Friday, September 25, 2026
The Long View
Tubi finished Fox's fiscal year with 110 million monthly users, revenue above $1bn and positive EBITDA in all four quarters. It has roughly 375,000 titles and asks nobody to subscribe. The economics are the inverse of prestige streaming, and they are working.
Widow's Bay took six Emmys in its first season on Monday night, including outstanding comedy series. The Pitt won outstanding drama for the second year running. Jean Smart became the first woman to win an Emmy for every season of a show, and Matthew Rhys the first person to win two lead acting Emmys for different series in the same year.
Solo publications and small newsrooms are multiplying, powered by cheap tools, direct payment rails and an advertising market that finally learned to buy small.
Two trade outlets reported this week that standalone streaming services are in decline in the United States and that the market is consolidating. Both stories trace to a single press release issued on 23 September by Parks Associates, a research firm in Plano, Texas. The number underneath is a count of apps — ten removed from the tracker in the second quarter, two added — and it says almost nothing about where Americans watched television.
National CineMedia has closed its $275 million purchase of Captivate, the elevator-screen network in office and apartment buildings, giving it more than 48,000 screens outside the home. It paid with a new $275 million term loan. On Monday the whole company was worth about $211 million.
More than 400 pages of Defense Department contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI were obtained through freedom-of-information litigation. The documents were disclosable when they were signed. What separated them from the public was not classification but the cost of asking twice.
The region accounted for 36 percent of first-run scripted commissions from major streaming platforms in the first half of this year, making it the largest single market for new drama. Amazon is doubling its Japanese originals spend. The commissioning decision has moved before the audience conversation has.
Publishers reported AI licensing as meaningful revenue in first-quarter earnings, and Meta has signed deals with People Inc. and USA Today Co. among others. Almost all the money has gone to large newspapers and wire agencies. The training data did not come from a smaller share of everyone else.
From February 2027, Ad Manager and AdSense stop counting a display impression when the creative begins downloading and start counting it when the creative begins rendering. Publishers will see their impression totals fall. Nobody will see fewer advertisements.
The Community NEWS Act has passed both chambers and is on the governor's desk. It pays local outlets a refundable tax credit for every journalist they employ — twenty thousand dollars for the first five, fifteen for each one after — funded by capping the corporate deduction for executive pay above a million dollars.
A federal judge declined to make Google sell the ad exchange she had already found it used to monopolise the market. The remedies are behavioural — open the bids, drop the pricing rules, end first and last look. Every one of them is a rule that somebody has to keep watching.
OpenAI says its advertising business reached a billion dollars in annualised revenue in under two hundred days. That is about two and a half percent of the company's revenue, which is the part publishers should read twice.
Advertising spent a century building a comparable unit so that two buyers could argue about price instead of arguing about what they were buying. Creator deals never got one, and every negotiation still starts from nothing.
The job of knowing whether an image actually shows what the caption claims was a specialism. Publications removed it, and the errors that followed are the predictable kind.
The embargo gave reporters time to do the work properly and gave sources control of the clock. One half of that arrangement has quietly stopped being delivered.
The free-article limit trained readers to wait it out. Publishers are replacing it with a demand for an email address, which converts worse and is worth more.
Audio-first shows are building studios because discovery moved to video platforms. The production cost rose, the advertising improved, and the thing that made podcasting cheap is gone.
Outlets that spent a century competing are pooling coverage of the beats none of them can staff alone. The arrangement works because the thing they are sharing was never what made them distinct.
Synthetic narration has made it viable to record books that were never going to be recorded. It has also made the gap between a reading and a performance the whole commercial question.
Publishers that spent two decades shrinking print are reintroducing it at high prices and low volumes, aimed at readers who already subscribe digitally and want something the feed cannot supply.
Publishers spent two decades treating back catalogue as storage cost. The same material is now the thing buyers want, and the ones who kept clean rights records are discovering how few of their competitors did.