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This week on the podcast, I fulfill a lifelong dream and co-star with the one and only Valerie Bertinelli, star of the classic sitcom One Day At A Time, the hilarious Hot In Cleveland, and for a decade on The Food Network with her own cooking shows (plural).

Valerie is a force. But this is not a trip down nostalgia road, this is an energizing conversation with a true creator/entrepreneur, now building her own digital enterprise from the ground up.

Fed up with the Trad Media, Valeria has started her own content platform, Valerie’s Place, working with Visible Things - a studio for the digital first age, founded by another (behind the scenes) TV legend Billy Cooper.

This is a pitch perfect Affinity Economy case study: A creator-led studio and community platform, built on a foundation of fandom, with complete autonomy and authenticity. Valerie’s Place runs on engagement - the mutual love between Valerie and her fans.

I am literally thrilled to bring you my conversation with Valerie Bertinelli.

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If you’re in Denver for StreamTV, I’ll see you today! If you’re in Cannes next week, I’ll see you on the Croisette! If neither, enjoy your weekend and I’ll see you on the internet!

ESHAP

Introducing the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index.

In the commercial Media industry, measurement has always been divided by screens. No major auditing bureau or currency panel has ever forced television meters, handset timestamps, and browser logs into a singular, logic-enforced, zero-sum attention budget. This is collective malpractice. If you still treat social video and television as separate silos, to twist the age-old Wanamaker adage: You are wasting half your fucking money.

Here’s why…

In the next three years, one trillion dollars will be spent on advertising in the US. More than three quarters of that will be spent on digital platforms. Another $180 billion will be spent on television advertising. No one is measuring the reach, frequency, or effectiveness of this massive cashflow across these platforms.

Publishers and advertisers look at their TV ratings, digital buyers and social media experts look at mobile handset logs, and everybody claims they are winning the war for reach. Meanwhile the measurement industry locks agencies into long-term contracts, then charges sellers through the nose to use their “currency.” Or, they will track attention across all the platforms, but only by campaign - not as a map nor trajectory of total cross-screen attention. This leaves our collective data on real attention siloed to the point of pointlessness.

The industry is totally blind to how real people actually behave. Today’s consumer is a singular, fluid entity moving seamlessly across a multi-screen day, allocating a single, finite commodity: attention.

The Media industry is lost specifically because they are charting their course based on the failed logic of vanity metrics, rather than following the actual data; the voice of the audience.

In a recent survey by ESHAP and MX8 of 3,000 US consumers, 59% of people say they use their phone to watch video more than any other device. Just 28% named TV as their most-used source for video. When you look only at people under 55, however, this ratio gets more dramatic.

Only Baby Boomers watch more video on televisions than on phones. Every other generation of Americans watches video on their phones two to three times more than their TVs.

This is the Media Generation Gap.

I have been studying this trend all year. I have become obsessed with the idea of measuring total attention among competing platforms across all screens.

As far as I can tell, the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index represents something never achieved in media analytics: a singular, logic-enforced, zero-sum attention budget that tracks the whole consumer across all attention endpoints simultaneously.

By treating human focus as a tangible physical property constrained by a fixed 24-hour clock, we built a model that removes corporate bias, complacency, and corruption from measurement.

This model produces a singular, unduplicated map of total human attention by harmonizing Nielsen’s TV currency with Comscore’s handset panels and GWI daily consumer diaries. We collapsed every delivery mechanism — linear, on demand, broadcast, cable, subscription streaming, free ad-supported streaming, and mobile social feeds — into their corporate parents. To do this, we built a deterministic Python accounting engine that operates under the laws of data science and geometry. This logic engine treats attention as a closed, zero-sum matrix.

This data is from December 2025 through May 2026, and tracks all attention, including time spent watching video and consuming other social media.

