Morning Brew Daily
Netflix Draws 60M Households in Live Sports Gamble & Are Spam Calls Over?
Mon, 18 Nov 2024
Episode 455: Toby and Kyle recap the big fight over the weekend – not the one with Jake Paul & Mike Tyson – but with viewers and Netflix as people took to social media to express their frustration of the glitchy broadcast. Then, some dissension between Trump and Musk over who should be the next US Treasury Secretary. Next, a settlement between Warner Bros. Discovery and the NBA is reached to keep content on its platform, including the hit show “Inside the NBA”. Meanwhile, AI transparency and spam call declines are the weekend’s biggest winners. Lastly, important news to know in the upcoming week ahead. Download the Yahoo! Finance App (on the Play and App store) for real-time alerts on news and insights tailored to your portfolio and stock watchlists. Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Get your Morning Brew Book of Crosswords HERE: shop.morningbrew.com Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 00:00 - Spirit Airlines Files for Bankruptcy 03:00 - Netflix Tyson-Paul Fight 07:30 - Treasury Secretary Pick 12:10 - Warner Bros. Discovery NBA Rights 17:30 - Winners of the Weekend 24:15 - Week Ahead Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened with Spirit Airlines?
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Chapter 2: Why was Netflix's live sports broadcast glitchy?
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Kyle Heggie. Today, Netflix's foray into live sports broadcasting went about as shaky as Mike Tyson's jab.
And the reason you haven't been getting as many robocalls.
It's Monday, November 18th. Let's ride. Happy Monday, everyone. Hope you are having a great start to your week. I'll tell you someone who isn't having a great Monday though. Spirit Airlines. The budget airline officially filed for bankruptcy this morning after years of losses, a failed merger with JetBlue and shifting consumer preferences.
Yeah, Spirit has not been having a good time lately. Not only was it dealing with like failing demand, a failed merger, but it also had an engine recall, which had to ground a bunch of its planes earlier this year. And I think the final nail in the coffin was just post-pandemic travel inflation. It couldn't find a way to get back to where it used to be.
I'm actually quite sad about this because Spirit, like it needs to exist just spiritually for America. Yeah.
Yeah, the last few years have just been a rough time for them. Spirit hasn't had a profit since 2019. It lost more than $335 million in the first half of this year. So the writing was on the wall. That said, if you are eyeing cheap flights home for Thanksgiving, Spirit says it does expect to continue operating normally and letting customers book flights. I'm getting on my
last spirit i know spirit is down but it is not quite out yet kyle now a word from our sponsor yahoo finance kyle the purple prince has once again made its return to mbd and what a pleasure it is to have them back i was actually using yahoo finance to prepare for the show today oh do tell
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Chapter 3: Who are the contenders for Treasury Secretary?
Right.
No, and so that has been grading on Trump a little bit. And then you have, of course, the wild cards of Elon and RFK weighing in and saying, I think you should go with Lutnick. So a lot of moving pieces here.
And it is just notable how much longer Trump has taken to fill this position than every other position within his cabinet, which I will just run down quickly some of the positions that have been filled. Recently, Trump chose Chris Wright, the CEO of this oil field services company, Liberty Energy, to serve as the next president.
Energy Secretary Wright is known as one of the pioneers of the American fracking revolution. And then also you probably heard about this one last week, but Trump did name Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his new Secretary of Health and Human Services. So outside of the Treasury Secretary, this cabinet is coming together, but clearly dragging his feet on this specific position.
Yeah, but just one final note. These are just nominees. They do have to get confirmed by the Senate. And so none of these are finalized until they do that task. Warner Bros. Discovery settled their breach of contract lawsuit against the NBA, an agreement that will keep the company in business with the league for over about 10 years.
Now, the backstory on this lawsuit, the NBA signed a new rights deal with ESPN, Comcast and Amazon.com. for nearly $80 billion, and then Discovery sued, saying that this violated a matching rights clause it had with its own TNT cable network. Now, the ref has blown the whistle. They've gone away from the review, and they're not going to court.
The new settlement now focuses on the ability for Warner Bros. Discovery to develop new shows with the NBA. house some international rights for Northern Europe and Latin America, and then Bleacher Report and House of Highlights, two of their social media channels, will continue to have access to NBA content. The company is also going to partner with the NBA's digital operations.
That'll drive about $350 million in revenue for Discovery. And then finally, which was the most important to me, Warner Bros. Discovery struck a deal with Disney to license the TNT show inside the NBA. This is kind of a cult classic show of NBA followers. So we're still going to have Charles Barkley and Shaquille O'Neal on the big screen for the NBA season.
Toby, what are your thoughts about this deal? And are you pumped that we're still going to have Sir Charles on TV?
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Chapter 4: What was the outcome of the Warner Bros. Discovery and NBA settlement?
