As audiences continue to migrate toward streaming, the NFL remains a powerful exception.
In the latest episode of In the Vicinity, eMarketer Senior Analyst Ross Benes joins Tim Hanlon to explore why football continues to defy television’s broader transformation, how local advertisers benefit from its unmatched reach, and whether the NFL can embrace streaming without weakening the broadcast ecosystem that helped make it America’s dominant sport.
Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Tim Hanlon: Hello and welcome. You are In the Vicinity. How are you? My name's Tim Hanlon. I am the founder, the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively advise and counsel various companies in the media and technology spaces. I'm your humble, congenial host each and every week for this little extravaganza we put together for you, where we kinda focus on all things local media.
Hopefully you've discovered this by now and you're nestled into your podcatcher to listen to this week's episode. If you're new to the proceedings, welcome. Where have you been? This week honored to have eMarketer analyst Ross Benes on the show. Ross is very well known in media analysis circles.
EMarketer, of course, is essentially a gold standard, certainly among the advertising and agency spaces, but also more broadly in and around the media industry as well. Ross's expertise is largely focused on linear and streaming video, television, and all the various permutations of such. And he's got a great new report out you can find it at eMarketer.com.
And it is that season as we finally get nestled into September. That generally means NFL and NCAA college football. Clearly football is an amazing phenomenon that does not seem to lose any steam. If it's not the national pastime in the United States, it certainly could be confused for such.
And the dominance, especially in linear presentation and live sports and its value, its high value, its unique value in the television and streaming food chain is unquestioned. And Ross and I are gonna kinda dig into some of the current numbers and forecasts and stuff like the NFL and to a smaller extent, but certainly similar, the NCAA tends to defy the rules, it seems, of what is happening to television or video consumption, and perhaps how long it will stay that way.
Will it be the exception? Will it become the rule? Will it be the savior of broadcast television? Or perhaps, maybe the NFL is onto something in its unique way of presenting games across both of those environments. So give a listen. You're gonna hopefully learn a few little interesting little nuggets, some non-obviousness in all of that.
Here's my chat we had with Ross just a couple of days back. Please, as always, enjoy.
Give us a little bit of background on you, your work, and what eMarketer does. I'm very familiar with it, of course, from my advertising and/or agency days. Still rely on its data for analysis and stuff. But some background about you, how you got to this role, what you do at it, and frankly, also what eMarketer is generally.
Ross Benes: So I've been at Emarketer now for over eight years, and before that I was at Digiday covering advertising and ad tech, and I had freelanced for AdExchanger and Adweek and I'd freelanced for a ton of people like Esquire, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Entertainment Weekly, while also publishing four nonfiction books about sex, Nebraska politics, and '90s pop culture, my favorite things.
Tim Hanlon: By the way, those all relate. There's a throughline there. But we'd need another podcast to go through that.
Ross Benes: We'd need another half hour for that one.
Tim Hanlon: That's great, though. I love that. But I could basically say you're an industry journalist plus, per se, right?
Ross Benes: Yeah. I did a lot of journalism. Now I do more market research, and at eMarketer, for most of my tenure, but not all of it, I have been the analyst covering TV and streaming. Now, eMarketer does a lot more than that. We're essentially a market research company that publishes forecasts and other data about basically all aspects of marketing and retail. But for me specifically I'm really focused on how the TV industry is changing and sports is a big part of that.
Tim Hanlon: And eMarketer, what is its raison d'etre? Because there are a lot of different entities that either rely on it or go to it. Clearly a lot of the roots come from advertising and ad tech and related. But eMarketer is, it almost belies its name maybe per se, because some of the data here is actually probably useful for other industries and other folks who care about similar things, including, by the way, television.
Ross Benes: Yeah. Its genesis is in digital marketing. That's where the name comes from, and that is still the core focus. But we have data and reports and forecasts on health and connected cars and finance, especially fintech. So yeah, there is a lot more than just marketing. I'd say the biggest area of expansion has been retail.
There's always been retail coverage, but now, we do almost as much work, maybe more on, in some months on, on retail than we do in marketing. Because that area's just really been completely upended, especially with Amazon.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah. Look, in many respects, frankly, this silly little podcast has been focused on all things local media, right?
And frankly, everything goes or anything goes, right? And retail media in many respects can be absolutely looked upon without much squinting frankly, as literally, last inch kind of media, which is the ultimate micro kind of local thing, right? Because it's the point of purchase and you're in the decision.
