(Preview) The Murky Future for the NBA, A Variety of Notes on Apple and AI, In Defense of Tech That Removes Friction
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Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. If everyone's talking about it, you feel like I need to watch it to sort of be part of things. And if you can't do that, then you're just filler. And filler is useful, but it's just not worth that much. It's the Peacock strategy. We'll pay a lot for the NFL, and we'll have a bunch of reality TV shows that don't cost us anything to make. Yep. Yep.

Yeah. Well, and I'll, I mean, as somebody who hosts an NBA podcast, like shortening the season would also help eliminate a lot of the dumber meta conversations around the league. Like I know, but you realize that'd be bad for people. That'd be bad for your business. Maybe it would be bad for podcasting. Everybody would just be like, I don't need podcasts anymore. I'm going to actually watch these games because I care about the games. Now this is what's so interesting is it,

I put this thesis forward. I think Derek Thompson wrote an interesting thread for the Super Bowl where he didn't consume any Super Bowl content, but of course watched hours of it. Meanwhile, he was listening to a gazillion NBA podcast because the Luca trade had just gone down and didn't watch any basketball games. And there's this, or there's a forecast, I think, of one of the final questions in the rundown here. But

In addition to this FOMO and filler dichotomy, there's two ways that value can be generated from things like sports. Number one is the actual rights value, which is watching the game. And number two is the cultural value that goes along with it. The NBA still generates a lot of cultural value. And folks like Mark Cuban back in the day would be happy to talk about, oh, we dominate social media. The problem is the NBA didn't capture any of that value. The only way it captures value is through sports.

The sports rights and you and Ben Goliver made a great living, have a great product with a few, you know, with, with thousands of, of, of listeners. And it's great for you, but the NBA doesn't capture any of that and all the other sort of podcasts out there. And there's a bit where they're only capturing one portion of it. Netflix with like drive to survive, uh,

I talked to Greg Peter. He's like, yeah, we missed the boat on that one in that they generated huge cultural value for F1, and they captured that by having Drive to Survive. What they didn't capture was the huge value or the huge increase in the rights value that cultural development drove. And so it's sort of a missed opportunity, which I think they're –

You know, as I mentioned, the Women's World Cup. Yeah. Yeah. Like the reason they got the Women's World Cup rights for a long time is they're going to try to generate a lot of cultural value and not just capture that value, but also then capture. Oh, now we have more value than we paid for the actual rights to the games because we created it and we're going to capture it.

Well, and as far as Netflix is concerned, you mentioned in your interview with Michael Nathanson an idea that I floated in the past, like as RSNs become fully extinct, does a league like the NBA put all of its regular season inventory, anything that's not sold to NBC or ESPN, all the random regular season games that would have gone to RSNs, do those then make sense on a streamer where...

They a it gives the NBA a way to reach a larger audience. So customer acquisition is what those games are about from the league side of things. But then also maybe it has more value to a streamer like Amazon or Netflix as like a churn mitigation tool. Do you think that's a possibility?

That's a possibility. There's a team like the Jazz don't have an RSN deal anymore. They put it on local broadcast TV, and they make way less money by doing so, but they'll argue we're making more fans. Like, the ratings are significantly up. Yeah, so they have more viewers...

but make less money. And that's a trade-off that is, that is going to happen. I think ideally the, the problem with all this stuff is you can zoom out and what's an ideal format and ideal format is you're generating fans or keeping long-term ones, but then you're, you're generating FOMO for the big matchups that you have to pay to get. And, and,

The problem is how you get from here to there is not at all clear because that's kind of the inverse of how it's worked. Everyone had access to the big games because everyone had cable and then the hardcore fans could watch what's extra. It's not clear. Again, we could – to your point, you warned at the beginning –

We could do a whole podcast about this, but I like Brandon's analogy. And again, I think it's an analogy that extends far broader than just Intel or the NBA, and it is something to think about. Yes, and there are no easy answers to where the NBA will be in 10 years, where the NBA will be in two years. For the love of God, just cut down on some of the replay at the end of game.

I'm just going to say, great call by me. I was anti-replay from the very beginning. The moment it came out, I've been anti-replay. It was...

