The Vergecast - Your next laptop could be a foldable phone

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

The Verge's Allison Johnson has recently been doing the unthinkable: she's been leaving her laptop at home. Allison joins the show to explain how she turned her Samsung foldable into a useful computer, and why it feels so good to do so. Then, Sportico's Jacob Feldman joins the show to talk about the Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl, and the overall state of sports streaming in 2026. (Unfortunately, it's all still very complicated.) Finally, David answers a question on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]!) about whether flip phones might have a future in an AI world. Further reading: YouTube TV reveals pricing for its sports, news, and entertainment packages From Sportico: 2026 Sports Tech: Amazon vs. Youtube vs. ESPN vs. Netflix vs. Tiktok Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 review: stunning, bendy, and spendy Motorola Razr Ultra (2025) review: looking sharp Logitech’s Keys-To-Go 2 Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the first cast, flagship podcast of phones that are also laptops and tablets and maybe kind of smartwatches. I'm a friend David Pierce, and I just got a new game for the Nintendo Switch, and this is a surprisingly big deal to me. So I'm sure I've talked about this before, but my like true sweet spot era of gaming growing up was the Nintendo 64, which means I logged, you know, a million hours on Golden Eye. I played a lot of Mario Party. I played a lot of Mario Golf, but the Nintendo 64 game for me was Mario Tennis. It was the game I played against all of my friends, all of the time. We would have these epic five set, like three hour long matches. It was the best game ever to sort of sit next to somebody and have a conversation while you also were playing a video game.

Because there's a lot happening, but you don't have to fully focus. I loved you very much. But anyway, this new game, Mario Tennis Fever, just came out for the Switch 2. So I immediately got it. And I have to say so far, it's like, it's good. It's kind of a lot. These games have gotten much more complicated and gimmicky and just kind of wacky over time. They're all trying to bring more stuff into it.

And that's frankly not for me. I liked when it was just tennis. But this is still tennis on the switch, and I will play it presumably for decades. I'm very excited about that. Anyway, I'm going to put this away because I'm just going to get distracted otherwise. Today in the show, we're going to do two things. First, we're going to talk to Alison Johnson about an experiment she's been doing, about whether she can actually use a folding phone as a computer.

This is a thing people have been talking about forever. It's sort of the dream of big phones is that they can adapt to be other things. Allison has given it a real try. She's bought some gear. She's used the thing, and she's going to tell us how it went. Then Jacob Feldman, our friend from Sportico, is going to come on and catch us up on the state of sports streaming. We have some YouTube TV news.

Super Bowl just happened. The Olympics is going on right now, and it seems like a good moment to just catch up on what it means to be a sports fan in 2026. Plus, we have a hotline question about foldable phones, which happens to be right up my alley at this moment. I'm very excited to talk about it. All of that is coming up in just a sec. But first, I'm going to go win this tournament because I play with Lefty Luigi, and I am unstoppable in Mario tennis. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone

else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all.

I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938.

This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Allison Johnson, first senior reviewers, Hi, Allison. Hello. You have been on what I would say is one of your stranger phone adventures recently.

A thing that you do is just sort of ruin your life with phones to varying degrees. And that is your job. And I love that for you. But you've been trying to figure out recently, I would say, how to make a phone work as your computer. And it seems like you've had some success. Uh-huh. Yeah. How is it going?

Tell me the origin of this experiment. Okay. Yeah. And it's specifically a foldable experiment, which I can date back all the way to the Samsung launching the Z-fold. Seven, the summer. Yeah. V-Song and I were in this, you know, tin can of an auditorium. Wi-Fi on our phones was like working okay, but we couldn't get our laptops connected.

So I was like, hell, this is a computer. I opened it up and used the inner screen. And it's just enough room to run, like, to like functionally use WordPress. So that was kind of a light bulb moment. I remember V came out of that, like a changed person. Yes. She watched you use Slack and WordPress in sort of a desktopy way on your foldable phone. And she came out of it being like, I have seen the light.

Yes. This is the future. She still brings it up to this day. It's true. So, yeah, and I, you know, ran the gauntlet of new phones coming out over the fall and into the winter, but I find myself with some time to use whatever phone I wish right now. So I came back to the Z-fold seven. People have been doing this, specifically our friend, Mr. Mobile, Michael Fisher. He's been evangelizing the foldable as a computer kind of thing for a long time now. I actually called him up and I was like, what do I do? Like, give me your tips and tricks. So the thing I liked about your experiment, though, and I, Michael is the best. And we'll link his videos.

He's been doing this for a long time. I've never been able to tell for him how sort of real a part of his computing life it actually is. Do you know what I mean? Because I think there's a thing where, you know, we talk about decks all the time on the show, which is Samsung's sort of desktop browser all the way back, like, 12 years ago, Motorola was trying to do this thing. Like, the idea of what if my phone was also my computer is a very old one. But I feel like you, in this experiment, tried more earnestly than most.

Like, this wasn't sort of like a bit you were trying to do. Like, I feel like you went after this question that I have been asking for a long time, which is basically where does my phone end and my laptop begin? And you tried to sort of see how far into laptop your phone could. actually get. And I feel like you got pretty far. Like, were you surprised by how much you have enjoyed using a foldable phone kind of as a computer?

Yes. And I've seen people trying it and doing it over the past few years and kind of wrote it off as like, okay, that's great for them. But, you know, that's like a weirdo thing to do. To me, it's like the exact opposite of the people who bring IMAX to Starbucks. Do you know what I mean? It's like, yes, this is technically a thing you can do, but I don't think you're serious. Oh, yeah.

It's like you're just being way too extra. But I was getting annoyed with like, you know, this MacBook air I have in front of me is a very light laptop, like relatively speaking. But once I'm leaving the house with it and if all I need to do is get into Chrome and write something up in a Google Doc or WordPress, I'm like, why do I have this big thing? And it, you know, I was thinking about it. kind of changes my kind of mindset. You know, if I'm leaving the house with a backpack and I've got my laptop and a, you know, water bottle and snacks, I'm like, I'm on a particular kind of journey. Whereas if I can outfit my phone, the thing that I was going to have anyway, into a package

that I can put in my purse, all of a sudden I'm on like a totally different kind of journey. I'm like, I don't feel weird if I go run an errand afterwards or if I go pick my kid up. I'm like, what do I do with, you know, do I put the laptop in the trunk of the car? It's just, it just all exists at once. And yeah, I've gotten pretty far with it. I'm not trying to like replace my computer at my desk, you know, crucially. But it's sort of that thing of like when I leave the house and my needs are. pretty straightforward of like need something to run Google Docs. You know, that's basically a Chromebook. I like I have Chromebook. It's this phone. And it has really worked surprisingly well. That is very exciting.

So let's walk through the setup you've landed on. It seems like from reading your story, you picked the Z Fold 7 pretty immediately. It was clear to you that this, you've been calling this purse computer. It was clear to you that this was going to be a purse computer. By the way, what is it about the Z Fold 7 as opposed to like the pixel fold or any of the other sort of giant screen phones out there? Yeah, it really is just the size and the weight. It is on paper doesn't seem that much smaller or lighter than like the pixel fold. But I feel the difference every, you know, day that I'm carrying it around.

It feels like a normal phone. So if it feels like all upside, you know, what you get with the inner screen as opposed to like, well, I'm putting. up with this, you know, kind of heavier phone that fits weird in my pocket to, in order to get this other stuff. My phone sucks, but I can kind of type on it is not a good excuse for a phone. Yeah. And like, you know, maybe if I go to the coffee shop today, I will experience the full magnitude of the phone.

