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'm Dan Rayburn, back another week with Mark Donaghan, co-host, Friday April 18th. Now fully back from NAB. Hope everyone just had a good trip back. You know, Mark, as quickly as NAB comes, it's gone, that's right Back to the other business.

Speaker 3 0:42

It's like Christmas Dan. It's like by the time I'm ready for Christmas. I'm really happy it's gone. I got to wait a year.

Speaker 2 0:51

That's the reality. There's plenty of other shows to go to, so that's right. For those that haven't seen it, all the videos are now online from the NAB Streaming Summit. If you go to nabstreamingsummitcom, just click on 2025 videos, you'd see them right there. If you go to nabstreamingsummitcom, just click on 2025 videos, you can see them right there. I'll start highlighting many different sessions over the coming week or two weeks with slides as well.

Speaker 2 1:12

So, mark, this week we have quite a bit to talk about here with Netflix Q1, 2025 calendar year earnings. We've also got some sports news here, but let's just jump right into Netflix. So, for those that don't know, just a reminder this is the first quarter that Netflix no longer gives out subscriber numbers. So, quarter over quarter, they're not giving them out. What Netflix has said is that they will still give out some subscriber numbers when they reach a certain number or an internal target that they were targeting. So we will get some total subscriber numbers at some point from them, but it's unknown when. So the high level here is Netflix had a great quarter.

Speaker 2 1:51

Revenue is up 13% year over year 10.54 billion. They had free cashflow of 2.66 billion Again, just great free cashflow. They expect their ad revenue to roughly double in 2025. Now we don't know what the numbers are. They haven't given out those numbers. Numbers from Wall Street are all over the map. They also said they're going to extend their live event strategy to other countries over time. Now we don't know exactly what that means, and they didn't say by doing specific live events that they gained new subscribers. They didn't talk about live sports and the impact on new subscribers or turning subscribers, but they're seeing success, however they measure it. If they're going to extend to other countries over time, In Q2, they expect revenue growth of 15%, so that's good to see as well.

Speaker 2 2:44

Yeah, they expect revenue growth of 15%, so that's good to see as well. Now they did say quote higher than expected subscriber and ad revenue. I don't think that really surprises any of us, considering that they raised pricing, so that's not too surprising. They're still forecasting full year 2025 free cash flow of about 8 billion, so that's great to see. They also did not change Wall Street. Thought they were going to change this. I'm not quite sure why they thought this, but they did not guide higher or lower on previous full year 2025 guidance, so it's still 43.5 billion to 44.5 billion. They announced that they did successfully launch their ad tech platform in the US and they're on track to roll it out in remaining ad countries in the coming months. They did roll it out already last year in Canada, so they're well on their way to pushing that out there. Interesting mark in their shareholder letter they estimate that their audience is more than 700 million people, with over two thirds of them living outside the US.

Speaker 3 3:52

That's right.

Speaker 2 3:53

So not surprising growth outside the US that audience number.

Speaker 3 3:58

Maybe I just wasn't doing math, but I was a little surprised at how high that was 700. And by audience that would imply subscribers plus ad. You know that's not true?

Speaker 2 4:14

Notice, they didn't say households, they said 700.

Speaker 3 4:17

Yeah audience. And so that would be. I'm a family of four, in other words a household. They would count that as four people. I would think so.

Speaker 2 4:26

So they use the term households and just build differently over the years. Yeah, they're very clear about that, which I do like. They also didn't say 700 million subscribers.

Speaker 2 4:36

No, they did not say subscribers, they're very quick to say people. On the ad tech side, they said that they believe their ad tech platform is foundational to their long-term ad strategy because it will enable them to offer better measurement, enhanced targeting, innovative ad formats and expanded programmatic capabilities. That totally makes sense. Not surprised by that at all. We're going to get into some of the ad stuff in a minute. End of Q4. So let's see, they ended Q4, although why am I having, sorry, ended Q1,. This wouldn't be before. Gross debt of 15.1 billion, yes, cash cash equivalents to 7.2 billion.

Speaker 2 5:25

A couple of things they talked about on the earnings call podcast came up which was interesting in video podcasts. So they said quote as the popularity of video podcasts grow, I suspect you'll see some of them find their way to netflix. Now I saw some people saying netflix is getting into the podcasting business. Well, they already produce some of their own podcasts related to shows and talent which are widely available. So they're already doing some of that, but they're obviously very selective. And he also talked about popularity of podcasts and didn't say all of them, right, some of them are coming. I think that's just you could read into that of podcasts and didn't say all of them. Right, some of them are coming. Yeah, I think that's just you could read into that. Hey, if it makes sense and it's tied to other shows or genres, we could see adding some popular video podcast to the platform. Makes sense.

