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 0:21

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn Podcast. I am Dan Rayburn here with co-host Mark Donegan. Friday May 2nd. We've got some earnings to go through this week Fubo, roku, microsoft, meta, apple, amazon, harmonic. Probably missed one or two others there.

Speaker 3 0:38

Just a few.

Speaker 2 0:39

Mark. Overall actually pretty quiet with earnings, even though it was a busy week. Just not a lot in terms of new information. Now next week, disney, paramount, wbd those three should be interesting.

Speaker 1 0:56

They will.

Speaker 2 0:56

Plus, we have quite a few in terms of vendors as well. But let's jump into this week. Let's go to Fubo first. So Fubo's Q1 2025 earnings their North American subscribers declined just under three percent year over year. So they ended the quarter with 1.47 million. In north america revenue of 407.9 million. Rest of world they called row streaming revenue was down half a percent to 8.4 million. Paid subscribers declined 11 to 354 000 ad revenue overall was down 17 22.5 million. That's mostly due to fubo dropping wd and tvu networks tvu, yeah, televista, univision. So not surprising.

Speaker 2 1:43

Fubo is pretty clear every year in terms of which quarters, because of sports events and seasons, they get more subscribers versus less. Now the net profit number here they gave out is a bit skewed, yes, and that's simply because uh, let's go through the number. So the net profit for the quarter was 188.5 million, but that was due to the positive impact of the 220 million associated with the gain on settle uh, the settlement of litigation from disney fox and warner bros discovery about the venue sports living. So that's why that number there was so high. Fubo ended the quarter with 327.8 million in cash and cash equivalents. So pretty straightforward as far as earnings. Now what do we all want to know more about.

Speaker 3 2:27

Hulu.

Speaker 2 2:29

We want to know more about that Disney deal regarding Hulu plus live TV. Yeah, definitely, Fubo has no additional update. They did not answer any questions on the call, the note to shareholders. The letter simply says we'd love to update you once we can Once, we can yeah shareholders.

Speaker 2 2:45

The letter simply says we'd love to update you once we can. Once we can, yeah, and from all indications it sounded like even when the deal was announced that was a 2026 or, sorry, 2026. Um, yeah, 2026, uh, date of when they thought that deal would go through. So no real update there, other than they did say they're still working on rolling out a skinny bundle package which they want to launch in time for football in the fall, but no details on pricing or exact timing as of yet.

Speaker 2 3:16

Let's jump into roku roku's q1 earnings. So first, roku announced, separately from earnings, that they're going to acquire Friendly TV for $185 million in cash, but $75 million of that is being held back. It's tied to meeting performance goals and milestones over the next two years. Friendly TV I forget the cost of that, mark, we'd have to look it up. I want to say it's $7 or $8 a month and it's a subset of very niche channels. Yeah, a month and it's a subset of very niche channels. Yeah, roku's q1 revenue was up 16 percent year over year to 1.02 billion. Its platform revenue was 881 million. Of that, it was up 17 percent. Its devices revenue was up 11 percent, a little better than they expected, so that total revenue just on devices was 139 million. They had free cash flow of just under 300 million and that was down 30 percent. Other notes here from them streaming hours were 35.8 billion, which was up 5.1 billion hours year over year.

Speaker 3 4:25

It seems like a jump. It's just amazing. They just continue to grow that.

Speaker 2 4:31

They do, and yet their stock just is getting crushed. Over the last Today they were down let's see down 8.5, they closed down 8.5% today. In the last one year they are up 2.6%.

Speaker 3 4:54

In the last five years they're down 46% yeah if you look at the performance, stock performance the last one year and just look at it on a daily view, they kind of hovered on the low side around 60, as low as 55, august of 2024. So they got up to 90, or almost 100.

Speaker 3 5:25

That was a short blip but they were they, they got into the eight, eighties, eighties range, for what was it December to? I mean really about two months, 60 days they were. They were right around 80, 82. That's when they leaped up and then now they're, you know, back to 61. Um, far cry from the 400.

Speaker 2 5:46

Of course they were at a couple of years ago. Yeah, yeah, totally, not even that long ago. Yeah, no, no, that's reality.

Speaker 3 5:52

February of 19. That was 19? February 19. February 19, 2021. So you know, we were well into the pandemic at that point and they had two peaks.

Speaker 2 6:06

Wow, that is four years ago.

Speaker 3 6:08

Yeah, they had two peaks 467 and 440 or something 430.