My view on replay, it's a very simple rule. If your game naturally includes stoppages, replay is great. So replay is great in the NFL. It's great in tennis. We're probably one of the all-time great implementations. There's a break between... It's not like they're stopping a set in the middle to do a replay. You do it afterwards, right? Exactly. No, that's the difference. Tennis and football, it's perfect. But everything else, it's like... Basketball and soccer is the selling point. Soccer is the worst. Soccer is the worst. Yeah. Because the...

The issue with soccer is on one hand, you have more motivation to get it right because a goal is such a big deal. On the other hand, the best part about soccer is you're enduring the ball just going back and forth and nothing happening for so long that

for that one moment. Just for the release and the culmination of a goal which has been completely destroyed and diminished, right? Oh, we've got to wait for VAR. Oh, God. Yeah, and we're going to get a, but every time I bring this up, we're going to get a bunch of emails and I'm sorry, you're all wrong. I don't think so. I actually don't think so. The tie,

has turned. No, no, the soccer people hate the idea. The basketball people, I think, are coming around to our side. Yeah, people get it at this point. Well, hopefully the NBA will get there. And like you said,

Nothing is better for conversation and FOMO generation than a missed call controversy. It's good for business. It's an entertainment business at the end of the day, and it's good for the entertainment product. So figure it out, NBA. Also cut down on some of the complaining to officials. Maybe cut down on the threes over the next couple of years. But we can continue spitballing for eternity. Every team should get one time out in the last two minutes.

and there should be no replays. If we want to get really radical, we could also cut down on the intentional fouling. You can choose to get the ball side out of bounds instead. So you have to actually try to steal the ball and play defense instead of intentional fouling. Maybe that's a bridge too far. People will come around to my side in a few more years on that one. Give it time. You'll be on the right side of history eventually. Oh, and no live ball timeouts. That's another great thing in FIFA.

FIBA. You keep saying FIFA. Yes. Just adopt the FIBA rules whole scale and call it a day. Bring in all the FIBA officials. Yeah, the FIBA officials do not take any guff from any player, no matter how famous they are. We need those guys over here. All right. Well, to keep it moving and speaking of the European continent, Nick says...

Greetings from rainy London. Greetings, Nick. The latest iOS beta is out this week and it comes with Apple intelligence in a whole bunch of European markets, fully translated and available as far as I can tell from the news coverage. So what has changed? Why can Apple suddenly do that? I thought with all the bad AI regulations, the EU shot itself massively in the foot.

Ben, do you have any answers for Nick there? Yeah, Apple hasn't fully shipped Apple intelligence. The core problem with Apple intelligence relative to the EU's, I believe this is with the DMA, which is the core problem.

is there is it's forbidden for a, I can't remember the actual nomenclature, but for a dominant company to leverage this control in one area to launch into another area. So this is, so the Apple intelligence you specifically is less about, I think the AI stuff and more about the Apple's whole theory of the case is we have exclusive access to a lot of important data to you. So we're the only ones that can apply AI to that and deliver an interesting product.

And they haven't done that yet. So whatever that comes. It does seem to be most of these products do seem to launch in the EU eventually. I don't know. I'm guessing there's some sort of negotiation that happens with regulators and then they okay it. And so it ends up manifesting more as a delay than anything else in some cases. But the Apple one specifically, the core crux of the problem is

with Apple intelligence in the U.S., I believe, is actually a DMA issue, not a AI act issue. And that issue at the crux is not available in the U.S. either. Yes. Well, thank you for the email, Nick, because it made me look back and smile at all the grave warnings. And it's now...

A year later, it's like, oh, the horror. What will the folks in the EU do without summaries of their text messages and everything we've seen from Apple over the last couple of months? But again, maybe they'll ship something more impressive eventually. Yeah, everything. The handful of morsels that Apple has put forth thus far. Speaking of which, Anthony says Ben and Andrew.

The news broke last week that Apple is delaying its updated Siri product with Mark Gurman leaking that some folks at Apple are advocating rebuilding it from scratch.

Given the embarrassing state of Siri, at what point should Apple consider an acquisition of an LLM company? I get the sense Apple wants to own the entire LLM versus leveraging an open source one like Lama. But given how far behind they are, do you think buying versus building will make sense? And who might be good acquisition targets? What do you think, Ben?

So the Apple situation, yeah, there's a pregnant pause because there's a lot to say and think about this. I am going to write about this this week. So we'll talk about it more on Thursday. Well, I haven't written it fully yet. So this is both a preview and I'm subject to change as I fully flesh out my argument. But I thought last week was really interesting from an Apple perspective.

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