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 0:22

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I'm Dan Rayburn. Welcome to the Dan Rayburn Podcast. I'm Dan Rayburn, long co-host, mark Donegan.

Speaker 2 0:27

Back for another week Recording Friday, december 13th. We took a little bit of a break there as I had to travel, but back in town and, as usual, just news left and right. News left and right, yes. So we're going to go through as much as we can today and try and keep this digestible for everyone listening. A lot of news around content, some infrastructure news, some stats, obviously, some interesting things going on between Warner Bros, discovery and splitting out some of the business.

Speaker 2 0:58

Before that, let's just get into, unfortunately, some of the not greatest news in our industry, which is that there's been more layoffs and there's definitely more coming. It's going to be a challenging time for some people in December. So recently Dolby did a round of layoffs, endeavor obviously, egeo, which most people know about, but that's going to end up being hundreds of employees. Agora has done some, quilt has done some, televisa, univision, condé Nast so not just vendors, but content owners and broadcasters as well. And when I'm talking to the companies that are doing the layoffs, it's just that end of year didn't meet the numbers they were hoping for. Pulling back on some of the projections, potentially for 2025. So they have to make changes. So unfortunate, but that's the reality of the industry that we're in. Many are still looking to find ways to get growth in the new year, and by growth I mean revenue growth year over year, so it's still going to be challenging.

Speaker 2 2:02

There are going to be some more layoffs coming in the new year as well. Reality of the market. In April I'm going to do another session the last session of the day at the NAB Streaming Summit, where I'm going to talk about what you need to do to help yourself in terms of setting yourself up for success and getting a job. Moving to another potential job Anyone who gets laid off. Leading up to the show again, I'm going to offer a free pass to anybody who happens to be at NAB recently laid off Last year I think it was almost 60 people took advantage of that, so we'll have some more information leading up to that, but that's the reality of what we're seeing in the market. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 3 2:46

Yeah, just to jump in real quick, I had an interesting conversation just yesterday with somebody who was asking for my input on actually how to get into speaking and kind of make themselves a little more visible. Good question, yeah, it is. And I asked the person. I said well, what are you trying to achieve? And this person's very gainfully employed, you know, near as I can tell, you know, as at least I hope I don't believe at any risk of losing their job. But you know they made the observation like, hey, you know, it's like I want to just kind of get myself more known so that you know if you know if things were to change or whatever. Get myself more known so that you know if you know if things were to change or whatever.

Speaker 3 3:30

And one of the things you know that I that I mentioned this person I think listeners should just not dismiss, is it? Don't wait until you need you know, until you kind of need to get yourself out there, start building your LinkedIn profile, start commenting intelligently. You know, put yourself out there. Yeah, contribute I love that word, dan, contribute, and that was really my feedback. You know I was giving this person some ideas about how to, you know, maybe begin to moderate and do panels and speak. But I basically said, look, you know that's going to take a little time. You got to get known. You need to practice your skills. You know, you just don't suddenly jump up on stage, but you can start tomorrow, you know, contribute to threads on LinkedIn, make yourself you know and be smart about it. Say smart things and people will. They watch that stuff.

Speaker 2 4:21

Yeah, it's good advice you have to contribute, you have to create content.

Speaker 3 4:25

But you have to start now, though. You know, I think to you know too many. It's like oh, I'm good, you know, and then the day comes, and then they're scrambling, and you know, these things take time. Build a reputation.

Speaker 2 4:37

It's a good point, mark, and I'll talk more about that at the show for sure how you can do that on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is a great resource if you use it properly. Yes, as long as you don't allow it to use you.

Speaker 3 4:50

Well, that's true, because it can, it can.

Speaker 2 4:52

So let's jump into some news here. So who likes paying more for YouTube TV?

Speaker 3 4:56

Oh, I love it, Dan. I hope so because it's coming up by 10.