The results show, for the first time, a more accurate media hierarchy across every format and screen — from vertical social feeds and letterboxed streaming to smartphones, laptops, and Connected TVs. Is this Index a 110% perfect read of all Media usage? No. Does it provide a clearer, more accurate account of actual, total Media attention in the US than the industry has ever had? Hells to the yeah.

Our data construct is sound. But the framework for this index is not built solely on quantitative analysis. Over the last year, we have interviewed hundreds of experts, practitioners, vendors, buyers, managers, executives, interns, academics, data scientists, platforms, publishers, producers, and members of our community. On nearly every one of our working days.

The numbers in this index are from companies we all know. So is its point of view. We knew to ask the right questions, because everyone asked us. We use words in this report that come straight from the mouths of the people, at all levels, who run all the companies in the Media Universe.

These results are not mine. They are ours. These opinions aren’t mine. They are ours.

The underlying raw inputs we used to construct this index — Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge, U.S. Census population stats, Comscore’s digital market updates, and GWI’s consumer diaries — are all 100% publicly available, out in the open for anyone to read. Yet, no one in the multi-billion-dollar Media Industrial Complex has ever combined and shared them. Because our industry is kept in eat-what-you-kill silos. So we don’t ask.

That fear of finding out is the systemic blindness now pushing our industry off a cliff. Thus, the Cross-Screen Attention Index. It’s our new compass, away from the cliff and on the path toward today’s audience: The Whole Consumer.

Like many metrics used in the Media Universe, this index’s framework — our Cartographer’s Blueprint — is a mix of hard math and human behavior. We have a pretty strict methodology for both. The quantitative methodology is at the bottom of this report. The qualitative framework is our secret sauce, so, then, it’s secret.

The result, is that the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index shows a picture of the Media landscape, and The Whole Consumer we have literally never seen:

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The 2026 World Cup officially kicks off today! I live in New York, where World Cup fever has officially taken hold. This is the first time in more than three decades that North America has hosted The Cup. So much has changed in sports and Media since then, we might as well call it the new world order cup.

To celebrate day one of the tournament, we are joined on The Media Odyssey podcast by Scott Melvin, CEO of The Overlap - one of the fastest growing digital sports networks in the world.

Scott takes us behind the scenes of a sports media empire that began as a simple YouTube side hustle with Gary Neville. They started with a radically simple, totally unscripted rule: put legendary athletes in a room, start rolling the cameras the second they walk in, and give them an hour and a half to say whatever they want. The result? Content magic that surrounds sports while also transcending it.

Traditional TV execs want us to believe that the world completely stops for hours and hours of linear broadcast (and in soccer that could even be scoreless!). They pour billions into exclusive sports rights because it is the absolute last thread keeping legacy television afloat.

But if you only look at live broadcast metrics, you completely missing the goal - the most seismic shifts in modern media history are happening right now, in sport.

In this episode, , Scott, and I go deep into the business of modern sports:

• “Rights-Free” Masterclass: Independent creators can’t compete with the likes of Apple dropping $2.5 billion into the MLS. But you don’t need to. By adopting a “rights-free” strategy, The Overlap bypassed the billions required for game footage and monetized the community around the game instead.

• The Power of “Shoulder Content”: Traditional TV assumes sports fans just want the match. The data proves otherwise. Digital-first shoulder content—raw conversations, unscripted clip culture, and post-game reactions—frequently outpaces official live broadcast views by 20x.

• The Clip Culture Paradox: Why Lionel Messi scoring a hat-trick generates a billion views on social media, yet nobody wants to watch 90 minutes of a standard league match.

• The 2026 Time Zone Gamble: Will European fans actually stay up until 2:00 AM to watch the group stages, or will they completely abandon linear TV for TikTok highlights?

• The Overlap Shoots… Scott and The Overlap team will be covering the 104 matches (the most ever) of The World Cup - without any rights to the matches themselves. Will that work?

• Calling The Cup: Scott, Marion, and I make our predictions for who will win The Cup!

