Summary

• The Day YouTube Officially Became TV: At BrandCast 2026, YouTube dropped the “social platform” framing for good. A new premium creator slate with Alex Cooper and Trevor Noah. The pitch to advertisers: stop buying TV, stop buying creators as influencer campaigns, buy this. Plus, shoppable TV finally shipping at scale via Google Pay.
• Why Disney Stopped Selling Exclusivity: Disney pitched itself as a “company of one”, Disney, Hulu, ABC, ESPN, FX, all one. But the real shift is on fandom. Bluey lives on YouTube. Savannah Bananas stay on YouTube. Disney has quietly stopped fighting where content goes and started fighting for the emotional behaviour around it. Is fandom the new moat?
• The Network Zigging While Everyone Else Zags: Paramount is loaded with debt buying WBD. Disney is expanding. Fox is doing the opposite, divesting traditional networks, doubling down on Tubi as a creator-native platform with a creative studio and FAST monetisation. Could the most conservative legacy media business in America have quietly built the most modern strategy?
• How NBC Just Turned Sunday Into the Most Valuable Ad Slot in America: Sunday Night Football. Sunday Night Basketball. Sunday Night Baseball. Plus the FIFA World Cup 30 days out. NBC has stacked every flagship sports right onto a single day and built a habit loop nobody else can match. The advertisers don’t need a second day, Sunday alone is doing the work.
• Inside Warner Bros. Discovery’s Pre-Merger Upfront: Shaq with a marching band. Heated Rivalry tied to NHL rights. A pitch designed to convince advertisers that the inventory, the brands and the rights all survive whatever the next 12 months bring. It’s an upfront for a company that may not exist in the same shape this time next year. So who actually buys this?
• 5 Upfronts. 5 Completely Different Strategies: YouTube is pitching itself as TV. Disney is selling fandom. Fox is going creator-first. NBC is owning Sunday. Warner Bros. Discovery is selling stability while it’s still in flux. The 2026 upfronts didn’t reveal one winner, they revealed five completely different bets on the next decade of media. The one nobody’s talking about yet is the one we think might just work.

Show Notes

• Inside YouTube’s BrandCast 2026 — creator-led premium TV pitch.
• Disney’s 2026 upfront — the “company of one” and fandom play.
• Fox doubles down on Tubi as Paramount and Warner Bros merge.
• NBC Universal owns Sunday — every flagship sport, one day.
• Warner Bros. Discovery’s pre-merger upfront.

Transcription

Ed (00:01.8)
Hello and welcome to the Attention Shift Podcast. I’m Ed Abis.

Jo (00:05.432)
I’m Jack Redfern.

Ed (00:07.144)
Joe, so this week we’re gonna do a special pod and we’re gonna do all about the upfronts because obviously YouTube and people like that have all done their upfronts recently so we’re gonna get into that one by one and see who comes out winning, losing or if it’s a score draw. But before that, Joe, you’ve got some news.

Jo (00:13.541)
Yeah.

Jo (00:19.728)
Ha

Jo (00:23.248)
I’m gonna be taking a bit of a break. I’ve got a super big project coming up. I’m not really gonna have time for your head, so keep my seat warm. Maybe I’ll be back.

Ed (00:33.044)
So basically you’ve got things going on in your life that’s more important than this podcast, is that what you’re saying? Well this pays nothing, so I mean that was a very low bar. Well obviously I’m going to miss you having you on here. I enjoy this weekly chat. This meander through the world of sports media and technology and marketing. But yeah look, amazing for you and I’m sure everyone will find out what you’re up to in due course but obviously I’m going to be sad to see

Jo (00:36.048)
That pay more. That pay!

Jo (00:46.112)
I’ll miss you Ed.

Ed (01:02.462)
you go for the for the time being.

Jo (01:02.544)
well, I’ve enjoyed it too, but anyway, let’s not natter about me too much. Let’s crack on. Yes, YouTube. Do you know what? I really like upfronts week because it’s them having to be candid about where they’re gonna make their revenue. All of these media companies, studios, networks, where the next 12 months revenue is gonna come from. there’s no hiding really. It’s strategy front and center.

Ed (01:06.682)
Okay then, let’s crack on that. You go first then.

