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 0:23

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn, running solo this week. Co-host Mark Donegan is returning from IBC, so it'll just be myself today. I'm actually recording today, on Monday, september 16th Normally record on a Friday, but recording on Monday here. A lot of news broke last week that I would have covered on the next week's podcast. But since it's broke last week and I would have covered on the next week's podcast, but since it's broke last week and I'm recording Monday, the benefit for listeners is we're going to go through a lot of news today, which is really good. There's numbers and some other things that came out regarding the venue case, with some dates and whatnot, so a lot of good information to talk about today.

Speaker 2 1:04

First, I want to thank two podcast sponsors. I am now inviting a small number of sponsors in the podcast Tend to be smaller companies I'd like to get some exposure to. So the first two I'd like to thank are IDS. For those that don't IDS, those guys are some of the most efficient backend developers in the industry and they've done some really cool stuff with content discovery systems and processing, custom video processing in the cloud. You can check them out at integrated-digitalcom and the other one's Netskirt. If you don't know Netskirt, I'm actually working on a blog post now talking a little bit more about what they do. And they're a different type of CDN because they're focusing on delivering video within ISPs that serve remote and rural and under-deserved urban areas. So a unique application. They're also targeting specific video applications with hard-to-reach subscribers across rail operators and airlines. So interesting what they're working on Netskirt N-E-T-S-K-R-T Netskirtio.

Speaker 2 2:14

So with that, let's jump into IBC news. I'm not going to go through a lot here. I'll let Mark bring back what he thought was interesting. Almost all the IBC news I've seen so far is vendors working with vendors. The amount of vendor partner deals at IBC this year was huge, which is good from an integration standpoint. But let's be honest, there's no real revenue there and if it is, it's a small amount. Anything where you're working with another vendor hoping to get a lot of revenue from, if you're a vendor channel sales, as we'd call it that takes time to build. That's certainly not going to happen overnight. But I didn't see a lot of customer announcements. I saw a few case studies and what's clear just looking from the IBC website very similar to NAB as well.

Speaker 2 3:06

The show overall is there's just I hate to say it but it's. The reality is there's far too many vendors in the space For the size of the space and the rate of growth for some of these services. There's just too many vendors. It simply can't support them all. So we're going to have to continue to seek consolidation. And people talk about consolidation all the time and as if consolidation works out well for all the companies involved, but many times it does not. Companies will not get the multiple that they really want. It's still hard to get money out there at a low interest rate, so we're still going to see some challenges across the market for the next few years. Make no mistake, this is not going to be easy for many vendors out there.

Speaker 2 3:52

Let's jump into Venue. So there's two separate cases happening here with Venue and some people are sort of confusing the two. So first Venue, which is Disney WBD and Fox. Their antitrust trial with Fubo is going to begin in October 6th of 2025, so next year Separately. Disney WBD and Fox's motion for the expedited hearing appeal on the venue sports injunction has been granted. That opening brief is due September 20th, so in another four days. Fubo's response brief is due November 4th and then you have Disney WBD and Fox's reply brief due back November 25th. Now the order also says, quote the appeal should be heard as soon as practical following completion of the briefing. So there is a possibility here that we could have a ruling on the injunction by the end of November or soon after, if the last brief is due on November 25th. So we may hear some more on the legal side in the next 90 days, which would be nice either way.

Speaker 2 5:19

Next let's go into DirecTV and Disney. I had a whole list of things I was going to cover last week because the dispute was still going on and there were all these different filings and DirecTV reaching out to FCC and whatnot. But we don't have to go through any of that now. Bottom line is they've reached a distribution agreement in principle. Now this is they've reached it in principle and DirecTV restored Disney channels while the companies worked to finalize the agreement. But just to be clear, there's no agreement in place yet. It's agreement in principle. As part of the terms, what they announced was Disney+, hulu and ESPN+ will be included in select DirecTV packages under a wholesale agreement and made available on a la carte basis. It also says that DirecTV will have the opportunity to offer multiple genre-specific options such as sports entertainment, kids and family, inclusive of Disney's linear networks, along with Disney+, hulu and ESPN. So having genre-specific options, I think that's good. It's also one of the points DirecTV was really fighting for that they said. And then, finally, directv also gets the rights to distribute Disney's upcoming ESPN flagship D2C service upon its launch and at no additional cost to DirecTV consumers. So it sounds like DirecTV got what they wanted from this. But until the deal is done, you know, nothing's official until the paperwork is signed. But I don't expect anything would go sideways here. They put out a press release, restored the channels, so I expect we'll hear more about a deal being official before too long.

