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We all know what Bari Weiss was paid $150 million to do. The end of The Best Thing on TV has been fate accompli since Donald Trump let David Ellison finally take over Paramount last summer. But here’s one thing we still don’t know: A news show very different from the one we’ve called 60 Minutes for the past 57 years will soon emerge, using the same name. What will that even look like?

If David Ellison hired Bari Weiss mostly to transform a very independent CBS News to better fit the curious ideas about “journalism” held by a very specific audience in the White House, the process is going well.

Others will understandably have wildly different opinions. Whether that means that one of Ellison’s most valuable properties, the 57-year-old journalism institution 60 Minutes, will ever again be as culturally (or financially) important is a much more fraught question.

Over the past year under Weiss’ dubious leadership, what had been a largely self-contained and consistent ratings champ has sent out the door two executive producers and, with the Tuesday firing of a noisily insubordinate Scott Pelley, more than half the show’s correspondents. Puck’s Dylan Byers speculated on MS NOW that the “entire staff” will depart the show “in a matter of weeks, if not days.”

Maybe so, though some quietly sympathetic workers in the ranks may stick around, looking for a promotion/continued employment in a terrible market/just want to do their job.

New executive producer Nick Bilton, a well-regarded former text-based tech columnist with no pertinent broadcast experience, shared his vision to transform a show that runs for an hour a week for around 30 weeks a year, to something more frequently available, in more places, for a very different media landscape than the one where the show started.

That kind of shift is overdue in some respects, even if it sounds exactly like Mark Thompson when he took over CNN three years ago (and what Thompson did while transforming the New York Times while Bilton was a tech columnist there).

But Bilton hasn’t yet articulated what such an approach means for the 60 Minutes brand or its aging audience of loyal fans not known for their heavy TikTok use. Regardless, it’s clear whatever is called 60 Minutes will be a radically different show whenever it returns to the air next fall (or not). It likely will also be far less successful and lucrative.

Meanwhile, whither all those highly respected, newly unemployed 60 Minutes correspondents? Anderson Cooper flew the, uh, coop almost four months ago, heading back to his day gig at CNN; now Ellison is trying to ram through his $111 billion purchase of CNN’s parent company, apparently with more Trump-ian instructions to defang yet another source of reasonably arms-length journalism.

One option, Netflix, has shown little appetite for regular programming of most types, with the exception of WWE Raw and the recent three-hours-every-morning deal with longtime podcaster Charlemagne Tha God. So, maybe the 60 Minutes crew won’t decamp to Netflix’s Hollywood studios (or their new New Jersey complex). It’s not difficult, however, to imagine some of them signing documentary projects for Netflix, which remains a major outlet for such work.

But Rachel Maddow had a suggestion for Pelley, at least: come to Versant’s MS NOW cable-news channel. It’s actually kinda brilliant. Pelley would get a high-profile position at a still-independent (if sharply partisan) news organization, which in turn would finally have a star of at least Maddow’s wattage. That Pelley feels like a near-carbon copy of equally square-jawed white guy Lawrence O’Donnell, who holds down a nightly hour after Maddow and Jen Psaki, may be a feature, not a bug.

— By David Bloom

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YouTube is having yet another moment.

The startling box-office success of Backrooms, Iron Lung and Obsession, each directed by popular YouTube creators, has, overnight, reoriented Hollywood’s creative nexus.

Meanwhile, YouTube chief Neal Mohan could be seen on the front door of the Penske showbiz trades Wednesday, glammed up along with some of his platform’s biggest stars under the conspicuous section header “awards,” as YouTube productions including TBPN make the rounds supporting not-so-outlandish-sounding bids for Emmy nominations next month.

Meanwhile, the business of world video-entertainment-market conquest, in the words of a yesteryear YouTube star, remains “every day, bro.”