Speaker 2 5:00

Because I'm going to have an opportunity 10 bucks a month Because I'm going to have an opportunity 10 bucks a month Effective immediately for most new customers, others starting January 13th for existing customers. Youtube last raised its price to $73 in March 2023. Before that, for those that remember, it was $65. Before that, I think at one point wasn't it $35? It started there. I think it was $35't it 35? It started there. I think it was 35. I remember it as 50. But as usual, youtube says the price increase is due to, quote, rising content costs yeah, no surprise at

Speaker 2 5:38

83 monthly, though if you're on a double player definitely in a triple play bundle it's more expensive now than cable tv. Yes, if you throw in hardware if you're on a double player definitely in a triple play bundle it's more expensive now than cable TV. Yes, if you throw in hardware, if you're using a hardware, dvr, cloud or all that, ok, it's not, but eighty three dollars, yeah, it's getting expensive. Let's go to FIFA. They've finally agreed to a broadcast deal. They've been shopping around Apple for a while. Apple didn't want to pay them what they wanted, so they announced a deal with DAZN for the 2025 Club World Cup tournament. Now, according to Athletic, it's worth roughly a billion dollars. We don't have confirmation of that by either FIFA or DAZN.

Speaker 2 6:20

All 63 matches are going to be available for free on DAZN. I think that's the key here, keyword free. Dazn also has the option to sub-license to local free-to-air broadcasters as part of the deal as well. So you know DAZN has been super active in terms of what they've been doing on the soccer side. That's something that they've been doing on the soccer side. That's something that they've been they've been doing for a long period of time. So I wasn't too surprised when I saw that they got this deal. Interesting to know how they're going to sub-license some of that. And also, just how do you make back a billion dollars in revenue if it is in fact, a billion dollars yeah, Sorry, not a billion dollars in cost? How do you make back more than that in revenue?

Speaker 3 7:04

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 7:05

So we'll have to wait to get some more information, but at least that deal is now done. Let's jump into some numbers here. We got some new numbers. Epic Games said that 14 million concurrent players partied up for the remix the Finite finale and more than 3 million streamed it online. Interesting here because it was a live streaming event and they called it a new Fortnite record for an in-game concert. So 3 million people streamed it online concurrently. So that's new as far as a record goes. Now one ISP in the US told me the concert and other associated downloads helped them hit an all-time new peak traffic mark with their internet traffic.

Speaker 1 7:47

And that's across for the owner.

Speaker 2 7:48

It's across peering CDN cache and transit. Yeah, and it was up 43% over the average of all the peaks in the rest of the month. That's incredible. That's so for all the talk of video. There isn't much growth in the volume of streaming bits year over year. Overall year over year bits, total bits delivered are pretty flat, but gaming downloads are a different story and we're seeing massive year over year growth within ISPs for downloads.

Speaker 1 8:18

It's a big number into that.

Speaker 2 8:27

Kai sent reclaimed a record for the most simultaneous twitch subscription streams at uh 727 000 just a little over that. So interesting to see what we're uh having there with downloads. Also this isp. This isp told me and mark, this is such a good thing and I don't, I don't get this. But he said, why are some of these gaming companies releasing updates on the same night of Amazon? Thursday night football.

Speaker 1 8:51

They know the football schedule.

Speaker 2 8:52

Why are they pushing this stuff on our network at the exact same time as the live stream? It's a great question. What are gaming companies doing? It's just common sense. You can't push that out by another day.

Speaker 3 9:04

Yeah, yeah, really Do it on Wednesday night. Maybe not Friday night, you know, but like Wednesday night, come on.

Speaker 2 9:13

A couple comments from ISPs around that they wish that these were staggered.

Speaker 3 9:18

It's common sense, let's jump into some numbers here.

Speaker 2 9:22

Talking about Thursday night football on Amazon, so Nielsen released its big data plus panel measurement numbers for the December 5th game. So it's a combination of multiple sources of data. Just to make it clear, so this is the largest game ever for Amazon, thursday night football, with 18.4 million AMA average minute audience, largest for them. Now, obviously, the caveat here is Nielsen doesn't disclose the methodology of how they define the term viewer, so there's a lot there that we do not know and just don't think we'll get. But that's the new number for Prime AMA 18.4 million. That's the one to beat.

Speaker 2 10:09

Going back to soccer, on CNBC, alex Sherman sat down with the MLS commissioner and it was a fascinating conversation because he was asked well, you've taken these games off broadcast. You've gone to streaming. What was the real reason for that? And what the MLS commissioner highlighted was that when their games were on broadcast TV you're ready for this? They had 60 different start times for the games. I had no idea. 60? Yeah, what? This just doesn't make sense. Yeah, with MLS and Apple just doesn't make sense. Yeah, with.