Speaker 2 7:10

Let's go now to Charter. Charter announced an early renewal of their distribution agreement with WBD. So under what they're calling a multi-year pack, the ad-supported version of Max will be bundled with all Spectrum TV Select packages for no additional fee. This is very similar to the deal that Charter recently inked with Disney for Disney Plus and ESPN Plus, and they also linked one did a deal with Paramount Global for Paramount Plus, nbet, alongside agreement also with AMC Plus. So Charter has cut a lot of distribution deals as of late, which is really good.

Speaker 2 7:56

Now today, monday September 16th, charter also announced some new bundle pricing. Some new bundle pricing talking about bill credits, guaranteed pricing for up to three years, no annual contracts. They're also raising the lowest tier of their internet service at no cost. So they've announced a lot here, but let me just sort of cut it down to what this really is. So they're including a new 500 megabit internet plan starting at $30 a month, but that's only when it's bundled with two lines of spectrums mobile or video service. Any spectrum internet or internet ultra customers who have speeds right now 400 megs will automatically get increased to 600 and no additional cost.

Speaker 2 8:48

Now charter's talking a lot about setting a standard for customer commitment, and I think that's a good thing. But you really have to ask questions here and read the fine print. So a couple of things they're saying is they're going to fix any service disruption quickly, including dispatching a technician the same day if the customer requests it prior to 5 pm. If they do that, hey, all the power to them. I think that's actually awesome.

Speaker 2 9:17

Now here's the one that's interesting If a neighborhood experiences an outage that lasts more than two hours, customers will automatically. You won't have to call in, but you'll automatically get a credit for the full day. The problem here is when I reached out to Charter, I asked if it's prorated for the day only and they said yes. So if you're paying call it $60 for your service on a month, you're going to get a credit of $2 for that. If you're paying $30 for internet, you're getting a credit of a dollar. So you know, credits sound really nice, but when they're prorated and if you're down for hours and you're getting credit of a dollar honestly, charter it's not that big of a deal and you're getting credit of a dollar, honestly, charter it's not that big of a deal. So I don't think the way they're calling this out in the press release it's, as the title says, unprecedented. It's really not. They're also talking about some of the things they're going to do. As far as notifying users within 15 minutes of an outage, they're saying they'll notify effective customers. They're not saying how there's no contracts for any residential services. I don't know if they were on charter before, but most didn't have contracts previously, so I'm not sure how their contracting was offered. So that's a little bit of information there from Charter.

Speaker 2 10:47

Okay, now let's go to NFL. There's a lot here around NFL. So again, because I was originally going to record this last week I was going to talk about the first weekend of NFL across NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV and some of the others. It's now been two weeks. Overall, I have not seen many issues on NFL Sunday Ticket from YouTube. It's been two weekends of just really good service.

Speaker 2 11:14

The issues I am seeing are still tons and tons and tons of user issues Many users not knowing how to update their viewing location. Many complaining like I can't see the game. Yeah, it's blacked out in your region. It's incredible how many still don't understand blackout restrictions or how multi-view works. Uh, a lot of complaints still about hey, let me pick all my own games. You can't do that right now. If you're getting NFL Sunday ticket through YouTube TV, you can't do that.

Speaker 2 11:43

Youtube, I will say, has done a great job. Just before the season started, they launched brand new support sections on the website, easy to get to, very detailed. Here's everything you need to know. But there's still a lot of confusion out there and part of the confusion comes from the fact that NFL Sunday ticket subscribers can build any combination of NFL Sunday Ticket games that they want, with similar start times, in a multi-view functionality, which is called Build a Multi-View Feature, and that includes NFL Red Zone. But if you subscribe to YouTube TV's base plan, local games are available multi-view but in limited, pre-selected combinations.

