NFL + ESPN: A streaming power play or a risky marriage?

0:04Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime sports. My name is Chris Stone I'm the community lead joined as always by our CEO, Nick Meacham. Now, Nick, I'm going to have a little bit of a moan about social media platforms. And I don't know why it just seems more common these days. But something recently has come up primarily with, I would say, Twitter and LinkedIn are the worst at it. Is when I've got a tab open or exit the app on my phone and then I come back in and I see a post at the top that looks really intriguing and then it goes and auto refreshes. and then I can never find that post again.

0:40I don't remember it always being that common, but it's happened more and more. Or for example, like LinkedIn, I click on a post and I want to go back and I want it to take me in my timeline to where I was when I clicked out, but then it takes me to a whole new one. And I don't know what it is, Nick. I feel like some of this auto refresh stuff has been happening a bit more frequently to me and it's a little bit annoying. I want to come back exactly where I was. Do you know why that happens? Tell me, Nick. I'm going to guess it's because it means you count as more views and impressions by seeing more stuff.

1:08So if you auto-refresh, therefore they see more things on your page versus going back to the same slides. It's a simple numbers game, I believe. That's my theory anyway. It could be. You're probably right, Nick, but that doesn't mean I enjoy it. Like seriously, every time I like click on Twitter and I know it's X now, whatever, like old habits. But like literally every time I click on, ooh, that's a really interesting post. And then bam, auto-refresh before I've even had a chance to read and then I never find the post again. I find it's happening more and more these days. and it's just it's grinding my gears a little bit well you just need to follow through and actually watch and consume whatever you want uh at the time and then uh move move on with your day uh rather than uh need to come back to it but i i do agree i've had that experience before i'm like oh now i want to find that thing that i was go look at and it's uh it's disappeared although i've actually accounted to that uh and the other not account of it i yeah a contrasting gripe or issue uh with those same sort of social platforms is a couple of times i'm on instagram or or an x and it's serving me just utter crap let's just be be blunt and so i leave the page because i like oh i can't why am i why am i on x again this is ridiculous this stuff's just getting worse and worse and the problem is when i open that stuff or if you're on your phone and you're closing down the apps you when you like slide yeah you've got close it depends on what type of phone you have but you sort of open up there you can see you toggle through the different apps to close them the last screenshot you have is of the really bad or crappy thing you stepped away from and a couple times like oh that the reason i left x is because that was not pc what they are trying to serve me on this platform but it's still on my phone it looks like i've been looking at this stuff actively when i'm actually running away from the platform so i had to make a conscious effort to uh get rid of that stuff especially if kids pick up my phone or whatnot as well but x is an awful awful place for that sort of stuff now.

3:02So I really go there. Well, I basically make a conscious effort is whenever I get served stuff that I think is just ridiculous, basically. I don't know what the right term is. Bad content that I don't want to be served that is offensive or not PC. I immediately go off platform to try and maybe let the algorithms know that I'm not interested in that sort of stuff. But so far, it just keeps coming more and more. So let's see what happens with X in the future. but it is not a nice place to just sift and trawl through, which maybe is a good thing for us to keep our social media usage down. I mean, honestly, Nick, it is incredible because I think I've mentioned this before.

3:42I've got multiple X accounts. One of them is just for fantasy football. And basically anything that isn't fantasy football, it's just an automatic block. And I'm just amazed at how many accounts they still serve to me when it's like, clearly anything you serve me that's not related to sports is an instant block. and it's just like how do these people keep accounts keep popping up like the mike my block list is in the thousands of just wow i'm curious to know why x keeps sir like i well i have theories as to why they keep serving me this stuff but it's like i block anything that isn't sports related yet it keeps like trying to pop up into my feet and i'm just like yeah it's it's a weird place right now you need to ask uh what's the x uh x's ai tool grok grok grok yeah ask ask it it should be able to give you all the answers to that.

