The WaPo Reckoning & TikTok’s Next Act

[MUSIC] Congratulations, you made the varsity. >> The podcast, my name is John Aran, and I am hooked sports correspondent in the hooks of this pod. And today, Sarah Fisher joins us. Sarah is a great media reporter for Axios, and thankfully for me, a regular guest on this podcast. We're going to talk about everything from Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery to Jeff Bezos' decision to cut sports from the Washington Post to a Super Bowl preview. But before we get to Sarah Fisher, today's Wednesday, January 28th, and here's what I'm watching. I'm focused on two things. First of all, did you see the numbers for Paramount's first UFC card last weekend? Saturday night event from Las Vegas set records for the Paramount Plus streaming service. Five million streaming viewers. It was just last August that Paramount signed a $7.7 billion deal for UFC rights. And the deal kicked in this week. Both Paramount and UFC execs, they have to be thrilled with those numbers. But now comes a tricky part, they have to sustain it. I'm also intrigued by all the negative stories around this summer's world cup, which, as you all currently know, will be played in Canada, Mexico, and the US. Some influential people in Europe are calling on fans to skip the game over immigration concerns. Others are pressuring countries to boycott the games because of Trump's threats to take over Greenland. These stories reached a crescendo this week when former FIFA president SEP Platter promoted the idea of fans not traveling to the US for any world cup games. Yes, the same SEP Platter, who 11 years ago resigned in disgrace following a scandal written run as FIFA's president, and the same SEP Platter, who awarded the World Cup to Russia in 2018, and another to Qatar in 2022. But I digress, my main point in bringing all of this up basically is to ignore it. Seriously, it's a time-honored tradition before every World Cup and every Olympic Games for sky-as-falling type stories to emerge. Host cities, these stories always say they always miss deadlines and never seem to be ready to host these kind of big events. But consider this, fans have complained loudly about the cost of tickets. ESPN reported that the list price on a World Cup ticket for the July 19th final in New Jersey is close to $9,000. But tickets are still hard to come by, at least so far. And Fox, which will carry the game, should expect huge ratings. And I fully expect this summer's tournament to be huge. Okay, now let's get to Sarah Fisher. Sarah, first of all, thank you for joining the pod. But we're both journalists. We both live in the DC area. And for both of us, what's going on at what's happening at the Washington Post is, you know, I don't think saying emotional is too strong a word. It's not quite personal, but it's something that people that live in this area and have grown up with the Washington Post, it's utterly shocking. Give me what you're reporting on this as told you from your perspective. What is happening at the Washington Post? Yeah, John. It's very sad. And part because there was so much optimism around the future of the post when Jeff Bezos bought it for $250 million in 2013. And the post, what made it different from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal was that it always remained a little bit more focused on its local constituency than those two papers which became hyper-nationalized. You know, the post hung on to its metro section a little bit longer than the times did. It continued to invest very heavily in local sports coverage in the DMV and was considered very authoritative on that, also local food coverage, things like that. What happened was when Jeff Bezos instilled new management in 2024, they decided that they wanted to shift the direction of the paper and make it a much bigger and broader entity reaching a wider audience nationally. And we saw last year there were huge bios at the local level, gutting a lot of the local metro desk. And now we're seeing reports that they're going to be essentially cutting 300 jobs, and that many of those jobs will impact local reporters. And in particular, the sports desk, John, the Washington Post has been the home to some legendary columnists in sports. You think about Christine Brennan who was there. You think about Sally Jenkins who took a buyout. It is just absolutely devastating to see this coverage be gutted. And in particular, because there's incredible reporting of Washington DC, local sports reporting is much harder to come by. Yeah, in fact, I grew up in DC, and I grew up reading Michael Wilbond and Tony Cornheiser. And I'm convinced that that is why I do what I do today. That was part of my daily life in terms of doing that. Now, if you want to grow, not just a newspaper, newspaper sounds so old-fashioned, but if you want to grow a media brand, why would you give up a sports desk? Like, what's the reason behind that? So you have to think about what is the opportunity, the void, that you could fill uniquely. And I think the Washington Post has decided because of its connections to Jeff Bezos, because of its investments in technology, that it has a really good opportunity to reach