Speaker 2 12:29

So that's where some users are getting hung up, not too surprising, but most of the issues I'm seeing are definitely user issues. There were some issues, for sure that you can tell the usual issues we're going to see when you're streaming anything on the internet. I'm seeing some some comments, reddit, twitter, other places just in terms of some audio issues, syncing issues, some startup issues. So so definitely some issues with consumers, which we're always going to have, but I didn't see anything widespread. I didn't see any outages of any kind and overall I also looked for opening weekend. I looked at not only YouTube NFL Sunday Ticket but also Fubo, paramount Plus, sling TV, fox Sports, peacock. Everybody worked really well from what I can tell. Fubo, for me, had the fastest startup times of any games by far, and this was I only tested on Fire TV and Apple TV. Peacock did seem to have some audio issues for their Friday night game in Brazil. I experienced some issues there, as did others. That was the number one complaint online. But overall I will just say everyone had a good weekend First. Two good weekends, really. So let's go out with streaming, which is Peacock, nfl Plus and local stations in Green Bay, milwaukee and Philadelphia.

Speaker 2 14:12

Now what's interesting here is NBC Sports did not break out Peacock-only viewership numbers. Well, why didn't anybody just ask them? I found that so odd. Everybody reported the numbers, didn't say that they didn't break out any Peacock, and then nobody asked them. Well, they were happy to give it out when I asked them. Now, they didn't give out viewers on Peacock, but what they said was the concurrent device count for Peacock was 8.6 million. Now, obviously that doesn't equate to exact viewership, but that helps us. It's the same similar way methodology that they broke out numbers for the exclusive NFL wildcard game earlier in the year the 14.2 million viewers should be noted. That data is according to the custom fast national plus live same day data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics. So that's the first one.

Speaker 2 15:07

Next, nbc Sports said the average minute audience for the Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens game that was the kickoff game averaged 4.6 million viewers via Peacock, nbc Sports and NFL digital platforms. In the second quarter it peaked at 33 million viewers across digital and TV. So 4.6 million streaming and total 33 million. When you add in TV ESPN for their Monday Night Football, their opener averaged 20.5 million viewers. But the problem is that was across ESPN, abc, espn2, espn Plus Spanish ESPN, so we have no breakout there in streaming.

Speaker 2 15:55

Next let's go to Amazon, their opening for Thursday Night Football. This is, as usual, confusing here because it comes from Nielsen, which provides no transparency of any kind. So Amazon says according to Nielsen, the Thursday night football kickoff game had an average audience of 14.9 million viewers. Now it says average audience, yet it doesn't say average minute audience. Now I reached out to Amazon.

Speaker 2 16:28

Thank you, amazon, they did confirm for me right away that the numbers are AMA average minute audience, even though Nielsen doesn't use the word minute anywhere in the press release. Also, note the figures are from Nielsen's panel-only measurement. It does not include their big data plus panel metrics. So the problem I have, and I've always had with Nielsen and when they're used for events like Thursday Night Football on Prime is Nielsen provides no methodology for classifying a viewer and to date they have not been willing to answer how they track viewership when, for Thursday Night Football, the stream auto-loads on the Amazon website or in the carousel on your Fire TV platform, it auto-loads. So if I go to Amazoncom to buy a product and it auto-loads and I stay in the homepage for five seconds and leave, am I a viewer? I don't know. Do I have to interact with the streamer? Click on it to be counted as a viewer?

Speaker 2 17:29

I don't know Nielsen won't. They never have and they won't say because if they did, I guarantee you the viewership numbers would would be lower, not just for TNF, but for all the games that they're measuring. We also obviously don't get average viewing time. If I come in, I see the stream for 45 seconds. Am I still counted as a viewer? If I never come back? Don't know. So you know, nielsen, as always, provides zero transparency. They don't want to because if they do, it's bad for their business. And yet companies like Amazon and others still use Nielsen in absence of a better solution in the market, which is, frankly, just really sad. Because, as an industry, all we're talking about is viewership and what viewership needs to grow to and what CPMs need to be and how targeting is going to work, and we don't even have baseline metrics of what is a viewer Don't know. The thing that frustrates me is that everyone regurgitates all this stuff and no one asks questions. Why is nobody saying like hey, nielsen, what is an actual viewer? Define it for us. You don't hear anyone talk about it. So that's to me that's super frustrating. But there's the numbers.

