Summary

• The Sidemen’s IP Power Play: By licensing Family Fortunes from Fremantle and using Side+ subscribers for survey data, the Sidemen have turned a legacy TV format into a high-yield fan data engine. As production giants become “IP wholesalers” for creators, Ed and Jo ask: what “moat” is left for traditional broadcasters like the BBC or ITV?
• The Streaming “Truce” of the Titans: Apple and Netflix’s deal to split F1 coverage and share Drive to Survive marks the end of platform exclusivity in favor of aggregated reach. But as content becomes a “utility” shared between rivals, is the fan the ultimate loser as their sport fragments across even more subscriptions?
• The Premier League’s “Singapore Beta”: The launch of “Premier Plus” sees the League owning the entire stack—production, platform, and first-party data—for the first time. Singapore is the test bed, but Jo and Ed debate if the “rights cheque” is really being outvalued by the cost of running a global streaming operation.
• Wolfsburg’s Digital Squad: By deploying 100 custom AI agents across every department, VfL Wolfsburg is in-housing agency work and saving six figures. It’s the ultimate “efficiency play,” but does doing more with less inevitably mean the sports industry is heading toward a massive headcount cull?
• The End of the Search Bar: JioHotstar’s OpenAI integration turns 500 million passive viewers into active conversationalists across 19 languages. If discovery becomes a two-way dialogue, does the traditional “search bar” become a relic of the past for the world’s biggest streaming libraries?
• AI as the New Gatekeeper: As LLMs become the primary layer between fans and their content, “sponsored search” is entering the living room. Will rights holders soon find themselves paying a premium to AI platforms just to ensure their highlights are surfaced over a competitor’s?

Show Notes

• Sidemen Freamantle IP Acquisition
• Apple TV & Netflix Formula 1 Deal
• Premier League to launch streaming service in Singapore
• VFL Wolfsburg & Open AI Collaboration
• JioHotstar & Open AI Voice Search

Transcription

Ed (00:01.27)
Hello and welcome to the attention shift. In the weeks the Sidemen proved that the most important TV show of the month didn’t actually happen on TV but on YouTube with a former older than most of their fans. Apple and Netflix decided the streaming wars were overrated and just teamed up to split Formula One between them like two mates sharing a lovely takeaway. The Premier League announced its launch in its own streaming service starting in Singapore. And if you think that’s just about football, you’ve definitely not been paying attention. VfL Wolfsburg, glad I got that out.

Quietly built 100 AI colleagues. They even gave them names like Ulf and Hannah and handed them to every department in the club, saving six figures without hiring a single person. And Geo Sots, got a common say, and Geo Hotstar just handed 500 million Indian viewers an AI that speaks 19 languages until the search bar. It’s done. Without further delay, you know the drill. Five stories, five minutes. Ready, Joe?

Jo (00:55.662)
I wasn’t until I heard you reading that.

Ed (00:59.062)
I knew I’d missed that, I knew I’d missed that.

Jo (01:02.734)
Brilliant. Safe to say news reading wasn’t your calling.

Ed (01:07.049)
Absolutely not.

Jo (01:09.1)
You did great Ed. Okay, I’m going to kick off Sidemen Sunday, which is something that has been ongoing for ages. I don’t think you were aware that Sidemen Sunday has been a regular feature of their channel, was it? I speak as the mother of a son who’s been watching Sidemen Sunday religiously for at least six, seven years. So it’s not really any surprise that they, I mean, they’ve already come up with original formats. They did Sidemen Inside that was then licensed to Netflix who took

two seasons, but they’ve been playing in the sandbox of old formats of late. did some supermarket sweep not so long ago. You might remember that one. And now they have done a fully licensed adaptation with Fremantle of Family Fortunes, which I remember and I know you remember, but a lot of people won’t remember what Family Fortunes was. The interesting thing about this, and I’ll relate it to sports in a minute, is this idea that…

Ed (01:57.494)
Absolutely.

Jo (02:07.266)
There is no appointment viewing on YouTube, one, think, Sidemen have already busted that myth with Sidemen Sunday. But the idea that actually they can, they can corral some of their not insignificant audience on a Sunday night to watch a reboot of a decades old format is not to be sniffed at really. For anybody who thinks that the Sidemen aren’t a serious creator group, I think that really, you know, that’s one in the eye for you.