a much broader audience. One of the things that they've been experimenting with has been micropayments, for example. So if you want to read one article for like 70 cents, they want to give you the opportunity to do that. And one sense, I applaud that effort because I do think we're heading into a world where great journalism has never been more accessible and inaccessible. You know, so much is moving behind a paywall. So many news companies are launching catered towards professionals, such as my outlet and to an extent yours. And so I understand what they were trying to do. The challenge, John, though, is that there is still so much that is accessible for free. And then if you're trying to get to that big, big, big, wide audience to tough business model, where I thought the Washington Post had a really strong lane to win would be actually to have doubled down on this market, reinvest in sports, reinvest in local restaurant coverage, local education coverage, and double down on the industry in your town, which is policy and politics. Instead, it's sort of retreated from both. You know, they've let outlets like Puck, like Politico, like Punchbowl really take the reins on the political and policy side. And they've sort of seem to be retrenching from their local coverage. I hope it works out for the post because I'm always rooting for great journalism and great brands. But I do think they're going to have a lot of challenges. This is a company that lost $77 million for the trailing 12 months in 2023 and 2024. I think over $100 million in 2024, I assume that's the case for last year as well. And so unless they can really figure this strategy out, the Washington Post is looking like it's not in a good place. Yes, this is so difficult because the people that are populating podcasts and talk shows are journalists and they all love the post and they hate to see anything. You know, change is scary and layoffs are terrible across the board. But I am going to try to articulate, as you just did, I like sort of what will Lewis, the CEO of the post is like what his thinking is on this. And if you're a sports fan and if you're a fan of the local DC teams and you want to find out about the DC teams, the first place that I think of is not the Washington Post anymore. I would go to the athletic or I'd go to various blogs that have popped up that cover these teams really in depth. So they really have lost a big step on terms of that. You reference this also. If I'm thinking of politics, I'm thinking of Axios, of course, I'm thinking of Politico, I'm thinking of Puck, I'm thinking about areas, other publications that have really come in and just are part of the mix in a much deeper way than the Washington Post is, which is not to take anything away from the great journalism that is coming out of the post every single day. Even locally, Axios has a local DC newsletter that my family devours when it comes out all of the time. Axios DC, I think that they're in, I forget how many markets that are out there. And so there are local areas to go to too. So if you're the post, you're sitting on this brand that's based off of a fantastic newspaper of the 70s and Woodward and Bernstein in the 80s of a lot of those sports journalists that you and I have already named checked in the early 90s. And that doesn't work in 2026. And so this is a way of saying, OK, how can we take this great news brand and make it more applicable for 2026, 2030 and beyond that? Yeah, I mean, my argument would be there's a way to modernize it without abandoning the audience that has long stayed loyal to you and has long offered a strong business model. You know, the Washington Post still had up until a few years ago pretty good distribution in print. They have a sizeable online readership within this local jurisdiction, a ton of local businesses advertising the Washington Post. So I'm very curious to see what happens. But of course, I'm rooting for great journalism and great journalists at the post. You also have been covering pretty in depth what's been going on at CBS News. And I know this is a sports business podcast, but is there, can you step back and take a look at these two stories? CBS News, of course, is where Barry Weiss has come in to run it. The rank and file at CBS News are not happy. There's a lot disgruntled as always a word that seems to come up there. As you step back and you look at what's happening at CBS News at the Washington Post, is there a common thread that runs through both of those? Oh, absolutely, which is that the ownership in both cases is trying to panor to Trump. I mean, you have Jeff Bezos who owns the Washington Post, billionaire, who has billions of dollars of government contracts through Amazon, Blue Origin, his space company that are at risk if Donald Trump does not like him. And you see him going to Donald Trump's inauguration. You see his wife, Lauren Sanchez mixing and mingling with Ivanka and Jared, the president's daughter and son-in-law. And then at the same time with CBS, it was purchased by David Ellison, a Hollywood executive who is the son of Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, who is an ally to Trump. And they want to get more deals done. So