And so now, all of a sudden, the content rights holder, you know, oh, I'm sorry, you know, we've got MFNs here, we can't violate, you know.

Speaker 2 8:31

Yeah, it's an interesting aspect of the law, and neither of us are legal experts.

Speaker 3 8:34

No, no, no no.

Speaker 2 8:39

Can't chime in on that, but for those that haven't heard of it, mark, you bring up a great point. It's it's in so many contracts tied to media entertainment and, for listeners, very simple it's a provision in the contract that requires a party to receive rights and benefits under the contract that are equal or more favorable than the rights and benefits received by any other party, by any other party. So it's supposed to be a level playing field.

Speaker 2 9:02

Yeah sure, but there's a there's a legal side of that of what you can and can't do, cause you can charge others more for certain things. I don't. I don't understand the law, how it works, but this is, this is a case that we're going to have to watch. It's pretty interesting, and especially since it involves Hulu and live TV live streaming, absolutely. So. That's one trial. Now let's go into the NFL.

Speaker 3 9:28

Oh boy.

Speaker 2 9:31

Because they lost their Sunday ticket trial. So the jury ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, ordering the NFL to pay $4.7 billion to residential subscribers and another $96 million to business owners. So $4.7 billion. Now the figures can be tripled under federal antitrust law, so that number can be a lot larger. However, this case is far from over. The NFL is going to appeal the ruling. They said they're going to test the decision. They think it's baseless and without merit. So this is going to draw out. I think, mark, this doesn't get settled till 2026 or later.

Speaker 2 10:08

Yeah probably it's not getting settled this year. We already know it's going to get drawn out to next year. I don't even think it ends next year. So this is another really interesting case to watch, but we're not going to know the outcome for quite a long time now, uh, the 96 million to business owners.

Speaker 3 10:27

That would be like like sports bars, and yeah, okay, yeah hotels, I think this house like hotels and others.

Speaker 2 10:36

So two very interesting trials, both talking about live streaming. Different, a little different with nfl being but, uh, two things we're going to have to keep on. Uh, on top of as an industry. I expect we'll see a little bit of flurry in the next week or two, some filings or whatnot, and then it should go quiet for a while until the case comes back, sure, sure. Let's go into little sports news here. Uh, the big East, which is men's and women's basketball games, announced a new content licensing deal. We didn't get terms on this Originally, it was just with Fox. This deal is now, let's see, 2025, 26. So this deal goes from next year until 2031. And the coverage is now going to be on Fox Sports, nbc Sports and TNT Sports. That includes Peacock Mac, some of the streaming brands as well.

Speaker 3 11:32

Yeah.

Speaker 2 11:33

The Fox Network is going to remain home with the Big East Men's Tournament. Uh, so interesting that we see big east. Clearly. Of course they got more money and taking approaches we've seen with some of the other uh leagues. I don't know, big east, is that a league? I think so. Um, but they now decided, instead of having one burn broadcast uh deal, they're gonna split the content up across three, not too surprising. Some stats here. Two stats ESPN said Monday's game seven, the Stanley Cup final, was the most viewed NHL game ever on ESPN Mark. What were the numbers?

Speaker 3 12:12

I know.

Speaker 2 12:13

Oh, okay, well then tell listeners, you don't know actually oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, all right, so it was a trick question. So it was the most viewed nhl game ever on espn plus, but they didn't tell us what the numbers were yeah, but uh, oh, okay, okay. Okay, I'm looking at across all viewing platforms, yeah so when you add up abc, espn plus and espn, 7.7 million 7.7 million.

Speaker 2 12:44

it peaked to 10.3. But unfortunately, one thing that we never get from espn slash disney. Yeah, we've never I don't think mark ever gotten numbers on espn for any live game. Peak, that's right, they don't yeah, you've you.

Speaker 3 12:59

You point that out a lot.

Speaker 2 13:04

Yeah, they just don't, because then look at NBC Sports, they'll break out Peacock individually, which I love, of course, but ESPN, we don't know. We do have some numbers here for let's see ITV and ITVX. So some, let's see what day was this? Oh, okay, that was actually this week. England's match with Slovenia, across ITV and ITVX, had an average audience of 14.5 million viewers, average 9.2 million. Let's say it's the highest peak audience of any opening match of a major, major tournament in a decade. Uh, no, sorry, the uh, Germany and Scotland won at 10.5 million. Uh, so this was, this was close 9.2 average. Uh, but there's, there's some stats. We know most of that viewership, obviously, actually all that viewership is in europe. I don't know how it's broken out, country specific, but we know how important uh that sport is to them. Yes, so not too surprising there.

