Essays on media, technology, sports streaming, and strategy from a founder and media executive.
Thirteen NBA teams and seven NHL teams became local-television free agents this spring, and every bid on the table is a haircut. The post-RSN war will not be won on the rights line — it will be won on the production line, and AI tooling is quietly rewriting that cost curve.
Rapid Recap, Catch Up to Live, AI vertical cropping — every AI feature that shipped in sports streaming compresses time. The recommendation layer everyone spent a decade predicting never arrived. That is not a failure of the technology; it is a truth about live.
Half a season into MLB's robot-umpire era, the machine's biggest effect on baseball has come from the calls it never made. Umpires shade toward the machine's zone, hitters have learned to wait, walks hit a rate unseen since 1950 — and knowing the strike zone better than the umpire is now a measurable, tradable skill.
The World Cup that just ended was the most ambitious live production ever attempted — sixteen venues, 104 matches, roughly 9,000 hours, all of it processed in software at one facility in Dallas. Almost none of it was AI. The 'AI World Cup' story came from the sponsors.
The World Cup's offside machine took a goal off the board for a touch no replay can show, and FIFA says the call was correct. It probably was. That is the problem.
Buttondown's free plan blocks the two features that matter most for a newsletter — automation and custom CSS. About two hundred lines of Python in the publish workflow walked around both. The plan I am paying for is $0.
Three seasons in, the reason YouTube TV took NFL Sunday Ticket from DirecTV is the one nobody wants to write down in a deck — it is the living room, not the ledger.
More than 80% of Google searches now end without a click. The grief is over. The structural question is which content categories survive zero-click — and which were always going to be the training set.
Google's defense of AI Overviews is that the clicks they replace were 'bounce clicks' — visits no one valued. The defense is technically true. It is also the same shape, almost line for line, as the one regional sports network executives offered in 2018 about the cable bundle.
Two MLB games every Friday, with MLS folded into the same Apple TV subscription. Apple is the only buyer running sports rights as a Services-line CAC, not a P&L.