The Weekly Listen: Takeaways from Super Bowl LVIII; Fox, ESPN, and WBD new mega sports streaming service, and more

On today's podcast episode, we discuss the main takeaways from this year's Super Bowl; which ads had the biggest impact; how Fox, ESPN, and Warner Bros. Discovery's (WBD's) new giant sports streaming service announcement changes the game; some unbelievable facts about trees; and more. Tune in to the discussion with our forecasting writer Ethan Cramer-Flood, director of forecasting Oscar Orozco, and analyst Max Willens.

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Episode Transcript:

Marcus Johnson:

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Oscar Orozco:

Because the faithful [inaudible 00:00:56]-

Marcus Johnson:

I am impressed [inaudible 00:00:57]-

Oscar Orozco:

... No matter what. That's what it's about.

Marcus Johnson:

I respect that. This is also the show that sent Ethan, the runner show, 10 minutes before recording and got sent back the dumpster fire emoji.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I had sort of assumed that maybe we were going to talk about the Super Bowl, but it would've been nice to have some information ahead of time.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes, Stuart, that was my fault entirely. I'm Marcus Johnson, who's fully responsible in today's show. Takeaways from the big game, we dissect the new giant sports streaming service yet to be properly announced, and have some facts about trees. Join me for this episode. We have three people, let's meet them. We start with our director of forecasting based in New York City. It's Oscar Orozco.

Oscar Orozco:

Hello, Marcus. It's been a while. Happy to be back.

Marcus Johnson:

Welcome back. Did you have to wear that?

Oscar Orozco:

Thank you.

Max Willens:

Did you have money on the game?

Marcus Johnson:

You're from New York.

Oscar Orozco:

Of course.

Marcus Johnson:

You're not even from the Bay-

Oscar Orozco:

We are faithful.

Marcus Johnson:

I can't with you. All right, we're also joined by-

Oscar Orozco:

It doesn't matter, 49ers fans are-

Max Willens:

Don't listen to him, Oscar, this is what you're supposed to be doing.

Marcus Johnson:

We're also joined by Max Willens. He is one of our senior analysts covering everything digital advertising and media based in Philadelphia.

Max Willens:

Yo.

Marcus Johnson:

We finally have our principal forecasting writer, also based in New York. It's Ethan Cramer-Flood.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Marcus, I'm sorry I couldn't be your Valentine this year, but I appreciate you still having me on.

Marcus Johnson:

You're half welcome. What do we have in store for you today? Takeaways from the big game. We'll start there, of course. We then move to a Super Bowl edition of What's the Point? Our contestants try to win make-believe points, and we give them, I guess a Lombardi Trophy and then we end with some facts about trees. There'll be some other stuff as well, so that might be worth sticking around for. The tree tree stuff, probably not. We start of course with the story of the week.

Takeaways from the big game. The Kansas City Chiefs just beat the San Francisco 49ers in a thrilling overtime win in Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas, only the second Super Bowl ever to see overtime and 123 million people tuned into the game according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics' preliminary figures, making it America's most watched TV show of all time. That 123 million is up 7% from last year. Great news for advertisers who were spending about $7 million on average for a 30-second ad slot at the game, and that's just for the ad slot. Jeremy Goldman points out that they also have to pay to make the ad, so total costs can come close to about $20 million for that 30 seconds of airtime. But we start with our first question, I want to ask you two in this segment. One is going to be your takeaway from the game, the second your favorite ad. We start with takeaway from the Super Bowl. Max.

Max Willens:

I guess I would start with, it's funny you point out the high cost that brands often incur paying for their Super Bowl ads because Temu apparently decided, the hell with paying big money for the spot itself, I'm just going to spend all that money buying all the airtime I possibly can, and that seems to have worked. I've seen a bunch of research suggesting that the number of post ad searches by spot was tabulated and Temu won going away. And I think that there's something to be said for people have been aware for over a decade that Super Bowl airtime is really expensive and I think that the notion of buying multiple spots for something so simple is really kind of powerful. So I feel like in a weird way, Temu kind of won the Super Bowl, even though they aired inarguably the cheapest looking Super Bowl ad in the history of Super Bowl ads.

Marcus Johnson:

It's a lot of money upfront, but there was some Kantar research saying Super Bowl ads in 2022 had an ROI of $5 for every dollar spent. And so, it seems like they get that back and then some in terms of their return on investments, so well worth it.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Was it three? Did they run three times? That's what I remember.

Marcus Johnson:

At least.

Max Willens:

I think was five, but that might have been the... I was very tired watching it. I think it was more than three. I feel confident about that.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Maybe [inaudible 00:05:48].

