Next TV writers Daniel Frankel and David Bloom engage in a kind of weekly text-based podcast here. Send complaints to Bloom.
DAVID BLOOM: Yo, D to the F! So, it looks like while we were busy kvetching over the fight between Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast over a $2.5 billion package of NBA games, Netflix slipped in and secured ... two NFL games on Christmas! It'll be a very nice payday for the league and its players, though the mid-week matches will seriously complicate scheduling for the teams involved. But this feels big because it's Netflix getting a little taste of that sweet, sweet NFL tune-in audience action. The Big Red N already proclaimed during Upfronts this past week that its ad-supported tier now has 40 million subscribers (about a third more than Peacock). This surely only boosts that further. NFL media and business chief Brian Rolapp had this to say on CNBC the other day:
DANIEL FRANKEL: How does a company like Netflix ramp up the production infrastructure needed to streamcast NFL football ... and make it cost-effective for just two games a season? Amazon had to make that commitment for Thursday Night Football, and it cost them a fortune. As much free cash flow as it may have right now, Netflix isn't Amazon.
So I do wonder how this will all work. Speaking of the NFL and its many telecast partners, I mean, if you're Amazon ... or Fox, or Paramount, or NBCUniversal, Disney, Google or any of the TV rights partners I maybe haven't mentioned, you've kind of gotta feel like you're living in some polygamist village somewhere on the Arizona-Utah border. (If you ever get to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, I highly recommend the Merry Wives Cafe in Hildale, Utah.). It seems the ol' patriarch, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, has entered into still more nuptials. I'm not sure if "living the principle" falls into Harrison Butker's retrograde lifestyle proselytizing, which kicked up quite the controversy of its own after the Kansas City Chiefs kicker told graduating female students during a Catholic college commencement speech that they'd just wasted four years of their lives.
But as I suspect just like many of those female Benedictine College graduates, who were told by a person who is effectively the "housewife" of an NFL team, the place kicker, to get into that kitchen and start making sandwiches, more than a few NFL fans could feel marginalized and let down by the NFL here, as well. A year ago, before the NFL further proliferated its regular and postseason brand across more subscription streaming platforms, Omdia released data suggesting the average fan has to fork over $170 in monthly TV fees if they want to see every game. That bill just went up again.
BLOOM: Roger is certainly the promiscuous polycule right now. It's hard to keep track of all the outlets he's "dating," a confusion likely to be even worse for mere fans who don't track all the deals with your professional zeal. The league is happy to bank the $300 million it reportedly will get over the next three years, while Netflix is banking production and financing expertise in live events ranging from last week's 170 comedy events to the upcoming WWE Raw weekly 'casts.
The more they do, the less your understandable question matters. On another front, how excited are we about yet another online-video service with a two-syllable, four-letter nonsense name? This week, Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery announced Venu, their useless moniker for what I still like to call Spulu?
Also read: Sports Streaming JV Gets a Name, Venu Sports
They should have named it Venus, after the great tennis player, random Roman goddess, hellish second planet, and wonderful Frankie Avalon hit. More importantly, we still don't have a price, though maybe that's because they still don't know if Spu ... Venu will have dozens of NBA games in 2025, or those games will be parked with NBC/Peacock/Comcast while WBD gets even smaller. It's notable that WBD still isn't charging for its Bleacher Report sports add-on for Max either.
FRANKEL: I think this NBA issue with Warner Bros. could end up in court. There seems to be a dispute as to whether Warner can price match Amazon. And as I've said, I think the league doesn't want to abandon TNT and Inside the NBA, which is so intrinsic to its brand. This could take a while to haggle this out. As for Spulu ... er, Venu, we had an analyst suggest that 10% of the remaining pay TV customer base could migrate and cut the cord on their current linear or virtual service if Disney, Fox and Warner price it at the right level. A top cable executive somewhat incredulously emailed me a polite WTF? But Fubo is taking Venu to federal court describing the JV as an existential threat.