But the interesting thing was that they’re using other parts of their media ecosystem. So our survey says the hundred people surveyed who used to the answers for family fortunes, they’re using their direct to consumer platform, Side Plus, as their database for asking these questions, which is really smart because it brings along their existing audience. It directs them to go and watch Sidemen Sunday.

because they feel like they’re invested and they’re integrated into the making of the show, which is really, really clever. So they’re bringing their community along with it. But then it plays into two things. As you know, I was at MIP London last week. I interviewed YouTube and the BBC about their partnership that we spoke about on this podcast a couple of weeks ago. And we were talking about that more premium TV-like experience on YouTube. Well, this is exactly that.

So then if we think about how Fremantle is now basically functioning as an IP wholesaler, it’s sitting on a ton of rights, format rights, not just archive, but formats rights. It’s now acting as an IP wholesaler to create a saying, here’s our sandbox, here’s all our archive. Do you want to come in and have a rummage around and if there’s anything you like, we’ll do a deal. Think about what you could potentially do with that in sports. I think that’s really interesting. I was thinking about loads of old sports.

formats that I used to watch when I was a kid growing up. My mom and dad used to watch, even my grandparents, they could be given a new lease of life with creator groups. And then I got to thinking about, there could even be, I reckon, in the next 12, 18 months, a top European football club could say, again, looking back into its archive and basically its history and say to a creator group, what do you want to do with this? Come and have a play around. You’ve got all the archives, you’ve got all the previous…

Jo (04:31.254)
seasons, data, you’ve got, it might have been when they won the Champions League 20, 30 years ago. Come and do something and we’ll co-produce and you can stick it on your YouTube channel. So I think that’s really interesting. Where do you think it could go? If the Sidemen are starting something, where could it go in sports?

Ed (04:49.728)
Yeah, I think it is interesting. Like I I remember when I worked at ITV a number of years ago as well, and we were sort of in between projects and we started rummaging around similarly in the archive because as the saying goes, there’s no new ideas. There’s plenty of stuff there. Obviously, you’ve worked in TV for long time as well and you’ve seen that yourself. I think what I liked about what the Sidemen have done with this is the Sidemen have turned reality TV for them into a fan data engine. And what they’re doing really cleverly as well is by

Jo (05:00.302)
Hmm.

Jo (05:07.054)
Yeah.

Ed (05:20.618)
you know, the survey says using Sidemen Plus as the means by how they get the opinion from the fans that ultimately be creating that. You only get to take part if you’re a subscriber in this, like anyone can watch the content, but only the subscribers get the opportunity to actually impact the content. So they’re getting the subscribers to ultimately impact the editorial narrative. And I think what’s clever for Fremantle as well is like, look, these formats are going to exist forever. And what it does is it brings them back into the consciousness where maybe people have forgotten about them. And I think, like you say, I

From a sporting perspective, plenty of stuff that people have done in the past, there’s no reason why they can’t bring it around again.

Jo (05:55.534)
Yeah, and it’s money for old rope. All of this stuff sits there. It’s all available. It’s not being utilized, but it’s there. So Fremantle can open it up and say, look, come in. And it’s not just Sidemen, it could be anyone. But I do think that there’s opportunities with sports, not just with people like Fremantle who have produced sports stuff, but you’ve got IP rights holders, like big football clubs that could just come in and say, look, you’re expert at this.

This is what we’ve got access to. This is our data. This is our content. This is our archive. This is stuff that we’ve done in the past. Come and do something with it and we’ll co-produce it with you, but you can create it in a way that’s going to make sense to that audience and that we don’t really know how to leverage. So I think that’s, that’s fascinating. My bet is a football club is going to do something similar with a creator group soon.

Ed (06:45.654)
Yeah, it’d interesting to if they picked up license on a format from sort of yesterday from TV as well and repurposed it in the sporting environment. Like anyone could… Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, there’s loads of ways. Loads of ways of doing it, Right, the next story. So, Apple TV and Netflix, you’d imagine are competitors, even though everyone’s on each other’s platform these days with their carriage deals.

