The math, at the time, was compelling. Affiliated minor league baseball ran on player-development subsidies from the parent clubs, thin gate revenue, limited sponsorship, and almost no meaningful broadcast revenue. For most of its history, a AAA club’s television deal — if it had one — was a token agreement with a regional cable affiliate that produced a handful of games a year at barely-above-cost production. The AA and A-ball clubs had even less. The revenue line was tiny, the cost line was stubborn, and the parent MLB clubs, doing their own post-2020 math on developmental cost per prospect, decided that forty of these teams were not worth the carry.

It is worth stating the decision in its own terms. It was not cynical. It was, at that moment, defensible.

Here is what I want to argue: by the time that decision was made, the unit economics of minor league broadcasting had already flipped. The broadcast layer had quietly become something it had never been before — a plausible path to real audience and real local revenue, at near-zero incremental cost. The teams that got cut were the teams whose economic case had already changed, and the people making the decision did not know it. Because the measurement layer to know it did not exist yet.

Most of the minor league teams we cut were not dying. They were about to be reborn. Nobody was watching closely enough to notice.

What a Minor League Broadcast Used to Cost

To see what has changed, it helps to remember what a minor league broadcast used to be.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, if a AAA team produced a television broadcast at all, it was typically a deal with a local cable affiliate that carried a handful of home games a season. The production was modest — a couple of cameras, a local broadcaster, a small crew — and the economics were brutal. Production cost ran into the tens of thousands of dollars per game. Ad inventory was sold locally at rates that, on a typical Tuesday night game drawing a few thousand in-venue attendees and a few thousand more on television, could not remotely cover the production cost. The math only worked when the cable carrier paid a rights fee — which meant the team was effectively subsidized by the cable bundle, the same way every small piece of local sports programming has historically been subsidized by the cable bundle.

When the bundle started collapsing — which I have written about at length — the rights-fee subsidy collapsed with it. Regional sports networks started filing for bankruptcy; Diamond Sports Group, operator of the Bally Sports RSN portfolio, filed for Chapter 11 in March 2023 carrying roughly $8 billion in debt. The small line items on RSN rights cards — the AAA club’s ten-game package, the AHL team’s Sunday afternoon slot, the USL team’s highlight show — were the first things cut. By 2019, most minor league teams outside of the largest markets had no functional broadcast revenue at all. Their games were either not televised or streamed on obscure platforms with production that, to put it charitably, looked like what you could produce with a laptop and a single fixed camera in center field.

That was the reality going into 2020. A minor league broadcast was a cost center. A small cost center, often a zero-revenue cost center, but a cost center. The case for keeping an affiliated team alive had to be made on player development, on civic value, on stadium economics, on anything except the broadcast.

And then three things happened in parallel that nobody in the room during the 2020 contraction was tracking.

The FAST Stack

The first thing that happened is that the distribution layer changed completely.

Free ad-supported television — FAST, in the jargon — went from a curiosity to an infrastructure. The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Amazon’s Freevee (now Prime Video with ads), Pluto TV, Tubi, and a long tail of platform-specific FAST offerings collectively built out a connected-TV distribution network that reaches a large and still-growing fraction of American households. Parks Associates measured FAST usage at roughly 45% of U.S. internet households in Q1 2025, with Nielsen’s Gauge reporting the Roku Channel alone pulling nearly 3% of all TV-viewing time by mid-2025. The usage curve has flattened from its early explosion but the installed base is now structural.

The important thing about FAST is not the reach — although the reach is enormous. The important thing is the economics.

A FAST channel, once produced, costs almost nothing to distribute. The platforms do the distribution in exchange for a share of the ad inventory. The channel operator produces or aggregates the content and sells the ad impressions, typically through a combination of direct sales and programmatic. A sports channel on a FAST platform does not pay carriage fees. It does not negotiate with cable MSOs. It does not print subscriber circulars. It does not need a national sales force. It uploads a playlist, runs an ad server, and waits to see if people watch.

For most content categories, the FAST economics are marginal. The CPMs are lower than premium streaming, the audience is diffuse, and the competition for the same eyeballs is fierce. FAST has historically worked best for library content — old sitcoms, classic Westerns, reality show reruns — where the content is already produced and the incremental distribution cost is literally zero.

Sports is different. Sports is live. Sports delivers synchronous audience. Sports attracts a specific kind of advertiser — local, regional, national — who will pay a premium to reach viewers at the moment of peak engagement. On a FAST channel, a live sports event performs like nothing else in the category. It is, in platform terms, the most valuable inventory on the grid.

The unit economics of a minor league broadcast on a FAST channel, properly understood, look radically different from the unit economics on cable. Production cost is still a real line item — though connected-TV-native production has itself gotten cheaper, as the tools have matured and the expectations around broadcast polish have evolved away from the traditional-TV standard. Distribution cost is effectively zero. Ad inventory is sold against a live audience in real time. And the audience, once the channel is discoverable, can scale to numbers that would have been unthinkable for the same content on cable.

This is not theoretical. Victory+’s Sunday Night Soccer product — which I have written about at length — is the clearest instantiation I know of this model at work in American sports. Victory+’s NWSL Sunday Night Soccer franchise launched in March 2026 with 25 primetime matches on a free ad-supported platform, with no carriage friction between the fan and the game, building a primetime audience for a sport that on cable could never have justified the slot. If the model works for the NWSL, which operates at a revenue tier far below the big four American leagues, it works a fortiori for a minor league broadcast at a tier below that. The economics are more permissive, not less, the further down the pyramid you go — because the incremental cost to produce and distribute is the same, and the competition for your specific local audience is lower.

The Production-Cost Collapse

The second thing that happened is that the cost of producing a competent broadcast collapsed.

I want to be careful here, because there is a meaningful distinction between a competent broadcast and a premium broadcast. A nationally-televised NBA game is a multi-million-dollar production. It involves dozens of cameras, a production truck, a full broadcast crew, graphics engines, replay systems, commentator booths, and every piece of equipment a major network can throw at the event. That kind of production is not getting cheaper in a linear way.

What has gotten dramatically cheaper is the mid-tier. The broadcast that used to require a regional-sports-network production budget — a handful of cameras, a produced feed, graphics, replays, a play-by-play team — can now be produced at a fraction of historical cost, using a combination of fixed-camera systems, software-based graphics, remote production, and automated switching. I do not have a widely-disclosed per-game cost comparison I can cite here; operators guard those numbers tightly, and the setups vary enough from venue to venue that a single benchmark would be misleading anyway. What is not in dispute is the direction of the curve.

The cost curve has not just dropped. It has shifted in structure. Historically, a broadcast production was heavy on variable cost — a crew, a truck, a rights-holder fee, per-game expenses. Today, an increasing share of the stack is fixed — software licenses, installed cameras, amortized equipment — with variable costs trending toward negligible. Once the system is in place, the marginal cost of producing one more game is small enough that a team can credibly broadcast every home game it plays, from its AA-level Tuesday night affair to its Saturday promotional giveaway night, without the production economics forcing a choice about which games to carry.

This is the ballgame, to borrow the obvious metaphor. The historical constraint on minor league broadcasting was not demand. It was supply. Teams could not afford to produce enough games for broadcast to matter as a business line. Fans wanted to watch their team, the team could not afford to give them the product, and the distribution layer did not exist to monetize the product anyway.

Remove the production-cost constraint. Remove the distribution-cost constraint. Now what is the shape of the business?

The shape of the business is this: a minor league team, in 2026, can produce every game of its schedule on connected-TV-ready infrastructure, distribute those games through FAST and direct-to-consumer apps at near-zero marginal cost, sell ad inventory against a demonstrably engaged local audience, and generate a broadcast revenue line that, for the first time in the sport’s history, is a real fraction of total team revenue rather than a rounding error.

The team that could have existed in 2026, in other words, is not the team that the 2020 contraction decision was based on.

The Local-CPM Advantage

The third thing that happened is more subtle, and I think more important than the first two.

Local ad CPMs — cost per thousand impressions for a local audience — have held up dramatically better than national CPMs in the connected-TV transition. There is a reason for this. Local advertisers are specific. A local car dealer, a regional bank, a chain of local restaurants, a state-level political campaign — these advertisers do not need a national audience. They need a local audience. And a local audience is exactly what a minor league broadcast delivers, by definition, at high density.

National sports broadcasts have been grappling with a CPM compression problem for most of the past decade. As audiences fragment, national reach gets more expensive per viewer to achieve, and advertisers have plenty of substitutes in digital and social. The CPM a national broadcaster can command for inventory is trending in one direction, and it is not up.

Local CPMs tell a different story. A minor league team in a mid-sized market — pick any city with a AAA club that lost affiliation in 2020 — has an audience that is substantially concentrated in a specific DMA. The fan base is local. The advertisers who want to reach that fan base are local. The match between inventory and buyer is essentially one-to-one, with none of the leakage that national inventory suffers when half the audience is outside the advertiser’s geographic target.

I do not have proprietary numbers I can share here, and I will not invent any. The major programmatic platforms have begun publishing directional data on CTV CPMs for live-sports inventory, but the local-versus-national split on FAST-distributed regional sports is not something any operator has disclosed cleanly. The absence is itself the tell — a market this clearly bifurcated and this commercially consequential would, in a more transparent category, be a published benchmark. What I can say, directionally and structurally, is that the local-CPM advantage is the single most underpriced factor in the current sports-media economy. It is the thing that makes minor league broadcasting an economically live proposition rather than a charitable one. It is the thing that, if you had been tracking it in 2019, would have changed your answer on which MiLB teams were economically viable going into 2020.

Nobody was tracking it in 2019. The measurement layer did not exist.

What the Measurement Layer Could Not See

The MiLB 2020 contraction was made on the basis of a conventional accounting of minor league economics. Gate revenue, sponsorship, concessions, merchandise, rights fees. The conventional accounting produced a conventional answer: these teams were marginal, the player-development subsidy from MLB did not cover the gap for all of them, and the total system cost could be reduced by cutting the bottom third.

The unconventional question — which nobody at the negotiating table could answer, because the tools did not exist — was: if we held everything else constant and layered in a modern connected-TV distribution strategy, what would these teams’ economics look like in 2026?

I think the honest answer is that a meaningful fraction of the cut teams would have been economically viable under the FAST-era distribution stack. Not all of them. Some of the cuts were genuinely correct on the merits — markets without sufficient population, stadiums without sufficient capital maintenance, ownership without sufficient commitment. But some of the cuts were based on a snapshot of broadcast economics that was already obsolete at the moment the snapshot was taken.

The teams that are now operating in the independent leagues — the Atlantic League, the American Association, the Pioneer League, the Frontier League — are running, in several cases, exactly the playbook I am describing. They are producing FAST-ready broadcasts of every home game. They are distributing through a mix of team-owned apps, FAST channel partnerships, and regional connected-TV agreements. They are selling local ad inventory at local-CPM rates against an audience that shows up, in real numbers, on a Tuesday night in a mid-sized city because the team is their team and there is no longer a paywall between them and the broadcast. Team-level independent-league viewership and local ad revenue figures are not consistently disclosed; where individual clubs have published numbers, they are directional rather than comparable.

Whether those teams are thriving on these economics alone — I would not go that far. Independent baseball remains a thin-margin business. But the broadcast line is no longer zero. It is a real, growing, material contributor to the P&L, and it is growing at a pace that the 2020 decision-makers would not have predicted because they did not have the data to predict it.

The Adjacent Cases

I want to widen the aperture, because this is not just a baseball story.

The United Soccer League — USL — has been building out its broadcast infrastructure on essentially the model I am describing. The league’s 2025 national package pairs three CBS network matches and twenty-two CBS Sports Network windows with the ongoing ESPN relationship, while team-level streaming apps and the USL Television Network fill in the long-tail local distribution. USL has also cited an upward trendline in CBS-broadcast match viewership through the 2025 season as evidence that the model is working.

Whether the USL’s current audience is large in absolute terms is not the right question. The right question is whether the audience is large relative to the cost to produce it, and on that metric, the USL is doing something that was not possible under the prior distribution stack. A professional soccer league at the second or third tier of the American soccer pyramid, broadcasting every match of every team on distribution rails that reach the overwhelming majority of connected homes, is a thing that simply did not exist in 2019.

The NWSL’s proposed second-division reserve league, now targeted for a 2027 launch after its original 2026 plan slipped, is another proof point in motion. The infrastructure investment required to broadcast reserve-league matches is, under the old model, prohibitive. Under the FAST model, it is a marginal addition to an existing production stack — and the reserve audience is a highly engaged subset of the main audience, with local-CPM characteristics that ought to behave similarly to or better than the parent league in certain markets. Reserve-league viewership and local-ad-revenue figures will not be reportable until after launch; the thesis is structural, not backtested.

The same pattern shows up in minor hockey (AHL, ECHL), in lower-tier basketball (G League, independent regional leagues), in college sports at the tier below the power-conference media deals, in high school sports at the state-championship level. Victory+’s five-year deal to broadcast the Texas high school football championships globally for free, beginning with the 2025 season, is exactly the kind of distribution that would have been inconceivable on cable, because cable had no economic mechanism to deliver state-championship-level content to a national audience at a production cost the property could support. FAST has that mechanism. The audience followed.

What Should Have Happened

If I could go back to 2019 and put one thing in front of the people making the MiLB contraction decision, it would be this:

The broadcast layer is about to invert. The distribution cost is going to zero. The production cost is going to a fraction of its current level. The local-CPM market is going to survive the cord-cutting transition in a way that the national CPM market is not. The audience for your team’s games — actual viewable broadcasts of actual games, produced at competent quality — is going to be larger, not smaller, five years from now than it is today. Price the decision against that reality, not against the reality of the current RSN-era book.

That conversation did not happen. The tools to have it did not exist in a usable form. The industry trade press of 2019 was still covering cord-cutting as a narrative rather than as a structural reset, and the measurement firms were still producing reports built around the old bundle-era assumptions. The minor league teams making the case for their own survival were doing so on the basis of gate revenue and civic value, not on the basis of a broadcast economic model that had not yet been invented.

The measurement layer has caught up, mostly. Connected-TV measurement is real. Device-level attribution is real. Programmatic reporting on live-sports inventory is real. In 2026, a minor league team making the case for its own broadcast economics has tools available that its 2019 counterpart did not.

The question is whether the system will use them.

The Thing That Is Already Happening

I want to end on something that I think is more important than the regret-cast about 2020.

The structural shift I have described is not hypothetical. It is happening right now, in leagues that had the flexibility to adapt, on platforms that had the distribution to carry it, in markets that had the local demand to sustain it. The USL is doing it. The NWSL and its reserve infrastructure are doing it. The independent baseball leagues are doing it. College sports at multiple tiers below the power conferences are doing it. High school championships are doing it.

The leagues and teams that are doing it are, in aggregate, building the most interesting thing in American sports media right now — a second layer of broadcast infrastructure, below the national rights deals, that is growing at a pace that the existing trade coverage is not fully capturing because the trade coverage is still oriented toward the national-rights megadeals.

The economics of that second layer work. They did not work five years ago. They work now.

The MiLB contraction is a historical event and I am not going to relitigate it game by game. But the pattern it represents — the pattern of making strategic decisions about the survival of small-market sports properties on the basis of a broadcast-economics snapshot that is already obsolete — is a pattern that could repeat. College football is making versions of this decision right now, as conferences realign and tier-two and tier-three programs try to figure out their media futures. High school athletic associations are making versions of this decision as they decide whether to participate in the FAST-era distribution stack or hold out for a cable-era deal that is never coming back. Independent leagues in every sport are making versions of this decision as they decide how much to invest in broadcast infrastructure today against a return that takes time to materialize.

The decision should be made with the right model. The old model — broadcast is a cost center, the audience does not exist, the distribution layer cannot carry small-market content economically — is wrong. It has been wrong for several years. It is getting more wrong every year.

The new model is that a minor league broadcast, properly produced and distributed, is an audience engine operating at costs that make the math work at scale far smaller than anyone assumed was viable under the old stack.