Speaker 3 6:16

Yeah, for sure, for sure, On YouTube.

Speaker 2 6:18

Yeah.

Speaker 3 6:19

This is going to be more like Joe Rogan sized, not Mark Donegan sized, mark.

Speaker 2 6:26

Donegan sized. Well, I don't know if anybody's Joe Rogan sized yeah there's only one, joe Rogan, that's true, but yes your point is call it mid-tier, tier two I don't know what they're going to call it, but it makes sense. If it's the right fit, they're going to do it.

Speaker 3 6:42

Yeah.

Speaker 2 6:43

Now, interesting, when they talked about YouTube, they were asked about YouTube in competition. So they said you know, the question that's out there is is YouTube premium? Well, some of it is, and we believe we have the best monetization model on the planet for premium storytelling. I think we can help those creators reach an audience. Our model can also support more ambitious efforts for them, could help de-risk them, unlike the kind of typical user-generated content models. Interesting what they're saying is YouTube competes for people's time, but we don't necessarily think it competes for the exact same type of audience that we have Now.

Speaker 2 7:27

They also said later on, in reference to YouTube, just who they were targeting and how. Who they were targeting is a bit different than who they see watching content on YouTube. Yeah, and that makes total sense. So the fact the media loves to compare it because of the Nielsen garbage data and things out there about like who won the viewing war nonsense, netflix is very clear. The type of content they're creating and what they're calling premium they think is very different than YouTube. Yeah, and I agree. Calling premium they think is very different than youtube, and I agree. Now, later on, greg peters, co-ceo, said this in reference to youtube, quote we believe we are a more competitive, better service for a certain class of creators and certain types of storytelling. Storytelling, I agree, it's a different platform.

Speaker 3 8:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure, but you know, I think in the, in the creator economy and I think it's also interesting, we made the observation last week about NAB, that create for kind of the first time anyway, you know, there was a whole, there was a heavy focus on creators, and the fact is is that these are, you know, I'm going to call them just for sake of definite, just for sake of kind, of putting them in a, in a category, but in some cases these are the new filmmakers of today. These are the and I don't mean they're literally making feature films. But you think about Mr Beast just as one example, and what goes into creating that dollar deals to bring a major director, a producer, a writer, you know, which they've done multiple times, in fact, I think they have deals bigger than that. Well, why wouldn't they want to go find the next, mr Beast? And they do, you know exactly.

Speaker 2 9:42

I mean, that didn't, that didn't do well on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 9:45

You know, I mean that didn't, that didn't do well, on prime video, well, but okay, set aside. But the point is Mr B still is a billion dollar profit. That's his valuation for his brand and all that. He's a billion dollar media company, which you can say. How is that possible? But that's what he's valued at, at least that's what the markets claim.

Speaker 2 10:05

Which started on YouTube.

Speaker 3 10:06

Which started on YouTube, exactly, exactly. But you know, and he has 300, was it 350,? Somebody can fact check this 350 million followers. I think it's on YouTube or it's across his platforms. Again, I'm obviously not a Mr Beast, you know fanatic, but yeah, this makes sense. I mean what? What Greg Peters is saying? Um, definitely makes sense with even what they're doing you know, with, with, with sport, their approach to sports. Hey, we don't not like sports, we just want it to be profitable, you know the right sports.

Speaker 3 10:41

Yeah, the exactly the right sports, and you know. So why not go find creators, invest in them?

Speaker 2 10:47

And they have the free cash flow to do it Now on the margin side. I saw some people writing wow, margins exploded and grew and oh my God, okay, but remember what Netflix said. Maybe you didn't listen to the earnings call.

Speaker 3 10:59

Cool.

Speaker 2 11:00

But at this point, in reference to margins, most of that was is a little bit on the revenue side, mostly on the expense side, and it looks to us that most of it was timing of spend. So what they're saying is content spend and overall spend was down. We did raise pricing, so why are we surprised that we saw additional? Well, they're not surprised. Why is anyone surprised? Their margins were a bit higher in Q1, as they should be.

