Ben Gilbert

This is the ultimate appointment viewing thing to watch on TV.

It is the premier TV flagship event, and it only gets more and more and more premier each year.

Super Bowl viewership numbers over the last couple years yes one other point that I did miss while we're in TV broadcast land on the episode David I don't know if you knew this structurally TV networks actually get paid in two ways when we were sort of talking about oh the viewership has sort of stagnated so why do they get to charge more and more and more for ads and

The networks buy the rights, you know, Fox or NBC buys a rights package.

They show the game.

I assumed they were only getting compensated with ad revenue and then sort of indirectly for like retaining those viewers for whatever programming they also had on the network.

There is a second very large revenue stream called retransmission fees.

Did you know about this?

Yeah.

So starting in the mid-late 2000s, that's at least when they kind of got material, the networks started being able to charge cable companies for the right to retransmit stuff that they have the rights to.

Right.

But if you have a cable package and in your cable package you choose to go to the NBC station, then NBC gets paid by the cable company for bringing you as a viewer.

I think that revenue stream was almost as large as the advertising revenue stream.

So they have these two big pillars of their business, the direct subscription revenue that comes from retransmission fees and the advertising revenue.

Obviously, retransmission is sort of dwindling as cable dwindles.

But the belief is, well, hey, with Peacock or with Fox Sports or any of these apps, we have our own direct monetization revenue.

Or even, you know, if we're included in YouTube TV.

Yeah, sports and in particular premium sports and in particular, particular, the NFL is really where ad spend is sort of shifting on TV spend.

Yes.

And sports are sort of eating a larger and larger percentage of the pie of TV ad revenue.