Field of streams: sports viewing changes

The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In Russia, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has been sentenced to 16 years in prison on bogus spying charges. Our correspondent, a longtime friend of Evans, gives us a glimpse into the empty performance of justice in today's Russia. And a little vocabulary lesson arising from America's presidential race. Kamala Harris has been dubbed "brat," which is something of a compliment these days, one that comes with a collar. Don't worry, we'll explain. First up, though, Tonight's opening ceremony in Paris is the official start of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. Appointment viewing for fans of sport and of pageantry the world over. It wasn't always so. The 1936 Games in Berlin, which Adolf Hitler used as a global showcase for his repugnant politics, also showed off the newfangled technology of television.

"There comes Lovelock, running like a train!

World's record!" Back then, just one camera was capturing live footage, and only when the sun was out. The audience: 160,000 people within the limited range of the transmitter at the stadium. Compare that with today. Over the next 2 weeks, some 3 billion people will tune into the games, and not just on television.

About a third of all the people watching the Paris Olympics this year are going to be watching it via streaming platforms.

Tom Wainwright is The Economist's media editor.

This is going to have huge consequences for broadcasters, and it's not just changing the way we watch sport, it's changing the kinds of sport that we watch as well.

And the conventional broadcasters really depend on that sport coverage, don't they?

Yeah, they really do. It's extraordinary the extent to which the media really lives off sport. In America, for example, the biggest media companies there spend between a fifth and a quarter of their annual content budgets on live sports rights. Last year, of the 100 most watched broadcasts in America, 93 of them were NFL games. Sport plays an interesting role in the media ecosystem as well, because in recent years, a lot of TV has moved over to streaming, and sport is more or less the one really big category of programming that hasn't done that yet. And for media companies, it's tricky It's tricky because sport is still the thing propping up a lot of their cable subscriptions, and cable still is responsible for a big chunk of their profits. Nearly 10 years ago, John Malone, who's a big media mogul, said that sport was the glue that holds the cable bundle together. And now, as that sport is starting to move to streaming, that glue is coming unstuck.

But those broadcasters are chasing the streamers in their own way, right?

They want to move sport over to streaming because that's where the new audiences are. It's where young people are. Young people have more or less abandoned linear TV. That's broadcast in cable and then they've gone to streaming. But at the same time, these companies still rely on cable for a lot of their day-to-day profits. And so if they move the sports off there too quickly, they risk losing that source of profits. And so they're trying on the one hand to entice people to sign up for streaming, but on the other hand, they don't yet want to take all the good stuff off of cable. It seems as though this year and next is going to be the time when really the biggest part of all that sports content moves over to streaming. So ESPN, for example, which is the biggest sports cable network in the US, is launching a streaming platform next year. So the incentives for remaining on cable are diminishing and the amount of sport moving over to streaming is increasing. We're seeing this also on some of the dedicated streaming platforms like Netflix. Until pretty recently, it was fairly clear that sports rights, live sports rights at least, weren't something that it was very interested in, but it seems to have changed its mind. And I think the key thing here is that a couple of years ago it introduced an an advertising tier on its platform. And what advertisers really want is a big audience and ideally a simultaneous audience. And the easiest way to get a big audience over to your ad tier in one go is sports. And so Netflix has, for the first time, been buying live sports rights. It's doing a few kind of slightly silly ones initially. It's doing a live hot dog eating contest in September, for example. But in December, it's going to show its first live NFL game. And this is a big moment. Most people think that this will not be the last time that Netflix buys the rights to big live sports, and having an NFL game broadcast to 270 million subscribers in 190+ countries is a big change for the sports business.

Does this not point to a dynamic where instead of having some sort of, you know, cable bundle where you get all your sports, you just have a streaming bundle where you get your sports? Why isn't that the model here?

Well, that could be the way that we're heading. And it's interesting. I think all this sport moving to streaming, in some ways it's good for sports fans, but for people who aren't that interested in sport, this is possibly a bit of a worrying development because for a long time, non-sports fans had a bad deal in America because they had to buy a lot of very expensive sports content through their cable package. Often there wasn't really very much choice about that. And streaming in recent years have offered them a way out of that. You can pay $15 or whatever it is for a basic Netflix account, which is cheap, partly because it has no sports. As more sport moves over to those services though, what's likely is that we'll see those services increase their prices in order to pay for all that stuff. And if you're someone who's into movies and not into the NFL, that's probably not music to your ears.

