Pablo Torre Finds Out - The Sporting Class: Why the Future of Live Sports TV Is a Bundle

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

The future of our live TV viewing habits is ever-evolving: Every week, it seems, there's a new bundle. A new "skinny" bundle. A new merger. Is the media industry ready to help us find all the games we want to watch? Will there ever be one sports streaming service to rule them all? David Samson, John Skipper and Pablo pour one out for the streamer that would have included games from ESPN, Fox Sports and Turner Sports — and look ahead to what's next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. Today's episode is brought to you by Draft Kings. Graph Kings, the crown is yours. And today, we're going to find out what this sound is. Why can't you just say it one time on our show? Just say it. We took advantage of the little guy.

Right after this ad. You're listening to Draft Kings Network. I don't want to ring a bell. It's like, hey, yeah, I am trying to buy lube. Yeah. Take how long it takes to get somebody to come over and unlock. I've game the system. I go to Walgreens and Dwayne Reed, and I go right to the person with the key.

You go to the person with, oh, wow. Hold on, are we rolling? And I go, and I go with them aisle to aisle. And so I hand them a 20. Personal shopper. And so I have a per- Because I want their attention. Into your serfs, into your indentured servants.

Let me explain what I don't want to do. I don't want to press a button and say, hey, we need help at aisle four, cosmetics. I want to get what I'm there to get. I have a list and I have the person, give a 20, and then they do not take any of the other calls. They have a key and I'm in and out of there in a chiffy. You are... It was. Wait, you are turning this into the scene in Goodfellas where you palm a 20 into the handshake of the employee who's like, yes, Mr. Samson. I don't introduce myself. Will it be the same lube today? I merely say I need some Vaseline. Yeah.

I just, I don't want to have to ring the button every aisle, so I don't, I can't believe you're making fun of me. This is far more efficient. I'm on your side here. Of course. I just quit. I don't do it. Like, how can we, what if we just paid the guy directly to work for us instead of having to

navigate? Give him a 20, hand him a list. Say, I'll be here. Eat an ice cream when you get back. I like looking at expiration dates. So people don't do that. That's why I don't do like Instacarting or shopping like that, because when you're buying milk or eggs or yogurt, whatever, you have to buy the latest expiration date.

I never like the expiration date. If I could summarize, if I could summarize this show in one sentence, it's that David cannot stop checking expiration dates. John doesn't go. I am not the only one who looks for expiration dates. Nobody would suggest it. It's just typically you get home and you're like, I bought moldy bread. That's how you roll.

That's how I find out. No, no. You look at the bread. see if it's moldy. But sometimes it's like hiding around the corner of the bag and you're like, ah, got me again. We could do a whole show on this, but the way that I do my refrigerator may stagger you. What does, okay, what does it look like? It's in order of expiration dates.

So when you buy, let's say, dressings, you have to, so people tend to do last out first in. So you take what's in front of the fridge and you use it, then you just put it right back there. how people normally operate a fridge, which is whatever you use the last is in the front. Right. You don't want to operate it that way. Same thing's true of clean t-shirts, right? They put them on top. You just pull it off the top. I bet you don't. I bet you have your clean shirt. He has a rotation of blazers. No, I put obviously everything clean on the bottom. But the purpose of the fridge story, and I don't want to take up too much time. It should all be clean. You're putting in the clean stack. You're putting in the clean stack. You're just saying you don't waste food.

putting the freshly clean on the bottom so you don't end up. You know what stinks is when you have a guest at your house and they're in your fridge and they're looking for buffalo sauce and they look at it and say, oh, that's from 2021. That's a position I don't want to be in. I have solved that problem. You don't have buffalo sauce? I don't have anything. I have almost nothing in my fridge.

I thought David was just going to say it's a problem when you have guests, period. Well, there's certainly. I visited David's home. home in an undisclosed location, perhaps on a certain island that might be lengthier than other islands. And, uh... Strong island. I was told immediately what not to touch. Don't put your bag on this. Don't touch that. I had a sign, actually. There's a sign saying there was ice items on this surface. How could I forget that there was an actual sign? An actual sign? I do have signs around my house. People are not

courteous. They drop their crap everywhere. I find it rude. Can we start the show that? I think we have. We gather today looking westward in a couple of ways because the story we're going to lead with is this massive story, headquartered in part, out of the Burbank area. But we turn to Southern California also, obviously, because it is on fire.