You tend to be in either a physical or a digital environment of some sort that's defined and relatively discoverable and IP-targetable. Yeah, and everybody's falling over themselves trying to figure out how to take some more classic marketing skills and apply them to hitting people over the head to get them to buy something in the moment.
Ross Benes: Yeah. Those regional grocery chains have really become quite sophisticated. And I'm thinking of someone like Kroger. You wouldn't think of them 10 years ago as having a really sophisticated digital marketing arm, and now they do. And I think you're just gonna see more of that. Obviously Amazon and Walmart do this, but I think the smaller you could call them local, but I'd say they're more like regional chains are building out retail media businesses because it's a lucrative area that has a lot of room for growth.
Tim Hanlon: Let's use that almost as sort of a backdoor hook into the sort of meat of our conversation. Because you put out a report a couple of days ago specifically focused on, it's not the national pastime yet or now, but it kinda is, right? Football.
Especially come fall when the seasons both start on the college and the National Football League levels. But it's interesting because a lot of what you focus on is the linear television thing and how some of these classic linear broadcast/local station dynamics still very much dominate, if you will, especially on the NFL level, but certainly with college football playing a role too.
But it's an interesting dynamic because as we know streaming has become part of the mixture. We're coming off this conversation Netflix had their game last night, early morning there in Australia. Yet the first game of the season was on NBC, right? But you're hinting at the retail connections and stuff.
It's not lost on CTV advertisers about trying to figure out how to connect content, in this case sports, with purchase, right? And if you're Amazon with your Thursday night games, in some respects you kinda think you have the next model going forward that maybe these linear television broadcasters don't.
Ross Benes: That's why Amazon made a Black Friday game. You couldn't make a more shopping-centric sports event than having Black Friday Football on an e-commerce platform. And, it was quite successful for them. Then Netflix followed with their Christmas games. When the rights come up, I think you're just gonna see more of that, of the streaming services when they do get some games carved out for them, trying to put them adjacent to shopper holidays because it's a powerful way to drive purchases.
Tim Hanlon: Your main headline on the NFL front, though, is that still, and this is a feature not a bug of the NFL, that TV networks and their local stations are the vast majority still because of the NFL's foresight back in the late '60s, early '70s, that linear television, network television, and that scale matters, right? And describe sort of that. We'll get into the college thing in a second. But that does feel very much a gigantic exception to what is becoming more an unavoidable rule of streaming-first behaviors and economics.
Ross Benes: Yeah, so the NFL is still 80-plus percent ad revenue coming from linear TV, and that's if you look at the general market of what share of total. I'm gonna use the term converged TV to say streaming plus linear. In the general marketplace they're almost at parity. Streaming is not that far behind linear. In sports, and especially the NFL, it's way behind. The linear share is 4X what the streaming share is, and I think it's gonna be that way for at least a few more years.
And even when you see streaming commercials on NFL games, they're often just pass-throughs. If I watch Paramount Plus, I'll watch a noon game here on Sunday Paramount Plus the Jets will probably be playing.
Tim Hanlon: Essentially the simulcast of CBS' regional coverage.
Ross Benes: That's all it's gonna be.
Yeah. It's not gonna be like a bunch of local pizzerias or the type of ads you would get if it was specifically sold to my household. I'm gonna see a lot of the same ads that my father will watch on Dish Network in Nebraska. It's gonna be a lot of the same stuff.
And I think that's part of what works though, is the advertisers who buy the NFL are paying a hefty price, and reaching that amount of people at once is still attractive because there's not a lot of places they can do that anymore, even in a world where targeting and precision is everything.
There's still a place for I wanna reach over 10 million people right now in one shot, and they can do that basically every Sunday at that time.
Tim Hanlon: In many respects, it's also probably one of the only places at least during the season, on a fairly regular basis you could do that, right? So if you need to do something around the holidays or you've got a month that is especially good for one's products or services. I want to call them mini Super Bowls.
Ross Benes: The pricing is getting to that point. Sportico reported Sunday Night Football ad prices are over a million bucks for a 30-second spot, and that's just a regular season game.
Tim Hanlon: So in a weird way, let's describe this, right? Okay so that's obviously by design, right? And we can speculate about what the next round of rights will look like, what the NFL will choose to do and all that.
