UP571 The Bundle: Warning signs from the top of the market; IPL and NFL the same but different; DAZN's IPO; The Anti-Netflix

23:41Is it sort of limiting football rights as well?

23:43Yannick Ramcke:I think the hypothesis for football leagues looking at the Indian market has always been OK. Like nothing beats cricket by a mile. But even if you capture a small sliver of the overall media rights spent and looking at the number of people that are populating that country, for an international market, it should be more than it is today. But I think right now there, for football in particular, you have, again, like what are the market dynamics, like a Z Entertainment group, for example. They have acknowledged that they can't afford cricket. all of a sudden like and that started a few months ago they say okay let's build a complete football portfolio all of a sudden you have a serious bidder for a serie a it was just acquired by by z and for other european football leagues because they want to be the home of football of international football in india so it's always like from one day to the next if like company strategies change, it can be to the benefit or detriment.

24:46Yannick Ramcke:I think the bigger challenge right now is for the most expensive properties, because I think this is what also the quote from the top of the topic was alluding to, monetizability. India is a reach first market. So the ARPUs that you may spend on paying for content is super low, and it's about maximizing reach and through sponsorships and advertising and the betting industry was liberalized and for the past couple of years and all of a sudden like betting advertising is forbidden and i think that impacts substantially like ability to monetize so a lot of different facts right fascinating right okay that's a really good place to end that one right we're going to talk about DAZN and what DAZN is now and what does that mean and whether we what we should read into it there's a lot of stories around about DAZN always because they're an interesting part of the landscape and have been for a long time the story this time so this is taken from sportsvideo.org but it was everywhere DAZN has announced an agreement to acquire Everpass Media commercial sports distribution platform servicing bars restaurants hotels and other venues in North America, the acquisition will serve as the foundation for DAZN for Business, DAZN's commercial venue platform.

26:07Everpass will rebrand to DAZN for Business following completion of the deal. And Alex Kaplan, CEO of Everpass, will continue to lead the business and take on a broader role within DAZN. Founded in 2023 by Equity and Redbird Capital Partners, Everpass holds exclusive commercial distribution rights for NFL Sunday ticket, which covers every live out of market Sunday regular season afternoon NFL game. It also distributes Premier League, UEFA Champions League, MLB, NNBA, WNBA, and a whole load more PGA Tour, Formula One, etc, etc, etc. So a major player. And Murray, what does it mean? Let's unpick that.

26:49What did you see? What did you think when you saw this deal?

26:52Murray Barnett:Well, so, you know, one of the things about doing this podcast is it gives you an opportunity to do a bit of a deep dive on some of the things which you perhaps wouldn't do otherwise. And I've always been interested in DAZN, have worked for DAZN in the past. And I would say that this is DAZN on manoeuvres in the US because it's linked to what they're doing with the regional sports networks, which we'll come on to in a second. But firstly, The commercial premises in the States are important because it's a big business in its own right, but also its ubiquity. Virtually every bar you go into in the States, every airport, you see sports up there.

27:32Murray Barnett:And so I think it helps to start seeding the DAZN name a lot more. It also gives DAZN access to working directly with all of the major sports players. So I think this is one string to their bow. I can't remember where I read it, but in one of the articles about this, it starts talking about DAZN is not a conventional rights buyer. It is now setting itself up as the operating mechanism for sports in the US. And I think that's an interesting framing for what DAZN are trying to do between Everpass and the RSNs. And we'll go on to talk a little bit about what they're doing in Australia, maybe, which is a good indicator of perhaps where DAZN sees itself, which is not just as a traditional sports broadcaster.

28:22And again, we can speculate on whether they've tried to be the traditional sports broadcaster

28:27Murray Barnett:and that's not what worked for them, or whether this is just a natural learning from all of the things which they've done so far about looking at multiple different revenue streams and operate and collect, collecting the customer at various different points throughout their journey. Shai Segev has said again that there's a possibility of a float in 27. And this all points to building towards that point by getting some sort of critical mass. in undoubtedly the world's most important sports market and aligning themselves with the most important brands. And just one final point is something you touched on very briefly is it also changes the board of DAZN.