Jo (01:28.88)
So yes, of course, mean, YouTube is the one that everybody looks at when they do their brand cast. I always enjoy watching it because it’s normally Neil Moen and some super high profile folks talking about how YouTube and they’ve said it formally this time, they’ve repositioned themselves as TV. They’re not social, they are TV and they used brand cast this time to pitch. I know. Yes, that bloody argument.

Ed (01:51.44)
At it makes it easy now, we can just call it old TV and not have to get bogged down about different monikers.

Jo (01:57.198)
Let’s formally lay it to rest now. But they’re basically launching a creator slate of shows. So their creator-like programming, which to this point has not been perceived as premium, but it’s been nudging that way. They rolled out some big names with a slate of new shows, Alex Cooper, Trevor Noah. It’s basically premium factual formats. And instead of…

spending your ad dollars on TV, they’re basically saying, hey, we’ve got our first ever slate of premium creator shows, come and spend it over here instead. So really it’s them crossing that Rubicon. They are now officially, formally TV and advertisers rather than looking at creator media as experimental or somehow lower value. Now YouTube is saying, look, just stop buying TV, stop buying creators as influencer campaigns. This is now premium programming. Throw us all your ad dollars.

Ed (02:54.439)
Yeah, interesting as well. And just the way they went about some of the stuff they did. So they did it at the Lincoln Center, right? Which is deliberate theater. So that’s what saying. You know, we’re not just attending you up front now. We’re taking a proper seat at the table here. We are driving the agenda of what TV content looks like moving forward. And then I think buried in all of that as well, where they’ve been banging on about shoppable TV now for what? God, decade plus. But they’re now promising to…

Jo (03:00.89)
Mm.

Jo (03:20.645)
Mm.

Ed (03:23.623)
to ship this at scale, make it easy for people to purchase. And obviously the clever thing about that is obviously Google Pay is a thing that’s Parry Hall as well. So it’s all nicely tied up with the bow and all as it needs to be for them.

Jo (03:30.896)
Hmm?

Jo (03:36.741)
And there’s only really Amazon that can do that in a similar way, know, friction, content commerce has always been rife with friction, but Amazon has started removing that and now YouTube can do it with Google Pay. And it basically, it does what traditional TV broadcasts could never do really. And that’s prove direct outcomes from advertising spend. You could try and draw a line between it, but now they could basically go,

you put your ad dollars here or you did a promotion here and you sold through this many units or signups or whatever. So it’s removing that friction between proving your outcome and your revenues from investing with Google and with YouTube. So, I mean, God, it’s hard to argue against the success of YouTube. are on a clip at the moment and I don’t see them, you know, by this time next year when we’re talking about upfronts, maybe I’ll come back and talk to you about upfronts.

I can see that we’ll just be about YouTube. I can see we’ll be talking about YouTube front and centre, right? It’s hard to argue with them. But anyway, who was next? Talk to me about Disney. What do you think to Disney’s?

Ed (04:37.107)
You’re not gonna talk to me for a year? Really?

Ed (04:44.211)
Absolutely.

Ed (04:51.261)
Disney. So going to open this up as well. So the Savannah Bananas, your favourite, obviously who are, you know, social video native, obviously done a lot of what they’ve done on YouTube and the TikToks and so they appeared at Disney’s up-fronts and I think that one booking tells you exactly where sports media is heading. But it’s interesting about the Savannah Bananas, right, because their model is all about non-exclusive. I’m going to let you come on to that in a second because I know there’s been a video been doing around this last week, but

Jo (05:02.8)
Mm-hmm.

I mean, yeah.

Jo (05:16.453)
Mm.

Ed (05:18.887)
12th of May, the Javits Centre, Justamaro, the new CEO, opened up with this idea of a company of one. Because obviously Disney are, they’ve got ESPN, they’ve got Hulu, ABC, FX, and they’re trying to make it look like they’re not working in silos, they work as one. They’ve got Billie Jean King there as well, that’s really bringing a legend of sports into it as well. Obviously the bananas performed, Olivia Rodrigo closed it all out. So the word fandom was their commercial f***.

Jo (05:32.432)
Hmm.

Jo (05:37.424)
You

Ed (05:46.547)
frame throughout. So interestingly you’ve got YouTube going TV TV TV and then you’ve got Disney going fandom social video. Unpack that one.