Jo (06:51.222)
World of Sport at Grandstand, come on, bring it back, the new Dickie Davies.

Ed (07:08.318)
have done a deal on the back of Apple TV doing the deal with F1 where they’re going to become the exclusive home of F1 in the US. Well, they’re not going to become the exclusive home of F1 in the US anymore because Netflix are also going to be taking the races too. So it’s interesting, right? Because there’s a lot been going on and Netflix have been in the media quite a lot recently as well in terms of what they’ve been up to and managed to walk away with 2.8 billion for a deal they never did.

It’s interesting that Apple have taken this and I think to a certain degree Apple have decided to do this right. We saw what happened with the MLS where they became the broadcaster, the streamer of the MLS and when it was put behind the wall garden, you know, it’s probably not helped the MLS grow. And I think F1, as much as they want to work with Apple, they’ve seen the success of the film, the distribution’s not there, so Apple have had to find a way. I think this is a clever way making sure that Apple are still…

the leader in this, ultimately they can ensure that the content is reaching a big enough audience, because it’s so important to Liberty Media, right, as being a US business that, and also on the back of Drive to Survive, that F1 continues to grow in the US.

Jo (08:13.26)
Yeah, Apple are cash rich, but they’ve never managed to galvanize people into subscribing en masse to Apple TV+. Their content strategy has been a little bit hit and miss. They’ve had a couple of hits, but this, the interesting thing, and there was a lot of conjecture at the time when Liberty did the F1 deal with Apple as to whether it was actually gonna shoot them in the foot because it wasn’t the reach play that

they were saying they needed in the US. Given that they don’t get close to the popularity of NASCAR, even the Indy 500, they love their cars in America, but they like them going around in circles. And F1 has struggled to really gain a foothold there, with the exception of something like Drivetous 5. But the fact that they did a deal to have those on separate platforms really didn’t look like the sensible.

strategy to me by By Liberty. So I don’t think that this is a massive surprise. I think it helps Formula One in the sense that Netflix has this critical mass of more casual Formula One viewers now, younger, more female who tucked into Drive to Survive and who claim they’re Formula One fans, but they don’t regularly sit down and watch the live races, right? They’re going, they’re kind of fishing in each other’s ponds with this, I think.

But I think more than the platform deal, think it shows how Liberty took the big check from Apple and didn’t really think about what it was gonna do for F1 as a brand in the US. And now they’re having to try and work with Apple to circumvent it.

Ed (10:02.038)
I don’t know, I can’t believe that when this deal was done that this wasn’t part of the plan all along. think, you know, give Apple their window to make a big noise about the fact that they’d gone and won this, but knowing all along that it was going to go elsewhere. Because it’s not only Netflix, right? There’s also a top of the funnel player that’s going on with Tubi as well that are owned by Fox. And I do wonder as well, is this almost a bit of a tester of an alignment between Apple, Fox, Netflix, you know, when you see what’s going on now with Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery?

Is this the chess pieces moving around and people picking who their friends are going to be moving forward? And F1 is the first where this is getting mentioned as well. Obviously we’ve seen something similar in the UK, right, with the Sky package recently as well, where people who are not necessarily friends in the past have become friends to ultimately reach audience because it gets to a point where Netflix have got the size of audience they’ve got and similarly in the UK we’ve got Sky, got the size of, they’re in pretty much every home,

Jo (10:56.099)
Yeah, but you’re talking about streaming wars and you’re talking about platforms who are trying to, you know, basically stem churn. They’re all beginning to feel a bit samey. We’ve talked about this before. You can’t really distinguish one between the other now because they all feel very similar in terms of their offering. You used to kind of know what Disney Plus was. You used to kind of know what Netflix had. Each had their own flavor and their own thing. And now everything’s beginning to feel a little bit homogenous and a bit samey. What?

I don’t think enough people take notice of is what is it doing for Formula One fans? Well, it’s just fragmenting it and splitting it across a number of platforms. Again, it’s like the NFL, it’s like the NBA where people are going, on any given night of the week, I’ve got to swap streamers to go and tuck into the sport that I love. At what point does that turn around and it bites you on the bum? that, mean, all of these platforms can do all of this and make friends and share content. It’s the fan at the end of the day that’s ending up paying for multiple.