Speaker 2 6:15

Yeah Well, some other numbers they gave out. They reaffirmed Outlook for full year 2025 revenue of $3.95 billion from the platform. Outlook for full year 2025 revenue of 3.95 billion from the platform. Wall street was hoping that they would grow that or give out a little bit of higher guidance. They did not, but they just reaffirmed it, so I think that's good. They also said more than a third of streaming households in the us streamed monthly from its content row in q1 and they say content row they mean a certain row of content on their homepage. It also said that, as of Q4 of last year, Roku said its home screen has unique power to attract, engage and retain subscribers Due to its position as a lead-in for TV in US households. And here's the number, with a total of more than 125 million people per day. Wow.

Speaker 3 7:07

Interesting. I hadn't seen those numbers before. So that's Roku. By the way, I took a look at Friendly TV. I didn't know about them. Seven bucks, yeah, seven bucks, $6.99. You know, as even the name implies, you know they did a good job naming the service. It's things like me, I think. Me TV tunes any Hallmark Channel, history channel lifetime.

Speaker 1 7:32

Yeah.

Speaker 3 7:33

Game show channel, outdoor channel, yeah, you know. So seven bucks, you know, if you just want kind of some good quote unquote wholesome family content.

Speaker 2 7:46

Roku didn't say how many subscribers.

Speaker 3 7:47

They have.

Speaker 2 7:47

I've never seen a number publicly released.

Speaker 2 7:49

Now the deal's not done, so this is they plan to acquire them once that happens and then we get an scc filing, it's possible in that scc filing you might see some revenue or number of subscribers, but right now it's unknown. Yeah, yeah, or maybe ad revenue. That'd be great as well. Also, just going back to Fubo for a minute, they closed down almost 18% today. Wall Street didn't like their Q2 guidance. I think more than anything else, let's go to Apple. So not much to do on Apple's earnings call here. Nothing about Apple TV+ devices, anything like that. I will just say really what Wall Street was looking for here is the tariff answer.

Speaker 3 8:31

Well, $900 million.

Speaker 2 8:32

$900 million is what Tim Cook said. Apple's predicting an additional cost for this quarter, which ends in June, but was giving no guidance past that quarter. And it's important to remember, the vast majority of Apple's products are currently not subject to the tariffs. So I thought it was great how Apple was very clear, saying well, this is changing frequently, almost day to day. We're not going to give out any prediction past June because we just don't know and some on Wall Street, the notes they put out, didn't like that. But what were they expecting? Anything past June is a guess, frankly. Anything past May 2nd, when we're recording, is a guess. So that's the reality of it. So that's really the only thing to cover on Apple.

Speaker 2 9:17

Let's jump into Amazon here. Aws revenue, which we tend to talk about more, was $29.3 billion. It was up almost 17% year over year, but it was down almost 2% from Q4. Amazon's online advertising business had a revenue of just under $14 billion, up 19% year over year, but again down slightly from the previous quarter. From the previous quarter, this stat Mark they threw out which I had not seen before. Amazon said it had 54.6 million viewers for the season three of Reachers opening in the first 19 days and Amazon said it's the biggest returning season ever. So what percentage of that is that of the total viewers? We just don't know, because we don't know what prime video traffic looks like.

Speaker 2 10:10

Amazon stock today closed down 12 cents. So the market in the last couple of days and Amazon hasn't hasn't gone up or down really either way in the earnings Microsoft and Meta have earnings out. So nothing we really need to cover there, just in terms of nothing super significant. Yes, meta is still losing a lot of money from reality labs. I forget what the total number, tens of billions of dollars it is now at this point, but it's wow, it is a big number, big number. Now one call out here, mark, which was interesting, was microsoft announced that they're raising prices and everything across the line for xbox.

Speaker 2 10:54

So all the xbox series, s x, uh controllers, the special edition, limited edition headsets, all of that is going up and it's going up anywhere between 100 to I think the top was 130 in terms of different um devices, in terms of packages that they have. Now I did see a lot of people saying well, of course that makes sense, because these products and services have parts built out. You know from outside the us where they're building, so naturally we're going to have to increase. You know that's because of the tariff. But what microsoft is also doing here is they increase pricing in regions where there's no tariffs. I'm not sure why. Nobody seemed to notice that yeah so what?