And this is something that you guys have to think about because you do business out west quite a bit. So I just want to acknowledge that weird time to talk about entertainment without acknowledging the metaphor becoming literal. It's not just the entertainment business that's been impacted. And for some reason, people are focused on celebrities who have lost their homes, but they're not focusing on all of the people who don't have the means to rebuild,

don't have the proper insurance. It's a nightmare out there. So I'm heading out there because I want to see what's going on, and I want to visit with my daughter. And I feel terribly now because I am struggling with when to make calls to people I do business with in California. Because I feel like I have to start every call with, are you okay? But if they're not okay, I would have heard or they won't answer their text. So if they answer, it means they are.

So I don't know the actual right social rules. I think the right social rules are to ask them how they're doing today, as opposed to how you're doing. How are you doing today? I think that's the polite way to start, and I'm sure you do that. And I would just put that while David and I do business there, we also have friends there. Yes. And we both know. and every day I hear about someone else who has lost their home or who has had to relocate somewhere

and it's quite significant and as always happens the attention is on Brentwood and Pacific Palisades because they are they are prosperous and famous people live there but Altadena is a very old city has a very high ownership of black uh black ownership uh and probably you know Historically, it's going to be disrupted. That's where a lot of black professionals have lived and prospered. So I will be interested, as usual, to see how our resources mobilize and what we do. Hopefully it will be better than the ninth ward in New Orleans, where they did close to nothing. And Barbara Bush applauded that those people would be better off living somewhere else.

I doubt anyone will suggest it be better off not living in the Palisades or Brentwood. though somebody told me a very interesting thing the other day, which is why you want to get back, you don't want to get back in the midst of ash-strewn ground with lots and lots of homes burned. So it's a very difficult matter to figure out what to do. No, it is both strangely assuring that going through other, in this case, the pandemic, A global catastrophe is sort of helping us prepare for what to do when yet another catastrophe happens. But even just the basic thing of like, oh, by the way,

I talked to my friends in L.A. So many of my friends moved out to L.A. left New York to go work and entertainment. And it's like, oh, yeah, also our schools are all closed. Like, oh, well, at least we've gone through that before. But now it's yet another chain of dominoes in which you hope that, and I say this, knowing it already has been, You hope that it's not so deeply politicized such that the people who need help actually might even get it. But I want to make the very awkward pivot back to what we're really here to talk about by following just the map here towards an entity, a venue known as venue.

And I don't expect anybody, even the most diehard listeners of this program, to remember what venue, V-E-N-U is. I call it V-N-U in my head all of the time. wants to remind people what venue was. I'll try to do it quickly, John. Sure. Venue was a collaboration by three huge companies, Fox and Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery, which people may know is TNT, and they all got together, companies who had not really worked together all that much and said, we have a great idea.

We're all going to put our sports assets and channels, regular channels, TNT, pick your channel. We're going to put it into a bundle, and we're going to create its own company. call venue where if you buy a venue subscription, you're going to get Fox channels, Disney channels, and Warner Brothers Discovery channels. And it's going to be awesome for you the consumer. That was the original announcement when John Skipper during a sporting class episode said, I have no idea what all the hub of is about. This is a ridiculous announcement. This company does not offer anything new under the sun. He was so bearish on the company. Meanwhile, they were investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the information.

infrastructure, naming CEOs, creating an actual new company. And guess what? Then there was a lawsuit. And lawsuits can really get in the way of anything. And a company named Fubo sued saying, it's no fair. You're getting all these channels. We want these channels for our customers at Fubo, which is a digital platform. And the judge said, you know what, you may be on to something.

We're not going to let venue start. All the employees were in their offices getting ready to launch venue. and the judge says, nah, hold on. And then Disney and Fox and Warner Brothers looked at each other and said, hmm, we have a problem here. We're spending money with no revenue, all expenses. Yep. And so then they decided, they being,

they being Disney, as one of the partners, said, here's what we can do. Let's get rid of the lawsuit. Let's do a deal with Fubo. Let's buy Fubo. That'll make Fubo happy. That'll make them drop the lawsuit. And so they did. And so the lawsuit ends up getting.

dropped and everyone assumes everything's going to be great, except Skipper, who said, venue is still nothing. Like, what are we doing? Let's bring in, John, because the idea of why venue is gone seems clear to you then. Is it even clearer now? They don't need it now, right? It was always a temporary stopgap before they launched flagship. Which is the single tile app that ESPN will become.

This was always a different. This was always a Disney-led effort, in my opinion. I thought that Disney always got the preponderance of benefit. I believe this decision has been overwhelmingly made by the Walt Disney Company, and they have decided that, gee, we'll agree, because we not only have to make Fubo's lawsuit go away, DirecTV is still objecting, so is Echo Star. So we're going to give DirecTV the channels to put in a bundle

that will compete with YouTube TV. will, I guess, I didn't read it yet, I guess Echo Star will end up getting the same package. Should I know what Echo Star is? Dish. Dish. Okay, sorry, I'm trying to... It's the merger that wasn't allowed to happen that would have created some sort of larger satellite company.