Speaker 2 11:27

Now let's go to a Wall Street Journal report earlier in the week. Where you know Wall Street Journal, it seems to be the same person who keeps writing about things tied to our industry. It's just can't seem to get the facts right. So, apparently, internal projections they saw from somebody. They basically were saying by 2023, no-transcript, double its revenue from $39 billion in 2023, triple its operating income from $10 billion in 2024, targeting $9 billion in global ad sales by 2030, and wants to hit 410 million subscribers worldwide. Now I don't know why people were writing so much about this. Okay, netflix internally has projections of where they want to go as a company over the next couple of years. So does every other company. Now, on the earnings call, netflix called out and they said financial targets are quote not the same as a forecast. We often have internal meetings and we talk about long-term aspirations, sure, but it's important to note that this is not the same as a forecast. We don't have a five-year forecast or five-year guidance.

Speaker 3 12:43

Yeah.

Speaker 2 12:44

And yet the Wall Street Journal article never pointed that out. When I read it, I took away that they were implying this is what Netflix is forecasting for their business, which is not what Netflix was doing. It wasn't a forecast. It's not something they presented to Wall Street. Now, in this Wall Street Journal article, it also said that Netflix is reportedly moving to its own ad tech stack. What do you mean? Reportedly? In March, netflix announced its ad tech, what they're calling NAS Netflix Ad Suite. In March they publicly talked about how it launched April 1st and we know it launched in Canada last year.

Speaker 3 13:26

Yeah.

Speaker 2 13:27

So, again, like the Wall Street Journal, is this one person? I don't know why she can't get it right. It's not reportedly moving. They did report it.

Speaker 2 13:37

Now, in terms of what else we know on the ad side, in terms of their Netflix ad suite, they've come out and said there's four minutes of ads per hour to start, and the reason they're moving to a proprietary tech is so that they can move faster when it comes to rolling out new formats. And they said what they specifically called advanced, our capabilities around custom formats Makes total sense. Now, at the same time, they're still integrated with the usual DV360, the Trade Desk, xander. They're bringing in more third-party data to start, and there's going to be more. They also pointed out Mark and this is a really good call-out for them for Netflix.

Speaker 2 14:19

They say TV advertisers for linear TV are buying a specific program in time of day. Advertisers on Netflix and streaming in general buy against a genre or group of shows. It's a very different type of ad. Buy, yeah, yeah. So I thought that was great for them to call that out, yeah, and also just to highlight hey, we've moved to our ad tech stack, it's in-house and we're moving quicker, and yet I still sell two articles today mark where there's just people comment netflix isn't moving fast enough with their ad strategy. It's like okay, man Keep saying that.

Speaker 3 14:59

Yeah, keep saying that.

Speaker 2 15:02

My quick recap of their earnings got picked up by LinkedIn news of the day or whatnot. So overnight I woke up to why do I have 50 comments on my post? And it was interesting. I had to delete a bunch because I saw they were just cursing at netflix they were just it.

Speaker 3 15:20

It was I'm like who are?

Speaker 2 15:21

these like fu netflix and I'm like how is that a comment on their earnings?

Speaker 3 15:24

yeah, or or like oh yeah, oh yeah, when you raise your price with three times in a year, you can, you know, it's like they don't raise their. They haven't raised their price three times in a year, right, well, well, that's why I left that comment.

Speaker 2 15:37

Now, the person who left that comment, mark, was funny. They then reposted my post and they said this is what happens when you raise pricing three times in 12 months. And then, once I corrected them, I noticed their post disappeared. Oh, I was like good, at least they deleted it.

Speaker 2 16:02

I don't know what the backlash was. What's with the amount of f words against netflix? I was like, wow, like this is just earning. What's the problem here? So I had to delete a bunch of foul mouth people leaving comments. It was. It was interesting how many comments are on that post and and it's just reporting the numbers. So some people with their emotions around netflix.

Speaker 2 16:15

Man, you gotta just chill out here, chill out relax yeah exactly, and sometimes mark you get that if the stock thing gets crushed the next day, yeah, but it's friday, april 18th the market's not open yeah so no one can be complaining about the stock because the markets are closed.

Speaker 2 16:34

So I just just thought all the comments, a lot of the comments were really odd. Going back to Netflix, just very quickly, because we didn't report this Mark since we were at NAB, but most probably know that the NFL is planning a triple header this year on Christmas, because Christmas falls on a Thursday and they would already have a Thursday night Amazon Prime. So the first two games are going to be streamed on Netflix and then third will be on prime. These are all exclusive.

Speaker 2 17:01

So, get ready for all the people you know who don't know streaming to call you and ask you where the games are, because they can't find them, that's right. Kickoff times are 1 PM, 4 30 and 8 20. That's all Eastern, so that's that's the kickoff times. That's going to be a busy day. It's going to be a lot to review on that day.