Speaker 2 11:41

what Microsoft said was the reason they're doing this is quote market conditions very unspecific and quote rising costs of development. Hmm, development of what? Not sure Games. Some games are going up $80. Now maybe they're following what Nintendo's doing to Switch 2. That's right, where games will be $80. I don't know if that's all of them, but certainly some of them. But the interesting thing here is, historically, the price of consoles has gone down. Yeah, not in the mid-generation, they haven't gone up in terms of the console generation.

Speaker 3 12:14

They've gone down Exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 12:16

It's fascinating so the fact that they're going up. You know, you know that happens when you do a redesign.

Speaker 3 12:34

In this case, that hasn't happened. So the fact that Microsoft's increasing the price of the X and S five years after release, that's also going to, I think, kill momentum. Yeah, yeah, that's a very fascinating move. Because what does it say? You know this is conjecture, so you know we're asking the questions a lot of our listeners are probably thinking through even right now as they hear this. You know, but what does that say about your happiness with the current install base, ie, if you weren't happy? If you're saying we need to really grow our footprint, well, it's not a good strategy to increase the price of the equipment. You know, correct. Maybe they don't want to grow, exactly, I mean. Or maybe they're trying to shift to buyers LTV lifetime value, correct, exactly, I mean. There's some economic things in there. You know what, if they're even looking at a different business model model, you know, we could dream up all kinds of reasons.

Speaker 3 13:29

But as to how they extract rents, you know, ie revenue from the Xbox ecosystem, so yeah, so this is this is really fascinating news and I'm going to go do a little bit of research on it and watch the you know upcoming blog posts et cetera, just see if I can figure out what they're doing. That's kind of neat.

Speaker 2 13:45

Yeah, One of the things I looked at here in the price and here's a breakdown. So the Xbox Series S, 512 gigabytes, the old price was $299.99. And that's purposely because someone is thinking okay, I can get into Xbox for under $300.

Speaker 3 13:59

That doesn't include tax.

Speaker 2 14:01

But the new price is $379. Yeah, and then you have the one terabit that went from $349 to $429. So the jump on some of these in the Xbox Series X, which is the most powerful one they have, went from $500 to $600. So the jump is big and it does make you wonder just what is the reasoning here. Could it be just the cost to produce? It is much higher than it used to be. It's possible, but it's interesting they didn't come out and say that, yeah, yeah, which would have seemed like a very reasonable excuse it would have given some air cover to.

Speaker 3 14:40

You know, I mean, people would still not like it, but everyone kind of go okay, everything's getting more expensive. You know, shoot, have you been to Costco recently? No, oh no, um. You know, shoot, have you been to costco recently like no, oh no, it's. I mean, everything is getting more expensive, dan, like now. But isn't that the?

Speaker 2 14:56

case.

Speaker 3 14:57

Every year it's just getting more expensive at a faster rate I mean, yeah, and you know and as, as you know, often we comment, you know, in conversations like this, at trade shows or whatever, you know, sometimes it's slightly odd, you know, for some of you know, for a lot of us in the industry to be up there talking about rising prices, because you know we're fortunate in some cases, like with streaming services, that really, if Netflix goes from $15 to $22, okay, that's seven bucks, but you know it, you know I can afford that and I think all of our you know everybody can afford that.

Speaker 1 15:34

Um but yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 15:36

I mean, I'm just making a general observation when we talk as an industry. But you know, like when I go to Costco and like literally everything that I used to buy is now like appreciably more, not like, oh, it's 99 cents more, but it's not like $3 more on a $10 item, $11 item, you're just going. My bill is $100 more than it was, two or three. That's what it feels like anyway. All of a sudden I'm going. What is happening here?

Speaker 2 16:05

Yeah, that's the reality. In terms of price, yeah, definitely. Well, this is fascinating with Xbox, with microsoft's doing there with the franchise, and you know see yeah, dig into it a little bit more, but I can just tell you from the earnings call they didn't give out yeah, yeah and gadget and a couple of the. The gaming sites had just a little bit more information, but not much.

Speaker 3 16:25

Yeah, well there's, I do expect we'll get there's somebody out there sniffing around trying to figure out, you know well.

Speaker 2 16:31

Also, the the xbox team is very good in terms of talking to the gaming sites and giving insights and doing interviews, so I expect we'll get something within a couple months probably.

Speaker 2 16:39

On that. Let's jump to nfl. The nfl said that it averaged 7.5 million viewers across all networks and digital channels for three days during the draft, so that was up 27% from a year ago. The NFL said it's the second best total in league history for the draft, behind only the 2020 draft, which was altered by the pandemic. So 7.5 million across all TV networks and digital. I don't think that's very good. Now, this is a draft.