Speaker 1 10:46

MLS and.

Speaker 2 10:47

Apple TV+. They have two start times, that's it.

Speaker 2 10:52

He was also asked well, you gave this to Apple TV+, or Apple, I should say, which put it on Apple TV+. Yeah, they don't have as many subs as, say, Amazon or Netflix say Amazon or Netflix. And the commissioner responded and he said that he wanted a streaming partner to prioritize them so they wouldn't get lost on a larger service Interesting. Now, he did not give an update on the number of subscribers MLS has and he said the reason MLS hasn't done that is because of Apple. Apple does not allow them to talk to that yeah.

Speaker 2 11:25

He did say that he believes that both MLS and Apple in 2025 will provide, and he wants to provide, more transparency into the subscriber number. But for all those that complain of like, mls should give us more information. They can't without Apple's permission. They can't, which Mark just shows really the dominance of Apple or some of these platforms, because Apple doesn't own the content.

Speaker 3 11:49

Mls- does no, but Apple can say it's our platform, right, you can't reveal any.

Speaker 2 11:57

Yeah, yeah, so interesting there.

Speaker 3 12:00

Any stats.

Speaker 2 12:01

Let's go to YouTube real quick. Youtube just put out some numbers for 2024. They say that viewers globally streamed over a billion hours of content every day on tvs so specific to tvs only and also watched over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices. They also gave out just a quick stat no other context here, but they said the share of videos uploaded to YouTube in 4k is up by over 35% year over year. Interesting Now, that's the volume of videos, though yeah, that's not tied to the length of the videos.

Speaker 3 12:41

Yeah, yeah, and and and. You know what that doesn't surprise me? Look at mobile devices. Even a mid range mobile device has a 4k sensor, you know the capture.

Speaker 2 12:53

Well, they said uploaded to 4k, they didn't say streamed it delivered.

Speaker 3 12:57

Yeah, yeah, and I'm finding. So that's a very important observation. I'm finding more and more when I'm on desktop and you know, usually it would always default the red, like if it was 4K, it would basically play in 4K. If I had the bandwidth, and I almost always do so, it would always play. I'm finding now it's 1080p, some cases 720p, and I have to go select 1080p, or it's 1080p and I have to select. So which sort of makes sense? You know?

Speaker 2 13:35

how many. We talked about this. Yeah, how many people.

Speaker 3 13:39

Exactly, exactly. And how many viewers even know the difference? And how many times do I watch and I don't change it, like more often than not, because I don't even check, because I don't care, because the quality is perfectly fine. So, yeah, it's good enough, but interesting stat there.

Speaker 2 13:57

I'd love to get some stats from them on playback and 4K. That would be interesting.

Speaker 3 14:01

Yeah, that would be super interesting.

Speaker 2 14:03

Let's go to SiriusXM. So they announced they're going to move its marketing and other resources away from what they call quote, high cost, high churn audiences and streaming. Yeah, in a new cost cutting move, they've appointed a new EVP and COO in Joe Inzarrillo, which many listeners know from the BAM tech and Disney days.

Speaker 3 14:20

Oh wow, to bam tech and disney. Oh wow, he's leaving, huh, uh, yeah, he was the cpo and cto.

Speaker 2 14:28

He was there for, oh, a couple years, more than a couple years, I think I'll have to go look at linkedin uh. Sirius xm also delivered updated 2025 revenue guidance of uh 8.5 billion. Yeah, so it's below its 2024 revenue guidance of 8.675 billion.

Speaker 3 14:42

So the wall street didn't wall street didn't really like that.

Speaker 2 14:47

Even though it was very slight. The company is looking at saving a couple hundred million dollars based on what they're doing Now. They didn't announce any layoffs as part of that restructuring. Don't know what that means in the new year, but if all of a sudden you're shifting resources from marketing and other things away from streaming back to the car, I would imagine there's going to have to be a reduction in headcount.

