Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris.
It’s easy enough to comment on everyone else’s media businesses, but it can be really hard to find the time to sort out our own between doing the podcast and events (we’re still barely part time on Media Voices!) Anyway we’ve finally pulled together a shiny sponsorship pack with all our podcast options.
Another commercial note, which I’ll try not to apologise for as it’s how we keep the lights on: our annual Media Moments 2023 report sponsorship slot is up for grabs. Reply to this email if you’d like to see the proposal doc!
Now this is an interesting one. Plenty of individual publishers already bundle their articles, back issues, and audio together — but this is the first time I’ve seen such a comprehensive bundle of a variety of brands’ content all in the one place. RTL Deutschland has now launched what it calls an “all-in-one” streaming service that promises to bundle video, live sports, music, podcasts, audiobooks and ‘a suite of digital magazines’ — in a single monthly subscription.
Now while that’s interesting in and of itself, the broadcaster’s reasons for doing so are fascinating. Effectively, it is positioning itself not just to compete with Netflix as the headline suggests, but to compete with everybody: “Everyone is talking about bundling, which is why we’re proud to this week be launching the first multimedia app,” said RTL Deutschland co-CEO Matthias Dang.
It’s a tacit acknowledgement that as the internet has broken down the barriers between time spent with different forms of media, everyone is now in competition with everyone else. The Hollywood Reporter also makes clear this is a bit of a gamble for RTL, driven by ongoing underlying trends at some of its existing businesses.
In this slot in yesterday’s newsletter Esther included a piece on the difficulty of preventing AI companies getting their fingers all over your digital content. Well, now Google is effectively arguing that it should be the default that they be allowed to train their AI models up on publishers’ content — and that publishers would have to opt-out to prevent it.
Here’s some fallout from the ongoing row about the quality of the inventory Google was selling. As the standfirst of this Adweek article makes clear, it’s very limited fallout, but still. Effectively Google is rebranding ‘in-stream’ to ‘skippable’ — perhaps because saying something is ‘skippable’ puts the onus upon the audience for having skipped it rather than the platform itself…
This is fascinating, citizen journalism meets personal protection. Just look at this quote: “The phones keep us safe in a way. People protesting point them at the police officers, so they don’t arrest or shoot us.” That’s a horrendous thing to have to think about — but it speaks to the power of citizen journalism during an age of protest.
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