Jo (05:55.513)
Yeah. Yeah, no, but it’s right, isn’t it? It’s interesting. This idea that Disney is one company when really it’s a lot of constituent parts. But again, it goes back to what we’ve all seen is the Disney flywheel that does the rounds on LinkedIn every once in a while, how they link together all the constituent parts of their business. So this idea that they’re pitching themselves as Disney is a company of one. And basically, what is it built around? It’s built around fandom. So again, not TV.

Ed (06:05.352)
Yeah.

Jo (06:25.456)
It’s not movies, it’s not the sparkle of Disney that was basically what it traded on for decades. Now they’re basically saying, because it’s hard to argue against YouTube for its gravitational pull with attention, they’re now saying, actually, Disney are masters of fandom, which they are, but it gives them something else to hang their hat on. So it was less about content and more about this ownership of fandom and the emotional behavior that Disney’s so good at evoking, whether it’s…

with a movie or whether it’s now with Savannah Bananas.

Ed (06:57.971)
So let me pick you up on that then. So Savannah bananas, right? I always find it weird saying bananas rather than bananas. They came at this with, we’re bringing this, well, these guys are gonna be on ESPN now, but that’s not exclusive, right? They’re not just gonna be on ESPN. So they’re not really in control of any of that, right? Cause they’re just another distribution point. And I think that, like I said, look, I’m sure everyone’s seen this video doing the rounds and Harry sent it to me on TikTok the other day as well. The CEO talking very eloquently, very passionately about.

Jo (07:23.29)
Hmm.

Jo (07:27.234)
It’s so good, isn’t it?

Ed (07:28.749)
like why they exist. And you just think, I wish I could do that.

Jo (07:32.463)
He’s, yeah, he is very good, is Jesse Cole. He’s kind of part guru, part cult leader, part motivational speaker, and kind of business, almost kind of like a business leader. But what he’s really done in building Savannah bananas over the last seven and a half years is he’s basically done what Disney had done.

for years, as in build something that puts the fan and fandom at the very heart of everything. And I know that’s a trope and I know we hear that ad infinitum, but they really built it in that way. They’ve been very open and honest and said, we will never take stuff off YouTube. That’s where we built our audience and our fans. And so when ESPN came to acquire,

Ed (08:10.684)
Yeah, yeah.

Jo (08:27.268)
package of games a couple of years ago, and they’ve increased that package in subsequent years since to I think 25 now. He very rightly said, we’re not taking it off YouTube. We’re not doing this exclusively, which was the old way of doing business with Disney. And they relented because they saw how important having that access was to the fans of Savannah bananas. Now Disney has got form on this. It’s beginning to move on its exclusivity stipulations because Bluey

which is another massive kids IP at this moment, is produced and distributed by BBC Studios. So Disney didn’t originate it. Disney doesn’t own it, but BBC Studios sold it to Disney Plus. But BBC Studios also said, we’ve got quite an aggressive YouTube strategy. So Bluey’s gonna live on YouTube as well as on Disney Plus. And Disney relented on that as well. And it’s done them absolutely no harm whatsoever. In fact, Bluey is the most watched show on Disney.

Ed (09:00.167)
Yeah.

Jo (09:25.936)
So Disney are beginning to realize that actually in practice, what we’ve said very often, exclusivity no longer equals the true kind of value. It needs to be in other places too. So this is what Savannah Bananas have leveraged with ESPN. I don’t suppose that it will harm viewing on ESPN at all. So Disney now is beginning to reorient their moat, which used to be platform exclusivity, to now it’s this fandom.

We own massive IP that can, that have these huge fandoms, whether it’s Bluey or whether it’s Savannah bananas. So that’s an interesting pivot for Disney and it’s not all stuff that Disney has originated and owned as well, which is a bit of a shift for them.

Ed (10:11.932)
Yeah, yeah, true. Cool, right, next one.

Jo (10:16.272)
Fox, well, so this is one that feels a little bit different, but also is an interesting case study because Fox has really changed its direction in the last couple of years because Fox, although it’s doubling down on live sport and it’s always been keen on sport and news as we know, they’ve moved away from owning their own networks and they have pivoted towards Tubi.