I like to position myself as a proxy for the audience. I also have just no fucking idea what anything is called anymore. So proceed, please. That's it. So now they don't need venue. They've got My Sports on DirecTV. They'll have something on Echo Star. Flagship will be coming along.

before too long, and you'll have ways to get ESPN. What they're just trying to do is aggregate as much of the audience that has left back. But you didn't think they ever needed venue. What it confuses me is the corporate discussion that happens in the boardroom is they come up with this idea, they launch it, they have press releases. The Avengers of Media are going to combine for the first time for one magical product. And what John is saying is from the beginning that you questioned it. So it's not a lawsuit.

What did they want out, what did they want to get by the announcement? and the hubbub. Just to be very clear, they wanted... My view is they wanted to give the consumer another mirage of a choice of efficiency. And that is what these companies are trying to give consumers time and time again after they started cutting the cord.

They want to be the savior, except really all they're doing is making you pay the same or more but to different platforms. I agree with that. We should talk about just the consumer here because as everything is now feeling, like Echo Star and Flagship and

it all feels like we're naming Transformers now, like codenames. Rob Iger has gone crazy for Flagship and Jimmy Pitar. They talk about it as though the world is about to change. Well, we should just explain, again, John Skipper, former president of ESPN,

this was a thought, of course, when you were running the company. Now it is an imminent priority in a way because of, again, gaze across the map of media. So I get why this is like the number one, like a number one priority. But what is confusing to me is that while flagship is being prepared for launch,

there are these other things happening. The Fubos and the venues of the, and I'm like, so what, what is this? Well, and you've got leakage that flagship is not going to fix. So the longer they wait, there are more and more places where there's been leakage of forts, right? Netflix has now entered the game more aggressively. Amazon is buying things. So there was a moment where virtually everything you wanted appeared on an ESPN channel.

Don Skipper, the number one enemy of leakage of sports rights. Truly. Because he doesn't like competition. Well, that's what we're saying, yes. He had no interest. I think that it's... I love competition. It's fun.

As long as you win. Yeah, that's a fun part of competition. I get it. I'm not really in it for the sport. we were in it to be the worldwide leader by a large margin. They still are, by the way. This is interesting in that while there have been lots of digital disruptions, in some cases you've had completely new players

or you end up with just three players like the music business. And here you're going to end up with many, many more players. ESPN is still going to have more rights than anybody else for a long, long time. so they have managed to be smart and prevail. But I think flagship in some way is less and less attractive because there's less and less it's not on there. Right? There's stuff on Paramount and there's stuff on Max

and there's stuff on T&T. And you're still going to have to, I guess if you buy flagship, question is what you get from flagship that you don't get from my sports or... It would be arguably in... the name, right? Like the biggest flagship items. Like you get the NFL. But you get that. Well, you remember what John said from the beginning is, and it got so much attention because people misunderstood it. The Super Bowl behind, first of all, on a streamer,

for sure it's coming. Second of all, behind a paywall as a pay-per-view event. We are not far from that. And the question is, is flagship going to be closer to CNN Plus or closer to Netflix? And what Disney is betting is that flagship is going to be closer to Netflix. And my biggest concern is, as a consumer, I don't miss flagship. It doesn't add value to my portfolio of subscriptions or my ability to get things that I can't get until ESPN says, we'll get you to like flagship. We're going to take everything off ESPN.

ESPN, and I don't think they're going to do that for years still at the minimum. I don't think they will. Now, there is one thing which they have alluded to without very much detail, but I wouldn't provide detail either, and that is the original promise of streaming, right, that you would get more personalization, you would have more choices, there'll be some things you can do,

and that is a way they could distinguish flagship, right? Which is to say, well, you can get all those channels on a linear basis or on an archival basis, but you're not going to get the great feature number one, great feature number two, great feature number three, that nobody else has. Now, I'm quite frankly skeptical of that And always have been

Remember how many times people have talked about Oh, you're going to get to pick your own camera angles Nobody wants to Even the Manningcasts Which by the way I watch Monday night Instead of the regular feed I sample it all the time Quite fun, most people don't watch it

And it doesn't really Compared to the game, it is dwarfed by that audience And if you add the two together They're probably not getting A marginal Oh, the party getting new people. You just have some leakage. Given what they're paying the mannings,

it is staggering to me where they see any incremental benefit and you've got all these networks with the Nickelodeon cast, you've got everyone doing the alt-casts, and now it's the hottest thing because it's like the watch parties. And watch parties are of value, and that's all the Manning cast is. The Manning's, I mean, that deal is a bigger deal across production in various ways. But I digress. I want to get to what the consumer allegedly was promised.

and what now can be expected. So, like, if you're a customer and you're like, I don't know where anything is to sort... I'm the host of this show, and I have trouble keeping track. I have trouble calling Fubo Fubo instead of Fubu. Do you have a problem finding a sporting event? Yes.