they've been trying to do more to bring CBS News to the center, hiring Barry Weiss, bringing in more conservative contributors. I had a scoop this morning about who some of those contributors that they're going to add to CBS News will be. And so in both cases, you have ownership of these news entities that has an agenda that is separate from the news entities themselves. You know, Bezos has his companies, David Ellison and Larry Ellison have their companies and they want to do more deals that need regulatory approval. And so that dictates in some ways the direction of the news coverage. And this is becoming a much bigger trend that we're seeing in the Trump era, sort of this succumbing of newsrooms because of their corporate parents. And it's interesting, John, I cover a lot of different types of news organizations and sports and in other verticals. And now we're starting to have a little bit of a conversation around how do we fund news so that it remains independent? You know, we thought for a while that billionaires coming in and owning these outlets would actually save them because we'll recall when Bezos came in and bought the post it was seen as his great thing. When Lorraine Powell jobs, the wife to Lilith Steve Jobs bought the Atlantic, we thought that would be a great thing. Mark Benioff bought Time Magazine and the list goes on. We're now seeing that billionaires can be just as susceptible to political manipulation as publicly traded companies or as private family owned entities. And so there's a lot of conversation about do we make more news outlets nonprofits so they can accept philanthropic funds? Do we look at reader donations or subscriptions? That's sort of the through line here with all of this. Yeah, and I can't emphasize that enough. It's easy to have a lot of iron toward what Bezos is doing to a great newspaper in the post. But when he bought it, there was a sense of like finally somebody's coming in saving the Washington Post and it did have a nice run under Marty Barron and Bezos as well. I want to end this on a more positive note because it does feel like your journalism is going down a sinkhole right now. But there are examples. I think that the New York Times provides an example of an outlet that actually is doing well and is figured out how to double down on sports. They bought the athletic, how to double down on local reporting and on national reporting while maintaining a sense of independence. Yes, and they're able to do that in part because they are owned in a family structure within a publicly traded company. So there is incentive for the family which has class A shares to bring its values and morals to the decision-making of the company. But it's also owned by so many class B shareholders who are financially driven. You know, it's kind of a similar situation in some ways to Fox Corp, which owns Fox News and Fox Sports. On the sports side of things, John, just be remiss not to know what the Times has done is they double down on a bundle, a lifestyle bundle, which is what a newspaper typically was. It wasn't just news. It was classifieds and sports and whether and you know, whether my school lunch calendar was going to be in there. The post is doing the opposite. You know, they're pulling away from sort of the bundle of lifestyle products, which would include local coverage and sports. And they're trying to just lean into sort of the big national, you know, investigative stories. We shall see where it goes. Yeah, yeah. And even with the pose, they did away with the comic section for goodness sakes. I love you all. It's on my kid. We're not reading it nearly as much. What's up, guys? I'm Candace Deward Bassett and you may know me from my time on the Real Housewives of Potomac or as a part of the latest cast of the traders. And I'm Michael Arsano off of the New York Times bestseller. I can't date Jesus. On our podcast, undemesticated, we don't just say the quiet parts out loud. We're putting it all on a kitchen table and inviting you into the chaos. If you're ready for bold takes, real talk and a little fun, come join us. Listen to and follow undemesticated and audacity podcast. We'll work wherever you get your podcasts. Let's stay in DC for a second. We have Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery. It looks like that's going to chug ahead. And we're not saying that it's actually going to come to completion, but the Warner Brothers Discovery Board has gone and said that they're going to accept the Netflix bid. Paramount is still in the offing trying to be an agitator of source, but it looks like it's going to move forward with Netflix. What's your read on that situation? I think that's the case. I think in order for Paramount to prevail, it would really need to convince a majority, 51% of Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders to tender their shares to Paramount. And I think even though that the offer from Paramount is probably more financially lucrative, and we know that because Netflix just changed its offer to an all cash bid, I think that there is enough of a hesitation from the Warner Brothers Discovery Board that is being translated to shareholders around the Ellison bid, the Paramount