Speaker 3 15:14

Yeah, speaking of serious, I saw an interesting article. I really don't know how credible it was article. I really don't know how credible it was, but it basically was just making the observation that with car sales a little bit spotty right now new car sales, that is that Sirius is possibly really getting hit by that because there was a certain element of their subscription revenue which was, you know, the article didn't say, and you know I bought a few new cars and most of the time actually have not activated Sirius, but in a few cases I did and it's true, like once you activate it you just sort of keep it until you trade the car in, you know, and then sometimes you know the next one. But if you're not selling as many new cars or the articles making the other point that now bandwidth into the car, you can drive pretty much all 50 states in the US and just be streaming Spotify and with unlimited plans and all it's sort of free right, unlimited data meaning. So I don't know.

Speaker 2 16:30

I don't know if that's really. It's hard to know because here's the thing I last looked at car sales in September. They were down 13% as far as new registrations.

Speaker 3 16:37

New yeah.

Speaker 2 16:39

But it looks like, depending on whose numbers you look at projections, it looks like car sales are down, will be down for the year, about 1%, yeah. So how much does that 1% impact Sirius?

Speaker 1 16:50

I don't know but to your point.

Speaker 2 16:51

They're talking more and more about the car business again. Yeah, because that is really where they're making their money and we all just have so many options when it comes to streaming of music. Exactly, and do you think of Sirius?

Speaker 3 17:07

xm is the first place to go.

Speaker 2 17:07

No, no apple, spotify, pandora. I mean, those are the first three. Yeah, so now uh, pandora is uh, pandora is owned by spotify, right?

Speaker 2 17:17

um, yes, yes, yes, they are um so you know, do they put more effort into that? Because, uh, sirius xM holdings that's right, they're holding, they're holding Pandora Media, but interesting to watch there just what happens. Let's jump into Max and WBD max pr team. They're just always pushing out useful information. So they they did this nice recap email out to some members of the media, uh, and they're talking about what they did for for the whole year. So, in in nine months of 2024, max launched in 73 new countries across latin europe and asia, across latam europe and asia. Uh, dandiv q3. It had 110.5 million ddc subscribers. Uh, it also continued to roll out product enhancements, a new personalization system and also over 120 different new features within the platform. Lots of little tweaks and whatnot, but that's what I love about it is just making the experience better.

Speaker 2 18:24

Yeah, so really cool just to see what they've done, what they're doing with the service. I love how they think about the experience for users and I've highlighted this before. I would say, almost on a quarterly basis, they will share here's things that we've solved or fixed in the platform or made easier or changed, so I love that we get updates from them.

Speaker 3 18:46

Yeah, that is good.

Speaker 2 18:47

Now, tommy, the parent company, wbd. I don't think to shock anybody, considering Comcast did this, but WBD did announce that it'll serve as the parent company going forward for two distinct operating divisions. They think this new structure will be completed by mid-2025, so it's not yet. Mm-hmm and the streaming and studios will be Max, hbo film and entertainment studios as well. Now, I don't think anyone who tracks the market very closely is shocked by why Warner Bros is doing this. First thing they say is it's going to enhance clarity and focus of the business.

Speaker 2 19:41

That makes sense Each division is going to focus on its specific strength and operational objectives. Yeah, and what are those objectives? Well, for linear networks it's maximizing profitability and free cash flow. Free cash flow is where it's at with the networks. How do you optimize that? Streaming and studios it's going to be on driving growth and getting returns, on increasing invested capital into the business. Yeah, yeah, so really straightforward, not surprising. I've seen all kinds of posts online Mark of people throwing out numbers of what the businesses are worth or this or that, or it's going to decline, that. I don't know where any of that data comes from. Don't know where any of that data comes from. They could be maybe accurate, but uh, they're just. There's wild speculation right now about splitting out the linear networks and what that's going to mean, or oh, now they're going to sell them all to pe companies and pe companies are looking at some of them, no doubt yeah sure but uh, there's nothing confirmed as of yet of where this is all going.

Speaker 2 20:41

Of course we also have the paramount skydance link up next year, if that finalizes and gets cleared. So you'd have that plus you'd have Comcast plus you have WBD all doing different things with linear networks. 2025, 2026 is going to be an extremely interesting time in our industry when it comes to the legacy TV business and what they do with networks, how they're split out, how it's fragmented. Get ready to start having to track a lot of different networks across a lot of different owners, probably yeah absolutely yes, yeah, yeah, don't worry, elon musk will buy cnn oh okay, well mean, that's okay, I don't even care about.