Speaker 3 17:19

Yeah, really. Let's go on to some other sports A lot of video on on the internet on that day.

Speaker 2 17:25

If you think about I mean really, I mean if you think about what's going to take place that day, and then just throw on also christmas also happens to be the highest day, just for netflix in general in terms of viewership yeah and then think about whatever is going on in youtube.

Speaker 2 17:44

Yeah, it could potentially be one of the highest days of just video consumption, certainly in the us for sure. Yeah, some other quick sports news here. A couple reports that formula one is seeking between 150 million 190 million per year for its domestic rights package. Supposedly that's double what espn has been paying. As a result of that, we're seeing company names like apple and amazon it's being reported that they're no longer interested or bidding on it because f1 just wants too much money. Now we don't know if these numbers are accurate. One of the issues, though, that I could see this being accurate, one of the issues tied to these numbers, is just that F1 races happen around the world. So many are early in the morning, overnight in the US from a time zone standpoint. So unless you're a platform that has a really large international audience that you can drive to that content and we know US tends to be the largest viewership or number of subs it may not be great content for US users. Simply based on time zone Makes sense.

Speaker 3 18:53

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 18:55

Let's go to Flow Sports. So Flow Sports has raised approximately $25 million in Series D funding. They announced this. It was led by Dream Sports, which is Indian-based and it's a fantasy sports platform, and it's a parent of a company called FanCode, which is a sports content commerce platform. So to date, Flow Sports has raised more than $100 million. It said it had a record revenue in 2024, but it didn't disclose it. However, it did say that it has reached sustained profitability. So at least we have a little bit of guidance there, but we don't know actual revenue. Mark. We didn't get to cover this after this happened because, again, we were at NAB. But after MLB had the problem on the opening day with streaming on MLBTV, they announced that they're not refunding customers for the outage, but they're offering a $10 credit if you spend $25 or more at their store. So it's about tone deaf, as you can get there, Give us more money and then we'll give you a credit.

Speaker 3 19:56

Give you a credit if you buy some merch.

Speaker 2 20:00

So they would have just been better saying hey, sorry, sorry for the outage, no refunds, so not a great way to do it. Let's go to ESPN's coverage Milwaukee Brewers and New York Yankees On Thursday March 27th. They said it generated the largest national MLB opening day audience in seven years and just to put this in perspective, it peaked at 1.93 million viewers. Sorry, it averaged 1.93 million, peaked at 2.2. So just another data point Baseball in the US just not that large. The viewership is just not that big if we're looking at views or concurrent users.

Speaker 2 20:43

Next up, max is live in Australia. That's a what week or two? Maybe it was April 1st. It went, I forget the exact date. But again, we didn't get to cover this Special pricing for 12 months as part of the launch. Basic with ads is $8. Standard is 12 bucks, max premium is 18. Pricing ends April 30th, so about another two weeks on that For the NCAA March Madness final games available on Max which, uh, saturday, march 29th. So just before I bounced out for nab, I did a quick review of the stream platform max across nine different devices and platforms. I looked at quality of the stream, the encoding bit rates, their key moments feature, which was cool where you could jump to key moments, but it wouldn't spoil the the outcome or the score I looked at the cdns they used so.

Speaker 2 21:36

So a couple of quick stats here. Mark their encoding bitrate ladder the SDR stream maxed out at 10 megs. Hdr was at eight. They used both HLS and Dash shared the same underlying CMAP media segments. Chunked encoding came in at 3.2 seconds. Stream was delivered by Amazon CloudFront, akamai Fastly and google media cdn. They did not break out afterwards. The ama, a concurrent stream count, so I can't go into details on that. Uh, I do have access to some of their data. Uh, off the record, so I have a better understanding what went on behind the scenes. And the max team was great in terms of working with me of hey, by the way, check this out or see this, or here's an more of an insight into how we coding. So that was great to see yeah uh, let's see if we go to.

Speaker 2 22:29

Live streams are available to all max subscribers in the us uh at that time. But keep in mind max has pulled live streaming from its ad-supported tier on March 30th. Bleacher reports, bleacher boards and CNN content is available at no additional cost to subscribers in the standard and premium tiers, but some of the content has been pulled from the lower tier. But overall the March Madness game looked really good. It loaded extremely fast on the devices I tested. Quality was good. You can see the breakdown of everything I tested and how on my blog. I added in Vizio TV. This year, thanks to Vizio that shipped me a TV. So it was TVs on LG, samsung, vizio, tcl, roku the usual Apple TV, roku sticks, fire TV sticks, macbook, iphone, ipad. Also two ISPs I was testing across. Thank you to my neighbor for letting me use their cable run from their house to mine.

