ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro on streaming, the NFL and sports betting
The media industry has been waiting for ESPN to cut the cord for a decade. Now it’s finally happening: This week the sports TV giant will let you start streaming — without a cable TV subscription — for $30 a month.
Why now? ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro is quite frank about it: Along with his boss — Disney CEO Bob Iger — he wanted to make as much money from the cable TV business as he could before it dwindled away. And even now, Pitaro says he hopes the new service brings in customers who don’t have cable — as opposed to getting ones who do still pay for cable to trade down.
That illustrates the issue facing all of the big TV players these days: They know the future is a digital one, where they’ll have to work much harder to win and keep customers. So they’re hanging on to the old TV model as long as they can. At the same time they’re trying to build a profitable streaming future. That tension is the main thrust of this conversation I had with Pitaro this week in Disney’s new Manhattan headquarters. We also had time to get into his recent deal with the NFL, his ongoing commitment to sports betting — and whether ESPN is still committed to diversity in 2025.
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A Busy - and Expensive - Summer for AI, with NYT's Mike Isaac
What makes a particular engineer worth $250 million to Mark Zuckerberg?
What does Trump 2.0 mean — and not mean — to people building large language models?
I didn’t know the answers to these questions either. So I got the New York Times’ Mike Isaac, who covers this stuff for a living, to walk me through some of the biggest questions in AI right now — which means we’re also getting at some of the biggest questions in tech.
Warning: This is a pants-free episode. Probably still Safe For Work, though.
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Why the Algorithm is Making Comedy Boom, Again
The last time I talked to Jesse David Fox about the comedy boom it was… March 5, 2020.
Since then, some things have changed. But in other ways it’s just the same: comedy - or at least, some kinds of comedy - seems almost custom-built for our current technological and cultural moment, and it’s easier than ever to get this stuff on your devices whenever you want. Or whenever the algorithm thinks you want it.
Fox is a great person to talk to about this stuff: he covers comedy very, very seriously over at Vulture, and on his Good One podcast, and he has a lot of thoughts about the way tech - and perhaps politics - is shaping the stuff that makes us laugh.
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What is TV’s endgame?
A decade ago, Disney CEO Bob Iger freaked out the media industry by acknowledging something many of us saw coming — his previously unassailable TV business was starting to erode.
But even with a 10-year warning, today’s moguls seem unable to copewith 2025’s reality: The pay TV business is permanently eroding, and there’s nothing in its place that’s likely to generate the same kind of revenue and profit.
But the people who run Big TV are trying to find answers, anyway. So I asked Lightshed analyst Rich Greenfield to talk through some of their moves. What will David and Larry Ellison do once they finally buy Paramount? What are the prospects for ESPN’s soon-to-launch streamer? What about Fox’s soon-to-launch streamer? Who’s going to buy all of these ailing cable TV networks that are coming on the market? And what kind of deals - if any - can get done in the Trump 2.0 era?
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Why Trump is defunding NPR and PBS - and suing Rupert Murdoch
Reporting on the place you work is not fun. But it is an occupational hazard for media reporters — particularly for NPR’s David Folkenflik.
That’s because National Public Radio — along with Public Broadcasting Service, its TV counterpart — is quite frequently the target of attacks from critics on the right, who would like the federal government to stop funding it. Now it looks like they’ve gotten their way, and the two networks are going to lose a combined $500 million a year.
So what happens now? And how did we get here? And should the federal government be funding media organizations at all? We discuss.
And, since Folkenflik is also one of my go-to Rupert Murdoch experts, I asked him to stick around and opine about Donald Trump’s libel suit against Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal. Who has more to lose, and who is likely to blink first?
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Media and tech aren’t just intersecting — they’re fully intertwined. And to understand how those worlds work, and what they mean for you, veteran journalist Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers - and gets them to spell it out in plain, BS-free English.
Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
New Zealand