But in the meantime, it's going to be hard to hold and use with my thumbs. Yeah. Yeah. Not what we're looking for. So, and it's a, the pixel fold is fine and it does air drop now, which I, in joy. But Z Fold 7 just feels like a normal phone. It feels like all upside. So I was like, well, I'm carrying this anyway. Why don't I, you know, the first step is a little keyboard. And I saw Michael Fisher posting about, you know, a thing called like a travel keyboard, like a portable keyboard.

I didn't know that was a thing, a category of keyboard that exists. imaginable keyboard rabbit hole is 100 times deeper than you can possibly imagine. This is what I've discovered is like any specific kind of keyboard you need, A, exists, B, there are thousands of them. And C, everyone has really strong opinions about all of them. Oh, my God. I have learned very quickly not to ask like the keyboard nerds on staff because they just keep recommending stuff that I don't understand. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't get it. Like, I want something that folds in half. Like, our needs are different. So, yeah, I started out. The first thing I ordered was this proto-arc. I have them all here because, of course, I do. So it folds up about the size of,

I don't know what I compare this to, like a notebook. But it does kind of a trifold thing, and it unfolds into a full-size, backlit keyboard with like a number. pad and kind of realized that was overkill and it was a little too heavy anyway. Okay, I was just about to say, we've arrived at my biggest picture question here, which is the minute you buy a keyboard, haven't you completely undone the whole problem you're trying to solve by not having your laptop? Yeah, I started to question the journey, honestly. And I really think that part of the reason for getting this particular keyboard was because it came with a little like carrying case.

And I was like, well, that can't be the, you know, reason why I. There's such an easy road here to actually ending up with more gear. Oh, I am a wash in weird little keyboards. It's so silly. Like, they keep arriving and my husband's like, oh, God, another one of these things. Yeah. So which one ended up working for you? It's kind of been like a Goldilocks journey.

I got one that's like really slim and light, folded. half. It's called like Samzers. Yeah, it like it's the size of a passport and it I don't feel it in my purse when I'm carrying it. But it is a little like squarely. When you put it down, it like slide around a little bit. Typing on it's a little funny. There's a hinge right in the middle. So you kind of like are working around that. What I've landed on is this Logitech. It's called Keys to Go. It's a it's an iPad keyboard basically. And is very slim and light. It's sort of right in between like the other two.

I had tried out. It's amazing, I think. It's basically the keyboard I use at my desk, but made super small. This is so funny. I did not realize that was the one you had landed on. And I was fully prepared to tell you that no matter what you've been using, it's not as good as the logic keys to go. I have one of them lying around here somewhere.

And yeah, this keyboard has. has no business being any good. Right? Like it's not, the keys don't travel really. They're all, it's all sort of one sealed thing. So everything just feels like kind of gross and membraney. But like 30 seconds of work and I'm typing as fast as I do on my full-size keyboard. It is shocking how good that keyboard is. And it basically weighs nothing in the battery lasts forever.

I have a red one that for a long time went everywhere with me. And I love it. Yeah. It's so nice. In the battery. Yeah, it's not USBC rechargeable. But you get three years of battery out of the little coin cell batteries in there. So I'll take that.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's been great. It's totally the size and weight that I was looking for. I can put it in the bag that's on the back of my bike. This is a good example of purse computer versus pocket computer, right? Because the keys to go takes this out of being pocket computer. But it remains Fannie Pack computer.

or purse computer or like the thing about the keys to go is like you mentioned am i okay just like leaving this in the car while i'm at target like the answer is yes it's a it's a tiny little like wafer of a keyboard if you lose it i promise it will be okay yeah yeah so like that that there is something about the like throw it in the back seat and don't worry about it thing that is also i think really important for this particular use case yeah what i wonder most about this is my discovery with the keys to go in particular was that actually I realized what I wanted most was not some wild new operating system idea or like I spent less time doing the multitasking stuff than I expected but I realized like what the actual utility here for me is to have my phone with a much

better keyboard on which I can type much more quickly and that there was just a series of things that made it feel like I was getting more done on that than I could just with my thumbs on my phone. just like I could sit, I could put it down, I could prop it up in a coffee shop, and it felt like I was doing stuff more efficiently. Yeah. But I feel like you had, I don't know, you tried to take it a step further. You were like, how can I actually make this feel more like a desktop computer and not just like I can type faster into my phone apps?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I feel like that's where all of this starts to fall apart. It's, and it definitely I have boundaries around like when I'm willing to take this out as my only computer. Okay. I do want to talk about those boundaries. Okay. Because I think that line is really complicated.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I, like, I have some trips coming up. Wouldn't it be nice to not haul my MacBook around? But then I start thinking about using Lightroom on Android and the whole thing just disintegrates. Yeah. But it really is kind of the, I want to leave the house. I want to be as unencumbered as possible. But I still, you know, there's a minimum violation.

product of I sit down at a coffee shop. Something, you know, Michael Fisher and I talks about is we both have trouble, like writing anything meaningful on a slab style phone. It just feels like you're boxed in. And it, it, I'm like, I can type an email, but everything, anything longer than that, just feels like it's not working. So having the inner screen of the foldable changes things for me. How big is the internal screen on the Z Fold 7? The inner screen is eight inches, so just big enough to run WordPress, write my little blogs. And it does something for my mindset. And having a real keyboard in front of me also does the same thing. And there's sort of two parts to this journey, I think, which is convincing myself that the phone is a computer and not a phone. And the keyboard, all of that. has done it, you know, like successfully. Wait, tease that out for me. What, what does that sort of emotional difference look like? I think it is the thing, whereas on a phone, if I'm typing out with my thumbs, you know, it, I'm just so aware that it's a phone.

And something about having, like, keys under your fingers, you're not, like, tapping around with your thumbs on the screen. Yeah, it does it for me. just like clicks, I think. Okay, I buy that. So where has your line landed? Like, if you're leaving the house, what is the most complicated thing you're willing to sit down, prop up the keyboard, open up the phone, and try to do? It definitely comes down to, like, dealing with images.

If I am going to be, like, taking photos and I need to move those onto a computer. the phone and manipulate them and export them. Like, I'm sure I could do that on Android, but it makes me kind of queasy. I will do as much as like, you know, when we're writing up some news, we'll get some images supplied and you need to resize them or crop them because they're not quite right and all that. Like, I'm comfortable doing that, but that is like right up to the end. of like if I need to start doing background cut out things like forget it. Yeah, that seems right. But it's, I think, yeah, it seems like if you can hit the list of I'm comfortable doing basic communication stuff, even if what I need to do is like write a long email, I can, I think spreadsheeting is a tricky one.

There's going to be a lot of people who are like even an eight inch screen with a keyboard is not enough to do spreadsheeting. Yeah. I think that line is probably different for everyone to some extent. But again, one of the things I keep coming back to is I think Android is part of the problem here. And you ran into this a bunch that, like, for our purposes, we use Google Docs like for a living, right? Like I fundamentally, I make Google Docs for my job. It's essentially what I do. Google Docs, the app on Android is garbage.

And if you try to use Google Docs in the web browser, it just constantly yells at you to open the app. and the app is garbage, as I said, because it's garbage. And there's just sort of this ongoing frustration that I think, like you mentioned it being a Chromebook. The thing about a Chromebook is it is a really good browser. And if you open up the Z Fold 7 and it gave you, honest to God, desktop Chrome, I would be so much more compelled by this whole setup

because it would feel simple and thoughtful and you could just open up a thing with a bunch of tabs and that would be your work system. But it feels like at every turn, Android is fighting this thing that your phone is trying to let you do. Yeah. And that just drives me nuts. And you can wrestle it into a place that works. But you do have to be willing to deal with the weird edge cases where it's just funny.

