Next TMT Talks
We discuss Peacock’s evolution to become America’s most tech-savvy premium streamer, and we also try to decide if the reanimated HFPA is actually less corrupt than Penske Media.

With new local sports deals coming just three months after it also purchased OTT tech shop ViewLift, the London-based streamer seems to be auditioning to become the NBA’s long-term local TV partner

London-based sports streamer DAZN has long wanted to be more than a destination for futbol and combat sports in the U.S. And the collapse of the regional sports networks could be providing that opportunity.

On Wednesday, DAZN announced deals to become the exclusive direct-to-consumer streaming destination for the YES Network and MSG Networks.

DAZN, which is pay-by-the-month-priced at $34.99 in the U.S., will replace the two-year-old Gotham Sports App joint venture between YES and MSG, becoming the exclusive local-sports streaming home to the NBA champion New York Knicks and Brooklyn Nets, Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees, and the NHL’s New York Islanders, New York Rangers, New Jersey Devils and Buffalo Sabres.

Current Gotham Sports App users will continue to receive access to their teams as they migrate to DAZN for the 2026-27 NBA and NHL seasons, which start in October. Those who watch the RSNs through linear pay TV will be able to access YES and MSG through DAZN at no additional cost.

Launched in August 2024, the Gotham Sports App quickly built a notoriously awful reputation among Big Apple sports fans, but the JV partners were powerless to improve it.

MSG, for instance, flirted with Chapter 11 bankruptcy a year ago, before convincing the Knicks and Rangers to take respective haircuts on local TV rights fees of 28% and 18%.

In DAZN, they have an outfit that just purchased in April live-event streaming shop ViewLift from billionaire Ted Leonsis. ViewLift handles the DTC technology backend for RSNs Altitude Sports, Leonsis’ Monumental Sports Network and NESN.

DAZN’s U.S. ambitions don’t end there. According to the Sports Business Journal, DAZN is close to securing full exclusive broadcast TV rights for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, Cleveland Cavaliers, Indiana Pacers, Memphis Grizzlies and San Antonio Spurs, as well as DTC-only rights for the Orlando Magic and “possibly” the Charlotte Hornets.

All of these teams lost their RSN homes when long-troubled Main Street Sports finally liquidated in April. These franchises are merely looking for one-year distribution deals, tiding them over until the NBA follows through on plans to launch with an as-yet unnamed technology partner a league-wide local streaming hub by the 2027-28 season.

Serving as the local DTC streaming home to as many as nine NBA teams is broadly seen in sports-media circles as DAZN’s audition to be the NBA’s tech partner for its planned local streaming hub. DAZN is already reported to be a leading candidate for the role.

Backed by billionaire Sir Len Blavatnik and the Saudi Public Investment Fund, DAZN reported losses of $936 million in 2024 on revenue of around $3.2 billion. With around 20 million paid memberships globally, as well as programmatic advertising for live events across 200 countries, revenue and red ink for 2025 are projected to be better, though the privately held company hasn’t reported those figures yet.

But despite the losses back home, this shot at NBA glory, as it might be, is probably affordable for DAZN’s deep-pocketed backers.

DAZN paid a reported $100 million in cash and company equity to acquire ViewLift. It’s unclear how much money is changing hands between DAZN and the erstwhile Gotham Sports backers, but how much could that be? — YES and MSG are probably just happy to lift the streaming infrastructure burden.

As for the NBA’s Main Street Sports refugees, they’re reportedly asking for annual rights fees ranging from $8 million to $20 million, depending on their market size. In some cases, DAZN could recoup barter advertising revenue through local broadcast licensing of a limited amount of games.

— Daniel Frankel

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YouTube has taken a few runs at making YouTube Premium more than an afterthought in its bid to dominate seemingly every corner of video delivery. Now, with an expanded Comcast deal that includes Peacock Premium in its $15.99-a-month offering, YouTube Premium might actually get there.

Under the deal, YouTube Premium will offer its subscribers Peacock feeds of live sports from the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball (among much else in NBCU’s hefty sports portfolio), plus plenty of Hollywood stalwarts such as Law & Order and Saturday Night Live.

The deal goes both ways in terms of content sharing. Some YouTube offerings will be available on Comcast’s Xfinity and Xumo platforms, and NBC Sports will stream some live sports on its own YouTube channel, while producing select live events on YouTube.

This deal may sound vaguely familiar, because Peacock previously agreed to be one of the channels offered for sale in YouTube’s resale-aggregator service, Primetime Channels. Now, though, the bird isinside the beast, not merely an add-on available for an extra price.

“This makes it easier than ever for our members to find and watch all the premium content they love, all in one place,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said of the deal.