And, to celebrate The World Cup, you can watch or listen to the full episode right here on Substack! Or, you can choose your favorite podcasting platform right here:

WATCH/LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS | YOUTUBE | SPOTIFY

What’s your hot take? What will happen to live sports as clip culture booms? Does it expand the audience or diminish the game? Who will take home The 2026 World Cup? Let me know!

ESHAP

As much as Scott Galloway hates social media, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he understands that, today, there is no “Media” without “Social Media.” In fact, as Galloway’s reach on social platforms has risen, paid advances for his books have climbed along with it.

[My entire conversation with Galloway is at the very bottom of this piece.]

Prof G’s hot take is reinforced - in droves - by a new, exclusive survey of US consumers I did this month, with my partners at MX8 Labs.

Consumers now say that the device they use most to watch video is not the TV, but rather the phone - more than 2 to 1.

That’s for the whole general population. When you break it down by generation, the gap is even more dramatic…

The only generation who uses the television for video more than the phone are people born before the invention of the TV. Two-thirds of Gen Z (more than 3 to 1) use their phones for video more than their TVs - and the phone wins with 63% of Millennials and 59% of Gen X.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the Media elite, the living room is not the only place we consume our entertainment. We asked consumers to rank their Top Three Places to watch video. The answers may surprise you.

(NOTE: In the first iteration of this survey, we omitted “Bed” as a choice. So we reissued the survey and included the bedroom in our list. BTW, this is the huge advantage of working with MX8: We were able to turn this new survey around in just one week.)

“Bed” is THE #1 place that consumers say they consume video, beating the couch/living room handily. And while many people do have TVs in the bedroom, a LOT of us watch on our phones in bed.

More importantly, the places we watch video is now a wide-ranging spectrum. Yes, two-thirds of us say the couch is a preferred location for video consumption. But one-third of us rank “waiting on line or in an office lobby” in the top three, more than one-quarter rank “Work” and “The Toilet” atop their lists.

This picture gets even more complicated when we look at the viewing habits of our most voracious Media consumers, Gen Z.

“Bed” beats “Couch” even more handily among Gen Z, with “Toilet” jumping to #3 in the rankings - 40% of A18-24 and more than one-third of A25-34 rank the WC in the top three places they watch video regularly. (So, when a Gen Z in your life sends you a video to watch, know they very well may be in the head.)

Think about yourself: Is your smartphone the first thing you touch in the morning? Is it the last thing you touch at night? (Be honest.) As depressing a thought as this may seem, it is simply the new truth - our phones are now the touchstones of our lives and remote control of our lifestyles.

Returning to Prof G’s point: The very definition of “leisure-time” content consumption has changed drastically in the last ten years. What mainstream Media C-Suites seem to misunderstand, is that “content” is no longer defined by Hollywood, but rather by the audiences themselves.

According to data collected by SQ, Social Media now outpaces traditional “entertainment” for screen time. One third of our time on our screens is spent on social platforms, yet less than one-third on “entertainment.”

So, if you are a publisher, platform, producer, or advertiser, you no longer have the luxury of targeting only the living room, the couch, or even the home. You must see THE WHOLE CONSUMER.

This strange new world perplexes the existing power structure of the entertainment industrial complex. To be fair, it is not easy to transform the way you reach your community in today’s nuanced, fragmented, modern Media ecosystem. It is much harder than in the Media world in which I was raised.

Yet, if you listen to your audience, if you put your community at the center of your business, it is not as hard as it seems either.

AFFINITY ECONOMY CASE STUDIES

Below, you will find three Affinity Economy case studies that I will present next week at the Media Universe Summit at StreamTV in Denver (use Code ESHAP200 for $200 off passes right now, right here). These aren’t hypotheticals: they are specific lessons on moving your brand beyond marketing and into passion.

These companies and brands aren’t running away from the challenges of our radically fragmented Media Universe, they are embracing The Affinity Economy and targeting the WHOLE CONSUMER.