Speaker 3 21:24

CNBC. That's one of the rumors that's floating around on, of course, guess where? On X? I don't need any financial news, so it's okay if he acquires CNN as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 2 21:37

Now let's jump into more WBD Comcast news here. So Comcast Sky Division has dismissed their federal lawsuit against WBD, thank God. So they've come to a new multi-year carriage deal. So Comcast has renewed carriage of WBD channels, so that's HBO, tnt, tbs, cnn, etc. And it also has the right to package the ad-supported version of Max and Discovery Plus in its streaming bundles. So that's good news. And then also, sky will get the bundle as supported max in the uk and ireland starting in 2026 when the max app launches in those regions, because max isn't there yet. So that's good. More options for users. One less lawsuit taking place in the market, which we need more of. Let's jump into some more Comcast tied news here. So Peacock users started receiving emails about changes coming up to Peacock's terms of service, which will start on January 5th.

Speaker 2 22:41

So this is all about the password sharing crackdown coming and peacock talks about in the revised agreement that you cannot share your subscription outside of your household. Now how peacock will define a household we don't know. They haven't detailed its plans on how they're going to do that. Will it be like how netflix at times will send you a code to authenticate via email? I don't know, but that's coming. Uh, and the terminology it's interesting to Mark. I looked at the terminology that Peacock uses and then I looked at what Disney uses it's. It's fascinating how nearly identical the wording is. I thought that was interesting. Let's go to Netflix. We got a stat here from them. Netflix had a media event in Japan and Netflix had a Japanese content production. So the number of subscribers in Japan for Netflix topped 10 million in the first half of 2024. So that's a new number. We hadn't had a number from Netflix in Japan for quite some time.

Speaker 3 23:53

Yeah.

Speaker 2 23:54

Netflix also said that Japanese content is the third most viewed non-English content, after Korean and Spanish. Really, I would have thought mandarin, yeah, I'm surprised because of how small the population is there. Yeah, they're watching a lot of content. Yeah, uh, also, it gave out this number. It's animation. Uh, animation, anime content was viewed by more than 1 billion times globally last year. That's not hours, they didn't give out hours, they just said more than 1 billion times.

Speaker 2 24:30

So I don't know exactly what that means, but that's another number. Let's go to Walmart. Walmart has completed its $2.3 billion acquisition of Vizio. Deal is done. What exactly are they going to do with it? It would be nice if they told us, but all they really say is like we're going to deeply integrate blah, blah blah into this and that, but there's no specifics. We're going to tie together the two greatest brands in advertising. How Don't know, no idea. So what is going to happen with Vizio's watch free service? Hopefully nothing. Hopefully it stays. I wouldn't be surprised if it's rebranded Walmart free plus streaming, something or other. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 25:13

But the key thing here that you know listeners should really think about is to date, vizio has been the only company to break out ARPU for its fast service from an advertising standpoint, and so are we going to lose that data point in the market? We might, which would be a shame. Walmart also said that for the foreseeable future, which of course is not a date, vizio will continue to operate separately.

Speaker 3 25:39

Yeah.

Speaker 2 25:41

All right, let's go into some AI news here, mark. So Amazon had the reInvent conference. Now some really interesting things came out here in terms of just what Amazon is doing and they are going for the jugular here on everybody. I mean what they announced. They announced their own foundation models, which are 75% cheaper, plus AI chips, plus a supercomputer. They're challenging OpenAI and Microsoft and its foundation models, nvidia and chips. It's just, it's incredible what they are doing and what they announced.

Speaker 2 26:15

So I threw together just some points tied to chips and the foundation model. So, in chips, they've got chips showing four times performance gains versus competitors. They've slashed costs by more than 50% compared to Nvidia. And they signed Apple as a major customer and keep in mind, these numbers are for them, from them directly. On the foundation model, so they've got six new Nova models that they say match or exceeds competitors 75% lower cost. They're already powering more than a thousand Amazon applications, of course, and their 2025 roadmap they talked about the speech to speech and to any to any model. Yeah, and while a lot of competitors out there are focusing really on English languages right now, um, their foundation model supports over 200 languages.

Speaker 3 27:09

Incredible.