bid, whether that's sort of the debt financing or just the structure of the partnership. The thing that's worth noting is, you know, if Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix do end up officially moving forward with this, which I don't think Paramount's going to give up without a fight, I think there will be a long legal road ahead. They then face a big regulatory hurdle here and in Europe. The folks in Washington, DC, the Justice Department, they're pretty independent. So when people say Trump is meddling in this deal, he's trying to, but ultimately I think the DOJ will make the call that they think is best for consumers and competitors. I do think they will sue to block this deal, but that does not mean that it doesn't necessarily prevail, independent judge in a courtroom will ultimately decide whether or not to bless the deal. And then in Europe, I do think Netflix will face a very, very challenging approval process, but we've seen in Europe that even when these processes take a long time, I think about Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard, even Amazon acquiring MGM, they do eventually get approved sometimes with concessions. So what I think is going to happen is it's going to be a very dramatic and chaotic legal and regulatory battle filled year in 2026. I think in 2027, it's likely that these two companies, Netflix and whatever this discovery do come together. I'm going to ask you an unanswerable question right now because what you described is a long regulatory process, they're going to be peaks, they're going to be valleys, they're going to be concessions given, they're going to be other things granted to the company. Let's say we get to the end of this process, Netflix owns Warner Brothers Discovery, what does that mean for the entities within Warner Brothers Discovery specifically the cable channels? So one of those discovery has already committed to spinning out the cable channels separately into a publicly traded entity called Discovery Global and that's going to happen in the summer of 2026, barring any dramatic changes to this deal structure. Those cable companies spun out publicly will then be forced to and they'll take on, by the way, a lot of the debt from the existing overall company. They're going to be forced to survive on their own. The thing about cable though, John, and you know this and your audience knows this better than anyone, it's, death is greatly exaggerated in the sense that a lot of the cable fees between networks and telecom providers, those deals have been struck in multi-year terms. And so it's not like these cable companies are dying tomorrow. They still mint tons of cash. Warner Brothers Discovery just put out new numbers on CNN's profitability. It's still making 600 million dollars a year. So some of those networks I think will survive. It'll just be sort of a slower death than people realize. And for your sports fans on this pod, we have TNT and TBS, which still have some rights. Bleacher Report, which is the digital sports entity that's owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, you know, still has deals for distribution of certain content like with the NFL and the NBA. And so it's not like the sports energy from Warner Brothers Discovery completely dies. It just will live in this new publicly traded company that's mostly cable networks. You know, I do want to give an ode to the cable networks because like their death has been written about for, you know, about five years now. And there certainly is a trend. Look, it's going down, cord cutting is it's real. It's happening. But you know, Paramount just did a bunch of deals where, you know, MTV Latino is still getting carriage on the distributors. You know, channels that you haven't watched or thought about in years, you know, that are part of that Paramount family are, you know, they still exist. And they're still out there. VH1 Classic is still a channel that you can go to a really any provider in the country and be able to be able to watch. So the idea that the distributors are turning their back on on these cable channels is a total misnomer, like you said. The, you know, why it's because of sports fans. There is a ceiling, John. There is a ceiling. It's 55 million households in the US of people who refuse to give up cable because there's still sports distributed on it. So thank you to the sports fans. And that matters because like the sports fans need to have access to CBS and they need to have access to, you know, a little less so, but CBS sports network. And well, if you want those two channels that you definitely have to take VH1 Classic or, you know, whatever permutation of MTV is out there. In fact, you know, whenever we have Michael Nathanson from Affit, Nathanson on your way, I was talking about, you know, the floor, like how far is it going to go? And like originally, both of us were like, how the, you know, there'll be 60 million cable homes. And then then I think Michael is down around 40 now. It keeps dropping a little bit. But at some point, we are going to see this great re-bundling happen. And people are going to realize like, boy, it was actually cost effective to do one subscription and be