And speaking of sports on TV, a FAST channel has secured live game rights to an American major league sport, with Major League Baseball's 18-game Sunday Leadoff package officially coming to Roku Channel this weekend. My questions: Is there any national audience, beyond the playoffs, for baseball anymore? And why did Peacock -- which was paying around $30 million for Sunday Leadoff the past two seasons -- just let it go?
BLOOM: It’s not a stirring endorsement of Our National Pastime that Comcast, with its deep roots in sports, couldn’t figure out a way to make those Sunday morning games work, though that failure probably kept rights prices at Roku-appropriate levels. We’ll see more deals like this by FAST channels. They need to differentiate. At the extremely busy AI on the Lot conference this week, I met a TV maker’s new chief content officer, a veteran of NBCUniversal and Netflix. That a TV maker even has that job says how much the business is shifting, because they’re actually making content for their platforms, not just shepherding things to their screens. They’ll use AI to help make original shows, but it also will improve show recommendations and ad targeting, and help them evaluate which of their hundreds of FAST channels should keep operating.
Meanwhile, creators were showcasing their workflows, AI tools and quite engaging results. Hollywood is still deathly afraid of AI, understandably, but lots of people are embracing it. Many used downe time during last year’s strikes, when AI was a major bargaining issue, to learn how to use various AI tools to make shows such as Our T2 Remake, a parody of Terminator 2. One of the 50 or so T2 contributors used Mortal Kombat as inspiration for his version of the climactic showdown between Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and Robert Patrick’s T-1000. It was quite funny, and rather intriguing. Neither actor was actually in the scene, but looked like it, as did all the details from 1990s MK, including fatality cut scenes. Hollywood’s future is already pretty much here, whether industry creatives like it or not.
FRANKEL: Wow, don't be mad when I say this, but that is the weirdest, least engaging content I've seen all week. There will be day when AI makes a lot of the content we watch and listen to. But the AI hype kind of reminds of 1999, when Warner Bros. wanted me and my 1 Mbps "broadband" connection to get excited about its new cartoon streaming site, the Web 1.0-era Adobe Flash in the pan, Entertaindom. Listen, I'm not saying the possibilities aren't compelling. And you're better at seeing them than I am. It just feels like anything that bills AI, video creation-wise, as more at this point than an effects tool is a little hypish. Then again, I dismissed the internet in 1994, so I could be very wrong. As for other things that lack engagement, perhaps it's not baseball that's not connecting with younger fans but Major League Baseball. My son's Palisades Dolphins high school team was eliminated from the City Section playoffs Thursday night. A lot of emotion from young athletes who have spent years together... their parents, too! Great group who, as a father of a senior, I will truly miss. I found this interesting: When emotions settled a bit Friday, these high schoolers couldn't stop talking about the controversial call that rendered what seemed to be a walk-off Moorpark home run into ground-rule double, ultimately resulting in a CIF Southern Section Division II championship for Hart High. In SoCal this weekend, this clip has been played more times than the Zapruder Film.
Got the original quality of the @FiveToolCA Moorpark vs. Hart walk-off home run ruled ground rule double video.Marked key parts to look at.I can clearly see the ball in front of the fence and bounce left.If you cannot see that, I have an eye doctor appt. Monday you can join… pic.twitter.com/5PZUaMhRupMay 19, 2024
On Saturday, the sophomore and junior Dolphins players who didn't go to prom decided to head two hours south to Lake Elsinore to see local school Harvard-Westlake take on Corona, perhaps one of the greatest high school baseball teams ever, in the Division I championship. Corona's 5-0 victory was televised -- our local Bally Sports channel had it. But the kids wanted to take the congested 10 Freeway to the I-15 to see their best peers play live. Now, Walker Buehler, back from Tommy John surgery, was taking on the Reds at Dodgers Stadium, but most of Reece's teammates didn't even know that ... or if they did know that, they didn't care. They go to rap and country music concerts together. (Most of them saw Sam Barber together at the El Rey a few weeks back.)