4:29I see everyone asking that now. Yeah, it's a bit lazy. Well, I've got another story I'll tell on Friday about how AI is not stealing our jobs, but I'll save that for another one because we need to jump into bits. But Nick, we've not spoken in a couple weeks. We've both been on our respective holidays off to the countryside in our countries that we live in, getting away for a little bit, but we're back in content never sleeps. We're going to talk about some of your LinkedIn posts you put that were hot fire people. They might not know, but internally at sports pro we say content never sleeps and you are continuing to serve people some really hot content while you were away nick and we'll touch on that a little bit more but there was some breaking news that took place while we were away nick and we're going to go and cover some of that and i think probably the biggest one from a from a scale perspective is actually one that actually just broke a couple days ago so more recently the others is that nfl and the espn are finalizing sort of a landmark deal with we've known the nfl has been looking to try to offload or offset its NFL media side of the business.

5:25And it looks like that's now going to be a part of a deal with ESPN, where ESPN is going to acquire some of the products that exist within that from NFL Network. The NFL is going to get a piece of equity within ESPN, if I've read that correctly, which I find really interesting. There's different angles to take on this particular story, just given what we've heard about the NFL trying to offload this, what we know ESPN is trying to do by moving to a more streaming-based service, lots of different moving parts on this. But ultimately, the NFL, we can argue by which statistic you want to do it on or global appeal, arguably the biggest sports league in the world.

6:00ESPN, arguably the biggest sports network in the world. And these two now coming together. So, I mean, maybe what were some of your first initial thoughts, Nick, before we start picking this apart? yeah absolutely i mean look for me uh the initial reaction i have a general thesis on this and which is that i'm never a fan of when a broadcaster does an equity deal with a right zone i just think that when you start to do that you just take some of the edge off your competitive market tension for media rights sales so particularly for the top players that have a legitimate media rights marketplace which you know these days is is less and less but particularly for the nfl the risk when you start to get in bed with any one particular partner means that there might be not a complete stop, but a minimization of interest in working together with the NFL if there's more and more insights to be shared with the respective competitors.

6:54So for example, you think about NBC and all the different channels, but going to bed with ESPN, would that make them 5 % or 10 % less interested in paying the premiums for media rights if they don't think there's a longer term relationship to build with NFL or the ESPN. ESPN is always going to get the first look at new opportunities as a result of this newfound relationship. So I think it's a risky game to play. That being said, to your point about the scale here, if there was anyone that you would want to do a deal with of this type of nature, for ESPN it would be the NFL and for NFL it would be ESPN.

7:30So out of any example I can think of, this is the best type of marriage, particularly given the NFL has made it clear they don't want to continue to invest in creating the breadth of content they've been doing and distribution and production of an NFL network and the like. And they have a really great product in the red zone that now becomes a staple of the ESPN ecosystem and the new flagship product that's coming to market. It gives us something really tangible to get excited about and not just be an aggregation of ESPN's rights across ESPN's main channels and ESPN Plus. But now they have a really brand new, exciting, shiny asset to add to the mix.

8:09And that's going to be really compelling for them to be able to market to new customers when they launch their flagship products soon. So I think it's a great, it's a smart move by ESPN. 10 % is a lot, if that is true, of the ESPN business. And what isn't clear is it says there's a multi-million dollar agreement. But what we don't see is how much of that's cash, if any, how much of it's just equity. And the devil is absolutely in the detail there. Well, one of the things I found interesting, I agree with you, the equity stakes is something that's going to be interesting because I think it's probably more of a long term impact.

8:47But our friends at Transmit, Scott Young had a post saying, looking back at the ESPN business, if you think about what its legacy was, and I'm going to age myself here, think about what it was like when I was 10, 15 years old. It was waking up in the morning to watch SportsCenter, and then it was in the evenings to watch live sports. And for so long, that was sort of the bread and butter of the business. You had so many great people within the ESPN space in terms of the different hosts they had on SportsCenter. Whereas now it feels like to some degree, ESPN has gotten a bit away from that. And I remember when the first take first came out, Stephen A.