Oscar Orozco:

Maybe a few too many in the end. I don't think that was needed. I also noticed there were very few auto makers. It's just something you've come accustomed to seeing, so auto brands. I just really remember the Volkswagen commercial. It was one of my faves, we'll get to that I'm sure, but not much else.

Marcus Johnson:

Really? Ethan, takeaway.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Well, unfortunately the biggest takeaway is probably that if you want to have an incredibly successful Super Bowl for everyone involved, you have the Kansas City Chiefs play, which I'll speak for a significant cohort of sports fans and just say I could not be more sick of them, and that's not just because of this year and all of the ancillary things going on around them. I would've said that last year, too. It's just so annoying that after dealing with the Patriots for however long, now we just have another team and that we just have to watch them every time and they win all the time, but that works out. They do spectacular numbers. Everyone could not be more delighted. I guess the game was actually exciting. It was a pretty terrible game for a while there. By the end, if you were still awake, it was quite exciting.

Oscar Orozco:

One thing I'd say going back to the ads though, I thought there were too many celebrity cameos. I think we've moved a little bit away from the narrative, a plot, it's 30 seconds, but just to kind of plopping them in the middle of commercials and thinking that works, maybe it does. I haven't seen any data on that, but I noticed a lot.

Marcus Johnson:

Well, I do have some numbers on that, and so what you are saying is a trend that has been happening apparently for the last 10 years, and I hadn't noticed it, but when you point it out it's like, "Oh no, that is definitely true." So, celebrities dominating Super Bowl ads from 2010 to today, the share of ads with celebrities in them has gone from 30% to close to 70. This was referenced in the Wall Street Journal. So, from 30% of ads having celebrities to now 70, the share of ads featuring multiple celebrities, you won't be shocked to learn, has exploded from around 5% to about 40 during that time, 4-0. Why? One, celebrity infused ads, they make good for social media content, shareable content after the fact. But two, it's what young people like to see apparently. Jeremy Goldman, who writes for our briefing, pointing out in January, there was an Ad Age-Harris Poll study survey that suggested 53% of Gen Zers favored star-studded ads versus just over 40% for the overall population, so apparently appealing to the young people.

Max Willens:

I'd love to know who Gen Z was thinking about when they mentioned they like seeing celebrities. I do not imagine it was Zach Braff and... Oh my god, what's his name?

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Those guys have a whole side business now. This is a second career.

Max Willens:

Really and truly, but I don't know a lot of Zoomers who are all about Donald Faison and Zach Braff and Jason Momoa.

Marcus Johnson:

What did the kids say-

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Also, Usher was in three or four ads for different brands. I don't remember that. Obviously, there's a reason they all went after him, that makes sense and everything, but the idea of having a celebrity popup again and again and again promoting all different kinds of things [inaudible 00:09:03]-

Marcus Johnson:

Exactly, tied to the halftime show. That was pretty cool, but Jeremy makes a good point though. He said celebrity-heavy Super Bowl ads, while attention-grabbing, risk overshadowing the brand. There was some research from System1 Group showing about 20% of Super Bowl ad viewers walk away unable to record the advertiser brand because they're so focused on the celebrity or celebrities. So, you do have to be careful about that. Real quick for me, the takeaway I had was it's becoming even more of a must advertise event than ever before. I'm surprised it's only $7 million to be perfectly honest because of the size of the audience. The Super Bowl has twice the number of viewers, at least 2023, twice the number of viewers as the second most watched TV program, which was also, it was the AFC championship game between last-last year's, 2023, so it was like 2022 seasons.

But they take full calendar year 2023, Super Bowl was number one over 115 million last year, and then about half of that for the second place program. Super Bowl has drawn over 100 million viewers for nine of the last 10 years, so that's one. Secondly, the halftime show. Usher's Super Bowl halftime show drew 30 million households according to numbers from Samba TV. That's up 5% from last year's Super Bowl halftime show, and also just the demographics, a more balanced demographic than you might expect. According to Nielsen, women make up 37% of viewers for regular season NFL games, but 47% of last year's Super Bowl audience.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I can verify that right away because my disdain for the Chiefs is so significant when combined with being utterly exhausted by Sunday night, I had a whole weekend full of wedding related festivities, shout out to Ted and Nicole. By Sunday night, I would've been just as happy to not even watch this thing, even though I knew that was a bad idea considering my job, but my girlfriend wasn't having it and she doesn't particularly care about the NFL, but she was not going to allow us to just skip the Super Bowl. I was like, "Okay, all right."

Marcus Johnson:

She's half of that relationship, I guess.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I'll do a better job on the podcast thanks to this insistence.