So they’ve positioned Tubi as their kind of creator native platform. And I did write a little bit about this after we’d been in Lisbon for Stream TV Europe, because you and I both watched Evan Shapiro talk about how unlike Paramount who were acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery, which is traditional media and they’re taking on a ton of debt to do so, Fox has done the opposite. They’ve shared a lot of their traditional media networks.

and they’ve doubled down on Tubi, which is their creator native platform. So a real divergence between the two there. So Fox Creative Studios, they have launched an IP development arm. They’re partnering directly with creators. This is their future now, Tubi. It’s not a side hustle. This is the direction that they’re going in. So not subscription heavy. We know how that’s kind of plateauing out that subscription business. Fox is betting on fast.

more than anything, so free ad-supported television and this creator-native television, which back up at the top we were talking about with YouTube, is now positioning as premium programming. So yeah, interesting that Fox is, Fox, know, five, 10 years ago, you would have thought about it. Synonymous with Murdoch, a very old conservative traditional media business, completely done at 180.

Ed (12:06.866)
If haven’t gone as far as going for the Savannah bananas yet though, that might be a step too far really, Daws. It might come.

Jo (12:11.088)
I would be very surprised if Disney didn’t acquire a stake in Savannah bananas soon, because it is the sport version of everything that Disney’s about.

Ed (12:21.49)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s the theme park version of sport in a lot of ways, isn’t it? So yeah, you’re absolutely right. Yeah, so lot of Fox, like I said, it’s interesting. did cover off Tube, didn’t we, a few weeks ago as well and what they do with the creative studios. But they’ve understood where attention has shifted to. And ultimately, I think we sat in a session as well where they were talking about Fast as well and the fact that, you know, there was this whole talk about, oh, Fast is not quite caught on in Europe as it has in the US. kind of like because we’ve got loads of free content in Europe, so people don’t have to go searching for it.

Jo (12:32.72)
Mm.

Jo (12:43.568)
Mm-hmm.

Jo (12:51.002)
Yeah.

Ed (12:51.302)
Whereas in the US, you’ve got to pay for everything when it comes to content. So that makes total sense. And I’ve spoken to a few friends in various different sports orgs based out of Europe who’ve been doing very nicely out of distributing their content across fast channels in the US and been making some nice good money out of it without having to make any new content for it as well because it’s stuff that isn’t easily distributed out there for them. So I can see why that’s becoming a thing for them. And the fact look, like you say,

Jo (12:54.916)
Mm.

Jo (13:06.542)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ed (13:20.252)
For an organization that is as traditional as it is to be pivoting as much as it is without having to get, I guess, caught up in what’s been going on with the whole Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount, Netflix thing, and just pivot in the way that they have done towards the tube. I mean, I think I saw something as well about they were talking about the Fox fan OS, you this operating signal that signals this audience as a platform play, whatever that means.

Jo (13:43.792)
Mm.

Ed (13:46.482)
We just keep seeing things every few weeks that Fox are doing that none of it feels like seismic at the time but as they start layering it in you can see how they’re setting themselves up and it’s almost like doing it under the radar while all these big big deals are sort of happening on around them but not really worrying about it and keeping true to the strategy they’ve set for themselves.

Jo (14:04.825)
Hmm?

Jo (14:08.708)
Yeah, they’re zigging while others are zagging for sure. While all of the &A is happening on the big studio side, they’ve divested themselves of a lot of that baggage and are going in a completely different direction. Now, I mean, it may or may not work. The signs are that actually FAST is a very lucrative business in the States. As you said, it’s not really taken off as much in Europe, but it’s doing great in the States. There was a report released by…

Ed (14:11.963)
Yeah.

Jo (14:36.366)
Bango on subscription behaviors that was released while we were in Lisbon worth a look and I’ll not try and quote the figures because I’ll get them wrong but the direction of travel was that a few years ago you would subscribe and pay a little bit more not to see ads. Now you’d rather pay less and have ads because you know everybody’s feeling the pinch and there’s so many subscriptions that you’re expected to have.

but actually fast is something, it’s a trade-off that’s increasingly looking attractive, free ad supported. And actually the ad load on fast platforms is actually lower than on some of the subscription platforms. So it actually feels a little bit like what we would class as, you know, kind of old fashioned free to wear linear TV. So I think Fox has actually been quite prescient.

Ed (15:17.084)
Yeah, interesting.

Jo (15:29.582)
doing what they’re doing. So it’d be interesting to see how that nets out in the next 12 months or so.