The KitKat Heist

The KitKat Heist is a masterclass on modern brand management. Nestlé, one of the oldest and most traditional packaged goods companies on the planet, turned a fascinating crisis into a viral sensation - by embracing every aspect of their audience and gamifying their entire brand.

Many have speculated that Nestlé staged the crime (it happened on April Fool’s Day). They didn’t. But where many/most brands might have dived headfirst into damage control, KitKat embraced the chaos and invited their Fans to play along - ceding control to the entire internet.

COACH: Explore Your Story

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THIS IS THE JUNE 2026 MAP:

[THIS IS A LOW RES JUNE MAP - HIGH RES MAPS FROM 2020-2026 ARE THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST.]

My name is Evan Shapiro. Many people refer to me as a Media Cartographer. This map is why. Since 2020, using only publicly available data and powerpoint, I have been mapping the Media ecosystem, redrawing it each month and posting it here. The map represents my view of the most important entities warring for attention in the Media, tech, and entertainment industries.

The ratios on the map are not subjective opinion... they’re maths. Each entity is represented to scale by their current valuation - the fairest way I could find to portray the gravitational pull of power in the info-entertainment-tech industrial complex and track the trajectories of all its major players over time.

As a point of comparison, here👇 is my first Media Universe Map, from 2020…

Drafting these maps, by hand, in PowerPoint; digging into the earning reports of every company on the map quarter after quarter; tracking the trajectories of all the planets, month after month, year after year, offers useful and unique perspective.

That process fuels this newsletter: where I publish more visualizations and infographical landscapes (such as the UK TV Universe, the Addressable Table of Elements, and the Creator Ecosphere) as part of weekly analytical essays covering the Media Industrial Complex and its ongoing mishegas.

The June map shows massive movement in the Media Universe.

• AI Valuations are literally off the charts. I’ve added SpaceX/xAI which goes public this week, likely at a valuation of $1 trillion or more. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are valued near that bonkers high water mark as well. Oracle is up $51 billion in the last 30 days, making Daddy Ellison the world’s third richest man.

• For some perspective, Anthropic, alone, is now worth $300 billion more than Netflix, Disney, Comcast, Paramount, Fox, and Versant - combined.

• I’ve added Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to the telco region - because mobile providers are now the most important Media bundlers on the planet.

• I added Mediawan to the Euro Media Zone, at the suggestion of a super-savvy reader of the newsletter.

• Samsung has overtaken Walmart in value - also a product of the AI hype cycle.

• Comcast is at its lowest market cap in a decade and a half, proving my ongoing assessment of their epic leadership vacuum.

• Many of the sports leagues have been re-valued: the MLB jumps from $79 billion to $95 billion; the NHL skates from $57 billion to $67 billion; the IPL scores $19 billion; and, in honor of The World Cup starting this week, the introduction of FIFA to the map.

• Netflix’s value is down 40% year on year - showing that the street agrees with my analysis that they are utterly out of ideas (proven by their silly bidding war for Disco Bros and their constant copycatting of YouTube. In just one year, Netflix has devolved from disrupter to Trad Media - and its value shows it.

• On the other hand, FOX is charging, while Paramount continues to shrink (in both value and ethics). This reiterates my side by side case study of the two companies and their very different Nepo Kid leaders.

May’s map shows that gravitational pull I demonstrated in my very first map - away from Trad Media and towards Big Tech - isn’t just continuing, it’s accelerating. It makes one wonder:

Which OG Media Planets on today’s map will even exist as stand-alone entities on my May 2030 Media Universe Map?

Stay tuned right here to find out!

The maps above are in low resolution. Below, you’ll find Media Maps from each year since 2020, in high res, for you to download and use however you like.

I hope you have a very Happy 2026!