Marcus Johnson:

Favorite ads, gents, before we close out the story of the week real quick. Oscar?

Oscar Orozco:

Of course, I'm going to mention the Messi, Dan Marino Michelob ULTRA, come on, with the GOAT of soccer. It was epic to see Messi finally get his first Super Bowl commercial.

Marcus Johnson:

I wouldn't have been able to remember the brand though. I was so focused on Messi that I couldn't remember what the-

Oscar Orozco:

The billion dollar smile, so handsome.

Marcus Johnson:

Yep. Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Well, so let me answer two, because the noteworthy one I think we should mention... So, my favorite one was just Deadpool 3, give me that. That was the very first one right around kickoff, but that's probably not what everyone's going to remember, but that's what I was most psyched to see, but we should probably mention the Snapchat one. I thought that was really interesting as part of this new attempted rebrand away from social media, although grammatically questionable presentation, I don't know if anybody else noticed that. Go check it out.

Oscar Orozco:

That's a good one.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Go check it out. I'm not going to tell you if you didn't notice. Grammatically questionable, but clearly making an effort to separate themselves from all the negative attention around social media by declaring that they are not social media and trying to get everyone to sort of buy into that, which I was thinking in my head, "Imagine if we took Snapchat off of all of our charts and graphs and tables about social media." I imagine they'd call us the next day and say, "Why did you delete us?" We'd say, "Well, you said you're not social media, so we're not going to cover you anymore."

But they're making a big push in that direction, which I thought was interesting and they spent a lot of money to try to get that into everybody's heads. It wasn't like my favorite ad, but it's one that stuck, but sorry, I'm going to say one more thing, the absence of the single hottest topic of the year I thought was interesting. In the past, we've seen nothing but say crypto related ads when everything was crypto, and this year I thought there would be more AI or GenAI stuff since that's all that everyone is talking about all year long. And there was one, there was a Microsoft Copilot ad and that was all there was.

Oscar Orozco:

Copilot, yeah.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

And when that came on I was like, "Oh yeah, we've seen nothing about AI," the way in the past that whatever the hottest topic is tends to dominate that year. So, those are the three things came up, but Deadpool all the way.

Marcus Johnson:

Max.

Max Willens:

I hate to double dip, but for me it's the Temu one because as it was playing out, I was like, "What the hell is this?" And then as it was going on, I thought, "No, this is actually brilliant," because this is just the biggest flex on Planet Earth that you can just be like, "We took an ad that should run in the middle of your match game on mobile, boom. Oh, also we're going to do it three more times," so that was my favorite one.

Marcus Johnson:

Nice, two real quick from me. One was... You mentioned GenAI was a Discover ad with Jennifer Coolidge and I thought it was interesting because as everyone is kind of zigging, it seemed like they went to zag by basically saying, "You'll get to speak to a person. You won't just get a chatbot or an automated message if you call us," and it was a joking with Jennifer Coolidge trying to figure out whether the person on the end of the phone was a robot or not saying that they should... Or they were telling her to prove that she wasn't one and I thought that was interesting because everyone's going towards GenAI, but that was kind of a pivot away from it. And the other one was the Hard Knock Life Dove commercial I thought was quite powerful. 45% of girls they said quit sport by age 14 in large part because of body confidence. So, I thought that was quite an enlightening ad as well. All right, folks-

Oscar Orozco:

I feel like they've had ads up for a few years now, at least I remember one last year [inaudible 00:15:18]-

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Dove's on that.

Oscar Orozco:

... It's good to see that repeated.

Marcus Johnson:

Absolutely, that's what we've got time for the story of the week. Congratulations to Kansas City for winning the Super Bowl. Sorry to Oscar.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

No, don't say that.

Marcus Johnson:

Definitely put that in.

Oscar Orozco:

Just delete that.

Marcus Johnson:

Time now for our very own Super Bowl, it's the game of the week. Today's game, What's the Point? Three-team Super Bowl style, oh.

What does that mean? I'll tell you, glad you asked, where I read out four questions related to one huge story that just broke in the sports streaming world surrounding a brand new sports streaming service from ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Okay answers get one point, good answers get two, and answers that give you the same feeling as, I guess throwing a game-winning touchdown in overtime, answers that leave you with that feeling, not the feeling that Oscar had because of that, but other people, they'll get you three points. Each person gets 30 seconds to answer before they hear the bell. If you run long, then I'm going to throw a yellow flag, literally. I have a couple of options here. This one's kind of mustard colored. I don't know.

Max Willens:

It's kind kind of dirty.

