Next TMT Networks with Dan Jones

Your weekly deep dive into the infrastructure powering everything — wireless, broadband, satellite, and the networks being reshaped by AI, big tech, and government policy.

Hosted by veteran telecom reporter Dan Jones, formerly of Light Reading and Fierce Network, Next TMT Networks covers the stories that don't make the mainstream tech press but determine how the internet gets built, who controls it, and what it costs.

From Starlink's battle to crack the terrestrial wireless market and the AI-RAN turf war between Nvidia and Intel, to 5G stadium buildouts, spectrum policy, and the cable-wireless convergence nobody can stop — this is the newsletter and podcast for anyone who wants to understand what's happening under the hood.

New episodes weekly. Part of the Next TMT family in partnership with Media Play News.

Subscribe at nexttmt.com

00:02 Introduction to Next TMT Networks

01:44 Deep Dive into Satellite Internet and Starlink

04:45 The Role of AI in Telecom

07:56 Disruption in the Telecom Industry

09:17 Future of Handsets and Starlink

10:46 Verizon's Innovations and the World Cup

12:43 Conclusion and Future Insights

Daniel Frankel and David Bloom dig into the biggest stories in media, tech, and streaming — from Hollywood's complicated relationship with AI to Peacock's TikTok pivot, the slow-motion unraveling of 60 Minutes, and the Paramount-WBD mega-merger's legal landmines.
🤖 Hollywood's AI Civil War — Two of three filmmakers who won Amazon's Project Nara grants backed out after peer pressure from anti-AI colleagues. Meanwhile Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Godzilla, Star Wars) says AI is a creative accelerator — "an assistant director that's a billionaire on acid." And Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old YouTube creator, just opened Backrooms to $120M on a $10M budget.
🎬 YouTube Creators Are the New Studio System — Backrooms. Iron Lung. Obsession. Three films made by creators with built-in audiences, tiny budgets, and no studio gatekeepers — all outperforming legacy Hollywood franchises. Meanwhile The Mandalorian & Grogu spent $200M+ and stalled at $240M.
📺 Peacock Goes Full TikTok — Vertical NBA game highlights, micro-dramas, Bravo content, Real Shorts — Peacock's new mobile app is engineered to reclaim the 30% of Love Island's audience that drifts to YouTube. It's further along than Netflix or Disney on this.
📰 Bari Weiss Is Breaking 60 Minutes — A fifth-place broadcast institution. A new EP with zero broadcast experience. Sharon Alphonse pushed out in what looks like retribution. CBS News ranked 27th in the season's newscast ratings while ABC finished first. And now she may get her hands on CNN too — if the Paramount-WBD merger clears 13 state AGs.
⚖️ The Nexstar-Tegna Injunction & Media Consolidation — California's injunction is being appealed, Nexstar wants August hearings, and Tegna already cleared out its senior management. Who broke the rules and who has to live with it?
🏈 College Football Playoff Expansion: Fox's $100M Play — The Big Ten wants 24 teams. The SEC wants to protect its $50-100M conference championship. Fox — which missed the last broadcast rights round — is the hidden hand pushing the whole thing.
🤫 ByteDance at AI on the Lot: "Don't Quote Us" — Seed Dance told journalists not to write about Gareth Edwards' talk. Within 12 hours, two stories ran. A masterclass in bad PR — or a very weird counterintuitive strategy.
🎙️ Hosted by David Bloom & Daniel Frankel | Next TMT × Media Play News
🔔 Subscribe → https://nexttmt.com
🎧 Spotify & Apple Podcasts — Also launching: Next TMT Networks covering wireless, broadband & compute with Dan Jones