able to see all the sports that I wanted to see out there. Yeah, totally. I also want to move on. We're sticking just because we live in DC doesn't mean that we always talk about regulatory issues. But one more item that you've been reporting on a lot about is TikTok, which now has new owners. And all of a sudden, within the first week of new ownership that's tied to the Trump family, you know, their accusations that they're not showing you know, a lot of videos that are, I guess, anti-ice out of Minneapolis. They blamed it on a power outage or some sort of the technical failures. What's going on there? Sure. I definitely believe that. And I'll tell you why. When you look at the way this deal was structured, it is the hottest deal if you're an investor to get your hands on because it was a fire sale. The deal valued TikTok US $14 billion. John, that is nothing. TikTok US makes $14 billion a year. That is a one time multiple on its revenue. That's nothing. Why does this deal value TikTok at such a low price? The answer is because when the Supreme color held a law by Congress to ban TikTok, it essentially put TikTok and its investors and its owners, a Chinese company by dance in a very perilous legal position where they were very likely to face very steep lawsuits that would have been much more financially burdened some of them $14 billion. So it's structured a deal to be able to just get it fire sold quickly. And if you are an investor on that deal, your incentive is oh my god, I paid nothing to get a stake in this thing that mince money. I wanted to keep minting money. So when I hear reports of TikTok, throttling content, or whatever, my initial reaction is none of these investors who are not, most of them are really not very political from being honest with you. It's Michael Dell, the founder of Dell. It is silver like a big private equity firm that now owns endeavor and endeavor formerly the parent to UFC and WWE. It is Oracle. It's not just like the Murdoch's are not in on this deal. It's not a super political people. You know, you could argue Larry Ellis and an Oracle's ally to Trump. But otherwise, these investors have very little to gain from throttling content. So when they come out and they say like this was a data center outage issue, I actually tend to believe them because the worst thing that they could do is try to throttle content when they have investors. These are money firms, right? That are signing on to this because of the financial terms. So I think that you're not going to see a lot of political meddling. What I do think could happen, once you get more greedy private equity in there, John, is you turn up the dials on engagement bait, right? That's what you see from the publicly traded social media firms, like meta, that want to make more money off of engagement bait. That's what I think could actually happen. But I don't think they're throttling political content. I actually do believe that this was like a data center issue. Yeah, like you said, these are proper business people that are out there. Why would they buy something to run it into the ground, which is what that would be? What you did mention engagement bait? What are some other differences? Is it going to be one year from now as we're talking about TikTok? Is it going to be the same TikTok? Yeah, I think it's pretty much going to be the same TikTok, but they have to migrate a lot of the infrastructure over. And so I think what you're seeing is the destruction to the service as a result of that. You don't just move things on to new servers, you know, billions and billions of trillions of gigawatts, gigawatts, and expect no disruptions. I do think that it's giving new entities more control over the licensing of the algorithm, what goes into it. And so there could be some small adjustments, like for example, the Guardian had a report many years ago that said under the bite dance sort of Chinese ownership, TikTok's algorithm, even in the US, was censoring things like Tiananmen Square. I do think those types of efforts will definitely come to an end. I also think from a data security and privacy perspective, you're going to have new terms that get rolled out. In fact, I think a lot of those new terms were already rolled out to users. And those terms will include things like location services, sharing, all sorts of stuff. So I don't think the end user is going to notice it necessarily upfront and dramatically, but there will be changes on the back end. You know, Sarah, it was probably about 15 years ago. I wrote a ton of stories about, like, here come the fangs. And the fangs was like Facebook and Twitter and all these social media companies that were exploring sports rights and wanting to get more into sports rights. Even with TikTok, you're seeing them do really kind of like a unique type of deals with, say, you know, following messy, you know, the messy cam for Lionel messy, the MLA's team in Miami. But the social media companies, they really haven't done a ton with sports or with sports rights. And sports, as the streamers are finding out, is big on engagement. It's big on advertising. There's a lot of tentacles that come from this. Why aren't, why isn't a company like