The doors are open. Somebody is going to build in this space, at tier after tier below the national deals, and build something significantly larger than the current coverage suggests is possible. The teams and leagues that figure this out first will look, in retrospect, like they saw something that was hiding in plain sight.

It was. It still is.

In that version, you produce a certain number of hours of content at a certain cost per hour, you distribute those hours across a certain number of subscribers, and you optimize the ratio. Content cost over engaged households. Cost per minute delivered. Cost per minute watched, if you are being rigorous about it. The variables are legible. The finance team can model them. The board can argue about them. Whole decks — entire strategy offsites — are organized around the denominator in that ratio.

And that ratio is, I have come to believe, describing the wrong business.

The scarce input in streaming is not minutes produced. Minutes produced is extraordinarily cheap and getting cheaper. The scarce input is minutes earned — and by earned I mean attention that is arousal-weighted, in the sense that Daniel Kahneman used the word in his 1973 book Attention and Effort. Attention with the pupils a little dilated. Attention that expands the pool rather than draining it. The kind of attention that, when the credits roll, leaves a person wanting to come back tomorrow instead of wanting to cancel before the next billing cycle.

The services that win the next decade will not be the ones that get the cheapest per-hour cost of content. They will be the ones that learn to put a price on mild disappointment — the half-watched episode, the trailer that did not land, the Tuesday night where the user opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, and closed it again. That Tuesday night is where the business is actually being won or lost. And almost no P&L I have ever seen has a line for it.

The Denominator Problem

Every streaming finance team I have worked with or alongside treats content cost as a numerator problem. How much did we spend to produce the hour. How much did we license it for. How does that amortize over the window. Those are real questions and I do not mean to dismiss them.

But the denominator is where the business actually lives, and the denominator is almost always wrong.

The typical denominator is some version of minutes consumed. Total viewing hours. Average daily active minutes. Minutes per paid member. The dashboard metrics that sit in every streaming executive’s Monday morning email. And each of those metrics silently assumes that a minute is a minute is a minute — that the forty-fifth minute of a half-watched procedural carries the same weight as the final minute of a championship game, or the closing minute of a show that made someone text three friends immediately after.

They do not carry the same weight. They do not even carry weights in the same order of magnitude.

I wrote about this in the attention essay — the thing Kahneman observed, more than fifty years ago, was that attention is not a fixed budget. It is a pool whose size fluctuates with arousal. Ten minutes of genuinely riveted attention recruits more cognitive capacity than ten minutes of half-awake scrolling, and it lays down more memory, and it is worth more to an advertiser, and it earns more loyalty from the viewer, and it makes the next subscription decision easier instead of harder.

A minute of riveted attention is not 1.5x a minute of distracted attention. It is something more like 5x or 10x, depending on what you are measuring. And nobody’s P&L knows that.

What the Spreadsheet Misses

Consider two shows. Both cost the same to produce. Both land the same raw minutes-watched number in the first month. The finance team looks at them and concludes they are equivalent investments.

Show A is the one people put on while folding laundry. They hear dialogue. They catch the beats. They do not remember, a week later, a single line of it. They will renew their subscription, probably, but nothing about this show is the reason.

Show B is the one that made someone turn their phone over on the coffee table. That held them still for forty-two minutes. That they then talked about at work the next morning. That they mentioned to a friend at dinner that weekend. That, six weeks later, they remembered to check if a new season was coming.

The denominators are equal. The businesses are not equal. One of them is producing attention that compounds. The other is producing the television equivalent of ambient lighting — which has its uses, but should not be priced as if it is the thing carrying the service.

I do not think the industry has a vocabulary for this gap yet. Or rather, it has one — engagement, retention cohorts, the various loyalty scores — but the vocabulary lives in the marketing organization, and the content-investment decisions live in the finance organization, and they are looking at different spreadsheets.

The unit economics of boredom is the cost of that disconnect. Every show greenlit on the assumption that a minute is a minute is a show that slightly drains the pool. Every show greenlit on the assumption that arousal-weighted attention is the real input is a show that grows it.

The Price of Mild Disappointment

Here is the claim I have been circling toward: the most expensive thing on a streaming P&L is not the content line. It is not the marketing line. It is not the technology line.

It is the user who, on a given Tuesday, opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, did not find something they wanted, and closed it without watching anything.

The most expensive thing on a streaming P&L is the user who opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, did not find something they wanted, and closed it without watching anything.— the thesis

That user has not churned. Not yet. They have not generated a support ticket. They have not triggered any threshold on any dashboard. In most reporting frameworks, that Tuesday does not exist. The minutes consumed is zero, which means it does not show up in the denominator, which means it does not move the cost-per-minute number, which means the finance team does not have a reason to care.

But that Tuesday is the beginning of the churn. That Tuesday is where the mental accounting starts to shift — from “I use this service” to “I pay for this service and I do not really use it that much.” That Tuesday is the one that shows up, six months later, as a cancellation that the retention team will spend a quarter trying to model and will mostly fail to model, because the actual cause is buried in a behavior that was never measured in the first place.

Mild disappointment is expensive. It is the single most expensive thing in the business. And the reason it does not appear on any P&L is that it does not produce an immediate transaction. It produces a slow, invisible draining of the reservoir of goodwill that every subscription product runs on.

The services that win the next decade will be the ones that learn to put a number on that Tuesday. Not a precise number — nobody will ever have a perfect model of mild disappointment — but a directional number. A number that changes the order of the items on the product roadmap. A number that makes the content team and the UX team and the pricing team have a different conversation than they are currently having.

What a Correct Denominator Would Look Like

I do not think the fix is complicated, at the level of concept. It is just unfashionable.

A correct denominator would weight minutes by arousal. It would distinguish between the show that someone watched while half-asleep and the show that someone watched with their phone face-down. It would distinguish between the trailer that played because autoplay fired and the trailer that played because someone clicked on it. It would have a way of saying: this hour of content produced engaged attention, and that hour of content produced ambient attention, and those two hours are not the same input.

The industry has fragments of this. Completion rate is a fragment. Rewatch rate is a fragment. Share rate is a fragment. Whether somebody searched the title by name, versus arrived at it through a recommendation row, is a fragment. The time between sessions is a fragment.

Stitched together, those fragments would make a weighted-minutes metric that actually matched what the business is trying to do. But I have not seen anybody stitch them together publicly. No major streamer has disclosed a weighted-attention metric that goes beyond variations on completion rate, watch time, and the standard engagement scores that anchor every earnings-call talking point. The fragments sit in separate dashboards owned by separate teams who each have local incentives that do not compose.

The companies that stitch it together first — and then actually re-organize their greenlight decisions around the stitched number — will have an advantage that is hard to describe in a deck but will show up, eventually, as lower churn, higher ARPU, and a library that compounds in value instead of eroding.

The Netflix Example, Carefully

I want to use Netflix as an example here, and I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming.

Netflix launched its ad-supported tier on November 3, 2022. It has adjusted pricing in October 2023, again in January 2025, and again in early 2026 — with the Basic plan quietly phased out for existing subscribers through 2024 in between. It has, along the way, become — on public reporting — the most profitable subscription streamer by a significant margin, with the best combination of engagement, retention, and unit economics in the category.

The standard story about Netflix’s advantage is that it had a head start. That it has the deepest library. That its recommendation system is better. All of that is true, and none of it, I think, is the main thing.

The main thing is that Netflix has spent a decade treating content as if the denominator is arousal-weighted attention and not raw minutes. They do not disclose the internal machinery. They do not publish a weighted-engagement score. But the decisions they make — the shows they cancel that were hitting raw-minute targets but not share-and-talk-about-it targets, the originals they re-up on evidence that goes beyond completion rate, the willingness to let library content carry the low-intensity side of the business while originals carry the high-intensity side — read like the decisions of a company that has quietly built a better denominator.

Other services are reading the same raw-minute numbers and drawing different conclusions, because the numbers are not actually the same numbers. A Netflix minute and a Peacock minute and a Paramount+ minute all get called “a minute” in the trade press. They are not the same unit. They carry different densities of earned attention, which means different retention impact, which means different unit economics, even at identical content spend.

The Paramount-Shaped Version of the Same Problem

Consider the ongoing narrative around Paramount, which was folded into the Skydance structure when that merger closed on August 7, 2025. The public story has been a DTC turnaround — some good quarters, some harder quarters, an ongoing question about whether the combined company has the scale to be a standalone streamer or whether it ends up as a content supplier into somebody else’s bundle.

The framework question underneath the turnaround narrative is the one this essay is about. You can get a DTC P&L to look better in the short term by two very different routes. You can optimize the numerator — cheaper content, less content, more library mix, fewer originals, tighter marketing — or you can optimize the denominator, which means producing fewer but more arousal-weighted hours and measuring them correctly.

Route one looks good for two quarters and then the churn math catches up, because the library is slowly draining the reservoir of earned attention. Route two looks worse for two quarters and then starts to compound, because the content is laying down the kind of memory and loyalty that reduces the cost of the next renewal decision.

Almost every DTC turnaround I have watched from the outside has been built on route one. And almost every one that has actually worked over a multi-year horizon has, under the hood, been built on route two. The first is visible on the P&L immediately. The second becomes visible on the P&L eventually, but it starts on a spreadsheet nobody is looking at yet.

The Ad Tier as a Forcing Function

There is one place where the industry is, almost by accident, being forced to price attention correctly. The ad tier.

When a service sells ad inventory, the advertiser does not care about minutes consumed in the abstract. They care about impressions that are actually impressions — that land on attention that is actually there, that produce brand recall that is actually measurable, that convert at rates that are actually defensible. Advertisers have been doing this kind of math, in television and print and digital, for fifty years. They are not perfect at it. But they are far ahead of the streaming P&L at it.

When a streaming service goes down the ad-tier road — as most of the category has, since 2022 — it imports, whether it realizes it or not, the advertiser’s weighted view of a minute. Live sports minutes are worth more than library drama minutes. Finale minutes are worth more than premiere minutes, sometimes. Morning minutes are worth less than evening minutes. Minutes on a television set in a living room are worth more than minutes on a phone on a commute. The CPMs are not uniform, and the non-uniformity is not a pricing quirk — it is an admission, by a market, that a minute is not a minute.

That admission is the most interesting thing happening in streaming finance right now. It is the beginning of an attention-weighted P&L, and it is arriving through the ad organization rather than the subscription organization, which is why most strategy conversations have not absorbed it yet.

Two P&Ls, One Tuesday

There is a wrinkle to the Tuesday-night thesis that depends on which side of the streaming business you sit on.

For an SVOD service, the Tuesday-night user — opened the app, scrolled, closed without watching — is a churn warning. The user paid a flat fee, did the mental work of opening the app, and walked away with nothing in the pocket. The next renewal decision just got harder. The reservoir of goodwill drained slightly. That Tuesday, on an SVOD sheet, is cost.

For an AVOD service, the same Tuesday reads almost the opposite way. The user opened the app. They scrolled. They were looking for something to watch. They did not find it tonight, and the platform ought to be unhappy about that. But they showed up — which means they are exactly the kind of user the AVOD model exists to monetize over time. They demonstrated intent. They self-identified as engaged audience.

That Tuesday, on an AVOD sheet, is not the beginning of churn. It is signal. A flag against a known user that says here is someone who wanted to be entertained — give them better next time. The platform now knows something it did not know yesterday: this is the kind of person who opens the app on a Tuesday looking for something to spend time with. That is the input the AVOD business is built around. SVOD has to earn the renewal; AVOD has to earn the next session, and the next session is already half-earned the moment the user shows up.

The same behavioral data — opened, scrolled, did not watch — is cost on one P&L and signal on the other. Most strategy conversations elide this. They use “streaming” as a single category and assume the unit economics travel. They do not. The Tuesday inverts the moment the revenue model does.

It is also why AVOD economics survive at content tiers that would obliterate an SVOD library. If every session produces signal regardless of completion, a library of low-arousal content is not a tax — it is inventory that earns its keep on the showing-up itself, while a smaller arousal-weighted layer carries the moments advertisers will pay the most for. The SVOD platform has no equivalent. Every session has to contribute to the renewal decision, because the renewal decision is the entire revenue event.

What Happens When The Framework Lands

If the framework I am describing is right — and I think it is, and I think the next decade will prove it — then several things that currently look like mysteries will stop looking like mysteries.

Why does a service that has ten times the raw library of a competitor lose subscribers at a higher rate? Because the library is mostly ambient-attention content, and the competitor’s smaller library is mostly arousal-weighted content, and the attention-weighted denominator favors the competitor even though the minutes-watched dashboard favors the incumbent.

Why does a live-sports package that costs a fortune still pay back, when the per-minute cost looks indefensible on a spreadsheet? Because a minute of live sports is not a minute of library drama. Live is the highest-arousal content in the television ecosystem, which means it is the densest earned-attention inventory available, which means the real per-unit cost — properly weighted — is a fraction of what the naive math suggests.

Why do streaming services keep rediscovering that their biggest retention lever is a small number of shows that people actually love, and not a large number of shows that people will technically watch? Because earned attention compounds and ambient attention does not. The math has been telling them this for a decade. They have been looking at the wrong math.

Why does the “value” tier — the cheapest, most library-heavy tier — churn so much harder than the premium, originals-heavy tier, even after accounting for price sensitivity? Because the cheap tier is almost entirely a low-arousal product. It is optimized for the denominator the P&L measures and not for the denominator the user is actually experiencing. It wins on the spreadsheet and loses in the brain.

The Next Decade

I will not pretend this reframe is simple to operationalize. It requires content teams and data teams and product teams and finance teams to all agree that they have been looking at the wrong number, and then to agree on what the new number should be, and then to stay agreed on it for long enough for the first wave of contrary-looking quarterly results to come in and not cause a panic.

That is a lot of agreement in an industry that is not, historically, famous for it.

But the economics are going to force the reframe regardless. The services that continue to optimize for cheap minutes will keep producing cheap minutes, and their denominators will keep looking good, and their churn will keep being inexplicable, and their content libraries will keep failing to compound. The services that figure out how to price the cost of mild disappointment — the Tuesday night when the user opened the app and found nothing — will keep building libraries that get more valuable over time, not less.

This is not a content-quality argument. It is a measurement argument. You cannot run a business on the wrong denominator for more than about a decade before the business starts to disagree with the spreadsheet, and in this business we are now about a decade in.

The unit economics of boredom is a line item that does not exist on any P&L I have ever seen. It is the most important line item in the category.

Put it on the sheet.

Eleven years is a long time.

I keep coming back to that duration. Eleven years ago was 2015. Snapchat was what teenagers were on. TikTok did not exist in the United States — ByteDance did not merge Musical.ly into TikTok in the US until August 2018. Netflix had not yet made Stranger Things, which premiered in July 2016. Regional sports networks were still a functioning business. Amazon did not carry its first NFL streams until the 2017 Thursday Night Football sublicense — and did not own exclusive NFL rights until the eleven-year Thursday Night Football deal that began in 2022. The idea that a single streaming service — any streaming service — would pay a league in the NBA’s range for rights would have sounded like a category error.

Eleven years from now is 2036.

I do not know what media looks like in 2036. Neither does Adam Silver. Neither does Bob Iger, and neither does Andy Jassy. What everyone did at the negotiating table in 2024 — which is what you always do in a media rights negotiation — was extrapolate from what had just happened and add a premium for scarcity. That is the right move, given the tools available. The NBA, to its credit, got paid for the cultural weight it actually carries in 2024. The partners, to their credit, paid for live inventory that has held its value better than almost anything else in the television economy.

But here is the thing about extrapolation. It works until it doesn’t.

I think the second half of this contract will feel like a different sport than the first half. Not because basketball will change — basketball does not change — but because three tectonic shifts are already underway underneath the deal, and each of them will keep moving, regardless of what the contract says.

The deal is not wrong. The world underneath it is changing.

What the Deal Was Priced Against

Before I get into what is shifting, it is worth being clear about what the deal was priced against. Not the number — the number is a function of competitive dynamics between three well-capitalized bidders — but the assumptions embedded in the number.

