David Bloom and Daniel Frankel break down the week's biggest stories in media, tech, and telecom.

🚀 SpaceX's $1.75 Trillion Valuation — What's actually driving it: Starlink's satellite-to-device dominance, NASA contracts, and government policy tailwinds from the FCC. Plus, what it means for Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire — and why Daniel has complicated feelings about it.

🌊 Undersea Cables & the Internet's Hidden Fragility — 95% of global data runs through fiber optic cables clustered in geopolitical chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz and the Baltic Sea. How vulnerable is the infrastructure that powers everything?

🎯 Authentic Brands Group Goes Public — The $38B brand machine behind Shaq, Kevin Hart, and David Beckham is heading to market. Their pitch: "content drives commerce." What that means for celebrity IP and the future of brand licensing.

📺 The Disney Bundle Actually Works — Hub Research confirms 59% of Disney+/Hulu/ESPN subscribers have zero plans to cancel. David and Daniel dig into how ESPN Plus transformed from obscure college softball to must-have sports streaming.

📰 CBS News Civil War: Is Bari Weiss Getting Edged Out? — Anderson Cooper's exit from 60 Minutes, Paramount's crushing debt load, the Skydance merger hanging on 13 state attorneys general, and why the real issue isn't who runs CBS News.

🎬 The Mandalorian & Grogu: Can a TV Show Survive as a Movie? — The biggest test yet of whether streaming-native IP can convert audiences to the theater.

🎰 Banning Gambling Ads for Under-18s — A bipartisan bill takes aim at digital gambling advertising targeting minors. The leagues made a Faustian deal. Now the cleanup begins.

🏀 NBA Playoffs & Victor Wembanyama — Is Wemby already the most dominant player anyone has ever seen? Plus: the $76B TV rights deal is looking very smart right now.

🎙️ Hosted by David Bloom & Daniel Frankel | Next TMT × Media Play News

🔔 Subscribe → https://nexttmt.com 🎧 Spotify & Apple Podcasts

00:00 SpaceX Valuation and Market Dynamics

05:58 Authentic Brands and Celebrity Influence

12:02 Fiber Optics and Global Connectivity

17:54 Disney Bundle Effectiveness and Star Wars Future

21:06 The Future of Star Wars and Development Challenges

22:08 Leadership Changes in News Organizations

23:59 The State of Broadcast News Ratings

25:03 Political Dynamics and Future Prospects

26:30 The Impact of Talent on News Organizations

27:19 The Evolution of 60 Minutes and Its Talent

28:56 Mergers and Acquisitions in Media

30:31 The Future of the NBA and Emerging Stars

35:34 The Influence of Gambling on Sports Broadcasting

39:29 Upcoming Events and Opportunities in Streaming

David Bloom and Daniel Frankel break down the biggest stories in media, technology, and telecom this week.

📺 The TV OS Power Grab – A Laguna Beach reunion special beat Netflix on Looper Insights' platform visibility rankings. How? Roku put it there. With 100M households, Roku — and soon Google TV with YouTube Shorts integrated into the discovery layer — has the home field advantage that's quietly making or breaking what you watch. Second-tier streamers like Peacock and Paramount+ are increasingly vulnerable.

🎮 Roblox's Older Audience Play – 131 million daily users, 8 million experiences, and now a deliberate push to grow with its aging user base into the 18-25 demo. Major game publishers are starting to treat it like a console. David reports from his Web Summit Vancouver conversation with Roblox CMO Jared West.

🛰️ AT&T, Verizon & T-Mobile Team Up — Sort Of – The three biggest wireless carriers formed a joint venture framework for satellite connectivity standards. Musk isn't happy. Analysts aren't sure what to make of it. Is it a real deal or a trial balloon ahead of SpaceX's IPO?

⚽ FIFA's $13 Billion World Cup – While host cities celebrate, FIFA is pocketing an estimated $13B in TV rights, locking down stadiums for a month before games, and keeping nearly all revenue. Hotels, restaurants, and Airbnb hosts are quietly asking: what's in it for us?