Ed (15:36.242)
Cool, so next up, NBC. So, NBC’s turned the day of the week into its most valuable sports advertising slot in America. So, Sunday for them now means football, basketball, and baseball all in one platform. So, this matters because they’ve managed to get Sunday night football, they’ve got Sunday night basketball, and they’ve got Sunday night baseball. you know, that, I mean, we’ve heard this Monday night football, but they’ve now really gone all in on Sunday, all across Peacock.

Jo (15:39.198)
and

Jo (15:58.864)
Yeah.

you

Ed (16:03.003)
They’ve got the FIFA World Cup coming up like, you know, in 30 days time, roughly speaking, when we’re recording this. And of course, NBC, you and Telemundo, they own those rights too. So they’ve got a multitude of sporting rights all around that day. So the idea is you’ve got no reason to leave the NBC ecosystem on a Sunday. Interesting, right?

Jo (16:06.416)
Mm.

Jo (16:11.536)
Mm.

Jo (16:20.624)
Mm.

Jo (16:24.38)
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Because they, I mean, we’re talking primarily sports here, but sports was the thing that was front and center throughout of all of these up-fronts. That wouldn’t have been the case a few years ago, but now sports, we know that everybody’s clamoring for sports rights. It seems to be the thing that all of these networks are thinking is going to be their savior. But rather talk about a particular sport. I really thought it was interesting how

NBC Universal were just like, no, it’s about the biggest day of the week for sports viewing in the US. It’s all about Sunday. And when they said it, I was like, I think that’s kind of genius. Now it’s only one day of the week, but like you say, come for Sunday sports, stick around for the rest of it.

Ed (17:09.071)
What’s interesting is Sunday in the US is NFL Day, but the NFL only runs for a relatively short window in a sports season. I never thought I’d say this, I can’t wait for it to come back. But I can see the commitment that NBC have to sports. I was over in Tampa a few weeks ago for the Premier League weekend live that NBC did along with the Premier League. Just to see the way they put on the whole experience in person, but also…

Part of time I was watching it back in my hotel as well, because it was a very hot day, was far too much to be staying outside all day. So I back and watched the game as well, so it was interesting seeing how that was being presented to their viewing audience at home to have this combination of the physical and then the distance viewing experience. And they do such a good job of presenting it, but not…

Jo (17:50.596)
Mm.

Jo (18:00.663)
Yeah, they do.

Ed (18:03.045)
But not only like the experts that they’ve got, the presenting team that they’ve got, but they interconnect with the fans as often as they possibly can so people understand that the fans are totally invested in what that experience is. It’s that formal, right? You don’t want to miss out on it because they make you feel part of it. And I think they are doing that now across all of the sports. Like whenever I am in the US, generally speaking, the sports I want to watch are on Peacock or on NBC or Telemundo, right? I end up watching on one of those channels. So…

Jo (18:16.42)
Mm.

Jo (18:28.357)
Yeah.

Ed (18:31.361)
And that focus towards Sunday, when that’s when people have most of their disposable time, is looking like when most of the advertisers are putting most of their disposable advertising money into it now as well. So they’ve slowly but surely built this up to become the place to be on a Sunday.

Jo (18:48.068)
Yeah, I think they were smart to drill down onto habitual viewing because when everything else is being thrown up in the air, actually Sunday sports viewing, particularly in the US, is still something that is ingrained in the psyche. So if you can take that, it and leverage that, then I just thought it was a really smart execution by them. I agree with you. Every time I have watched Peacock, I’ve always been impressed with how…

their UX, their fan experience. I just think that they’ve done it really, really well. So yeah, kudos to them. The interesting challenge for them, because they have Premier League as well, don’t they? Is this sports rights inflation, you know, thinking about what the NFL is asking for, thinking about NBA, you know, Premier League when it comes up for renewal, I’m pretty sure that there’ll be a hefty ask there.

If those rights costs for Peacock rise faster than their subs revenue, then obviously you’re in a very precarious position economically and those economics are want to break. So that’s the only caution I would say, but I really liked the idea that they just pinned it all up. They just hung it all on Sundays, the Sunday habit of sports and then everything else you stay for.

Ed (20:10.189)
It’s interesting as well, because obviously, like I said, if you can drive that amount of audience to Sunday, the reality is you’re going to get bleeding to other days. You just are. Because it becomes like I it’s that habitual viewing on Sunday, and then that’s when you are signpost and what else is coming during the week until you get back there again next Sunday. They will bleed that into other days.