It’s well established that YouTube connected TV watching in the U.S. has for some time beat all competition, including Netflix, in viewership share. But as this graphic from Bath, UK-based streaming analytics company Digital i reveals, the U.S. marks one of YouTube’s more mature regions in terms of overall viewership growth, while markets including France and Spain remain in a more explosive expansion phase of usage expansion.

In its summary of 2025 global YouTube consumption, Digital i also illustrates the steady but not quite explosive migration of YouTube usage from mobile and web-based apps to CTV.

Here’s another interesting tidbit from the report: For the rather conspicuous exception of older men, males mostly watched less YouTube in 2025 versus 2024, while the opposite is true for female viewers, particularly those 18-24.

— Daniel Frankel

And as the FCC tries to steer even more of Charlie Ergen’s spectrum to Elon Musk, the agency’s first spectrum auction in four years gets off to a slow start

As we highlighted in our inaugural issue of Next TMT Networks Tuesday, Elon Musk and Starlink have the regulatory wind, blighted as it may be, at their backs as their umbrella company, SpaceX, approaches an IPO that could be valued as high as $2 trillion.

And for the incumbent telecom industry, being on the wrong side of FCC cronyism and ideological hackery is starting to exact a toll, as it did Wednesday for AT&T. Specifically citing emerging low-earth orbit satellite competition from Starlink, Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan downgraded AT&T from “buy” to “perform.”

“We think longer-term broadband subscriber growth and eventually mobile is at risk from rising threat of satellite constellations,” the analyst told clients. Notably, Horan didn’t downgrade AT&T’s traditional wireless competitors, Verizon and T-Mobile, stating that they’re less exposed to “direct-to-device” competition from not just Musk’s Starlink, but also Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Leo.

The FCC’s wireless internet strategy under Chairman Brendan Carr has strongly favored a future (controlled by oligarchs!) in which data is delivered directly to smart phones and other end-user devices directly via satellite. As these operators will also need spectrum to deliver their goods in places like cities, where direct-to-device gets far trickier, the FCC has been forced financially strapped EchoStar and Charlie Ergen to give up on their quest to create a fourth U.S. 5G network … and cough up their spectrum in process.

And the FCC continued this week its quest to take even more spectrum out of EchoStar’s hands, conducting its first spectrum auction in four years. In all, the FCC’s AWS-3 auction is selling 200 5G-grade spectrum licenses, with EchoStar agreeing to pay the difference on any shortfall under $2.9 billion.

By all accounts, the auction got off to a slow start Tuesday, tallying only $54 million in bids covering just 52 of the available licenses. And early on, it doesn’t appear that the satellite insurgents are doing the bidding — analyst suspect most of the bids have come so far from incumbent wireless companies, with EchoStar itself trying to goose the market with its own bids.

Whether or not Musk, Bezos and the rest of the satellite D2D gang get in on the auction action, life was already getting very competitive in the U.S. internet provisioning business.

Canada’s Cogeco this week said it’s taking a write-off valued at $1.2 billion U.S., with high-speed internet competition besetting its U.S. Breezeline-branded telecom assets.

Starlink, which already has 10 million subscribers, is beginning to flex its global might. In Australia, wireless operator Telstra started partnering with Starlink much the way T-Mobile does here in the U.S., by using its D2D capabilities for users who are out of tower range.

In just one year, Telstra has 2.7 million subscribers who’ve signed up for this Starlink Mobile-provided D2D capability.

— D.F.

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The Five Spot
Some other things you oughta know…

NBC made official what it foreshadowed in March, killing off Access Hollywood after nearly 30 years, part of a previously announced exit from first-run syndication. The long-running entertainment-news show will air its last episode in September, around the time of the Emmys with which it’s been inextricably tied over the years.

Exec Frances Berwick told the Penske trades that “NBCUniversal is making changes to our first-run syndication division to better align with the programming preferences of local stations.”

Count this as another indicator of the increasingly independent path that local broadcast chains are pursuing these days separate from the networks that have long provided the bulk of their programming. Add in Nexstar’s move to replace all the networks’ newcasts with its own News Nation, among much else.