Like some stuff is just so much better on the inner screen in a Chrome tab as opposed to the app. Slack. terrible on the, you know, like tablet kind of screen. It just is the Slack app, but stretched. So there's a bunch of white space that's not used. But actually, Richard Lawler, our friend and senior news editor, he was like, I opened it in Chrome. And it's great. It's everything you want it to be. You get the columns. And yeah, you will inevitably like close the phone and I'll open that text. on the outer screen and be like, oh, my God, what is this? An app for ants, you know.

So you have to be willing to, like, fuss with things a little bit. But when I'm sitting down at the coffee shop to work, you know, I get situated. I get Slack going in a Chrome tab. And what trips me up, and it always trip me up on a Chromebook, is the switching profiles. Like, my phone is, you know, kind of default assigned to my personal Gmail and Google account. I have the work Google account on there, but Chrome is constantly trying to, like, shove it to the backseat. Like, no, no, no, you don't, you don't belong here. Like, every time I open a new tab, it's my personal, you know, Google and all the things tied to that.

I'm like, no, I want the work profile. and you have to kind of keep doing that. But for me, I can get to a place without too much trouble, where I can sit down, I have my little blog, I put up with the Google Docs app because I cannot get it to run

the desktop version of Google Docs in a Chrome tab, even though it's all made by the same company. I am convinced. That no one at Google has two Google accounts somehow. Because this has been a problem for 20 friggin years, and somehow nobody understands how to just make it work with multiple Google accounts. And also, I don't think anyone at Google uses a web browser.

I'm dead serious. It's the only thing I can make up. Everybody is just like desktop apps are great. And we don't need web tabs. And I'm like, have you, what if we opened up Google Docs? Wouldn't that be cool on our phones? And they're like, why would you ever do that? Oh, yeah.

insane. But back to your sort of, is this a computer or is this a phone question? Like, when you, when you sit down and you're sort of in the flow state of your your purse computer life, what does the screen look like? Are you, are you in a, are you in a one app at a time thing? And you're sort of flipping back and forth. Are you tiling as many apps as you can fit on this eight inch screen? Because that's kind of what you would do on a laptop. Like, how does it, how does it end up after you've been doing this for an hour? I am usually kind of like one app gets most to the screen and that's Google Docs. And then off to the side, I'll have like Chrome with whatever I'm referencing or I'm looking up. I had the pixel, the Google Pixel recorder. You know, I had a

transcript and recording that I was referencing kind of back and forth. It gets a little hinky because Google Docs app will constantly like, you know, you. You have to like tap into it and then you're actively typing and writing. It's not as seamless as if you're just kind of like tabbing back and forth on a desktop. You can open like so many tabs on little windows on the Samsung in particular. I find that like I can just as easily, you know, have my two apps set up, swap over to Spotify and start playing something. And then I've got controls on the keyboard

if I need to do something quickly, like pause or turn the volume down. Okay. So that's slightly chaotic, which feels sort of manageable. And I feel like I'm looking at my computer right now. I'm sitting in front of a 27-inch screen and I have four windows open,

including the one that we're recording into right now. And that's probably one more than you would do on purse computer. Yeah. But like you could split screen an 8-inch screen fairly functionally. And Android does allow for that more or less. Yeah. And Samsung is very like you can make each window as big or as small as you want to.

It doesn't matter if it looks like garbage or like, yeah, go for it. That's so nice of you, Samsung. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate it. Yep. So what about the software in particular would work better for you? Do you have a wish list coming out of this experiment that you're like, if only I had X, Y, or Z, this thing would be totally doable? I want every company to remember that they have an Android app and to fix the bugs in their Android app.

Amen. I know all these developers are running around with iPhones and they're like, oh, something. thing is horribly broken on Android. So first things first, fix your Android apps. Second, I think the profile thing is really the only thing that I get tripped up on over and over, and I'm kind of like, this, like, it could just be better, you know, I know how I have it working on my laptop, you know, the two profiles coexist reasonably well on my MacBook. So those would be my two things, I think. Okay.

I think that's a good one. And I think I've actually been thinking a lot about the app thing from a different direction. I've been using this Razor Ultra for the last of a while. And I am actually, I find myself more and more convinced that I'm right that flip phones are the correct form factor and should be the future for everybody. So congrats to me. But there is this thing about even the apps that are best designed. And there are some very good Android apps out there. A thing that is true is that iOS apps are better than Android apps.

Like it's just a fact. But there are some very good Android apps out there. But none of them have done the work required to work on a bunch of different screen sizes, right? And this is like the promise of Android is that Android can be functional all the way up to the size of a TV and all the way down to the size of like a watch. Like this is the thing we're supposed to do. And there is nothing in these apps that works properly on anything other than like a six point something inch. candy bar screen. It doesn't work on the smaller screen. The stuff doesn't work great on the bigger screens. Like, my guess would be the Z-fold experience probably works best in some ways when you have

two apps side by side because they are essentially phone apps. Like you get something that looks and feels sort of like a vertical oriented phone app side by side. And that that in many ways is actually how these things are intended to be looked at. And there's like, Android is so desperate to be versatile but just hasn't quite finished doing the work. And all the developers haven't quite finished doing the work of like you want the phone to be all of these things and to be able to do all of these things and sort of satisfy all of these different use cases. And technically speaking, Android is so close to that and so much closer than anything else is out there. But there's just all of these tiny little design quirks and the fact that everybody wants to push you to mobile apps

because that's what the ecosystem is. And all of this stuff that's like, Like, we've talked a lot about aluminum, this, this like long Google project to unify these things. That it's like, if Google can actually start to put some of these pieces together, like, they will solve purse computer. Like, this is the thing they want to make work, which I find very exciting. And every time I use it, I am just less and less convinced that everybody who is going to need to be on board to pull this off is going to be anytime soon. Yeah, it's frustrating because, like, the hardware exists. Like I have, there is so much more like horsepower in this Z Fold 7 than like the Chromebook I bought five years ago, you know? Totally.

It has, you know, like an insanely good Wi-Fi and cellular chip. Like so many problems, like hardware problems are solved. There's a million tiny keyboards, you know? Like, it's all here. But then you kind of get let down by the software. and you're like, oh, this is where the limitations are. And it feels like, yeah, it just could be so much better. Yeah.

All right. So real talk. Before I let you go here, your hypothetical situation, you're going away for the weekend. It's, you have no work plans, but like we're in the news business. Sometimes work happens. We always exist in a phase of I might have to work soon. It's a delight. Everybody should do this.

Yeah. But you're going away just for a couple of days. Are you comfortable enough? that purse computer, the Z Fold 7 can do it, that you're going to leave your laptop at home? Yes. Yeah. I am bringing purse computer. I'm bringing my little logitech keys to go. Love it. I have had enough success being in WordPress and getting everything I need to do done, that it feels like this is the minimum viable product. I'm not going to run into some weird edge case. where I'm like, oh, God, now I need to slack somebody to do something for me or like upload an image or something like embarrassing.

It covers all of those basic use cases for our jobs that I'm totally happy and only like 5% unsure. What do you do with the fact that this thing is going to be super destructive to your battery? Like we all kind of baby our phones anyway, and you're saying I'm going to do more aggressive stuff for hours with the screen on even more. Like, are you just killing your phone by 1 p.m. every day now? No, not quite. I would not trust it as like a full day. You know, I'm going to ride the bus downtown and use my phone and sit at a Wii work and write blogs for five hours. The phone would absolutely be dead.