29:13Murray Barnett:So now adding to News Corp and Telstra and PIF, you have Redbird Capital, TKO, and NFL's investment arm 32 equity all becoming shareholders in DAZN, which I think is kind of starts to look like quite an impressive portfolio of brand partners. Some big names on that. You know, brand partners that you have when you're thinking about how that would play out with the investment community. Certainly something that I can never say his name. I can't say it. It took me ages to learn how to say DAZN. And now is it Shai Segev, who's the CEO? And he certainly went big in the press release for the Everpass Media deal, listing all of the Redbird 32 equity TKO.

29:58And as you say, it's a really interesting board. Yannick.

30:02Yannick Ramcke:I would like to mention, but park for a second, this topic around this converging platform playbook that you observe with DAZN, Amazon, YouTube, where you are distributing third-party content and then mix in some exclusive content. And that overall makes up your proposition. But let's park this for a second because I think the overarching theme right here is all eyes on IPO, both for raising capital, but also I think as M &A currency down the line. And I think there is a window for such floating coming up relatively soon. And I think the zone is pushing all the buttons to put them in the best position possible to execute on that.

30:46Yannick Ramcke:And one of those things that would position them significantly better than it is today is to track the U.S. market, right? For me, it's almost like a strategic and a commercial imperative to make a dent in the biggest entertainment marketplace in the world. But also, we are the biggest stock exchanges. are operating and they are pretty much fighting for critical mass right now both in terms of consumer level awareness in the US market. Speaking of private, not private investor, but how do you call not institutional investors, but family office? No, if you public market. Yeah, but you want to have the layman, right?

31:31Yannick Ramcke:You want to have the everyday Joe in there, Not institutional investors. Retail investors. There we go. And for that, obviously, like consumer level awareness in the market is big. But just like also on the institutional side, right? And associating, as you said, with the big time brands will help this significantly. So a few questions, because I think this is, it feels like a new bundle that they've sort of put together here. And they're different guys. I don't know much about the bar and hotel market. But do we know anything about the margins of that and in terms of what sort of business it is?

32:06Is it a durable business that, OK, it's the pipes and not the whatever the word is, not the water, but the pipes? All of those questions, I think, are quite interesting because it sort of takes them into a different bit of the conversation. I just don't know whether that's enough to excite investors on IPO day when they get in, when they start banging gongs in the stock exchange.

32:28Yannick Ramcke:What will excite investors is EBITDA-level profitability. And just like what they did with Foxtel, where they effectively bought positive EBITDA and profits, the business is at least profitable. Because as far as I understand, it's a bit of a path-through entity that you pass on the revenues that you make to the NFL and its franchises. And you take your cut, which then inherently is a positive EBITDA business. And I think that's like, in addition to set yourself up in the US and build relationships, both on the rights owner side, but also with institutional investors, being profitable and having this proof of concept that you can run a profitable business is paramount for any successful IPO.

33:15Yannick Ramcke:And I think they have said that 2025, they want to be profitable in the nine figures. I think accounts are still pending for 2025. I think they have been even more bullish on 2026 to be even more profitable. But I could imagine that they may then take a step back in 2027 when all of those deals with the regional sports networks and so on are kicking in. So I think this is a window of opportunity and buying profits, I think, has been part of their strategy to get to EBITDA level of profitability, which is just key nowadays to float publicly.

33:54Murray Barnett:But you touched upon it earlier, Richard. This is bundling, but it's vertical bundling if there is such a thing, because you're trying to capture different potential revenue streams. And that's exactly what's happening in Australia. they are now all in on new audience measurements different ways to monetize social media virtual media inside inside stadia trying to shore up some of the holes that are in the leaky bucket of when you acquire rights and then they're exploited elsewhere in various different ways and this is just another example of that rather than seeing sort of commercial revenues being leaked out in one way, the more that you can control all of the potential revenue opportunities is a good thing.

34:40Murray Barnett:Because as we've talked about before, the content renting business is a pretty shitty business by itself. The ones who make a success of it are where they've got multiple different ways to exploit the customers or the revenue streams. And I said that IPO, when they bang a gong? I think they ring a bell, don't they, when they're on the stock market. Show us how many IPOs I've been to. Sorry, Yannick.