9:24Smith and Skip Bayless, that was great. but now it feels like a lot of sports not just espn itself in america like these like just you know hot takes like get people riled up it feels less and less from what that traditional espn model was and the point scott was making is you're actually seeing more of these people go and set up their own media businesses um with this idea that espn has lost its way a little bit and this is almost a move to try to bring back some of what espn originally was which is focusing on live sports and some of the news stories that were around it, such as a sports center.

9:57It feels like ESPN has gone away from that. And this is almost a play to try to pull something back in because his argument was you look at some of these people, they end up leaving an ESPN or leaving a Fox Sports and end up actually being able to do something bigger with their own media platforms because you have things like YouTube now that or, you know, all the Spotify podcasts allow people to do this. I thought he had kind of an interesting point of this is a play by ESPN to almost try to go back to its original home you know 20 years ago which i thought was a fairly interesting take when i think about sort of what i remember espn as versus kind of where it's gotten to today yeah i think it's an interesting take on it um obviously with the deal they get a number of regular additional regular season games as well as part of the deal espn i think there's there has been if you followed espn's journey um i mean whenever i go to the us obviously espn is a staple for me to tune into and what has struck me watching it is they just have these back-to-back talk shows for hours and hours on end and they lose me a bit they just doesn't doesn't give me the same uh feel uh as i used to get from going and watching espia now look i'm just sample size of one you're a sample size another one uh and they've got obviously the data to prove what works and what doesn't.

11:17My theory is that there's a couple of parts to it, that personality-led content is really valuable for ESPN for a few reasons. One, we've seen that athlete and personality-based media businesses, creators are on the rise. So if you can back the right creators, the right talent and personalities, it can be a win-win for all sides. Big audience growth on their channels, big audience growth for you, because people want to hear what Stephen A. Smith has got to say on a topic. And that's genuinely a reason why people are tuning in to the platform, to some extent. There's a portion of audience. It's also the repurpose value.

11:56So a lot of those shows are great to repurpose into podcast, into YouTube clips, and then into bite sized chunks, because it's a bite sized fest of comments and hot takes, as you sort of pointed to. So there's a lot of repurposing value. And then the final bit is that creating that sort of content outside of the cost of the talent themselves isn't actually really expensive to do versus producing a live match or other live content. So an hour of producing a talk show with two talking heads that going at each other or plus plus will only be a fraction of the cost of filling that programming slot that it will be for other live matches they could potentially put into the mix.

12:36so i think there's a few factors in why this type of content has been living on whether it's whether espn is going to shift away from that i doubt it given it seems like there's more momentum behind that personality-led approach but they seem to be recycling through stuff quicker like a show's dying off or or or uh talents leaving as quickly as they can and that is a cost saving thing because some of the talent costs in are cheap it is unbelievable and I think maybe you'll see more of a fundamental reset on the market there and maybe that's where ESPN goes actually we're going to build let's stop building up these talent these people these personalities because the reason Stephen A has a platform the reason a bunch of the talent they have on their books have grown to the stars they have that attract these audiences and are paid really well is because they're working with ESPN they have got a ready-made audience base in front to them to build these audiences heck if you and i were given a slot on espn i reckon we'd be um we'd get a pretty good audience chunk even by default because espn is always on a lot of people's tvs right so i'm not saying they're not talented whatever but i'm what i'm saying is this because they have that gravitas that espn does that power that draw those talent that that talent is benefiting off of that so i i think there's a bit of a win-win there and if they move on to bigger thing i'm not sure it's a big deal for espn if they're not having to pay out those contracts it just means they bring up the next star they're normally rotating in the background different talent and get different types of roles right like richard jefferson's an example who's now was appearing on a variety of talk shows and bits and pieces here and there building up his expertise building up his brand being up here the the trust of the audience and now he's a play-by-play caller for games right across the NBA season.

