In this video, I break down:

• Why the Disney/Fox deal is a great case study for why Ellison’s deal will fail, even it’s allowed to close;

• Why Larry Ellison doesn’t have the cash to close the deal;

• The actual antitrust law governing the AG’s case;

• The competing AG case from Iowa and Montana;

• The odds for each of the potential outcomes in this case;

• And who might swoop in to buy the WBD parts if the deal falls through.

If you’ve been wondering what’s actually going on withthe deal, want a factual breakdown of the actual law involved, and/or a complete handicap for all the potential outcomes in this ongoing saga, go no further, this video is for you.

Thank you to , , , and many others for tuning in live.

Join me for my next live video in the app.

Cheers.

ESHAP

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Previously on Media War & Peace…

Two years ago, I was the first to tell you that YouTube is TV - and my comments got flooded with a metric ton of “WELL, ACTUALLY…” trying to argue that what the data said was not true.

But then, it happened. YouTube is now the number one channel on TVs: bigger than all of Disney, with more viewing on televisions than all of CBS and Paramount, and greater reach each month in the UK than the BBC. Most everyone in Media, from the BBC to France TV to Sesame Street, has accepted that the “YouTube is TV” genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back.

But here’s the thing: YouTube is also mobile social media, and if they aren’t careful, they might lose their video crown to (get this) TikTok.

Eighteen months ago, I declared the Streaming Wars were over and Netflix had won. But I also warned that the victory was pyrrhic. Netflix had disrupted television, only to become Trad TV itself.

Then, as if on cue, Netflix embarked on an ill-advised, ultimately unsuccessful bid to buy Disco Bros (WBD) and morph into Trad Media. They announced a deal to aggregate TF1 and now are apparently seeking similar deals to solidify themselves as 21st Century Cable TV.

But here’s the thing: Netflix is simultaneously trying to become YouTube…

So, what does all that mean?

That, fellow Peaceniks, was the topic of my Futureview Address - my first and last speech ever at ETVF, because it’s moving to Manchester, England (England) next year.

For 50 years, Edinburgh TV Festival has been the center of conversation and transformation for UK television. And, personifying the points above, the 2026 ETVF Advisory Chair is Adam Hawkins, Netflix’s Head of Documentary for the UK, who was instrumental in securing YouTube’s Head of EMEA, Pedro Pina, for ETVF’s legendary MacTaggart Lecture - considered the most important speech in British TV each year.

In explaining why he wanted Pina and YouTube in the spotlight in Edinburgh, Hawkins said “They are television. It is important that the TV industry sees that, and it’s important YouTube play their part. They’re calling themselves television. We must treat them like that.”

For his part, Pina’s speech was a love letter to British TV, pointing out that the UK television community produces much of the most important TV content in the world. Yet, reading the room and the moment, he pivoted to describe the current state of UK TV as a “well-crafted tragedy, where many cast YouTube as the villain.”

Instead of conflict, however, pointing at YouTube’s newly-formed partnerships with BBC, ITV, and Channel 4, Pina shifted the room towards cooperation and optimism, promising that through collaboration between his platform and the UK’s traditional players, British TV was on the precipice of “a third golden age - it won’t be a tragedy, it will be an epic.”

During almost every conversation at the festival, YouTube was the center of conversation. Even more so, as it turns out, Netflix ain’t the only one cribbing the YouTube playbook. Apparently, so is the BBC…

The day after Pina gave his speech, at the very same time as my address, BBC’s newly minted Director General took the stage and introduced the idea that BBC’s iPlayer would soon emulate YouTube functionality. Seemingly floating a trial balloon ahead of the 2027 expiration of the BBC license fee, Brittin (former YouTube Head of Europe) raised the idea of an BBC’s iPlayer that could function as a YouTube-style app, with content uploaded by independent Creators. He hinted that “iPlayer 2.0” would use a “public service algorithm” with strict guidelines but without a commercial agenda. Instead, the rebooted app would “educate, inform, and entertain the public in the UK and around the world”.

Ironically, one of my earliest “YouTube is TV” declarations came in front of BBC senior management, at their Executive Committee, in January, 2024. I warned them that YouTube was eating their biscuits, that younger Brits were not developing a BBC habit, and that if they did nothing, their relevance and their license fees would be in grave danger. Turns out I was right about all of it.

Despite having first predicted that YouTube would be TV, me hearing everyone in TV talk so much about YouTube as TV was not as satisfying as one might imagine. I am glad everyone in the business, including Netflix and the Beeb, have come ‘round to my point of view, and are finally investing in their own YouTube strategy. Yet…

One of Trad Media’s most honoured traditions is resisting important change far too long (see streaming), then suddenly rushing all at once at that shiny new object (see streaming), then believing that they have “finished changing,” thus losing complete sight of the next new change staring them in the face.

Change is not binary. You can’t choose either blinking or breathing. To keep up with the modern industrial revolution, you must both change for the current moment and prepare to change again for the future - at the very same time.

And so, following Pina the next day, at a television festival steered by Netflix, starring YouTube, up against the BBC’s new DG, I took to the stage to show everyone what’s next, now.

And that, fellow Peaceniks, is what’s in the video above. It’s also what’s on the downloadable slides at the bottom of this post. Here’s the headline:

Now that YouTube is television and telly is becoming YouTube… the Phone is the new TV.

Change doesn’t end. Evolution never stops. That’s true in life and even more true for TV. However, I have found that if you strive to change in bite-sized portions every day, you can keep pace with change - and even get ahead of it. That’s my process and my practice. It’s what led me to predict that YouTube would be TV and how I am able to confidently point to what comes next.