35:05Yannick Ramcke:No, I think like content renting business is a bad business to be in. I know. But I was recently asked, okay, why then like a DAZN or even like an Amazon, why do they actually get into rights acquisitions if they just could distribute all the third-party content because their existing audience and billing relationship is valuable for them to play in connecting dots. I think the one benefit of paying fixed fees for content is that you get operational leverage. Imagine you are a pure play distributor. Each incremental dollar, euro, whatever in revenue doesn't get more profitable over time because you always have to pass on the revenue share to the actual content owner.

35:50Yannick Ramcke:If you buy based on a fixed license fee certain content and assuming it's profitable because if not, then you make losses, which won't happen with the distribution business. But when you pay$100 million and you make$120 million, you make$20 million in profits. If you do$200 million, you do$100 million in profits. So I think it's too easy to say, okay, content renting is a bad business, but owning content is still good. Only being a pure pay distributor, like the business that Dizone is now getting into, just like Amazon, YouTube and others have been doing. It's great on one side, it's asset-light, operationally scalable and all of this.

36:31Yannick Ramcke:But then also it has limited profitability.

36:36Murray Barnett:I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't get into the content acquisition business. All I'm saying is it's a bad business if the only way you have to monetize it is limited revenue streams of subscriptions or maybe some advertising. The more that you can add different revenue streams that sit next to that, or you can amortize it across different revenue streams, as YouTube do, as Amazon do, as Sky Sports do, or Sky does to a certain degree by selling telephony and other products, that makes it a better business. If you look at the sports businesses littered with people who have tried to do pure pay businesses with no other revenue streams.

37:21Murray Barnett:And that becomes really difficult to refinance as LFP are finding out with their own DTC, as DAZN have found out by overpaying for Belgian Football League, et cetera.

37:33Yannick Ramcke:Yeah. And I think DAZN found after all a healthy balance here because remember that DAZN had much bigger plans And when it comes to those adjacent, content adjacent revenue lines like betting, merchandise, ticketing, which may not have materialized to the extent that they hope for, I think now they are untapping more realistic revenue lines that, again, as you said, can spread the fixed cost base or over a broader set of revenues. But it's not this completely new thing that may have been part of the hypothesis five, six years ago with betting merchandise or ticketing.

38:14Murray Barnett:Yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking about us recording this today. And I think if you could put behind whatever the balance sheet looks like today or in the past, I would be pretty bullish on what DAZN's strategy is now. It seems to be joining the dots a lot more rationally. and whether that is to the level that access is satisfied with remains to be seen. But I can see a path to success now where maybe it was more challenging a year or two ago.

38:49Yannick Ramcke:Absolutely. I mean, this 24-7 sports destination that is not only relying on live sports at any given point in time and being more diversified on the revenue mix. I fully agree. I think the strategy that they now settled on after doing some segways left and right over the years is absolutely promising. Even though I think the challenge is still a capital challenge. That is why they are putting them into the best position possible to float. Because they are still EBITDA positive doesn't mean that you are cash flow positive, even though it's often considered a proxy. And we have seen it in the past that they cherry-picked their battles when they wanted to go to their shareholders for additional cash.

39:38Yannick Ramcke:When in doubt, they have preferred to renegotiate quite strictly and forcefully with their leagues instead of going to existing shareholders to ask for another capital call. So I think capital remains a wild card in this overall strategy, which I agree with you, looks quite clear and thought through nowadays.

40:01Murray Barnett:I think the other thing which is important to mention is the appointment of Patrick Delaney as COO. And there have been a few of the senior Australian executives that have now come over to be sort of at DAZN HQ in Europe. And I think that this is a clear, positive sign about a stronger management team that can take them to that next level with proven people who have been successful with various businesses in the past.

40:29Yannick Ramcke:I think that goes back to legitimacy, right? Across all facets of the business, not only legitimize yourself as a consumer brand in the US, but also institutional trust and having people in there who have done this before, obviously, back to putting yourself in the best position possible. It's all geared towards having all eyes on IPO for, and I don't think we should underestimate once you have a stock publicly floated, it's also like an M &A currency, right? In addition to cash, which can also enable and unlock further inorganic growth. Okay, so next story is, it starts with the BBC, but is much broader than that.