🤖 Gossip Goblin & AI Filmmaking – California-in-Sweden creator Zach London is making artistically striking AI horror films that are turning heads in Hollywood. A preview of what's coming at the AI on the Lot conference on the Amazon lot later this month.

🏀 NFL Streaming, the Next Bond Search & More – Netflix gets 5 NFL games in 2026, Congress tries to legislate streaming football, Wembanyama's future, CBS's decline, and Amazon's search for the next James Bond.

🎙️ Hosted by David Bloom & Daniel Frankel | A Next TMT production

🔔 Subscribe for weekly media, tech & telecom analysis → https://nexttmt.com🎧 Also on Spotify & Apple Podcasts

David Bloom and Daniel Frankel break down the biggest stories in media, technology, and telecom this week.

📺 The TV OS Power Grab – A Laguna Beach reunion special beat Netflix on Looper Insights' platform visibility rankings. How? Roku put it there. With 100M households, Roku — and soon Google TV with YouTube Shorts integrated into the discovery layer — has the home field advantage that's quietly making or breaking what you watch. Second-tier streamers like Peacock and Paramount+ are increasingly vulnerable.

🎮 Roblox's Older Audience Play – 131 million daily users, 8 million experiences, and now a deliberate push to grow with its aging user base into the 18-25 demo. Major game publishers are starting to treat it like a console. David reports from his Web Summit Vancouver conversation with Roblox CMO Jared West.

🛰️ AT&T, Verizon & T-Mobile Team Up — Sort Of – The three biggest wireless carriers formed a joint venture framework for satellite connectivity standards. Musk isn't happy. Analysts aren't sure what to make of it. Is it a real deal or a trial balloon ahead of SpaceX's IPO?

⚽ FIFA's $13 Billion World Cup – While host cities celebrate, FIFA is pocketing an estimated $13B in TV rights, locking down stadiums for a month before games, and keeping nearly all revenue. Hotels, restaurants, and Airbnb hosts are quietly asking: what's in it for us?

🤖 Gossip Goblin & AI Filmmaking – California-in-Sweden creator Zach London is making artistically striking AI horror films that are turning heads in Hollywood. A preview of what's coming at the AI on the Lot conference on the Amazon lot later this month.

🏀 NFL Streaming, the Next Bond Search & More – Netflix gets 5 NFL games in 2026, Congress tries to legislate streaming football, Wembanyama's future, CBS's decline, and Amazon's search for the next James Bond.

🎙️ Hosted by David Bloom & Daniel Frankel | A Next TMT production

🔔 Subscribe for weekly media, tech & telecom analysis → https://nexttmt.com 🎧 Also on Spotify & Apple Podcasts

Vancouver ate Hollywood — and TV's upfront revolution

AI is upending how television sells ads, EchoStar is breathing its last, and Vancouver just quietly became the world's animation capital. David Bloom reports live from Web Summit.

00:00

TV upfronts 2025: impressions are out, ROI is in

NBC Universal, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery all pitched agentic AI ad systems this week — promising advertisers a direct line from ad exposure to actual purchase. But can legacy TV really close that attribution loop the way Amazon can?

07:00

Nielsen's measurement crisis and the TCL lawsuit

As Nielsen struggles to transition from analog panels to smart TV data collection, a new class action against TCL highlights just how murky — and legally fraught — TV audience measurement has become.

08:00

Vancouver ate Hollywood: the animation cluster LA forgot to build

Sony Imageworks, Blue Ant Studios (Spider-Verse), and Disney Animation (Frozen 3) are all thriving in Vancouver — with government seed funding, workforce pipelines, and over 100 VFX companies. Meanwhile LA doubled its tax incentive and still can't keep productions home.

15:00

AI branding, copyright, and the EU's 15% fine cliff

Companies racing to market with AI-generated brands may find they can't copyright what they built — and in the EU, failure to label AI-created content can trigger fines of up to 15% of annual revenue.