Assumption one: linear television, while shrinking, still has enough reach and advertising value to justify ESPN and NBC paying what they paid. The cable bundle is collapsing — I have written about this — but collapsing slowly enough that the tail is still lucrative.

Assumption two: the NBA remains the second-most-valuable American sports property, behind only the NFL, and there is no credible competitor for the audience it aggregates on a Tuesday night in February.

Assumption three: streaming — primarily through Amazon, but also through the digital tails of Disney and NBC — will pick up enough of the audience that does not watch linear to fill the gap. That the NBA can, essentially, migrate its audience from cable to streaming without losing the monetization layer that makes the rights worth what they are.

Each of these assumptions is defensible in 2024. I am not sure any of them survives 2030 without significant asterisks.

The deal was priced against a demographic, behavioral, and distribution reality that is already shifting.

There are three shifts I want to walk through. I have opinions about each. I do not have perfect data about any of them, because nobody does — the measurement infrastructure for the media economy in 2026 is still built for a world that ended around 2018. Where I have specific figures, I will cite them. Where I do not, I will say so and argue structurally. Structural arguments do not need false specificity to land.

Shift One — Generational Inversion

There is a particular kind of NBA fan that I suspect the league is aware of but does not fully know how to price.

This fan can tell you, unprompted, about the Victor Wembanyama dunk from last week, the Luka Dončić step-back that went viral on Sunday, the LeBron-to-Bronny highlight that racked up tens of millions of plays in under an hour. This fan knows every player, knows every contract, knows every trade rumor, knows which rookie is about to pop and which veteran is on the decline.

This fan may not have watched a full NBA game in months. Maybe years.

I want to be careful here, because I do not have proprietary viewership data, and the public data is partial. What the public data does say, though, is that the audience on streaming is running much younger than the audience on linear. Sports Media Watch reported that NBA on Prime Video had a median age of 46.8 through the first weeks of the 2025-26 season — about eight years younger than the linear networks. Sportico put the NBA on Prime median age at 49.4 across the full season window against 56.2 for linear NBA. The direction is unmistakable: the split audience is the story, and the linear half is aging. What I can say, as someone who spends a lot of time inside the sports media business, is that the anecdotal pattern around clip-first fandom is unmistakable too. The NBA’s cultural center — the place where the league lives in the popular imagination — increasingly sits inside social clips, inside group chats, inside short-form vertical video, inside fantasy and betting apps that deliver the moment without the match.

This is not a clip versus game binary. Clips are generative of games — plenty of people watch the full broadcast because a clip hooked them. But there is a growing cohort for whom the clip is the product. The game is a dependency, not a destination.

If you are selling eleven years of linear and streaming rights against the assumption that the full-game audience converts at historical rates, this cohort is your problem. Because the monetization model for a sixteen-second vertical clip viewed on Instagram is not the same as the monetization model for two and a half hours of a Lakers-Celtics broadcast. Not close. Not even in the same order of magnitude on a per-minute basis.

The NBA understands this better than most leagues. The league office has been unusually willing to let clips proliferate, to work with creators, to accept that cultural reach is upstream of paid viewership. I think that instinct is correct. But the instinct does not solve the economics. Cultural reach at clip scale does not, on its own, pay for eleven-year rights deals priced against full-game viewership.

Somewhere in that gap is a generation of fans who love the NBA and will not, as a rule, sit down for a full game. The league’s partners bought inventory assuming this gap does not widen. I think it is almost certain to widen.

What happens when it does?

One answer is that the full-game audience gets older, denser, and more valuable per viewer — a smaller but more monetizable core, which is what has happened to every mature television franchise in history. That is a defensible outcome but a shrinking one. Another answer is that the NBA, alongside its partners, invents a product that sits between the clip and the game — a ten-minute curated watch, a fourth-quarter-only stream, an AI-generated highlight pass personalized to the fan. The partners have the engineering capacity to do this. The question is whether the league and the partners agree on who owns the rights to that intermediate surface, and whether the money follows.

I have argued before that the universal remote control — that physical object that defined how a household watched sports for forty years — is dead, and with it, the assumption that an entire family sits down in front of one screen at one time. The NBA fan of 2030 is not sitting in the living room at 8pm Eastern waiting for the opening tip. That fan is on a phone, on a commute, on a treadmill, watching whatever the algorithm served, which may or may not be the game their rights-holder paid to broadcast.

Extrapolate that for eleven years. Now ask yourself whether the NBA’s next decade looks like the last one.

Shift Two — International Reconsolidation

For most of my adult life, the NBA’s international story has been a one-way street. Players from everywhere in the world come to the NBA, because the NBA is where the best basketball is played and where the money is. International fans watch the NBA because it is where their national hero plays. The league has marketed itself, correctly, as the global top of the pyramid.

That story is starting to have exceptions.

The EuroLeague is getting better. Not in some abstract aspirational sense — in a direct, measurable, year-over-year sense. The caliber of basketball in the EuroLeague, the depth of rosters, the coaching, the tactical sophistication — all of it has been on an upward trajectory, accelerated by the fact that a growing number of elite international players are choosing to stay in Europe longer, choosing to return to Europe at a point in their careers where a decade ago they would have stuck it out in the NBA, and in some cases choosing to go to Europe from the NBA.

The Australian NBL has become a credible development alternative for top American prospects — LaMelo Ball signed with the Illawarra Hawks in 2019 on his way to being drafted third overall, R. J. Hampton played for the New Zealand Breakers before going 24th in 2020, and others have used the NBL Next Stars program as a path to the NBA draft, giving the NBL a recurring American-interest storyline that it did not have a decade ago. The Basketball Africa League, founded in 2019 by the NBA and FIBA and tipping off in 2021, is building out a competitive infrastructure on a continent whose basketball talent pipeline is, by every credible estimate, underexploited by a factor of many. The Philippines, Japan, and parts of Latin America all have domestic leagues growing faster than most American commentators realize.

None of this is a threat to the NBA in the competitive sense. The NBA will remain the top league in the world for the foreseeable future. The talent will continue to flow toward it. I am not predicting the NBA gets dethroned. I do not think that is happening.

But the media rights math does not care about which league is the best league. The media rights math cares about where the attention goes.

If the share of elite basketball consumption watched outside the NBA rises — even modestly, even incrementally, even only in specific international markets where the NBA has historically sold a lot of League Pass — that is a direct hit on the growth assumption embedded in the $76 billion. The league has spent the last twenty years arguing, credibly, that it is a global growth story with an underpenetrated international audience. That was definitely true when I started watching the Bulls beat all comers in the 90s. That is still true - though the ubiquity of Lakers / Warriors / Yankees merch around the world suggests the league has made a LOT of headway. It may be less true in 2030 than it was in 2024.

The NBA does not publicly disclose League Pass international subscriber growth at the country level. What the EuroLeague has disclosed is telling in its own right — EuroLeague.TV reported a 37% year-over-year increase in OTT subscriptions alongside the viewership growth cited above. The absence of a comparable NBA disclosure is, at minimum, something a second-half-of-deal bidder should notice.

The second-order effect is subtler but I think more important. The NBA has historically been able to define the sport of basketball internationally — what the game looks like, how it is played, what kids in playgrounds from Manila to Madrid emulate. That hegemony has started to fracture. A kid in Belgrade today can watch Nikola Jokić dominate the NBA playoffs and watch the EuroLeague final live and follow the ABA League standings, all without friction, all on the same device. The kid’s mental model of professional basketball is not NBA-centric the way it was in 2008. It is basketball-centric, with the NBA as one very prominent node in a graph.

A kid who grows up with that mental model is not lost to the NBA. But that kid is a different kind of customer than the kid who grew up thinking the NBA was basketball. And in media economics, different kinds of customers monetize at different rates.

Eleven years gives a lot of runway for mental models to shift.

Shift Three — The Betting-Content Merge

Here is the shift I am most confident about, because it is already here and it is already the dominant mode of engagement for a large and growing segment of the NBA audience.

The most engaging NBA product in America, for millions of fans, is not the broadcast. It is the live-bet surface inside FanDuel, DraftKings, or their peer sportsbooks. The game is happening — but the game is happening inside an app where every possession is priced, every matchup is surfaced, every player prop is available to be played, reloaded, hedged, cashed out. The broadcast is a window on the action. The app is a participatory layer on top of the action. For a certain kind of fan, the app is now the primary interface and the broadcast is the ambient soundtrack.

I am not going to invent specific product-feature claims about any particular sportsbook. Operator-level NBA in-play handle, player-prop market counts per game, and bets-per-user metrics for 2025-26 are not disclosed at the granularity that would let me cite a number. Flutter’s FanDuel disclosures and the comparable DraftKings earnings commentary describe a product that is aggressively expanding the in-play surface — same-game parlays, player-prop injury protection, live-priced bet-builder markets — without publishing the per-game market counts.

What I will argue structurally is this: the sportsbook product gets better every year, and the broadcast product, structurally, does not. A broadcast in 2035 will still be a broadcast — a produced video feed of a basketball game with play-by-play commentary and advertising breaks. A sportsbook app in 2035 will be whatever the product teams at FanDuel and DraftKings and every competitor can ship in eleven years of iteration. The gap between those two surfaces, measured in engagement density per minute, is going to widen, not narrow.

The NBA, on the current structure, is a licensor to the sportsbooks. It sells data rights, integrity fees, official-partner designations. It does not, in any structural sense, own the live-bet surface. The sportsbooks own that. The sportsbooks are building the product that, increasingly, is how the NBA gets consumed.

I think the league cannot keep treating sportsbooks as licensees.

Not because the commercial deals are bad — the commercial deals are fine — but because the most engaging surface of your own product is being built by someone else, and that someone else is not obligated to optimize for the health of the league. The sportsbook optimizes for handle, for retention, for in-app engagement, for lifetime value. Those metrics correlate with a healthy NBA most of the time. They do not correlate all of the time. The divergences are where the problems live.

Consider the player-prop market. A sportsbook offering thousands of player props per game is, effectively, giving every bench player a market cap. Every rotation decision by a coach affects a market. Every stat-padding garbage-time minute is a payout event for somebody. The incentive structure that the sportsbook is introducing into the sport — at a scale that simply did not exist a decade ago — is not something the league designed. It is something the league is accommodating.

The second-half-of-the-contract question is whether the league remains accommodating or whether it tries to bring the live-bet surface inside the tent. The NBA has structural advantages here. It controls the officials, the data feeds, the schedule, the broadcast, the rules. If it wanted to ship a first-party betting-integrated product — and more importantly, if it wanted its media partners to ship such a product — it has the assets to do it. Amazon, especially, has the engineering and distribution to make an integrated watch-and-bet surface real inside Prime Video in a way no traditional broadcaster can. (Quick plug: we do too at Victory+)

Do I think this happens cleanly? No. Regulatory environments vary state by state. The league’s integrity concerns are real and well-founded. The history of sports betting and sports leagues is complicated by decades of mutual antagonism that the last several years have not fully undone. But the economic pressure to close the gap between the broadcast and the bet is going to keep rising for the entire duration of this contract.

Somewhere in the second half of this deal, somebody — league, partner, sportsbook, or some consortium of all three — is going to ship an integrated product that feels, to the fan, like the way to watch the NBA. And when that happens, every metric in the rights deal will need to be re-understood. Because the definition of what it means to “watch” an NBA game will have shifted.

What This Means for the Back Half

I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not claiming the NBA is in decline. It is not. By every measure that matters — revenue, player talent, international presence, cultural relevance — the league is in the healthiest position in its history. The 2024 media deal is the strongest single piece of evidence for that health, not a counterexample to it.

I am also not claiming the partners made a bad deal. Disney, NBC, and Amazon each got what they needed. Disney got ESPN’s marquee property for another cycle, which is existentially important to ESPN. NBC got a top-tier sports franchise to slot against football in a post-Comcast-cable world. Amazon got the thing it has been building toward since the NFL Thursday night package: legitimacy as a live-sports destination, with the scale of basketball’s hundreds of annual game windows to keep Prime subscribers coming back. Each of those outcomes was worth what each partner paid, measured against the alternatives available in 2024.

What I am claiming is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: the world underneath the deal is not holding still for eleven years.

Generational inversion means the cohort growing into peak-consumption age does not consume basketball the way the cohort paying for cable consumed basketball. International reconsolidation means the growth assumption about international League Pass and global audience share has more competition than it did. The betting-content merge means the most engaging surface of the sport is being built outside the rights-holder’s product and will keep being built there unless the league intervenes structurally.

Any one of these is manageable. All three, compounding over eleven years, produce a different sport.

The NBA has navigated transitions before. The shift from network to cable. The shift from cable to streaming. The Jordan retirement. The lockouts. The analytics revolution. The globalization of talent. The league has been, among major American sports institutions, the most willing to adapt — the most willing to let the product evolve, the most willing to experiment with rules and formats, the most willing to lean into cultural currents rather than fight them. That disposition is why the 2024 deal got priced where it did.

I think the same disposition is going to be required to get through 2035 intact. Not just intact — to come out the other side with the league meaningfully stronger than it is today, which is the bar the partners paid for. It will require a product roadmap that treats clip culture as a first-class citizen rather than a leakage problem. It will require an international strategy that assumes competitive pressure on attention rather than assuming uncontested growth. It will require a betting-and-media integration that the league owns rather than licenses.

None of that is impossible. Some of it is already underway. But the gap between what the contract assumes and what the world is about to deliver is, I think, wider than the people who signed the contract are prepared for.

The Thing That Is Not Changing

I wrote last summer about what isn’t changing in live sports — that even amid every wave of disruption in the media economy, live sports remains the most resilient asset in television, because the thing it delivers (synchronous mass attention, unfakeable human drama, ritual and identity) is the thing that gets scarcer as everything else gets more abundant.

I still believe that. Nothing I have written here contradicts it.

The NBA will remain, across any plausible version of the next decade, one of the three or four most valuable sports properties in the world. The 2035 finals will draw a massive audience, across whatever combination of screens exists in 2035. Fans will still feel the same thing watching a Game 7 that I felt watching the 1990 World Cup final on a black-and-white television in India. That part does not change.

What changes is everything around the core. How the game gets to the fan. Who builds the product layer on top of the game. How the attention gets sliced, priced, and monetized. Where the cultural center of the sport lives when nobody is watching a full broadcast. Which leagues the international fan considers peer competition versus lower-tier alternatives.

These are the things the rights deal cannot freeze in place.

The first half of the contract will look a lot like the last cycle. Linear will shrink on schedule. Streaming will grow on schedule. The league will be healthy and profitable and culturally dominant in the ways it has been for the last fifteen years. Everyone will feel good about the deal.

The second half is where the interesting questions live. Not whether the NBA survives — it obviously does — but whether the product the partners bought in 2024 still exists, in any recognizable form, in 2035.

I think it will exist. I think it will have to have been rebuilt at least once, probably twice, along the way. And I think the partners who understand that upfront — who treat the rights deal as a license to build, not a license to extract — are the ones who come out of 2035 with something worth having.

The deal is not wrong. It is a snapshot of a sport priced at a moment.

The moment is already moving.

After fifteen years of this, I have developed one strongly held view.

Measurement frameworks outlast the businesses they were invented for. They persist, in dashboards and in decks and in the muscle memory of the people who came up in them, long after the underlying economics have moved. And the damage a stale measurement framework does is not that it produces wrong numbers — it is that it produces numbers that look right, and therefore do not get questioned, while the business they describe quietly turns into a different business.

This is what has happened to creator-economy measurement. The canonical metrics — CPM, followers, watch time, RPM — are all inherited from businesses that existed before the creator economy did. CPM is a television-and-display-advertising metric. Followers is a social-media-platform-growth metric. Watch time is a broadcast-network metric dressed up for a streaming environment. RPM is a YouTube-era adaptation of CPM with some platform take adjustments baked in.