41:13The BBC acts the women's football show and confirmed Ski Sunday ends after nearly 50 years. Football Focus, obviously a recent casualty also. So a pattern. It insists commitment to women's football is intact. 25 live WSL matches plus Women's Champions League to 2030. What's changed is the format and distribution. Every WSL games highlights now go out via iPlayer YouTube, the website and app with Alex Scott fronted women's football YouTube chat show reportedly modelled on the overlap due to appear soon. So then that is the initial story. Ski Sunday is a is this will mean nothing to Yannick but is a sort of piece of every person of mine and Murray's age not that we're the same age but roughly it's a historic sort of monument that I haven't watched for probably 30 years which might tell you some of the story but I'm not a big skier but Murray is a good skier apparently I've not seen you on skis but I've heard good things so what's happening I think the thread of this story it begins with what is a public broadcaster now and what is its role in relation to sport and we've talked about top end sport and the rights market but a lot of sports rights and a lot of sports properties are looking for their local public broadcaster and what their response is and what then how they're defining what they're doing in relation to sport Murray what just unpick what's going on here you can start

42:44Murray Barnett:with the BBC I mean I think I think you're I think you're right but I think it's also So the natural conclusion to that is how a rights holder thinks about putting its content. We mentioned earlier about exclusivity no longer being sort of a given, how a rights holder thinks about laddering its content for different platforms. I think this is largely the case of what's happened with the BBC, and it's slightly different for different things. I think WSL is trying to recognize we've still got the life sport. And indeed, you could draw a line and say that what BBC is doing is moving away from editorializing sports and focusing much more on the live events.

43:27Murray Barnett:They recently signed a deal with WRC to take a whole bunch of programming live. But does a highlight show, does a magazine show work? I mean, last time I looked, the Match of the Day viewership was down, albeit that it's the number one league, number one sport in the country. And so therefore it has a sort of very key place. I think with something like Ski Sunday, when you talk about highlights, the danger is that you lose the serendipity or the widest possible audience reach for people to then go and find those elsewhere. And so slightly apples and oranges. I think WSL is largely fine. It's going to move to a platform where arguably most of their audiences is already, but still having the ubiquity of visibility on free TV for full length games.

44:18Murray Barnett:I'd be very worried if I was a winter sports seller in the UK because Ski Sunday, not necessarily from a revenue standpoint, but was an excellent shop window. And I don't hear any other sort of mainstream free TV broadcasters out there going for it. But again, is the kind of audience that watches a linear free channel the one that's really going to be interested in that stuff? Maybe not. I think it's a shame that the BBC is such a supporter of, let's call them Olympic-based sports in general, that they're not going to keep a window here, but they're also seeing massive cuts across the board, which is a whole separate subject about the role of a public service broadcaster in the UK that's funded by a licence fee.

45:06Murray Barnett:And that's a separate subject. But I do think that you're seeing them doubling down more on live sport content. And that's a good thing. And they're perhaps recognizing that the highlights or the highlights generation is used to seeing those when they want, where they want on the platforms that they want, which isn't necessarily the Indian TV.

45:29Yannick Ramcke:it's probably like a conference of many many different points and trends that we have been observing starting with obviously a public broadcaster justifying their different investments but i think it's also like an investment might be the right term because whether it's women's football or winter sports it's oftentimes an investment by a public broadcaster to give the reach and visibility to them. And I think there was a point to that editorial programming back then when it was cheap to produce filler programming on a 24-7 programming feed where you needed to fill in the gaps to have like at each point of the day something that is filling the broadcasting minutes.

46:18Yannick Ramcke:Now, and this goes to like, it's all about live. OTT is all about volume and choice and about the life aspect. So I think there are a lot of different things from consumption habits to justifying or cutting investments on the fringes that an editorial 30-minute, 60-minute summary of highlights is just not as valuable as it was in the linear path. So I think that's rational, but obviously, like these are still very prominent placements, the linear feed that those sports are missing out on. And if you think about downstream implications, yes, media rights fee is nice to have for those. But whether it's women's football or I also imagine winter sports, sponsorships is, if not more, as important as media rights income.

