Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Wednesday, May 10th, 2023

The future of AI and streaming TV isn't what you might think

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Wednesday, May 10th, 2023.

LIKE EVERY OTHER USER, TUCKER CARLSON LIKELY TO BE DISAPPOINTED BY ELON MUSK'S TWITTER
Ex-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson made news yesterday when he posted a video on Twitter announcing some sort of vague project that would be on the social media platform. He describes the project as similar to what viewers saw on Fox News, although there weren't any details beyond that.

While I haven't been able to get a better sense of what his show might look like (and I'm not convinced he knows for sure at this point), after talking to several people at Twitter as well as someone familiar with Carlson's thinking, a few things are becoming clear. Carlson appears to believe his current Fox contract (which they are enforcing through January 2025) allows him to post videos on Twitter. Although likely not long-form shows. He is apparently hoping to monetize the videos using ads as well as Twitter's planned subscription service. One wrinkle in that plan is the fear that the subscriber-based videos might not be allowed under the current Fox contract.

Carlson apparently hopes that the videos and the attention he would receive would convince Fox to set him free and there are multiple reports that he has offered to forgo around $25 million in future salary in order to get out of the contract.

One of the wrinkles in this plan is that according to several Twitter engineers I spoke with, the advertising component is nowhere near reliable enough to handle Carlson's project. And we won't even get into the challenges of finding enough advertisers who are both willing to be shown against Carlson's videos and have the budget to make it worthwhile.

As for the subscriber-based video plan, that technology is also apparently a work in progress. One Twitter engineer described the process as "trying to build a reliable car out of parts from a truck, a Pinto, an old school bus and an E-Bike."

So this should be interesting to watch.....

THE PROMISE OF AI AND CONTENT DISCOVERY
I've previously speculated a bit about how AI could help with the streaming industry's problems with content discovery. Now one real world example shows just how it might be done. Skift describes itself as "the daily homepage for the world’s largest industry, we are the leading news source for travel executives" and that is a pretty solid explanation. The company covers the industry better than anyone else in the sector and one of the things I've always admired about Skift is that it's nimble. They will change direction on a dime to reflect the needs of their readers and they have built out a great portfolio of products and events that exist to not just make money, but solidify their relationship with their customers.

So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see that Skift has rolled out an AI chabot called "Ask Skift," which was trained on all of Skift's content for the last 11 years as well as public SEC filings and other industry data:

Until now, we had a package-based relationship with our reader – a package we created and presented to you, in the form of a story, a research report or a conference. Now, with the new Generative AI tech, it is possible to have a Q&A based relationship with our users, at scale, in a way that just wasn’t feasible before. If we are the expert brand in the travel industry, we should have all the answers to your queries as we build this. For most part, we do, locked into various packages and this allows us to deconstruct our package and create custom answers to every query you have. 

That is the construct we are using to build the next, deeper phase of our relationship with you, indeed the next phase of Skift eleven years in, to graduate you from a Skift reader to a Skift user.

I have a couple of initial thoughts about this. If I was Penske Media, I would work on the AI chatbot approach instead of things such as Variety's VIP+ subscription plan. Train an AI chatbot on every bit of content from all of the Penske publications and make it all available as a standalone subscription. People can search the archives, research trends and discover context using what would be the entertainment news world's biggest dataset of content.

And if I were Google, I would make this bot a core part of Google TV. Train the AI chatbot on every piece of TV data it can find: listings, reviews, where content can be streamed, where someone can watch tonight's game. By focusing just on the data that amplifies the viewer's experience, they would have an app that would be as integral to television viewing as the TV remote. Because while Alexa or Siri or various search engines offer some of that data, it's too filled with extraneous data noise to be consistently accurate and helpful.

Or imagine a Netflix AI chatbot that would allow you to ask "I want to watch that NCIS episode where Jethro goes hunting with his Dad," and it instantly brings up to the link to watch. 

There are so many possibilities here and predictably, the smaller vertical media companies are getting there first.

DISNEY MAKES NEWS, ALTHOUGH IT'S NOT CLEAR EXACTLY WHAT THE NEWS MIGHT MEAN
Today was the earnings call for The Walt Disney Company and you have no doubt read the headlines about it, so I want to focus on a couple of non-financial highlights.

CEO Bob Iger announced the company would be pulling some content off of Hulu and Disney+ in order to license it out to other platforms. That could lead to as much as a $1.8 billion content charge-off cost. It's not clear what content that might be, but my guess would be that lesser NatGeo programming would be a likely start. There certainly would be interest in on other platforms. Likewise, some of Disney+'s non-Marvel & Star Wars Universe original content is another safe bet. Disney+ has struggled to get people to watch them and some of those shows are quite good. I suspect Netflix would love to get something like the recently canceled National Treasure spin-off. 

I see a lot of people arguing that this move puts pressure on Netflix to do the same thing - boost revenue by licensing out old content. On the contrary, I think this makes Netflix less likely to do it. While the revenue would be nice, it's not necessary for them and if they want to boost monetization of lesser-viewed content, they could roll out some Netflix-branded FAST channels that would help with that while still keeping the content on the main Netflix platform. I suspect this will also give Netflix the opportunity to cherry pick some content from WBD, Disney and even Amazon, as those companies seek license content out to the highest bidder.

But the biggest takeaway from the earnings call was Iger's announcement that at least some Hulu content would be part of Disney+ in what he describes as "one app" approach. Some analysts quickly saw this as Iger signaling that Disney will either sell off Hulu or roll it completely into Disney+. But I don't see either of those possibilities happening in the near future. And it's worth noting that while Iger didn't offer any thoughts about the issue, he did say that his mind had changed over the past few months.

The existence of the current Hulu/ESPN+/Disney+ bundle makes it much less likely that everything will be rolled into one app. There are a lot of content and contractual reasons why that would be problematical, but one technical reason is that the current Disney+ platform isn't designed to handle it. The entire Disney+ tech stack would have to be rebuilt from the bottom up and while the company has continued to tweak it, my understanding is that it is not capable of handling live TV at the level required to continue offering Hulu Live TV as well as various ESPN live products. In fact, one of the best side effects for customers who subscribe to the current bundle is that live sports from ESPN+ will show up on Hulu, integrated seamlessly into the user interface. Yes, it can be clunky and sometimes impossible to find a specific game. But it is there.

The other technical challenge is the same one that faces Warner Bros. Discovery with their new Max app. It's one thing to have a lot of similar content that you have to fit into one consolidated app. But it's an entirely different challenge to cram movies, TV shows, various originals from multiple networks as well as Live products into one app and still keep the end results usable. Try and imagine what an app would look like that included Disney+, Hulu, Hulu Live TV and ESPN+ in one combined interface. That idea alone is likely enough to doom any consolidated streaming product.

TWEET OF THE DAY

WHAT'S NEW FOR WEDNESDAY:
*African Queens: Queen Cleopatra (Netflix)
* Class Of '09 (Hulu)
* Dance Brothers Series Premiere (Netflix)
* Missing: Dead Or Alive (Netflix)
* The Game Show Show (ABC)
* The Muppets Mayhem Series Premiere (Disney+)
* We Need To Talk About America (Fuse)

Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.

SEE YOU TUESDAY!

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.