For those kind of one to two-hour stints in the middle of the day at the coffee shop, I'm finding it's fine. I get to the end of the day, like in the alarmingly low percentages of battery, but it's okay for those little short stints. Anything longer than that, I would definitely plan to have like some recharging time or a battery or something like that. Okay. The version of this experiment that personally I'm very excited to try is the, it's a three-hour train ride from D.C. to New York. Can I purse computer through the whole train ride, which is like, I very rarely have like serious business to do, but it's a perfect time to catch up on emails and get some reading done and watch a show and whatever. And that is in theory the thing this is perfectly set up to do for me really well without me even needing to bring a bag on the train, which would just be glorious. There you go. That's the dream. I like this idea. All right. Well, I'm going to do it. I'm coming to New York in like two weeks. I'm going to keep you posted. It's going to be unbelievable. All right. I want to hear all about it.

Good. All right. Allison, thank you as always. Next time we're going to do this from your phone and it's going to be awful. And we're going to have a whole different conversation about it. I'm ready. We're going to take a break. Thank you, Allison. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work?

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slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T-com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. Welcome back. One of the most interesting pieces of news to me over the last couple of weeks was a new set of packages from YouTube TV that try to kind of

split out different parts of what you might want to watch on YouTube TV. And the funniest thing to me was that there is a sports-focused package, right? So the idea is you don't want everything. You just mostly want sports. And the sports package is like 80% as expensive as the whole package. So this really just is the state of sports streaming. Sports rules television, particularly live television. And most of the money and most of the resources and most of the viewership in TV, in live events, period, goes to sports. So I figured now was a good moment to catch up on where we are in the state of live sports and streaming. Jacob Feldman, who's a reporter at Sportico, keeps up on this and covers it tons all the time. And he was on the show last year to explain where we were with ESPN. And a lot of these changes going on with how the sports industry is morphing itself for a streaming universe. So I invited Jacob to come back and talk about the Super Bowl and the Olympics and what's going on with YouTube TV and ESPN, which I honestly forgot, launched its. streaming thing. We got a lot to catch up on. Let's get into it. Jacob Feldman, welcome back to the Virchcast. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

This is like an annual tradition where I watch a bunch of sports and I get really annoyed at how hard it is to watch sports and then I bring you on to talk about watching sports. Sports streaming therapist is kind of my title in many ways and so it's an honor to do it. This sounds right right. So I have a bunch of things I want to kind of jump around and then I want to talk through a bit of a piece you wrote kind of about the sort of big wars in sports dreaming coming this year. But I want to start with the Winter Olympics. For anyone who can't see, you're wearing a USA curling jacket, which just hopelessly biases you forever in this whole thing. Have you been watching the Winter Olympics?

I have been. And we can get into this. Obviously, the Winter Olympics overlapped the Super Bowl this year. So I was out in San Francisco last week or two weeks ago, depending on when you're listening to this. And so I missed the beginning, but I've been catching up and watching morning, midday and night. What have you made of it as a sports business report? or thinking about like the streaming of it all. Yeah, the streaming of it all is amazing, I think, as a fan. I think they finally figured this out. And we can talk about the progression here

because for a long time, the Olympics were one of the most frustrating sports to watch. You had it on for three hours each night. They were kind of spending most of the time talking about family backstories, which are great if you're into family backstories, but if you're into curling, not so great. There was a lot of stuff that had already happened that you already knew all of the results of,

that they weren't showing enough of. So it was just like it, for the longest time, the Olympics sort of satisfied nobody in the way that drove me crazy. But it does, it feels now like Peacock in particular was just like, what, you want Olympics? Here's all of it. Here's the Olympics. We have 400 streams going at any given time.

And honestly, it's exactly what I want it. Yes. And if you want multi-view, they have that. If you want curling only multi-view, they have that this year. If you want Red Zone with Scott Hansen, they have that. It has really been, you know, a choose your own adventure in the best kind of way. It does seem like the biggest technical innovation, at least the one that has sort of blown the most people's minds, is the drones. I feel like the drones are suddenly everywhere.

They have absolutely made some of the coolest shots I've ever seen in the Olympics. There's one for the downhill skiing that it would just sort of fly up behind them and follow them for the beginning of everyone. And it's amazing. It is noisy, which is a little weird. And there's sort of this whirring sound that I now associate with the Winter Olympics. What have you made of the drones? Yes, the warring Olympics. And I have heard from some producers, because I asked them about this too.

Some people think this might be a solved problem, and maybe even by the end of the Olympics, they'll have figured out the right setting in terms of the audio to cut that out. But yes, the drones have been one of the biggest surprises and delights of this Olympics, and I think it's probably,

I'm curious your perspective on this and someone from the tech side, I mean, you guys have seen these drones develop and then us on the sports side every four years like wow they can go that fast or that small the cameras are that good you know it's kind of like when you jump you know four generations of iPhones all of a sudden it's like oh okay uh yeah these these actually can fit in they don't you know distract from from the broadcast like they might have four or eight years ago yeah it is really fun to watch that progression because there was this moment i don't know five eight years ago that there was this thought that drones were going to become sort of a real consumer

product that like you would have a drone and I would have a drone. Sure. Everyone needs one for Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. And we would just like play with our drones. And that has not really panned out for it. Then the FAA got involved, I think, at something.

Right. Maybe not. And they're still, they're still a little too expensive and they're still a little bit fragile. So there's like a lot of reasons it didn't quite hit the mainstream that way. But as a, as a professional tool, we just continue to unlock incredible new things that drones can do. And I've had the same experience that it's like,

Every time I turn around some sporting event or another, they're all over F1 now, too, these drones that are like, they're opening up new ways to watch all kinds of things in ways that I find just unbelievably exciting, even as somebody who just absolutely does not care about drones as a product. I think they're such a cool camera thing. Yeah, the cool thing is I think we'll get to the point where it's just a cool shot, right? We can talk less about the technology,

and yeah, they're coming to NASCAR this year in a big way, baseball's using them. One of my favorite little details about the Olympic drones is that in a few cases it's actually X, Olympic athletes piloting the drones. So one of the big concerns was, you know, are these going to get in the way of the athletes, are they going to crash? Are there going to be injuries?

And so this was a multi-year process to get all the various sporting bodies on board, eventually get the athletes on board. One of the things that helped was, yeah, these are, I think it's the ski jumping and maybe one other. You know, these are extreme sport athletes who were the core drone market. And so a lot of them after their playing days are over have moved into, the drone piloting world and bring, I think, that expertise of, you know, here's actually how we should be using these drones. Here's the coolest shot. Here's how to get people at home a sense of what it's like to jump off one of these mountains. That's so cool. I mean, that's kind of an extension

of the sort of athlete to sports photographer pipeline, which is the thing I've always enjoyed. Like the Randy Johnson's of the world who are like, I know what's happening. I know what it looks like. I know where it is. And so I can get different sorts of shots because I just understand the game differently. I love that. And especially with extreme sports athletes, I was going to be like, oh wow, impressive that they're this good at flying drones, but they're probably all learning how to fly drones anyway, because if you're helis skiing, you probably have a drone with you. Right, right, exactly.

That's awesome. So real quick, I'm curious also about the Super Bowl. You were there, it sounds like, as a viewer, the Super Bowl was pretty uninteresting this year. And I mean uninteresting in the best way, right? Like, there were no streaming issues. There were no, it wasn't like, oh, it's on Tubey. How do I download Tube?