And I suppose from the perspective of the sports leagues, this is good news in a general sense because it's not just domestic cable audiences, it's the whole world.

That's exactly right. It's really striking how little watched some of these very successful leagues are outside of their home market. So if you look at the NFL, for example, probably the best example of this, hugely successful at home, but 98% of the media rights revenue that the NFL made last year was in its domestic market, only 2% in the whole world outside the United States. And the same is true of most of the big American leagues. Baseball's similar, NHL is similar. Basketball's a little bit more international, but still very, very domestic-based. And it's not just an American thing. I mean, the Indian Premier League makes something like 96% of its revenue at home.

The grand opening ceremony.

Most European football leagues are very domestically focused. And so to them, the idea of having a streaming service which is distributed in 200-odd countries is extremely appealing.

And I suppose makes sense in the context of something we've talked about on the show before, which is that young people in particular seem to be falling out of love with sport.

They do and they don't. It's a funny one. Young people are falling out of love with sport by some measures. So the key one is that they watch less live sport than older people do and less than older people did at that age. But by other measures, they're at least as interested, if not more interested. So they watch highlights, they follow sports stars on social media, they read about sport, they listen to sports podcasts, they place lots of bets on sport, which in the States recently has become legal. I spoke to more than one person who said that the issue at the moment in sports is that a lot of people are following sports, just not that many people are watching sports. From the point of view of companies that have long made most of their money by selling the rights to these live games or selling advertising against them, it's a bit of a conundrum.

But is there strong evidence that if everything becomes available to everyone, that, for instance, Indians will be interested in NFL and Americans will be interested in Indian cricket?

Well, it remains to be seen, and I think it's gonna take time for these things to take off. But one reason for thinking that that kind of transmission of sports from one country to another might go more quickly than in the past is that another thing that is different about young fans is that they follow not teams so much as individuals. And a big reason why sport hasn't really traveled very well in the past is this team-based followership. If you are someone who follows sport through your local team, then by definition, you are not likely to take an interest in a sport from another country, 'cause you don't have a local team there. But the more that young fans follow individuals, the easier it is for them to get into teams that they don't follow and whole sports that they haven't watched before. So we see examples of this, like say Lionel Messi attracting people to watching Inter Miami and Major League Soccer, even if they're not from Miami.

I would like to introduce to you your number 10, Inter Miami's number 10, America's number 10, the best number 10 in the world, Lionel Andrés Messi.

We see people watching women's basketball, not because they played basketball before, but because they're interested in Caitlin Clark, who's a big star of the moment. And so this kind of followership of individuals rather than teams is helping to decouple fandom from geography. And I think that will help sports to spread further around the world than they have in the past.

And taking all of this together, it stands to reason then that at the next Olympics, whether it's teams, nations, individuals, a majority of people are going to be streaming it, not sitting down to watch it on the TV.

Yeah, absolutely. But I think the worry for some of these sports broadcasters and sports organisers is that fewer people will be watching the actual live games themselves. If current trends are anything to go by, we'll probably see lots of following of these events on social media, lots of people keeping up with what their favourite stars are doing, but the number of people actually sitting down to watch hours of live Olympics coverage or whatever it might be, that's the thing that people have got their eyes on. And so the puzzle facing sports broadcasters and sports organisations is how to turn those young sports RealSports followers into RealSports fans.

Tom, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

Over the summer, The Economist is launching a new series of its Schools Briefs, simple guides to some of the most important stories of the day. This time around, we're focusing on artificial intelligence, from its origin story through to its existing and future capabilities. Here on The Intelligence, we want to hear your questions about AI. Do you have particular worries or hopes for its use? Will it steal your job or allow you to retire early? Maybe you want to know what it means for journalism, including ours. Ask and ye shall receive as our correspondents field your questions. Just send them to podcasts@economist.com. After more than a year in pretrial detention in Russia, Evan Gershkovich was convicted of espionage last week and sentenced to 16 years in prison. The Wall Street Journal reporter is the first American journalist to be arrested on such charges since the Cold War. It would now seem that Mr. Gershkovich's fate is entwined with that of others. A prisoner swap is in the offing. Vladimir Putin said in February that a dialogue was already underway, something that America's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, hinted at on the day of the sentencing. Any effort to bring any American home is going to be part of a process of back-and-forth discussion, potentially negotiation. But that is not to say that Mr. Gershkovich's ordeal will necessarily be over anytime soon.