Speaker 1 17:10

It's not a game I get it.

Speaker 2 17:11

Yeah, but I saw the nfl really touting wow look how popular the draft is. And uh, okay, but that's across three days. So, hey, cool the draft. I just I don't know, I didn't think it was that big of a deal. You have to be a hardcore, you have to be a hardcore football fan, you know? I mean because you have to care, I guess just check it every once in a while, yeah, exactly now let's go into the zone.

Speaker 2 17:32

Now. I'm just for all the people who are listening in france or who are french. I'm sorry, I'm definitely going to get this wrong, but according to a report from le quip if I said that, right, a french online news site uh, the zone and lfp have agreed to terminate their contract for league one after just one season. Yeah, it has not worked out well there. So DAZN is going to reportedly pay what equates to 113 million US dollars to terminate the deal after the end of this season with two further rights installments payments worth 158 million. Now the rumors. This hasn't been confirmed by DAZN, but the rumors, and these have been out for a few weeks. Confirmed by DAZN, but the rumors, and these have been out for a few weeks is that DAZN signed up half a million customers, but it needs three times that to break even on the investment.

Speaker 3 18:21

Yeah, when this news, this news first broke, like the end of last year, right when there was a rumor, it's been a couple weeks at least, maybe longer. Yeah, I thought that there was some room, but it was very much a rumor and I think you mentioned it and I remember that 500,000 number and it was 1.5 million for the investment.

Speaker 3 18:47

So you know again, you're right, we did bring that up a couple of months ago it was a couple of months ago that, yeah, I had to go do some searching but um, but again, you know, kind of going back to, it's interesting that the fact that they're willing to pay all these breakup fees, they have done the math, you know, and and and the math is better to lose a little bit of money now than a whole lot more money later.

Speaker 2 19:13

Yes, and you wonder now what LFP is going to do. Yeah, are they going to go direct to the consumer. It sounds like they're going to try with maybe a broadcaster, but you have about three and a half months until the season starts. Yeah, They've got so timing. Timing isn't great, but clearly this is a good indication of where sports select. Sports events don't always work out from a content licensing standpoint yeah but Dan sports is the only thing that consumers care about.

Speaker 3 19:43

It's the only thing they're willing to pay for.

Speaker 2 19:45

Yeah, that's true, that seems to be the case.

Speaker 3 19:47

I'm taking a swipe at vendors, who you know, everything is sports, sports, sports. What's new for you? We're in the sports market.

Speaker 2 19:58

You and everybody else. I was so hoping Roku and the earnings would break out. Just a little bit of viewership of those billions of hours based on content. Because I wanted to know what percentage was related to sports content not even live, just sports in general. And I asked afterwards and I was told they weren't going to go.

Speaker 2 20:13

No surprise, let's go to TikTok. So TikTok had a press conference last week. Well, depending when you're listening to this, it could be more than a week ago, but it was pretty interesting what they're doing with content creators, bringing them to one place in the city to talk about more services they're building out for them. But they gave out some numbers we hadn't seen before, and the number was that creators are making 10 million dollars daily from live streaming.

Speaker 3 20:39

That's what they're paying them. They're, yeah, that's what they're paying. The creators are to be making more from, you know, brand deals and whatever else.

Speaker 2 20:44

But and overall, tiktok live makers earned 63 million dollars in the previous 30 days, with creators with fewer than 50,000 followers accounting for 80.4%. That number was interesting because if you take into account how many followers say, have 1, 2, 3, 5 million sure a small percentage of those followers or those with followers can make up the largest percentage of revenue, but here it didn't. They also said approximately 30 million users watch TikTok live streams daily and 400,000 producers go live daily, so they're working with them to figure out how to create more content. There was also a little bit of talk of CPMs, which, which was interesting, actually CPM rates. So if you want to see more about that, just Google. I did something just quick on LinkedIn, but there were a couple of people who covered it news-wise because they were at the event.

Speaker 3 21:41

So just Google TikTok, new York city creators you'll find some news around that Important to highlight, just in case someone missed this, because often in tiktok it's like oh yeah, short video, this is the live streams that they're talking about. This is tiktok, yeah. So way more than 30 million users watch tiktok videos right daily, but for live streams, yeah and this is also tikt makers. So correct, what percentage had?