00:00 Hollywood's Fear of AI
02:59 Young Filmmakers and AI Concerns
06:05 The Rise of YouTube Creators
09:05 The Future of Star Wars
12:08 Environmental Concerns in AI
14:52 Gareth Edwards and the Role of AI in Creativity
17:56 CBS News and Barry Weiss's Controversial Moves
20:48 The Future of Broadcast News
23:12 Diversity in News Opinion
24:34 Regulatory Challenges in Media Mergers
26:49 Legal Implications of Media Ownership
30:24 Streaming Wars: The Rise of TikTok-like Features
34:44 The Future of Journalism and Media Integrity
41:01 College Sports and the Future of TV Rights

David Bloom reports live from AI on the Lot in Culver City — the fastest-growing AI filmmaking conference in Hollywood — with 2,000 filmmakers, technologists, and studios gathered next to Amazon MGM's virtual production stage.

Amazon's Project Nara is now open to independent filmmakers via a new grant program, with three animated series already greenlit. Google's Gemini Omni Flash tool is reshaping multimodal production workflows. A Spanish-Brazilian co-production called Miasma used AI for costume design and set building at a fraction of traditional cost — and a $500K horror film that ran $400K in compute tokens just screened at Cannes.

Markiplier's Iron Lung — a $3M self-distributed film that made $35M — shows what happens when YouTube creators with built-in audiences get access to serious production tools. The creator economy just got a film studio.

David also moderates a panel at Car App World on the explosion of in-vehicle apps, and why it mirrors the early days of connected TV. Plus: Cineverse's Matchpoint technology maps every emotional beat of a film for contextual ad placement — so Delta never ends up next to the plane crash scene.

The real story from AI on the Lot: Hollywood isn't uniformly afraid of AI. Two thousand people showed up voluntarily. The question is whether the industry can adapt faster than the tools can replace it.

Next TMT Talks is produced in partnership with Media Play News. New episodes twice a week on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to the newsletter at nexttmt.com.

Daniel Frankel and David Bloom dig into the biggest stories in streaming, sports rights, media consolidation, and the AI video revolution in this week's flagship Sunday edition.

🚗 Cars Are the New TVs — The modern vehicle is a rolling screen. What that means for content creators, advertisers, and the future of in-vehicle entertainment.

⚖️ NFL Antitrust Exemption Under Fire — The DOJ expands its probe to include baseball. A bipartisan "Save Our Sports" bill targets streaming deals. But is this a genuine consumer revolt — or broadcast TV using Washington to protect its turf? Rupert Murdoch's fingerprints are everywhere.

⚾ Local Sports Networks Aren't Dead — They're Just Different — Up to 15 MLB teams are now streaming refugees. But if you know where to look, fans can cut their sports bill in half. The real problem: misinformation from people with a financial interest in keeping things confusing.

🏈 College Football Playoff Expansion: Fox's Power Play — The push for a 24-team playoff isn't coming from fans. It's coming from Fox, which missed out on the championship broadcast rights and wants back in. The SEC is holding firm to protect its $100M championship game.

⚽ Arsenal Wins the Premier League — The Kroenke-owned club will generate $1B this year. But sports rights spending globally is wildly outpacing revenue — from the EPL to cricket's $6B bubble.

📺 Stephen Colbert's Exit & the Future of Late Night — CBS cancels The Late Show. What replaces it? Charlemagne tha God's morning show goes to Netflix, TBPN hits 70K subscribers, and the lines between journalism, entertainment, and tech-backed media keep blurring.

🎬 Netflix Keeps Grabbing Everything — A Brad Pitt/Quentin Tarantino prequel (Cliff Booth) gets a two-week IMAX run. Narnia is theatrical. iHeart's morning show is streaming. Netflix is now in breakfast TV, premium cinema, and live sports. What's left?

💸 Paramount + WBD Merger Debt Reality Check — S&P rates the combined entity BB+ (borderline junk). $84B in combined debt. Thirty percent of all TV viewership under one roof. An economic downturn could be catastrophic.

🤖 AI Video at YouTube, the White House & AI on the Lot — The latest from the front lines of AI-generated content, plus what it means for Hollywood production.

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

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

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

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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.