TikTok more involved with sports or sports rights? Two reasons. One, they're not consumed on living room horizontal televisions, right? They're vertical video on mobile phones. And people do not like to watch sports in full in games on their phones. They like watching highlights. They like watching reels. They like watching commentary and little bits on their phones. But when it comes to watching an actual game, the consumption habits prove that people like to sit and watch it on a big screen TV at a bar restaurant or in their living room. So that's number one. And the number two, why does honest questions on why does the NFL have CBS and NBC and now Netflix and all these guys? Why does they have them distribute their games when they have red zone and they have the NFL network? The honest answer is because the NFL is not an advertising sales engine, the way that TV networks are. And it is a more lucrative prospect for everyone involved to license the rights out to a company with expertise, not just in production, but in the selling of advertising around it and then getting a cut essentially through a licensing fee. It's a more lucrative model for everybody. So when it comes to these social media companies, they're very good at selling high performance advertising on mobile, meaning I want you to buy something, click here and buy it. Where the social media companies are not as smart and don't have as much expertise is how do I sell like big brand campaigns against TV long form content? They're just not built for it. They don't have direct sales teams that do that. The networks do. And so that's why this has never become a world where social media companies own sports rights. What I do think is going to happen is social media companies are going to get smarter. How can they own the conversation around sports on the phone? And that's where you have the TikTok messy cam come in. That's where you have Tom Brady lending his, you know, name and likeness to the meta AI chatbot. You're going to expect to see more and more of that because sports is becoming more cultural and relevant, but you're not going to see meta buying sports rights. Yeah, I tell the story all the time and it's now like five years old, but I was watching a Wizards game on a big TV and my son was on the computer and he was watching the game too, but he was watching it for the social media because five minutes after like a big dunk, he would come over and show me the highlights. So he we were watching the same game, but we were watching him in totally different ways. And he was doing it in a social media format, which is a really like small snackable format. And I'm, you know, the the Gen X just sitting there watching like the big full presentation for for two hours on a couch and a big screen TV. Yeah, I think it's going to continue to be a combination of both. Like there's a reason why, you know, not just the Super Bowl, but like all of the playoff ratings, all of the ASC and NSC championship ratings. Like there's a reason why they're hitting records too is like when it comes to watching something live, you do want to see it in full and really digest that game as well as watch the clips and the highlight rails and all of those things. So I think it's going to continue to be a mix. Sarah, let me take one quick quick break and I want when we come back, we are about to enter February, which NBC has called the legendary February. And I want to give a quick preview about what to expect there. Sarah, we are a week and a half away from the Super Bowl, which is going to be carried by NBC. The winner Olympic opening ceremony also coming up, the NBA All-Star game getting thrown in there, which is going to be an LA. They're calling it a the legendary February. We had Mark Marshall on this pod just a couple of weeks ago, just kind of talking about, you know, the ad sales going through that. They're sold out of everything months ahead of time, which which, you know, giving the pricing of everything is a pretty amazing. What are some of the storylines through the Super Bowl, the Olympics, you know, even like going into the second half of the NBA season that you're going to be focused on? We saw in 2025, John. It was the year that big events really came roaring back. You know, massive record breaking writings for the Macy Thanksgiving Day Parade for the Super Bowl. The MLB saw record readings after declines for so long. And so what 2026 is going to bring is a slew of events starting in February, where I think you're going to have just record ratings and engagements. So for the Super Bowl, you know, we could talk for hours, John, about changes to the measurement at Nielsen that's going to make the viewership record numbers. Please don't share people who are sticking off now. We're talking Nielsen measurement. Oh my gosh, our ratings just went through the toilet. But I do bring it up because you're going to see record ratings at the Super Bowl just because of some of those changes. Then you're going into the Winter Olympics in Milan, Cortina. And I do think that there's going to be record engagement because NBC has been focusing so much on some of those storylines that are going to be very powerful. Lindsay