Marcus Johnson:

I know, I think it was used to wash the car, but I brought some other options as well just in case. We've got this one, got a pattern.

Oscar Orozco:

Right.

Marcus Johnson:

That's fun. This is mainly white actually, so I probably shouldn't have brought that one, but the penalty flag will get thrown literally if you go long is the point of that. For folks watching-

Max Willens:

[inaudible 00:16:49] is that a visual medium.

Marcus Johnson:

Folks watching the video podcast, all 12 people watching the video podcast will see this happen, as well as the folks on the episode. Everyone else will have no idea what's happening, but I'll provide an audio queue as well, letting you know what's going on. Most points wins and gets the very underappreciated last word. All right, so before we start, what's the story?

So, the story behind our four questions for today in a surprise announcement, ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery said they will combine their sports content into a sports super sports streaming service by this coming fall, right in time for the NFL and NBA seasons. The new streaming products will combine 14 linear networks across Fox, ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery, including channels like ABC, ESPN, FS1, TNT, the SEC Network, et cetera. The new service will include content from the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, NHL, college sports, NASCAR, and more. No name yet. Pricing details also don't exist thus far. All right, gents, let's move to the first quarter, clever. And this is all about the partners that are involved in this, Fox, ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery, so I'll start with Max, which of these three partners does this joint sport streaming service benefit the most?

Max Willens:

I think I would say that it's probably News Corp and Fox. They were in sort of a weird spot where the pace of cord cutting was probably pretty bad for them. So late last year, FS1 surpassed ESPN as the most subscribed to cable channel, which on some level was a huge dream come true for them because they had been sort of slowly but surely building this ESPN killer for years and years, but they kind of got to the place that they wanted to get to just as the bottom was starting to drop out of the linear TV universe.

And as far as I can tell, they had not really laid a ton of groundwork for an FS1 streaming product, and so launching this thing sort of allows them to put this product on equal footing with ESPN, with Bleacher Report, and WBD's sports properties. And so, they get to sort of tick the box of they managed to beat ESPN in terms of cable subs and now they are on this equal level playing field as a legitimate sports brand that can hopefully continue to monetize in some form fashion as the next generation of sports media gets put together.

Marcus Johnson:

It wasn't even kind of close to 30 seconds, so we threw the flag.

Max Willens:

That's fair.

Marcus Johnson:

[inaudible 00:19:34].

Oscar Orozco:

How did it even [inaudible 00:19:36]?

Marcus Johnson:

One second, I hadn't thought this through.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I wasn't even watching the clock, I thought he did a great job.

Oscar Orozco:

It was great.

Marcus Johnson:

He went really long. I retrieved the flag.

Oscar Orozco:

[inaudible 00:19:45] deduct points. We're trying to win here.

Marcus Johnson:

He does lose points. Great answer, but I had to throw the flag, delay of game on the offense. See what I've done? Ethan, very unimpressed. Ethan, you're next.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Well, that was a good answer. I'll just take a different one because I was going to say Warner Bros. if only because they needed a win. You're talking about a company that's been an enormous amount of financial difficulties, enormous amount of debt problems, and their sports properties were probably the most at risk in terms of maintaining the cost that it's going to take to maintain their NBA coverage, which is sort of the top of the mountain for them. That was at risk and now it probably isn't. This is probably going to solve the issue. They're going to all be able to bid together and they're going to probably be able to keep what they have thanks to hitching their wagon to this and it's probably going to be a big win, and my sense is that they needed a win, a big win more than the other two.

Marcus Johnson:

I am interested in whether they're going to be able to bid together because I'm surprised... So, the NFL and the NBA, they weren't involved in the creation of this new venture. They were kind of left out in the cold and just informed about this right before for, but the Wall Street Journal pointed out apparently ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery say the new service won't violate any current agreements with the NFL or NBA or traditional pay TV distributors. The league's obviously going to comb through the details and make sure that's true, but I was wondering whether this means-

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

But that's current deals. So, the big issue right now is not the NFL, because those are set, it's the NBA thing that's expiring and everyone's going to really pony up next year.

Marcus Johnson:

But I wonder if in that deal it says something like, "You can't do this. You can't join forces and get together." For current deals, you're right. It's for future deals or pending deals like the NBA, I wonder if they're now going to have fewer buyers or whether those three are going to roll up it into one.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

It's got to be an advantage for them because if you think about it from the NBA's perspective, now there's a risk to them to not be on this. So, this is a good move no matter what, whether or not they can sort of collectively bargain and bring down the price because now they're not going to be bidding against each other as much, it's like Amazon or whoever, instead of having lots of people all bidding, they'll be able to put their heads together, I assume. And even if they can't, it's not like the NBA is going to want to relegate itself to only being on Amazon. They're going to want to be on this.