Ed (11:35.798)
It’s like Premier League.

Jo (11:54.444)
subscriptions and the sports that they love are just being more more fragmented.

Ed (11:59.392)
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I and that, that I think that fragmentation is real. I think, you know, we, I think at the moment it’s working for them all because I think we are in that certainly in that golden age. I think there’s more content being made that’s ever been made before. And probably at the very least the quality of it is probably the height that we’ve never seen before. But, you know, do we reach a peak? I guess the question.

Jo (12:19.097)
Well, I mean, things are going to have to start consolidating again, we obviously if well, now we know that Paramount has won the deal for Warner Brothers. Murray and Ron Shea made a post today and she was listed out the crossover between HBO in Europe and Sky Showtime. And there are something like 12 markets where both will exist. Well, that’s a massive conflict. So the regulators are going to start wanting one, either one to divest the stake. Excuse me.

or there’ll be a huge amount of consolidation. So I just think the ultimate loser is the fan because currently it’s, they’re having to subscribe to a great many platforms and just see, try and get their sports across a million, million different platforms. And then that has an impact on piracy because what are they going to do? They’re just going to go and find a pirate fleet. So it all starts again. However, do you know what? Next story and this.

this tees up the next story pretty well because if we’re thinking about putting content together in one place, not fragmenting it and maybe dealing with the piracy problem, we’ve got Prem Flix. Why didn’t they call it Prem Flix? I mean, they should have called it Prem Flix.

Ed (13:28.766)
To be fair, it’s probably trademarked.

Jo (13:32.607)
Yes, as we said before the worst kept secret in sports so Premier plus I think it is Premier Premier League’s going DC launching its streaming service in Singapore next season So for the first time they will own the entire stack from production because they’re taking that back in house from IMG And then they will own the platform and distribute it What do we think?

There’s lots and lots of stories this week on LinkedIn, people going, this is going to make billions. I think they perhaps underestimate how expensive it is to run a streaming platform. The skeptic in me was like, oh, come on, it’s not that much of a slam dunk.

Ed (14:12.37)
Yeah, but I don’t think it’s difficult now as it has been before, right? And I think it’s becoming easier and easier to do these kind of things. And look, I know there’s a few people we know are involved in that venture, you’ll say. It’s not that easy. But I think of any territory where you’re trying to have a crack at this, think Singapore’s a good one, because again, they don’t necessarily have a language barrier as well, so it makes life easier. They’ll have a certain control over…

Jo (14:32.271)
Mm.

Ed (14:37.364)
that market to be able to do it as well. I think ultimately they want to start on in the relationship with the consumer, which is why they’re thinking of doing it right and start to understand more what that means. Probably driven by, you know, all the different investors that we have now in English football expecting to, you know, and we always hear this all the time, don’t we? When you get American investors coming into the foot, you know, into English football, you guys don’t know how to truly sweat the assets, so to speak. So this is probably one of those, no doubt, that’s happened in the boardrooms. One of these like, this is how we’re going to sweat the asset.

Jo (15:02.253)
Mm-hmm.

Jo (15:07.373)
Yeah, is it, but you say sweating the asset, it’s not actually that easy to do. It’s okay streaming all of the live games in your own owned and operated platform or app, but user acquisition costs are sky high with that. And they’re also not gonna give up the massive rights checks from people like Peacock and NBC Universal. So they’re not just gonna switch off the rights checks and then switch it on and put it all in the Premier League app.

So there’s gonna be a long period of time where it’s this hybrid approach. I get the whole Singapore thing, do it in smaller markets where you can test and learn very sensible strategy. Maybe one where actually you’ve either not got a local broadcast partner or it’s a pretty small one so you can afford to turn that rights check down. But given that user acquisition costs are massively high, you’ve got churn, you’ve got to think about churn. So you’ve also got to invest in creating content, not just producing the live games, but what about…

the stuff around it. We’re literally just talking about Sidemen, about creator content, about shoulder content, all of that other stuff that is the sticky stuff that people won’t churn for, costs. So, I mean, the pathway to profitability is long and it’s not necessarily easy.