Vaughn making a comeback. And then of course, the NBA El Star Weekend is going to be huge. And for NBC, this is like their moment to shine. This is very high stakes two weeks. You have Mike Tureko, who is going to be the prime time Olympic host for the network, who's also the networks play by play host for the NBA, who will take part in the All Star coverage, the following week after the Olympic opens. And he will also be doing the Super Bowl coverage, the weekend of the seventh and eighth. So Mike Tureko will be the star of the show. And NBC gets to prove itself as one of the most formidable brands in sports broadcasting. You and I were just talking about the fact that social media companies tried to experiment with sports rights, but never really got them there. The reason is companies like NBC exist. They have incredible infrastructure to be able to handle three of the biggest sporting events in the world simultaneously. Very few companies could ever pull that off. You know, let's start with the Super Bowl real quick because the thing about the ratings that I find interesting, I agree. It depends on the game. But, you know, you have a, New England Patriots, a national brand, you know, playing in the game. It's a Super Bowl. They're going to get big ratings. But what if they're, what if it drops? Like what, what if they get, I always think about this. What like, at what point is it a disaster? Let's say they get 90 million viewers. And typically you get like up around 140 or 130 million viewers. There's nothing else on TV that's getting 90 million viewers. Like so, like the, the, it's a big story. And I'm going to be following it. And you're going to be following it. And we're going to be writing about it. But if, if there's a 20% drop, it's still going to be a massive audience that's coming in. And it's something that I've been writing about a lot. Broadcast TV, it's still the one place more so than any of these other platforms that's able to get this massive audience. And when we talk about court cutting and, and everything, everything else, eventually, you know, Netflix could get there, or Amazon could get there. But right now, currently in 2026, it's really only in on broadcast TV. Yeah. And that's the reason why these broadcasters, John, still invest in things like NHL rights, they still invest. I mean, actually most of that's now cable, but they still are investing in things like ward shows, you know, the Oscars and the Grammys. Those ward shows, they've all fallen off, you know, 20% or more from their peak audiences, especially pre-COVID. But the fact that they still draw millions of viewers at once makes them still worth it to the networks to invest in. Because it's an opportunity for them to say to advertisers, look, in this very, very fragmented world, we have an asset that we know is going to draw millions of people at once. And not only does that matter from a ratings perspective of selling advertising against it, but it also creates culturally relevant moments that they can then sort of upsell across digital channels, across social highlights and clips. So there's a reason why you still invest even if the ratings are going down. Now, I don't think that's going to happen with the Super Bowl, but let's say ratings do decline from last year because this game is like boring or whatever. It's not going to change the fact that advertisers are still going to want in. For example, Super Bowl advertising this year, a 30-second spot is $8 million. Even if the ratings are lower than that, I still think next year the networks will be, the network that's hosting it will be able to command something along that premium. So I'm not saying it doesn't matter if the ratings go down, but John, it doesn't really matter if the ratings go down. Then I will say it. I don't think it matters. It does not, unless the ratings crater to where it's no longer the most watched thing on television, then I just don't think it matters. And you're right about that. Bad Bunny is going to crush it, John. Bad Bunny is by far one of the most popular, if not the most popular artist in the world. He's the number one most streamed artist on Spotify. People, I think, underestimate the extent to which the halftime show brings the overall ratings up for the entire program. So that's another reason I'm very bullish on these being high ratings. That is so true because every single Super Bowl, you see that spike at halftime, where non-football fans want to come in and watch a performer. And it's something the NFL learned back in the 1990s. And they're now trying to do that with their Christmas day games or with their Thanksgiving day games and trying to make it, you know, the halftime shows a little bit more consumer friendly, I guess, as a way to look at it. Yes, totally. One storyline that I'm looking at is with the winner Olympics and Peacock, because one of the reasons, the Olympics is a great purchase for any media company. But one of the reasons that NBC really wanted the winner Olympics or all of the Olympics is to help grow its streaming service, Peacock. And they take every, you can watch every single sport on Peacock. And the hope is that once that they will gain a bunch