Speaker 2 22:11

how many followers, I don't know, but you know this is.

Speaker 3 22:13

this also is interesting. It shows that TikTok's serious about stimulating live video on the platform, because this whole event is around live live creators going live live.

Speaker 2 22:31

Creators going live, yes, and what I'd love to know is okay, you're going live, what? What is the format in terms of the content.

Speaker 3 22:34

What is the like you? Know, I know some have to do with selling stream selling is kind of what we call it here in the west, but uh, I I think in asia, well, you can actually call it the same, really.

Speaker 2 22:46

But that seemed to be the focus, but just google that you'll get some more information there. Some folks did a did a great job in terms of covering. Let's jump into harmonic. Harmonic q1 earnings revenue of 133.1 million, so that's up from 122. Gap net income of 5.9, which is good because year over year they had a net loss of 8.1. Comcast accounted for 34% of Harmonix revenue. Charter represented 12%, so those numbers are actually down. Broadband revenue is up almost 7.5%. Video revenue was up almost 12%. The company did say they expect quote more significant impacts on its broadband business due to the tariffs, but that's broadband business only, not the video business.

Speaker 2 23:35

And that's primarily because its third-party manufacturing site is in Malaysia, hence the tariffs. They ended the quarter with $148.7 million in cash, compared to the $84.3 million in the prior year period.

Speaker 3 23:49

To really increase their cash on hand, cash hoarding, which is a good thing they did not update its full year 2025 guidance.

Speaker 2 23:58

Not surprising, I think. If you're tied to the tariffs in any way, how are you going to guide second half of the year, just like Apple? You can't. So just full year 2025 guidance stayed the same. Stock-wise Harmonic in the last month is down 3%. In the past three months it's down 16%. In the past 12 months it's down 1%. So they haven't taken that bad of a hit, considering what the market's been doing.

Speaker 2 24:24

A few more things here. Mark, just twitter. I still call twitter. I refuse to call it x. It just doesn't sound right. Um I I put this up on on linkedin just to let people know. Hey, if you're following me on twitter, you'll notice I haven't posted much hardly anything over the last couple of months and going forward I won't be anymore. In 2018, twitter accounted for 28% of all referral traffic to my blog. By 2020, the number dropped under 15%, and last year it was such a small fraction of a 1% that there's too many zeros here for me to even count. It didn't even come up in the top 20 refers referral sites. It's basically absolutely dead for business news tied to our industry. Now other industries, I don't know, maybe the pharmaceutical industry. Everyone's still posting on.

Speaker 3 25:18

Twitter VCs. I have no idea. Vcs are on Twitter. Okay, so there are some.

Speaker 2 25:23

So other industries might be doing better. To give you an idea, posts I would publish to twitter with industry data just those small snippets I push out that would, on average, get 10 000 plus impressions. Now they're averaging less than 300. Even what I did during the Super Bowl with Fox, which normally in any other platform just Super Bowl streaming Fox right, or pick any platform you know people go bonkers for that data. Some of those have 275 impressions, I suppose. So it's literally just died. Google, linkedin, reddit, mainstream news sources they make up 98% of all referrals to my blog. News sources. They make up 98 of all referrals to my blog.

Speaker 2 26:06

So one of the issues here with this is, once elon came and killed off free api access, many third-party apps didn't the access now, so you could no longer track news from twitter and rss feed. So I used to be able to track people in the industry in my rss uh app feed lead best out there, based on either a person or a hashtag. Well, all of a sudden now it's broken. So now to actually track anybody in Twitter, I have to go to Twitter every single time, which, of course, is what Twitter wants because of ads or anything else, but it doesn't make for a great reading experience, not to mention the amount of dead links. I get things not broken and sorry, try again later.

Speaker 2 26:44

So twitter had a good run for many years for our industry. At one point it was a great place to post quick, little hits of information, but over time its source for business news just really died out for our industry. I'm still going to use it to I did mention to track users comments during live events because they're so quick to put up there and say I hate so-and-so cause it's not working. Uh and man, that language is getting bad.

Speaker 3 27:10

By the way. By the way, I'm curious Um, do you, are you just, do you just have a selection of five or six kind of search? You know strings, that you know that you found surface, or how? How do you?

Speaker 2 27:26

Yes, absolutely so. Before it's great question, so before our live event. I already have bookmarked the keywords that I want to search on. But also, if you just look for replies with Peacock or replies with Tubi or replies with Fox, you can see how they're replying to others saying sorry, you're having a problem. Have you checked the following?