Speaker 3 23:33

You have a geeky neighbor? Cable run from their house to mine. Do you have a geeky neighbor? No, If I went over and asked my neighbor hey, can you run this Ethernet line out your window and cross over the fence?

Speaker 2 23:46

Well, considering they get free tech support, they're always happy to help. Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 23:50

It's always a trade right? Yes, always, but that's an easy one.

Speaker 2 23:55

So you want to know more about that. Check that out on my blog you can see the review. But overall super impressed with Max. Great quality service, you know.

Speaker 3 24:03

Dan, you always highlight the fact that Max does such a good job of providing updates on, you know, progress in the app. You know progress in the app. Um, you know when, when they have issues they report, they seem to, you know, be very candid and and and quick you know to respond. I'm going to ask a question which you know it's kind of like well, why would you ask that? But why aren't more companies like that? Well, I think you have a view, of course some of that we know.

Speaker 2 24:36

So there are other companies who want to be that open but are told legally they're not allowed.

Speaker 3 24:41

Yeah, they're just not allowed in other words the technical. It's, yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 24:45

It's not because the technical team is holding something back or it doesn't and some companies are just a little more reserved in terms of what they share and and what they don't, and I'll give you an example. We'll cover this in a minute. But I did a blog post earlier this week talking about how Google's media CDN in a hundred terabits of capacity. Well, google had to get that cleared from legal. Yeah, and they did, and I was like, oh wait, I can actually use that number.

Speaker 3 25:13

I can.

Speaker 2 25:14

I wasn't expecting clearance to come. Yeah, so part of it too is, just, some companies are a little more forthcoming with that information, and also it's not just Mac. So, for instance, the Prime Video team, they are very, very good. I call them out as well in terms of how they work with me. During the last NFL playoff, you know, they called me up from their broadcast operation center because I was sending emails, what I was seeing, and they're like let's, let's walk through some things. We want to get some information from you. During the game.

Speaker 2 25:47

Now, I couldn't talk about some of the information they were giving me. Yeah, sure, I couldn't put it out there, yeah, but they were very quick to say, hey, let, hey, let's give you some insight. Also, you notice something? Oh, you found a bug that we're kind of aware of, but we're not fixing until the next revision. Okay, but that allowed me to know that they weren't blind to it, they knew about it. Max just seems to just I don't know have a easier way of getting information cleared from the higher ups of yes, let's put out this information of here's the bugs that we've fixed on the platform. So, yeah, it would be great if others did it. Why they don't. I think it's just. I think it just depends on how much legal wants to keep information in house it's really all.

Speaker 2 26:34

Let's go to Nokia and Amazon. They've reached a deal over nokia's patents. Yes, so there was a whole bunch of back and forth with these two. I'm not going to go into the history here, but the agreement settles all patent disputes between the parties in all courts, including germany. Uh, nokia sued germany, uh, amazon for patents in the US, germany, india, uk. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the good news is that that's now done. Amazon's paid Nokia and all the suits are done. So that's a good thing to see. Yeah, that's good. Next, cnn mentioned that they plan to roll out a quote suite of digital subscription services as part of a overhaul aimed at really doing something to have a positive impact on the decline of their TV business. So what they said is they're going to debut at least one new streaming product this year. But then the executive described the launch this year as a quote, non-news digital product, though it might be heavy in information. Okay, not sure what that is.

Speaker 2 27:44

It would be us only yeah denny commented that the service would have more features and lifestyle content. So is this a tmc type? Yeah, I don't. I don't really know. He did say, quote we've got some interesting ideas about things which are not conventional television but which will be part of the offer as well as the core news. Too much to decipher there yeah really don't know what they're talking about. Keep in mind that they did have c CNN Plus as a subscription service. That was killed off when WarnerMedia merged with Discovery in 2022.

Speaker 3 28:22

That was killed off within what was it like six or eight weeks? Yeah, I was going to say months. Yeah, I mean yeah, it was quick.

Speaker 2 28:31

So something's coming from CNN of some kind tied to lifestyle content okay, I'll keep my eye out yeah this year. Yeah, with one or more expected in 2026 as well okay, I'll look for those one or more of lifestyle content. I'm sure it'll be right up your alley.

Speaker 3 28:51

Yeah, it's right up, my alley uh, some additional layoffs.