You do? Absolutely. I believe Fubu is for us by us. Well, now it's for us by others because they've sold 70% to the aforementioned Walt Disney Corporation. Good for them, by the way. They found an exit strategy. But I want to get back to this, you really can't find a support event.

You have that amount of confusion. It's harder. It's absolutely harder. But if you go to ESPN, the link, ESPN.com, and you look for scores, they will have on it what channel every game is on. So you know to go to Amazon. Information is available. It's just not easier because it's just a very basic math of whereas it used to be under one roof or two roofs or three roofs even. let's just call the ESPN, Fox, NBC, CBS. Now it's like, oh, wait, this is streaming over here.

Oh, and that is, I mean... This is how we all felt when Fox started, when we all had three channels. Maybe no one remembers this, but John and myself, but we had Channel 2, Channel 4, and Channel 7 in New York, which was CBS, NBC, and ABC. When Fox started, it was a major thing, like, oh, my God, there's a fourth channel where there's football games on Fox before Simpsons.

We were shocked when the NFC package went to Fox. I dealt with that. I dealt with that pretty well. Yeah, what was that like, John? Because all it meant was you, by the way, I remember when you had to get up and turn the channel. Of course, so I just don't see the big deal

that people are seeing. Well, you got to, hold on, it's not, I think this returns us to the very basic notion of what we're talking about is live television, specifically. And now, when I reference, oh, it's on Prime, oh, it's on Peacock.

I'm paying for all, I am the guy, unlike perhaps many people in our audience, who is paying for all of, because it's my job. Now it's like, oh, I don't have this unless I buy it. And so I think we return to the very basic bottom line of the bottom line. The bottom line is, A, I hope you write off all of these subscriptions that you have for your job.

Notice you just set it to the new ERS external revenue service. That's right. Two, I think that there, you didn't hear about this? External revenue service? No. So you didn't either? No one's heard this? You sure it's not the Elon revenue service?

No. I thought you. referring to our internal metal arc. No. Donald Trump has announced that he is starting January 25th, the External Revenue Service, which is different than the Internal Revenue Service. The External Revenue Service is charged with collecting money

from foreign governments, countries, entities, etc., who have not paid their bills to us. And is there still an internal revenue service? Is supplements or... It's a separate thing. I'm sorry. I thought that would have been funnier if you hadn't heard of the external revenue service. I just like that you're excited about taxes.

I'm just excited that we're actually going to charge people what they owe. I think it's very important to pay your bills. Wait, you're talking about individuals or foreign countries? Because we're certainly not making individuals pay what they owe. Which I firmly believe individuals and foreign countries should pay. I will also believe that all foreign countries will pay what they owe when I believe that we do not favor certain foreign countries to a degree that makes me laugh at the premise that there's an agency tasked with doing this. The ERS. The ERS. The ELAN revenue service. Anyway, by the way, we could probably

collect more money just by charging that guy. Then we could by fighting with Denmark for Greenland. Did you get an invitation to the any part of the inauguration? No. No. Heartbroken. Now that Biden's out, your invitations to the White House have dried up. I went to the holiday party. And you're done now. The vibes were bad. A delight. And you expected a big time, celebrate good times. A delightful spread of food. They take the holidays very seriously. At least they did.

But no, it's been remarkable radio silence, David, if that's what you're asking. I'm just saying, are you concerned about your loss of power? There's a transfer of power now to other members of the media like a Joe Rogan. Oh, that's, that horse has left so many barns already. I am more concerned about being individually audited, though, just for reasons of what I may say on various. You can deduct the cost of peacock. Very good. You did know.

And your sweater. We mentioned I was at the first Donald Trump inauguration. Wow. In 16? 16. I was there. Under what pretenses? I was in the Disney lobbying office and we were making calls on Congresspeople.

And I can't remember Richard's last name. But the main lobbyist for the Walt Disney Company said, hey, John, would you like to go see the inauguration today? And I said, yeah, of course, I've never been to one. And it wasn't my candidate, but it was okay. I was prepared to give the man a chance. But I can tell you, as an eyewitness, it was very sparsely attended. Now we're all getting audited. It was very sparsely attended.