Jo (20:18.764)
Of course!

Jo (20:26.519)
Exactly. Yeah.

Jo (20:32.324)
Yeah, 100%. So yeah, so far we’ve got YouTube who are owning TV, we are premium programming, creator led, you’ve got Disney who have pivoted away from we make movies and sparkle better than anyone else to we are the fandom experts. You got Fox completely zigging while everybody else is zagging and going creator first and doubling down on Tubi. And then you’ve got NBC Universal who are owning Sundays.

What’s left? So the final upfront was Warner Brothers’ discovery. What on earth could they hang their hat on? Well, who knows?

Ed (21:11.387)
Well, it’s difficult one this as well, isn’t it, for them? obviously, one of them is good, they’ve had to do an upfront and they had Shaq with a marching band. Yeah, exactly. Like HBO, Hockey, Romance. They’re doing all of this while not knowing if they’re going to still function. mean, they’re certainly not going to be an independent company this time next year by the looks of things. But what are they going to become? So that’s a difficult one. So what actually happened then at the upfront? What were they presenting?

Jo (21:17.624)
Yeah, when you can’t really talk about the future.

Jo (21:31.118)
Yes.

Jo (21:41.723)
Well, mean, we sport again, like every other one was front and center. So they were talking about NHL and Bleacher Report. Have you watched Heated Rivalry yet? So, I mean, I haven’t either. I will say it’s on my list of things to watch, but Heated Rivalry, which was, I think it was commissioned by, was it Crave in Canada? Relatively small.

Ed (21:53.051)
No.

Jo (22:08.816)
show and it got picked up and then it went completely stratospheric. About a love story between two hockey players on rival teams. It gets a bit saucy, you know, it’s the kind of thing that you might be embarrassed if you sat next to a teenager and you sat next to your mum and dad while watching it. But, no. But it has been one of the biggest sports adjacent kind of scripted dramas in a good long while.

Ed (22:25.434)
I won’t suggest it in front of my daughter then.

Jo (22:37.904)
So they obviously led with that because it blew up on social and young people are all about heated rivalry. I’ve seen so much content around heated rivalry on social. that and Bleacher Report and the sports that they got were front and center with their up-fronts. It’s interesting because clearly there’s bit of uncertainty around whether the acquisition will go through. they can’t really go out too hard and target advertisers.

Ed (22:46.223)
Yeah, yeah.

Jo (23:07.342)
because there’s that kind of instability with the inventory. If it’s all put under a different corporate structure next year, then buyers are not going to be very confident in it.

Ed (23:18.8)
I suppose the interesting thing is like, look, surely brands like TNT are not gonna go anywhere, right? As much as there is instability at management level at the top, you’d imagine they’re going out their way to go look, right? The long-standing brands that exist, the formats that we’ve created, they’re going nowhere. They’re only gonna get better. Blah, blah, blah. We’re totally not gonna cut any jobs. There’s not gonna be any cutbacks to save billions that we need.

Jo (23:29.327)
Mm-mm.

Jo (23:37.017)
Yeah, they’re not going at all.

Yeah.

We’re not going to cancel any of these.

Ed (23:47.729)
You know, they must be going out of their way. I suppose it’s up, it’s their job to convince everyone that that is going to be the case. And then the things that have made these, you know, Paramount and One of Us Discovery great over a long period of time are still going to exist and are only going to get better. I can’t believe they weren’t doing that, right?

Jo (24:05.422)
Hmm. Yeah.

Well, yeah, and the idea is that they will have such scale and they will have such a massive inventory from sport to premium sport storytelling, all the Harry Potter stuff. mean, everything will sit under one roof. So the idea is that you are an advertising buyer’s dream. You could more or less spend all of your budget just against Warner Brothers. Sorry, Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery inventory.

Ed (24:31.834)
Yeah, true.

Jo (24:37.808)
They’ve got a ton of it, but there is an inevitable instability while these things are going through. Systems aren’t joined up. Then when, if it does pass, yeah, you’ve got to join up those systems. You’ve got to de-duplicate departments. I’m sure there’ll be tons of layoff. I that just creates uncertainty in the short term, even if it nets out as an advantage in the long term. I mean, watch him brief on one of others.