But it's not lost on you or me or anybody, frankly, that all of these classic linear network entities have their own varying flavors of streaming services as well. We hinted at how they handle live stuff, especially with those that are simulcast in linear form, right? It's an extension play and stuff.
But as people, generations, audiences become more stream first, ask questions later, right? It's pretty clear that the IP delivery method called streaming or whatever, is essentially going to be the framework by which live stuff is delivered regardless. So today local TV stations benefit from their handful of spots during football broadcasts.
And that's great for the traditional local station DMA-wide ad proposition. But you gotta think that these entities will be aggressively considering how to hyper-locate these ads within those windows in these streaming environments, because I'm pretty certain that the Netflixes of the world, the Amazons of the world, those that don't are not the HBO Maxes of the world, that are not linearly tethered per se, will just zip plus four their way to, quote-unquote, "local spots" into that dynamic. They don't particularly care about the traditional methods. The question in there is, do you see this model of a handful of local ads and a lot of national ads, if you will, bowing to something much more sophisticated and targeted like digital is?
Ross Benes: It could in theory. It makes sense that it would. But so far when I see digital games or streaming sports the ad product isn't as different from linear as you think it would be. Like they're kinda just copying the same playbook. A lot of 30-second spots. A lot of them are still national.
You watch that Netflix game, you're still gonna see ads for Toyotas and Johnson & Johnson products for your household. It's not all localized, but they do have that ability. I think the shift you're talking about them doing will make more sense when some of these local advertisers funnel more money into streaming, and that is happening.
There's a lot of investment from that from Mountain going public, and TV Scientific, and Pinterest, and various things that Comcast and Roku are doing. But some of them, their budgets are still quite small, and even if that one spot is available, the CPMs are gonna be pretty high. I don't know if they'll buy into that when they could just buy a fast service library show, someone just sitting on their couch watching Midsomer Murders for the 30th time.
That's a lot cheaper to buy in. But for the local brands that start to go over a million dollars or even $5 million marketing budgets, like really successful local companies, I could see that. And Tatari had some interesting data they shared with me.
Tim Hanlon: Explain Tatari to those who might not be familiar with what they do.
Ross Benes: Okay. Digital TV ad buying is what their focus is on. They buy TV in sophisticated digital-like ways and they do it across all environments. They do targeted linear, but they also clearly do a lot of streaming. For small advertisers wanting to get into TV, they've been doing a lot of digital.
That's a type of company they would turn to for help with that. And what's interesting with even the NFL, which we think of the brands are national when you watch your individual experience, is I saw two local spots in the hour and the rest national. What that means on a countrywide basis is that everyone's seeing different local spots.
The number of brands who are local is actually much greater. Those national brands are spending the majority of the budget. One Toyota is worth probably 1,000 mom-and-pop pizzerias. But there's only a few hundred national brands buying an NFL over the course of a season. There's thousands of local and I think that number's gonna grow in streaming, because they won't be contained to the two minutes per hour.
Yeah. But it's not gonna be everything.
Tim Hanlon: No, and I think, too, that's always been the hallmark of NFL football at least, and we can make some arguments on the college front, too, is that these games tend to be, the scarcity of them, there are only 16 or so, or 18 of them each season, with maybe also some preseason, which is completely local affiliated revenue. It's a great way, an amazing way, and probably an increasingly unique way, for a local advertiser, or even regional in a DMA that's large that essentially is a way for them to draft off of a major national property that everybody seems to wanna watch.
Ross Benes: Yeah and some of them aren't even doing it in a targeted way. And you see this more in college, where the national spot is bought by a local company.
I'll give you an example. I watched the Nebraska game on FS1, and probably 80% of the people watching that, especially because they were playing a non-conference school, are from that state, so there were political ads that were about the Senate race. But it wasn't in the spot where you see the local.
It went to everyone. They're just buying FS1 broadly and you see a lot of that if you watch a Georgia game. You'll see a Georgia Southern race. But you're not gonna see that in the NFL as much. If the LA Rams play the San Francisco 49ers, they're not gonna even run a California ad, even though both teams are from California, because the NFL is such a national sport, you got 20 million people watching from all over the world.
A college football game is so much more regionally focused, especially if it's a noon game and not in primetime. Those local advertisers are buying national inventory essentially because they know it's being watched primarily within that DMA. I find that interesting because I don't think outside of sports that really happens.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah, it's a bit of an interesting quirk in national buying that it's the efficiency of the inefficiency in that I remember Southwest Airlines used to do a bit with Monday Night Football back in the day when they weren't in every major market in the country, far from it.