And there's a picture of me because the Time magazine did a thing. Oh, we've got to find this. Find it immediately. Where you could find yourself, right? They did 360. And I'm right behind the present, on the back row. There's nobody up there in the last four or five or six rows. You literally sat next to nobody?

I sat next to nobody. That's great. Where is the consumer now? If you're looking at keeping track of what you have to subscribe to in order to get the same things you used to get on cable, I think John has been clear and I agree with him that you are probably behind. You're probably paying more per month now than you did to get basic. cable. And the question is what has been the benefit to the consumer? And what we thought it was, was the al-a-cart, was the bundling where you only have to pay for what you want? And what it's

turned into is that in order to get what you want, it's been split by the owners of that content in so many different ways to maximize their revenue that it's ended up bleeding down to the consumer. Right. Al-a-cart seems fictional as a concept. It's just expensive. Well, and we may differ on the nomenclature here, there is no al-a-cart. You still cannot look at, oh, here's what the cable company, the satellite company offers, and I just want to pick the ones I won't. You can do a little better, right?

There are more choices, but you can't do much better. You're still buying a bundle. It's a pre-fix menu economy in media. It's not, oh, I'd like this, that, and that. I'm going to combine my own favorites. And, of course, the ones who are going to say, suffer the most are not attached to a great big company. Right?

I mean, so the, you know, American, I think AMC remains independent. That's still $9.99 I pay. They're there. But they're going to suffer over time and they'll either get consolidated in one of the big companies because they're going to continue to bundle the companies are and force the distributors to take a large selection of their bundles. They're going to be some sacrifices. Disney's closing channels.

The regional sports networks, as we've talked about often, are going to be a victim of this. And so there'll be less available. Nitch channels will disappear. And there'll be a few big cable bundles. Do you enjoy, John, seeing someone disrupt what you have called the greatest business in the history of media and the economy around it in favor of clearly the same shit

but worse with worst profit margins? No, no, I'm not amused at it. It's actually, it's difficult to navigate. It's not much fun. You're not saving money. You're not yet getting any benefit from streaming, right? Well, they're just remaking cable, is my point. They're remaking cable.

But with worse profit margins. You know, you hope someday that there will be some benefit from the streaming distribution of content that did not exist when it was satellite or telephony or coaxial cable. But we haven't seen that. In fact, they still struggle to get it done, right? Didn't Netflix on their first Christmas Day game struggled to deliver it to people? Well, it was the Jake Paul Tyson thing.

Yeah, on Christmas Day, they actually did much better with their buffering. But if you're saying the profit margins have gone down, then where is that money going? Because I don't think it's going to the consumer where it's actually going is to just competitors. Yeah, because it may not be the percentage profit margin that has changed,

but it certainly is the amount of profits. And you've seen that with the quashing impact that's had on so many media stock prices, which is causing all this unrest. So it's actually, they're all related. And so what we haven't seen yet is where the consolidation ends. You've seen a bunch of mergers that have been attempted. Some of them are still in the process of happening, like CBS. And we don't know what will happen at the end of the day there.

But I think you are a decade away. And we've said this from the start of the show, a decade away from understanding who's going to make it. who's not. But go ahead, John. I just want to say it's interesting because sports has proved to be the glue that has prevented new entrants from running old entrance out. You still got NBC. In fact, broadcast networks are somewhat ascendant here. But it is all sports. It's NFL on those broadcast networks.

It's, you know, every, it's Amazon getting some sports. It's Netflix getting some sports. It's Apple getting some sports. But it's always been, though. So this is something I keep arguing with power about. The reason Fox got into the NFL game at a loss is they wanted to prop up their programming. Right. And it's worked and it's made them what they are today.

Some could argue the NFL deal, the loss they took. So live sports has always been recession proof. But now it's proving to so far to keep digital companies from completely disrupting and driving old media companies out of business, right? Nobody's really been driven out of business. I think it's a matter of when it comes to David and this argument about, hasn't this always existed before?

Yes. Has it existed with this level of difference between sports and entertainment? That gap is just bigger than it's ever been. And it's just fascinating to see, again, we return to Hollywood briefly here, but like they're all freaking out. And sports, like you could argue maybe they should be,

but it is ascendant at a time when everything else is descending. And that's what's fascinating about being the sporting class is that this is the business that everybody is saying, at least this is working. This sports matters more to more people than anything else. Right? I mean, look at the... That's always been the best argument for it. But look at the dispersal of music, right?