Marcus Johnson:

Executives say that the plan isn't to negotiate together. I think they are going to negotiate separate rights deals. We'll see if that ends up happening, but it does feel like there might be some antitrust concerns down the road perhaps for them because of how big this service it seems like it could be, and the negotiating potential as well from a combined trio. Oscar.

Oscar Orozco:

I agree actually with Ethan, I think it's got to be WBD and I think the timing is good for them with this new Bleacher Report sort of added tier and extra money to access different sports content. It kind of overshadows that news a little bit. I also think from the content perspective, they've had less to offer, men's and women's national team soccer, a little bit of this and that. So, I think on the monetization side, when you think of ad revenues, it opens up much more ad inventory for them in this situation, I think if it's split three ways.

Marcus Johnson:

Let's move to the second quarter. We're talking about the stakeholders, the other stakeholders, the external ones. Ethan, we'll start with you. Which other external stakeholder will this affect the most?

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Well, other than the sports leagues themselves that are going to be dealing with the question that we just discussed, I guess it's Comcast and CBS and the folks that just aren't a part of this now, the folks who still are going to have more of their wagon hitched to the traditional cable bundle as this increasingly... When this news broke, sorry, I know it's 30 seconds here, but when this news broke, we knew it was just a monumental announcement. Right in the beginning, it was like four sentences came out of the announcement and we're already all over in Slack like, "Oh, this is enormous, this is gigantic." It doesn't solve all the problems for all of us sports fans. We can talk about that later, but it seems to me that this is just going to accelerate all the problems for anyone who hasn't sort of figured out their next step, and if you're not part of this party, where are you?

Marcus Johnson:

Oscar.

Oscar Orozco:

That's a good point, Ethan. For me, again, the obvious one were the leagues. I started to think about the Amazons, the Netflixes, the Googles, the tech companies and their play in all of this, how it can potentially benefit them if the other guys, the media conglomerates are negotiating as one. So, they've been angling to get more involved in sports programming, and so it does seemingly create an angle for them there, so that's who I thought about.

Marcus Johnson:

Nice. Max.

Max Willens:

I decided to go one step outside or a concentric circle outside, and I thought about the guys who several years ago sort of fancied themselves as future kind of OTT sports brands, like Fubo and DAZN, who are now basically DOA. DAZN is kind of pivoted into boxing and combat sports and things like that, but any kind of dream that they might've had of becoming the sort of sports OTT destination of the future, that's over. This is the new thing now. How it stacks up against the tech companies, as Oscar and Ethan both mentioned, is an open question, but those guys are done.

Marcus Johnson:

FuboTV, their shares dropped 20% after this news, not a great sign. It's time for the halftime scores, 4-4-4, so all tied up. We'll do a quick, probably about 10 seconds of an Usher song, under fair use, for your halftime show. Now, that's out of the way, let's move on. We've got for our third quarter coming up, Oscar's going to kick us off for this one. The most surprising twist, so Oscar, what's going to be the most surprising twist coming out of this new super streaming service announcement?

Oscar Orozco:

You could say it's the most surprising, but it's not. It's obviously going to drive more people to cut the cord, but the most surprising twist, or not surprising one would be the sort of recreation of cable TV in a 21st century type of way. So, it really does depend, as you said Marcus earlier, we have no idea on price. At first, I'm sure it'll be pretty reasonable, but eventually it's probably going to mirror the price that people are paying for cable and satellite now. So, that remains to be seen, but that'll be the most ironic twist I could think of coming out of this.

Marcus Johnson:

It's a good one. Max.

Max Willens:

I think what it's going to be is one of the outsiders looking in here in the form of Comcast launching some kind of super mega soccer content products. Quite recently, Bundesliga, they renewed their rights to the Premier League quite recently, Bundesliga is... I think ESPN wants to renew, but they haven't yet, and I could see Comcast basically putting a stake in the ground and saying, "The one sport you guys don't have a huge stranglehold on is soccer. It's an ascendant sport in the United States. We'll take that, thank you."

Marcus Johnson:

Nice. Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I want to see what ends up happening. I don't know if this is a surprise because, I don't know what's going to happen, but I guess the biggest question I have that could involve a surprise twist is, what's going to happen with the dominant regional sports networks that are out there that are actually carrying the vast majority of the games that a very significant chunk of sports fans actually want to watch? A large percentage of sports fans care more about their team than they do about the sport in general, and while this product will obviously be the leading provider of sports in general, it's not going to have all the Knicks games on that I want to watch, it's not going to have all the Yankees games that I want, it's not going to have hardly any of the Knicks games that I want to watch, and it's not going to have hardly any of the Yankees games that I want to watch.