But they were in enough markets where they could do a national ad buy and know that they can saturate the markets that they're in even though it would fall upon deaf ears or curiosities in markets that they were either not yet in or never would be in, say New York, which took a long time for them to get into.
But all of this though feels like it's one exceedingly large anachronism. In contrast to what seems to be the rest of the television and/or entertainment industry, right? I guess what I'm trying to divine here is will this always be the case in your mind based on all the data you've gone through and stuff where the NFL and to a certain extent college, right?
Clearly cable is a big component of the college game in particular, but there's still plenty of broadcast stuff in that too, so we can lump that in. Do you think this is always gonna kinda be the case because football, because the NFL, because the college game is so big and almost like the mini NFL do you think this can translate to other sports as sports is having its moment, or is the NFL and/or football generally gonna be just different and always the exception in this regard, or is it just they're the last ones to kinda maybe capitulate to streaming first economics?
Ross Benes: I think the NFL will be the last ones to capitulate. They got great TV deals right now even though they can opt out of them and get even better. But I look at the NBA, and I think they've moved more to streaming than the NFL has and part of that is due to they've had rights renewals more recently.
But the NFL I think they're headed in that direction, but what makes it also more challenging is there's not just inertia, there's political pressure for them to keep things as is because if they go to too much streaming there's all these congressmen and other legal figures or politicians that are threatening to revoke their antitrust exemption.
And I think a lot of that's theater and it wouldn't actually play out, but they don't wanna get- caught in that. So they have incentive to have two of their three largest packages still with the legacy media company that will primarily transmit it over linear, even if they're simulcast over streaming.
So they can't upend it too much. And I think the NFL's a little different than basketball and baseball, being the other large American pro sports, in that it doesn't have nearly as many regular season games, so regional sports networks don't come into play as much.
So a national TV network makes more sense than all these little piecemeal deals that the others seem to have.
Tim Hanlon: And that's the conundrum, and I guess this is the big sort of cul-de-sac question around.
Ross Benes: It's easier to go to streaming when a team has control of its destiny.
Sure. You understand? You're more tethered to the league.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah. That and look, it also is the idea of going stream-first or trying to be much more subscription-oriented so to speak, whether it's RSNs or the next generation of what those might be via streaming. It parallels the rest of the business model of sports teams, right?
Which is controlling your audience. Obviously the in-game experience and the at-site experience, right? Which is experiential and worth paying all that extra money. The stadium kind of dynamics and the economics there. It's like a flywheel of subscription, if you will.
And, going DTC with streaming is another way to do that. But yet we've seen things maybe a little too ahead of themselves, right? Major League Soccer is probably the best example, right? At the time doing a deal exclusive with Apple TV, but they have suffered, right?
Yeah, most would agree by not having that reach of regularly scheduled games that most people can access.
Ross Benes: Mike Shields had an interesting article right after the World Cup ended, and it was MLS should be in this position to take all this momentum. Interest in soccer in the U.S. is basically at an all-time high.
They just hosted a World Cup and they had a team that at least made the knockout round. And you got Messi and all these other stars that are in the MLS now. But who's gonna go to Apple TV to watch it? Only a small section of the population has that. Sure, they would've got less rights money being on Fox or ESPN, but they could have broadened their general fandom at that moment.
Instead, they were kinda ensconced in getting a lot of media rights money, but no reach. And that has a more long-term repercussion than I think those sports leagues appreciated at the moment.
Tim Hanlon: All right, so let me ask you this roundup question then. So there are a lot of people, a lot of folks who have been in the television, quote-unquote, "business" for ages, right?
Who kinda just looks at the situation where broadcast networks, local stations, the aggregation and amalgamation of those station groups into bigger and bigger entities, all the stuff that we hear about that has its issues. There's also this sort of parallel thought whispered constantly that if the NFL decides that they're gonna take, I don't know, 50% of their inventory or whatever, or they decide that they wanna make a change, the broadcast television model as we know it essentially may dissipate in due course.
In other words, is the NFL propping up the broadcast model? I think there are a lot of smart people out there that think so, and what do you think is gonna happen with NFL football in particular, maybe college too? Do you think it's gonna continue to use its leverage to maintain this, by all other accounts, creaky model of distribution, or do you think they just take their ball and go to another environment, maybe more direct-to-consumer, and they can keep more of the revenues that way? What do you think?