Speaker 2 27:41

And then, I see how quickly they're coming in. I count how many in a one minute period and then a one minute period over 60 minutes. So I have a process to it. But yes, beforehand I look at the hashtags. But also interesting to note that sometimes some of the actual content owners will come up with a special hashtag for that live event and they'll start using using it weeks before. So I tracked that one as well.

Speaker 2 28:02

Yeah, that's, that's the easy way to do it. Now mark what's. What's just, I think, comical here is I'm saying how bad twitter is for driving traffic and whatnot, and just this two little paragraph post I put up on linkedin within four days had 75 289 impressions because you put up something about Twitter and everybody has a comment.

Speaker 2 28:26

There was over 50 comments and the vast majority of them were just yeah, you're only realizing this and Twitter's dead. Or it doesn't work, or, man, I got off years ago, or there was also one or two I had to delete because people were they want to burn your Tesla.

Speaker 2 28:41

Nonstop curse words. Yeah, I don't have a Tesla, but just non-stop curse words. I was like guys, come on, exactly. So if you're following me on twitter, just I'll rarely post there, maybe never again. Uh, two other things here mark. Uh, one from neil, so let's do the linkedin one.

Speaker 2 28:58

Yeah, yeah, this is linkedin has announced that they are going to work with what they're calling top creator voices and they are going to work with them to create content video content from top, what they're calling top creators and publishers. So interesting to see them starting to use the platform more to try and push more video. And they say they're doubling down their investment in video. They say it's one of the fastest growing formats on LinkedIn. Now, of course, we have no details behind fastest growing based on what we don't know.

Speaker 2 29:37

All they're saying is advertisers are seeing 130% higher video completion rate when compared to standard video ads. Well, is that a fair comparison? No, all they're saying is advertisers are seeing 130% higher video completion rate when compared to standard video ads. Well, is that a fair comparison? No, if you're watching a video and there's an ad in it, there's a higher chance you're going to complete it, versus a page that just happens to have a video ad on it, yeah, so that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Now they say they have more than 1 billion members in their community, but they're starting off with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It looks like about N content creators to create what they're calling a collection of shows shows. I've seen some comments online people saying they're picking a small, you know, handpicked a group, and this sounds like the old, old media versus first new media.

Speaker 3 30:30

I think that's Jim. Jim Ladderback made that comment. Yeah, I didn't see who it was yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 30:41

But here's the thing you can't start with everybody, because everyone's going to create great content, or sorry, everyone's going to create content. A lot of it's not going to be great, and the key here is advertisers don't want to buy against it, so it's okay that they're starting small. That said, here's the focus. You ready the focus. This is their words will be on the CEO playbook. I have no idea what that means. Playbook. I have no idea what that means. Ai and innovation that's about as generic as you can get. Starting and scaling a business what kind, I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 31:11

So startup and startup and things tied to female businesses and small business stories.

Speaker 2 31:17

So what I don't like is that they're taking approach of shotgun approach of let's pick very generic high level subjects. Ceo playbook the information that a CEO is looking for in LinkedIn that is, running a coin operated business versus an AI business are completely opposite. A physical product versus a digital product, a2b versus a b2c. So this generic high level approach I think is absolutely wrong. But the reason they're doing this is because they're targeting brands and advertisers that are not going to be drilling down into a particular niche or vertical. So they're going for quantity over quality. I wish it was the other way.

Speaker 3 32:06

Could you imagine if just go with me on this thought experiment could you imagine if they had an algorithm as powerful as TikTok, but on LinkedIn? Because it is a complete taxonomy of what a professional like? If you're going to map, you know the attributes of what a professional network looks like. You know way beyond just the industry or the market or the geography or the level of position. But there is so much data that LinkedIn has Like I mean it's mind boggling when I think about it how both as a vendor I would be they would be able to serve ads with such incredible specificity, you know and content, and do this at scale. Like I've never figured out why they haven't been able to break through at that level. Because the algorithm it just continues to be a mess in my, in my experience, it's just it's.

Speaker 3 33:13

It's just a mess, it's like.

Speaker 2 33:16

LinkedIn is one of those platforms I've never quite understood because, to your point, they have something going. I talked last year. I got almost 9 million impressions. It continues to grow. I know what content to create. I know what stories to write about. They feature a lot of my content.