47:15Yannick Ramcke:And if you there limit reach and eye rolls, I think that can have also difficult downstream implications.

47:21Murray Barnett:Well, we often talk about the cyclical nature of the sports business or the sports rights market. And I wonder if, and this won't mean much to Yannick, that there is actually a place to bring back Grandstand, which was the father of magazine shows in the UK when live sport wasn't very prevalent on linear channels and there wasn't a thing of paid TV. It was a compendium of the greatest sports highlights from the weekend with some live programming interspersed into it. But I wonder if actually there is a real market out there to say, should the BBC be able to go out to rights holders and say, look we'll take your winter sports highlights we'll take your women's football highlights we'll take your rally highlights we'll take x number of other sports we won't really pay you anything for these but we're actually going to contextualize them and put them to a wide audience which gives you that discoverability window or that serendipity and so long as you could create a show that was dynamic and featured the absolute best of the best i would have thought that there's still a market for a shop window and i would nostalgically be very pleased to see something like that i used to say it's one of my red flags when i talked to ceos of governing bodies when they mentioned grandstand as i i sort of immediately put them put a question against them but i i can see what you mean i mean when i go on so there is a sort of it's the curation question and it's the you say the editorializing of it why does it matter to me i go on when i go on iplayer and it's the same as when I go on Apple or Amazon, you've got a wall of thumbprints of sports.

49:05I'm like, I don't really care unless I've gone for something specific. I'm not going to go and graze through that and pick and mix. I think you're right. There's formats. I don't know. I go around in circles on this stuff. The BBC is a terrible position because people say, why has it not got any live sport? Why are you not? Why is there no Premier League on BBC? And then if they bid for it, everyone would be you've spent how much on sport so it's stuck and you know alex kajowski is the head of sport there is in a tricky job and he's an interesting person because he's he's come with a whole different background he's not your traditional sort of sports rights person so it's interesting to see where they go and the sorts of decisions that they're making and their relationship with things like youtube and what they do i think it all comes back you've got this question about broadcasters with their relationship YouTube we had a whole session on it in at the EBU last year with Thomas Grace when he was at YouTube and it was it's a fascinating endless question about what's the best strategy and how to unpick it Janik I can also imagine there is a bit of a downside

50:11Yannick Ramcke:if you double down too much on this long tail sports because as you said if all of a sudden there are thousands of live events each match each month then people also can all of a sudden question, okay, they seem to invest here. Is this money well spent on all those long-term properties? And I think with that in mind, just cutting the editorial part of the coverage might be good in the sense of it's better than they cut on game productions, which might be the next step that when it comes to cost rationalization, that is it worth actually producing all this long tail, unless it is an investment, right?

50:57Yannick Ramcke:But I think to make the numbers work on that, I don't think it happens tomorrow, but I think as we further evolve, that might be another reality check that is it actually worth producing at BBC level? And if we bring Grandstand back, who is the new Frank Boff? That's the big question.

51:17Murray Barnett:I think it's an interesting segue into looking I wanted to spend a couple of minutes just looking at what the FIBA Women's World Cup have done in the US because I think it's an interesting perspective from a broadcast from a rights holder side where you're looking at something which has traditionally struggled to get strong deals in a market which is basketball crazy NBA does very well in the US But traditionally, FIBA events have struggled to find a long-term home. Indeed, the last Men's World Cup was only a few games were on ESPN and everything else is behind a paywall. And I think they've taken an interesting step back and said, OK, let's find a media partner in TNT that has lots of different ways in which we can exploit the event.

52:06Murray Barnett:And let's listen to them about how we can best marry up our objectives with their objectives. And so they've come up with this really quite interesting matrix across the various different assets that TNT has, which includes everything from HBO Max, TNT, True TV, access to their digital ecosystem across Bleacher Report, House of Highlights, and Bleacher Report, WebW, and retained all the rights to FIBA courtside, their OTT service. So I feel like what they've done is they've looked at it from the other perspective of saying, OK, if we can't get somebody to just write us a big check, let's marry up our objectives and our audiences with the different platforms and take a more longer term view on it.