18:00

K-pop Demon Hunters and the Netflix global hit formula

Sony Imageworks didn't know what they had. Netflix didn't know what they had. Then superfans found it — and it became Netflix's most watched title. What the surprise runaway hit reveals about how global streaming actually works.

26:00

EchoStar's endgame: spectrum seized, $40B in deals, a SpaceX stake

Dish lost another 366,000 pay TV subscribers. AT&T and Amazon bought $40B of its spectrum. The FCC — under Brendan Carr — effectively forced the sale. EchoStar walks away asset-light with a $10B SpaceX stake and Boost Mobile. Is this the next Yahoo?

33:00

Charlie Ergen, force majeure, and a very convenient escrow

Ergen tried to invoke force majeure to avoid paying $2.4B to tower vendors. The FCC required an escrow account. The whole saga — and what it says about doing business in the current regulatory environment.

Meta Dethrones Google, Nielsen Holds On & the Musk vs. OpenAI Saga Heats Up

David Bloom and Daniel Frankel are back with another packed Sunday conversation covering the biggest stories in technology, media, and telecom.

📺 Nielsen & TV MeasurementThe so-called "TV measurement revolt" heading into upfront season turns out to be more noise than reality. Nielsen's controversial shift from analog panels to big data — smart TV and set-top-box driven measurement — caused audience numbers to swing dramatically for some networks, triggering a backlash. But with Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and major agencies all re-upping with Nielsen, the legacy measurement giant remains the de facto standard. For now.

💰 Meta Overtakes Google in Ad RevenueFor the first time ever, Meta's ad revenue surpassed Google's — $244 billion to $240 billion. David and Daniel dig into what's driving Meta's dominance: hyper-targeted AI-powered advertising across 3.5 billion users on Facebook, Instagram Reels, and WhatsApp. Meanwhile, Google's advantage lies in its enterprise and full-funnel business reach beyond pure consumer advertising. Also on the radar: Amazon's rapidly growing ad business, the struggles of open programmatic platforms like The Trade Desk, and why walled gardens keep getting bigger.

📡 FAST TV & Connected TV TrendsNew survey data from Hub Entertainment Research shows 46% of viewers now consider FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) a must-have, with 60% watching it in addition to their paid streaming services. David and Daniel explore how FAST channels have become the modern equivalent of comfort-food TV — background viewing that fills a very different need than prestige streaming.

🎬 Immersive Entertainment: Harry Potter at CosmDavid shares his brush with the premiere of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as a shared immersive experience at Cosm — the 87-foot dome venue he calls "the world's greatest sports bar." With the Sphere's Wizard of Oz already surpassing $250 million at the box office for a 90-year-old film, immersive cinema is emerging as a genuine new category that gets people off the couch.

🎥 The Streaming Wars & Christopher NolanA detour into the pandemic-era decision by Warner Bros. to release its entire 2021 slate simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max — and the unintended consequence: Christopher Nolan walked to Universal, made Oppenheimer, won seven Oscars, and now has The Odyssey arriving in two months.

🏈 NFL Rights & the Comcast StandoffComcast blacked out NFL Network and Red Zone as leverage in rights negotiations — a signal of just how complicated the NFL's upcoming media rights reset is becoming. With deals being negotiated now for a 2033 landscape, nobody quite knows what distribution will even look like by then.

👟 Nike's World Cup CampaignWith the FIFA World Cup arriving June 11th, Nike dropped a cinematic five-minute ad featuring Timothée Chalamet, Bad Bunny, Lionel Messi, Trinity Rodman, Lamine Yamal, and a de-aged David Beckham. David's marketing industry contacts called it exactly the kind of cultural moment Nike is known for — and the kind Adidas has been trying to match.

