Is there a Future Book Reading Digital Verge? The Case for Venu Sports, or What Happens When You Can’t Watch Everything in One Place
Venu Sports seemed like such an obvious idea. Instead of spreading all your sports viewing across a million different platforms with a million different interfaces and subscriptions, what if you could watch everything in the same place? It makes sense until you get to some of the things that might be said. It isn’t everything. It’s going to be expensive. Some will argue it’s anticompetitive. Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all.
Source: How the future of sports streaming died
What Is Streaming? How to Stream or Not to Tune in on TV, or When I Cannot Stream at a Time
Kevin will be on the show for the first part of our New Year’s resolution series. If you’re hoping to read more books this year, or just want to replace some of your aimless scrolling with more focused reading, Kevin has some tips on how to make it work on all your devices, at all times of day. Sometimes you get to curl up with a good book, but sometimes you have three minutes in line at the coffee shop. If you do it right, they’re both great reading times.
Finally, we answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11, or email [email protected]) about why your phone won’t let you play multiple audio sources at a time. We have some ideas about how it works — and an easy way for Apple and Google to fix it.
Rose Oberman is the media and entertainment director at S&P Global Ratings, and she says that their expectation is that TV will decline over years, not months. There’s no sudden collapse in broadcast TV’s future, just a steady chipping away as audiences move from paying for cable to paying for streaming.
That’s what’s so crucial about broadcast TV. It’s possible to get a free internet service, but it won’t sell you huge amounts of data and you don’t have to pay a monthly fee. It is a completely passive experience. The stations air sports and news and entertainment, and you can tune in or not. People aren’t tuning in.
Take sports as an example. Events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl were once reliable audience drivers, but in 2024 the Super Bowl streamed on Paramount Plus. The experience was buggy and stuttering, but Paramount Plus still garnered 3.4 million more subscribers than it had before the game. The Olympics, which were simulcast on Peacock, experienced even more online success. People liked that they could just watch the events they wanted on demand and skip anything they didn’t.
It was the biggest event to date for sports streaming when two football games were streamed on December 25th. A complaint of stuttering could be seen. They said they were the most watched games in NFL history.
Streaming’s big sports win won’t immediately snuff out sports on broadcast TV—there are contracts in place keeping live games on the air. Yet as those contracts come up for renewal, leagues may opt to take their games elsewhere, particularly as broadcast becomes less profitable and viewers switch to streaming. Right now the networks spend billions to air NFL games, but companies like Netflix and Amazon have deeper pockets, and they’ve shown they have no problem paying big money to snatch rights out from under legacy media networks. Amazon agreed to pay $1 billion a year to secure the rights to NFL Thursday Night Football back in 2021. Fox paid about $660 million a year for those games.
