In this issue: Social media election s**tstirring/Cable TV’s decline/Streamers hiring lobbyists/Podcast agents/TEDgate/CollegeHumor graduates/YouTube starting RSS podcast acceptance + more.
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
Hey there. I just interviewed Simon Pulman for Kaplan’s AccelPro IP Law Podcast about intellectual property, movie franchises, video games and 1990s Valiant comics. I also just wrote about why you don’t want to make stuff on just one platform if you are creating stuff using computers, tablets, and phones. Platform lock = big mistake.
Anyway… On to the links.
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“More than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana and Mexico. These democracies will most likely face the same risks of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years. We should be worried about what happens next.”
”US cable company Charter released a remarkable investor deck about their spat with Disney on the fees for including ESPN and other linear video channels in their cable bundles. The deck illustrated how the current video ecosystem is broken, as linear video owners tried to keep carriage charges to cable companies artificially high, despite the traditional cable companies losing 25m customers to ‘cord cutting’ in the last 5 years. Its an astonishingly frank and honest deck, laying out how the current business models of linear TV are on a death spiral that could take down both the cable companies and the linear channel owners.”
”The world's biggest streaming companies are coming together to launch the industry's first unified coalition, the Streaming Innovation Alliance (SIA), reports Axios' Sara Fischer. Why it matters: The streaming industry has faced few regulatory threats over the past decade, but that's changing as more television consumption moves to digital. Details: The new group is led by two former policymakers acting as senior advisors: former Republican Rep. Fred Upton and former Democratic FCC acting chair Mignon Clyburn. Its board is comprised of the biggest streaming companies in the world, including Netflix, Paramount+, Warner Bros. Discovery's Max, Comcast's Peacock, Disney, TelevisaUnivision and Univision's ViX, as well as smaller, niche streamers, such as ForUsByUs Network, Vault and Afroland.tv. Noticeably missing from the group are Apple, Amazon and a few of the major ad-supported streaming companies such as Roku and Tubi.”
“These days, UTA is hardly the only game in town. Rivals Creative Artists Agency and Endeavor Group Holdings Inc. both operate teams dedicated to podcasting. In recent months, multiple podcasting clients have dropped UTA, including Mythical Entertainment. People familiar with some of these moves say creators have left over a range of frustrations.”
”Either my TED content is performing extremely poorly because it is far less interesting than most of TED’s content, or TED deliberately is not promoting it. A string of evidence points to the latter explanation: unique among the TED talks released around the same time as mine, my talk has still not been reposted to the TED Talks Daily podcast. In fact, it was not even posted to YouTube until I sent an email inquiry.”
“Looking forward to 2024, we’ll be increasing our investment in the podcast experience on YouTube Music — making it a better overall destination for fans and podcasters alike with YouTube-only capabilities across community, discovery and audio/visual switching. Later in 2024, as part of this process, we’ll be discontinuing Google Podcasts.”
“CollegeHumor is dropping out of school, so to speak. As the comedy brand shifts its distribution strategy under current CEO Sam Reich, it is giving up its original handle to rebrand as Dropout. That name, which previously applied to the company’s subscription service, will now become its official moniker.”