⚖️ Musk vs. OpenAIThe trial continues to unfold. A personal diary kept by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman was entered into discovery — and reportedly contains entries that support Musk's legal premise that converting OpenAI from nonprofit to for-profit amounted to misappropriating donor funds. David's takeaway: don't write anything in a diary you wouldn't want read aloud in court.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Subscribe to the Next TMT newsletter: nexttmt.com
• Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube

Like, share, subscribe, and let us know what you think.

Here are polished show notes ready to paste into Beehiiv:

Next TMT Talks | Episode Show Notes

Meta Dethrones Google, Nielsen Holds On & the Musk vs. OpenAI Saga Heats Up

David Bloom and Daniel Frankel are back with another packed Sunday conversation covering the biggest stories in technology, media, and telecom.

📺 Nielsen & TV Measurement The so-called "TV measurement revolt" heading into upfront season turns out to be more noise than reality. Nielsen's controversial shift from analog panels to big data — smart TV and set-top-box driven measurement — caused audience numbers to swing dramatically for some networks, triggering a backlash. But with Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and major agencies all re-upping with Nielsen, the legacy measurement giant remains the de facto standard. For now.

💰 Meta Overtakes Google in Ad Revenue For the first time ever, Meta's ad revenue surpassed Google's — $244 billion to $240 billion. David and Daniel dig into what's driving Meta's dominance: hyper-targeted AI-powered advertising across 3.5 billion users on Facebook, Instagram Reels, and WhatsApp. Meanwhile, Google's advantage lies in its enterprise and full-funnel business reach beyond pure consumer advertising. Also on the radar: Amazon's rapidly growing ad business, the struggles of open programmatic platforms like The Trade Desk, and why walled gardens keep getting bigger.

📡 FAST TV & Connected TV Trends New survey data from Hub Entertainment Research shows 46% of viewers now consider FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) a must-have, with 60% watching it in addition to their paid streaming services. David and Daniel explore how FAST channels have become the modern equivalent of comfort-food TV — background viewing that fills a very different need than prestige streaming.

🎬 Immersive Entertainment: Harry Potter at Cosm David shares his brush with the premiere of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as a shared immersive experience at Cosm — the 87-foot dome venue he calls "the world's greatest sports bar." With the Sphere's Wizard of Oz already surpassing $250 million at the box office for a 90-year-old film, immersive cinema is emerging as a genuine new category that gets people off the couch.

🎥 The Streaming Wars & Christopher Nolan A detour into the pandemic-era decision by Warner Bros. to release its entire 2021 slate simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max — and the unintended consequence: Christopher Nolan walked to Universal, made Oppenheimer, won seven Oscars, and now has The Odyssey arriving in two months.

🏈 NFL Rights & the Comcast Standoff Comcast blacked out NFL Network and Red Zone as leverage in rights negotiations — a signal of just how complicated the NFL's upcoming media rights reset is becoming. With deals being negotiated now for a 2033 landscape, nobody quite knows what distribution will even look like by then.

👟 Nike's World Cup Campaign With the FIFA World Cup arriving June 11th, Nike dropped a cinematic five-minute ad featuring Timothée Chalamet, Bad Bunny, Lionel Messi, Trinity Rodman, Lamine Yamal, and a de-aged David Beckham. David's marketing industry contacts called it exactly the kind of cultural moment Nike is known for — and the kind Adidas has been trying to match.

⚖️ Musk vs. OpenAI The trial continues to unfold. A personal diary kept by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman was entered into discovery — and reportedly contains entries that support Musk's legal premise that converting OpenAI from nonprofit to for-profit amounted to misappropriating donor funds. David's takeaway: don't write anything in a diary you wouldn't want read aloud in court.

🔗 Links & Resources

Like, share, subscribe, and let us know what you think.

Disney about to walk away from broadcast television? What does Jimmy Kimmel's FCC trouble actually mean for free speech and media? And what does the former head of EA and Unity think about the future of gaming?

David Bloom and Daniel Frankel break it all down on this episode of Next TMT Talks — your go-to podcast for technology, media, and telecom analysis.

In this episode:

Sponsors & Partners: A big thank you to Media Play News for supporting the midweek edition of Next TMT Talks.