14:27And I think they'll just keep doing that to keep their costs under, what do you call it, under, keep on top of their costs, basically. Keep on top of their costs and not have to start paying extortion fees to the people that are not moving the needle as much as they perhaps think they are. Well, one I will be interested in, speaking of a very specific case study within this and personalities i swear nick if they get rid of scott hansen on nfl red zone we riot like i mean he's just synonymous with the with the product and i'll be honest with you like you talk about talent it's amazing when they go to the octobox like i actually don't know many people could just alternate between eight games going on at one time and like i i wonder i wonder there chris if they have someone like training in the wings because he's got to be sick someday right like he could be off you know does i i did hear him say something about he doesn't he just basically doesn't go to the toilet for like 12 hours or something yeah ridiculous he just he's trained his body to like well once he's uh in game mode he just yeah he rides it rides the whole way through and never leaves uh his position there must be someone training in the background somewhere for that but you would have to be like i imagine like sitting in some dark room pretending they're live on espn yeah live on the red zone sorry but actually there's an audience of one which is like one of the producers just no you need to do this better champ whatever your name is yeah i don't know it has to be someone in the in the week someone that must have a backstop or provision yeah there must be you know what nick uh you know i met i know i kind of slagged off ai that i would slag them off on friday i would i'd be okay if they trained a ai scott hansen so that he just lives on forever that's you never know i look give us a few years of ai and could ai do that job to some extent i think it could absolutely do that i mean we see an ai commentary become more of a thing right yeah i reckon it could but yeah nick again this is a story that we've followed for some time in terms of you know the nfl with the media rights and we knew espn was going to try to build that out.

16:38So is there something else you want to add on that? I see you trump. I would just say that I'm really fascinated to see how integrated the products become and how standalone NFL Network stays. NFL Network itself still has quite a lot of visibility in a lot of different places. And now with the ESPN flagship product launching, will you see the NFL Network actually just be wrapped fully as part of the ESPN ecosystem? A bit like one of ESPN's channels. Or will it have its own journey, its own distribution strategy, and will it keep living on like that? Or will ESPN lean into that further and at some stage maybe actively want to broadcast premium live matches in the NFL network because of the brand association, etc.?

17:23I doubt it, but it would just be interesting to see how integrated, how much of a pivot in approach they take with the NFL's assets that they're now about to acquire. Yeah. Well, interesting to say that because within the story, it's almost included as a throwaway line, but I know it won't be because I know it'll be very intentionally negotiated. But it also says that ESPN has acquired the ability to integrate betting into the coverage that takes place within those things. So obviously, we've talked about betting, what it means in the US, ESPN, doing different things around there. But the fact that that was very intentionally included lets you know that there are, to your point, how much integration is there going to be between the two products?

18:03like they very clearly do have an idea of what they want that to be yeah that i'm still curious to see what espn does because quite frankly from everything i've seen everything i've heard the espn bet project is not working i watch espn on tv uh or was watching it on tv and they would integrate espn bet into the conversations into the talk shows and and basically like in in i'm not sure the different names of the shows i can get wrong but nba on espn or something i think it's they had and they would look at the different bets and really focus in on talking about the odds the problem comes back to why would someone go to espn bet when they can have just as good or better experience with their incumbent platform in like draft kings or fans you'll and the like that's the problem they still have yet to overcome um so the fact that there's an integration there is intriguing to see if they just it's uh what you call it like organic just you know some betting prices on the side of the screen or what have you, or whether they really integrate it some way.