None of those four metrics describe the business that most serious creators are actually running in 2026. Modern creator revenue is a composition of three things — long-tail attention rent, backlog-compounding library value, and direct-relationship subscription premium. The canonical metrics price none of the three components correctly. That is the measurement problem, and it is, I think, the most significant unresolved structural issue in the creator economy today.

What follows is a framework-level argument. I am not going to name specific creators or specific platforms beyond what is necessary. I am not going to publish revenue figures I cannot source. The argument is structural, not anecdotal. It is about measurement. It is, specifically, about why the measurement is wrong.

What The Inherited Metrics Were Built For

To see why the current metrics fail, it helps to go back to what each of them was originally built to measure.

CPM — cost per thousand impressions — was a mid-twentieth-century advertising accounting convention. It existed because the buyer (an advertiser) and the seller (a network or a publisher) needed a common language for the unit of inventory, and that unit was an impression. The metric assumed a few things. It assumed the impression was real. It assumed the environment around the impression was roughly uniform. It assumed the advertiser’s goal was aggregate reach, because that is what television and print advertising could deliver at scale and what the attribution tooling of the era could measure.

None of those assumptions hold in the creator economy. The impression may or may not be attended. The environment around the impression varies wildly — a ten-second ad read inside a thirty-minute trusted-voice podcast is doing something structurally different from a programmatic pre-roll on a random vertical video. The advertiser’s goal is increasingly not aggregate reach but resonant attention, which CPM does not measure at all.

Followers is a vanity metric that became an economic metric through platform politics. Originally, it was a crude proxy for audience size — how many accounts had explicitly opted to receive content from a given creator. That proxy worked, approximately, for about five years. Then the platforms moved to algorithmic feeds. Once the feed was algorithmic, the follower relationship decoupled from the distribution relationship. A creator with a million followers who was deprioritized by the algorithm was reaching fewer people than a creator with ten thousand followers who was being pushed to a broader non-follower audience. Follower count persisted as a metric anyway, because it was easy to count and because the platforms had an incentive to keep it in the conversation as a proxy for value.

Watch time was introduced by YouTube in 2012 as the replacement for view count in the algorithm — the platform was being gamed by creators who optimized for clickthrough at the expense of actual consumption, and the platform needed a metric that rewarded content which held attention rather than content which merely triggered a click. Watch time did that. It was a better metric than views, for the platform’s purposes in 2012. But watch time, like CPM, treats a minute as a minute. It does not distinguish between a minute of attentive, arousal-weighted consumption and a minute of ambient, half-attended background play. I have argued at length elsewhere that those two minutes are not economically equivalent, and the creator economy is a particularly acute place for that distinction to matter.

RPM — revenue per thousand views, or per thousand minutes watched, depending on the platform’s convention — is a creator-facing derivation of CPM with platform-share adjustments baked in. It is useful, as a rough input for a creator trying to model whether a given piece of content will cover its production cost. It is catastrophically inadequate as a representation of the value a creator is actually generating across their full body of work and across their relationship with their audience.

The Three Components of Modern Creator Revenue

The business that a serious creator is actually running, today, has three revenue components. They do not show up discretely on most dashboards. They are often bundled into a single aggregated “monthly earnings” number that hides the structure underneath. The structure matters.

Long-Tail Attention Rent

The first component is what I will call long-tail attention rent. A creator produces a piece of content. That piece of content, under the current platform economics, continues to be surfaced to new audiences for months or years after it was published. Each surfacing produces some small increment of attention, which converts into some small increment of revenue — through platform ad share, through evergreen sponsorship placements, through the indirect mechanism of driving new audiences to the creator’s other properties.

Long-tail attention rent is the recurring royalty a creator earns for content they already shipped. It is the closest analogue, in the creator economy, to the back-catalog revenue that a television studio earns from licensing reruns, or that a music label earns from catalog streaming.

CPM measures the first-day-surface of a piece of content. RPM measures the first-month or first-year surface. Neither measures the fifth-year surface. And for a creator with a meaningful body of work, the fifth-year surface is a very large fraction of the total lifetime value of that work.

Most creator-economy conversations treat long-tail revenue as a nice-to-have rather than a structural component. That is backwards. For a creator with three to five years of output, long-tail attention rent can be a material and growing share of total earnings — and it grows without any new production effort, which makes it the highest-margin part of the business.

Backlog-Compounding Library Value

The second component is adjacent to the first but meaningfully different. A creator’s backlog — the archive of content they have produced over years — is not just an annuity that spins off long-tail attention rent. It is also a discovery mechanism. It is the library that a new audience member, having found the creator through one piece of content, can work backwards through. It is the thing that converts a casual viewer into a subscriber, because it is evidence that there is more where this came from.

The economic value of that evidence is enormous and is not currently priced into any standard creator metric.

When a potential subscriber is deciding whether to commit to a creator — whether via a platform-native subscription, a newsletter sign-up, a Patreon tier, a Substack subscription, a YouTube membership — the single biggest determinant of that decision is whether the backlog is deep enough to feel like a worthwhile investment. A creator with five years of strong backlog is much more subscribable than an equivalent creator with six months of strong backlog, even if their most recent work is at the same quality level. The backlog is doing the work of de-risking the subscription decision.

A creator's backlog is not just an annuity. It is the thing that converts a casual viewer into a subscriber, because it is evidence that there is more where this came from.— the thesis

No current metric captures this. Watch time does not capture it. CPM does not capture it. Follower count does not capture it. And because no metric captures it, creators in the middle of their careers systematically underinvest in backlog quality — cleaning up old content, re-packaging older pieces, making the archive more discoverable — because the dashboard does not reward that work. The dashboard rewards new production.

The misallocation of creator effort produced by that measurement gap is, I think, the most expensive single thing in the creator economy today.

Direct-Relationship Subscription Premium

The third component is the one that has received the most rhetorical attention and the least rigorous measurement. The direct-relationship subscription premium is what a creator earns from the fraction of their audience who have opted to pay for ongoing access — through a newsletter subscription, a podcast membership, a Patreon tier, a Substack paid tier, a platform-native support mechanism, a private community access fee.

The subscription premium is structurally different from ad-supported revenue in ways that the standard metrics completely miss.

A paid subscriber is not a unit of audience that happens to also pay money. A paid subscriber is a different economic relationship entirely. They are much less churn-prone than a free follower. They consume more content per visit. They share more. They convert at much higher rates to the creator’s other offerings — books, courses, live events, merchandise. They are, in other words, the compounding asset. The free audience is the traffic. The paid subscribers are the business.

No creator dashboard I have seen represents this correctly. The dashboards aggregate paid subscribers into the same “audience” number as free followers, apply the same engagement metrics to both, and then report a blended revenue figure that makes it impossible to see which part of the business is compounding and which part is just churning through.

Why the Mispricing Is Structural, Not Incidental

It would be tempting to read the preceding sections as an argument that the platforms just need to add a few new metrics and the problem will be solved. That is not the argument.

The measurement problem is structural. It is baked into the revenue models of the platforms themselves. A platform that is primarily an advertising business — which most of the major creator platforms still are — has a strong incentive to optimize its measurement layer around ad-facing metrics, because those are the metrics that determine the platform’s own revenue. CPM, RPM, watch time, and follower count are all, in one way or another, metrics that the platform’s ad sales organization cares about. The platform publishes those metrics to creators because publishing them is cheap — the platform is already calculating them for its own purposes.

Long-tail attention rent, backlog value, and subscription premium are metrics the platform’s ad sales organization does not directly care about. They are creator-facing metrics that would require separate instrumentation, separate reporting, and separate engineering investment. The platforms have, with rare exceptions, not made that investment, because the return on that investment accrues primarily to creators rather than to the platform’s own P&L.

The mispricing, in other words, is not an oversight. It is the natural equilibrium of a system where the measurement infrastructure is paid for by one party and consumed by another, and the two parties do not have aligned interests.

This is the part of the creator-economy conversation that I think gets least attention. Everyone is arguing about platform take rates. Almost no one is arguing about the measurement stack on top of which the take rates operate. But the measurement stack determines what the creators can optimize for, and the creators’ optimization choices determine what kind of content gets made, and the content that gets made determines what the platform actually is.

What a Creator-Facing Measurement Stack Would Look Like

If we were starting from scratch — if a platform were being built today specifically to represent the creator economics that actually exist — the measurement stack would look different in at least three ways.

First, it would report long-tail revenue separately from current-period revenue, broken out by content-cohort age. A creator would be able to see, at a glance, what share of this month’s earnings came from content shipped this month, this year, two years ago, and five-plus years ago. That single breakdown would transform creator investment decisions. It would make the backlog visible as the compounding asset it is.

Second, it would report subscriber metrics and follower metrics as separate categories, with separate engagement profiles, separate revenue attribution, and separate lifetime-value modeling. The conflation of subscribers and followers into a single “audience” number is the single most damaging convention in current creator dashboards. Unconflating them would clarify, for every creator in the category, which part of their business is worth investing in.

Third, it would attempt some form of attention-weighting on the consumption metrics, even if the weighting were imperfect. Completion rate, rewatch rate, share rate, the ratio of active-visit time to passive-background time, the gap between autoplay-started views and user-initiated views — these are all fragments that exist in platform telemetry and that could, in combination, produce a directionally correct attention-weighted consumption number. Nobody is publishing that number today. No major creator platform — not YouTube’s public Studio reporting, not TikTok’s analytics, not Patreon, not Substack — surfaces anything beyond standard watch time and completion-rate derivatives as of this writing. The first platform that does will have an advantage that is hard to appreciate until you try to optimize a creator career without it.

What Happens If Nothing Changes

I do not want to end on an optimistic note that is not warranted. The most likely scenario, in my view, is that the measurement layer of the creator economy does not change meaningfully for the next several years, because none of the incumbent platforms have a direct incentive to change it.

If nothing changes, several things will continue to happen.

Creators will continue to over-invest in new production and under-invest in backlog, because the dashboard rewards the former and is silent on the latter. The careers that compound will be the ones whose operators intuit the backlog’s importance despite the dashboard, and those careers will be rare.

Creators will continue to treat subscribers and followers as interchangeable, because the platforms do. The subscription premium — which is the most durable revenue component in the creator economy — will continue to be systematically underdeveloped, because the tools for developing it are not well-instrumented.

Advertisers will continue to price creator inventory using CPM-derived conventions, which will continue to misprice the high-resonance inventory by a large margin. The creators running the most attention-dense formats — deep-dive podcasts, long-form video essays, serialized written work — will continue to extract less revenue per unit of earned attention than those formats are actually generating, and the category will continue to feel, to serious practitioners, slightly economically broken in a way they cannot name.

The creator economy, in other words, will continue to behave like a large, growing market that is also — at the level of the individual creator P&L — a little more precarious and a little less lucrative than it should be. The gap between the aggregate growth story and the individual-creator experience will persist, and it will be explained, as it has been for years, by the somewhat mystical invocation of “platform dynamics” rather than by the much more prosaic reality of a measurement stack that is describing the wrong business.

The Measurement Layer Is The Business

I want to land on a claim that I think is strong.

The measurement layer is not a technical artifact sitting adjacent to the creator economy. The measurement layer is the creator economy, because it is the thing that determines what creators can see, what creators optimize for, and therefore what gets made and how it gets monetized. A creator economy with the right measurement layer is a fundamentally different market than a creator economy with the wrong one — different content, different revenue distribution, different career paths, different power dynamics with platforms.

The industry has, for fifteen years, treated the measurement question as a detail. An engineering task. Something that would get solved eventually. I do not think it will get solved eventually by the incumbents. I think it will get solved — if it gets solved — by a new generation of tools, likely independent of the major platforms, that start to represent long-tail revenue, backlog value, and subscription premium as first-class metrics in a way that the platforms do not.

When those tools arrive, the creator economy will feel, retrospectively, like it had been badly mismeasured for its entire existence. Careers that looked thin will turn out to have been deep. Careers that looked dominant will turn out to have been shallow. The people who understood the three components — long-tail rent, library value, subscription premium — without being able to measure them cleanly will turn out to have been operating on a different and better map than the dashboards allowed.

I do not know exactly when that arrives. I do know the direction the map is moving in. And I know that the creators who internalize the three-component framework now — who build their work around all three, rather than just the one the dashboard rewards — will be the ones building businesses that compound while the rest of the category is still counting followers.

The measurement problem is solvable. Nobody is solving it yet.

That is the opportunity.

Sometime around the spring of 2024 — and the pivot was marked, for me, by the May 2024 announcement that Disney+, Hulu, and Max would sell as a combined package — the streaming industry collectively conceded that the Great Unbundling was over. The services that had spent a decade explaining why the cable bundle was a relic, a regressive cross-subsidy, a tax on consumers who only wanted the good parts, now stood up and said, with straight faces, that actually what the consumer really wanted was a bundle. Just a better one. A smarter one. A streaming-native one.

I watched this happen with some amount of grim amusement. I had written the previous fall about what the death of the universal remote really meant — that the subscription bundle was a child of the cable era and that it could not simply be reassembled in software. I did not think that view would be validated as quickly as it was.

In the eighteen-ish months since the Disney-Hulu-Max announcement, the industry has tried a lot of bundle shapes. Co-branded stacks. Telco-plus-streamer sleeves. Sports-plus-entertainment packages. Plus-Plus tiers. Family tiers. Household tiers. Wallet-based promotional stacks routed through credit card co-brands. A joint sports product — Venu — announced with fanfare on February 6, 2024, blocked by a federal judge in August 2024, and abandoned by its three partners in January 2025 before it shipped a single minute.

Most of these bundles have collapsed. The ones that have not collapsed yet are trending, by any reading, toward collapse. And the failures are not random. They fall into a small number of recurring modes, and the modes rhyme, and once you see the modes you cannot stop seeing them.

This essay is a short taxonomy. Four modes. Each of them is a different way a streaming bundle dies.

Mode One: The Dual-Sub Stack

The first and most common mode is what I will call the dual-sub stack. You take two standalone subscription services, staple them together, discount the combined price by some amount, and launch the result as “a bundle.”

On a whiteboard, the math looks compelling. Service A costs fifteen dollars. Service B costs twelve. Together they would be twenty-seven. You offer them together for twenty-two. Consumers save five dollars a month. Both services get credit for a new incremental subscriber. Churn goes down because users are now anchored to two content libraries instead of one. Everybody wins.

In practice, almost nobody buys the dual-sub stack. The consumer who would have bought both services separately buys the bundle and saves five dollars, which is not a new acquisition — it is margin compression dressed up as growth. The consumer who would have bought only one service is not actually going to add a whole second service just to save money on the one they wanted. They look at the bundle, compare it to their single-service subscription, and keep the single-service subscription.

The dual-sub stack, in other words, does not expand the market. It just re-prices the intersection of the two existing markets. And it re-prices that intersection downward.

This is what has happened with most of the headline “bundle” announcements of the last eighteen months. Disney has not, to date, publicly disclosed a specific take rate for the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle — an absence that tells you something in itself, given how prominently the bundle was positioned at launch. What has been disclosed is that the bundle’s monthly price moved up in October 2025, from $16.99 / $29.99 to $19.99 / $32.99, which is the move a service makes when discount-driven acquisition is not paying for itself. The stack exists. You can buy it. The services have a line item in their investor decks that proudly reports the bundle as a retention lever. But the actual behavior — the movement of subscribers from one-service to two-service — is much smaller than the whiteboard said it would be, and the discount-driven margin compression is much larger.

The dual-sub stack is the bundle shape that looks most like a bundle on paper. It is, for exactly that reason, the one that fails first.

Mode Two: The Zombie Middle Tier

The second mode is what happens when a single service tries to bundle itself, internally, by creating a tier structure that is supposed to satisfy everyone and instead satisfies no one.

Almost every streamer now has some version of this. There is an ad-supported tier at the bottom, at a promotional price. There is an ad-free premium tier at the top, at a price that keeps climbing. And there is, in between, a middle tier that nobody at the company can really explain.

The middle tier was supposed to be the bundle inside the service. A little cheaper than premium, a little richer than the ad tier. It was supposed to capture the subscriber who was price-sensitive but did not want ads, or who wanted ads but wanted some kind of upgrade in quality. On a whiteboard, it looks like a reasonable compromise.