I mean, I do just want to drill in on how big this supercomputer is. It is probably going to be the biggest supercomputer in the world, and why Elon is so confident in making this bet on just buying all these GPUs is that Tesla does have a, or Elon does have a really great use case for a data center like this. Not only will it help train the model's
put forth by XAI, but also Tesla's full self-driving is expected to rely heavily on this new supercomputer. It's nicknamed Colossus, and it is just going to play a role in a lot of the enterprises, not just Tesla, not just X, but also SpaceX, also Neuralink. So he does have a lot of use for this, which is why I think investors are
ready to fork over $6 billion, pushing it to a valuation of $50 billion. It really is crazy how big of a bet and how quickly this happened. Elon didn't have an AI company really even just at this time a year ago. Now he's got one of the biggest supercomputers in the world.
Yeah, I mean, basically, if Elon wakes up and says, I'm going to start a company, he'll have $5 billion at his door in about 10 minutes. I mean, you said he didn't have an AI company, but I want to go back to when he actually co-founded OpenAI because you mentioned the lawsuit. I actually think the lawsuit is very revelatory about both Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Chapter 5: What are the weekend's biggest winners in news?
The emails that are coming out between them are now part of discovery so everyone can see them. Sam Altman, people are complaining that like we're not really sure what your like calculus is, what your true ambitions are, which is what we've heard when he got kicked out and came back exactly about Sam Altman.
For Elon, they were like, it seems like you want complete dominance and you want to own AI completely. And that's kind of what we're seeing, too. So interesting to think even, you know, five, 10 years ago, their characteristics were quite the same.
Absolutely. I do highly recommend checking out these emails as well just to see the communication styles. Because Sam Altman will write this multi-paragraph thing about why he thinks AI is the bet to make right now. And Elon Musk will respond in one sentence that literally says, like, sounds good. Count me in.
Doesn't even sign his email. So for all of you being like best, Kyle, which I do, delete it. Delete it. You don't need it. All right, Toby, let me paint a picture for you. Your phone rings and it's an unknown number. You pick it up because you're convinced it's actually your crush calling from a new number. You say hello. Nothing happens. You say hello again.
A prerecorded message plays telling you that you're behind on a car payment and you need to pay immediately. You don't even own a car. You're confused. You hang up. Yes. This is a classic American experience, but thanks to the FTC, it's happening less and less each year.
Now, the Federal Trade Commission reported that unwanted telemarketing calls are down more than 51% since 2021, and they've dropped in each of the past three years. Now, This has been a major focus for the FTC. In 2023, the agency announced Operation Stop Spam Calls. Very creative name there. The largest crackdown on illegal telemarketing in the agency's history.
They've also gotten the big phone mobile carriers to do anti-spoofing protocols and to stop people from spoofing numbers. And they've also put out new regulations around AI, saying AI telemarketing is still telemarketing. Now, for every month in the fiscal year, robocalls made up the most of consumer complaints. Those are down.
I just thought it was interesting, the other common tactics, imposters. debt reduction, fake calls, and then energy, solar and utilities, fake calls. Now the FTC said they'll continue to be vigilant on this front. They also clarified that this doesn't mean you don't have to call your grandma anymore. So please pick up the phone and call her. Toby, have you felt like spam calls are down?
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Chapter 6: What should we expect in the week ahead?
I do think generally speaking, there have been less. I'm still one of those people. I never pick up from a random number.
I never do, but I feel like I get so many spam calls still.
Right. It is one of those things where the FTC did finally put its flag in the sand and say, like, we are going to do something about this because it truly was just a massive problem that a lot of people... I mean, you took us through that beautiful experience at the start of the story. A lot of people have had that experience.
I think one of the big things that the FTC did is that they now have the power to directly file a federal court complaint to force these scammers to return stolen money. So they've actually just... basically grown some claws, grown some teeth, and actually go after some of these big robocall, big scamming operations.
They estimate that the impersonation-based scam calls have cost consumers $1.1 billion during the last year. So this is still a pretty big problem. But Also, going after these AI-generated calls as well, that's been a big part as well. So it is good to see those numbers going down.
One segment of these spam calls, though, that did jump in that you mentioned a little bit is that debt reduction calls actually spiked 85% from last year. So we are still seeing these random, I mean, car warranty calls have gone down, but debt reduction calls have gone up.
Yeah.
you see these scammers kind of maneuvering and countermaneuvering to the FTC's move. Now let's see what's on the docket for the week ahead. The G20 summit begins today in Rio. Top world leaders, including the US's Joe Biden, France's Emmanuel Macron, and China's Xi Jinping,
as well as India's prime minister, will gather in Brazil for a two-day summit to try and address some major geopolitical issues. It's also the first major gathering of leaders since Donald Trump was elected, who has pledged to enact policies that put America first over international cooperation. So, could be a little testy, Kyle.
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