The Rams and Chargers at SoFi Stadium is a preferred destination. They even venture to a movie theater from time to time. But Major League Baseball has total dissonance among a group of Los Angeles-area teenage athletes ... who are passionate enough about the game of baseball to bawl their eyes out when their season ended too soon. Can't be good for Rob Manfred. So the question is maybe framed wrong -- it's not why doesn't baseball connect with TV viewers, it's why MLB doesn't.
BLOOM: As a former Riverside resident and reporter who commuted for a couple of years from Redondo, I would have told those Pali kids to take the 405 south to the 91, and go across. Most of that drive would have been a little more human. It will be fascinating in a few years to see if your young ballplayers are still driving hours to watch high school baseball. I bet no. MLB has notably improved and sped up its product the past couple of years, a bit like cricket did with the Twenty20 format that spawned the multi-billion-dollar Indian Premier League (not to mention incredibly valuable TV rights). These days, I like baseball, but mostly for socializing in the stands, or for the mellifluous sounds of Vin Scully or Jack Buck or Jon Miller narrating a summer evening while I’m cooking or reading. The game itself is nearly incidental.
As for complaining about the nascent state of AI creations so far, I think critics are missing the imminent forest for the extant saplings. It’s a bit like saying in 1994 that the Internet will never amount to much because Prodigy is slow and filled with ads. The pace of iterative progress with the zillion applications of these technologies puts 1994 tech companies to shame. One filmmaker at the conference told me we’re already in Hollywood's third AI era, the phase where everyone figures out workflows so they can get, uh, stuff done efficiently and engagingly. Remember that ChatGPT was released publicly only 18 months ago. The question isn’t whether any specific result or tool is good, but how fast it can get better, and how fast everyone can get good at using it. Soon enough, AI will be just a big ol' quiver filled with powerful talent extenders. Then we’ll see what happens to Hollywood business models. Big studios already struggling with the decline of their money-making linear operations are really going to be stretched, because they’ll need to make some serious investments to truly take advantage.
FRANKEL: AI ... workflowzzz ... cyborzzzz ... ChatGBzzz ... Oh, right, the column! I'm up! I'm up! ... Many compelling topics beyond rehashing what's wrong with baseball and AI we didn't get to. Notably, your favorite media-entertainment executive, Bob Iger, said Disney crowded its pipeline with too many stories. The biggest name in film comedy, Will Ferrell, has moved onto TV series with Netflix.
Four full years after the T-Mobile/Sprint merger closed, a research firm has determined that we consumers got screwed. Oh, and we've been getting calls from short sellers reminding us that Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment revenues were down 75% in the first quarter. Guess the stock isn't falling fast enough for their liking. Any last words or requests before we turn the lights out on the week that was?
BLOOM: Your sleepiness in the face of technology reminded me of a certain former president/sitting criminal trial defendant, or perhaps a cortisol-exhausted CEO at the helm of a tanking media company.
We should probably pray for the soul of Chicken Soup. It's a penny stock, threatened with delisting by NASDAQ. And that's after a reverse stock split and a recapitalization, so I can hardly imagine how much further they could fall. Like Sinclair with its pre-pandemic acquisition of those regional sports networks, CSSE bet on a formerly reliable cash cow (those Redbox DVD-rental kiosks) just as the herd blundered onto the freeway of technology-fueled changes in customer habits. Maybe it's time CSSE became a meme stock? That's worked, impossibly, for Adam Aron and AMC Theaters for four years now. As for other ill-starred mergers, T-Mobile/Sprint is high on the list, at least in terms of delivering value to customers instead of just investment bankers. I'd probably also throw the Disney acquisition of Fox onto that list, given the debt hangover and Disney's continued erratic recovery. Iger beat away the Trian and Blackwells proxy challenges, got shares above $122 apiece in April, then promptly saw it all fall apart again. Now shares are back to $103 as I write, a brutal 15% fall in six weeks. Will Nellie Peltz make a third run at the Disney board if this keeps up? At least we'll have something to write about all summer.