ESHAP

MEDIA UNIVERSE MAPS 2020-2026: IN HIGH RES

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Recently I was lucky enough to moderate a panel at the Greater Together LA conference in Los Angeles. Greater Together was an ultimate transatlantic mashup - where the world’s two most powerful creative engines proved that the future of storytelling isn't dying; it's evolving into something new.

My panel was a literal all-star line-up:

• Alison Lomax, Head of YouTube UK & Ireland

• Dame Carolyn McCall, CEO of ITV

• Tony Pastor, co-founder of Goalhanger (one of the hottest podcast companies on the planet).

I am not just saying this because I moderated - it was a terrific, honest, entertaining conversation. I asked each leader to speak on innovative new efforts at each of their companies; to tell us what we all needed to stop doing; and where they saw entertainment and news headed next.

Tony talked about defying conventional wisdom of short attention span and attracting younger audiences to news and history programming, by distributing their podcasts, on all platforms, to wherever the audience is.

Carolyn talked about bringing disruption into a legacy institution and how ITV now programs the digital prime time, between seasons of their shows, by focusing on the IP and not the “channel.”

Allison talked about finding new audiences and breaking down boundaries by using technology to translate entertainment for new regions and bringing new ideas to new audiences.

These are three literal legends of Media. Grab a coffee, ignore your inbox for a bit, and take a trip with them to the UK - via LA. You won’t regret it.

Cheers!

ESHAP

Given the hyper-fragmentation of modern media, the infinite algorithmic noise generated by every human with a smartphone, and the undeniable reality that the mobile device is now mankind’s primary viewing apparatus, the single hardest thing to achieve in all of entertainment right now is getting a consumer to leave their home at an appointed hour, buy a ticket, and sit in a dark room with strangers.

For decades, legacy Hollywood treated theatrical distribution as a predictable consumer habit. It was top-down scale. You bought billboards, ran a TV spot, and the transactional machinery took care of the rest. That universe is dead.

To understand just how severely this consumer habit has eroded, look at the cold, hard trajectory of the domestic box office over the last quarter-century. The industry has masked its worsening decay behind rising ticket prices, but the real metric of health—actual tickets sold—tells a story of systemic, secular decline.

The 25-Year Theatrical Decay (2000–2025)

Movies for The Affinity Economy: Yindie Film

That table is Hollywood’s terminal disease. But a new vanguard of digital-native creators has the cure: The Affinity Economy. While legacy media is trying to use expensive, transactional marketing to buy back an audience that has moved on, YouTube creators are leveraging pure, un-churnable Affinity to pull millions of people out of their living rooms and into theater seats.

This is exactly what legendary indie producer and former Amazon Movies head has been urgently shouting about in Hope For Film. Ted has meticulously documented the absolute collapse of the traditional independent film pipeline and how the streaming wars destroyed the ecosystem. Ted articulates impeccably for film what I’ve been earnestly preaching for the rest of entertainment: artists and publishers must build direct, activated relationships with audiences before asking them to fork over cash or time.

Ted’s “audience-activated cinema” is perfectly suited for The Affinity Economy. But his movie movement means something larger. Social media is no longer just marketing. These para social video platforms are no longer the beginning, middle, and end of a creator’s career. They have become capital-efficient seed layers for bootstrapping the next generation of diversified entertainment empires.

In the movie industry, this has sparked a new era of Indie Cinema: “Yindie Film” (YouTube + Indie). This new indie wave is its own sovereign cinema category that converts fandom into physical, localized, retail mobilization and turns its talent into vertically integrated studios. (Trademark application for “Yindie Film” filed with the USPTO this morning! So, hands off.)

The Cold Open: Inoxtag & Kaizen

The absolute origin point of this systemic disruption happened internationally in September 2024. France’s MrBeast, YouTube sensation Inoxtag (Inès Benazzouz), spent a year completely offline to train for a seemingly impossible task: climbing Mount Everest. He didn’t pitch a network, and he didn’t sell a documentary package to a streaming giant. Instead, he partnered with French indie cinema circuit MK2 to test the boundaries of digital loyalty.