In practice, the middle tier is a zombie. Nobody chooses it deliberately. The subscribers who land on it are mostly legacy — they were on the premium tier when it was cheaper, got price-migrated to the current middle tier during some reorganization, and have not yet bothered to check whether the new structure makes sense for them. They will check, eventually. And when they check, some of them will move up to premium and some of them will move down to the ad tier and some of them will cancel entirely.

The middle tier is a zombie. Nobody chooses it deliberately. The subscribers who land on it are legacy, and when they check what they are paying for, they leave.— the thesis

The zombie middle tier is a bundle in the sense that it is trying to be many things to many people at once. It is failing for the same reason the dual-sub stack fails. The bundle is not expanding the market. It is cannibalizing the two good tiers that bracket it.

Netflix did the honest thing. It eliminated the Basic plan for new customers in 2023 and migrated existing Basic subscribers off the tier in June 2024, collapsing its pricing architecture into a cleaner three-point menu: ad-supported, standard, premium. Most of the other major streamers are still defending their middles, and their middles are still emptying. The ones who keep the middle tier are usually doing it because eliminating it would require admitting, publicly, that the previous pricing architecture was wrong. That is a harder conversation than continuing to report the tier.

Mode Three: The Co-Branded Tourniquet

The third mode is the most embarrassing one. The co-branded tourniquet is a bundle announced, usually with press-release fanfare, in response to a churn crisis. Two services — typically ones that are not natural partners — stand up together on a stage, announce a joint offering, describe it as strategic, and then quietly abandon it within a quarter or two when the underlying numbers do not move.

The Venu Sports arc is the canonical example, and it did not even make it to market. Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced on February 6, 2024 a joint sports streaming service. It was positioned as the answer to the cord-cutting-and-sports problem. FuboTV sued on antitrust grounds, and on August 16, 2024, federal judge Margaret Garnett granted a preliminary injunction blocking the service from launching. The partners began appealing. And then, on January 10, 2025, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced they would not pursue Venu at all — the same week Disney announced a merger of Hulu + Live TV into Fubo that resolved the underlying lawsuit. Eleven months from announcement to abandonment. The service never launched.

The thing to notice about Venu is that it was the correct idea, in the abstract. A single destination for the sports that are otherwise scattered across three disconnected services is, structurally, what the user actually wants. I have written before about why a consolidated sports experience would outperform a fragmented one by a very large multiple — the audience will find the game if the game is findable.

The reason Venu collapsed was not that the product idea was wrong. It was that the three partners could not agree on whose P&L the bundle would protect, what the sub-economics of a joint venture between three rivals would look like, and — most importantly — whose churn problem the bundle was solving for. All three companies were trying to use the same bundle as a tourniquet on three different wounds. When the courts intervened, the partners were ready to walk away. The bundle had not been strategically necessary to any of them. It had been politically expedient for all of them.

Every co-branded tourniquet launched since has some version of this problem. Two partners, each solving their own quarterly churn, stapling together a temporary offering and calling it strategy. The offerings get announced with phrases like “long-term partnership” and “reimagining the consumer experience.” They get deprioritized, quietly, within two to three quarters when the partners figure out that the bundle was not saving either of their balance sheets, and then they get unwound in an even quieter press release some weeks after that.

The co-branded tourniquet fails because it was never designed to succeed. It was designed to show motion on a quarterly earnings call. The motion was the product. Once the quarter had closed, the bundle’s job was done.

Mode Four: The Sports-Shaped Hole

The fourth mode is the one I find most structurally interesting, and it is the one most relevant to the work I do every day. Call it the sports-shaped hole.

Every bundle that has been attempted in the last eighteen months has had, at its center, an unresolved question about sports. Sports is the content category with the most retention value per minute, the highest ad load tolerance, the lowest substitutability, and the worst fit with the rest of the streaming library. Sports lives on a different calendar. It has a different rights structure. It is licensed in ways that make it hard to include in a general-entertainment bundle and hard to exclude from one without creating a visible gap.

So every bundle ends up building around a sports-shaped hole.

Some bundles put sports in a separate tier and charge extra for it, which makes the bundle feel like a cable bundle with an extra sports charge, which is the exact thing the streaming pitch was supposed to eliminate. Some bundles include only a partial sports lineup, which generates constant support tickets asking where the other games are. Some bundles exclude sports entirely and watch their churn spike in October and February and then again during playoff season, when the users who were willing to tolerate a sports-free service for a few months finally give up and go to wherever the games are.

The underlying issue is that sports rights are currently structured across too many services for any single bundle to solve the sports problem. The NBA’s eleven-year deal announced on July 24, 2024, for roughly $76 billion, split rights across Disney (ESPN / ABC), NBC (NBCUniversal / Peacock), and Amazon (Prime Video), with the first season of the new contract beginning 2025–26. The NFL has games on CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, Amazon, and a Sunday Ticket package that moved exclusively to YouTube TV beginning with the 2023 season in a reported $2 billion annual deal. The regional sports network business, meanwhile, has collapsed into itself — Diamond Sports Group filed for Chapter 11 on March 14, 2023 and eventually emerged as Main Street Sports Group, with the surviving networks now pushing direct-to-consumer wrappers because the cable-distributed RSN model is no longer solvent.

No bundle currently in market solves all of that. None can, structurally. The rights are not available to be consolidated at bundle-construction time. And so every bundle announcement in the last eighteen months has included some version of the line “we are working to bring more sports to the platform over time,” which is a sentence that means, in practice, that the sports-shaped hole will remain a sports-shaped hole for the foreseeable future.

A bundle with a sports-shaped hole is not a bundle. It is a fragment marketed as a unified experience. Users figure this out quickly. Most of them do not object loudly. They just keep a second subscription to whatever service carries the games they care about, and the bundle becomes the thing they use for everything other than the thing they most wanted the bundle to solve.

The Bundle That Works Looks Least Like a Bundle

If the four failure modes all have in common that they try to look like bundles — announced as bundles, marketed as bundles, invoiced as bundles — then the implication of the pattern is that the bundle which actually works will look, on its surface, almost nothing like a bundle at all.

I think that is right, and I think the shape of the successful bundle is already visible in outline.

It is a single service with a single interface and a single remote action. You open one app. You browse one library. You press play on one title and the thing plays. Behind the scenes, the content may be coming from six different rights holders and ten different billing arrangements. The user does not know and does not care. The experience is unified.

That is what a real bundle is. It is not an invoice decision. It is an experience decision. The cable bundle, in its time, worked not because it discounted the per-channel price but because it restored a single remote — one set of buttons, one channel guide, one expectation about how the television worked. You did not think, when you clicked up and down through channels, about which content company owned which channel. You just watched television.

The industry has not yet built the thing I am describing. Most of what is being marketed as a bundle today is an invoice staple — two subscriptions sold together, two billing events, two apps, two remotes. That is not a bundle. That is two services with a shared line item.

The successful bundle will be something different. It will be one service with one remote that happens, under the hood, to have licensing agreements with many rights holders. It will not be launched with a press event. It will not be co-branded. It will not have a dedicated landing page explaining the partnership. It will just be the service that works, and it will grow because it is the thing users actually want, which is not a bundle discount but a single act of turning on the television.

What The Next Eighteen Months Will Show

I suspect we are at the tail end of the bundle-announcement era. The four failure modes have repeated enough times that even the executives most invested in the bundle narrative are starting to notice that the announcements are not producing the subscriber numbers the announcements predicted. The dual-sub stack is not converting. The zombie middle tiers are being collapsed one by one. The co-branded tourniquets are unwinding. The sports-shaped holes remain unresolved.

The next eighteen months, I think, will look different. Fewer bundle announcements. More consolidation. More services buying each other rather than partnering with each other. More direct-to-consumer sports services rolled into general-entertainment services rather than offered as separate tiers. More library content flowing between companies as licensing deals replace failed partnerships. The single-remote experience will start to emerge — not from any one company’s strategic masterstroke, but from the accumulation of consolidation decisions driven by the fact that none of the standalone strategies are working.

The companies that will be around in 2030 are the ones that are already designing for that single-remote outcome. The ones that are still announcing bundles in 2027 will be the ones that did not notice the pattern had changed.

The bundle, as currently marketed, is dead. The bundle, as experienced by the user, has not even been built yet.

That is where the next decade of this business is going to be won.

This was India in the early 1990s, and the rules were simple. You were a science student or you were an arts student. You picked a track, it picked your future, and that was that. Science meant engineering or medicine. Commerce, meant accountancy. Arts meant law or — and this was always said with a slight wince — journalism. There was no third door. There was no “what if I like physics and I want to write?” That question did not compute.

I picked science. I ended up in journalism. And then marketing. And then streaming media. And now I spend my days building data dashboards, negotiating distribution deals, and writing essays like this one on the weekend.

The binary was wrong. It is almost always wrong.

The Laziest Form of Thinking

Here is what I have come to believe after twenty-some years of working across countries, industries, and disciplines: binary thinking is the most dangerous shortcut the human mind takes. Not because the categories it creates are always false — sometimes there really are only two options — but because the habit of reducing the world to two buckets is so deeply satisfying that we reach for it even when it destroys nuance, flattens reality, and leads us to terrible decisions.

We do it in politics. We do it in business. We do it in our personal lives. And every time, the thing that matters most — the texture, the tradeoff, the spectrum — gets crushed in the compression.

A binary feels decisive. It feels clean. You are either with us or against us. You are either growing or dying. You either succeeded or you failed.

But the world is not clean. The world is a gradient. And the people who navigate it best are the ones who have learned to sit with that.

The Political Binary

Consider how we talk about politics — not just in America, but increasingly everywhere. Left or right. Red or blue. Progressive or conservative.

These labels are not useless. They describe real tendencies, real coalitions, real differences in how people think society should be organized. But the moment you turn a spectrum into a binary, something insidious happens: the middle disappears. Not because moderate people stop existing, but because the framing no longer has a place for them.

I have watched this happen in real time over the last decade. The Pew Research Center has been tracking political polarization in the United States since 1994. In their landmark study, the share of Americans who hold consistently liberal or consistently conservative views across a range of policy issues jumped from 10% in 1994 to 21% by 2014. The median Democrat and the median Republican, who once overlapped significantly in their policy views, now barely touch.

But here is the part that gets less attention: the majority of Americans still hold a mix of liberal and conservative positions. They want fiscal discipline and a social safety net. They believe in border security and a path to citizenship. They are, in other words, living on the spectrum. The binary does not describe them. It just ignores them.

And the cost of that ignorance is enormous. When you frame every policy debate as a zero-sum war between two camps, compromise becomes betrayal. Negotiation becomes weakness. The politician who reaches across the aisle is not praised for pragmatism — she is primaried for disloyalty.

The binary does not just describe polarization. It produces it.

The Business Binary

The same pattern shows up in boardrooms. I have sat through more strategy meetings than I can count where a complex decision gets collapsed into a false choice.

Should we focus on growth or profitability? Build or buy? Go direct-to-consumer or keep our distribution partners? Double down on our core product or diversify?

These are not either/or questions. They have never been either/or questions. And yet the structure of a board deck — the two-column comparison, the pros-and-cons slide, the “Option A vs. Option B” framework — practically begs you to turn them into one.

I have seen this play out in my own industry. The sports media world spent the better part of five years arguing about whether the future was streaming or linear television. Streaming or cable. Digital or traditional. Pick a side.

The answer, as it turned out, was both — in shifting proportions, for different audiences, at different price points, on different timelines. The companies that committed fully to one side of the binary — the ones who dismissed streaming as a fad — are the ones that lost the most ground.

(I wrote about the 10x opportunity in sports streaming last year. The thesis was not “streaming beats linear.” It was “free, ad-supported streaming unlocks an audience that neither model was reaching.” That is a third option. Binaries do not have third options.)

The best strategic thinkers I have worked with share a common trait: they resist the binary. When someone presents them with two options, their first instinct is to ask, “What is the third option you are not showing me?” or “Is there a version where we do both, but sequence them?” That instinct — the refusal to accept the frame — is worth more than any MBA framework I have ever encountered.

The Personal Binary

But the place where binary thinking does the most damage, I think, is in how we think about our own lives.

Success or failure. Winner or loser. Passion or pragmatism. Career or family. Ambitious or content.

These are the binaries we carry around in our heads, often without even noticing them. And they are brutal, because they turn a rich, complicated, evolving life into a pass/fail exam.

I chose science over arts at fourteen. But the truth is that I never stopped writing. I never stopped being curious about language and narrative and how ideas move through culture. I was crazy enough to never tell myself those interests were secondary — hobbies, not a vocation — just because the binary said so. Science was the real thing. Writing was the other real thing.

It took me a long time to understand that the most interesting version of my career was not on either side of that binary. It was in the intersection. The ability to think analytically and communicate clearly. To help build a financial model and write the narrative that explains why the numbers matter. To sit in a room full of engineers and translate what they are saying to a room full of salespeople, and vice versa.

That intersection — the space the binary told me did not exist — turned out to be the most valuable place I could stand.

I suspect this is true for most people. The things that make you distinctive are rarely the things that fit neatly into a single category. They are the combinations, the contradictions, the both/and.

The Courage of the Gradient

I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that all distinctions are false, or that taking a clear position is somehow a failure of nuance. There are moments when you have to choose. There are hills worth dying on. There are genuine either/or decisions — you accept the job or you do not, you ship the product or you do not, you marry the person or you do not.

But those moments are rarer than we pretend. And even when the final decision is binary — yes or no, in or out — the thinking that leads to that decision should never be.

The danger of the binary is not that it forces you to choose. The danger is that it forces you to choose before you have understood what you are choosing between. It compresses the deliberation. It skips the part where you sit with complexity, explore the gradient, and discover that the best answer might be one that neither bucket anticipated.

In politics, the gradient is where policy actually gets made — in the messy, unglamorous work of compromise and coalition.

In business, the gradient is where strategy lives — not in the bold declaration of “we are a streaming company” or “we are a linear company,” but in the quiet, unglamorous work of figuring out what this particular audience needs, right now, and how to serve them.

In life, the gradient is where you actually live. Not as a success or a failure, not as one thing or another, but as a person who is — on any given Tuesday — some complicated mix of both.

The binary is a shortcut. And like most shortcuts, it gets you somewhere fast, but it is rarely where you meant to go.

That is what a Los Angeles jury decided Meta and Google owe a young woman named Kaley, who started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at 11 — and spent the years that followed battling depression, body dysmorphia, and an inability to put her phone down.

The verdict came down yesterday, March 25th. And a day before that, a separate jury in New Mexico slapped Meta with $375 million for violating child safety laws. Two verdicts in two days. After years of hand-wringing, congressional hearings, and sternly worded letters that changed nothing, a courtroom finally said what millions of parents have been saying all along: these platforms are not safe for children.

“Bring Them in as Tweens”

What made the Los Angeles trial so damning was not just the outcome — it was the evidence. Internal Meta documents revealed a deliberate strategy to hook young users early. One memo, entered into the court record, put it plainly: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”

Think about that sentence for a moment. This is not a company failing to anticipate harm. This is a company engineering for it. Infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, beauty filters, the dopamine loop of likes — plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier called it “the engineering of addiction.” The jury agreed. They found that the defective design of these platforms, not the content users posted, caused the harm. That distinction matters. It means Section 230 — the shield Big Tech has hidden behind for decades — did not apply.

One juror, Victoria, told reporters: “We wanted them to feel it. We wanted them to realize this was unacceptable.”

This case is a bellwether. There are roughly 2,000 more lawsuits lined up behind it — from parents, from school districts, from communities that watched a generation of kids disappear into their screens.

We Built the Other Way

I work at A Parent Media Co. We built Kidoodle.TV — and we built it because we believed from day one that children’s media did not have to work this way.

