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Originally posted on Forbes

Earlier in our Covid lockdown, almost all sports were cancelled and there was little to broadcast. A number of sports newer to the TV world, like Lacrosse, were available and gained more attention, particularly last summer when live sports content was barely available on TV or the Internet. One big winner during the Covid-limited sports environment, was the Premier Lacrosse League(PLL), who played in a “health-safety pod” at one location, for all their 2020 games.

The League is now returning to normal travel-based competitions and recently announced a major deal with NBC and their Internet-based video service, Peacock, to stream their matchups this season.

This is the third season for the PLL since being founded by Michael and Paul Rabil, who are brothers, with funding from the Raine Group, CAA, The Chernin Group, Blum Capital, and Alibaba billionaire Joe Tsai, who also owns the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets.

All PLL’s televised coverage will also stream on NBCSports.com and the NBC Sports app. This year is the first season that Peacock is the streaming home of the PLL.

“We are looking forward to presenting PLL’s world-class players and captivating style of play on Peacock, NBC and NBCSN,” said Pete Bevacqua Chairman, NBC Sports. “For the third consecutive year, following a momentous offseason for the PLL that welcomed a merger with Major League Lacrosse and a new expansion team in Cannons LC, we’re excited to showcase this historic moment on NBC Sports.”

Opening weekend of the 2021 PLL season will take place June 4-6 with five matchups from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, home of NFL’s New England Patriots.

In an exclusive email exchange with the founders of the PLL, Paul Rabil, co-founder and CMO of the Premiere Lacrosse League, as well as a college and professional lacrosse player said “This record slate of programming from NBC is a reflection of our success from the first two seasons on-air. The addition of Peacock as our streaming partner will further elevate the PLL as a property that embraces the future of content distribution. We’re eager to showcase even greater broadcast innovation that will surely bring more sports fans to lacrosse in 2021.”

The second of the Rabil brothers, co-founder and CEO of the PLL, Michael, said “The demand has never been higher for live sports content and we are excited to showcase lacrosse to the already large subscriber base of Peacock. In the last year of our current term with NBC, we are honored to be part of their selective sports properties on Peacock’s platform.”

Originally posted on Forbes

Zoom is the hot technology of the last year to be sure. Covid made the word – Zoom – a household name. Many fundamental technologies from the past (telegraph, printing press, combustion engines, etc. are fading fast or have already left our zeitgeist. One of the best examples of the fading, older technologies in our life, is the near elimination of landlines.

According to Statista, only about 37% of American households still have landlines – phones provided by the local telcos that operate off the copper phone lines strung across the Nation. Of course, if you ask someone under 30 years old, they might ask what a landline is.

On the other hand, this author, well in to his sixth decade of life, not only has a landline, but can tell you why I have one and how they work.

I have a mobile phone, of course. In fact, like most households, there is one mobile phone for every person in our household. And yet, I have a landline for which I pay a monthly bill. But why? My nephews and nieces don’t have landlines. One of the few people in my family with a landline is my 94 year old mother, who even has problems making the wireless version of her landline work.

But many of those, myself included, who have a landline are very sensible in this decision. Landlines, as no doubt few folks know, have their “own energy,” their own electric power. The copper wires used in the telephone system, installed across

the Nation decades after the telephone was invented in 1876, transmit a tiny bit of electric power that allows the landlines to operate completely independent of the household electricity or the general electric grid. Without electric power to the house and the grid, your cellphone batteries die and the wireless home phone systems fail. But your landline lives on, pulsing away, using the technology that makes voices audible on the phone – the ability to produce and interpret sound waves over an electrical circuit.

When I think about earthquakes here in Los Angeles, I worry about being able to communicate with the outside world after a big disaster. In such a situation my landline phone is my go-to device because it will not be felled as quickly as cell towers in an earthquake. When the energy does occasionally go out at home, I gleefully walk to my hard-wired landline phone (conveniently hidden away in the guest room) to assure myself that there is a reason I have not joined the vast majority of Americans without a landline.

What technology will be disrupted next and perhaps driven to extinction from our current technology tableau? The TV set? No, we need it as the monitor to our Netflix NFLX -1.5%, YouTube, Disney+, Roku and many others. The combustion engine? Yes, it seems to be going the way of the dodo bird. The movie theatre? The robust amount of entertainment content available to us and the fear of crowds sitting together for hours, threaten the stability of the movie exhibition industry.