Ed (16:26.774)
See, I’m going to count on that because they’re making a lot of that content anyway for all of their broadcast partners around the world. the content, the content, they’ve been doing it with IMG for a number of years. They’re making that content anyway. They’re not necessarily making all the content that maybe we think we should be creating right for the different digital and social platforms in the way that we would say. But they are, they’re taking it over. They’re taking over. They’re going to be making that content now. You watch, most of the people who are working currently for IMG will move over to the Premier League because it’s an easy thing for them to do.

Jo (16:43.353)
But they’re not making it. It’s IMG that’s making it, isn’t it?

Ed (16:55.05)
I think that, you know, they plan things out. They don’t make knee-jerk reactions. Like I said, there’s a few people we know who’ve already gone in as part of that process. They will move people over and they will continue to make a lot of stuff they’re making because I think their licensees around the world expect to receive the different productions that they currently receive right to be able to. So then they don’t have to produce it themselves in different territories. So I think for Singapore, because obviously they can do it in English, it’s a relatively simple market. I think the challenge comes, as you say, when you start going into

territories where it’s not English as the first language and then you have to start to repurpose.

Jo (17:29.263)
not sure even if they take over a load of people from IMG do they have the skill set to produce content that is gonna service all of those subscribers and all their different needs and wants aside from the live games all the creator stuff the new formats that we were just talking about does that skill set exist is it one that IMG have already got and they’re gonna take it into the Premier League because it doesn’t strike me that there’s a huge amount of

ancillary content around the Premier League content outside of what Sky do, Sky do some interesting stuff but are they going to be able to create the suite of content that is going to be required running your own streamer? It’s hungry.

Ed (18:11.22)
I think they can, yeah. I think they’ll find, assuming they’re gonna, the central operations for this are gonna be based out of the UK, we’ve obviously, I’m sure they’ll have some in-market people as well. I think there’s enough people who working in the UK, in London, that have had experience working around subscriptions and churn management. And, you know, there’s a few people I know that worked in the Dazon world as well, right? There’s people out there that can do this. guess it’s like how much investment is actually going into doing this. And one other thing I’d say as well is if they own the relationship,

with the fans through that content, then they’ve got an ability then to on the back of that sell sponsorships and it might be betting or so that they do a multi-sell there as well because they own that relationship.

Jo (18:46.541)
I get that. Yeah, I get that.

Hmm, I get that. And that’s, that is something that could actually be used to create content as well. was having a meeting this afternoon with somebody who creates branded entertainment with brands. Well, there’s a ton of brands that are involved in sponsorships in the, in the premier league. So actually there could be a brand funded content that could keep feeding that hungry content beast when you run in your own streaming platform. What I think is interesting, given that they’re not summarily just going to stop

Ed (18:58.762)
Yeah, yeah.

Jo (19:19.991)
receiving rights checks and they’re going to turn them all down in three or four years, is this idea that they are building leverage for future negotiations. So when it comes to negotiating the next right cycle with Sky, Comcast or NBC Universal, they’ve got a bit of leverage now. Hang on. We do have the…

Ed (19:37.566)
It’s totally, yeah, it’s gonna be a fragment, but it’s not gonna be a one size fits all. They’re gonna do different things in different places, absolutely. I agree.

Jo (19:43.949)
Yeah, but I don’t think it’s the slam dunk that I’ve seen a lot of commentators, particularly on LinkedIn this week, talk about.

Ed (19:52.864)
think he’s very clever, there you go, we’re disagreeing here Joe, we’re disagreeing.

Jo (19:55.447)
Love it. Love it. Love the disagreement. Next one. AI, something that I wrote about this week. Not that… AI in sport. I wrote about it and it was uncharacteristically kind of a negative story for me because I like to be negative, Ed. But there was a culmination of three stories and I did put it in my newsletter. You’ve got VFL Wolfsburg.

Ed (19:58.388)
Next story.

Ed (20:05.268)
I wrote about that last week as well.

Jo (20:24.655)
in Bundesliga that is rolling out, well, depending on which article you read, between 50 and 100 autonomous AI agents across the club, varying functions from marketing to HR to even ground-keeping, if you believe some of the stories. And then there was also the announcement that Block, the payments company, was laying off something like 4,000 employees.