Ross Benes: So they are propping it up, but there isn't as much to prop up. It's less of an industry or less of a model than it used to be; it's going by the wayside anyways. I expect them to go more streaming, but not at the pace of the other leagues due to some political pressure.
But also they become more linked with ESPN. And ESPN is also going more direct-to-consumer with ESPN Unlimited, but they can't cut the cord entirely either. Most of ESPN subscribers are still coming from MVPDs. So the NFL being really tethered to ESPN where ESPN owns the NFL Network and they have more games and their coverage of it is so substantial, the NFL basically has editorial discretion to tell ESPN how they're covering their league.
I don't think you're gonna see what you used to see back in the day with a show like Playmakers showing the NFL being controversial or Outside the Lines doing a deep report. ESPN doesn't do that work anymore. They're a PR machine for the NFL, because that's their moneymaker. With that relationship, though, that makes them a little even more tethered to the cord until ESPN can fully unlatch, and I don't think ESPN Unlimited has been successful enough for them to do that yet.
That's five years down the line probably.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah, look, I also think, too, it's important as we kinda wrap up here the notion that the NFL's been, I guess that whole question and that whole debate seems to be predicated on one or the other, black or white, right?
It's a zero-sum game. It's all gonna go streaming and broadcast is dead and blah blah blah. And I think really where the NFL kind of in its own way tells the marketplace is that it's very much in between, right? And we can debate how much or where that seesaw is in terms of stream first versus broadcast and the vicissitudes of how they seemingly ebb and flow and all that kinda stuff, but, the NFL in many respects has some is almost maybe a paradigm or a model of sorts that other leagues, especially the fledging ones or the other ones that wanna emulate that, this massive pot of shared media revenues amongst their franchises, in that they literally take any stream, any national game or whatever it is that is more exclusive, and in those, in the two local markets where those teams exist, they will ensure that it will be available on a local broadcast signal in those places.
Now, for the diaspora of fans not in those markets, okay, so you're SOL. Yeah. I look at that model and go, could you change that for Major League Soccer, right?
Ross Benes: It'd be amazing if it was for baseball. I don’t wanna pay for YES Network when, and there'll be a game on TBS and it's blacked out, I could watch the Yankees on Pix 11 or something, like, why can't I do that?
Tim Hanlon: It feels like that serves both sides and frankly more in an additive way than an either/or kind of manner because and politically as well?
Ross Benes: Yeah, because you're still offering that free access, and the NFL wants to maintain its hegemonic status, like it is the huge sport in America. Everyone watches it. It has a viewership lead on everyone. To maintain that, the only streaming service that would really work for is YouTube, because it's primarily free.
If you put the games, most of them, on Amazon or even Netflix, or especially if you put them on HBO Max, you're gonna lose a chunk of your audience. And you saw that when Amazon first took Thursday Night Football, even though they made it better than what it had been before, the ratings initially dropped compared to linear.
And there's a historical precedent of that too, when games have moved from broadcast to cable networks, you always see some audience erosion.
Tim Hanlon: There's the switching problem too, of input, if you will, right? One's streaming environment, one's local linear channels, and yeah, people older don't grok that really well.
Ross Benes: And they're not used to it, too. It takes some time to habituate that okay, Thursday I'm going to Amazon. When you start doing that, it's kind of a new muscle to move when it had been I think Thursday night was on NFL Network before, right? Yeah the NFL serves them to have that reach, even if it means a little less media rights.
They're the complete opposite of MLS with Apple TV. They're already the largest game in town, and they put it on a free-to-air TV network. But the only free-to-air TV network really with that penetration, to me, is YouTube. And you could put it on a fast service, but then you gotta convince 100 million people to go download Pluto TV who don't have it, and that's its own issue.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah, it almost seems to me that the local broadcast stations, and folks like Scripps and Gray, and to a lesser extent Sinclair, have been trying to create their show up as being a place, at least in the short term before new deals and contracts get signed, as being a place to kinda take over for the collapsing RSNs and stuff.
Ross Benes: That's really worked out in basketball. And there have been owners, I think the Jazz owner has talked about this, where they obviously took a haircut losing the RSN, but now that they're on that local affiliate, their reach has expanded, and then they're able to sell more sponsorships, get more people to games, get just more people excited about being a fan.