Speaker 2 27:10

So amazing what they're doing. So you know. To wrap this up, you know Amazon's creating an entire ecosystem here. Yeah Right, they're. They're solving for compute, their prod project, rainier, their chips, their models with Nova, partnerships with Anthro, all while undercutting everybody's pricing and not undercutting it by 5% or 10%. Yeah, undercutting it by huge numbers, yeah, yeah. So how will this impact streaming industry? Don't know. Yeah, it's too early. A lot of the modeling what ai is going to be used for is not tied to video no, it's not but it's still super interesting to watch and to keep an eye on yeah, for sure

Speaker 2 27:54

and then let's go to google real quickly. So google has launched a private preview of its vo and image gen 3 generative ai models. So, uh, it's not open yet to everybody, but customers of google's vertex ai cloud package. They now have the ability to generate video from text prompts and images using vo, and it's capable of creating footage that's 1080p, can't doK, and it can generate videos lasting over a minute. That's the latest. Google says the tool can use both text prompts and images as starting points for videos. And what I was interested in. Mark was okay, but if you just start ripping off everybody else's content, this is a problem. Okay, but if you just start ripping off everybody else's content, this is a problem. Google told me they've implemented prompt-level filters in an indemnity policy to address potential copyright issues.

Speaker 3 28:50

So they're not saying like— Indemnity, it's not going to be our fault, it's your fault. You're the one that typed the prompt in.

Speaker 2 28:55

Correct. So they're basically saying hey, we're going to ask you if this is your stuff and if it is, don't complain. If you say yes, yeah, exactly yeah, but interesting there, you know see where that goes. It's a long way to go there.

Speaker 3 29:13

So if I ask it to make a video of Dan Rayburn, are you going to claim copyright infringement?

Speaker 2 29:21

of dan rayburn. Are you going to uh claim copyright infringement? Uh, I won't. But here's the problem with google and ai and dan rayburn. So I saw this the other day when someone sent me a link. If you google dan rayburn, the first page that comes up is matt levine from cashfly. Oh, and I can't figure out why oh, so I've seen that similar.

Speaker 3 29:43

Similar with me, I don't think. If you google mine, look in the image. It's my images, but you just scroll. If you go into the full page and start scrolling down, you'll see all kinds of stuff that it says it's me, um other people, just random graphics. Yeah, I can't figure out this whole google ai thing. It's just Other people just random graphics.

Speaker 2 30:01

Yeah, I can't figure out this whole Google AI thing. It's just so bad because it pulls up a photo of Matt Levine and under his name it says Cashfly CDN. When you click on it, it takes you directly to my LinkedIn profile. So how did they pull?

Speaker 3 30:15

So, it no offense to Matt Levine, right no no, no, but it indexed, so you and it would make sense. Right At some point you posted something about Casfly or whatever a link, Maybe it was even an article that he was.

Speaker 2 30:33

But I never posted his photo, so it's.

Speaker 3 30:35

No, exactly.

Speaker 2 30:37

Yeah, weird.

Speaker 3 30:39

Yeah, that's not right. And what's interesting?

Speaker 2 30:41

is, and I've seen this before. What I think is fascinating is the AI is not smart enough to even see the text in the image, because on the image it says the person's name, says the title and says their company, yeah, yeah. So this is how dumb AI still is from a search standpoint the amount of misaccurate information, even just a very, very simple thing like a photo of a person.

Speaker 2 31:04

now I also could understand if google didn't have copies of you know, my headshot anywhere, but I mean you know you're yeah images, then you want to see there's a lot of images so, uh, you know, fascinating in terms of just how much work is still still needed to do there yeah uh, let's go to some infrastructure news here, mark.

Speaker 2 31:22

Uh, we still have some what I'll call ridiculous conversations taking place, I see from some users on linkedin around cdn because of edgio. Uh, you know, quick, oh, you got to deploy, quick almost multicast, you got to deploy nodes inside people's homes. These people are just like going on and on and on and sharing comments and comments and comments, like guys. None of this is real.

Speaker 2 31:47

And get back to the facts here. But some some news sort of tied to that infrastructure. So Microsoft flight simulator 2024 could not get off the ground, so to speak. Uh, last month so microsoft, they said that they simulated tests for 200 000 users. But then microsoft said they completely underestimated how many players wanted to get into the sim and they they won. So people were getting queues and loading screens showing zero percent. Now I'm going to give Microsoft Flight Simulator team a huge amount of credit here, because they quickly hosted a live stream where they came on to talk to users and be like okay, here's the problem. We're going to address this situation. And first thing he said was quote I just want to thank you all for the encouraging emails, texts and other contacts we had during what we can only be described as an awful launch experience. We want to deeply apologize for what happened. Taking responsibility, Boy, that's new for companies these days.