When his documentary, Kaizen, was given a hyper-limited, 24-hour theatrical window, it shattered every alternative programming record in European history. The film sold 350,000 movie tickets across 1,000 screenings in a single day. Over 200,000 of those tickets were stripped away in the first few hours of presales, completely crashing theater ticketing servers across France, Belgium, and Switzerland.

At an average ticket price of $12, Kaizen pulled in a massive $4.2 Million global box office gross in 24 hours—on a production budget subsidized entirely by his digital brand partners. When it migrated to YouTube the following week, it logged an additional 24 million views in just 96 hours.

This is for a documentary.

“Traditional media told me this wasn’t television, so people wouldn’t pay to watch it in a room. They didn’t realize that my community doesn’t watch me because of the box I’m in - they watch because we lived the climb together.”

- Inoxtag

Flush from the cross-border success of Kaizen, Benazzouz is now scaling his operations into a full-scale documentary and unscripted production company. Inoxtag is evolving from Creator to mogul, leveraging his massive corporate brand partnerships to bankroll a slate of high-end adventure and human-interest documentaries, giving other prominent European digital creators the infrastructure to mount high-production physical projects that bypass the traditional French state television funding system entirely.

The Inciting Incident: Markiplier & Iron Lung

If Kaizen was the flashpoint, then Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach led the mass migration out of the digital wilderness and straight into Hollywood’s premium real estate.

A lifetime ago, in 2023, Markiplier, a horror YouTuber with 38 million subs, announced he was adapting a viral, indie cosmic-horror video game called Iron Lung into a feature. If legacy gatekeepers paid attention, they scoffed.

Fischbach self-financed the production entirely out of his own pocket for $3 million. When major studios failed to offer a distribution deal that preserved his autonomy, he went direct to his community. He told fans to contact their local multiplexes directly and demand the movie.

When Iron Lung breached mainstream cinematic inner sanctums in January 2026, it triggered a theatrical shockwave. It didn’t just perform; it shattered the structural math of traditional distribution. With a total of $0 in traditional marketing or P&A spend, he weaponized his deep audience equity to self-distribute directly into 3,015 commercial screens across North America, logging an iconic $17.8 million domestic opening weekend and wrapping its theatrical run with a massive $51.2 million global haul – a 646% return on Fischbach’s investment. Before streaming!

Rather than do one, simple deal with a distributor, or simply sell Iron Lung direct to consumers as a one-off, Markiplier is using his momentum and newfound leverage to change the nature of digital distribution. At the Cannes Film Festival, Fischbach announced the creation of Markiplier Studios, to empower the new wave of indie creator filmmakers, cutting direct distribution deals with major theater chains and digital platforms, lowering traditional middleman fees, and ensuring maximum backend equity.

During his Cannes panel, Markiplier explicitly noted that the primary delay in bringing Iron Lung to digital wasn’t technical—it was legal. He spent months building out the framework to act as an official digital aggregator on YouTube. And this is the crux of today’s point:

This Creator used YouTube to become so huge, he could open a mainstream motion picture in theaters. His fandom gave him the power to force YouTube itself to change. And that has become the capital behind a new, powerful, vertically integrated Yindie Film studio, operating on all platforms, including IRL.

Setting a trend many are bound to follow, on Friday, Markiplier activated Premium Streaming access for Iron Lung exclusively on YouTube Movies & TV, keeping his entire distribution loop sovereign. We will likely find out how the film did there, because unlike most major studios, Markiplier Studios has cemented transparency a core value.

“The traditional studio system is designed to take the keys out of the creator’s hands the second real money gets involved. Markiplier Studios exists to prove that the community is the engine, the funder, and the distributor all at once. We don’t need Hollywood to validate our audience; we are building a permanent pipeline where online communities own the theater screen from day one.”