Speaker 2 14:11

A couple other things here. Mark for limited time, dish network is offering a free netflix standards with ads plan if dish customers sign up for two new, two new two-year commitment. So another bundling, not too surprising. Uh, this on the ad side was was pretty interesting. So yahoo japan is going to waive 189 million dollar charge to advertisers after deciding they were fraudulent charges. Pretty interesting. So what they say is quote in fiscal 2023, yahoo Advertising determined that approximately 96 million advertising materials were not improved and that approximately 30.2 billion yen worth of advertising costs were invalid clicks and therefore will not be charged for them. So $189 million worth of clicks is fraud. So hey, heads out, heads up to Yahoo Japan like for doing the right thing. Yeah, sure, because how many times do we see that happen? Almost never, but that just shows you how big the problem is. This is just Yahoo in Japan.

Speaker 3 15:25

Yeah.

Speaker 2 15:25

And they're going to not charge $189 billion. Yeah, yeah. So what the real number is for ad fraud globally? It's in the billions, clearly. Yeah for sure, Another price raise here, but this time in India.

Speaker 2 15:40

So this is an important mark because of the cricket. So Reliance Jio, which is India's largest telecom operator, is raising some of its plans by more than 20%, so effective next month. Its entry-level plan is $1.87, and it offers two gigs of data and unlimited calls plan is $1.87 and it offers two gigs of data and unlimited calls. Another plan that has one gig of data is also going to rise as well. It's going up a little bit.

Speaker 2 16:11

So it's interesting because GEO, which is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, in the last couple of years has really changed how they've bundled data with their plans and they've made it much more affordable for cellular plans and, as a result, other competitors in the area have also had to reduce pricing as well. But the benefit there is they saw a lot more consumption of cricket on mobile because it was more affordable. A couple of years ago it was extremely expensive in India for cellular data, so definitely impact streaming in a positive way there. That's definitely good for them. Bloomberg is reporting that FIFA, which is the soccer governing body, is seeking to raise up to $2 billion to expand its streaming service, FIFA Plus. So they're working with some bankers that were highlighted.

Speaker 3 17:10

But interesting there, what are they going to spend the $2 billion on?

Speaker 2 17:12

That's got to be fun, yeah you wonder To increase and also it's to increase the reach of their Plus product. But to your point, well, mean it's fifa, so they, they already have the content right because they're, they're the, they're the organizing body, yeah, so I assume that they already own it. Or I don't know if they get it, if they have to pay for it from the teams. I don't know how that works yeah they're the governing body.

Speaker 2 17:37

I think they already have. They certainly have the rights to it. I don't know if they're paying the teams for it, but yeah, I saw that number of 2 billion. I thought you want to expand streaming. Why would you need $2 billion? You already have a product out there. It's not infrastructure costs. You couldn't even spend that if you wanted to an infrastructure. So it's a good question. I don't know, bloomberg article didn't have more, more details, but it's uh, it's definitely one to watch. Uh, I'm sure some others who know that space better have broken it down. I'm thinking, like sports pro ott, go find their podcast that nick and the guys do it was great podcast. They just I guarantee they're talking about that 15 minutes probably. You know the details, so check them out. I'm sure they'll give more information there. Two other things, mark, and we'll wrap this up. We'll keep it easy for everyone. This week, 12 labs has raised 50 million in a series a funding. This was this month after raising 17 million through seed rounds Series. A 50 million that's. That's a big round.

Speaker 2 18:44

That's a lot of expectations. Uh, the company uses AI to extract information from videos and movement and actions um, people and objects in the videos, text on the screen, um, the, the audio, and then they identify the relationships between all these objects. So their platform converts all that into vectors and there's all kinds of things that they say they can do with this. They say that they're building foundation models for multimodal video understanding Sorry, multimodal video understanding. They say developers can be able to access through API. So they're talking about a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2 19:24

I did talk to the company maybe about six months ago. It basically just said they they had some content owners that were testing it, they were trialing it. They had no details on who those customers were. Unfortunately, their website is. I mean, I'll just I don't know how else to say. It's horrible. There's broken links. I click on pricing it's broken. Some pages don't load, images are missing. So they talk about having to hire 50 new employees before the end of the year. I hope they're hiring some folks that really make it clear what exactly they do, how they sell. This is extremely complicated. If you look at their pricing online, it's confusing because it's per minute. Then there's api calls and their storage and this purchase of tokens. I'm not sure how all that works. Uh, much of the data they reference to mark, I noticed on their websites from 2021. Yeah, so it sounds interesting, but sure does it work?

Speaker 3 20:27

I have no idea yeah, you and I know very well, you know there's there's two parts to building a successful company. One is the technology. The product has to work. That that's a given right. But you can have a product that works in technology. That's really transformational. But if your business model isn't isn't, you know, established, and if the market can't understand uh, you know what it is you do then you're it's going to be tough.

Speaker 2 20:59

It will, it will, and there's clearly some smart people here If you look at the background.

