Each Sunday, Daniel Frankel and David Bloom share thoughts, ideas and impulses related to the global technology, media and telecom industries. You can also find this weekly column on LinkedIn. Starting on Oct. 6, it will have a new platform home, Next TMT. Email frankeldd@gmail.com if you'd like to sign up for free to that new newsletter.
DANIEL FRANKEL: Not sure if you're still in Northern Italy minding the GDP of Tuscany, Piedmont and Veneto, but I finally moved 95% of my social engagement off Twitter/X this week and onto Threads ... and it was every bit the good decision I was told it would be. My first sports-centric perusal on the platform -- a next-morning dive into the New York Jets' dominant win over New England on Thursday Night Football -- was satisfying. Plenty of good content and takes ... sans notes about what a boss Aaron Rodgers is for being a COVID denier. The Amazon Prime Video live stream of the game averaged 13.37 million viewers, the company said.
Barring a World Series championship from the American East-leading Yankees, the Jets, Giants, Rangers, Islanders, Knicks, Nets and Mets will have exceeded more than 100 combined seasons without bringing a major sports title to the Big Apple, according to a recent Associated Press tally. Responding to Nielsen's 2025 "universe estimates," WPIX-TV research exec Eric Kabakoff posted on LinkedIn Friday morning a useful reminder of the density and impact of the New York DMA. In short, it helps everyone when these teams are winning and drawing an audience.
DAVID BLOOM: Greetings from our new adjunct bureau on the Italian Riviera. Office hours are from Maybe Later Today to How About Next Week, except when it comes to the Next Text, the holiest writ being writ since at least the Bill of Rights, at least until we see how that whole presidential election thing plays out in the States. Speaking of prudent shifts, congrats on the almost-exit from the soul-destroying sump of an evil genius/ketamine fiend gabillionaire to a quantifiably less terrible platform owned by another gabillionaire with apparently fewer problematic intentions for the Republic. Feels like a win. I’ve been on both platforms (@DavidInLA on Threads; join me!) for a while, but generally have pulled back on social media, joining a significant slice of the populace seeking more meaningful life connections. By all accounts, the same is happening to the dating apps. I regard this as social progress.
Your New York dude’s homer attitude is completely unsurprising, given what he does and where. It does seem that the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, not to mention the MSL, NWSL, and WNBA have managed just fine in the absence of any display of competence by Kabakoff’s Klatch of Keystone Kops franchises. At least the Knicks and Yankees have lately provided some competitive respite. Perhaps more interesting than the Championship Winter in the No. 1 market is how sports programming will displace more and more entertainment programming on broadcast and even on streaming. NBC’s piece of Comcast’s new $2.5-billion-a-year NBA deal will displace 150 hours of prime-time programming. ABC will see lesser displacement, while Amazon and Netflix aren’t spending more on entertainment programming, so their sports ventures mean fewer shows featuring clueless Americans in Paris or the Middle East. This all adds to the real winter of discontent in Hollywood, with even fewer scripted and unscripted projects being commissioned. Happy Emmys Week to you, Hollywood!
Speaking of our sports obsession, we should note the last Woj Bomb of all, the stunning decision by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski to forgo another $20 million or so in his contract as the Four-Letter Network’s crack NBA scoops machine. What will he do instead of working multiple iPhones 23.5 hours a day for every shred of fast-breaking news that he would then spill on, wait for it, X? That always seemed a bit odd, probably to his ESPN bosses too. The Woj will become general manager of the men’s basketball team of his alma mater, tiny St. Bonaventure University. GM is a new position among many college football programs these days, as they grapple with NIL, TV rights, player salaries, the depredations and opportunities of the transfer portal, and old-school high school recruiting. The University of Alabama’s football team just bent everyone’s brains by giving GM Courtney Morgan an $825,000 a year contract. That’s a lot of money, but that’s also a thankless job, especially at a pressure cooker such as ‘Bama. But lots of luck to Woj. I still think he should join Next Text's fast-growing adjunct bureau in Rapallo, which is far more temperate than the Bonnies’ upstate New York home. But the heart will do as the heart will do.
FRANKEL: I noticed that NBC won the 2023-24 broadcast TV season in total viewers, averaging 4.9 million a night, a performance charged by the 14 million viewers it averaged for the Summer Olympics. NBC also won the demo race, averaging an incredibly tiny 0.72 rating in the 18-49 demo. Two years ago, we made a big deal out of it when NBC won the year with a 1.1 demo rating average. Speaking of ratings, Scripps chimed in with more explosive WNBA audience news -- the league's audience grew 133% this past regular season on Ion.
Also read: Ratings for WNBA Telecasts on Scripps-Owned Ion Rise 133%
What I found particularly interesting about this is that the male 25-54 Ion WNBA audience grew 181%. In the controversial words of comedian Bill Burr, the dudes are still "carrying most of the couch" when it comes to supporting the league.