Kidoodle.TV is not an algorithm optimized for engagement. It is a streaming platform where every single piece of content is reviewed by a human being before a child ever sees it. Not flagged by an algorithm after the fact. Not moderated by community reports. Reviewed. In advance. By real people — many of them parents and grandparents — who watch every episode and apply standards rooted in child development, not advertising revenue.

There are no comment sections. No push notifications designed to pull a kid back in. No beauty filters. No likes. No follower counts. No algorithmic rabbit holes that start with a cartoon and end somewhere no child should be.

The platform is COPPA-compliant and carries the kidSAFE+ Seal — one of the most rigorous independent certifications for children’s digital products. It is available in over 160 countries on more than 1,000 devices. And it has been doing this for over a decade, long before the lawsuits, long before the congressional hearings, long before “child safety” became a talking point in every tech company’s quarterly earnings call.

We did not retrofit safety onto a platform built to maximize time-on-screen. We started with safety and built everything else around it.

The Difference Is the Starting Point

The Meta memo — “bring them in as tweens” — tells you everything you need to know about where that company’s design process begins. It begins with acquisition. With engagement. With retention metrics that treat a child’s attention as a resource to be extracted.

Our starting point was different. It was a question: What does a streaming platform look like when the first design constraint is that a child must be safe?

That question changes everything. It changes what content gets on the platform. It changes what features you build — and, more importantly, what features you choose not to build. It changes how you measure success. We do not measure success in time-on-screen. We measure it in trust — the trust of the parents who hand their child a device and walk into the next room.

Yesterday’s verdict will be appealed. Meta and Google will spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars fighting it. But the legal question is already answered in the court of public opinion: parents know these platforms are not safe for their kids.

The harder question — the one that matters more — is whether the industry is willing to build differently.

We were. We did. And we have been for ten years.

My younger brother and I had worked it out with the precision that only children negotiating the allocation of scarce resources can achieve. We would pool our pocket money — mine, his, and whatever loose change we could extract from the sofa cushions or from being unusually helpful around the house — and once a month, we would go to the bookshop and buy one Enid Blyton book. One. Not two. We could not afford two.

The negotiation over which book to buy was serious business. We had a system. We alternated who got to pick. The picker also got to read the book first, which was the real prize. The other one had to wait — sometimes an entire day, sometimes two, sometimes an agonizing three if the reader was the type to savor things slowly. (I was not that type. My brother was. He did it on purpose.)

There was a rule, unstated but universally understood, that you did not talk about the plot until both parties had finished reading. No spoilers. This was the 1990s. We did not have a word for spoilers. But we had the concept, and we enforced it with the ruthlessness of two boys who had nothing else to do during Rajasthan summers except read and argue about what they had read.

The books we were buying, one careful rupee at a time, were the Famous Five.

Julian, Dick, Anne, George, and Timmy the Dog

Enid Blyton published twenty-one Famous Five novels between 1942 and 1963. I did not know this at the time. I did not know that Blyton was one of the most prolific authors in history, that she had written over 700 books, that she was British, or that the England she described — cliffs, moors, smugglers’ caves, ginger beer, lashings of tongue — was a real place that existed outside of my imagination. I knew only that these five characters (four children and a dog) had the most extraordinary lives of anyone I had ever encountered, fictional or otherwise.

Julian was the eldest and therefore in charge, which seemed right and natural. Dick was his younger brother and the loyal second. Anne was the youngest of the three siblings and, in Blyton’s telling, the domestic one — the one who wanted things to be tidy and safe, which meant she was perpetually horrified by the situations the others got them into. And then there was Georgina — George — the cousin, who insisted on being called George, who was fierce and stubborn and brave and owned a dog named Timmy and an actual island. Kirrin Island. Her island.

George was, without question, the character we both wanted to be. Not Julian, who was sensible. Not Dick, who was agreeable. Not Anne, who was anxious. George, who was angry and loyal and refused to be told what to do. George, who had a castle on her island — a ruined castle, but a castle nonetheless — and a dog who was smarter than most adults in the books.

(My brother and I also had a dog. An enthusiastic mongrel who was nothing like Timmy in temperament or intelligence but whom we loved with the same uncritical devotion. We would sometimes try to bring him on “adventures” in the neighborhood. He would eat something disgusting and we would have to carry him home. Timmy would never.)

We did not have cliffs or caves or smugglers. We had dusty lanes and a large garden and our cycles and our friends. But we had the books. And the books were enough.

Five Run Away Together

Of the twenty-one books, the one I loved most — the one I have re-read more times than any other book in my life, the one whose plot I can reconstruct from memory right now, thirty years later — is the third: Five Run Away Together.

The setup is this. The children arrive at Kirrin Cottage for the holidays, only to find that Aunt Fanny is ill and a horrible woman named Mrs. Stick has been hired as a temporary housekeeper. Mrs. Stick is awful. Her husband is awful. Her son Edgar is awful. The food is awful. The house, which should be a place of warmth and adventure, has become a place of surveillance and cruelty. The adults who should be in charge are either ill or absent. The children are, effectively, trapped.

So they leave.

They pack food and blankets and supplies, they row out to Kirrin Island, and they live there — on their own, in George’s ruined castle, cooking their own meals over a campfire, exploring the island, sleeping under the stars. They run away not to somewhere specific but away from something intolerable. They choose freedom over comfort. They choose the island over the house.

I cannot overstate how powerful this idea was to me as a child. The notion that you could simply leave. That if the situation was bad enough, you could pack a bag and go somewhere and be self-sufficient. That competence and courage were enough to sustain you. That you did not need adults to solve your problems — that, in fact, the adults were sometimes the problem.

(It helped that the island had a well for fresh water. Blyton was very good at making the logistics of escape seem manageable. You never worried about the children dying of exposure or dehydration. There was always a well, or a stream, or a farmhouse nearby where a kind farmer would sell them eggs.)

Of course, there is also a mystery. There are always mysteries. A kidnapped child hidden somewhere on the island. Smugglers, or kidnappers, or some variety of low-grade criminal who has chosen the worst possible hiding spot — an island occupied by four determined children and one very loyal dog. The criminals are discovered, the child is rescued, the adults arrive to be astonished and grateful.

But the mystery was never the point for me. The escape was the point. The self-sufficiency was the point. The feeling that a small, tight-knit group of people who trusted each other could handle anything — that was the point.

Five Go Off in a Caravan

The other book that lodged itself permanently in my imagination was the fifth: Five Go Off in a Caravan. Two horse-drawn caravans, painted in bright colors, trundling through the English countryside. The children cooking over an open fire. Sleeping in bunks that folded down from the walls. Timmy running alongside.

This one I remember for the sense of motion. The Famous Five books are usually set in a single location — an island, a farmhouse, a stretch of coastline — but the caravan book is a road story. The scenery changes. New hills appear. The weather shifts. There are encounters with circus performers, which in Blyton’s world is a category of people roughly as exotic and unpredictable as smugglers.

What I loved was the caravan itself. The idea of a home that moved. A tiny, self-contained world on wheels — everything you needed packed into a wooden box pulled by a horse. I had never seen a caravan. I had never seen a horse-drawn anything, except the occasional tonga in Jaipur, which was not romantic. But I could picture it. Blyton’s descriptions were precise enough to build a mental image and vague enough to let your imagination fill in the colors.

What Blyton Was Actually Teaching Us

I have read, in the decades since, all of the criticisms of Enid Blyton. That her prose is formulaic. That her characters are thin. That her depictions of class, race, and gender are products of their time, and not the best products. That George is a tomboy in the most reductive sense — that Blyton could not imagine a girl being brave without also insisting she wanted to be a boy. That the books are, in a word, simple.

All of this is true. And none of it mattered to two boys in Rajasthan reading one book a month.

What Blyton taught us, without either of us understanding it at the time, was the habit of reading itself. The expectation that the next book existed. That there was a series — a sequence — and that if you kept going, there would be more. Twenty-one books. At one a month, that was nearly two years of anticipation. Two years of knowing that next month, there would be another adventure, another mystery, another trip to the bookshop.

She taught us that reading was a shared activity. Not in the sense of reading aloud together — we never did that — but in the sense that a book was a thing to be discussed, argued over, compared, ranked. “Is this one better than the last one?” was a question we asked after every single book. We had a running ranking. It shifted. (Mine has not shifted in twenty years. Five Run Away Together is still first.)

And she taught us pace. The Famous Five books are short — 40,000 words, maybe 50,000. You could read one in a day if you were determined, two days if you were savoring. They moved. Things happened on every page. There was no wasted scene, no throat-clearing, no subplot that didn’t resolve. For a young reader, this was essential. It meant that reading felt like doing something. It had momentum. It pulled you forward.

She taught us that reading was a shared activity — a thing to be discussed, argued over, compared, ranked. “Is this one better than the last one?” was a question we asked after every single book.

When I built a 10,000-book digital library, I included an entire section for children’s adventure fiction — Blyton, of course, but also the Hardy Boys, the Three Investigators, Tintin. These were the gateway. Every serious reader I know can point to the books that made them a reader, and for a very large number of people who grew up in India or Britain or Australia or really anywhere in the English-speaking world, those books were Enid Blyton’s.

The Bookshop

I do not remember the name of the bookshop. This bothers me. I remember the street — a narrow lane off MI Road in Jaipur, the kind of lane where shops were stacked shoulder to shoulder and you had to squeeze past displays of stationery and greeting cards to get inside. I remember the shelves — tall, wooden, slightly dusty, with the Blyton books on the middle shelf, spines facing out, the distinctive yellow-and-blue covers of the Indian editions published by Hodder & Stoughton.

I remember the owner, a middle-aged man who wore glasses and who, after the third or fourth visit, started setting aside new Famous Five arrivals for us. “The new one came,” he would say, and pull a book from behind the counter. We had not asked him to do this. He just did. He recognized what we were — two boys working through a series, one book at a time, pocket money in hand — and he made sure we didn’t miss any.

That man was a bookseller in the truest sense. Not a retailer. A bookseller. Someone who understood that a book is not a product but a relationship, and that the relationship between a child and a series is something worth protecting.

I think about him sometimes when I think about the attention economy — about what it means to earn someone’s sustained attention over time, month after month, the way Blyton earned ours. The way that bookshop owner earned ours. The currency was not money, although money changed hands. The currency was trust. We trusted that the next book would be worth the wait. He trusted that we would keep coming back. And we did.

Twenty-one books. One a month. Two brothers on a pre-liberalization-era budget (though we weren’t buying computers — we were buying paperbacks). Summers in Rajasthan where the temperature outside made reading indoors not just pleasant but necessary. A dog who was no Timmy.

I do not know if my brother still has his copies. I do not have mine — they were lost in one of the many moves that happen when you grow up and leave home and live in different cities and different countries. But I can still see those yellow-and-blue spines on that middle shelf. I can still feel the weight of a new paperback in my hand, the spine uncracked, the pages stiff. I can still feel the urgency of wanting to start reading immediately and the particular torture of having to wait because it was my brother’s turn to go first.

One book a month. It was enough. It was everything.

I type DO MAIN at the DOS prompt and press Enter. The screen clears. Then, character by character, a box draws itself — top-left corner first, then the horizontal line racing across the top, then the right corner dropping down, the sides descending in unison, and finally the bottom sealing itself shut. Inside the box, a menu appears. Below it, a shadow — two characters wide, one character tall — painted in dark gray to give the illusion of depth. On a flat, text-only screen, my program looks like it has windows. It looks, to my sixteen-year-old eyes, like magic.

I did not know it at the time, but I was learning to code in a language that was powering business software on every continent. A language that would teach me more about building practical things with limited resources than any university course ever would. A language that, by the time I understood what it had given me, was already disappearing.

This is about Clipper. The language that built the world’s databases.

What Clipper Was

To understand Clipper, you have to understand the problem it solved.

In the early 1980s, the most popular database software on personal computers was dBASE, made by Ashton-Tate. dBASE was powerful — it let you create databases, write queries, build reports, and even create simple applications using its own programming language. But dBASE was an interpreter. Your programs could only run inside the dBASE environment. You could not ship a standalone application to a client. You could not give someone a program without also giving them a copy of dBASE. For a developer trying to build commercial software, this was a dealbreaker.

In 1984, two men — Barry ReBell and Brian Russell — founded Nantucket Corporation to solve this problem. The legend, which may or may not be true but which I choose to believe, is that they got the idea at a seafood restaurant in Malibu. A picture of a clipper ship on a napkin. The restaurant was called Nantucket Lighthouse. And so Nantucket’s Clipper was born — a compiler that could take dBASE-compatible source code and turn it into a standalone .EXE file that ran on any DOS machine, no runtime required.

The first version shipped in 1985. By the time Clipper Summer ‘87 arrived — confusingly named, since it actually shipped after Christmas 1987 — it had become one of the most popular development tools in the world.

The reason was simple. With Clipper, a developer could write a complete business application — accounting, inventory, payroll, point of sale, banking — compile it into a single executable, copy it onto a floppy disk, and hand it to a client. The client did not need to install anything else. They did not need to understand anything about databases or programming. They just typed a filename at the DOS prompt and the application ran.

For small and medium businesses around the world, this was transformative. For developers, it was freedom.

How You Built an Executable from Nothing

The Clipper build process was a pipeline, and understanding it felt like understanding how a factory works — raw materials in one end, a finished product out the other.

You wrote your source code in .PRG files. These were plain text files containing the Clipper language — a superset of dBASE that added local variables, code blocks, arrays, and a preprocessor with user-definable commands. You ran the Clipper compiler (CLIPPER.EXE), which read your .PRG files and produced .OBJ (object) files. Then you ran a linker, which combined your .OBJ files with the Clipper standard libraries to produce the final .EXE.

What most people did not know — what I certainly did not know at sixteen — was that the Clipper compiler did not produce native machine code. It produced p-code: pseudocode that was interpreted at runtime by a virtual machine baked into the Clipper libraries. The .OBJ wrapper was partly a technical decision and partly marketing genius. It meant that Clipper object files were compatible with standard DOS linkers and, more importantly, with object files produced by C compilers and assemblers.

This was the real power move. You could write most of your application in Clipper — fast to develop, easy to maintain — and then write the performance-critical parts in C or assembly language. The C functions compiled with Microsoft C 5.1 into .OBJ files. The assembly routines assembled with MASM or Turbo Assembler (TASM) into .OBJ files. And the linker — Blinker, ExoSpace, or the bundled RTLINK — stitched everything together into one executable.

You wrote the application logic in Clipper. You wrote the fast parts in C. You wrote the fastest parts in assembly. And the linker made them all into one program.

The linker was more important than most people appreciated. DOS had a hard limit of 640 kilobytes of conventional memory. A serious Clipper application could easily exceed that. So the linkers implemented overlay systems — dividing the executable into segments that were swapped in and out of memory on demand. Blinker, the most popular third-party linker, allocated an overlay pool at startup. A larger pool meant fewer disk reloads and faster execution. ExoSpace went further, using protected mode to break the 640KB barrier entirely, accessing extended memory above one megabyte.

Getting the linker configuration right was an art form. Too small an overlay pool and your application crawled. Too large and you ran out of memory for data. The configuration file for Blinker — specifying which modules to overlay, how much memory to reserve, which libraries to include — was often as carefully tuned as the application code itself.

Drawing Windows with Characters

If the compilation pipeline was the engine of a Clipper application, the screen was its face. And the screen was, by modern standards, absurdly limited: 80 columns, 25 rows, 16 colors. Two thousand characters. That was your entire canvas.

And yet, within those constraints, Clipper developers built interfaces of remarkable sophistication.

The fundamental tool was the @ command. @ 10, 20 SAY "Name:" GET cName placed the word “Name:” at row 10, column 20 of the screen, and created an editable input field next to it bound to the variable cName. A READ command activated all pending input fields for user interaction. The PICTURE clause formatted the input — "999.99" for a number with two decimals, "@!" to force uppercase. The COLOR clause controlled the display colors: "BG+/B" for bright cyan on blue.

This was how you built forms. Character by character, row by row, placing every label and every input field at exact coordinates. There was no drag-and-drop. There was no layout engine. There was you, a text editor, and a mental map of an 80x25 grid.