19:05I'd love to see them go, right, if you want to watch the next play, you have to make a bet. That would really force some inertia happening in the market. I don't think that might be a little bit step too far. Maybe, maybe. Well, speaking about another broadcaster streamer who's tried to take off in the betting space with mixed reviews is DeZone. We're not going to talk about DeZone and some of its betting, but another story, very interestingly, so my opinion, interesting is they've now acquired the international rights for nhl tv um on an international scale so again to me this seems very similar to what they did by acquiring um the nfl game pass the nfl's international package you know one of the few sports packages that i pay for um and i think it's interesting nick in the sense of it actually does kind of follow the model of what the zone has seemingly done which is very rarely does it acquire premium rights and premium markets instead going after maybe tier two rights or tier three rights in premium markets and i know you're in scandinavia i know they love ice hockey up there so like it might not be as true for you as it is in the uk but you know acquiring another set of major rights it's not on par with the nfl but it's you know one of the america's big five leagues um to be able to have the international rights of that and i think now we've seen how they've integrated um nfl game pass into zone i imagine they're probably going to have a similar plug and play model with how they'll put an hl tv into the app but they've gone about acquiring another set of significant rights.

20:30And they're continuing to build out this wider portfolio within the platform. Yeah, I think it's the deal they needed to do. After the NFL, they've had a couple of other deals that have come to market. They're not needle movers. They're not name brands to really stamp their flag in the ground and like, hey, we are going to be serious about becoming the aggregator of OTT-based platforms in the market. The NFL deal was the a needle mover, they paid an extortionate amount of money for that commitment versus what I heard was being offered by their incumbents to get that. But it was very much a, we're putting our flag down that this is our intent and we need a flagship partner to kick this off and to make other people take note.

21:13So they were willing to take that investment and pay a little bit over the odds for that commitment. They will tell you in the data that they're sharing is that they've now got pretty good momentum on subscriptions. I think it was about 30 % or 24 % went up year on year. Hard to know how good that is for a few different reasons. Firstly, what was it the year before that? How much did they lose in the transition? We've not had any feedback on those numbers. And what's their run rate need to be to basically justify the cost that they've made? Because they made just a huge commitment through a minimum guarantee for those rights.

21:52But they are growing audiences. And if they want to make this commitment to this aggregated play, which I like the concept of, I think it's quite innovative. I think it makes a lot of sense if they get a good critical mass of these platforms. And because the NFL is so synonymous with U.S. sports as well, and fans like us and others who follow U.S. sports will have some interest in consuming other U.S. sports, if for the right price and whatnot, that they needed to get another US sports property and sports league on the books to this level, to this global exclusive deal. And I think the NHL was the most natural partner in this instance.

22:31So I think it makes a lot of sense. I think they needed to do this deal. I think if they didn't get this deal, they'd be in a lot of, they'd be lost in between like, we're all in on this approach. We are this new destination and kind of like, well, there's a little bit on the side here along everything else. Like what were the other partners? They had Rally TV. Okay. You know, Rally is a good sport, but it's targeting a specific audience that is willing to pay the premiums there. Courtside 1891, the FIBA-led project, certainly not the NBA in terms of premium nature. The National League, football.

23:03Yep. As I said, don't forget about the European League of Football for all us American football fanatics. Of course. Of course. And really, that was a key deal to get in place. But they've got some second tier, whatever tier you want to put them on. Right. So they needed another marquee brand on there. Now, the NHL isn't a massive subscription driver, but in certain markets, to your point, like Scandinavia, it could have real cut through. Sweden, Scandinavia is, Sweden in particular, Finland, I'm really big on ice hockey. It's the number one. It's basically the number one sport. Football and ice hockey go hand in hand here.

23:42And there's a load of Swedish players in the National Hockey League. Now, there are games available. I don't know the specifics on the rights, but I don't believe they're available to the extent where my favorite hometown player who's now playing in the NHL, can I just watch him on a heartbeat and follow that particular team? I don't think accessibility is there. So I think it could have a real cut through in those markets. I still am a bit concerned with sports, the sports industry generally, and in particular these relationships, is how marketing is done. So how do they get people to subscribe to NHL TV on the DAZN platform when DAZN is still largely unknown in so many of these markets, particularly probably where the NHL is strong in or ISAC is strong.