It’s useful to think of 2026 as the year everyone in streaming TV realized that the toll collector at the distribution front door is in a pretty good position. Thus, Fox buys Roku, Walmart buys Vizio and Vibe.co, etc. This deal puts Peacock on a platform it doesn’t control, but that claims some portion of 125 million subscribers it shares with YouTube Music, whose forebear Music Key was YouTube’s first paid content offering back in 2014.

And certainly, folding Peacock Premium into the far broader but far less premium YouTube service makes sense for both sides. Dodging ads on YouTube is a perfectly good reason to subscribe to Premium.

But actually offering name-brand Hollywood content, not just the increasingly sophisticated stuff coming from YouTube’s millions of creators, communicates “premium” to the Olds in a way that even the latest MrBeast or Dhar Mann project really doesn’t.

Peacock, meanwhile, has struggled to break even, taking six very long years, 24 quarters, to get above zero. And that, as Next TMT noted last weekend, happened in an extraordinary quarter that included Telemundo/Peacock’s Spanish-language World Cup, the NBA playoffs, the unhinged latest season of Love Island, and whatever holdover subscriber boost came from “Legendary February,” with Peacock carrying the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Game and Winter Olympics.

After all that, Peacock still only has a modest 48 million subscribers.

So how to sustain altitude for a very low-flying bird? As the iTV Doctor Rick Howe put it in a LinkedIn post, “Nobody understands the power of a gatekeeper like YouTube better than The Original Gatekeeper, Comcast.”

The deal also spawns some other, bigger questions: Will it be Alphabet/Google/YouTube who buys a spun off NBCUniversal, for instance?

All that content would sure provide some nifty training material for Google’s fleet of AI large language models, plus some very nice revenue from what’s left of cable and broadcast. Heck, it could probably be bought for far less than one of these mammoth data-center deals all the hyperscalers have signed, though none of them has the spare cash flow they had just a couple of years ago.

Short of that, will Mohan pursue his everything-for-everybody vision by cutting similar deals with other streaming services? This feels similar yet somehow more ominous than Charter’s industry-changing move to offer all the streaming services for free alongside their legacy broadcast and cable outlets.

Also, adding this kind of content to YouTube Premium suggests a price hike, or other tweaks to price and model may be coming soon enough.

Given the relentless rise in everyone’s subscription fees, especially for ad-free offerings, another price hike here would hardly surprise anyone. At least it might come with a markedly more attractive offering, especially for older audiences that actually value what NBCU puts on the screen.

— David Bloom

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The Five Spot
Some other things you oughta know…

As putsches go, Penske Media’s 2023 takeover of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and its very golden goose (the, uh, Golden Globes) was largely bloodless and widely applauded, given the many, many conflicts of interest and other issues the group had long been accused of.

Nonetheless, the takeover created a problematically formidable vertical integration (if not a legally defined “monopoly”) in the still lucrative business of trafficking in Hollywood vanity.

Though multiple buyers were involved, it’s Jay Penske’s media empire that now runs the show, owns show producer Dick Clark Productions, and extracts TV and film studio ad and marketing revenues for its many entertainment publications as they write nearly year-round about said awards campaigns.

The new antitrust lawsuit accuses Penske Media Corp. and others of fraud to acquire the show, and have since created a legal monopoly that should be unwound at least partly. The suit suggests, intriguingly, that the industry boycott (set off by an L.A. Times investigation) that temporarily shuttered the Globes was secretly abetted by Penske publications to help drive down the eventual acquisition price.

The suit also alleges that Penske didn’t live up to promises made to Hollywood Foreign Press Association members to entice them to agree to the sale and restructuring. Event access, lifetime voting rights and other promised perks became subject to intolerable work conditions, the plaintiffs.

Penske spokeshumans denied the allegations, and said the suit was relitigating old news, continuing “the absurdity and irrationality that the industry has come to expect from the defunct organization formerly known as the HFPA.”

—D.B.

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As the broader media and entertainment industry tries to make sense of Paramount’s surprising legal retreat, the off-the-record tea-leaf reading is off the charts on what’s next with the stalled $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Enlightenment — or at least the illusion of it — can be obtained by piecing together some of the various reports.

According to Semafor, unnamed Paramount executives “have conceded that they may have gone a little too far trying to ingratiate themselves with the president, feting him with a Washington dinner, all the while claiming their deal, unlike Netflix’s, was favored by the Trump administration.

Somehow, these same executives are also irked that the successful legal opposition to the merger by 12 blue-state attorneys general has become so … politicized.

And reading Sharon Waxman’s diffuse take in Wednesday’s New York Times — headlined, “The Paramount deal is in trouble. It’s not the movies” — Paramount’s leaders are a bit bombastic in their assertions, but they’re aren’t wrong.