Evan's a friend of mine. He's a damn fine journalist. And I've known him ever since he came to Moscow.

The Economist's Ukraine and Russia correspondent Oliver Carroll has been following the case closely.

And I remember how chuffed he was when he got a role as staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal. And there he was producing some of the best coverage of the war. So You can imagine sort of my own personal feelings when I got a phone call from a contact early in the morning asking if I knew where Evan was. And as we know now, on the 29th of March, 2023, the day before I got that phone call, Evan had been snatched from a restaurant in Yekaterinburg where he'd been reporting, with a sweater pulled over his head by unknown people. And over the next day, when we were trying to find out what had happened to him, we realized it was very serious. And then finally the Kremlin admitted it was one of them who'd snatched him from the restaurant. And since that, we've had a year of pre-trial detention culminating in this Alice in Wonderland sham trial, which has been held behind closed doors, where there was only ever going to be one verdict.

And what is it that Mr. Gershkovich was doing, and what is it he's accused of doing?

I think the word accusation in a Russian trial is perhaps charitable. There's very little in the way of process or any kind of thing resembling justice. 99.85% of cases which reach a judge end up in a guilty verdict. And this, the shammiest of all sham trials, a trial which was supposedly focused on espionage and national security, there was only ever going to be one verdict. So the Kremlin's men say that he was collecting some kind of secret information. They don't say what it was, from the Uralvagonosavod, which is a huge tank factory near Yekaterinburg where he was arrested. Now, it's an absurd accusation for a number of reasons, but let me just give you a couple. First, he was accredited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to work as a journalist in Russia. He'd been vetted and cleared by the Russian security services. And the second thing is that Evan knew he was being followed in his work. We all knew we were being followed So sure, Evan was doing journalistic work. He was reporting on the war. He was reporting on the war economy, which I suppose by its very nature is dangerous. But he was absolutely sure he was doing nothing illegal. The overarching nature of laws in Russia, certainly those which were passed a year before the war and those which were passed in the first few months of war, do make almost any reasonable journalistic activity potentially fall into the realms of being interpreted as illegal. They argued that he was a secret CIA operative. Again, I can't state enough that that's just absurd. But from my sense, from the conversations I had with him before he went to Yekaterinburg, he seemed to be being set up by dodgy local contacts. But again, you know, the allegations of espionage really are absurd.

And there is this suggestion now he's been sentenced that he may be involved in some way in some kind of prisoner swap. What's your take on that?

The Russians have made little secret of the fact they're, you know, far less interested in Evan as they are, you know, a range of spies, saboteurs, and scoundrels being held in Western prisons. Almost from the get-go, they've talked about a man called Vadim Krasikov. You might remember, as an assassin who killed a Chechen rebel commander in central Berlin in 2019. And there've been schemes reported before the death in February of this year of Alexei Navalny the Russian opposition leader, which would have seen Mr. Krasikov returned in a wider swap involving presumably Evan Novyaling and Paul Whelan, who was an American Marine arrested and jailed in 2018. There's been a few things which have got in the way of that potential exchange, not least the seriousness of the crime and the fact Mr. Krasikov is being held not by the US but Germany. But it might be that the Russia and the US are returning to a deal. The good news is that Evan's verdict was reportedly brought forward on the assistance of his own lawyers, and this might— emphasize might— fit a previous pattern. Russia has rushed through verdicts just before similar exchanges in the past. This is to sort of present this image of justice being played out, however absurd it is. So the Russians know the Americans are ready to do exchanges, even such a lopsided one as this. Because the Americans have public opinion they need to take into account.

It's really interesting, the back channels that this represents. How does that work when America and Russia are making these kinds of negotiations behind the scenes, given the geopolitical situation that surrounds it all?

Well, I suppose in some way, the fact that the hostage-taking continues is probably an indication that the back channels are still very much there, at least in some working order. There are certainly still links. These are mostly on the military and security levels. The political links are still very, very limited. But we do know that Bill Burns, for example, the CIA chief and a former ambassador in Moscow, has traveled to Russia at key moments in the last 2.5 years of war. Sergei Naryshkin, his counterpart as the head of Russia's foreign intelligence, has also been in the US. And we also know from the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who's actually confirmed the level of security contact, that these particular talks about exchanges are being conducted.