That takes some time but yeah, the affiliates have stepped up in a huge way in the NBA. The NFL's a little bit different though with fewer games to go around.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah. But I guess my point is that there's, and I'm gonna leave with this and maybe some thought about perhaps coming back next time to talk about more broadly in sports.
We're in a time now where private equity and the asset class is a term that now applies to sports, right? You and I are gonna talk about on a separate podcast my night job about the vicissitudes of pro sports and stuff. But there's just a ton of new leagues and new teams and franchise expansion.
Yeah. The money seems to be no object at this moment, right? We'll see how long that lasts. But it's almost like local stations should be grokking. As these leagues evolve their distribution deals are to be a component of that, right? Maybe a la the NFL when there's a stream first or exclusive kind of thing and it's a local market exposure thing, right?
It's bizarre, but these local stations become almost attractive in the mix. Now, it's not necessarily taking over, right? I don't know how long these deals that Sinclair and others are doing in the local markets are gonna last once the new deals get done, but it's just ironic how actually valuable local broadcast inventory and distribution is and could be as part of a more sophisticated structure maybe pioneered by the NFL and the way that they do it.
Ross Benes: There's some interesting things happening with local TV in college sports too. Like local broadcasters, especially the public ones, the PBS affiliate in Nebraska for instance will have certain volleyball games and not as much as they used to, and baseball games. And it's kinda interesting because they'll actually get the bigger match-ups.
Because otherwise they go to a really niche streaming service, like ACC+ or Big Ten+ that really no one watches. So when you have a match-up with a rivalry, and ESPN isn't gonna put a niche sport like that on primetime, your local affiliates are your best place to get a quality broadcast and reach more people.
And I just kinda find that interesting. Okay, like a big college baseball game's coming up. I gotta use a VPN to get the local PBS station where I don't live because they're gonna do a better job than the streamer is.
Tim Hanlon: All right. I gotta ask you then as we tail out here you hinted at you're a Nebraska native.
Where's your NFL football alliance then?
Ross Benes: I don't really care who wins most games that I watch. I've lived in New York for a while, but the Jets and Giants have been mostly terrible while I lived here. The Chiefs were closest to where I lived growing up, and they sucked. But now it'd be fun to just get on that bandwagon, but so many people have gotten on that bandwagon that it's like being a Chiefs fan seems passe.
A team that I actually enjoy, it's not like I'm a diehard even when they have a heartbreaking loss, I'm over it in 10 minutes. But I lived in Detroit for about a year, and I went to some Lions games, and since then I've always rooted for the Lions because they've been through so much.
That franchise. Those fans have supported them through some just terrible decades. And aside from Barry Sanders, there wasn't really much to cheer for 30 years. And now they're good. And I don't think they'll win the Super Bowl, unfortunately, but I love watching them play and I think their offense is really exciting.
And that Goff trade worked out for both franchises. So I found that interesting. It benefited the Rams and the Lions both to do that transaction. So I really hope the Lions can put it together and at least make a Super Bowl because it would mean a lot to the people in Detroit and they're overall pretty nice people.
Tim Hanlon: All right. Where can people find you and your work, and how can we get them interested, especially if they've never heard of eMarketer before?
Ross Benes: Yeah, sure. Just go to emarketer.com. If you sign up for a pro subscription, you can read all my reports and articles.
You could listen to our podcast. Plugging a podcast on a podcast. But Behind the Numbers is a free way to access eMarketer if you're not gonna pay for pro. And then the easiest way to probably just find me on LinkedIn, just at Ross Benes.
Tim Hanlon: All right, my thanks to Ross. You can check out his latest reporting on the NFL and college football and its impact on television linearly as well as the streaming variety at his website and the company's website. That's emarketer.com. E, the letter E, marketer.com. Again, Ross is a must follow and must read when it comes to all things television/streaming and all things video related there.
Lots of good stuff for you there at emarketer.com. Our thanks of course each week to our friends at TVREV who help us put this all together and without whose support we couldn't do this show. Led by the general in chief. Her name is Melissa Hourigan, but also backed by a crack staff in the forms of Jessika Walsten and Mike Gasbara, as well as Jason Damata.
Our thanks to the TVREV folks. Our friends at Madhive as well, who put their sponsorship and endorsement behind this effort each and every week. We appreciate them too. And last but certainly not least, our pal Jerry Payne for his audio excellence behind the knobs and the twiddling this week in the digital editing booth.
We thank him for his efforts and you for listening. We'll see you next week when we find you once again here In the Vicinity.