Speaker 3 33:31

Yeah, you get featured even.

Speaker 2 33:33

And that's all great, but I am still getting every day bombarded with Dan. You should really look at opportunities at this company, say for a board seat, and every opportunity is tied to pharmaceuticals, automobiles, things. Where they have my information on LinkedIn, they can see 30 years of my work history and I don't use any words tied to medical or device implanted or I can't figure out why they still target me with all of that. It's very odd and that's just jobs. If you think about board opportunities, if you think about all the things they continue to send me saying, dan, is your company hiring? Well, you hiring so it seems so unpersonalized. The other thing I noticed today too, on the mobile side, is they still have it set up as default. Then the top of your newsfeed on mobile, it automatically comes in as most relevant.

Speaker 2 34:36

Oh, that's right, you have to go into your settings and switch. Most recent. So I got a promoted ad that I and this wasn't from the NAB, it was actually Hydraulics. It was a promoted Hydraulics ad from LinkedIn saying you should come by the Hydraulics booth at the NAB show Little late guys the one three weeks ago, and it's not Hydraulics fault, it's LinkedIn's fault.

Speaker 2 35:01

So why am I getting an ad for something that took place three weeks ago Now in LinkedIn on mobile? I double checked today and I do have it as newest. I don't have it as as um most relevant, but I'm still getting ads that are not irrelevant. So there's some things about that LinkedIn platform that I just can't figure out, why they can't sell them.

Speaker 2 35:22

I know it's not that complicated. Also, you have a timestamp. Let's talk metadata. A timestamp is about as good as you get. So can't you tell just a date and timestamp of when that piece of ad is referencing an event like the NEB, and realize after this date, kill it. Yeah, don't you have a time to live, just like you know TPL, just like we use in other things.

Speaker 2 35:45

I don't get it. Yeah, incredible. It's weird to me, but I just I think about LinkedIn and what it could be, mark, if it just was on another level. All right, last thing here, let's go to Nielsen. Oh, nielsen, okay. Oh, nielsen, okay.

Speaker 2 36:01

So nielsen's launching a new ad supported gauge report, what they're calling a new look at the ad supported tv landscape, okay, oh. So their website shows these two charts. Now the charts can't be blown up, so all this text that you see underneath it, where it's fine print, I can't read it. That's not helpful. So if I download it and then I put it into Photoshop and then I do some stuff, I can just see that it says ad-supported includes broadcast and independence, ad-supported cable and streaming, minus non-ad-supported streaming. Okay, so what they're saying is in Q1, ad-supported share of TV 72.4% was ad-supported, 27.6% was not.

Speaker 2 36:54

But there's no methodology here and when you go to their methodology page, it doesn't give you any. When you go to their methodology page, it doesn't give you any. So what's interesting is I can't tell what is included or what isn't included. So they have something called viewing by distributor and they have services that are completely free to be Roku channel, some of those others, but then they list prime video. Okay, fine, that's not, that's not free. But how come you don't have amazon's free service listed? Are they not tracking that one? I don't know it. Just it doesn't say. Now, when you go to the Add Supported View tab, it gives you some numbers and then you click Read More, which takes you to the press release. So that doesn't actually allow you to get any more details, it just sends you to a press release which literally is two paragraphs at most.

Speaker 3 37:55

Yeah, it's not helpful at all, except I like this. Okay, I love this quote. You're going to love this one. Every day, our clients use our data to make informed decisions about their business. As we head into the upfronts, this ad-supported layer to our industry defining gauge report provides deeper levels of analysis to help guide advertising strategies. That is the quote from the CEO underneath these two graphs that you point out like don't tell you anything.

Speaker 2 38:30

These two, you know these two circle charts and I can't see what's included and what is not. The other thing is I get they're doing live plus two or live plus seven, but if we're talking live it should be live, so they're including just for listeners to know. Live plus seven includes live television viewing plus viewing up to seven days later for linear content that's not live, so I don't understand what that means.

Speaker 3 38:56

That is, though, you know there's the plus three plus seven. You know different. I mean, that is somewhat. The industry has been tracking that for years, because of DVRs, you know because of DVRs, so I, so I get the, you know live plus seven, or you know however many days you want to, but we're comparing apples to elephants with all of this and again, I've called Nielsen out for this multiple times.

Speaker 2 39:22

They refuse to answer what's included in other streaming. They say streaming platforms listed at other streaming includes any high bandwidth video streaming.

