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.

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.

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Sports may be the most valuable content in media — but the streaming era is making it harder than ever for fans to find the games they want to watch.

In this episode of Next TMT Talks, hosts David Bloom and Daniel Frankel are joined by Jon Giegengack, founder of Hub Entertainment Research, to break down new research on how sports fans are navigating a fragmented media ecosystem.

The conversation explores why streaming services are both expanding sports access and simultaneously creating confusion for fans trying to find games across multiple platforms.

Hub’s latest research surveys thousands of sports fans to track how their viewing habits are changing as leagues move more games to streaming platforms .

• Why 31% of sports fans have now cut the cord
• Why sports fans are increasingly frustrated trying to find games across platforms
• The growing role of YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram in sports discovery
• Why documentaries like Drive to Survive are creating new sports fans
• The rise of sports betting and fantasy sports as engagement drivers
• How streaming platforms are changing sports rights economics
• Why universal search across streaming services may be the next big TV feature
• How younger fans consume sports through highlights and social media

Topics Covered