- Markiplier

The Rising Action: Obsession & Backrooms

Remainder reserved for Premium Peaceniks only!

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The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS has been the #1 late night show on TV for nine consecutive years. Last week, Colbert broadcast his last show. Because CBS canceled TV’s most-watched late night program.

The last edition of Colbert’s talk show scored the biggest audience in the show’s history. The catalyst for Colbert’s firing, the sitting president of the United States, the world’s most powerful man, in the middle of an escalating war and a major legislative crisis, celebrated the death of the late night institution, with a social media post, at 2 am in the morning, in which he also threatened other late night comedians.

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TL;DR: Many of us still watch most video on the couch. But 31% of Americans and 41% of Gen Z say the toilet is a “Top 3” place they watch.

And that’s one reason why the 2026 Upfronts focused on reaching beyond TV, to the WHOLE CONSUMER.

Last week, TV’s biggest players staged their Upfront presentations. It was the culmination of months of presentations, schmooze-fests, parties, and pitches, yet strangely, it’s really only the midpoint of boondoggle season, with Cannes Lions still more than a month away.

Many themes pulsed through Upfront Season, including omnipresent “agentic AI” talking points, big sporting events, “full funnel CTV,” and on stage handshakes with everyone’s DSP arms dealer, Amazon.

I was actually interviewed by DIRECTV, in an SUV, during a ride around Upfront Week, about how The Upfront continues to survive and what all these trends really mean for the ad industry.

However, one theme that stood out most to me, maybe because I predicted it, was the Mobilization and Verticalization of Premium TV as the best way to reach THE WHOLE CONSUMER - from the couch to the doctor’s office, to (yes) the toilet.

HOW AND WHY THE UPFRONT IS GOING TO THE TOILET 🧻:

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The Finals for the 70th Eurovision Song Contest start at 3:00 PM ET today. You can watch them LIVE on YouTube. And I am partly to blame for that.

There are MANY reasons to watch the Eurovision Finals.

🎤 It’s an amazing event. Incredible talent from 25 countries, sing and dance their hearts out, vying to be the world’s best song - and maybe even a modern-day ABBA (yes, they first got famous at ESC!).

🎤 It’s an incredible TV show, produced by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in a different country each year - in conjunction with the host broadcaster of that country. They don’t know which country, or which broadcasting partner, until the very end of the Final - because this year’s winner hosts next year. This year, the contest is LIVE in Vienna, Austria, last year’s champ.

🎤 Eurovision is the world’s most popular entertainment event, only behind The Olympics and World Cup in popularity.

🎤 The drama every year is tremendous - the Olympics of Music. This year, THE DRAMA is palpable through the screen - as is the controversy!

🎤 Finland is in pole position coming into the Finals, but Greece and Australia (not European but still competing) are hot on their heels in betting markets.

🎤 HOWEVER… Amazing art is also colliding with intense geopolitics. Five countries sat out in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza and Israel’s behavior during the last Eurovision. Broadcasters in Ireland (RTE), Spain (Radiotelevisión Española), and Slovenia (Rtv) refuse to show the contest at all. Protests broke out during the show this week.

🎤 What’s more: EVERYONE can vote for the Eurovision winner! Last year, 1.5 million Americans voted in the ESC.

🎤 To avoid “gaming,” the EBU keeps semi-final vote counts a closely guarded secret until after the Finals. So while we have odds, we have NO idea where rankings stand going into the Finals.

🎤 BEYOND the international drama and pageantry of this global spectacle, Eurovision is also a PICTURE PERFECT case study in Transformation for The Affinity Economy. 🎤

🎤 YOU CAN WATCH THE EUROVISION FINALS LIVE ON YOUTUBE FOR FREE!

🎤 In Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia, if you want to watch the Eurovision Finals (and believe me, MANY do), the ONLY way to watch them live is on YouTube.

🎤 The EBU has 113 member countries/organizations. Between 35 and 45 countries participate each year in the Eurovision Song Contest. The members are all public service broadcast television or radio organizations.