BLOOM: It’s nice to see the interest in newcomers Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese continuing through the season (though Reese’s record-breaking run has ended with an injury). Clark has been putting up lots of records of her own, and her slow-starting franchise might just make the playoffs. I hope it continues to shine a light on the good ball being played everywhere else in the league, too. But in terms of scoring big, the real long-range shooter this week was Ted Sarandos, speaking at a tech conference in New York where he called for more transparency in streaming numbers. That’s especially easy to do when you’re the industry leader, with 94 billion hours viewed in the first half of the year, and your new viewership report about to splash down. But yes, it’d be great to see what all the other players, even Apple’s TV Plus side hustle, are actually getting in terms of viewership, instead of the bank-shot metrics we get from third-party providers.
I’m also looking forward to seeing how things play out for YouTube’s new connected TV app, which was due for some tech lovin’. Here at the Adjunct Bureau, with its erratic internet connection and dinner-plate-sized TV screen, we haven’t been actually watching much video the past couple of days. But I was interested to read the interface is designed to look more like SVOD apps, with more prominent subscribe buttons, QR codes, and widescreen trailers that YouTube calls “immersive previews.”
Also read: Surging YouTube Set To Overhaul Its Connected TV App
More intriguingly, the app is designed to encourage YouTube creators to organize their shows around episodes and seasons. Given how 10% of view time supposedly already going to YouTube, any bets whether this will further accelerate that?
FRANKEL: I myself raced back home from the bank Saturday morning to watch USC vs. Michigan in their first-ever Big Ten matchup at the Big House ... only to realize I had no way to get CBS. I let DirecTV Stream go. Sling TV doesn't have CBS. And our Paramount Plus subscription lapsed when one of our credit cards was swapped out few months ago amid our frequent fraud-alert experiences. We never gave Par the new credit card number. I resubscribed and fiddled with the app for 15 minutes, well past kickoff ... before realizing that you have to pay extra for the $13-a-month, premium "Par Plus With Showtime" to access the live feed of KCBS-TV. I know Peacock also makes you spring for a similar amount to watch your local NBC station, but I still didn't expect not to get a channel that I could obtain myself over the air. Now, I have an OTA antenna ... but it's been in a storage crate somewhere ever since I folded up my studio office and started renting the place back in June. My son, exasperated with me, ended up signing up for a free Fubo trial while I was out of the room. Another example of the fragmented video market for sports confounding semi-innocent fans! If you like football, you've got to pay at least $100 a month for TV now. You need at least a virtual MVPD that has ESPN and all the broadcast networks, and you probably need Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. As for the game, man, how does SC give up that run? What a game! But ... so disappointing if you're an SC wonk.
BLOOM: And here I thought watching American football in the Rapallo Adjunct Bureau was complicated! The nine-hour time zone difference means that even mid-day games in Los Angeles are starting far into the night here. Not to mention that everyone here thinks football really means futbol. I will say that OTA antennas never went away in Italy. They are everywhere, of often rather baroque design, as seen in this photo of homes near the Rapallo Adjunct Bureau that clearly have awesome views of Golfo Tigullio topped with kinda weird TV antennae alongside a couple of satellite dishes.
At this month's Next TV Summit, I recall a speaker who blithely said frustrated TV viewers can always erect a digital antenna to get free live sports and whatever else is left of broadcast television. True enough for those with a reasonable sight line who locate the antenna in the right place, and don’t need to worry about inclement weather, birds, squirrels, or earthquakes dislodging it. Cable actually did solve some consumer problems; that was its original reason for being, as a community antenna service for remote mountain towns. It’s just all the stuff that’s come after, spawning an overpriced, oversized, abusive beast. Now, we’re busy rebuilding it all. Charter has all those streaming services available on top of its traditional cable package. That, to me, is a temporary but attractive fix that salves the transition for media companies to a streaming future. Perhaps by then the USC defense will have become more consistently reliable at wrapping up a player before a back-breaking, game-winning run. At least No. 7-ranked Mizzou eked out an overtime win over mighty Vanderbilt University, formidable in its academic if not football achievement.
I would be remiss in not marking the passing of the great songwriter/singer J.D. Souther this past week at 78. He made much of his money and modest fame writing or co-writing huge hits for the Eagles: Best of My Love, Heartache Tonight, New Kid in Town, Victim of Love, How Long. I was enough of a music geek to know who he was back then and owned his two solo albums. Then I had a surprising indirect personal connection through Charlie Bates, an older colleague at Texas's Amarillo Globe-News. Charlie played in a band with J.D. in high school in Amarillo, mostly blues skiffles and similar Texas sounds in the early 1960s. Then the Beatles came along and blew all that up. J.D. left for Los Angeles, where his roommate was one Glenn Frey. That worked out. Souther also wrote or performed with Linda Ronstadt, Dan Fogelberg, Bonnie Raitt and other '80s stalwarts, but my favorite was one of his few hits under his own name, a 1981 duet with buddy James Taylor that has a prescient resonance with today’s vicious online gossip on X and elsewhere. Plus, those harmonies! RIP, J.D.