There is no centrality to music right now, right? You don't have a top 40 that everybody listens to. It's just dispersed everywhere. It doesn't mean it's bad or good. There's a lot of interesting music. People can find what they won't. But in fact, that's actually not true because everybody who uses all these music services

actually listens to a less and less wide variety of music. Okay, but that's a metaphor again for, like what we're getting here. We got the illusion of choice, to paraphrase David, and instead we are bundling. We're retrenching, in fact, in fewer as opposed to more. When you lose a barrier to entry in any industry, you run the risk of actually constricting and constraining that

which the consumer is taking advantage of. And there's, so podcasting is a great example. There's no barrier to entry. Anybody can start a podcast, but 99.4% of podcasts get, you know under a thousand downloads per month how many new leagues have tried to start you're doing one right now which is starting i believe tonight unrival unrival no no starting friday okay sorry john this is airy oh oh okay okay again expiration dates dates in general just such a transparent guy i cannot bring myself to pretend it's friday

all right we'll try that but i wasn't actually trying to do that i just oh no i believe Leave that. We know. But the sports that are there have held up very well, for the most part. You don't see a lot of things going away. Music, you see a lot of things going away. We are being algorithmed to death. I think more people are in music.

More people are releasing songs. More people feel empowered to try to have their voice served. That's because there's less barrier to entry, and lots of people can do that. But many, many fewer people can make a good living at it. Well, that's 100% the case, and it's also the same with athletes. There is a story that we would tell athletes that the number of rich athletes is really very few. There's way more Sunday night athletes or weekend athletes. They're about athletes as a class of human.

As a thing that you do. In order to get paid to do that, you have to be unbelievably good. In order to be rich and do that, you have to be out of this world. It's the same with acting. Not every actor is Julia Roberts making $20 million a picture or Tom Cruise. The 99.9% are doing the TV when you fly and they're saying, please fasten your seatbelt. Those are actors who are at the sort of bottom end of the pay.

Those aren't flight attendants? No, they are actually actors. Paid actors. I think he's talking about the video. I am. You're saying they don't actually use the flight attendants. They hire actors to play flight attendants, even though flight attendants are actually doing that very job. You're hearing this for the first time.

I just thought it would be cheaper to just have the actual flight attendants. No, but they're not actors. Haven't you ever seen your flight attendant on Flight 880? They're not going to be able to be on video. And he or she is great. They're great. By the way, the best buckle your seatbelt ad is always on British Airways. Have you seen the new one?

I don't watch them. I know how to buckle my seatbelt. I have breaking news from He goes out of the glass. Matthew Coker has now weighed in. David is totally wrong and his sources the flight attendant he has lived with previously Are you going to tell me that your flight attendant does the videos?

They work for the company. I would bet there's some combination. I would bet there's some combination of votes. There's a line on it. There's a proviso. I think this is probably deep dive into something This is an episode of a lot of time.

This is. ...cars about right now. I feel confident. I want to get us back to our wonderful listeners who probably don't care. I'm just saying I've never felt worse than when you're flying and they tell you how to close your seatbelt. I can't stand it. I keep wondering why it is necessary still. The other one I like, too, is we're beginning our initial descent.

I'm like, I only want one descent. I just want one. I just want one descent. What do you mean the initial descent? Why aren't we going to try this? We're going to try this until we get it right. The initial dissent did not go well. We're going to be trying it again.

The secondary dissent is going to be fantastic. I would like to just keep track, Koka, if you could, of just all the times that David says, there is no worse feeling van. And then we could just have the list of feelings that are at the very bottom of David's list of feelings he would like to have. There's a lot of things. Let me raise one other thing. Why do you have to disarm the doors?

That's actually very important. Yeah, it's actually when it goes from red to green. It's so they can't be opened in the life and the, what's the thing where you float on when you're in the water? The raft. There's a raft as a part of every emergency exit on the plane. Oh. So forget it. It's a raft of vocabulary going on here.

Just remember sitting in front is the worst place to sit on a plane. Right. Well, no, no, it's the best place to sit on the plane. Unless it crashes. It's the worst place to be in a crash. But since I'm not planning to be in any crashes. Another great distinction between John and David is that David is planning.

Are you sitting in the back for safety? Oh, no. But I want to bring us back to the question of population and how many people are actually into the things we are talking about or watching. Hulu Live TV, okay? If you were wondering, around 4.5 million subs. Fubo TV, the protagonist, you could argue, in this story.