Speaker 2 18:48

As reported, a deal with Amazon Prime Video Today came out with Everpass Media, so businesses and other commercial establishments can now get Thursday night Amazon Prime Video games in their businesses. So this is a similar content deal that Everpass Media has done with. Let's see, they got NFL Sunday Ticket and also Peacock, so a bunch of sports events with Peacock as well. Olympics football. You can get those in bars and restaurants and other places. So that's good. Another option for bars and restaurants to get Thursday night football.

Speaker 2 19:27

Talking football here, nfl Commissioner Roger Goodell said that he was on a podcast and he said that 80 to 90% of NFL games are shown on free television, which is true in home markets. But I thought it was funny because he called the NFL league's broadcast standards quote as fan friendly as you can get. End quote Fan friendly. The NFL is distributed across more than 10 platforms this year. That's not my idea of fan friendly, including four different platforms exclusively just for streaming Prime Video, peacock, espn and Netflix. So calling it fan friendly in local markets, you know, in home markets, is nice, but it ignores the reality that many fans support clubs that aren't in their local market. So let's see, this past weekend I was in Florida. I wanted to watch the Jets game, but if I turn on any of the local channels. I can't. I'm getting the Jacksonville Jaguars. I don't want to watch the Jaguars, so it's not available to me. Of course I'm not in my home market, but this idea that now fans of a particular NFL team you know, stay or live in the market they grew up in, you know is, is pretty crazy. Now we know why the NFL does this money greed. They don't care about the fan experience. I've been saying that forever. But but I think it's funny for the commissioner to say, quote our media policies are as fan friendly as you can get, end quote. It's just so tone deaf with reality for sports leagues whose games are spread across so many different platforms.

Speaker 2 21:17

Let's go into Amazon. So we don't have any update on this yet. It was reported a week ago that Amazon is in late stage talks to stream all the Valley sports broadcasts of 12 NBA franchises, five MLB teams and nine NHL teams on Amazon. Prime Sources are saying, based on different people reporting this, the fans would pay about $20 a month to access their home teams local games through Prime. Interesting if that happens. We haven't heard any other news yet, but if price points are already being talked about, sounds like at least the discussion between the two companies are pretty far along, so we'll have to wait to hear about that.

Speaker 2 22:02

One other piece of amazon here. They put out some numbers saying rings of power season 2 reached 40 million viewers in its first 11 days. Um, they also talked about tens of millions don't know what that means tuned into season one since august. I've seen some talk about these numbers online but honestly it's tough to put it in context. The numbers aren't very specific and, compared to the first season of the series Amazon talked about, it had 25 million viewers in the first day of distribution. So far, rings of Power 2, season two 2 definitely appears to be trailing, uh, season 1, but that's all the numbers we have. Uh, as of now. Uh, going into netflix uh, no new news here from netflix.

Speaker 2 22:56

They did have a presentation, um, that was interesting at ibc where they were talking about advances in terms of their live streaming tech stack. I'm working to get those slides, to get that online on LinkedIn. Put a little post up. It was interesting to see how they listed out, from their first event to the upcoming Tyson Jake Paul fight, what they're supporting in terms of Dolby bit rate 4k. Interesting to see their progression there. So I'll get that up. Uh, once I get it from them. I'm assuming I can get it with them. Hopefully, sometimes those presentations, while they're allowed to be shown in a room at a conference, uh, the speakers then not allowed to actually archive it or put it online. That happens, so we'll see, but I'll try and get it.

Speaker 2 23:45

Also, there are just some people talking about Netflix online and, frankly, man the stuff they say they shouldn't even be allowed to speak. I mean, it's just, it's so absurd. Someone put up on Netflix because of what was going on with the stock and it was up and down, a little like Netflix always is. They said quote because of what was going on with the stock and it was up and down, a little like Netflix always is. They said quote lots of people still suspect companies floating ever upward on a Ponzi scheme of other companies' content. You think Netflix is a Ponzi scheme and you come out and say that just without any proof. I mean that's slander. They could sue you for that, not that Netflix would. They don't care what this person thinks, but just it's incredible how few people don't understand balance sheets, what the profit and loss is of companies, how much they're spending on content, the number of users they have, it's just. It fascinates me just in terms of how people share information that is so factually inaccurate. But there's been a lot of talk about Netflix as of late.