Everyone is deeply immersed in the technology of old and the technology of new. The landline is not the canary in the coal mine because it is not predicting lethal, imminent danger, but it is more like the radio and the train – we still have them and we still use them, but there is something about them that seems so last century.

Good bye landline! Hello to the next disruptor of personal communications – the messaging service. Today, according to my recent national survey of U.S. households, over 75% of the US population with connection to the Internet and/or mobile phone services, use a messaging service at least once a week. It is quite clear where this trend is headed because 91% of 18-34 year olds are using messaging services regularly, vs. only 56% of the over 55 year old age group.

Eventually the messaging service may well challenge the “phone” function of the smartphone. Messaging services not only offer text, but also robust voice services, free, over the Internet. And remember, your smartphone is also a TV.

Originally posted on Forbes

Rolling Stone magazine, founded in 1967, in the depth of the free love and rock music revolution sweeping America, launched its first Twitch channel today, March 1. Rolling Stone announced that the new channel will have original live content hosted by Tia Hill and Jon Weigell, a diverse, Gen Z duo, who are video content creators and social media influencers. Twitch has tens of thousands of partner channels covering far more than gaming, for which it is well known. Music is a growing area on Twitch which is complimentary with the young audience often watching gaming content on the platform.

“The Rolling Stone on Twitch” channel will be streamed five days a week. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays the channel will present a two-hour live variety show. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Rolling Stone will produce live music performances. The first live performances will be from Marcus King and Ted Park. The Rolling Stone shows on Twitch will have “an array of guests: both emerging and established musicians, comedians, actors, political figures, and journalists,” Rolling Stone said in their announcement.

Twitch, founded 10 years ago, has become the dominant live streaming platform on the Internet in the U.S. As of February 2020, it had 3 million broadcasters monthly and 15 million daily active users, with 1.4 million average concurrent users. 

The Rolling Stone channel will allow fans to interact directly with their favorite artists

and performers. Executive Producer Christopher Cruz from Rolling Stone said the goal for the channel is to introduce audiences to Rolling Stone content in an entirely new way. “This channel is a labor of love for the Rolling Stone staff, and is an opportunity not just to bring our brand of storytelling to new audiences, but make them a part of the story.”

Ari Evans, CEO of Maestro.io, and a veteran entrepreneur in the live streaming industry, commented on this expansion by Rolling Stone into live streaming, “This is another example of how the music industry is expanding into the still largely untapped medium of live streaming. Furthermore, live streaming of virtual concerts and digital experiences are proving to be big revenue producers. For example Billie Eilish’s recent streaming concert, powered by Maestro, was one of the biggest monetized events of 2020. Rolling Stone’s new channel taps into new audiences, alternative monetization strategies, and a live interactive voice for the brand in the Twitch world. Hopefully it will further encourage other brands and artists to follow suit.”

Just five years after Rolling Stone magazine was founded, a hit song was released by Dr. Hook in 1972, called “The Cover of Rolling Stone.” Ever since then major music, cultural and political figures have sought to be on the cover of Rolling Stone. Now maybe we will see Twitch on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Originally posted on Forbes

This Sunday, for the 55th time, the Super Bowl will be played among the champions of the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference, respectively, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The winner of NFL’s finale to the football season (a football season unlike any other due to limited crowds and extensive Covid-19 testing and precautions) will not only be one of the two competing teams – but also CBS VIAC -1.3% will be a big winner with the huge revenue gathered from over 40 ads run during the game and previewed online.

In past years Super Bowl advertising has been dominated by consumer goods, beverages, snacks, cars, and some services (such as Turbo Tax). This year some of the

best known regular advertisers in the Super Bowl, such as Budweiser, Coke, and Pepsi are not advertising in the Super Bowl. Many of these traditional Super Bowl advertisers are “reallocating that money to increase public awareness about Covid-19 and the vaccination process” wrote Blake Morgan of Forbes.com recently.

So who is filling in those holes in the advertising schedule for the Super Bowl? As another reflection of the growth of the digital industry, this year there are 11 ads running in the Super Bowl from Internet/digital companies like Uber Eats, Amazon, Squarespace, Vroom, Mercari, Fiverr, Larna, Indeed, Dexcom DXCM -1.9%, Dr. Squatch

and Robinhood (newly famous from the Game Stop stock trading controversy). Last year there were only seven digital ads from such companies.