It just, like, was the Super Bowl. Yeah. Did you notice anything different this year? No, I think that's right. It's interesting. last year it was on tube as you mentioned, which is free. And so there was no free streaming option, but it didn't seem like there was any uproar. I think people still accept that if it's on a broadcast network

that you can get with an antenna, they're not too upset. And so, yes, the streaming option was Peacock. Peacock, as we mentioned, has grown a lot over the last four years since the last time. They had a Super Bowl. It seemed to hold up well. You know, Hulu, YouTube TV,

all those companies now at this point can handle the scale of the Super Bowl. And as you mentioned, it's become standard for them to broadcast these massive events. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about some of these streamers because I think we're in a really interesting moment of change for a bunch of different streaming services

and almost all of it is centered around sports in some meaningful way. But let's start with YouTube TV, which just announced a bunch of new packages. There's the sports plan. There's the sports and news plan. There's the news and entertainment and family plan. They're trying to sort of slim down the bundle a little bit to make it a little less expensive for people.

Yeah. But the most interesting thing to me here is basically there's YouTube TV, which is all the channels. And then there's YouTube TV, which is just the sports channels. And boy, is it almost as expensive as the whole thing. So watching these things, you've been covering YouTube TV for a long time. I think YouTube TV is the closest thing we have to like a real success of a cable replacement, I think. What stuck out in these new plans to you? Yeah, I think taking a step back, this is what YouTube TV always.

wanted to be is my sense, going back to the early days. I think there was even a conversation about, you remember, like, low cast and Aereo and some of these, like, free streaming, legally dubious services. I don't remember exactly how that shook out in the courts, but they no longer exist. Not well for Aero, I'll tell you that. Yeah. But point being, I think YouTube TV kind of thought about that model, too, of like, you know, we're YouTube, we're a free streaming service. Is there any way we could ingest these local channels and give people a package of TV on top of YouTube. That didn't work out because as low-cast scenario,

these programmers, these channel owners, wanted you if you're going to show Fox. You also needed to show Fox News and Fox Business and Fox Sports. They're bundling these all together. You had to buy them all, essentially. And YouTube said, okay, we'll do that. We'll put together

this big base plan. And then YouTube TV got big enough where they're like, actually, what we want to do is offer a sports plan. And if you're not going to go along with that, we're going to go, you know, We'll offer it without you, essentially. So there was the big Disney dispute last year. Right. So this was all part of this. Yes, exactly.

Interesting. Okay. Yes. So even before the Disney one, there was a renegotiation with Paramount, which on CBS, with NBC Universal, and I think Fox as well. And so they have a new set of deals that allow them to offer these bundles. And the sports one is particularly interesting because it separates sports and news for the first time. Basically, you can get T&T without CNN, which normally come together. You can get Fox Sports without Fox News. which almost always come together. But as you mentioned, it's not that much cheaper.

I think it's $55 if you're a new user, which is a pretty good deal. $65 if you're not a new user, and I think that'll be most people, which is $18, $17 less than what's called the main plan now. You'd say it's called the base plan, but it's kind of confusing because now base is the most expensive. So some education to be done there. But I mean, in my world, every sports fan that subscribes to YouTube is like, Okay, great. $15 less. I'm not losing that much. Sign me up. And I do think the timing of this is really notable as well. They launched this or they announced this the day after the Super Bowl. As you know, YouTube TV is most popular during the football season. They have Sunday ticket. Obviously, it's a big part of that. And churn rates are the highest in February. Everyone cancels or downsizes. And so I think this is YouTube TV's effort to say, stick around with the spring. You can get all the March Madness on this slightly cheaper bundle. You can get all the World Cup in the summer on the

slightly cheaper bundle and then football season will be here before you know it. That to me, I think, is what will be successful. They can flatten that churn a little bit in between football seasons. Yeah. Well, and I think that reaction you described where a bunch of people just immediately go, oh, great, this is all I'm here for anyway. And now it's $17 cheaper is, I think, a really telling one. And to me, it feels like what I can't decide is if YouTube is in a particularly good

position of leverage where it is the one that is the most successful. It's also YouTube. It's also Google. Like it just doesn't need to play the games that everybody else needs to play So it can afford to basically sit back and be like, listen, Here's what we're going to do. Either get on board or don't. We don't really care all that much.

And I think the dispute with Disney pretty clearly proved that YouTube has more leverage than its content providers at this particular moment. But what I wonder is, is this just YouTube? Or is this the beginning of a sea change that's like actually what's about to happen is we are all just going to recognize that cable is sports and sports is cable, and in 12 months, that's all it's going to be. Yes, I think it's both. So YouTube TV is not the first of these products to come out with a sports-specific bundle.

Fubo did it six months ago. Direct TV did it a year ago. No offense to Fubo, but I don't think that's going to move the needle quite the way YouTube TV does. But point being, this is not a new idea. I think for a long time, these companies have said, look, people are signing up for sports. How do we maximize and make this the cheapest we can with the most sports that we can? I think that has been the direction for a long time, really probably since the launch of Netflix and since the destruction of the cable, the slow death of the cable bundle, which both started 10, 15 years ago.

And then, yeah, I think YouTube size is what allows it to pull this off in a big way and allows it to charge $65 and still be successful. And I do think we're going to see my sense as another part of these negotiations from last year are going to be more integrations between YouTube.com. on YouTube TV. I'm sure you have this experience too when you talk to those folks. There's YouTube on TV, which is the YouTube app on the TV, and then there's YouTube TV on the TV, which are still two different apps.

And they'll explain to you why people love that. I will tell you that that's confusing. They're wrong about that fact. And not only that, those two apps seem to have no idea that the other ones exist. The thing I keep asking people at YouTube is like, you understand that people who watch NFL games might be interested in NFL content on you.

YouTube. And every single time, they're like, oh, that's such an interesting point. And I'm like, how, it's like, have a meeting, guys. This is not complicated. Right. Or maybe the people, yeah, who are watching Pat Mac if you on YouTube might want to know that he's on your other app. Yeah. But yeah, they'll tell you it's actually, yeah, whatever. It's a whole, whole other conversation. But point being, I think those are going to get closer together now that they have some more flexibility in that. And I do think, you know, YouTube, as you guys have written about, is dominating TV viewing time, both apps included increasingly in recent months. And this is only going to accelerate now that they have some flexibility, both into how they're

selling it and also how they're distributing some of this content. Yeah, that's interesting. We've been tracking this change for YouTube for so long from kind of, you know, cat video platform to hugely powerful cultural influence. Everything video, yeah. But that everybody still thinks of as cat video platform, right? Like the sort of in the, in the business in particular, the idea of what YouTube was was so far behind what YouTube actually was for so long. And I feel like over the last two years, really, that has caught up. And now everybody who needs to know from like the CEO of Disney to advertisers to users understands that YouTube is this like unparalleled cultural power. And I wonder if this is the year it starts to flex that power on a lot of different fronts like you're describing.

that all of a sudden, in the way that I think back to like Steve Jobs basically going to AT&T with the iPhone and being like, you will either play our game or we will walk away. I have all of the power in this relationship. Like, that's a game YouTube is sort of uniquely positioned to start to play on a lot of different fronts if it wants to. And it'll be interesting to see how hard it tries to push. Yeah. I think before you said sports is cable and cable of sports. I think increasingly YouTube is TV and TV is YouTube for a lot of people. Yeah, I totally agree. The other company sort of sitting there next to this, and this is the one we talked about a lot last year, is ESPN. When you came on last year, one of the things you talked about a bunch was this looming launch of ESPN as a streaming platform.