52:53Murray Barnett:And at least anecdotally, it seems like that's worked out really, really well for them with some very, very strong ratings in certainly the USA games that appeared on Linear. And then some strong feedback from the digital side of things in terms of people engaging more and more, which helps sort of set them up for a longer term go at the US market.

53:15Yannick Ramcke:I think, as you said, like it's a backup plan, right? The preference would have been that someone buys out full exclusivity at a high price tag, which might be unrealistic for a middling property like that in the US market. And it almost feels like, without having any insight, that this has almost been paid with value in kind.

53:38Murray Barnett:right that whether it's i mean there's a significant decent level fee maybe not what feeber wanted but it's certainly not going to be for free to tnt okay i mean that that's then good

53:52Yannick Ramcke:for them but mixing this okay you have the superfan product with quartzite where you can get wall-to-wall coverage but then creating discovery and consumer touch points across both the linear and digital ecosystem. Ultimately, such kind of content you need to bring where the consumers are already because no one will move unless they are a diehard fan. Then the court side is your place to be. They won't move just to seek out proactively such content, so you need to bring it to them.

54:21Murray Barnett:Yeah, I think it's actually a different way of people thinking about it. We've talked about this before, about people feeling like they're leaking audiences if they don't have exclusivity. I think this is recognizing that actually different fans are following the sport in different places. And if you're keeping it largely within your ecosystem or the ecosystem of the rights holder and the broadcaster, it's not being monetized by somebody else in the marketplace, you're getting the best of both worlds. Where, you know, the old school theory was if I don't have an exclusive to my sports channels, I'm leaking audience.

54:59Murray Barnett:And in actual fact, the key is to keep it inside your ecosystem. And luckily, TNT has lots of different ways in which they can access audiences through Bleacher Report and some of their other avenues. And so it's less about rights fragmentation. It's more about sophisticated multi-distribution partners.

55:20Yannick Ramcke:I agree to the extent that I think back in time when the pay TV distribution system had a monopoly on the addressable consumer market, I think exclusivity mattered a lot because everyone was there and there was only one channel where you could have watched it. for sure. Now with audience fragmentation, like also like, okay, pay TV has an audience, digital has an audience and so on and so forth. There's no one who can address the entirety of the consumer market on its own. So I think it's much more additive than it is cannibalizing. With the small disclaimer that I think for absolutely top tier properties, I think the value maximizing approach is to full exclusivity, at least on a per game or per match

56:09Murray Barnett:basis there's another example which has come up which is fox fox sports and indycar because the the key is the enthusiasm that the purchaser has for your second tier sport if you take the conceit that nascar is a second tier what you're then looking for is a partner that is enthusiastic about having you and again we the nascar have seen something like i've got a number here a 25 % increase in their ratings this season. 23%, I think it is. 23 % and 57 % on the 2024 NBC average. Yeah, and I think that's largely due to the enthusiasm that Fox Sports has for the property because they've actively gone out and supported it, given it the right scheduling and promotion and built the storytelling around it, which tells you that they wanted to have this support, they're treating it right.

57:03Murray Barnett:So it's not that exclusivity on a linear is dead. It's that you need to match your expectations with whoever the broadcaster is that you're with. And if they're saying, look, in the case of IndyCar, they're not willing to put every single race on live, then you have to say, OK, well, how do I make sure that I am then working with you to ladder the rights in a way that makes sense, which is exactly what FIBA have done? Well, it's sort of a, it's an interesting sort of definition of what a tier one, tier two sport is, because if the broadcaster gets behind it and turns it into something television attractive, builds an audience, spends a lot of money on marketing, does that, all of the jobs that we know that television does really well over a period of time, it improves the value of the property.

57:54and you get to the question of saying, right, okay, you actually turned a tier two into a tier one sport and now you're going to have to pay more for it the next time around.