But the real art was in the boxes.

DISPBOX() drew rectangles on screen using the extended ASCII characters from IBM Code Page 437 — the box-drawing characters that anyone who used a DOS computer will recognize instantly. ╔ for the top-left corner. ═ for the horizontal line. ╗ for the top-right. ║ for the vertical sides. ╚ and ╝ for the bottom corners. You specified eight border characters clockwise from the upper-left, plus an optional ninth character to fill the interior.

A single-line box. A double-line box. A box with single-line top and double-line sides. By combining different border characters, you could create visual hierarchies — an outer window with thick double borders containing inner panels with thin single borders. It looked, squint a little and use your imagination, like a graphical user interface.

Eighty columns. Twenty-five rows. Sixteen colors. Two thousand characters. And within those constraints, an entire generation of developers built business software that ran the world.

And then there were the shadows. Libraries like SuperLib provided shadow functions that drew a dark gray rectangle offset from the box by one or two characters, creating the illusion that the box was floating above the screen. The shadow was not just decoration — it was a depth cue that told the user which window was on top.

The trick that made pop-up windows work was SAVESCREEN() and RESTSCREEN(). Before drawing a window, you saved the rectangular region of the screen beneath it — both the characters and their color attributes — into a string variable. When the window was dismissed, you restored the saved region. The underlying screen reappeared instantly, as if the window had never been there. Stack multiple save-and-restore operations and you had a window system — pop-up menus, dialog boxes, help screens, all layered on top of each other.

Some developers took this further. SuperLib offered animated transitions for restoring screens — FADEAWAY(), SS_HBLINDS() (horizontal blinds), SS_WIPEV() (wipe from top), SS_SLIDELEFT(), SS_FALL(). Your window did not just disappear. It dissolved, or slid away, or fell off the screen. In text mode. On a 286.

I realize, writing this now, that this sounds primitive. But there was something deeply satisfying about building an interface within such tight constraints. You had to think about every character. Every color choice mattered. Every pixel — well, every character cell — was a conscious decision. The limitations forced a kind of design discipline that I think many modern developers would benefit from.

The Ecosystem

No language succeeds alone, and Clipper’s ecosystem was extraordinary — perhaps the most vibrant third-party library culture of any programming language before the internet made open-source distribution trivial.

The Nanforum Toolkit was a community-driven function library born on CompuServe’s Nantucket Forum in late 1990. Nearly 150 functions in its first release, contributed by third-party developers, Nantucket employees, and community members. It was deliberately designed not to compete with commercial products but to fill gaps in Clipper’s standard library. By 1992, it had been downloaded over 2,100 times on CompuServe — a number that sounds quaint now but was significant when distribution meant dialing into a BBS at 2400 baud.

The commercial libraries were where the real power lived. Clipper Tools (later CA-Tools) added hundreds of functions. Funcky extended the language further. The SIx Driver — the SuccessWare Index Driver — was the first Replaceable Database Driver for Clipper, bringing FoxPro-compatible tables and indexes to Clipper developers. It was so good that Computer Associates licensed a subset and bundled it with Clipper 5.2. And FiveWin, perhaps the most important library of all, eventually let Clipper developers create actual Windows GUI applications while still writing in the Clipper language.

The RDD (Replaceable Database Driver) architecture, introduced in Clipper 5.0, was ahead of its time. It made applications data-format independent. Your code talked to an abstract database interface; the RDD translated those calls into operations on the underlying file format. DBFNTX for Clipper’s native .NTX indexes. DBFCDX for FoxPro-compatible compound indexes. Third-party RDDs for Paradox tables, SQL databases, and more. Swap the driver, keep the code. It was, in principle, exactly what ODBC and modern ORMs do today.

The instinct I developed in those years — thinking in terms of structured data, building tools to process and transform it, designing systems that could adapt to different backends — has never left me. When I built a 10,000-book digital library with a Python CLI, REST API, and editorial frontend, or when I built a family recipe system with ingestion pipelines from YouTube and Apple Notes, I was doing the same thing I had learned to do in Clipper: take messy real-world data, give it structure, and build something useful on top.

The World Ran on Clipper

Between 1985 and the mid-1990s, Clipper applications powered an astonishing amount of the world’s business software. Accounting systems. Inventory management. Point-of-sale terminals. Banking software — savings accounts, current accounts, fixed deposits, loan processing, daybooks. Insurance claims. Hospital records. Government databases.

The adoption was global, but it was especially deep in the developing world. In India, where I learned to program, Clipper was everywhere. Every midsized business that needed software — and could not afford a mainframe or a team of COBOL programmers — hired a Clipper developer to build something custom. The entire first generation of Indian IT professionals, the generation that would go on to build the outsourcing industry, cut their teeth on Clipper and FoxBase and dBASE.

In Brazil, the Clipper community was enormous — among the largest in the world. Programming courses in Clipper were a standard entry point into IT careers. In Southeast Asia, in Eastern Europe, in Africa, the pattern repeated: wherever businesses needed affordable, customizable database software, Clipper was there.

(Quick aside: I find it remarkable that so few people in the technology industry today know about Clipper. It was, for a period of roughly a decade, one of the most widely used development tools on Earth. Millions of applications. Hundreds of thousands of developers. And yet it has largely vanished from the collective memory of the industry. The tech world has a very short memory for anything that is not currently making someone a billion dollars.)

What made Clipper so successful in these markets was the economics. A developer with a PC, a copy of Clipper, and enough skill could build a complete business application in weeks. The cost to the client was a fraction of what mainframe development would have required. The applications were fast, reliable, and — because they compiled to standalone executables — easy to deploy. No installation headaches. No dependency management. No runtime environment to configure. Just an .EXE file and a DOS prompt.

The Windows Cliff

In 1992, Computer Associates acquired Nantucket Corporation for $190 million. Clipper became CA-Clipper. And then, slowly, everything fell apart.

The problem was Windows. Microsoft Windows 3.1, and later Windows 95, were transforming personal computing from a text-mode, single-tasking environment into a graphical, multitasking one. Clipper was a DOS tool, and DOS was dying.

CA’s answer was CA-Visual Objects — a new Windows development environment that was supposed to be the natural upgrade path for Clipper developers. It was not. Visual Objects was too different from Clipper. The syntax had changed. The paradigm had changed. The reliability was questionable. Most Clipper developers tried it, struggled with it, and abandoned it.

The migration scattered the community. Some developers moved to Visual Basic. Others went to Delphi, which offered a similar rapid-application-development feel. Some chose Microsoft Access for simpler database applications, or PowerBuilder for client-server systems. A dedicated minority stayed on Clipper 5.2e — widely considered the most stable release ever — and used FiveWin to put Windows GUI faces on their Clipper code.

Many developers, myself included, leapfrogged the entire client-server era. We went from DOS straight to the web. From @ 10, 20 SAY to HTML forms. From DBFNTX to MySQL. From distributing floppy disks to deploying on servers. The intermediate step — Windows desktop development with Visual Basic or Delphi or Visual Objects — was a step that many of us never took. We skipped it entirely, the same way India’s telecom sector skipped landlines and went straight to mobile.

I wrote about my own career arc — from running a web design shop in the early 2000s to journalism to digital marketing to streaming — and I realize now that the thread connecting all of it was the thing I learned sitting at that 286 in Jaipur: how to take a blank screen and make it do something useful. The tools changed. The screens got bigger and more colorful. The databases moved to the cloud. But the fundamental act — understanding a problem, structuring data to solve it, building an interface for a human to interact with it — has not changed at all.

The Ghost in the Machine

Clipper is not dead. Not exactly.

Harbour, an open-source project started in 1999, is a cross-platform compiler that is 100% backward compatible with Clipper 5.x. It compiles on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and more. It supports modern backends — MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, OpenSSL, cURL — and has GUI frameworks for building contemporary applications. xHarbour, a fork, offers similar compatibility. Both are actively maintained.

There are developers, right now, in 2026, taking Clipper code that was written in the late 1980s and compiling it with Harbour for modern operating systems. Applications that have been running for thirty-five years, still processing data, still serving businesses, now running on hardware that is millions of times more powerful than the machines they were written for.

I find that extraordinary. Not because the code is elegant or the technology is cutting-edge — it is neither — but because it speaks to something about the durability of well-built tools. A Clipper application written in 1990 to manage inventory for a small business in Jaipur or São Paulo or Jakarta was not trying to disrupt anything. It was trying to solve a problem. And if the problem still exists, and the solution still works, then the tool still has value. Thirty-five years later.

Every time I rebuild a personal site — choosing Jekyll over a heavyweight framework, preferring static files over a CMS, reaching for simplicity over cleverness — I am, in some way, still that sixteen-year-old in Jaipur. Still looking for the most direct path between a problem and a solution. Still finding satisfaction in constraints. Still drawing boxes on a screen and making them do something useful.

The tools change. The screens get better. The databases move to the cloud. But the instinct to build — to sit at a blank screen and make it come alive — that does not change.

That is what Clipper taught me. And I suspect, if you are reading this and you ever wrote a line of xBase code, it taught you the same thing.

Clipper was created by Nantucket Corporation (1984) and later acquired by Computer Associates (1992). The versions referenced in this essay include Summer ‘87, 5.0, 5.2e, and 5.3. The open-source successors Harbour and xHarbour continue active development. The Nanforum Toolkit, CompuServe forums, and third-party libraries like Blinker, SIx Driver, FiveWin, and SuperLib were central to the Clipper ecosystem.

One hundred and twenty-nine thousand, two hundred and two.

That is how many fans showed up to NWSL opening weekend this past Saturday and Sunday. Eight games. An average of over sixteen thousand per match. Seven of those eight games drew crowds north of ten thousand. This was the best-attended opening weekend in National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) history, and it was not particularly close.

Boston Legacy FC, a team that did not exist eighteen months ago, drew 30,207 for its very first game. Thirty thousand people showed up to watch a team play its inaugural match in a women’s professional soccer league in the United States. If that sentence does not make you stop and reconsider what you think you know about the sports landscape in this country, I am not sure what will.

But here is what makes this moment different from every other “women’s sports are growing” headline you have read. This time, the infrastructure is actually being built to match the demand. The media ecosystem is catching up. And one of the most important pieces of that ecosystem just went live.

We launched Sunday Night Soccer on Victory+.

Twenty-five exclusive Sunday night matchups throughout the 2026 NWSL season, available to every fan in the country, completely free. No subscription. No cable package. No paywall. You open the app, you watch soccer. That is it.

I want to explain why this matters. Not just the business case — though the business case is strong — but the larger story of how we got here, why this moment is different from the ones that came before, and what it means that for the first time in the history of women’s professional soccer in America, the sport has a dedicated primetime window on a platform built to make fans, not extract them.

The Arc of an Idea: Women’s Soccer in America

To understand where we are, you have to understand where we have been. And where we have been is, frankly, a masterclass in squandered momentum.

Start with Title IX. When the legislation passed in 1972, it mandated equal access to sports and educational programs for girls. The effect on women’s soccer was seismic. Before Title IX, there were thirteen women’s college soccer teams in the entire country. Thirteen. Today there are more than 1,500 across all divisions, with over 44,000 players competing at the collegiate level. That is not a growth curve. That is a category creation event.

The infrastructure that Title IX built — the scholarships, the coaching pipelines, the competitive ecosystems at every level from youth to university — gave the United States a structural advantage in women’s soccer that no other nation could match. And that advantage produced results. The U.S. Women’s National Team won the very first FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1991 in China, beating Norway in the final. Most people do not even know that happened. It was played in front of modest crowds with almost no television coverage.

Then came 1999.

July 10th. The Rose Bowl, Pasadena, California. Over 90,000 fans packed into the stadium for the Women’s World Cup Final between the United States and China. Forty million Americans watched on television. It remains the most-watched soccer game — men’s or women’s — in U.S. broadcast history. Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty kick and ripped off her jersey in celebration, producing one of the most iconic photographs in the history of American sports.

(Quick aside: if you are under thirty, you probably know that image but might not fully grasp the cultural weight of the moment. This was not a niche sporting event that got lucky with a viral photo. This was a genuine national moment. The kind that creates before-and-after lines in how a country thinks about a sport, an idea, a possibility.)

The ‘99 World Cup should have been the beginning. Instead, it became the high-water mark of a wave that would crash twice before it learned how to sustain itself.

Two Leagues, Two Collapses

The Women’s United Soccer Association — WUSA — launched in 2001, riding the momentum of that World Cup victory. It was the first fully professional women’s soccer league in the world. The ambition was enormous. The timing felt perfect. The execution was catastrophic.

WUSA burned through its entire $40 million startup investment in three seasons. The money that was supposed to last five years was gone in three. No national television contract materialized for a fourth season. By some estimates, total losses exceeded $100 million. The league folded in September 2003.

Let that sink in. Two years after the most-watched soccer game in American history, the professional league that was supposed to capitalize on it was dead.

The post-mortem on WUSA is instructive. The league had launched at a cost structure that assumed rapid audience growth and lucrative broadcast deals. Neither materialized fast enough. Salaries were high, stadiums were expensive to fill, and the television landscape of the early 2000s — still dominated by cable and network gatekeepers — simply did not have a slot for women’s professional soccer. The World Cup had proven that Americans would watch women’s soccer en masse for a singular, high-stakes event. But no one had figured out how to translate that into weekly appointment viewing. The infrastructure to bridge that gap did not exist. Not yet.

The second attempt came in 2009. Women’s Professional Soccer — WPS — launched with the backing of several wealthy ownership groups and a slightly more conservative operating model. On paper, the lessons of WUSA had been internalized: lower costs, more cautious expansion, a focus on building sustainable franchises rather than chasing immediate scale. In practice, new problems emerged. The league was never able to find stable footing. Teams lost more money than projected. Ownership disputes turned into lawsuits that became public spectacles, draining organizational focus and credibility simultaneously. By the end of 2011, only five teams remained functional. In January 2012, the league ceased operations.

Two professional leagues. Two collapses. Fourteen years of trying, from 2001 to 2012, with nothing lasting to show for it.

The pattern seemed clear to the skeptics: women’s professional soccer in America was a noble idea that the market simply did not support. The demand was there for national team events — World Cups and Olympics — but not for week-to-week domestic league play. Women’s soccer, they argued, was a quadrennial phenomenon. You could sell the World Cup. You could not sell a Tuesday night in May.

The skeptics were wrong. But it would take another decade to prove it. And the proof would come not from replicating what had failed, but from rethinking the model entirely.

The Third Time

The National Women’s Soccer League launched in 2013 with a very different philosophy than its predecessors. Where WUSA had spent lavishly, the NWSL would operate lean. Where WPS had relied on wealthy individual owners without structural safeguards, the NWSL would secure federation subsidies — the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican soccer federations all agreed to pay the salaries of their respective national team players, dramatically reducing team operating costs.

Eight teams started in that first season. The budget was modest. The ambitions were deliberately contained. The league was not trying to be MLS or even close to it. It was trying to survive.

And survive it did. For the first several years, the NWSL existed in a kind of quiet stasis — present but not prominent, competitive but not culturally relevant beyond a dedicated (and frankly underserved) fanbase. Average attendance hovered in the mid-five-thousands. Television coverage was minimal. Most games were streamed on obscure platforms with production values that made public access television look lavish.

But something was happening beneath the surface. The quality of play was improving rapidly. International stars were increasingly choosing the NWSL as their league of choice. And a new generation of American players — many of them raised in the post-Title IX infrastructure boom — were entering the league with skill, athleticism, and marketability that demanded attention.

Then came the catalysts.

The USWNT’s back-to-back World Cup victories in 2015 and 2019 poured fuel on the fire. The 2015 tournament in Canada drew record American television audiences and introduced a new generation of stars. But it was 2019 that changed everything. That tournament, held in France, transformed players like Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, and Rose Lavelle from athletes into cultural figures. Rapinoe’s fearless public persona and golden boot. Morgan’s tea-sip celebration against England. Lavelle’s stunning solo goal in the final. These were not just sporting moments — they were cultural ones, shared across social media by people who had never watched a soccer game in their lives.