Speaker 2 24:53

Let's move into Crunchyroll. I love this because Crunchyroll gave out some numbers here, even though their percentages they're still interesting. Know their percentages, they're still interesting. So the president of Country Roll estimates the average cost of producing animation content had increased between 40 to 60% over the past few years due to the increasing pricing power of creators in Japan and a limited supply of animators. That's interesting. I would have had no clue that it's up at a median of 50%. As a result, crunchyroll and Sony are trying to co-produce shows and actually train more animators. I thought that was interesting. One other stat that they released this was cool because I've never seen this stat released before. Sony's CFO said quote about 30% of PlayStation Network service customers watch animation, but only 5% have Crunchyroll accounts. So just shows you the penetration rate there in terms of how important Sony feels Crunchyroll is and how they're going to work to increase that penetration across PlayStation Network customers. So that takes us in here to Egeo.

Speaker 2 26:15

I've got some things I'll close here on Egeo. So, for those that didn't hear, egeo announced that it voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, a week ago. The company is still listed on NASDAQ. The way I understand it is, they'll only be delisted if they don't maintain a certain price point over a certain period of time. If they don't maintain certain price point over a certain period of time. Um now, just because they filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy does not mean they're going out of business. Um, with this, they also announced that they received approximately 15.6 million in financing from Linn Rock. Uh, following approval from the court. Uh, cause, now this is there's a lot here that goes on where the court's going to decide what happens here. So, with that money, egeo will continue to operate like it is today and throughout the sale process and Chapter 11 cases. So Egeo is not going under. They're not disappearing. Employees are not being fired. With the announcement, now what's going to happen to Egeo Still to be seen, and this is the way it's going to play out. So there's a 40-day bid procedure process and once all the bids are in, the court is going to decide what's best for the company.

Speaker 2 27:39

Now the purpose of the filing is so Egeo can sell off parts of the business that no longer wants, or the entire company, which would allow for continued operation of the company's business or businesses under new ownership. As of now, it's not an asset sale, but it's a business sale or the entire company. Now, the reason Egeo does this is, frankly, just the balance sheet. You're running out of cash is, frankly, just the balance sheet. You're running out of cash. What allows them to continue operations here and while they're not selling off assets is the fact that they got $15.6 million in financing from Linrock so they can continue to run the company.

Speaker 2 28:15

Now Egeo says they've recently engaged in discussions with several parties that have been involved in the business that could be interested in acquiring all or parts of the company's businesses and, by using what is now a court-supervised sale process, they're looking to get the highest bid or the best bid for their assets. Now, keep in mind the court gets to decide this, so you could have someone come and say, okay, I'd like to pay X for Egeo, but I would only want the assets. Another company could come along and say, well, I'm willing to pay X for Egeo, but I would only want the assets. Another company could come along and say, well, I'm willing to pay less for Egeo, but I'm going to keep all the employees. Well, there's a high level probability the court's going to go with the lower price because it keeps the employees. It's better for the employees. So my point here is we don't know what's going to go on, because the court has a lot of say in what happens here.

Speaker 2 29:07

Now, as part of this process, egeo's entered into something called a stalking horse, which is an asset purchase agreement with Linrock, which is its primary lender, and Linrock has agreed to acquire assets of the company through a credit bid for $110 million of the existing secured debt. So, very simple, what this means is the reason Linrock does a stalking horse here is that prevents any from coming in and saying, okay, I'll give a million dollars for the company and then all of a sudden it's sold. So the minimum bid here is $110 million for the entire company. Again, that doesn't mean that that's what the company will necessarily go for, because there's a 40-day bid process which has already started. We're going to know pretty soon what happens to Egeo. Now they also say they're targeting the sales process to be completed in approximately 80 days. Now they also say they're targeting the sales process to be completed in approximately 80 days, if not sooner. So that's something to look at as well.

Speaker 2 30:10

Now there's been all kinds of crazy nonsense on LinkedIn by people who have no understanding how this deal works, frankly, have no background in the CDN space, have no relationships with companies that they might be talking to, relationships with companies that they might be talking to. That is putting out all kinds of crazy ideas, including. I saw someone say well, I'll bet you anything, verizon buys it. What verizon couldn't wait to offload? Edgecast? Verizon is not buying this back. I've also seen people say well, you know, youtube will buy this to get more capacity. No, that's not what youtube does. That's not how they add capacity. Same with amazon prime video or for Amazon Web Services with CloudFront. The last thing companies like that do is acquire large network assets running different hardware and platform systems that they don't use or want, just to add capacity. That's not the way it works.