24:28And that is a bit of like, okay, I'd love to see how much conversation has already happened on NHL. We need you to do X to push DAZN on our channels and DAZN needs to do Y to get NHL visible and how much cross-collaboration there is. Plus using external channels, paid marketing to really commit to growing these audiences because it is a huge opportunity. But, you know, we've seen it. We've seen it so many times. You can't just build it and hope they will come, right? You have to make the effort to create awareness. And they have the problem that DAZN is still relatively unknown in a load of markets, even after having things like the Club World Cup, where none of the Scandinavian teams, for example, played in.

25:10So there's a lot of work still to be done, that's for sure. But they needed to do this deal. Yeah, I mean, I know people in the UK that subscribed to NFL Game Pass that still can't pronounce DAZN correctly. So they're on the platform every week and still can't pronounce it. But I'm actually going to open up a different can of worms with DAZN, Nick, which I believe I saw rumored with some of their boxing to move away from the pay-per-view model and to move more to a subscription-based model. One of the things I was saying is they're going through this conversation is I subscribe to NFL game pass.

25:39I don't subscribe to anything else via design. At what point do they potentially offer a, I'll say all a cart monthly pass because at the moment I'm not going to go from NFL game past NHL TV, but if instead of paying 180 pounds round fee you say hey we'll charge you 15 quid a month 20 quid a month you get access to everything the boxing the nhl you think that ever happens nick is there a reason to do that oh i think there is definitely a reason to that i think that is basically it's a kind of reinvention of the the cable approach and to some extent you're paying one fee to get access to all those things i think there's a lot of studies around this i certainly believe in this, that sometimes when you package up too much into one offer, you actually just dilute the perception of the value in the eyes of the customer.

26:32So what I mean by that is, I've used this example with other people on F1, but I'll use it in this case. If I'm a massive NFL fan, I just live and breathe. It's in my veins. I don't care what the price is, I'll basically put by it. If it starts to get wrapped into a bigger product or project or offering, and you haven't been a subscriber before, your perception of what the value is can be difficult to quantify. But if you've been a subscriber for a long time, it's a bit different. You know what you've been paying. You kind of know what the market is. So if it's an anecdotal 10, 20 % more, you're like, you know what?

27:06I probably will. Why not? That's not a big stretch. But if you've never paid it before to get a new customer, I think sometimes that means I'm still paying for all this other content that I don't want. You've got to educate them into understanding that, that it's a really great deal and not to sound like you're marketing at them too hard. So it's just a really tricky balance, particularly for new customers, I think, to get their heads around when you start bundling stuff together. But I completely agree. That is a great next step. The tricky part comes down to actually the construct of those deals.

27:38So let's say the the framework, I'm going to speculate on some of the deals, but there's a minimum guarantee in place with someone like the NFL. Then once they hit certain thresholds, then there might be a revenue share component on subscriptions over a certain number. Now, if you start bundling those things together, it becomes really tricky to dice up and splice and dice those. Again, you're looking at how the cable approach was basically done where people are forced to pay or there's an allocation going to each channel depending on what sub deals are kind of being struck if you're looking to a bundle-style approach.

28:12And that can be where it gets complicated. But that's something that can be worked out as well. So there's different models and approaches that can be done. You can look to different streaming platforms about consumption to work that out. But it's a tricky one to navigate if they do play that out. But on the boxing front, they do already offer it, I believe, in the US, a subscription offering for their fight sports. So the fact they've come out and now said that the boxing that they run that I think is backed by Saudi Arabia or the Riyadh seasons, that series will now be included in a subscription product.