Speaker 2 28:56

This is from a few weeks ago, but EchoStarDish did a round of layoffs. It also included Boost Mobile Sling TV team For those that were let go. Man, you've got to add hashtags to your posts Add Sling TV, add Dish, add EchoStar, because when I go to look for who got laid off, those are the hashtags I'm putting in. Otherwise there's really no way to find everybody. And then quick news thing as I mentioned earlier, mark did a post here about Google's media CDN. Google's been pretty quiet about its media CDN and offering, but that's now changing. They've signed some large M&E customers at Major League Baseball, warner Bros, discovery, the two that I can mention. As I said earlier, they now have over 100 terabits of egress capacity. Now for those that don't know, don't confuse Google Media CDN with Google Cloud CDN. So Cloud CDN is for web acceleration, media CDN is for large object delivery, software downloads and video. It uses the same underlying infrastructure as YouTube. They're also targeting live. But I think really smart here, mark, is that they're prioritizing customers who commit to a certain level of sustained traffic, because there's no point taking on a whole bunch of live traffic for four hours and saturating your network If that's the only business. There's just not a lot of revenue. Yeah, so in my blog post, google also gave me numbers that I was allowed to put out in terms of their cache hit ratios, their averages. You can look at that online. They talk about the number of locations that they're in and that they can grow to. Also, some of the things they're supporting as far as edge programmability, so you can do custom logic for services like header manipulation, token authentication what you would expect from a media CDN service out in the market. They're also adding some additional services later in the year what they're calling flexible shielding. In addition, waf DDoS protection at the edge with Google's Cloud Armor, so you can bundle a lot in here if you want to.

Speaker 2 31:00

I also detail some of the things they're doing with real-time logging some of the metrics server-side metrics that they're including as well, so they're starting to grow here. They shared with me, mark, a very detailed in-depth product roadmap engineering side as well. Also, customers I got to see a list of a lot of customers. They don't have permission to put them out, so the ones I've previously said MLB and and wd you can see that, based on trace routes, they do now have a testimony with mlb using google media cdn public. So that's. That's another one where you can see a little bit, just watch what they're doing and keep in mind google already has a lot of large relationships with m&e customers using Google's cloud stack.

Speaker 2 31:48

So over time I expect them to be added for media CDN to the mix with customers that want a multi-CDN approach. Okay, they're not doing 50 Ts for a company. They're not going to be doing the Super Bowl and having a large percentage of the traffic. Keep in mind the entire Super Bowl peaked at about 142, based on what Fox gave out at the NAB Streaming Summit. But adding Google Media CDN to the mix in a multi-CDN strategy going forward for customers is a potential. We're starting to see more of that. So one to keep an eye on, for sure. Another infrastructure player in the market. And then finally mark, let's just hit a few funding acquisitions. Uh, funding and acquisitions news. We didn't get to cover this in the last podcast talking about nab.

Speaker 2 32:35

Some of these came out days before nab that's right, yeah, so let's do the first one hydraulics that we talked about briefly on the last podcast.

Speaker 2 32:46

They've raised they closed an 80 million Series C funding round, so like what they're doing in the market, so super smart in terms of what they're using for the money Grow, but don't go crazy. They are looking to increase head count by about 50 percent, so we'll see more from them coming out, just in terms of what they're doing and what they're working on tied to media services. The other thing that's interesting to hear, mark is somebody mentioned how piracy and thwarting piracy is starting to become more of a focal point for content owners, because if you're using the data that hydraulics is pulling in, you can see more in real time of what's taking place to try and thwart it and be more proactive instead of reactive. So there's some additional tools and sources out there tied to piracy and we don't hear a lot about it because none of the content owners want to talk publicly about it. Yeah, exactly, which is why I did not have a session this year on DRM and piracy at the streaming show Like I never did Dan you should have.

Speaker 2 33:50

I would love to If content owners would come and talk about it. Or sports leagues, I would love to.

Speaker 1 34:00

And you need to bring Netflix To talk about piracy, wow, okay.

Speaker 2 34:02

Good luck on that one. Have they ever talked about piracy publicly?

Speaker 3 34:06

No, because, well, no because. Do you remember? Oh, this, this goes back 12, 12, maybe 12 years ago, when some HDMI keys were stolen and people were um taking some of the early you know, like, like, I think it was like house of cards. In fact, I'm fact, I'm certain it was house of cards. It was house of cards started showing up on all the pirate sites and not you know, like video camera, like just filming the screen. I mean like you know the source files and they stole it. It got stolen through an hdmi key hack. That's how they stole it.