Speaker 2 31:04

Now, what could happen here with Egeo? There's a lot of different variables. They really have three lines. Well, they have four what I will call groups of businesses. You have the Limelight network and you have the Edgecast network. Those are still two separate networks. On top of that, you have Uplink and then you have the apps and security business. Top of that you have uplink and then you have the apps and security business. So edgio could potentially sell off certain lines of the business and still operate as edgio, just offering a smaller product offering. That's totally possible. So we don't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 31:42

We've seen a lot of people reference okay. Well, what's going to happen is they're going to sell their contracts on the CDN side to Akamai, just like we saw Lumen and Stackpath do. Well, here's the problem. Lumen and Stackpath did not have as much overlap with Akamai already in customers. Limelight has a huge amount of overlap, edgecast had a bunch of overlap and now combined as Egeo, there's quite a bit. And remember, a smaller percentage of Egeo's customers make up the largest percentage of their revenue. In their last filing it was somewhere around 18 to 20 customers were making up over 70% of the revenue. And we also know that the two largest customers at the time of their last filing that they said this was Amazon and Sony. So with Akamai already having some Amazon business which we know because Amazon is a multi-source CDN distributor, right, they're using multiple CDNs.

Speaker 2 32:42

I would not expect any CDN to go out and acquire contracts from a competitor. When it's a contract from a company that they're already serving, it doesn't make any sense At an extremely low price point. Yeah, maybe it's worth it, but you know that you'd lose part of that business if you acquire those contracts, because the whole reason they're with multiple CDNs is they don't want to put all their traffic on one network. So I've seen a lot of people speculating kind of crazy things without understanding what's going on. I'm not going to make any comments and people will ask me online of what I think will happen. I will not. A lot of the conversations I'm having either are under NDA or are just off the record in terms of companies looking at different vendors, looking at different pieces of the business units here, what they might be interested in. I'm not going to go into any of that. So whatever the news is that happens, I will put that news out when that happens, but otherwise I won't be commenting on it.

Speaker 2 33:39

Uh, also some interesting things here, just in terms of the stock, wow. So things here just in terms of the stock, wow. So last Friday the stock closed up 130% for the day. Now, mind you, it obviously fell a lot In July. The stock was $12 a share Last Friday. It closed at $2.14.

Speaker 2 34:09

But here's what's absolutely crazy. On a normal day, egeo trades about 350,000 shares. Last Friday it traded 105 million shares in the day 300 times its normal volume and it ended the day with a market cap of 12.5 million. At one point the market cap was down to under 7 million 105 million shares. So what's happening there is, you know, people might be thinking who's buying the stock of a company that's filed for chapter 11? Well, at one point the stock was down to, I think, 70 some odd cents. Now, all of a sudden, it's $2.14 on Now, all of a sudden it's $2.14 two days later. So somebody or I should say somebody, many people obviously with 105 million shares trading hands are playing on the fluctuation of the stock there between, call it, $0.75 and $2. And it was bouncing up and down nonstop. So man shares are trading really, really fast.

Speaker 2 35:17

Today, monday September 16th, the market's almost closed not yet but the stock is back down to $1.35. But interesting volume. On Monday, september 16th It'll be around $5 million by the end of the day. So a lot lower than $105 million, but also a lot larger than the 350,000 shares it usually trades. They'll end the day. Egeo will, with their market cap of around $8.5 million. So that's the latest on Egeo.

Speaker 2 35:44

You have questions on that? Reach out to me. Happy to break it down further. Uh, and then the final two things I'll do here is I'll talk about some some new uh CEOs. So Zigzy has a new CEO, mark Aldrich. He was the CEO of Think Analytics for eight months. Before that, he spent five years at AWSs, where his uh final job there was gm of global media entertainment. So he's he's the new ceo now over at zigzy. And uh, mainstreaming uh, they replaced their entire c-level suite, um, so they have a new ceo. Uh, they have a new CEO, they have a new CFO, they have a new CSO and then they have a new CRO and they announced this all at once. So basically everyone but the CTO and the CMO. So four new C-level positions, and I talked about this maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago, but I went and looked up just amongst vendors. In the last two and a half years there's been more than 250 changes at the C-level at companies in our industry Just vendors I'm not talking content owners, broadcasters, just vendors alone, and there's probably ones out there.