Speaker 2 32:53

Awesome you know you do so much goodwill when you say, hey, we had a problem, sorry about that, we're going to fix it Now.

Speaker 3 32:59

Here had a problem, Sorry about that.

Speaker 2 32:59

We're going to fix it. Now here's the number. He says quote someone told me we had 100 billion package requests on the first day. That is insane. He says quote the infrastructure simply could not handle the amount of requests and started to fail. I mean the staggering number. Now what exactly failed? Well, they said it was a database cache issue.

Speaker 3 33:31

Well, 100 billion packages, and you think all the database records. Yeah, exactly, had to be associated.

Speaker 2 33:40

I mean gee whiz Now they said it was a CDN problem. Before anyone starts going all bonkers here, this is a Valve. This was mostly on Steam, so it's a Valve Steam issue. Now Valve has their own CDN for most of the stuff and also it's an Azure issue. So this was not a third-party CDN issue that I can find in any way. So this was not a third-party CDN issue that I can find in any way. You can think of the major CDNs out there. They were not involved in this.

Speaker 3 34:02

And no crypto-optimized, blockchain-hosted CDNs are not going to fix the problem. What?

Speaker 2 34:11

I call garbage. Yes, no, garbage is going to fix the problem. But think about that 100 billion package requests on the first day, and this goes back to what we mentioned before. Volume of bits for software downloads for gaming.

Speaker 3 34:24

Yeah.

Speaker 2 34:27

That's where it's at, not streaming, so just absolutely incredible. Also, again, just credit to the whole team at Microsoft there.

Speaker 3 34:33

Yeah that's amazing, just to come on, go live.

Speaker 2 34:36

They were providing updates every couple hours publicly on a chat thread of like here's what's going on, here's what we fixed. Uh, that's, it's just a way to do it. Yeah, keep users informed, yeah, uh. Final piece, here is amagi announced the acquisition of argoid ai. Uh, so just, they didn't put out much information on the deal size. I did confirm it's a technology acquisition. This was not revenue.

Speaker 2 35:03

They've got less than 25 employees, so it's a team acquisition and basically they're going to use the technology to help with content programming metadata enrichment, recommendation engine, what we're seeing use case wise for a lot of AI technology right now in the video world. And then, finally, mark, I did officially announce today, finally, the opening and the call for speakers sponsorships for the 2025 NAB streaming summit. So it will take place in the same location, west Hall lobby, right as as you walk in the room's on the left. So that's great. Three tracks, day one, two tracks, day two. We'll have an AI demo track again.

Speaker 2 35:48

So now let the chaos begin. I've already got a couple dozen inquiries, which is great Speaking submissions. We've already got CDN 77, wowza, uplink, netskirt, tata Consultancy Services they're all in already as sponsors, which is awesome, so thank you for that. So I still expect we'll have close to 35 sponsors this year. I do expect the audience to grow 20 to 25% as well. The show will be even tighter this year as far as operations and logistics. We have a lot more control going into 2025 in the venue, which is amazing. We've also got some new people involved at the NEB organization, which come with a very deep level of expertise previously having worked on or run shows for CES which is great.

Speaker 2 36:41

So I'm super excited for next year. I started making a list Mark of all the things that just I think are big for me to talk about in the opening keynote, year over year, like big events, and then I'm like, okay, I'm already at a list of 40. I'm going to have to somehow cut this down to 10. But just think of what's taking place over the last year. Come April, by the time I'll have stepped on stage in our industry, it's just the consolidation of the linear.

Speaker 2 37:07

We're spinning out of the linear but consolidation Live events with Netflix. We'll see what happens on Christmas the Peacock event. It's just absolutely incredible how fast our industry moves. Yeah, ben, it's just absolutely incredible how fast our industry moves. So I'm going to be hard pressed to pick the 10 I think are most important. But it also means we're going to have a lot of great content to talk about next year.

Speaker 2 37:31

So, as I say all the time when I open the call for speakers, this is on a first come, first serve basis. So if you're listening and you contact me a month before the show and you're upset that there's nothing available, that's on you.