This cutting of the maternal cord will only accelerate as the broadcast networks pull back from original entertainment programming (beyond syndication) and focus on live events and sports to draw tune in.

To that end, NBCU cancelled nine other shows, including Access Daily, talk shows from Kelly Clarkson and Steve Wilkos. Also out the door, two game shows, including On Brand with Jimmy Fallon, plus, impossibly, one of Dick Wolf’s evergreen Law & Order shows, Organized Crime starring long-time L&O star Christopher Meloni. Fans are mostly left hoping this means his Elliot Stabler character and Mariska Hargitay's finally get together like they've been shipping for most of the past two decades.

Berwick said NBCU “will remain active in the distribution of our existing program library and other off-network titles, while winding down production of our first-run shows.”

— D.B.

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Canada’s federal government has ordered broadcast regulators to pause a new tax on U.S. subscription entertainment services including Netflix and Spotify, one that would force these operators to triple their investment in productions originating from the Great White North.

Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller said in a statement Wednesday that the new Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission requirements “would impose new costs on the companies providing these services, which could ultimately fall on Canadian consumers through higher prices.”

The CRTC rules would triple existing “Canadian Programming Expenditure” mandates to 15% for any U.S. streaming company reporting annual revenue of $25 million or more in Canada.

In hearings focused on the so-called “Online Streaming Act” conducted in May of last year, the Motion Picture Association, which represents Netflix, warned that the levy would be passed onto Canadian consumers. The MPA argued that its constituents already spend a lot of money in the region. Netflix, for instance, said it spent $6.5 billion from 2021 - 2024 on Canadian production and service work.

“At a time when Canadians face cost-of-living pressure, now is not the time to make culture and entertainment more expensive,” Miller added.

Eleanor Noble, national president of the Canadian actor union ACTRA, accused Miller of letting Canadian culture become a bargaining chip in the larger context of free North American trade.

“Rather than requiring wealthy media companies to modestly invest in Canada’s cultural ecosystem, Ottawa has chosen to transfer that responsibility to Canadian taxpayers under the guise of ‘consumer protection,’” she said in a statement.

— D.F.

Credit Reelgood with addressing the elephant in the room in as direct a way as you probably can. The San Francisco-based tech and analytics company, which built a popular consumer app for finding where to stream movies and shows, put ChatGPT and Claude through their competitive paces recently.

Querying the leading Large Language Models on 50 movies and 50 TV shows, Reelgood said that Anthropic’s Claude delivered only 50.21% accuracy, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT scored 43.76%.

Reelgood, which covers 300 services in 25 countries, touts and accuracy rate of around 97%.

With Next TMT on a bit of a Clint Eastwood bender amid the filmmaking legend’s retirement this week, we got a little (unscientifically!) curious and punched the 1970 war film Kelly’s Heroes into both Gemini and Reelgood. Reelgood gave us pretty good directions on where to stream the movie, but the LLM told us we could stream it on Netflix. We cannot at this time.

Reelgood notes that LLMs for the most part aren’t designed to keep up with constant changes to catalogs. But beyond that, their basic engineering and training aren’t optimized for fined-tuned, realtime searching of entertainment content.

At least Reelgood will get to keep its job.

— D.F.

So now that EchoStar and Charlie Ergen have been pushed out of the 5G wireless network business, their $30 billion debt brought to heel following their associated (and forced!) spectrum divestments, what’s next for this enduring telecommunications giant.

We might have gotten a hint this week with Ergen’s SPAC, “CONX,” acquiring a 75% stake in HC2 Broadcasting, a company deep into 5G Broadcast.

HC2 is the largest U.S. owner and operator of lower-power television stations, controlling 202 of them. It also owns 53 Class A stations and three full power stations. But for Ergen and EchoStar, the interest is likely in 5G Broadcast, which allows the delivery of video and other data-intensive services to 5G devices.

— D.F.