They were going to just launch the channels. You could just stream ESPN the channels. ESPN was doing where to watch. It had this big idea of we want to be the destination for all sports everywhere all the time. I was preparing to do this conversation with you, and I literally just straight up forgot that ESPN actually did launch that thing. I'm sure it exists in the world

and I'm sure people like it. It is just not part of this conversation in the same way. Where is ESPN? ESPN did make this big deal with the NFL that just closed, that brings a lot of NFL stuff to ESPN. Where is ESPN in this journey

to be like the sports platform for all sports things everywhere? Is it working? It is complicated. Okay. So ESPN, as you mentioned, wants to be the destination. When you think sports, they want you to think ESPN. The challenge for them is that right now, a lot of their money still comes from the cable bundle.

So they don't want you to get rid of the cable bundle. So they are trying to walk this middle path, which included launching a service last year called ESPN, but also sometimes called ESPN Unlimited, that is free if you have cable, but otherwise is $30 a month. that includes everything. There's also ESPN select and plus if you just want a little bit less of things and increasingly less and less, but they're going to try to get you to Unlimited.

Then they're also going to bring in MLBTV, and that's going to cost extra. It's going to cost a little less if you have ESPN Unlimited, which is free if you have some cable doesn't currently include YouTube TV, but will by the end of the year. It's a big mess.

It's a big jumble. The fact that you just were able to do that coherently off the top of your head is the most impressive thing anyone has done in this podcast in a long time. It's terrifying and unfortunate and I go to bed and wake up every morning

being like, is ESPN Unlimited again? What is it today? You're the guy with like drawing the lines on the whiteboard being like, here's how all of this makes sense. Or doesn't. Yes, exactly. People in the office give me a hard time for saying I've just become customer support

at this point for ESPN and MLB and whoever else. Like, here's what you need. Here's why you don't have access to this. Here's what channel it's on. And maybe one day that will end. But for now, ESPN has given me a good job of explaining what they have going on. That's good.

Yeah, so in the long run, I think they'd like to get to the point where, you know, again, they are the front door and you can buy other services from them. You pay them monthly. But getting there is very complicated and has upset a lot of sports fans over the last six months, both in terms of the confusion of what do I have access to, why do I not have access to it? And also the cost of it. $30 a month is a lot for a streaming service, especially when it doesn't include everything that you might expect, it might. Yeah. Does ESPN have moves coming this year? Do you think? Like, is this NFL deal a big one? I think it's smaller than some people might think. So again, you have to get into the details here. For instance, they are getting NFL network, which means that they are getting seven more NFL games. I think that's the biggest deal. So they'll have more games. As part of the deal, they're giving back four games to the NFL. So they really are only getting three more games. They're getting the right to distribute NFL Red Zone on linear channels, but not the right to distribute it. digitally. So Red Zone's not going to be included in ESPN, not going to be included in ESPN unlimited, but there are some tie-ins there. And again, it's a little more complicated than ESPN all of a sudden owns the NFL or the NFL or the NFL. It's not going to be as straightforward as you might think. But it does help a little bit. This MLB TV deal is going to again be a big deal. I think next year, more so than this year. I think they're still getting up to speed in terms of what the integration

is. This year, you're still going to be able to watch in the MLB app or in the ESPN app. I think they'd like to get you to the point where it's all in the ESPN app, if they can get all the various authentications and configurations and bundles with local deals and T-Mobile has a benefit that doesn't expire until 2028. And again, you very quickly go down the wormhole of rights deals that make this all much more complicated. But ESPN is slowly working its way towards a more simple structure. Okay. Slowly but surely. And I think, and part of the challenge is, I think, you know, again, I was looking at some of these other deals going on right now. And Amazon continues to, A, have all the money in the world and B, invest pretty heavily in sports in such a way that I kind of think,

I don't know, I took Amazon only like half seriously as a sports player for a long time, that it was like, it seemed happy to have football. And you can see why it would be useful to have football, and maybe that would be enough. But it seems like Amazon is really interested in being one of the main sports networks in the world. Is that what you read to? Yes, and it's even bigger than that, because Amazon is really interested in being your TV app. And so in a very different way than YouTube TV,

very different models, right? So YouTube TV's model is you pay YouTube TV $65 a month. You get every channel you would need to watch sports. Amazon's model is, okay, actually on YouTube TV, you're not going to get Thursday Night Football because we have that. You're not going to get a lot of NBA because we have that. So you're already coming to Amazon. And while you're coming here, you might as well buy Peacock from us.

You might as well buy Paramount from us. Hopefully one day ESPN will allow you to buy ESPN from us. And we'll bundle it all together. We'll give you one interface with all your sports. And it's also a big deal for a lot of sports fans who maybe are not as technically proficient, that maybe they have an Amazon fire stick. They have an Amazon remote. There's an Amazon button on the remote.

I hear from a lot of people that's how they watch sports is they click the Amazon button and they see what's there. And so Amazon, I think, has a much bigger ambitions than just being a channel or a network. I think they want to be the plates you go to, just like all these other apps that we've talked about. Right. But Amazon can do that without needing sort of exclusive rights everywhere, which is a really interesting play that it has

that is going to be hard for anyone else to do. They need just enough exclusive rights to become the default place where they then have everything else. And this is why it is all so fragmented. I mean, we haven't mentioned Netflix. They have a somewhat similar model. Increasingly, YouTube had an exclusive game. So all these companies want to be the place where they can offer everything.

And as a result, everyone has a very small, you know, slice of the pie. Right. But it does seem like the way that race shakes out to me is it seems like the future is, there's sort of one of two futures that's going to happen, right? Either we get to a point where every sport has one provider and you have to go to lots of providers for different sports, but like in the way that Apple is just doing F1 and the MLS, right? That eventually everybody has, they're all sort of stratified that way. or you get to the point where it is so impossibly disperse, which is like what the NFL is, right?

It's, I mean, it's trying to know where all the NFL games are is insane. No one should be required to have to do that. Just be. I'm the only one who has enough. No one else has enough. Correct. That's why we bring you here every once in a while. But then the race is to be, okay, how do I become the gateway to all of that content?

The front door. Right. And this is, we've been talking about this with streaming in general for the longest time. that was like Apple TV is desperate to be the search engine for all of your other streaming networks. And that stuff has been messy over time for a variety of reasons. But it does feel like the race to do that for sports in particular is getting really hot. As this stuff gets so much more dispersed, that for Amazon to say, okay, you're coming here anyway. Like, sure, we'll send you to the ESPN app for the ESPN stuff, but you're going to find it through the Prime Video app.

Like that's a source of power that I think all of these companies are now after, even when they can't win the rights with all of the money in the known universe. Yeah. And as you guys talk a lot, a big part of that is, okay, if you buy ESPN through us, we're going to get 30% of that on and on and on. And that's how you make it make work from a financial perspective. Yeah. You mentioned Netflix, which is obviously a fascinating and unknowable player in this.

The other thing that's going on right now is Netflix is trying to buy Warner Brothers, which is another player, long time player in the sports world. what do you make of that deal? Let's say that goes through. Just purely hypothetically, it seems, I would say, Occam's Razor says that deal will eventually close. Does that change the sports streaming world in any meaningful way? Again, not as much as people might think.