Speaker 3 39:33

What is that? What is high bandwidth video streaming? I?

Speaker 2 39:35

don't know. It's a phrase they've been using forever that they won't define. So are they counting low bandwidth video streaming, because they're saying they're not counting high bandwidth? Are you counting low? I can't figure it out. So just more charts that everybody's regurgitating. As you could imagine, mark, people shared this all over LinkedIn and dozens of posts.

Speaker 2 39:58

Oh my God, look it. Ads supported this Without looking or questioning of what it means. You've got some stuff here that's two plus days. You got seven plus days. It's a mess. Somebody really needs to replace what Nielsen's doing here, and VideoAmp seemed to be the furthest along in terms of trying to do that. Then their business got upended. They had to do cutbacks. Now you have new management over there, but man, it's, it's. It's ridiculous in terms of the data that's just being shared out there without anybody asking. But what does this mean?

Speaker 2 40:32

Now, here's the thing. If you, if Nielsen, wants to do this, ad supported view of X, percentage of viewing, the way we define it with a clear methodology. This is the percentage that were ads and you're comparing that month to month, okay, but my question would be who the hell cares? Because what you're not providing is business intelligence of we could have more viewing, but CPMs went down, okay. Then advertisers had a poor experience and, as a result, paid less. Had a poor experience and, as a result, paid less. So we don't know the business outcome as these numbers shift up and down that Nielsen's going to be sharing with us.

Speaker 2 41:10

Yeah, that's the problem For sure. So you guys can go check it out. Listeners go check it out. It's just every day that they talk about this stuff or come out with more stuff. It just really is not helpful for the industry. And also I'll just put out there I have asked Nielsen to come to the NAB Streaming Summit every year to sit on stage free of charge, no sponsorship required, no money to be paid. I'll give you as many tickets as you need and come and talk about your methodology.

Speaker 2 41:38

Nope not interested. What does that tell you? I also, it's not me. I see I don't see them going to other shows. Yeah, exactly yeah.

Speaker 3 41:45

It's not like they're out talking and everybody else's, but they don't like you, dan.

Speaker 2 41:50

You know what they don't, but that's okay, I don't mind, I don't mind, I'm still going to ask hard questions. But you know what? Then go to some other conference where I can go listen and hear them talk. I just want to know what's behind the numbers. High bandwidth streaming no other company in our industry uses that term and notice they don't even say high bit rate, they say high bandwidth Weird.

Speaker 3 42:15

Yeah, really weird.

Speaker 2 42:16

So here's what we got next week, mark Earnings-wise Vimeo, disney, fastly, akamai, altice, cloudflare, kaltura, paramount, wbd and AMC Networks Love a lot. So we got 10 earnings next week that we'll cover. So we'll be back next week. Another episode. Everything Mark and I talked about today is online. Got questions? Hit us up. Appreciate everyone listening, mark, I have to check the downloads. I think we're at about 80 000 now incredible total so yeah, well, hey, I have an idea.

Speaker 3 42:46

Let's do a happy hour in phoenix, uh, when we reach 100 and and you get to fly in no, thank you.

Speaker 2 42:54

You know why? Because that's going to be sometime this summer and I went to phoenix last year to visit fox studios, which was incredible. Not Fox Studios.

Speaker 3 43:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 43:04

But I am not kidding. When I walked outside to head to dinner with them at six o'clock it was 108 degrees.

Speaker 3 43:09

Yes, that's right, and I thought why does anybody live here?

Speaker 2 43:14

Is this penalty for doing something wrong?

Speaker 3 43:16

Well, we ask ourselves that same question about three months out of the year, four months, maybe five months. That's what everybody says, same question about three months out of the year, four months, maybe five months. The rest we say it's heaven. So anyway, yeah, come join us all the power to you, man. That's just that's not my kind of weather all right, but yeah, we'll do something we have. I'll come to new york.

Speaker 2 43:33

I'll come to new york what we should do is we should give away free stuff to listen. Yeah, yeah, cool, I'll pull together a whole bunch of fire sticks, roku stuff. Just go out and buy a whole bunch and we'll just get it somehow Like people who leave comments.

Speaker 3 43:45

Yeah, yeah, there you go, there you go. You have to leave a comment. That's your answer.

Speaker 2 43:50

Or something like that. We'll figure it out. So more free stuff coming. But we appreciate everyone listening. Have a good week, Stay safe.

Speaker 1 43:58

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.