58:04Murray Barnett:Yeah, maybe it's not turning it into a tier one sport. It's just recognising that it has other ways in which it can develop its overall revenue. And what's interesting is you'll see at Sportel in October, they've got a CMO programme. And indeed, last year they had a few people over from the sponsorship world of sports. And increasingly, you're seeing this convergence where you can't just isolate, say, sponsorship revenue and TV revenue. You're having to increasingly understand how each of those markets work in order to be able to, if you're taking a perceived hit in your media rights revenue, are there other things you can get which are going to help you monetize other revenue streams?

58:46Murray Barnett:And I think you're going to see an increasing sort of blurring of this sort of siloed lines of different revenue streams that have traditionally existed with Rise owners.

58:56Yannick Ramcke:I think what it tells me as well is that audience is always a combination of content and distribution. And sometimes distribution can make up for lackluster content. Let's take the NFL, right? NFL going behind the streaming paywall. It was a matter of time until Amazon would deliver the same audiences than SNF football did on cable television before. Because the content just rules. And yes, it takes some time, but people will come. I think especially for tier two content, the distribution and the promotional might behind it or put behind it by the broadcaster can make a significant difference in terms of overall audience reached and IndyCar.

59:45Yannick Ramcke:And I also read it may have been NASCAR that NASCAR claimed back that they are the number one motorsports in the US again now that F1 has gotten behind the Apple TV paywall. paywall so for those kind of properties that are not top of the pyramid i think distribution and the promotional effort behind it makes a huge difference i can be made i can be made to care about some really weird things i mean i think sometimes i look at sport and think i don't know whether it's it's on tv because it's popular or it's popular because it's on tv and you go around in circles and a very skillful sports production or even entertainment production can do a job that puts it in my way and I suddenly think yeah okay I'm interested in this now and it and in a way that the sort of clip thing the clip is the product doesn't because it's just in a sea of stuff that I'm scrolling through so I think TV and particularly gets back to the public sector or not even public sector the free-to-air television question which is what is it now and whether or not there's another term.

1:00:49Because obviously people get, jump onto end of history type narratives where it's about YouTube is everything now. There's no point in doing anything. I don't know if that's true. And one of the readings was actually local counts. Even Sky, Sky, we had Jonathan Licton a while ago and he was talking about Sky defining themselves as sort of British champions. So they are seeing themselves as local in a global market. And so when everything is a global stream, when everything's Netflix, what's the competition? What is the alternative? And I can see plenty of strategic alternatives to Netflix. And in fact, I've got this thing about Korean films, which sounds pretentious, but the criticism of Netflix's impact on Korean culture is really interesting because it's sort of, it has smoothed it out and made it less interesting.

1:01:42and it's made it Korean culture for an American audience. And I think that's the journey that a lot of sports are on. And I think it's a bad journey. And I think some of them will recognize that this is not a road they need to. And in fact, the alternative is stay local and be very relevant to a smaller number of people instead of chasing a Netflix audience.

1:02:06Yannick Ramcke:Even though there has been a learning made by the global streamers that sports is tribal. It doesn't travel globally. You need to localize. I think that has been one of the learnings that based on the initial assumptions and hypothesis moving into the sports broadcasting market, where especially like Netflix and Amazon have made the learning that it is about locally relevant sports. Yeah, but their business model is global. They want to put everything through a global tube. They want one ticket and they want it to be easy. Everything else is friction. They hate friction. And so sport is, I think, local most of the time.

1:02:45Yannick Ramcke:Ask an Apple or Amazon if they have been willing to buy sports rights locally five years ago. It was always, OK, I need something global here. And even like an Apple, who seemingly would have been willing to die on this hill, have adjusted and understood that sport is local. And just the consumer, but also the business logic behind sports is all about... I'm not convinced that Apple understands sport.

1:03:13Murray Barnett:So that's a whole new podcast. Let's draw a halt. As ever, I am thrilled. Are you going to Sportel, are you two? Well, I'm not this year. We've decided to take a year out. But what are you? You're going, Murray. Yep. Yannick, are you going?

1:03:25Yannick Ramcke:I will be around. There's always a point in the sports media calendar. And are you going to leaders? Are you going to sports pro AI? All these things. It's conference season. We're doing loads of different things. Unofficial partner. How are you doing?

1:03:40Murray Barnett:Well, I think I'll see you on Wednesday at your live podcast. VIP, velvet rope shit.