So Netflix is buying Warner Brothers, but Warner Brothers already spun off Discovery, which included TNT sports in the U.S. And it's actually more complicated in Europe, and we don't have time to get into Eurosport and Discovery and Warner Bros. So we'll stick in the U.S. Okay. And so I think basically the only sports that Warner Brothers have is like hard knocks,

you know, things that are on HBO, essentially. Whereas the things that are on T&T, like NHL and college sports, those are still streaming in the HBO Max app. It's unclear how long that will continue. But wouldn't be owned by Netflix. But I think it goes back to a larger point of Netflix buys Warner Brothers in theory and suddenly becomes a much bigger player. And all of a sudden more sports are going to want to grab.

to where people are watching, and we can talk about the podcast part of this too. I mean, Netflix clearly wants to be a place where people are coming for sports content. I think they realized what I've survived, you know, kind of woke them up to, oh, sports fans, you know, they're pretty serious. They'll, you know, they'll pay to watch this stuff. And it's on and on, and all the way to the point of Christmas games and NFL and World Cup coming Women's World Cup next year, I think it'll be the next big test. Yeah, the women's World Cup one is going to be really interesting, because the question I was about to ask you is, it is very telling to me that we continue

to bring up Drive to survive as the example. The example, yeah. That show is old now. It's been around a while. It has fallen off a bunch. Like, I love F1 and I don't watch Drive to survive like I used to. But there was that phenomenon

of the first like two seasons was really something. And it doesn't, it feels like Netflix has spent a lot of time trying to repeat that and I'm not sure it quite has. It did for one evening. What was that?

Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson. Oh, yeah, fair enough. Okay. Okay, that's fair. Yeah, so they did Drive survive, as you mentioned. It blew up bigger than anybody could have expected. They did about 12 different other versions of Drive for golf and baseball and tennis.

The tennis one was pretty good. They canceled it so fast, but I really liked the tennis one. Tennis one didn't go over huge, yeah, with the audience. Golf, I think, was the one that has done the best. Baseball was won and done. And so, yeah, and then they slowly pivoted to live. And they had some really weird stuff early on. They had a golf tournament featuring F1 drivers.

They did a tennis exhibition match. This Jake Paul, Mike Tyson thing that's, if you believe Netflix's numbers, like the most viewed sporting events outside the Super Bowl this decade. And that has let them say, oh, like live events, we can do that. So they've done more boxing. I don't know if you watch skyscraper live. I did. I would argue that as sports. Terrifying.

Yes. Yeah. Like I'm the guy who gets like sweaty palms watching YouTube videos of people at the top of building. So watching this happen live was like an actively stressful experience. Yes. But it was amazing. The announcer seemed to be stressed too. I think everybody didn't really know what they signed up for until it got going.

Like, oh, he's actually just, there's no net or ropes. It's just a guy climbing a building. Okay. Okay, cool. It could start raining and he's just up there. It's like, okay. So anyway, point being, I think that sports is part of their larger live events push. And I think they're going to try to get more.

It's going to be really interesting to see. So the NFL is renegotiating its rights. packages starting basically now. And there's a big question of whether Netflix is going to go all in. Are they going to try to get Sunday night football or Monday night football? Is Amazon going to try to get even more? Is Amazon going to try to get a Super Bowl? Is NFL going to give them a Super Bowl?

Is YouTube going to do a lot more? Again, they've only had one game to date. Or are the existing players, CBS, Fox, NBC, and the ESPN going to say, we really need football. We can't give any more up. And the streamers say, okay, well, we'll pick up everything else. We'll take the World Cup that you can no longer afford because you're spending all your money in the NFL. We'll take the World Series.

We'll take college football. We'll take March Madness. So that is going to be the next big shake. I think it's going to be one of those two things. And this next NFL right cycle will really determine how important these streamers want to play a role in broadcasting football. So you bring up one of the last things I wanted to ask you about, which is it seems like we've been talking for years about this looming change

where if these unbelievable. unbelievably rich tech companies decided they wanted to win at sports. They just could. They could just outbid everybody. And there were questions on all sides, right? It was like, okay, well, does the NFL want to lose broadcast because it has these huge audiences, even in exchange for more money? So the back and forth has been really complicated, but it does feel like going back over a lot of this, that that change, if it hasn't already happened is like in the middle of happening right now, that like you, the first companies you just. named as the most interesting players for the NFL are all tech companies. And then we lump all the

other ones under the traditional players, which is like the most faint praise imaginable. So what is your read of that dynamic right now? Like has this great shift to tech money and streaming happened? Or are we still in this kind of diverse, diffuse space for a while? I think the big change that has happened is that four or five years ago, the fight was between the streamers and and the traditional channels. And those channels have streaming networks that's a little more complicated than that. But that was the basic idea.

Where are you going to watch the stuff? Are you going to watch it via a cable bundle? Or are you going to watch it direct to consumer via one of these streaming apps? And the streaming apps largely won. I mean, there is still stuff. The biggest events are still on broadcast TV. But for the most part, when you think of entertainment,

you're thinking of Netflix and Prime Video and you look at the Emmys or what have you. So the battle now is between the streamers, right? And that's what has really changed. It used to be, you know, am I going to bring this from, put this on TV or put this on streaming? And now the question is,

am I going to put this on Netflix or I'm going to put this on Amazon. And I think that is where it's going to really interesting to see different priorities emerge between what does Netflix want to do versus what does Amazon want to do versus what does YouTube want to do

rather than it's just make more sense on streaming or TV. Got it. Okay. All right. So I'm going to give you three events coming up soon. Okay.

And you're going to tell me which one is the one you're most looking at as like a moment in this transition. The beginning of the first, Formula One season, exclusively on Apple TV. March Madness, being March Madness. I think it's like that's the next big moment on the sports calendar. And the Masters, which also is moving, I think, to Prime Video, right?

There's a couple hours on Prime Video. Oh, okay. It's getting a little Masters. Boy, Amazon made a big deal out of that if it's just a couple of hours. I believe it's like Thursday, 12 to 2. Don't quote me exactly on that. But it's something like that. Yeah, early rounds.

Then I'm guessing the Masters is not going to win this game that we're playing. here. But of those three, which do you think is the most sort of meaningful next moment in the sports calendar for streaming stuff? Well, March Madness is the most interesting property because of who owns it, and we've already mentioned them several times. So TNT, March Madness is a weird event and that is split between CBS and T&T and the final alternates between these two. These are two companies that theoretically are competitors, but because CBS didn't have a big cable presence and because TNT didn't have a big broadcast presence teamed up for this kind of unlikely a lot. to broadcast March Madness.

And those are two companies, Paramount and Warner Brothers, but now T&T's spun out, that have been talking about buying each other in different ways, and emerging in different ways, and both trying to figure out what TV sports looks like in a streaming world. So if you want to watch all of the games, you need a cable bundle, right?

They're not all going to be one app. And if you have a cable bundle, then you can, I think, authenticate into the March Madness Live app and watch it there. again, it gets very technical very quickly. But that has made it a great event for YouTube TV, for Spectrum, for Comcast to say, look, this is actually the best way to watch. You can watch a multi-view. You can have a CBS and a TNT game next to each other.

And so the question is, are people going to pay up for that experience? Or they're going to say, yeah, you know, I'll watch what I can watch in my Paramount Plus apps. I have that subscription or I'll watch the highlights on YouTube or, you know, I'll watch the docu-series a year later. Probably not that option. but that is the question is can these events that are such signature TV events can they continue to be that way

or do they need to reformat themselves reframe themselves and pitch themselves like you're saying to an all-on-one audience that now is so used to getting stuff so easily I loved your summer takes episode what is that six months ago where you were like all streaming

all streaming services are bad and I believe that I really do believe that more and more every day that's still a winter take okay because it's interesting me. I mean, what you're basically saying was, you know, you should just rent the movies individually or buy them or what have you. And I think the reason all these streaming

sources are getting into sports is because you can't do that with sports, right? There is no alternative. They own this exclusively. You can't buy these all a card. And so the question is, can these events like March Madness, which is like, what, 63 games on the men's side, 63 games on the women's side? I think it's actually 67 games now with expansion and they're going to expand again. Does that work in a streaming environment compared to these big, you know, temple events? Is it all just going to turn into Jake Paul? Mike Tyson's standalone events, or can we do these month-long things via streaming? I think we still haven't seen.