of subscribers, the subscribers will then go through Peacock and pick and choose other, you know, watch some entertainment programming and then and then get stuck and make it sticky. Not a lot of churn there. In the summer Olympics, they did they did not gain as many subscribers as I thought they would. It's almost as though the people were already in there. I'm really looking to see what the bump is from from these winner Olympics that are coming up. Yeah, it's the same problem that soccer executives are discussing right now with the World Cup. Like does this bring people in for good or do people tune back out and come back in in four years? And I think what we're seeing is that the Olympics are heavily engaged during the Olympics. And after the Olympics, people do churn out. It's still though does give people familiarity with the Peacock product and the brand. And some of its technological capabilities that one could look at and say, maybe this is a good destination for me to watch now NBA games, for example. So they just added for the Winter Olympics this year on Peacock things like multi view and everything will be available on Peacock in 4K. If this is a really great user experience for the Olympics, the hope for NBC is that they're going to be able to then dry people towards all star content right after on the weekend of February 13th, which then gets people to stick around for the NBA. So I don't think that they think that the Olympics is what gets people to stick. It's giving getting them in the door of the Olympics, giving them a good experience, giving a little taste of NBA, and then hoping they stay because of that. Yeah, and if you talk to like Rick Cordella who's ahead of NBC Sports, it's as much as as it's getting the Olympic viewer to watch the NBA, it's about getting them to watch Love Island or it's about getting them to watch SNL or it's about getting them to watch a more, something that has nothing to do with sports, you know, an entertainment or a news type program, because that's what makes them not churn out. That's what makes a subscriber stick around for a month after month after month. Yeah, I think it's a combination of that as well as their new investments in sports. I mean, I do think that one of the reasons that NBC invested heavily in the NBA was because of the Peacock opportunity. So, and you know, there's going to be a little bit of MLB as well. So I think that there's just an opportunity all around sports, entertainment, news, but I'm excited. Legendary February means that we are going to be staying very busy, John. Staying busy watching Peacock and NBC as well. We only have like a couple minutes left, Sarah. I just wanted to get your take on, you know, that we have a new NBA deal, speaking of legendary February, that the all-star game, NBA all-star game in LA is a part of that. The baseball is coming up on NBC as well. I just find NBC's strategy with Peacock, where they they're using Peacock and the broadcast network as really complimentary to each other to be really unique in this business. To an extent, I do think that Disney and ESPN have been exploding with this for a while. And, you know, a good example of it being that ABC is taking on more and more Monday night NFL games, right? Because they want to go into the leagues and say, we don't just have ESPN cable distribution, we don't just have ESPN plus streaming distribution, but hey, we also have a big national broadcaster that has huge reach that you should consider when you're trying to figure out whether or not to give us rights packages. So, I think Disney ABC sort of came up with the blueprint for this. You're seeing now NBC really heavily lean into it to build out its streaming. And then I think the last one of watch, of course, is Paramount and CBS. You know, trying to, you know, get these big sports deals done, I think, about to an extent UFC. How can we build Paramount Plus, but also do it in a way that celebrates the reach of CBS that lands as a deal? So, everyone's trying to work at this, but I think NBC's been the most aggressive in the past year. Sarah, it's always great to have you on. Thank you so much for coming back and hopefully we'll see you very soon. Yes, so good to see you, John. Thank you. All right. So, if you take one thing out of my conversation with Sarah, it's not that it's chaos in the media business. It's just that there are so many unknowns with the media business right now. And this is a year, 2026, when we're going to have a lot of answers come out. So, I really want to thank Sarah Fisher for joining the pod this week. It's always great to talk to Sarah. More importantly, though, I want to thank you for listening to the varsity and Odyssey podcast and partnership with Puck. I also want to thank the executive editors from Puck, that's Gabi Grossman, Ben Landy, John Kelly, and the great team from Odyssey, Bob Tappett, or Patrick Antonetti. And I can't forget our partners at Nesson, Greg Poeth, and Mark Marlaka. If you like this podcast, make sure to sign up for my newsletter. It's also called the varsity. Head over to Puck, that news, and use a code word the varsity. All one word for a 20% discount. And I will see you on Sunday.