And a lot of people are like me. This is a fairly common way that people engage with sports. They care about their teams. What's going to happen with all that? We're still going to be stuck with our cable bundle for those, which means now we're paying a whole lot more because we're probably going to want this, but maybe we won't want this because if we're stuck with the cable bundle just so we can get MSG and YES, that's a New York story, but everyone is like that in Boston, Philly, and other places also, and where does that leave us? How do we make this decision? And then so the potential surprising twist that comes out of this is maybe something will happen with that. Somebody will step up, some kind of regional sports net bundle, something, because even though those are cash cows for the big teams, they don't want to be left behind either. And right now paying for the MSG app doesn't make... It's like $30 or something. Something is going to have to change on this huge, huge chunk that is not addressed.

Marcus Johnson:

Another flag-

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

That was long [inaudible 00:29:22].

Marcus Johnson:

... Is thrown for Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

But this top of mind for me because this is what I got to deal with.

Marcus Johnson:

Episode interference.

Max Willens:

Worked on this [inaudible 00:29:28]-

Marcus Johnson:

Let's move on. Sorry, Max?

Max Willens:

I said you worked on these, I like that you got the-

Marcus Johnson:

I actually didn't work on that that just-

Oscar Orozco:

Brilliant.

Marcus Johnson:

So thank you. Thanks, Oscar. How have you got more points all of a sudden?

Oscar Orozco:

Yeah.

Marcus Johnson:

To your point though quickly, Ethan, it doesn't fix the fragmented sports viewing problem entirely at all. And then there's a journal article pointing out, "If you're a really big NFL fan," it says, "This new service would give you only a portion of the games that you may want to see since you will need Amazon for Thursday Night football, Paramount+ for access to CBS's Sunday afternoon games, and NBC Universal's Peacock for Sunday Night football." So, it's definitely not fixed everything for the consumer. We moved to double points fourth quarter. Everyone's actually tied, sorry, Oscar, but everyone's tied going into double points.

Oscar Orozco:

The math doesn't make sense.

Marcus Johnson:

The super sport streaming platform success is where we finish. So, we go back to Max. Despite limited details, Max, how successful do you think this new platform will be out of 10?

Max Willens:

If they can keep the next media rights package for a major sport from going to YouTube or Netflix or Amazon, the answer is 10. This was basically a defensive move I would say that these guys made, and if it succeeds on those terms, then it is a success.

Marcus Johnson:

Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I'm going to hedge also and say that it could be a nine or 10, but what they have to do is control the sticker shock element. If they're able to not have this be just a shockingly expensive service, I think it's going to be an easy nine or 10, at least over the sort of near to medium term, and then things are going to keep changing. But they might not be able to control the sticker shock element, in which case we'll see. They'll become very interesting for those of us that are going to want to spend our money to watch our local teams.

Marcus Johnson:

On that point quickly, Oscar, before you go, there are some details about... Well, not some details, some predictions about the price. Research company LightShed Partners predicts that a subscription will start at $35 a month with ads. Wells Fargo analyst, Steven Cahall thinks the service could break even if approximately 6 million subscribers signed up at $40 a month, and other analysts have the price at closer to 50 bucks a month or higher, but it depends on so many things, estimated signups, the rising cost of sports rights, et cetera. Oscar.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

It's always going to have ads. These are sports, so no one's going to pay to get rid of the ads, but I think under $50 would be a success. To me, that seems that would be.

Oscar Orozco:

It feels a little steep to me, but yes, absolutely, and I think that-

Marcus Johnson:

You pay like $1 million a month for cable. What do you mean?

Oscar Orozco:

By the way, I got rid of cable.

Marcus Johnson:

No, you didn't.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Wow.

Oscar Orozco:

Yes. I'm officially a cord cutter, but because of that, I'm very price sensitive now and feels a little high, but we'll see.

Marcus Johnson:

You've changed.

Oscar Orozco:

Maybe in the long term. Well, in terms of my answer, I'm with the fellas here. I'm at 10 out of 10, 11 out of 10. How could you not be excited?

Marcus Johnson:

11?

