The tech, entertainment, and business worlds are reeling this Monday after the tragic passing of Susan Wojcicki at only 56 years old. Wojcicki was the former CEO of YouTube and one of the earliest employees at Google — founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page literally started the company out of her garage. She had been quietly battling lung cancer for two years, according to her husband, Dennis Troper. RIP.

In other news… NBCU uses the Paris Games as a lab for LA, MrBeast attracts negative attention, and Netflix brings in CBS Sports for its NFL games.

Want to discover even more newsletters? Here are some of our favorites

• YouTube – Skeleton Crew

• X (Twitter) – Tom Cruise

• Google – Olympics

• Reddit – Burning Man

• TikTok – “In Case I Ain’t Around” - Luke Combs

• Spotify – “Bright Lights” - The Killers

.SPORTS.

NBCUniversal’s takeaways from the Paris Olympics

The Future. The Paris Olympics was the best guinea pig NBCUniversal could’ve asked for in the run-up to the Los Angeles Games, giving the Olympics broadcasters ample data on what audiences loved about the revamped coverage of the Games. Considering the love for this year’s entertainment and celebrity factors, don’t be surprised if NBCU taps Universal Pictures’ bench of filmmakers to craft cinematic content around the Games and competing athletes.

Games debrief
Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal, said, “The Olympics are our billion-dollar lab.”

And the company now has a lot of data.

• The Paris Games were a massive hit, scoring over 30 million viewers every day (per data from both Nielsen and Adobe Analytics) and notching 75% higher ratings than the Tokyo Games in 2021.

• Those numbers demonstrated that covering events live didn’t really affect primetime viewership — audiences got a different taste by watching both or by playing catch-up on Peacock’s Gold Zone show.

• That’s because it wasn’t just about the results of the events — people wanted to hear the commentary, get sucked into the narratives of the athletes, and be entertained by on-air personalities.

• Celebrities ended up playing a large part in that — Snoop Dogg was consistently going viral, NBC’s A-list ambassadors were popular, and just seeing who was in the stands was fun.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: Amy Rosenfeld, the SVP of Olympic production at NBC Sports, told THR, “I’ve had more people say, I don’t really watch the Olympics, but I’m watching this, and I really do wonder if this is the evolution of where sports productions go.”

In other words, there will always be die-hard sports fans, but more and more people are just looking for great water-cooler entertainment.

79.7% of you voted Yes in Friday’s poll: Are you a comedy person?

“Yep, it’s my industry :).”

“Comedy shows make up the majority of my entertainment spending when going out. I’d rather see a comic than nearly anything else.”

“We all need to laugh sometimes, especially with the world being in the shape it’s in today.”

.A WORD FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MECO.

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Media, Music, & Entertainment

• Netflix announced that it tapped CBS Sports to produce the streamer’s two NFL games, which it will be exhibiting on Christmas. [Read More]

• Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund has invested $1 billion in Sotheby’s, making it the auction house’s largest minority investor. [Read More]

• Cartoon Network’s site has gone dark as Warner Bros. Discovery continues to push audiences to look for content on Max. [Read More]

Fashion & E-Commerce

• Reebok gave a first look at rookie WNBA star Angel Reese’s debut signature-sneaker line. [Read More]

• Temu founder Colin Huang has become China’s richest person after amassing a fortune of $48.6 billion. [Read More]

• Retailers and subscription services are cracking down on people who use student discounts after they’ve graduated. [Read More]

Tech, Web3, & AI

• FTX has to pay back a total of $12.7 billion to customers per a ruling by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. [Read More]

• Autonomously running scientific labs, which are typically tasked with trying to discover new materials, are AI’s newest innovation. [Read More]

• Microsoft may be getting back in the mixed-reality game after striking a deal with Samsung. [Read More]

Creator Economy

• YouTube is rolling out a “Sleep Timer” feature for Premium subscribers who use the platform to help them fall asleep, which pauses a video after a certain amount of time. [Read More]

• Substack is starting to let anyone post on its platform, even if they don’t have their own newsletter. [Read More]

• Despite plenty of threats, it looks like people haven’t left X after all… [Read More]

.ENTERTAINMENT.

MrBeast’s Amazon game show influenced some hard truths

The Future. Amazon was hoping for big things when it signed a $100 million deal with MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) to bring his $5 million-prize Beast Games competition series to Prime Video… but reports of a chaotic production and mistreatment of contestants have put the whole experiment under the wrong kind of spotlight. If Amazon is unable to change the narrative, MrBeast’s novel fray into the premium TV space may be a first and last for the digital-creator class.

Stunt experiment
Amazon is not getting the kind of attention it hoped it would after partnering with MrBeast.

• To win the auction for Beast Games and the overall deal with MrBeast, Amazon gave him complete control over the show’s creation, empowering the influencer’s team to handle the production instead of veteran unscripted producers.

• The production apparently was much bigger than what MrBeast’s team was prepared for, leading to reports of safety violations, injuries on set, and a lack of access to food, water, and medication.

• Those concerning reports led advertisers (whom MrBeast also had approval over) to get skittish about closing their sponsorship deals with Prime Video, which was the main reason Amazon brought in MrBeast to begin with.

So, what’s the fallout? Amazon’s Prime Video is big and diversified, so its ad ambitions will ultimately be okay, and they spent so much money on Beast Games that it will certainly air… eventually. Insiders told Insider that the show will likely get pushed to create more space between it and the bad headlines.

But for a creator who’s built such a family-friendly reputation, this situation (and other revelations) may give him the wrong kind of hit.

• Read: Top podcasters, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bowen Yang, and Rachel Maddow, debate the merits and insanity of listening to shows at 1.5x speed.

• Watch: Vox chats with sound engineers about what people expect and want an EV to sound like. Hint: people don’t like the UFO sound.

• Listen: The Future of Everything explores the future of hypersonic air travel decades after the retirement of the Concorde.

Probably bad news if you see this adorable bot out in the wild…

LATEST PODCAST EPISODE

Today, on an extra special bonus episode of Future Forecast, our hosts Boye and Chris sit down with Andrew Kenward, the President and COO of Almost Friday Media. Andrew was an agent at WME in the digital media department at WME before being brought into the Almost Friday universe in 2021. We chat with him about his career, his goals for the brand moving forward, and what it's like working in media today.