Publicly, it’s an antitrust matter, with opponents concerned about excessive market control of aging multiplexes and pay TV programming grids. But really, it’s about CNN. As Waxman pointed out, while Trump hurled insults at CNN commentators throughout last week’s White House Correspondents Dinner, it was CBS News ogre Bari Weiss whom he singled out for praise.

CNN, Waxman also noted, would have plenty of buyer interest, if Paramount chose to go that route, including a consortium led by Barry Diller. That group includes Jeff Zucker, who, as NBC chief, famously “created” Trump with The Apprentice, then later tried to destroy him as CNN’s top executive.

It’s fun for us outsiders to speculate on what happens next with this mega-merger careening off the tracks. It’s not as enjoyable for longtime former CBS news insiders, now on the outside, too, watching Weiss hire more conservative opinion columnists with zero TV news experience, just like herself.

On Tuesday, CBS announced the addition of The New York Times’ Ross Douthat to the eviscerated roster of 60 Minutes correspondents. Also brought in was another highly acclaimed celebrity writer — following the hiring of noted tech scribe Nick Bilton as 60 Minutes executive producer in late May, CBS also added this week Sebastian Junger, author of 1997’s non-fiction nautical disaster best-sellerThe Perfect Storm and co-directer of 2010’s Oscar-winning Afghan War documentary Restrepo.

Will these hires help 60 Minutes reach the younger “digital-first” audiences Weiss and Bilton insists it needs to? Well, the No. 1 news show on television just replaced 69-year-old Scott Pelley with 64-year-old Junger … so jury’s out on whether it actually skews … younger next season.

Weiss, one former CBS Newser told Too Much TV author Rick Ellis, “seems to believe in her core that there is a hidden conservative audience that she can tap into. And because her brain has been pickled by online conservative media, she believes things that only exist in that news universe.”

— D.F.

Cocaine, murder, sex, mean girls, scary dudes, rich and beautiful teens at an elite high school, all extracted from a best-selling novel by a notorious novelist who coyly suggests parts of the story come from his own Los Angeles upbringing four decades ago.

The pitch for Ryan Murphy’s The Shards, which debuts next week on F/X, had to be among the easiest in his career of over-the-top shows such as American Horror Story, Nip/Tuck and various true-crime retellings with a florid Grand Guignol impulse.

This one has had some classic peregrinations, starting at HBO with Italian Oscar nominee (and frequent provocateur) Luca Guadanigno attached. Eventually, it ended up with Murphy, and then at his old/new home at F/X.

Given the source material is Bret Easton Ellis’s bestseller of the same name, and given Ellis’ background as the best-selling twenty-something author of American Psycho three decades ago, expect a subtle tale told with a light touch and no exploitation whatsoever. Psych! This will be one for L.A. long-timers to dissect for any references to people, places and events they know by other names.

But it may provide for a little culture-mill grist to liven the dog days of late summer, when even the baseball players are tired of everything.

— D. B.

Netflix’s sophomore slump continued last week, with Ransom Canyon, a romantic drama starring Minka Kelly and Josh Duhamel generating just 4.1 million views in Season 2’s first four days on the platform last week, down 43% from its first-four-day stretch for Season 1 back in April 2025.

Granted, Season 2 had eight episodes versus 10 for Season 1, but binge dynamics skew the comparison only so much.

As we stated last week, as Netflix shifts from binge-able on-demand programming to ad-supported live-event content, there’s reasons for investors to just … chill.

For one, there’s the latest “Media Nations 2026 ” report from UK regulator Ofcom, which shows that Netflix now usurps the BBC as the first thing British TV watchers log onto when they look for something to watch on their smart TV.

Frequent CNBC contributor Michael Khouw noted this week that Netflix stock “has gotten cheaper while the underlying business has gotten better,” citing a $10 billion projected run rate just for advertising sales in 2030

— D.F.

In a man-bites-dog turnaround, OpenAI’s Sam Altman suggested this week that maybe it’s time to pump the brakes on previous pell-mell development of AI frontier large-language models.

Altman, known for his floor-it urgency to capture the future, didn’t endorse a pause so much as a more modulated pace “in the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around these new capability levels.”

Basically, we’ve zoomed past Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock fears into a new reality where we just can’t keep up.

Look at the latest frontier models from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Both are so powerful that the formerly go-go Trump Administration delayed their release because of threats they pose to encryption and software security.

Earlier this month, OpenAI’s Fable 5.6 teamed with an unreleased new version to not only break security containment but hack into code hub Hugging Face to find answers to a set of tests. The panic in both tech and national-security circles was both palpable and wholly justified.

The problem now: not everyone shares Altman’s pacing concern. Most particularly, the fast-moving Chinese companies are taking OpenAI and its competitors’s work, distilling them, and offering nearly equal performance for far less cost.

This feels a bit like beloved Walt Kelly character Pogo noting decades ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

—D.B.