Football Broadcasting and AI Gateways
The Economist and The Athletic are two digital publications I try to read daily. Each week, I'll share two articles that caught my attention; one from each publication.
What could Sky’s buyout of ITV mean for football-watching in the UK?
It was recently announced that Sky has agreed to buy UK broadcaster ITV’s media and entertainment arm, including its free-to-air channels and streaming service, in a deal worth up to £1.6 billion, subject to regulatory approval.
Tom Burrows’ piece highlights several implications for streaming and televising football in the UK:
Potential live Premier League or EFL matches on free-to-air ITV could act as a funnel into Sky's subscription platforms.
According to Dan Harraghy (media rights analyst), the Sky-ITV combination potentially “creates quite a strong offering when the combined entity goes into rights negotiations, because I think a lot of rights holders do value the combination of [Sky] revenue with [ITV] reach.”
An additional football highlights programme going head-to-head with Match of the Day. The BBC’s digital website and iPlayer offering could face direct competition, with football clips and content being placed across the ITV platforms.
This BBC/ITV tension could extend to their current joint approach for World Cup and Euros live rights. Beyond the 2030 men’s World Cup cycle, a Sky-owned ITV could potentially bid independently of the BBC, creating both commercial and political tension given the public-interest importance of major tournament broadcasting.
If and when the acquisition is completed, the competitive dynamics across linear TV, digital and streaming could shift significantly. More football could appear in front of the paywall, new routes into subscription products may emerge, even more nuanced rights holder negotiations may occur and existing broadcasting alliances could evolve.
The Economist Interview with Yuval Noah Harari
I’ve always enjoyed listening to Harari. Sapiens is excellent and Nexus is still sitting patiently in my reading pile. His recent Economist interview left me unsure whether to feel alarmed or reassured. What he does exceptionally well is make difficult, macro questions feel accessible (in a similar way to his writing style). My summary below may sound slightly far-fetched in isolation, but the nuance of the full 67-minute conversation makes the scale of the change he describes feel much more immediate.
He believes that AI differs from previous technologies because it increasingly acts as an agent rather than a tool. His example is that a printing press or nuclear bomb cannot make its own decisions but an AI increasingly can. His fear is that we are voluntarily giving AI more authority and the systems running finance, politics and society (after handing over the keys to AI) become too complicated for humans to understand or control. Whilst he doesn’t think it’s likely that a Terminator-esque apocalypse occurs (thankfully he thinks the chances are relatively low) he does flesh out a number of pressing concerns including:
The algorithm taking over. It has already taken over social media and large swathes of the internet. He thinks AI could substantially take over the financial system within roughly a decade.
Trust is the battleground. In Sapiens especially, his foundational theme is that human civilisation runs on trust: in banks, governments, newspapers, currencies and other people. Harari explains people increasingly trust recommendations, feeds and digital systems to decide what they read, buy and believe. What happens when/if we begin trusting AI more than human institutions?
AI intimacy. When Gary Vaynerchuk talks about our grandkids having AI partners and when Ann Droid becomes a mainstream BBC comedy hit (it’s excellent by the way), you know that AI companions are not a million miles away and moving into mainstream culture. What if an AI knows your physical and digital history, and through such interactions your preferences and personality? It could talk to you indefinitely and tailor every conversation whilst having perfect recall. Anyone remember the film Ex Machina and Ava? It’s already occurring with evolved debates around whether AI companions are reducing loneliness. He calls this “the ability to industrialise intimacy.” A key point was that politicians, political parties or companies no longer need one message at scale to persuade millions of people. AI could build millions of individual relationships and persuade each person differently.
I then thought of asking AI to summarise the interview in one sentence. It came back with:
“Harari thinks humanity is conducting the biggest social experiment in its history: handing increasingly intelligent non-human agents access to our money, relationships, politics and institutions before we have decided what powers they should actually be allowed to have”.
Have a listen.