Around 1.6 million subscribers in North America, YouTube TV, over 8.5. million subs. And so I guess I'm bringing that all to the table just to give a sense, in case you were wondering about the fragmentation of all of this. It's just... But give the number for cable, John, the number of people who had cable at its height. I want to say, $125 million? No, it was never $125 million, but it did peak at... 68.5. That's it? Well, that's what it is now. At its peak, it was about $100 million. So just $100? Okay.

100 million out of about 115 million households. So think about that. You had, you know, 87, 88% of every household in this country. It shows you how much we value television. You want to know where the numbers have gone and why there's a problem with rights deals and regional sports networks. Think about just what we said.

You just gave the numbers for streamers for these platforms. Can I briefly just blame? I say this all the time. Google has replaced search with an AI overview, which has said the following sentence, which I know to not be true. According to available data, the peak of cable households

in the United States occurred around the year 2000 with approximately 68.5 million cable subscriptions at that time. It's wrong on every count. It peaked in... Correct the record, please. It peaked in the end of 2000,

beginning or end of 2012, is when it peaked. And again, this was reported data, which was industry measurement, likely somewhat exaggerated, but it was about, 100 million homes. ESPN was in about 95 million of those. It also depends on how you calculate hotel rooms, bar televisions. I mean, there's a, so there's not just. It's a whole thing we

talked up before. But the point was it was ubiquitous. Yes. Close to nine out of every 10 households in this country had a pay television subscription. No other country in the world came close to that. England, I don't think ever crossed 50%. You were in other places. You were in other places. places in Europe, we would be 35%. And watch TV as much as we do. No, no, we're a TV crazed. The worldwide leaders in watching television. We certainly are.

So I just would say that because of that, you give numbers for the streamers and the platforms, there is so much market share left that it's hard for anyone to give up on the business. So when you ask why Fubo is trying to get money because they ran out of cash, They get an infusion of cash from Disney when Disney buys them, and it gives them the ability.

And what Fubo has said is, we're going to go out now and do more deals. We're going to get more channels. We're going to try to expand to get more subs. But we need money to do that. Well, Fubo, let's see, says Disney Fox and Warner Rose will make a $220 million payment. Disney's committed to $145 million term loan.

So you're getting close to $400 million for. for 1.6 million subscribers. It's an expensive acquisition. Well, the market seems to think it's an outstanding deal for Fubo, because if you look at Fubo's stock, you will see that they have skyrocketed, which means what the market is saying is, this is the type of growth Fubo needed to attain

and to do what they needed to get money. To do that, they needed to file the lawsuit in order to get the injunction, in order to get the deal with Disney, in order to get venue to go away, in order to then be able to get more market share, which in turn will keep pushing up at stock price. So the question, as I clarify also,

1.613 in North America is Fubo TV's subscriber base. The question of who won here? The CEO of Fubo is the biggest single... Stockholders. Why not all stockholders? Well, he probably has more stock than anybody else, and I was just being more specific. And by way, he's a quite good CEO.

who has hung in there, worked very hard to make this company work, pivoted when he couldn't do the original sports light bundle. So, you know, he did everything like... Which is your fault? You wouldn't give it to him, and you don't agree to give it to him now. You did not like giving just ESPN to anybody. Well, first of all, we very seldom gave it to anybody. That's true.

We were for sell for everybody, and had they wanted to pay us what other people were paying us, Would you have sold them one channel? No. Can we recap what this was about? So Fubo wanted from John, meaning ESPN, at the time, to carry ESPN. And they wanted to do it at a reduced price, is what you're saying? That was the dispute. They wanted a bargain.

And we don't do bargains. We had a single price. We did not negotiate price. We started every discussion with, this is going to be the price. and now let's talk about what the arrangements are when we're going to do it and no. You're such a bully because you were able to do that because you also, that's the way you propped up all your other channels,

ESPN 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 by saying you have to take it so you could show they have all these subs, which in fact no one wanted the channels. We had the most desirable content for consumers. Curling? We had the most desirable content for consumers, the college football championship, all the conference basketball games,

the U.S. Open. LeBron James, maybe you've heard of him. Yeah, NBA on Christmas. It's not on the deuce. What we charged was a reasonable price, and we did construct a bundle that says you're going to have to take all this to get this price. You want to take it out.

We are required by law to sell everything individually, but of course we'd say, oh, you don't have pay the $10. bucks we can take out and pay $9.80 for ESPN. And what was your guy of Fubo? And I say you're a guy jokingly, but also, David, you did, you have interviewed him on Dan's show, yourself, the CEO of Fubo, the winner of this story. And just to recap, he wanted to pay less.