The equal pay fight that accompanied the 2019 cycle amplified the effect tenfold. The USWNT’s lawsuit against U.S. Soccer, alleging gender-based pay discrimination, turned the team into a political and social touchstone. The chants at stadiums — the crowd at the 2019 ticker-tape parade in New York City did not chant “USA” but rather a different two-word phrase directed at the federation — blurred the line between sports fandom and social movement. Whether you cared about the tactical nuances of women’s soccer or not, you had an opinion about the team.

This time, unlike after 1999, there was a league to absorb the momentum. And that made all the difference.

The Inflection Point

I think historians will look back at 2022-2024 as the period when everything changed for the NWSL. And by “everything,” I mean the ownership structure, the economics, the competitive landscape, and most critically, the relationship between the league and its audience.

New ownership groups started pouring in. These were not vanity projects or passion plays — they were sophisticated investors who saw the math. Angel City FC launched in 2022 with a celebrity-studded ownership group that included Natalie Portman, Serena Williams, and venture capital heavyweights. Bay FC debuted in 2024 in the San Francisco market. The Kansas City Current built CPKC Stadium, the first purpose-built stadium for a women’s professional sports team in the world, and promptly sold out every single home game. As of this month, they have had twenty-seven consecutive regular-season home sellouts. Twenty-seven.

But the biggest signal was the media deal.

In November 2023, the NWSL announced a four-year domestic media rights agreement with CBS Sports, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, and Scripps Sports. The value: $240 million. That is $60 million per year. The league’s previous deal? Roughly $1.5 million annually.

Read that again. The NWSL went from $1.5 million to $60 million per year in media rights revenue. A 40x increase. There is no precedent for that kind of leap in professional sports media. None.

The deal put NWSL games on ABC, CBS, ESPN, ION, and Prime Video. For the first time, the league had a genuine national broadcast footprint. Fans no longer needed to hunt through three different apps to find their team’s game on any given weekend.

Almost.

The Accessibility Problem

Here is the thing about media rights deals. They are built for the leagues and the networks, not for the fans. A $240 million deal is transformative for the NWSL’s economics. It validates the product, funds minimum player salaries that have risen to $48,500 (and will hit $82,500 by 2030), and gives the league the financial stability to expand.

But media rights fragmentation — the same game on CBS one week, ESPN the next, Prime Video the week after — creates a discoverability problem. Especially for a sport that is still building its mainstream audience. The fan who watched the World Cup and thought “I should watch more women’s soccer” does not always know where to look. And the casual viewer, the one you need to convert from curious to committed, is not going to subscribe to four different services and memorize a broadcast schedule to find out.

This is the problem we kept thinking about.

I have written before about the fundamental economics of attention in sports media. The audience for live sports is not shrinking — it is migrating. Cable households in the United States have dropped from 85.4 million to under 50 million. But internet penetration is at 99 percent. Eight out of ten American homes have a connected TV device. The audience is there. The infrastructure is there. The question is whether the content is meeting them where they are.

For most of television history, the answer has been no. Sports media has been built around the scarcity model — make it hard to watch, charge a premium, extract maximum revenue from a captive audience. That model worked when cable was the only game in town. It does not work when your potential audience has infinite options and zero patience for friction.

Women’s soccer, in particular, cannot afford the scarcity model. This is a sport in its growth phase. It needs reach more than it needs extraction. It needs to be everywhere fans already are, not locked behind another login screen.

Think about it from the perspective of a potential new fan. She watched the USWNT in the 2023 World Cup. She remembers Sophia Smith’s name. She thinks women’s soccer is exciting. She would love to watch more. But she does not have cable. She has Netflix and maybe one other streaming service. She is not going to add ESPN+ or Paramount+ or Amazon Prime just to catch one NWSL game every couple of weeks. The friction is too high. The payoff is too uncertain. And so she does not watch. Not because she does not want to — but because the system is not built for her.

Now multiply that person by millions. That is the gap between potential audience and actual audience for women’s professional soccer in this country. And it is a gap that will not be closed by better marketing or more social media content or bigger-name players, as important as all of those things are. It will be closed by removing the barrier. Full stop.

Enter Sunday Night

This is why we built what we built.

Victory+ launched in September 2024 as a free, ad-supported streaming platform. No subscription required. No cable login. No paywall of any kind. You download the app — it is available on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung TV Plus — and you watch. That is the entire user experience.

The thesis was simple and, in my view, self-evident: if you remove every barrier between a fan and the game, you will build an audience faster than anyone thinks is possible. We tested this thesis first with hockey, carrying Dallas Stars games. The results were not marginal. We shattered records — over 342,000 viewers for a single Dallas Stars versus Colorado Avalanche matchup, validating the model at a scale that got the industry’s attention. Then came the Texas High School Football Championships last December. Over 2 million viewers tuned in on Victory+ during Championship Week. Two million. For high school football. On a free streaming platform that most people in the industry had never heard of six months earlier. The numbers validated the thesis every single time.

(I wrote about this last fall — we were told, repeatedly, that streaming free sports was a BAAAAD idea. That the economics did not work. That advertisers would not pay. What actually happened? Advertisers bid 1.5 times what we expected. The audience showed up. And it turned out that the conventional wisdom about sports needing to be behind a paywall was, like a lot of conventional wisdom, mostly wrong.)

And then came the NWSL.

In September 2025, the league announced an agreement with Victory+ to broadcast 57 matches across the 2026 and 2027 seasons. Fifty-seven games. That is more than a quarter of the entire regular season schedule. And the crown jewel of that package is Sunday Night Soccer — 25 exclusive primetime matchups, airing at 7 and 8 PM on Sunday evenings throughout the season.

Let me unpack why this specific construct matters.

Sunday night is the most valuable real estate in American television. It has been for decades. It is when the largest audiences assemble. It is when cultural habits form. NFL Sunday Night Football is not just a broadcast; it is a national ritual. By giving women’s soccer a dedicated, predictable, primetime Sunday window, we are not just airing games. We are building a habit. We are saying: every Sunday night, this is where women’s soccer lives. You do not need to check a schedule. You do not need to figure out which network has this week’s game. You show up on Sunday night, you get the best matchup the NWSL has to offer, and it is free.

That consistency matters more than people realize. Discovery is the number one problem in sports media today. There is no shortage of content. There is a massive shortage of reliable appointment viewing that new fans can lock into without effort. Sunday Night Soccer creates that.

More Than Live Games

But live games, as important as they are, are only part of what we are building.

In early March, we launched a dedicated NWSL Content Hub within the Victory+ app. The hub goes beyond traditional game coverage. It pairs live and on-demand games with creator-led programming — shoulder content that gives fans access to the players, teams, and personalities shaping the league on and off the pitch.

The centerpiece is a series of alternate broadcasts — alt-casts — hosted by two-time World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist Kelley O’Hara and women’s sports personality Coach Jackie J. These are not just repackaged commentary tracks. They are designed to be a different way into the game. If the main broadcast is ESPN SportsCenter, the alt-cast is your group chat — informed, opinionated, funny, and deeply invested.

We also gave creators direct, real-time access to live game highlights. This means creators on the platform can react, analyze, and publish content as the action unfolds. This is not post-game analysis twelve hours after the whistle. This is meeting fans in the game’s highest-stakes moments — when engagement, conversation, and sharing peak. If you have ever been on social media during a big game, you know that the most valuable window is the ten seconds after something incredible happens. We built for that window.

The reason this matters is that women’s soccer fandom, more than perhaps any other sport in America right now, is community-driven. It lives in group chats and Twitter threads and TikTok compilations and podcast Discord servers. The traditional broadcast model — watch game, go home, read recap — does not capture the energy of this fanbase. We needed to build something that matched how fans actually experience the sport today.

Sixteen Teams and a Wide Open Race

The 2026 NWSL season is the most expansive in the league’s history. With the additions of Boston Legacy FC and Denver Summit FC, the league has grown to sixteen teams. Each team plays thirty regular-season games. A total of 220 matches will air on national platforms — 212 regular-season contests, all seven playoff matches, and the 2026 NWSL Challenge Cup.

(Another number that stops me: Denver Summit has already sold over 50,000 tickets for their home opener at Mile High Stadium. If those numbers hold, it will shatter the current NWSL single-match attendance record of 40,091, set by Bay FC at Oracle Park in San Francisco in August 2025. Fifty thousand people. For a women’s soccer team. In its first season.)

The competitive landscape is genuinely open. There is no dynasty. The Orlando Pride won the 2024 Shield and Championship as an expansion team. The Washington Spirit retained Trinity Rodman with a record-breaking contract, debuting the league’s new High Impact Player rule, which allows teams to sign one player outside the salary cap structure. Kansas City, with its new stadium and sustained excellence, is the closest thing the league has to a perennial contender. Angel City, Bay FC, Portland, and North Carolina all have legitimate title aspirations.

This is the kind of competitive balance that makes a league compelling week to week. You are not tuning in to find out if the Goliath wins again. You are tuning in because you genuinely do not know what is going to happen. That unpredictability, combined with the skill level of play, is what makes the NWSL such a compelling product right now.

And the new teams are not filler. Both Boston and Denver came in without the benefit of an expansion draft or a college draft — the league eliminated drafts ahead of the 2025 season as part of the current collective bargaining agreement. These teams had to build rosters through free agency, international signings, and trades. The result is squads that reflect deliberate, strategic vision rather than the luck of a draft lottery. Boston’s opening weekend crowd of 30,207 suggests the market agrees.

I want to dwell on what it means that two brand-new franchises can launch in 2026 and immediately draw these kinds of numbers. It means the demand is not concentrated in legacy markets. It is national. It is latent in cities that have never had a women’s professional sports team. It means that the ceiling for this league is not twelve teams or fourteen teams or even sixteen. It is however many American cities have enough fans who will show up when you give them something worth showing up for. My bet is that number is significantly higher than most people think.

And you can watch it all. For free. Every Sunday night.

The Bigger Picture

I want to zoom out for a moment, because I think what is happening with the NWSL and Victory+ is illustrative of something much larger than one league or one platform.

The economics of attention in media are undergoing a fundamental restructuring. We are moving from an era defined by scarcity — limited channels, limited timeslots, access controlled by gatekeepers — to an era defined by abundance and accessibility. In this new era, the winners will not be the platforms that extract the most from existing fans. They will be the ones that create the most new fans.

Women’s soccer is the perfect case study. For two decades, the sport had an audience problem that was actually a distribution problem. The demand was there — you could see it every four years when World Cup ratings spiked, when USWNT games drew millions, when the equal pay fight became front-page news. But the domestic league, where fandom is sustained between those marquee events, was stuck behind distribution barriers that prevented casual interest from converting into habitual viewership.

Every other attempt to grow the sport’s domestic audience has started from the supply side — build the league, sign the players, find the TV deal — and hoped the audience would follow. That approach works if you are launching into a market with an established consumption pattern. It does not work when you are trying to create one.

What we are doing with Sunday Night Soccer is inverting that model. We are starting from the audience side. We are asking: what does a new fan need? They need the game to be easy to find. They need it to be free. They need it to be on a schedule they can predict. They need it to come with context and community and the kind of surrounding content that turns a casual viewer into someone who has a favorite team.

And then we are building exactly that.

What the Numbers Already Tell Us

I mentioned the opening weekend attendance numbers earlier, but let me add some context. In 2023, the NWSL crossed the one-million total attendance mark for the first time in league history, finishing the season with 1,060,978 fans through the turnstiles. That was landmark enough. By 2025, single-match records were being set regularly, with Bay FC’s 40,091 at Oracle Park representing the peak.

This season is already ahead of that pace. If the first weekend is any indication — and I believe it is — the 2026 season will blow past every attendance record the league has ever set. Boston’s 30,207 debut was the largest crowd ever for an expansion team’s first game. The Washington Spirit’s sellout of 19,215 at Audi Field for the season opener set the tone. Angel City drew 16,813. Orlando drew 16,120. San Diego drew 14,078. Kansas City continued its sellout streak.

But here is what attendance numbers do not capture: the digital audience. The fans watching on their phones during lunch breaks. The viewers streaming on connected TVs. The fans who will discover the league because Victory+ served them a Sunday Night Soccer highlight at 10 PM on a Sunday in April and they thought, “Wait, that was incredible, when is the next one?”

That is the audience we are building for. Not just the 16,000 in the stands — though they are essential and extraordinary — but the millions who have not yet found their way in.

A Personal Note

I did not grow up watching women’s soccer. I did not grow up in America. My introduction to the sport was the men’s game — World Cup summers spent glued to a television in India, worshipping at the altar of Maradona and Zidane and Ronaldo (the original Ronaldo). My first day at a new middle school in 1990, I was the only kid who did not show up — because the World Cup final was on. That is the kind of fan I was, and still am. The sport gets into your bones.

But one of the things I have learned, building in sports media over the past several years, is that the barriers between fans and the sports they love are almost never about the sport itself. They are about access, distribution, habit, and community. The quality of the game is the necessary condition. But it is not sufficient. You also need the scaffolding — the distribution, the predictability, the ease of access — that turns quality into audience.

When you remove those barriers, the audience does not trickle in. It floods. I have seen it happen with hockey on our platform. I have seen it happen with Texas high school football. And I am watching it happen right now with the NWSL.

The women’s game in this country has endured more false starts and broken promises than any sport should have to. Two collapsed leagues. Decades of underfunding. A media ecosystem that consistently undervalued the product. Ownership scandals that threatened to tear the league apart just a few years ago. Players making less than thirty thousand dollars a year while generating sellout crowds. Stadiums shared with minor league baseball teams and college football programs. A persistent, infuriating disconnect between the passion fans had for the sport and the resources devoted to serving them.

Through all of it, the players kept playing, the fans kept showing up, and the quality of the game kept rising.

What is different now — what is genuinely, structurally different — is that the economics, the media infrastructure, and the audience behavior have all converged at the same moment. The NWSL has real ownership groups with real capital. It has a $240 million media deal. It has sixteen teams in major markets. It has attendance figures that rival or exceed many men’s professional sports leagues.

And now it has Sunday Night Soccer on Victory+. Free, for everyone, every week.

The Game Was Always There

I want to end where I started. With the numbers.

One hundred and twenty-nine thousand, two hundred and two fans at opening weekend. Thirty thousand for an expansion team’s debut. Over fifty thousand tickets sold for Denver’s home opener. A $240 million media deal representing a 40x increase. Sixteen teams. Thirty-game seasons. Record attendance. Record investment. Record ambition.

These are not leading indicators of growth. This is the growth. It is happening right now, in real time, in stadiums and on screens across the country.

The game was always there. The talent was always there. The passion was always there. What was missing was the infrastructure to connect it all — to take the energy that existed in pockets and make it available to everyone.

Sunday Night Soccer is a piece of that infrastructure. A significant piece. Twenty-five exclusive primetime matchups, free to every fan in the country, surrounded by creator-driven content and alternate broadcasts and the kind of community-building programming that turns viewers into fans and fans into evangelists.

We are not just airing games. We are building a habit. We are creating a primetime home for women’s soccer in America. And we are doing it the way I believe all sports media should be done in 2026: free, accessible, and built for the fan first.

The NWSL has spent thirteen years proving it can survive. It has spent the last three years proving it can thrive. The question now is not whether women’s professional soccer has a future in this country.

The question is how big that future can be.

I think the answer is: much bigger than anyone expects. And for the first time, the infrastructure exists to find out.

We are all fans. That is something I believe deeply. The impulse to watch a game, to care about a team, to feel the electricity of a crowd — that is universal. It transcends gender and geography and every other line we draw. The only question has ever been whether the doors are open wide enough for everyone to walk through.

On Sunday nights, the doors are wide open. Come in. It is free.

Narendra Nag is part of the team at Victory+, a free ad-supported streaming platform available on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung TV Plus, and mobile devices. Download the app and watch Sunday Night Soccer — no subscription required.