📬 Subscribe to the newsletter & podcast: NextTMT.com 🎟️ See us live at Stream TV Denver — daily episodes coming soon!

chapters:

00:00 Jimmy Kimmel and Media Distractions 05:43 The Future of Broadcasting and Streaming 10:54 Challenges in the Gaming Industry 16:15 Insights from John Riccitiello on Innovation 21:38 The Evolution of Entertainment Delivery

At NAB 2026, David Bloom sits down with Matt Smith, Chief Evangelist at Akta, to discuss how AI is reshaping broadcasting, streaming, and digital media workflows. From automating metadata tagging and improving monetization, to creating more efficient content production pipelines, this conversation explores how broadcasters, sports leagues, and media companies can do more with less. Topics include: AI-powered video workflows Smarter ad monetization through contextual tagging Vertical video & social media publishing Broadcasters adapting to streaming platforms Why AI must be built into the foundation—not added later The future of TV operations and content creation If you work in media, streaming, sports, or advertising, this is a must-watch conversation from NAB. 🎧 Subscribe for more executive interviews and insider analysis from the worlds of Tech, Media & Telecom. #NAB2026 #AI #Broadcasting #Streaming #MediaTech #SportsMedia #AdTech #NextTMT

Cable TV is fading fast — but what comes next? In this episode of Next TMT Talks, David Bloom and Daniel Frankel break down the massive shifts reshaping media, technology, and telecom.

We dive into the decline of traditional cable giants like Comcast and Charter, why the NFL has become the most valuable force in television, and whether entertainment programming still matters to broadcasters. Plus, Microsoft brings back the Xbox brand, AI data centers face major resistance, and OpenAI's Sora future remains uncertain.

Also in this episode:

If you care about streaming, sports media, tech disruption, AI, cable TV, broadcast news, or the future of entertainment — this episode is for you.

👉 Subscribe to Next TMT for weekly insider analysis at the intersection of media, technology and telecom.

#NFL #CableTV #StreamingWars #Microsoft #Xbox #AI #MediaNews #Comcast #Charter #OpenAI #NextTMT

00:00 Introduction and Overview of the Podcast 00:48 The State of Cable Companies and Local Broadcast Journalism 03:15 Consolidation in Local Broadcasting and Its Implications 07:47 The NFL's Dominance in Broadcasting and Viewer Engagement 11:29 The Future of Entertainment Programming in Broadcasting 16:10 The Changing Landscape of Connectivity and Cable Companies 18:28 Cultural Preferences in Streaming Content 19:13 Discussion on the Michael Jackson Biopic 20:54 The Legacy of Michael Jackson 23:16 Evaluating Biopics and Criticism 25:06 The White House Correspondence Dinner Dynamics 28:07 Microsoft's Gaming Strategy Shift 30:35 Data Center Challenges and AI Compute 34:33 China's Energy Landscape and AI Competition 36:26 Innovations in Satellite Data Centers 37:38 Coyote vs. Acme: A Modern Take on Classic Characters

Live from NAB Las Vegas, David Bloom and Daniel Frankel break down the biggest trends shaping media, sports, streaming, and broadcast technology. This episode of Next TMT Talks covers: 🏀 Why Peacock is gaining momentum after the Super Bowl, Olympics and NBA 📈 What rising sports ratings mean for streaming economics 🌍 The incredible scale of the upcoming FIFA World Cup across North America 📡 How Verizon and global partners will power distribution to billions of viewers 📱 Why vertical video and mobile-first content are exploding 🤖 AI tools transforming production, search, metadata and workflows 🎥 What stood out most on the NAB show floor From sports rights to next-gen media infrastructure, this conversation explores where television is headed next. 🎧 Subscribe for weekly conversations on streaming, telecom, advertising, AI and media strategy. 📩 Visit: www.nexttmt.com #NABShow #Streaming #Peacock #WorldCup #SportsMedia #AI #Broadcasting #NextTMT