Why? What was the argument he was making? Because he didn't have the cash or the number of subscribers to actually give him money every single month that he could then turn around to give to the content providers. he was going to go bankrupt, so he couldn't afford to pay ESPN's rack rate. Well, his original proposition, I believe I remember this correctly, his original proposition was that the greatest point of friction in the cable universe is the cost of sports and the inability to just get sports.

So his theory, which is abstractly an outstanding theory, was I'm going to put all the sports stuff together. But, of course, we wouldn't do that. we wouldn't say, oh, we'll just take all the sports stuff out and sell it. And it was like, wait a minute, we're all the sports stuff together. Why do you get to be the sports stuff? And we're going to stand up our non-sports channels as part of this bundle, which nobody wanted. So I wouldn't suggest it. Nobody wanted them.

Sorry, the four people who wanted the channels that you were pushing were being paid for by the four million people. We exercised our leverage because of the quality of what we had. Why can't you just say it? One time on our show, just say it. We didn't have any chat. We took advantage of the little guy, and now I'm an absolute... I didn't take advantage of any little guys. I may have taken advantage of some big old distributor mofos,

because we didn't sell directly to consumer. But they passed the costs on right to the little guys. That was their decision. Oh, that's how he stays clean. Now we're in the good stuff. That I'm just having fun with. We knew what was going on, but we believed that nobody knew what they were paying for ESPN. They knew what they were paying for the cable bundle.

Correct. Yeah, we were in an advantageous position that we absolutely took advantage of. And I know you to be a man who believes that your only job as an executive at a public company is to make the most money for your shareholders. Let me be clear. I love you. I've already told you that you are the greatest businessman. I've had the honor of doing business with and being in your life.

But your lack of willingness to acknowledge it publicly makes me smile. That's all. I'm a company guy. No, you were a bulldozer. I'm a rude, mean, ogre. I'm a Mill Willie. I was going to say, there are so many other syllables after Mill that could have applied, and instead it was Willie.

Well, that's what you used to call. I grew up, you know, near some... North Carolina. Near some Mills. And you called a company guy of Mill Willie. That's right. The question, okay, so, but this is useful to me because I want to get actually to the beginning in some way, working reverse.

chronologically of like on some level sure you could argue that uh john flew too close to the sun by extracting value from the cable providers who then got their subscriptions canceled by the customers who are like this is way too much money leading to the rise of the a la carte desire um but like why are we here like what why why are how did we get here why why how will historians look back and think about, wow, this got real different because we're in the middle of a disruption. And the disruption is caused when you've got people who work for companies and for huge institutions who want to keep doing things the same way because there is imputed profit margin and there is fantastic stock price results and there's great bonuses and great salaries.

But then all of a sudden the customer base has a different version of what they want. And then you have to adjust. and some companies go Kodak and they just can't adjust. Some companies, Blockbuster, couldn't adjust. Some people, Netflix. Instead of selling DVDs, they start a streaming network and all of a sudden they're producing content. So that's to me where we are right now.

We're in that middle space, which sort of, it hurts because you don't know where it's going. Though in a lot of those examples you gave, there was a very superior product which overtook a product that didn't keep up, right? I mean, Kodak went out of business because why it's cool to take a one-shot photo, when you can do it all digitally, it's a dramatically superior and less expensive product. When you could buy $3 million, $4 million, $5 million for $4.99,

really better financial proposition than spending $20 plus on the CD. And so those were inevitable. They wouldn't get killed. The most interesting thing to me is that sports didn't get killed. Nobody has really come up with a better way to consume sports. I was always a skeptic of 3D sports and reality TV sports. The two-dimensional on a great big screen with HD is still the best way to watch sports. I think it's live versus not live.

I think if you want to break it down, the reason why sports is recession-proof and why it will survive. It's because it's the notion of something being live, and it's why networks are trying to do all sorts of live content. And it's exclusive, right? It works because you're not competing with somebody else's movie or somebody else's situation comedy or somebody else's reality show. You're the only one that has the Detroit lines and the Green Bay Packers, the only one. And that has power.

At the risk of sounding like the worst feeling that David Samson claims they've ever felt, we are beginning our initial dissent we've reached the end of the show maybe not yet the end of the business I thank you both for extending our expiration date for one more day that's great were you fed that by Coca no nice

Pablo Tori finds out is produced by Walter Avaroma Ryan Cortez Sam Daywig Juan Galindo Patrick Kim Neely Lohman Rob McCray Rachel Miller Howard Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tumenello, and Juliet Warren. Our studio engineering by RG Systems.

Our sound designed by NGW Post. Our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo. And we will talk to you next time.