Looking back at Super Bowls past, and advertising from the dot.com industry, we first saw a Super Bowl ad from a dot.com in 1999 with a widely complimented ad from Monster.com – the online job site. According to Ad Age, “Before the Super Bowl, Monster.com’s traffic was running at about 1.5 unique visitors per month. For the remainder of 1999, it averaged 2.5 million visitors per month.” Ad Age named the Monster ad as the the ad of the year. Monster continued for a number of years to

advertise in the Super Bowl after their first ad in 1999. Peter Blacklow, CMO at Monster.com in the early 2000’s, said, “the key to successful Super Bowl advertising is repetition – year after year.” I saw that in the research I conducted years ago for Monster.com when consumers said they were waiting for the new Monster ad at each Super Bowl. Blacklow, now a General Partner at Boston Seed Capital (an early DraftKings investor) said, “Every year, the Monday after Super Bowl, we saw our resume submission up by 50% or more. Super Bowls should not be treated as one-off commercials, but rather as a concerted long-term branding play.”

At the height of the first Internet boom, in the year 2000, the Super Bowl was played on January 30 and gained the moniker of the “Dot.com Super Bowl.” During that Super Bowl, 17 Internet-related companies advertised during the game. Just one month later the tech-heavy Nasdaq NDAQ -0.2%hit an all time high and soon after plunged by 75% in less than two years. The first Internet bubble was over and in 2001 only two dot.coms advertised in the Super Bowl.

The economy, attacked by the Pandemic, has nonetheless been a boom year for all of the stock market, and certainly for the major Nasdaq players, like the commonly monikered group of companies – FANG – Facebook Amazon AMZN +0.8%Netflix NFLX -1.5% and Googl GOOG -0.3%e. This year’s Super Bowl, with a big increase in advertising from Internet-related companies, is just another reflection of the robust economic power of the Internet.

Originally posted on Forbes

This past election saw record numbers of voters. There were numerous comparisons of Americans’ voting behaviors after the election. Blue vs. Red. Urban vs. Rural. And Young vs. Older voters. In fact, younger voters (under 30) voted across most States by a margin of 20% or more on behalf of President Joe Biden than for former President Donald Trump.

A survey released after the election by the highly-regarded Pew Research Center shows that over two-thirds of 18-29 year old voters often get their news from devices such as phones, computers and tablets. In strong contrast, less than a majority of the 65 year old and older voters report they use digital sources to get news often. The 55 to 65 year old group is also heavily oriented to traditional news sources, while the 30 to 49 year old and older voters acted more like their younger fellow citizens, focusing more on digital sources for getting their news, than from traditional media like televisions, radio and print.

To further show the dramatic behavior differences in sources of news among voters in America, note that 16% of the youngest age group often used TV to get news while 68% of the oldest group used TV often to get their news.

It is also striking that only 3% of voters under 30 years old used print newspapers to get their news often, but 25% of the older voters (65 and above) said TV was a frequent source of news for them.

Across all age groups more than half of U.S. voters said they prefer digital devices for getting their news. Television only had 35% of all voters saying they preferred to get their news from TV. Not surprisingly, radio and newspapers only had 7% and 5% preference choice, respectively.

As you would expect social media has become a major source of newsfor all voters. As far back as 2004, in a Carnegie Corporation studyI helped lead, we had already started to highlight that younger people were much more likely to use the Internet to get their news. We predicted this would grow and it has in a very big way, particularly with the growth of smartphones.

So what does this mean for people covering the news and those consuming the news:

1. Reporters and news outlets need to write for mobile devices – not just for a long printed newspaper article. Mobile news calls for a liberal use of headlines and subheadlines, photos, and short, scannable sentences and paragraphs.
2. Government and political officials need to recognize that their messaging is often being consumed on mobile devices and they need to release the news or their opinions in formats and platforms that will appeal to young voters using mobile devices.
3. The average citizen should be aware that longer, more in-depth analyses may exist in traditional sources on important issues and newsworthy figures.
4. Likewise, reporters, editors, newsmakers, and the average person must recognize that social media has become a major outlet for news, which often means the news is being “reported” by a wide variety of types of folks, many of whom may be relying on other news or opinion that are “second-hand”.