Yeah. It does feel like whatever is going to happen, this is not the year. It gets less complicated to be a supposed to. Right? Like, there's no sign of this thing letting up any sense. Next year. Next year, it'll be simpler. That's what we've been saying for 10 years.

And one day will be true. We're going to have you back in 2027 and you're going to say, guys, we fixed it. Yeah. It's one app. Everybody knows what ESPN Unlimited is by now, right? I don't need to explain that. Boy, am I looking forward to that. All right. Jacob, thank you as always for being here.

My pleasure. I appreciate it. Go watch more Olympics. This is what I'm going to go do, too. It's going to be great. Yes, you as well. Enjoy. Go team USA. All right. We've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and do a question for the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic.

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Let's begin. All right, we're back. Time for a question with the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866, Verge 1-1. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com. Keep all of your questions, all of your thoughts, all of your feedback coming.

A lot of the stuff that we've been hearing recently is still about tiny smart home mysteries, and I have to tell you, I love it. Please keep them all coming. Anyway, our question this week, happens to be just perfectly up the alley of what I've been thinking about all week. And it comes from Drake.

Hello, I'm Drake from Portland, Oregon. I'm actively listening to your podcast about the AI debacle pin. And as you were talking about, the flip phone sort of idea, it reminded me of the days when people would actually wear the foot phone as like a belt flip or like a shirt flip.

So it'd be like just being held there in place and people would use that as speakerphone with the little tiny, itty-bitty-like screen on the outside saying that they're in an active phone call so they've used it as a speaker phone sort of device. That might actually be another approach to the lip-phone AI debacle.

Okay, so the reason I've been thinking about this question all week is because I am using the Motorola Razor Ultra right now. I'm in my phone switching project, and basically what I'm trying to do is I'm going to spend a week using six different kinds of phones. Foldable phones, phones with keyboards, phones you've never heard of,

phones you've super heard of. I'm going to try and do the full sweep of the smartphone landscape to figure out which one I really want. It took me a day and a half to get the stupid E-Sim ported from my iPhone to this phone, but it is now my phone,

it's up and running, everything's going fine. And I've had the most fascinating experience, which is that I think, more than ever, that the flip phone is an important and good and correct in many ways form factor. And I think this for a bunch of reasons.

One, I think it is just easier to hold and carry. Like having this fit into your pocket makes more sense. It also fits in my hand. There's something really nice about the idea that I can actually hold and reach every corner of this device with one thumb. I can use it. Like when I sort of roll over in bed, I can like tap around on it much more easily.

This thing just works for me. me. And then there is this feeling like, okay, I'm opening up my phone to do something, take a call, write an email, look at a notification, whatever, and then I close it, and I'm finished. And there's, there's just something psychological about I am done with my phone now that I think has actually made me use my phone less. The problem is all of the software that is supposed to support this is bad. Like, Android just does not exist in a meaningful way to make this work. So what you're suck with is every time I'm using an app and I close the phone, it pops up a thing saying, do you want to allow this phone app to run on your external display? And I just say yes, because who cares?

But then what happens is it just runs the full version of the app. And so you just get a thing that just feels like a smushed Android app. Like what this should be, the correct version of this in my head is a phone on the inside and a smartwatch on the outside. What I want for this is to be able to do very simple input and very simple output, right? I want to be able to quickly see what the weather is. I want to be able to quickly do a tap back emoji on a text message. I want to be able to change the music. What I don't need is the full freaking Spotify app on this tiny little thing or my full Gmail or the full anything else. It's just pretending this is a tiny phone and it's not. And this is like fundamentally the thing I think is left to solve.

right? In the way that a foldable phone acts like a phone that turns into a tablet or acts like a phone that turns into a laptop as we were just talking about with Allison, that's an interesting software and UI problem to solve. This one goes the other direction. And this is where I think Drake's idea about having these be AI systems.

It's really interesting. Like the idea of having a phone that I can close or sort of turn off and mute in some way that then morphs into this whatever, always on or push to talk or whatever AI machine, I actually think is super interesting. Like if I, if, if when it was closed like this, I could press and it was essentially just a Gemini machine, that's pretty cool. I can use this for Gemini, but it's trying to do a lot of

other things, right? So if, if I'm using an iPhone and it's like, okay, I close the iPhone and then it turns into like a home pod or a basic controller for Siri and music, I think that could be very cool. And I do think there is something meaningful about the idea that I am actually shapeshifting the form factor, right? I've come to feel this way about foldable funds too. And Allison was saying this earlier that if you have a device that you change its sort of stature and the way that you're holding it and looking at it and using it, you can convince your brain this is a new kind of device. And actually, that's one of the superpowers of a device like this, is it can transform and so does your ability to interact with it. So I'm like,

Thinking about Drake's idea, and it's like, okay, right, I have this on my collar. And the other problem with this razor is it is exactly the wrong form factor. Like, it's too kind of big and thick and wide like this. And then this is just a little too much. Again, I want something that might not be possible to exist, which is I want a big phone that turns into a tiny smartwatch. But I digress. That's somebody else's problem to figure out.

But if I take something like this and then, you know, instead of having it open in my pocket, I turn it into like a pinnable, wearable on my collar. And now what I have is a sort of plod style AI recorder that I can talk to and get information from or take notes with or whatever. I think that's super compelling. And I think there is something more interesting about that than the idea of making a wholly different device. And that's what everybody wants to do. They want you to either use a smartwatch for a lot of these purposes, which I think is where Google and Apple and others will head.

or they want you to buy some complete new form factor. And to me, I'm like, what if it's just half my phone? And having now used this for a week, this feels like two devices. It is one thing when it's closed, and it's another thing when it's open. The problem is the thing that's when it's closed is optimized for when it's open. And if we can just fix that, I think we'll be on to something. This is the same problem Allison had, trying to make her medium-sized phone into a big tablet. I'm having it in the opposite direction.

and she wants to make laptop, I want to make AI. I think there's something really interesting there. Anyway, if you've figured out how this works, by the way, if you have a razor or a Z-flip and you've like solved this external display system in a way that you get your notifications and you can do your media controls, but you don't accidentally end up using a full Android app on this tiny screen all the time, please let me know. It's possible I'm just missing settings, but I don't think so.

I think we just need to fix this problem. Anyway, for now, That's it for the show. I'm sure I'll have new feelings about new kinds of phone next week, because that is what we do here on the Verge. But for now, we're going to get out of here. Please, as always, remember to subscribe to the Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. You can get this podcast ad-free. You can get version history ad-free, version history, by the way, just about to come back. Very excited about it. We're recording a bunch of really fun episodes. The week you're hearing this,

I'm really excited about the next batch we have coming for you. You can also get Decoder, ad-free, all of it, just by subscribing to the Verge. It is the single best way to support everything that we're. doing. This show is part of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network, and this episode was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Mia and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news, presumably more F-scene files, because that keeps happening and we keep talking about it, and some gadgets. We're getting gadgets again. It's mid-February, and it's already gadget season. It's great times out there. We'll see you then. Rock'am.