Ed (24:59.888)
I what is interesting is like you said, that heated rivalry there, because I didn’t know what it was until you explained to me then, the fact that you’ve already got NHL rights as well, they’re clearly looking for some kind of crossover there. And look, and I don’t know the makeup of an NHL audience, but I’m assuming there’s going to be some crossover there.

Jo (25:16.3)
yeah, so Heated Rivalry brought in a lot of younger viewers, a lot of women. Exactly, yeah. So I’m not surprised that given that they’ve got NHL rights and that Heated Rivalry had gone off, then they wanna tie those two things together because it really, you know, it did what Drive to Survive did, brought in a younger audience, brought in more women and.

Ed (25:24.558)
Which NHL’s crying out for,

Jo (25:42.672)
prompted a ton of noise on social media because some of the themes, the saucy themes covered in it, which yeah, doesn’t hurt. I’m looking forward to watching it actually. It’s supposed to be really good.

Ed (25:54.225)
Oh, you sold it to me now. I was gonna watch it tonight, but as we record this, I’ll be watching Burnley probably lose quite heavily to Arsenal. But if that’s going really, really badly, maybe switch it off at half time and watch Eater rather.

Jo (26:02.561)
So we’ve got a little list at the end, but I think, I mean, we’ve more or less said it, haven’t we? If you look at the upfronts, one of the big takeaways was that sports, everybody is talking about sports and we’ve seen it firsthand when we were together at Stream TV Europe. mean, sports was never far from the conversation. So it’s an interesting time for sports and sports media and rights across all of these networks and studios.

But there’s no getting away from creators as well, which you and I have been talking about for long enough, but creators being mentioned upfront as being key premium programming is, I reckon this is probably the pivot point for that now in terms of creators being seen less as influencers and more as serious kind of media creators.

Ed (27:00.965)
I mean, they’re just personalities that make great content, right? Which is what TV has always been about.

Jo (27:06.062)
And yeah, and formats and ways to connect. yeah, that’s what TV’s always been about. I think, you know, creators, you know, to a large extent, people have been sniffy about creators or traditional media has been sniffy about creators. I don’t think you can afford to be too sniffy anymore. Not when YouTube is putting them front and center, so is Fox. I mean, even War the Brother, sorry, Peacock and NBC Universal, they’ve got a pretty decent

a creator network across their sports broadcast ecosystem now. yeah, creators ain’t going anywhere. And this idea that Disney is owning fandom as their kind of monetizable unit, I think is interesting.

Ed (27:43.066)
Yeah.

Ed (27:49.457)
I mean they can claim it but I think they’re not the first ones to think about it. YouTube would probably argue that they own fandom. TikTok might argue that they own fandom, Yeah and also the irony is if you’d have tried to say fandom to anyone like you say 18 months ago they would have probably rolled their eyes and been sick in their mouths. Yeah, oh, don’t use that word.

Jo (27:58.959)
Well yeah, WWE, they’re pretty good at fandom too, yeah.

Jo (28:11.332)
Yeah, it’s a monetizable asset. Yeah, it’s stretching a bit.

Ed (28:16.9)
But now apparently it’s cool and you can use it. we’ll stop using it now. Now it’s apparently cool. Joe.

Jo (28:25.136)
Eduardo. Oh, gonna be fine. I look forward to being a listener.

Ed (28:26.926)
What am I gonna do?

Ed (28:31.226)
We’ll be fine. No, look. No, well, please do. That’ll be one more. Thank you so much, Joe, for making me sound borderline coherent over the number of months since we started this. It’s been great fun doing this with you. And I’m genuinely really happy for you, what you’ve got coming up. But I’m definitely going to miss you.

Jo (28:54.416)
I’ll miss you too. Anyway, this has been The Attention.

Ed (28:56.464)
Even my wife when I told her she went, No why? I’m like, You don’t even watch you all listen to it. There you go. See?

Jo (29:06.116)
Well, if you’ve got any suggestions for future co-hosts for Ed, email helloattentionshift.media.

Ed (29:10.288)
Yeah, definitely open to suggestions. Yeah, we will have someone on with me next week, but you’ll have to wait and see who that’s gonna be. I haven’t decided yet. Cool, thank you so much, Joe. So I’ve been Ed Abis.

Jo (29:19.044)
Yay.

I’ve been Jo Redfern, goodbye.

Ed (29:26.127)
Bye.