US Sports giant ESPN is signalling its TV days are numbered  

The media company has announced it's going direct to fans with exactly the same thing you can get through a Pay TV provider. In the USA, the leagues make deals with networks, who then make deals with Pay TV operators, who sell bundles of networks to consumers. ESPN has just announced it’s cutting out its old friend the Pay TV operator – ouch. Why? About 35 million households have stopped paying for the sports cable channel ESPN over the past 15 years, and they think they can win them back if they don't need to buy all the other cable stuff just to get the thing they want.  

In NZ terms —not that this deal is international yet— it would mean instead of only being able to get ESPN through Sky, you would be able to get exactly the same channels directly from ESPN.  

A digital environment means that you're not constrained by the number of channels – you could have 50 events taking place at the same time, instead of being forced to make decisions about what to show on your 5 channels. It comes with risks too, sports streaming can be laggy and grainy, sometimes struggling with the fast motion of a game. Linear broadcast has had that solved for decades.  

The US Government wants a piece of Intel?  

According to Bloomberg, the US Government is reportedly in discussions to take stake in Intel to help the company expand its US manufacturing efforts, including its much-delayed Ohio chip factory. It's the latest instalment in the tech tariff and China-AI arms race story, where chip giants Nvidia and AMD will pay the US Government 15% of Chinese revenue to secure export licenses to China. The US had previously banned the sale of powerful chips used in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) to China under export controls usually related to national security concerns, and had threatened large blanket tariffs on the import of semiconductor chips.   

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