Oscar Orozco:

Bob Iger talked about pulling sports into the future, and there are already rumors about how the platform, excuse me, could incorporate things like sports betting and fantasy and statistics and dynamic visuals and even shopping. How could you not be excited about that? Because it doesn't exist now, so I'm very bullish on this.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I just thought one of the thing that we should probably mention is that all of these players are going to have the opportunity to offer this service as part of a bundle, so that's a cost controlled mechanism. If you're thinking about you've got your Disney+ and you've got your Hulu, this thing will come into it. It'll cost more, but it'll cost less than it would if you just bought it on its own, and they're all going to have all this kind of stuff going on. So, there's going to be lots of different elements to track, and there are ways to avoid shocking people with how much it costs.

Oscar Orozco:

And that's why my thoughts on the 8 million subscribers, I think their plans are probably much higher than that, you'd have to think, for it to be successful.

Marcus Johnson:

How many share of sports will the new service include? Citi analysts expect the new super sport streaming service to encompass about 55% of US sports rights, and that's Joe Flint and Isabella Simonetti of the Wall Street Journal, which as I mentioned begs the question, will this even go through? Will there be antitrust concerns? Government looking at this saying, how is this really going to benefit the consumer? But yes, sports continues to reign supreme. 93 of America's 100 most watched broadcasts last year, unsurprisingly, were sports.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

There can't be any antitrust concerns in the near term because all this stuff is still going to be on TV.

Marcus Johnson:

True.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

So, this is more further down the road.

Marcus Johnson:

True. Yep, spot on. All right, folks, let's go to the scores. This week's winner, we don't need overtime, Oscar is this week's winner of the Super Bowl.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

With that jacket on? Oh my God.

Marcus Johnson:

Oh, yeah, I know-

Oscar Orozco:

Thank you.

Marcus Johnson:

It's because you guys ran long, multiple flags, multiple penalties, penalties loses games. Defense wins games? Same thing. Oscar, you won. Congratulations to you. You get the-

Oscar Orozco:

Thank you very much.

Marcus Johnson:

... Lombardi Trophy and-

Oscar Orozco:

It's been a while since we've had it, '95, but whatever gives me an opportunity to show this off again. Let me just say very quickly, a lot of questions. Did Shanahan cough it up again? Should we have run it more in the third?

Marcus Johnson:

Yes.

Oscar Orozco:

Yes, yes, we're the fifth team to win three straight Super Bowls in the row, yes, yes. But you know who opens up as favorites next season? The 49ers. We'll be back.

Marcus Johnson:

No.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I saw that.

Marcus Johnson:

As favorites?

Oscar Orozco:

That's right.

Marcus Johnson:

Congratulations to Oscar. He gets the pity trophy, if you will.

Oscar Orozco:

Is that what this is?

Marcus Johnson:

Of course not. It's time now for a very quick edition of Dinner Party Data. This is the part of the show where we quickly tell you about the most interesting thing we've learned this week in 45 seconds or less, Oscar. We start with Max to set the table. Set a good example, Max.

Max Willens:

I'll do my best. It being the beginning of the year, I am trying to sort of think about cool travel things that I can squeeze into 2024 and that got me thinking, and I thought the listeners of this show don't give a crap about my travel, but they would like to hear stats about travel. And so, I thought about the Hajj, which is the, as I guess everyone knows, but I'll just say the pilgrimage that Muslims are expected to make at least once in their lifetimes if they have the means to do so. And I read a stat that completely blew my mind. So as you might expect, the Hajj generates a lot of extra waste and presses down harder in its environmental footprint. In 2011, I think the Hajj generated 4,700 tons of municipal solid waste in Mecca every day. By 2040, if the kind of number of people going and migrating for this continues to grow, they think it could grow to 44 million tons a day. So, that's incredible and gross.

Oscar Orozco:

But what is the solution, Max?

Max Willens:

That is a great question because Saudi Arabia does not have any kind of recycling infrastructure at all, and they appear not to be terribly interested in building any, but I guess if you essentially live in a desert, the answer is just dig some sand up and throw the crap down into the hole you've just dug.

Marcus Johnson:

Hide the trash? That's not the answer. It might be, that's what we do with landfill. Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

All right, I got a quick one. I'm going to bring it back to the Super Bowl. So, Usher did a great job, so I wanted to just find out the numbers. Usher has had 18 top 10 hits, including nine number one hits and 53 total songs in the Billboard Hot 100 over the span of his career. I am more aware of songs like Yeah! and DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love and all these kinds of bangers that are more in line of what you might listen to on your own. Obviously, he's got a whole lot of semi hits that are in that very particular romantic R&B style that I don't listen to, but the man's a killer. He's got tons and tons and tons of hits. I have to admit I didn't know a few of them. Nine number one hits. Good job, Usher. You are still relevant.

Oscar Orozco:

He's underrated.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Maybe he was in my head. I was like, "Is this guy a megastar?" I'm like, "Oh yeah, he is a megastar."