Speaker 2 37:00

I just completely missed or didn't see. So why is that? Well, because the market's not doing great as far as valuations go. It's hard to raise money, grow your business. So boards and others are coming in and saying, okay, it's time for new leadership, it's time for change.

Speaker 2 37:22

Many are making mistakes in terms of the people they're bringing in just because they're bringing people who don't understand the business we're in. You have to understand the business. You can't just be someone who, well, you know, I had a SaaS business, a CEO running, you know, software for medical companies, and then they think they're going to come into our industry and just scale it because it's a SaaS business. It doesn't work that way. We've seen a lot of bad hires in that regard. So the reality is it's not going to get better anytime soon, right? Not doom and gloom here, but this is just reality.

Speaker 2 37:57

There's too many vendors in the market, as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, for the size of the market and the grade of growth that we're seeing. Some segments of our market are not growing, they're shrinking. For those that track the CDM market, as I put up a few weeks ago at cdmmarketcom, if it wasn't for two vendors in the CDM market growing the market overall. This year, total revenue of all vendors combined would have shrunk by 15% year over year. That's a big number. So this idea that everything is growing is just not the case.

Speaker 2 38:31

I saw a post today that was put up on LinkedIn by Disney Hotstar and they talked about how they optimized their encoding again and they called out specifically just how much bits they're saving from every single person who's watching a piece of video. Well, okay, that's less bits delivered. So it could be a bump for maybe a transcoding partner who had to retranscode all that, but that's a one-time hit. So if you think these things aren't happening in the market, you're not seeing the data points that customers not vendors, customers are putting out on a monthly basis, talking about how they're working to do less with more still to this day, and that's not going to. That's not going to end anytime soon, unfortunately. So that's the reality of what's going on in the market.

Speaker 2 39:18

Mark will be back next week. We'll go through any other IBC news he wants to go through. I'll also be opening up a call for speakers for the NAB Show Streaming Summit. I'll open that up in November. For those that didn't hear the podcast last week I announced we'll be in the same location in the West Hall in the lobby, which is awesome. It was a great spot last year.

Speaker 2 39:37

I expect the show to grow organically, 20% to 25% next year just in terms of size, got three tracks again, all kinds of new things we're going to do to show next year just to really fine tune the experience for attendees. So I'm super excited. I also have I have a lot of companies reaching out already broadcast content, owners, ott platforms where they want their C-level executives to come and talk about you know fireside chat, what they're working on and we're only in September. Imagine what it's going to be like in April of next year when we're going to have all these additional other events. You know NFL on Christmas on Netflix and a lot of other amazing things to talk about. So super excited for the show next year.

Speaker 2 40:21

If you have any questions in that reach out call for your speakers will go up. Sponsorships will go up. I expect slots to go much faster this year as far as speaking in sponsorships than last year. Last year we had almost 40 sponsors, which was amazing, but I will run out of spots. So when you see the Call for Speakers goes up. You want to get involved in some way. You have ideas, questions? Reach out. I always prefer people calling or just running through their idea with me, as opposed to lots of back and forth emails, but you'll see that in November. Also, if you want to be added to my list of when I announced the call for speakers, just shoot me an email danatdamierebercom. I'll add you to the list. So that's what I got this week.

Speaker 2 41:00

Thanks everyone for listening. You have any questions? Let me know. Everything I talked about today is already up on LinkedIn, so just go follow me and you can see that Mark and I will be back next week talking about IBC and also some, uh, additional news tied to transcoding. Uh, there's, there's some interesting news that came out there with IBC, where we can actually talk, some customers and whatnot, um, and then, before too long, we're going to have earnings again from Netflix. Uh, they do. And then, before too long, we're going to have earnings again from Netflix. They do them earlier than anybody else, but some more interesting news coming up. Appreciate everyone listening. Any questions, let me know Everyone. Have a great week, thanks very much.

Speaker 1 41:33

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.