So what to look out for? What do you expect, and over what kind of time scale?

There's certainly hints that an exchange might be in the offing, and I think the major evidence of that is the defense request to bring the sentencing forward, and also the conviction of another American being held in Russia. There are some reasons why it might make political sense for the Democrats in election season to show that they can bring their people home. But I think that's also perhaps a reason why I fear it might well be delayed till after the elections. Moscow does have its guys in these forthcoming US elections, and they aren't running on Team Blue. Obviously, from my point of view, I'm hoping that Evan will come back very soon. It couldn't be a day too soon.

Oliver, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

"You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you." This is the beginning of a viral clip of Kamala Harris.

Holly Berman is a news editor at The Economist and is so brat, I can't even.

It first started circulating after she spoke at a White House event last year, but resurfaced in the days after Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance. This video, though, has a twist. You start to hear the song Von Dutch by a British pop star called Charli XCX rev in the background. A lime green filter with the word "Brat," which is the COVID art and the name of her new album, starts to flash across the screen. Cute clips of Harris dancing, giving her signature belly laugh, talking about Venn diagrams, all of that kind of stuff. The video was uploaded to X by Ryan Long, who's a college student in Delaware. It has 4 million views, but that's not counting millions more from reshares and copycat remixes that have since spawned all across social media. On the day that Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Charli XCX actually gave Kamala Harris her endorsement on X in a post that simply read, "Kamala is brat." The post has hundreds of thousands of likes and over 50 million views, and that is high praise. That's because Charli XCX's songs, like the one you're hearing now, "365," and the color lime green have decorated the summer of the world's coolest it girls for weeks. But what does it actually mean to be brat? Charli XCX has defined the essence of brat on her social media. You're just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and like does like dumb things. But like, it's brat. You're brat.

That's brat.

So none of this screams White House exactly, but Harris's team is leaning into it. Her campaign has reshared Charli XCX's post and similar versions of the brat branding on the campaign's social media. That has puzzled some pundits in the process. A panel on CNN recently gathered to discuss brat and what it means.

So it's the idea that we're all kind of brat and Vice President Harris is brat? I don't—

I don't know if you're a brat, but you inspire me to be a brat. But this moment did not just fall out of a coconut tree. The ironic, organic collision of these two internet cultures is exactly why it works. So Brat album spoofs were across social media long before they reigned over Karma HQ. And Harris's predisposition to becoming a meme is a trait that Ryan Long, who I spoke to, thinks captures something actually quite similar to Donald Trump online.

You see him making riffs, making jokes, getting crowds excited. And I think Kamala Harris does the same type of thing.

That is also an opportunity that Biden's team of meme manufacturers could have only dreamed of. Well, what we really need is a femininominon. A what? A femininominon. Over on TikTok, the excitement is palpable. There's lots more edits of Kamala Harris all over there. Another one that is soundtracked to a song called "Feminominon," which you're hearing now. By a pop star called Chapel Roan has around 7 million views.

Did you hear me? Play the fucking beat!

And if you take a look at the comments, you can actually get a bit of a sense of how people are reacting to this moment. One commenter hopes to meme her into the presidency. Another one is calling for a Kamala-nomenon. A similar edit was shared to Harris's campaign TikTok, and it has over 40 million views so far. Whether she can turn turning vibes into votes is one thing, but another is certain: the TikTok election just became a lot more interesting.

A look at The Economist's poll tracker shows Kamala Harris swiftly catching up with Donald Trump, but voters actually know precious little about her. Who is she? What does she actually believe? And how persuasive will voters find her pitch as the election a smidgen over 100 days from now, draws closer. Of course, we're on it. My colleagues over on Checks and Balance, our subscriber-only show on American politics, have dug into her past and her past run at the presidency to make some informed guesses about what lies ahead. Checks and Balance is out later today and every Friday. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is Jonjo Devlin, and our sound engineer is Will Roe, with support this week from Johnny Allen. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Larniuk, and our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khadifa I'm Benji Guy, and our assistant producer is Henrietta McFarlane, with extra production help this week from Elna Schutz. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for the Weekend Intelligence.