Ed (20:51.776)
Fourth, yeah, 4,000 employees out of 10,000. So, and then all I kept seeing was just, yeah, all I kept seeing was a video of Jack Dorsey doing the rounds of him in his underpants doing some kind of dance in front of a fire. And I was like, I’m not quite sure what’s going on here, but if you’ve not seen it, don’t search it out. Cause once you’ve seen it, you can’t see it.

Jo (20:55.277)
Yep, 40%.

Jo (21:04.406)
Thank

Yeah. Yeah. So given that we talk a lot about AI, its ability to create more efficient workflows and cost saving, and there you go, you’ve got a tech founder laying off 40 % of the workforce in one fell swoop. Then you got also, and I’m not going to steal your thunder on the next story, but we’re talking about Geo Hotstar who are incorporating chat into their streaming service, into their system.

which inserts a whole new layer and I’ll let you talk about that because I have thoughts about that. All of it really kind of coalesced in my head in terms of AI in sport. We’re talking about it a lot. We’re talking about how it’s going to hyper personalize the content experience, how it’s going to help production. But at the end of the day, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is likely to, in saving costs, mean that there’s going to be job losses across sport. I don’t think you can save one without the other.

It’s the elephant in the room. If you don’t need a massive marketing team, because you’ve got a chat GPT agent doing a lot of it for you, or you don’t need a specialist agency that’s coming in and doing deals for you, or even, I don’t know, legal support, then there’s going to be knock on effects across the wider sports industry and those sports functions. So I think we need to talk about it. These digital colleagues called Ulf.

Ed (22:31.712)
See, don’t, look, right, you know, I run this business and we certainly don’t see it as something that’s gonna replace the people in the business. you know, I think about the way I’m using it, some of my colleagues are using it as well. We’re seeing this as an opportunity to, I guess, do things, test things out, move things at pace in a way that we wouldn’t be able to do before, you know, really allows you to fail fast and regularly to eventually find the thing, things that would have taken months and months and months to do before and quite literally that long.

you can now do in a weekend and you can get the agents doing it, but that doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t mean that the people who have got the creative ideas, who are not using those ideas to direct, interrogate, I guess, come up with different ways of doing things. I don’t think it has to be that people lose their jobs. think so, I can’t remember who the wise person who said this to me was like, you know, the people are going to lose their jobs are not the ones

that basically get replaced by the ones who don’t know how to use AI. Now look, only time will tell, right? Who knows?

Jo (23:38.009)
Yeah, I get it, but efficiency equals either not, well, yeah, it will include losing people, but it will also mean that you won’t have to add head count. You’ve basically just said the same thing. It allows you to do more with less and quicker, but that means that you might not necessarily need to grow your head count. So the net result of that is that there will not be as many jobs in sports. So.

what happens then, particularly if you’ve got a marketing team or a marketing agency that you used to have six, seven people servicing your account, now you don’t need them anymore because you’ve got one person who is really good at utilizing AI internally.

Ed (24:19.744)
You’re really grumpy today. I’m like, you’re really challenging me as well. I’m not used to this level. No, it’s fine. I’m joking. Yeah, I, look.

Jo (24:22.799)
I’m tired. get it. I just, yeah, I see, I see its benefits in plan engagement. I see its benefit. It’s in personalisation. I see its benefits in data. But what I don’t think we talk about is the job losses that is potentially going to result in.

Ed (24:32.288)
Yeah.

I’m

Ed (24:42.512)
And I’m not thinking about it, this is, know, because we’ve chatted about it internally, I’m not thinking about it in terms of replacing people, I’m not thinking about it terms of that we will not hire more people as and when we need them. I think specialisms will change. I mean, I’m old enough that we’ve obviously, we’ve lived through the era of email and all the other things too as well. And, you know, I think I read something recently that actually email made us less efficient, not more efficient. So there’s an element of now, you’ll see, and you find lots and lots of people now who using AI to do things as well that they couldn’t do before just because they can. Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re more productive.

Jo (25:11.821)
All

Ed (25:11.83)
So I don’t think that we’re at that point and I’m trying to take the optimistic view that actually it’s going to allow us to do things that we just previously thought was impossible to do rather than to replace people for what they’re doing already.