Speaker 2 34:46

It got stolen through an HDMI key hack. That's how they stole it. It does sound familiar, yeah, yeah, and the only reason we heard about that is because it came out publicly.

Speaker 3 34:52

A researcher? Yeah, I think it was. I don't know. It was one of the probably DRM companies I'd have to go back.

Speaker 2 34:59

Yeah, it was a security researcher.

Speaker 3 35:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah, who revealed? That's how the file got out, and this was when house of cards was such a huge deal and people are like Netflix is crazy, they're making their own content. It's not going to be very good, you know.

Speaker 2 35:16

Yeah, I forget man, I totally forget about house of cards. But that was the first big series it cost $100 million to make this season, yeah, and people are like they're out of their minds.

Speaker 3 35:26

Yeah, they're crazy. And Kevin Spacey took them for a ride. You know, good for Kevin Spacey, bad for Netflix. You know, like turned out to be just, I mean, brilliant. And you hear Ted Sarandos talk about it and you know, and I've heard a couple different interviews, and you know, and, and I've heard a couple of different interviews, and you know he um, I don't know if I, if he literally used the words like hey, we gambled. But you know he acknowledges like yeah, I mean it was a really big check. And you know, we didn't know. But they, they looked at it and said, look, we're going to write a hundred million dollar check for content that, on one hand, you know what it is, you know what the audience, you know you're reasonably certain you're going to get a return on that investment, but we don't own it, we're just licensing it. What if I took that same money and I own the content? And that was the genesis.

Speaker 2 36:19

Yeah, so they've taken gambles. It probably was the word They've taken. They've had to in their business. Let's also talk here Mark about, because I always love this is Amazon did a little blog post talking about cutting media convert pricing by nearly half since last year.

Speaker 3 36:34

Yeah.

Speaker 2 36:34

So always good to see video transcoding costs, or any part of the workflow, go down. It's also just part of AWS's model is let's just try and always reduce costs.

Speaker 3 36:44

Yeah.

Speaker 2 36:45

So you can see that online if you Google media convert.

Speaker 3 36:47

It's interesting, though, dan, because, um, you know, you hear, you just hear a lot of companies, and maybe you know everybody complains, no matter what it is you're paying for. When the bill goes up, I get it. You know my power bill is bigger this month than last month. I complain, right, um, but uh, you know you hear a lot of companies complaining about. You know and I'll leave AWS out just their cloud bill. You know which AWS is. Most people are using it, so that's what they're talking about. So it is interesting that here, you know they're taking a major service AWS is, and cutting the price.

Speaker 2 37:24

Yes, which is great because, to your point on costs, I was talking to someone the other day and I'm working on some new CDM pricing data I'm going to put out, you know, seven to 10 exabytes a month. You're looking at triple zero, five per gig delivered. One of the things we were comparing was well, on average last year, based on all the data I saw, the cost for electricity in the Us I sorry, in the us, outside the us, in europe it's up 30.

Speaker 2 37:48

Was up 30, your data center costs, just in terms of electricity alone. So this idea that people have in the market and love to write that every year costs come down, every year bandwidth is cheaper, that is not reality. In certain locations it is, but the when you see a large percentage of viewership coming outside the US. Now this whole Moore's law of bandwidth pricing drops 25% every year. No, it does not. It's not the reality. So I'm working on some CDM pricing Mark. I did just complete the Q1 CDM pricing survey. Over 600 customers filled that out so I'll provide a little bit of that online soon in a blog post. Working on that. Now A couple other things here. Banyan Software they acquired Touchstreams. For folks that don't know, touchstream based in Australia. Monitoring OTT Think of it as like an MPOC Viva QOE tool they got acquired. Banyan Software no details here on price value. Value don't know if it was a good deal. Could have been a fire sale. Don't know. Neither side's giving out any details yeah uh.

Speaker 2 38:54

Then another one here is uh simplytv. Uh, they acquired Red Bee Media's content discovery unit. So, for those that don't remember, that was formerly Ericsson's broadcast and media services. So that's good to see. There's some synergy there. They also welcome Summit partners in terms of securing an equity investment. I did ask in terms of just some numbers here, and what I was told was, while they wanted to share them, ericsson prevented them from doing so so which didn't surprise me too much.

Speaker 2 39:29

That's just kind of the way Erickson does things. Also, could you imagine I don't remember now, but part of the reason they Erickson most probably doesn't want to share this and probably okay, I don't know for sure but what they bought it for and what they sold it for, I guarantee you there's a big gap.