Speaker 3 21:03

Exactly, and the idea makes a lot of sense. There's a need for this.

Speaker 2 21:09

But I don't know what the business value is. Why is there a need? I'm not sure, and they don't talk to that on the site. They don't really say well, this is who we're targeting. These are the best applications. Do you need to have a certain catalog mark in terms of size and scale before this makes sense? I would think so, but what is that size and scale? Not really sure. It doesn't look like it works with live. It looks like it's just on demand.

Speaker 3 21:33

No, it's yeah.

Speaker 2 21:35

I didn't see anything referencing live Part of the money. Note the reason this got some play in the market, of course part of the funding.

Speaker 3 21:52

Nvidia. Nvidia ventures, yes, yeah, but they were also one, two, three, four, five other companies, partners, including intel, by the way, intel capital is in there, yep.

Speaker 2 21:56

So, um, what exactly they're doing here? Not really sure. Hopefully they'll. There'll be some more. Okay, it's great if you can take video content and you can extract from that data. Yeah yeah, but now what am I doing with that data, especially if we're talking about creating association between objects? I don't know. I don't know what the business value is of being able to do that. I've never heard anyone say, man, I wish I could associate objects inside a video together. Well, it's not. It's not advertising.

Speaker 3 22:36

I don't think, yeah, but but if you're going to build an application that is able to analyze video and infer meaning out of that, this is hard to do, you know. And so it appears again I I've not had any conversation with them and in fact only just recently kind of went to the website, which is very hard to really understand. So so that's my caveat here. But if, if they can provide the algorithmic building blocks for someone who says, look, I don't want to handle it, you know, it's like I'm too small or I don't want to deal with that, but I want to be able to bring value so that we can analyze video and we can improve, you know, whatever it is, you know we can bring some new experience to the market. In theory, this would be a library that you could access. That not access that you would implement in your workflow, but how it gets implemented.

Speaker 3 23:35

I don't know why you would do that. Oh, I mean, there's there's some very innovative use cases for for both AI intelligence or gen AI in video and video streaming.

Speaker 2 23:50

So, but what I'm asking is okay, I now have that functionality in my app. How am I making money for that, or how is that impacting my business? I don't understand the business value.

Speaker 3 23:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so, so. So let's face it, a lot of this we've been talking about for so long that people in the industry, that people have kind of said yeah, yeah, yeah, you know I'm tired of hearing about it, but it's the whole thing of there's a particular brand, there's a particular you know object that's on the screen and then that triggers something you know could trigger the next ad, could provide feedback to some other experience, could pop something up on the screen and those things are really really, really hard to do accurately at scale. So you know there's companies out there who have been working on this for a while, but you know the models now are at a point that I think there's a whole new level of scale and accuracy. So one of the things I do find interesting about these guys um, and again, you know it doesn't just because you have an advisor, you know who's notable, you know, doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Speaker 3 25:01

But, um, they, you know they do have the president of atlassian, um, and you know, look, I mean atlassian knows how to build, uh, at scale. You know, look, I mean Atlassian knows how to build at scale. You know SAS, software technology companies, technology companies. So that's interesting. They've got Alex Wang, the founder of Scale AI.

Speaker 2 25:23

Yeah, they've got. They've got a lot of smart people involved.

Speaker 3 25:26

They've got, you know, they've got a couple of professors from Stanford, I don't know.

Speaker 2 25:30

Yeah, but but and.

Speaker 3 25:31

Jeff Katzenberg, you're right, which who? A couple professors from Stanford, I don't know who they are, yeah, but and Jeff Katzenberg, right, which. Who knows what impact that is having? Well, he invested through WonderCoast, right, you're an investor.

Speaker 2 25:38

Doesn't mean you're ever talking to the company again, right? Doesn't mean you're providing day-to-day operations. Help Point is there's no business value right now that they're talking about. There's nothing on the site as a demo. Here's why you need this. So we'll have to hear more. But it's an interesting one to watch, simply because raising 50 million dollars today is is big, just because in terms of how much money costs and whatnot, but at a series a, at 50 million, that's a lot for series a. So you're setting expectations clear with investors that this is. You know this is going to turn to something big if you're taking 50 million at that size. Uh, one more thing here, mark, we'll close this down. Uh, at a very interesting meeting on a New York city this week, meeting with uh Tata consultancy services, so their media entertainment business unit. Um, you know I knew TCS in the market and media entertainment is one of just so many different verticals.

Speaker 1 26:33

Yeah, they're huge.