🎤 Despite long legacies, traditional origins, considerable bureaucracy, and carefully curated diplomacy, ESC has fully embraced a new form of Broadcast: one that includes ALL THE FANS, FOR FREE, wherever they are.

🎤 Jurian van der Meer is Commercial Director at The EBU. I’ve worked with him this last year on this new strategy. I’m proud to have played a part in this important broadcasting evolution.

🎤 I talked with Jurian, Yigit Dogan Celik from Merzigo, and Filipe Ligeiro of RTP about the legacy and transformation of THE ORIGINAL SONG CONTEST, live on stage, at StreamTV Europe. You can watch that whole panel at the top of this post.

🎤 And you SHOULD WATCH The Eurovision Finals today at 3p ET on YouTube.

Happy Saturday!

ESHAP

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This is my latest Media Universe Map. I “redraw” it every month, resizing each planet “by hand,” in PowerPoint. There are 173 companies represented. There are more than 600 datapoints included.

An enormous amount has changed since the last map in April.

• Alphabet/Google is now, securely, the second-most valuable company, of all time, and their current trajectory should allow them to overtake NVIDIA within the year. For those paying attention or reading this newsletter, this should not be surprising. When Google surpassed Apple for the first time, in January, I detailed how that happened, why Google was going to win the AI wars, and how the Alphabet flywheel flies faster than any corporate ship in this universe.

• Samsung and Walmart are both now valued at more than one trillion dollars. Again, momentous, but not surprising if you track the numbers, or read this publication. On Februa…

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Over the last decade, the television business has changed dramatically. Yet, one thing has remained constant: Sports are core to the US television experience and central to the TV business model.

However, even with the advent of streaming subscriptions, the rate of revenue growth for the television industry over this time pales in comparison to skyrocketing cost of sports TV rights. Sports fees have increased 121% in the last decade, while revenues for TV in the US have grown just 24%. In 2015, sports fees represented 8% of total US television revenues. In 2025, sports rights accounted for 14% of total TV revenues.

Sports fees are now TV’s “Survivor Tax.” Rights costs for live sports are now the price of entry into television’s major league. Yet, earnings reports of TV’s biggest competitors show how differently these companies play moneyball.

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A month ago, I published case studies on the transformation of mainstream Media companies for the Affinity Economy: Duolingo, TF1 and FIFA - established brands who adopted fan-first mindsets and shifted to a Creator mindset.

A week later, I posted side by side case studies of Dueling Nepo Kids: Ellison and Murdoch - one investing in the future, the other tripling down on the failed Hollywood mogul playbook.

That same week, we launched the inaugural StreamTV Europe, with one thousand delegates and three amazing days of content.

In the opening keynote (watch here), for the first time, I showed how my map of the media universe has forked - now clearly divided into the model of the past and the path to the future. Over the course of those three days in Lisbon, we shared numerous case studies, staged two debates, held myriad discussions - all focused only on the future.

Below are two, great, uncensored Case Studies recorded at Stre…

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• I am older than 88% of all other humans.

• 70% of people are now Millennials or younger.

• I’m older than 75% of Americans.

• 58% of all Americans and 58% of the US workforce are now 45 or younger.

This data surprises many people over 45. Most of my cohort, Gen X and older, still see Millennials as “kids.” Few realize Gen A is turning 16, this year, or that the next generation (B?) is being born right now.

More problematic: today, many of us still think that people Millennials-and-younger will “eventually grow up and consume Media the way we do.” In fact, as I wrote recently about generational shifts in Media: it is us (old folk) who are evolving into the Media behaviors of younger generations. YouTube’s fastest growing audience is 55+.

Millennials, Gen Z, Gen A, and Gen Next are now the majority of humans. The way they consume Media is the way people consume Media today.

That’s why, tomorrow, (for a birthday party, ESHAP styl…

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