Speaker 3 39:45

Two different things, two different numbers.

Speaker 2 39:47

Very much so so, but good to see some funding in the market.

Speaker 3 39:52

Yeah.

Speaker 2 39:52

Companies growing at a right speed. And then just final things from any B mark. All the videos are up. I did also get all the presentations up. Yeah, definitely check some of those out. You can download. Download all those. You can see the links right under the speaker's name. I have seen some additional articles about recapping the nb show mark since we did our last podcast. I you know, I don't know what to call some of these folks other than just goofs, but you know some of the headlines and then hopefully that's not me, because I wrote one of those articles no, but you also didn't say this was the first time you'd be ever charged to attend the exhibit floor.

Speaker 3 40:28

Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, I did. I did read that there's a charge every year, yeah, every year.

Speaker 2 40:35

And the reason there's a charge every year, like a lot of conferences, if you don't have a free code to get on the show floor, you charge a small fee, I don't know $25, $50. And the reason is it keeps the people out who just want to come there to collect stuff from vendors. That's why shows do it. I remember back in the stream media companies market was truly free to attend.

Speaker 3 40:58

Yeah, you could just walk in.

Speaker 2 41:00

You could walk in and then some years it was like who are all these people who clearly are not business people who are drinking and eating and just collecting swag, and the moment you added a $25 fee, you didn't see them. Next year, yeah, they weren't. There didn't have any of the major streamers, they didn't have TikTok or YouTube as an example. Well, actually we had.

Speaker 3 41:26

Yeah, tiktok, tiktok spoke at streaming summit and YouTube did a presentation and YouTube yeah.

Speaker 2 41:33

Of course you're not going to see them in the general NEB show program. The whole point of the streaming summit is to pull all those people into one location. Yeah, again, I checked that person's badge scan. They never went to a single session.

Speaker 2 41:49

So some of the stuff people are writing for these headlines, it's just, it's pretty silly. It makes for a good headline, but that's all it is. Is is a headline. So what the NAB will do next year in terms of the show's focus beats me. I'm not involved in that, but you know streaming summit I already know what I want to do next year Very similar to this year.

Speaker 2 42:05

Next year should be interesting, though, mark, because the things I were thinking about is will the um Skydance, paramount deal be done? Will the Fubo, hulu plus live TV deal be done? And then will all of the linear assets that are being spun out from the major companies Comcast, whatnot are those all going to be spun out by then? If so, those are three really large things that are going to impact the industry that we'll talk about next year. So plenty to talk about the next NEB streaming summit, neb show in general, but that's what we've got for this week.

Speaker 2 42:40

Everything Mark and I talked about is online. I did put up all the Netflix numbers so you can see that just quickly recapped. I also added a little bit after the post, just some of what we heard on the earnings call as well. I thought the commentary was really on point this time from Netflix, just clear to the point. Not that it isn't at all, you know at all times, but this was just even more clear. It's like hey, we saw the Wall Street Journal report. Yes, we saw it, but that's not a forecast.

Speaker 3 43:10

Yeah.

Speaker 2 43:11

They can call it whatever they want, but that's not a forecast and we didn't give that out to Wall Street, so that means it's not a forecast. So I love how direct they were yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 43:19

Well, they have to be, though, dan. Of course because you know the SEC, I mean when you're especially a company like Netflix. Forecast means something very literal, very well-defined, very and there's ramifications behind. You know giving out forecasts that are not correct or you know whatever, so Correct, but it was good they addressed it. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 43:41

Head on. So that's what we got this week. Mark and I will be back. Actually, next two weeks is normal. Next couple weeks are normal schedule until I travel again.

Speaker 2 43:50

So we'll be back next week. Some additional news now what we have coming up, mark, just so listeners know there was a lot of news this week where earnings dropped in terms of dates. So next week we've got verizon comcast, we've got charter, then we've got microsoft, amazon roku, we've got Charter, then we've got Microsoft, amazon, roku Fubo. So the next three weeks, because then we have Vimeo, paramount, wbd, amc, fast. So the next three weeks are earnings weeks again, just like that. But that's great, more data coming out. So if you have any questions, let us know, mark, and I appreciate you listening. If you have any follow-up questions from the NDB show, still let me know. All the videos online at nbstreamsummitcom Also made the player available so you can download them all, go, keep them, watch them somewhere else. You don't have to watch them, just make it easier. But any questions let us know.

Speaker 1 44:39

Everyone. Have a great week and we'll talk to you next week. 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.