Speaker 3 37:43

That's right that every year.

Speaker 2 37:45

You cannot slip into the program five days before, right, it just doesn't work that way. I'll have about 85 speakers across 40 total slots. So if you have anything idea wise you want to throw out, send it. Call me up. I prefer that over email. Just calling me. Discussing things, I've probably already talked to 10 vendors in the last just day Ideas they had. Can we do this or this? You know type of speaking or whatnot. We're also going to have a little more in terms of the way of meetups, networking type things.

Speaker 2 38:19

Also the balcony where we have the cocktail reception that's going to be open the whole day so people can enjoy it there. Oh, that's cool. That's a good idea actually. Well, it's an idea we've had, but we haven't been allowed to use the space during certain hours. We're always restricted. Now, if it's windy up there, you may not want to eat your lunch.

Speaker 3 38:39

Well, it was windy last year. It was, but it wasn't windy like some of those years where, like you even had people blowing around up there. It got bad there.

Speaker 2 38:50

So we've got some more things like that in store, which is great. Also, we're going to do more of food and beverage. Just make sure we have coffee at longer periods of time. I'm really trying to think of how do I optimize any attendees time there. Yeah, I care a lot the fact that they're paying money to come and I want the experience to be really, really good. To the point of where mark I've gotten these special um things that go on the actual doors so that no matter who opens the door or closes the door at any time, it won't make noise.

Speaker 3 39:21

Yeah.

Speaker 2 39:22

No noises when these doors are closed.

Speaker 2 39:24

No noise, I hate that You're concentrating and then that door slams. So I'm trying to think of every detail. But if anyone has any questions, if you want to speak, if you want to moderate, if you want to sponsor, if you want a discounted ticket, registration will open January, but email me. You want to discount a ticket? A registration will open January, but email me, I'll give you a discount code. However, you might want to be involved, now's the time to do it. So that's what we've got next this week.

Speaker 2 39:47

Next week, we're going to be back with a podcast on Friday. We've got two more this year and Mark and I are going to do a podcast on Friday the 27th, so two days after Christmas and Netflix. So we're going to cover the netflix streaming event and that podcast as well. Then we'll be done for the year. Mark did just get some stats which I'll have to email you. Buzzsprout, which is the platform that we use for our podcast. They just sent out a 2024 recap. I think it's interesting they do that, considering there's still two weeks left in the year. But okay, we had 31,000 downloads, 41 episodes Podcast was listened to from 95 countries, One point, let's see.

Speaker 2 40:35

So 1,900 minutes Also. This was fascinating, Mark. So United States was the top country, not surprising, followed by the United Kingdom. What was the third most popular country for our podcast?

Speaker 3 40:52

India, portugal, portugal.

Speaker 2 40:55

Yeah, really, I didn't figure that one out either, and it's a large number.

Speaker 3 40:58

Yeah, wow, fourth was Canada.

Speaker 2 41:00

Okay, fourth was Canada. Okay, fifth was Netherlands.

Speaker 3 41:04

Interesting.

Speaker 2 41:05

Yeah, wow. And then, finally, the most popular cities, new York and Los Angeles, almost mirroring each other. The next one was Lisbon.

Speaker 3 41:16

Portugal.

Speaker 2 41:17

Yep, so whatever's going on in.

Speaker 3 41:19

Portugal. We've got some serious fans there. I love Portugal. Maybe we need to Take a trip, yeah.

Speaker 2 41:26

Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1 41:27

There's a streaming population there, and then that was followed by Seattle.

Speaker 3 41:31

Yeah, and that A lot of tech there Makes sense. A little recap, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 41:35

Wow. So that's what we got Everything we talked about today is online.

Speaker 2 41:38

Any questions reach out to mark and I. We're always available. We appreciate everyone's support. Listening. A lot of people going away soon or already are for vacation. Hope you get some downtime, rest, recharge, spend time with family. Business is not what's most important. Stay safe. Don't eat and drink too much. It's the holidays, you never know I'll still be working, but, uh, you got much. It's the holidays. You never know I'll still be working. But you got any questions, even over the holidays, reach out, I'll be around Everyone. Have a good week. We'll talk to you next week. Thanks very much.

Speaker 1 42:07

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.