Jo (25:27.375)
Yeah, that’s interesting. think that there will definitely be a competency gap in the short term because there aren’t enough people that you can use it.

Ed (25:35.282)
yeah, yeah, yeah, without a doubt, without a doubt. And it’s a challenge for people to understand and it’s not enough just to put it in front of people and go, there you go. You’ve got to ultimately offer training to people as well. And again, something that we’re talking about, whether it’s all doing it ourselves or whether we bring specialists in and we’re working it out ourselves a little bit, but it’s not enough just to put it there. Cause I think people are genuinely fearful of it.

And I think that is fair, Joe, you’re right on that, they are. And I think, if I think of myself, even myself 12 months ago, I was a little bit like, yeah, not sure. Now I use it for all sorts of stuff. Sometimes use it personally, just so I can think stuff through, come and see me a little study at the weekend and I’ll be noodling things that I wanna try and think through, almost bouncing off it. And, it obviously remembers something. Yeah, yeah, exactly that, exactly that, exactly that. Because no one would have the patience to listen to me normally.

Jo (26:15.727)
Mm.

Jo (26:20.527)
Yeah, can be a sparring partner. Yeah, it can be a sparring partner. Yeah, for sure. I’m pretty good with… Okay, last one. It’s AI related. This is an interesting one. I also have thoughts on this one.

Ed (26:31.103)
Right then.

I’m going to try and say it properly so, so Geo Hotstar, brilliant, I could have done that in the opening. I’ve done a deal with OpenAI, right? So they’re looking at this as the end of search and the rise of conversations. So ultimately what they’re trying to drive is so anyone who doesn’t know Geo Hotstar are the reliance Disney streaming behemoth in India. 500 million Indian views, so absolutely huge. They’ve got 300,000.

Jo (26:38.287)
You

Ed (27:01.632)
hours worth of content. So imagine trying to search through that. So they’re making it conversational. You can have the conversation with ChatGPT that’s been built into their streaming platform to find the thing you really wanna find and vice versa. You don’t even just have to look within their own platform to do it. You can find it within ChatGPT too. And look, I’ve seen some cool stuff that ChatGPT are doing as well, which is gonna be around the commercialization, how you can integrate more and more things into.

chat GPT itself, because I think it is going to be that thing that potentially places search if they can find some kind of way letting Google give them access to data otherwise, chat GPT might struggle with that. I think that’s the one thing. But I think it’s interesting because in theory they’re taking 500 million passive viewers into active conversationalists and they can use all the data, all the information that’s been collected over a number of years around all of that content.

to potentially bring that content alive in a way that is not just about watching it right, it’s the stuff they can learn from it too. We all do it right, where we’ll be watching something and then we’re on Google, who’s that actor and what did they appear in? Well, you can just do that as part of the experience while you’re watching it now as well. So I think it’s interesting, but you said you’ve got a view on this, so go on then.

Jo (28:02.255)
Thanks.

Jo (28:08.175)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo (28:17.647)
Two, I’ve got a positive and a negative. the interest of balance, seeing as I’m feeling a bit grumpy and negative now, I’ll start with positive. I do think it’s a really interesting solve for the discoverability issue. Because when you have got that volume of content that you spoke about, much? 200,000 hours. There is no way that you could hope to surface that content efficiently.

Ed (28:35.638)
Yeah. 300,000 hours.

Jo (28:45.965)
to your audience. We’ve all done it. We’ve all sat and looked for 25 minutes through Netflix for something to watch and gone back and watched an episode of Friends because we just don’t know what to pick. It’s the age old choice paralysis. If you can streamline discoverability, then that becomes really interesting. I’m in the mood for watching this. I want a documentary about that. There was something really funny a couple of years ago with these two guys that we’re talking about this cricket match or this football game. The way that it can surface that to you.

is really interesting and I do think that that’s really positive. The negative side of it, and here it comes again, you and I were at Little Dot Studios a few weeks ago talking about advertising in these spaces. And you might remember I asked a question of some of the panelists about advertising in AI, in GPTs and autonomous agents, because OpenAI had said they were going to start

Ed (29:22.678)
Go on, waiting for this.