Marcus Johnson:

Oscar, you're up. Are you up? You're up.

Oscar Orozco:

All right, so I came across a report from the lovely people that Git Jerry, and it piqued my interest because it was about safe driving and smartphone OS choices. But what most interested me is as an avid Android loyalist and user and apologist, whenever there's a study that speaks to our superiority, I want to talk about it. So, let me tell you what it's about. It's about safe driving and smartphone OS choices, but we know the reason that I'm interested in this is because it's no secret really that iPhone users tend to look down at us-

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Oh, the less people?

Oscar Orozco:

Yes, let's just say it. You said it, not me. Studies have found that some iPhone users, they say that they don't want to message people who don't have an iPhone. I've even seen a study that said they don't want to date anyone who owns an Android device. Can you believe this?

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Oh, absolutely. I can believe that.

Oscar Orozco:

There you go. Max is a little quiet over there.

Marcus Johnson:

Ethan's like, "I would never date someone."

Oscar Orozco:

So long story short, they analyzed the driving behavior of 20,000 drivers. It was about 13 million kilometers of driving, and they found that Android users outperform iPhone carrying counterparts on the road. They achieve higher safety driving scores than iPhone users in every single category, that's safe driving, speeding, distraction, turning, and braking, and accelerating. And the widest margin was in the distraction category, which means that Android users don't drive and use their phone at the same time, while iPhone users do. So, what accounts for the different scores? It's not clear. The data doesn't say, but perhaps it's the other personality studies have found that Android fans are more conscientious, they tend to exhibit higher levels of honesty.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I see.

Oscar Orozco:

And they're just less emotional and consistent and predictable, and I can just go on and on and on. So Android-

Marcus Johnson:

Great Dinner Party Data, wow, you blow my mind, Oscar. Facts about trees, here we go. Forests cover about 30% of Earth's land, you'll be fascinated to learn or not. What else do we have here? Russia has the most forests-

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

After a slow start.

Marcus Johnson:

... It counts for about 20% of the world's total is in Russia, and about half of Russia is actually covered by forest. That seems difficult to move around. Brazil has the second-most forest area with 12%. Brazil's forested area is almost twice the size of Saudi Arabia, which is the 12th largest country in the world, so Brazil's got a fair amount. Canada-

Oscar Orozco:

Used to have a lot more, sorry to interrupt, just saying.

Marcus Johnson:

That's very true. Canada is third with 9%. The US, we have 8% of the world's forests, China is in fifth with 6%. The top five countries by forest area: Russia, Brazil, Canada, America, and China account for over half of the world's forests, but just one-third of the world's total land mass. And then finally a showstopper because of better technology and satellite imagery, it's given us more accurate estimates on the global tree population. There are an estimated 3 trillion trees just over in the world, according to a study in the journal Nature, that means there are 422 trees for every person on the planet. Canadians, those lucky devils, have close to 9,000 trees for every Canadian.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

You should have led the podcast with this. This is just killer stuff.

Marcus Johnson:

It's gold, isn't it? We'll just cut everything else out and just put this in.

Oscar Orozco:

It would've been expected, the Canadian data point, but what was it? 422, that doesn't sound that bad.

Marcus Johnson:

400 trees each, basically. So, you each get 400 trees, choose well.

Oscar Orozco:

Interesting.

Marcus Johnson:

All right.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

All right, get us out of here. My God.

Marcus Johnson:

V, if you put a tumbleweed in this part, I'll be furious. What was that, Oscar?

Oscar Orozco:

I like that one. It was a good one.

Marcus Johnson:

You're only saying that I made you the champion of the game of the week, but I appreciate that.

Oscar Orozco:

But that already happened. I don't need to suck up anymore.

Marcus Johnson:

All right, that's true. Thanks for that. Let's end you on that note. Thank you so much to my guests. Thank you to Max.

Max Willens:

Always a pleasure, Marcus. Thank you.

Marcus Johnson:

Thank you to Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Always fun.

Marcus Johnson:

Thank you to Oscar.

Oscar Orozco:

Good to be back. Thanks for having me, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes, indeed. Congratulations to you as well for winning the Super Bowl game of the week. Thanks to Victoria who edits the show, James who copy edits it, Stuart who runs the team, Sophie does our social media, and Lance who runs our video podcast. Thanks to everyone for listening in. You can find us on Instagram if you want, one word, InsiderIntelligence for behind the scenes content. We hope to see you on Tuesday for the Behind the Numbers Daily: An eMarketer Podcast made possible by StackAdapt. Happy long President's Day weekend.