28:56and I think the guy said it was quoted he was like the representative for the ministry or whoever was working for the Saudis there he pay-per-view basically killed the sport or killing the sport or something to that nature so I don't think there's probably much of a choice there but I think the net benefit is they hopefully have a more sustainable business model as a result of that and one less reason why piracy can be as powerful as it is when you're not asking for a hundred dollar one-off hit you can it's a it's a much more marginal price tag attached to it so yeah interesting one to follow for for many reasons as as as the zone always is well if i see in 2026 they offer a bundled monthly subscription i'm going to claim credit what was interesting very quickly on the club world cup uh the tactic they tried i'm going to mention it um is that every time i logged on to the club world cup platform um i immediately got an email pushing me to subscribe every single time it was like a push notification on email i thought it was a very interesting tactic to think that that would force that would push me into a subscription i don't think it's quite the right approach that i would support but uh i mean try what you can you gotta try whatever you can to get someone to subscribe these days yeah maybe like a post club world cup spotify rap you've watched more minutes than anybody else to the club world cup or hey we saw you really like chelsea that maybe that approach would have i don't even know if it's feasible i don't know if it would have worked but yeah i don't know if uh push notifications the second i log on is exactly gonna do it but whatever we'll we'll we'll see how things go for his own moving on the next story is one with the wsl here in the uk where they are now going to have a new sunday noon 12 p.m kickoff slot on sky sports um this will be new for them they've had the late night i say late night but late sunday kickoff on sky sports um they've got some other coverage deals across their their media sale side but this is new this is new and exciting um having that noon slot nick um i always refer back to the conversation i had with melissa lalton at sail gp where she talked about when it comes to programming I mean, if you're not the tier one, what you need to be thinking about is who you're around, who's immediately before you, who's immediately after you.

31:20And I think I'd seen some studies. They'd seen an uptick in viewership for the late kickoff on Sunday, immediately following the Premier League 4.30 p.m. kickoff. I feel like there could be a similar effect that, you know, if there is a big game at 2 o 'clock, 2.30, being immediately in front of it. And I know that won't be the only reason, but I just always think back to that conversation Melissa Lawton said, where when it comes to programming, if you're not the big ticket, make sure you're next to the big ticket on one side or the other. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that's a good piece of advice.

31:54And look, I do think there's still an element of artistry and science that goes into programming for any of these types of platforms or if you're the rights owner, trying to negotiate where you can get out of it. I would say that it hasn't been all roses for the WSL since they really committed to Sky and BBC. And I think some of the numbers that came out earlier this year were showing that there was actually a flattening or perhaps even decrease in overall ratings for the league over the past season. So I feel that this decision has been enough for a couple of reasons. Decision one, firstly, I would say that your point about the programming side is i remember hearing uh sky themselves talk about the fact that oh no actually i was talking to someone who'd done some research on it actually and the difference i think it was actually oh what was his name it'll come to me uh it basically he shared some data and insight um felon that's yeah felon's his name uh it was x i think he's x nielsen he's now yes i know i can see his face on LinkedIn right now.

33:08I know who you're talking about. Sorry, Phil, I've completely mind blank, but I've been on holiday, so forgive me. But the data I think he shared with me or showed me was basically something to do with the difference in audience when it was feeding off immediately off the Premier League, so it was immediately after, was significantly stronger when it was completely standalone. That was basically the premise that I think I saw. It doesn't surprise greatly, but with the numbers dipping maybe they decided that was no longer um the right approach for those rights and they had to find a different time slot for it now there's two other things to consider with the wsl now wsl's position and identity is still currently uh very uh focused on attracting family audiences both two games live um and i'd say watching the live experience so having a game earlier in the day rather than later in the day just works much better for families for those reasons.

34:06So therefore, that works better to watch it live in person and for Sky to then be able to market those and actually be a funnel and perhaps secure some later audiences towards the end of the WSL matches, but actually is where the real activity is happening, right? That's when the games are being decided. at the beginning just before people might be focusing on on the epl although the epl's in a blackout so uh that's another problem altogether but they might be watching it other ways um so that was that was one thing and the other thing was i have completely mind blanked on what i was going to say so why are you why are you thinking about that it's feeling hill that's it i thought always hill but i didn't just didn't want to get a surname wrong hi feeling uh good thank you for your insights uh as always and hope you're doing well i know he's been he's definitely been a listener listener for some time um yeah so anyway so i think wsl maybe made that shift to try to feed to really double down on that identity um and allow sky also to create a bit more around it to see if they can leverage more of that live time, that live asset, because they aren't paying a lot for it in comparison to the EPL.