Jo (29:45.665)
serving ads on recommendations through their large language models. The point I was making in my newsletter this week about that is if you are a rights holder and you sell to Geo Hotstar or you’ve got a streaming partner in ex territory and they’ve done a deal with ChatGPT or an AI LLM provider, how soon before that streamer

Ed (29:49.302)
Yeah, that’s right.

Jo (30:15.311)
or even the AI partner says, you know what, when someone says, really fancy watching a sports documentary about this, or I really fancy watching some football highlights, pay a premium and we’ll surface yours first. Little bit.

Ed (30:30.676)
Is it not like when you go to supermarket and people pay a premium to get their product in the most important place in the supermarket, so you buy that rather than something else?

Jo (30:37.229)
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s no different to how operating systems work on TV now, whose apps come up first when you switch on the TV. I mean, all of this is valuable real estate. And now that valuable real estate is being put into streamers via these LLMs that are going to surface content to you. It might solve for discovery, but at some point you’re going to have to pay a premium if you want to be surfaced before somebody else. And that’s where it starts getting expensive.

Ed (31:06.326)
But I think it’s happened. I mean, it’s kind of the way the world is happening everywhere that. I don’t disagree with you.

Jo (31:09.603)
Yeah, it’s sponsored search results. Yeah, it’s sponsored search results. So again, I wonder how many rights holders are thinking, well, this is going to become a negotiating point soon enough. If I want my sport, my tournament to be surfaced over and above something else by the large language model that’s now the layer between me, my audience, and finding that content, it’s going to come with a price tag.

Ed (31:36.842)
Yeah, on the flip side of it, what is interesting for me is obviously because it’s a diverse country, many different languages in you as well, it does allow them to do, because obviously the nature of Chad’s EBT, they can understand all the different languages, it does allow them to converse in a way that the realities, and this comes back to the thing about like not employing people, they just wouldn’t be able to physically have that amount of people to do what they need to do, because the cost base would just be too high. So that’s not even replacing people, right? It’s just.

Jo (31:56.879)
Mm.

Jo (32:05.071)
Mm-hmm.

Ed (32:05.622)
It’s just something that would just never happen. So there’s a positive there in that sense. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, It wouldn’t necessarily happen everywhere. And look, and I can see, I can see a world where, whether it’s open AI, one of the other different AI’s, right, starts to integrate more and more into sports teams, leagues, own platform. But like you say, you know, it potentially is gonna be who pays the most, who gets access.

Jo (32:07.951)
Yeah, it’s interesting. India is the perfect market for it. Yeah, I get that. Yeah.

Jo (32:30.105)
Bye.

Ed (32:35.508)
But that’s going to be potentially it is another it’s not necessarily this another sponsorship right for the eyes themselves. It’s going to be sponsored right for access within the eyes that helping those sports teams and leagues as well. it’s. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, we’ve had a bit of banter tonight. We might even come to blows next time. That’s good.

Jo (32:45.963)
yeah, it’s just, it’s another gate. It’s another gate and another gatekeeper. Yeah, interesting.

Jo (32:55.727)
And I’m actually feeling more positive at the end of this conversation than I was at the beginning. Thank you for cheering me on.

Ed (33:00.926)
I don’t know whether that’s because you’ve schooled me tonight or I don’t know, have I put you in a more positive mood? don’t know.

Jo (33:06.957)
No, it’s a Monday evening. I’m tired. It was a busy week last week. Right. I’m going to go and put my hands up. this has been the… you’re going to do it? I was going to do it then.

Ed (33:10.708)
No, it’s fair enough, were traveling, you were gallivanting around a lot.

Brilliant. Right then, I’ll wrap up. Yeah, well, I’m gonna try and then I’ll probably make a dog’s dinner of it. So thank you, Joe, most of all, but everyone else for joining us for this week’s episode of The Attention Shift. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and if you want to feature as a guest, give us a question or give us any feedback on the show whatsoever, that’s hello at attentionshift.media. I’ve been Ed Abbas and she’s been.

Jo (33:39.791)
I’m your Redfern,

Ed (33:41.568)
Goodbye!