Speaker 2 26:35

I didn't realize how big they were. Tata is just on a whole nother level, yeah, but the stuff that they're doing for customers across data and analytics, business decision making, how they're using that, the stuff they're doing with AI. You know, what's real interesting is TCS is not a platform, right, they're not a cloud provider. Everyone these days is selling a platform or SaaS or cloud, and what's fascinating is they're doing all the work for the largest media and entertainment customers you can think of, who are running on all the clouds, right? So, aws, google, you know, microsoft, these Oracle these are some of their biggest customers, because their customers are coming to them and saying, okay, they're running in our cloud, but now, you know, we need all these APIs or tie in all this data to link all this stuff together. I could not believe how much business the media entertainment team was doing. They broke out revenue, but also they broke out free cashflow the free cashflow in the media entertainment side.

Speaker 1 27:34

They didn't want me to give out the exact number, but it's in the multi-billions.

Speaker 3 27:38

Wow, that's just media entertainment.

Speaker 2 27:39

Yeah, yeah. How many companies out there are doing that tied to media entertainment and the revenue number? It's in the tens of billions just for media entertainment, media entertainment. So I was. I was blown away with just the work that they're doing, the size of the work that they're doing, how many different segments of the media entertainment, their mark, the market that they're in, and also just you can look this up online, you know, in LinkedIn. I did a little post about this and I included a link.

Speaker 2 28:12

They also have an amazing program for military members, something else I'm going to work with them on, um, which is awesome to see. But their corporate social responsibility programs and the way they work with NGOs and nonprofits is absolutely insane. They are impacting tens of thousands of school kids with regards to training and also things tied to nutrition and health. I didn't know they're also one of the largest, if not the largest, sponsor of the New York City Marathon. So one of the interesting things they do is starting. I think it was in middle school. They do shark tank type pitches where students have to think about hey, here's a simple problem that we could solve using technology in some way. So, um, they nicely invited me to be a judge, so later in the year I'm going to work with some of the kids on that.

Speaker 2 28:59

but it was fascinating to meet with um the different, some of the different groups in media entertainment and you know, it really dawned on me, mark, was that they put something we talked about, you know before and I talked to the streaming summit. Was they put people first?

Speaker 2 29:15

Yeah, yeah, it's true, it's not something they put on paper, it's truly a people first organization, the culture they've built there. When I went around the room and everyone introduced themselves, you know, after a couple of people were like I've been there 18 years, I've been there 23 years, I've been there 15 years, I've been there 20 years. I was like does anybody leave this company? Obviously not. And it was like no, why would we, why would you the? Culture is amazing. The people are amazing. We get paid well, we like what we do.

Speaker 3 29:42

Yeah.

Speaker 2 29:52

You're working with the biggest media companies and operators in the world, I'm sure with that kind of revenue In these days that is extremely rare that people want to stay at a company so long. So the culture that they've built is pretty amazing. I was really just blown away spending the entire day with them. Just how much they do across so many different aspects of media, entertainment and, in particular, the, the data, the advertising, what they're doing with ai, how companies are looking at them to help do this through different cloud services fascinating. So if you want to learn more about what they're doing, look at my post on linkedin.

Speaker 2 30:24

I put up a link um, you don't hear about them that much. And and they sort of also agreed yeah, we kind of don't really do much in the way of of marketing, we don't really talk too much. And and they sort of also agreed yeah, we kind of don't really do much in the way of of marketing, we don't really talk too much. And and they agreed that they should do more of that, which would be good, but uh the use cases were incredible.

Speaker 2 30:38

Yeah, amazing it was. It was good to see. So, mark, that's what we got for this week. Keep this one short. Uh, let's see next week. Uh, we'll see what comes out next week, because we've got the holiday, so it actually might be kind of quiet. So if no news comes out, we'll take a break for July 4th week, Then again, every time we seem to take a break or we think a holiday comes up some company drops something huge. You know of an acquisition, layoffs funding. I don't know.

Speaker 1 31:09

Something.

Speaker 2 31:11

But we'll see. We might take a break For those that are wondering, depending when this drops, but it'll already be up. I did record yesterday, mark, a podcast dedicated just on the CDN topic. Quite a long one, about an hour and 20 minutes. I had a lot to get through, but anyone looking for CDN information, check that out. On the podcast link You'll you'll see a dedicated CDN only. Yeah, uh, any other questions reach out to Mark and I. Uh, every, let's see CNN's up. Yeah, so everything we talked about today is up on LinkedIn, mark. It's all there. Anyone has any questions? Let us know. We appreciate the support, we appreciate everyone listening and we'll be back next week. If not, we'll be back the week after. Stay safe, be careful, don't play with too many fireworks, that's right.

Speaker 1 31:55

Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 31:56

I'm one to talk, cause I will be, but you know do it in a safe way.

Speaker 3 32:01

I want to see all your fingers, dan. Yeah, well, yeah, they're very important. Yes, very important.

Speaker 2 32:06

So everyone be safe. Have so everyone be safe, have a good holiday and we'll talk to you in the next podcast.

Speaker 1 32:13

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 streamingmediablogcom.