This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.
This past week, I flew to Austin to attend South by Southwest, the annual festival now owned by PMC that combines networking and thought leadership with live music and two-stepping.
The distributed nature of the conference, where events were split between a handful of disparate areas, meant that folks in different industries or with different interests likely had radically different experiences.
I spent most of my time speaking with executives in the media and entertainment spaces, chatting mostly about advertising, AI, podcasting, and live-streaming. Below are 14 things I learned across the five-day event.
1. Podcasting is primed for a gold rush
When Netflix acquired the exclusive rights to broadcast The Ringer and Barstool podcasts on its platform in December, the entire media ecosystem took note. Compared to traditional film and television projects, podcasts are far cheaper to produce, and many of them come with preexisting fanbases.
If the experiment is a success, other streaming platforms could likely follow suit, snapping up popular series, adapting them to screen, and ushering in a second podcasting gold rush—the first such boom having come in 2020, when Spotify dropped north of a billion dollars acquiring top talent.
A few enterprising platforms have already begun testing the waters.