Many thanks to Adam Hawkins, who not only recruited Pedro Pina to give the MacTaggart lecture, but was also instrumental in bringing me to my first, and last, Edinburgh TV Festival. Many more thanks to James Kirkham, the incredible interlocutor of my Q&A; the brilliant Niall Flanagan, ETVF’s Head of Editorial; the stalwart Matthew Clifton, who produced my session; and the legendary Fatima Salaria, Executive Chair of ETVF, who gave a roof-raising speech her own-self and leads the TV Festival into its next 50 years with vision and grace.

Cheerio.

ESHAP

DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION HERE:

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Today, I held a livestream with film legend , brand guru , and social entrepreneur about the bidding war for Letterboxd.

Joyce has a plan to counter bids for Letterboxd from Netflix, Sony, A24, and Versant under the Public Benefit Corporation model - a for profit model that equalizes social good with good business.

What is Letterboxd really worth? Can Letterboxd be saved from enshittification? If so, is a PBC the way to do it? That’s what this session aimed to find out.

Thank you , , , , , and more than 125 others others who streamed into this livestream.

Join our next Cartographer’s Log Live, next Wednesday, September 2.

Cheers.

ESHAP

UPDATE: of CNN quoting this post.

This BREAKING NEWS about “a meeting to discuss settlement in the Paramount merger case at Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office” is neither breaking, nor news.

The judge in this case has mandated that the parties meet to make good faith attempts to settle. This meeting is not elective by either side. It’s court mandated.

Paramount leaked this news to settle the nerves of their investors ahead of the October 1st deadline for their $7 million per day ticking fee.

Just hours before this leaked, Bonta was on CNBC talking about foundational, structural divestitures Paramount would have to make to satisfy the AGs’ demands and settle the case.

He also compared this case to the LiveNation/Ticketmaster case in which he and other AGs took the case away from the US Justice Department (sound familiar?), and won.

All of my reasons for my firm belief that this case will not settle this year, and the specific things that would need to happen for it to settle, are outlined in the video.

📉 The Real Math: Where My Numbers Come From

Under the SCOTUS 1963 ruling in US v. Philadelphia National Bank, a merger producing 30% of a market creates “a threat of undue concentration,” unlawful under Section 7 of the Clayton Act.

Long-standing DOJ antitrust guidelines consider “a market share exceeding 20% by a consolidated entity an illegal monopoly power.”

In cable, NepoMount would control 34% of viewership and 27% of affiliate fees and 27% of the film distribution markets: “monopolistic power,” as specifically stated in the AG filings. They’re a good read. Like True Crime. Take the time to digest them.

To get under these "safe" thresholds, NepoBros would have to sell a sizable share of assets, in a manner that those assets remain viable as stand-alone competitors.

That’s the point of an antitrust case.

To do that, NepoBros would need to spin out between 30-40% of the cable assets & 40-50% of film distribution / production assets. It’s maths.

One of many sources: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-problems-with-the-paramount-warner-merger

You do NOT have to agree with the Attorneys’ General’s case, or even think they’re going to win, to see that they hold all the cards.

The ticking fee is a time bomb for NepoMount. October 1st is looming. And Larry is running out of money. So don’t expect big news out of Monday’s big meeting.

Have a great weekend!

ESHAP

Era-defining economic Bubbles (and bursts) are never caused by random acts of speculation — they are all intentionally inflated. They all start as cultural “phenomena,” invented by “visionaries,” shrouded in “new-age metrics,” and sold to the public by “trusted institutions” as “the next big thing,” until the rug gets pulled and the bottom falls out.

This was the 1720 South Sea Bubble, when a British shipping monopoly with zero ships generated a groundswell in South American commodity trading, nearly taking down the British Empire. This was Enron, when Jeffrey Skilling wrapped volatile energy trading in a shiny “New Economy” bow, which Wall Street sold to investors as “risk-free profit.” In the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Countrywide put lipstick on complex, toxic, subprime mortgages and called it “the democratization of the American Dream.”

In the Dot-Com Bubble and crash, the designer drug of choice was AOL. In today’s AI hype-Bubble (and impending pop), the sexy gateway drugs are OpenAI and ChatGPT. The eerily parallel stories of AOL and OpenAI prove the dangers of combining a revolutionary tech, zero discernible long-term business model, and a singularly powerful message. A deeper comparison of AOL and the Dot-Com Bubble to OpenAI’s Closed Loop Economy lays bare the underlying fissures in today’s AI models and points toward likely long-term outcomes for the wider AI industry.

CAUTIONARY TALL TALES

For both AOL and OpenAI, the revolutionary nature of their technology was quite real. The problems arose when they convinced themselves and the world that “this single beautiful feature,” could be a standalone, hyper-profitable industry in a new, yet to be invented digital economy.

In both case studies, when the mousetrap beneath the cheese gets exposed, the structural parallels share a corrupt reality. Both companies weaponized circular financing to mask staggering operational deficits, and both locked investors into unsustainable business models based on relatively simple features, doomed to be absorbed, commoditized, and rendered free on the other side of the inevitable (and very predictable) crash.

THE METRIC MIRAGE OF THE GATEWAY DRUG

The genesis of both the Dot-Com and AI Bubbles relied on a three-dimensional psychological con game. The underlying technologies – the TCP/IP internet protocol in the 1990s and transformer-based large language models in the 2020s – were significant paradigm shifts. They were difficult and costly to achieve first and incredibly challenging (though far from impossible) to replicate. Importantly, no one in banking or on Wall Street really understood them. So, the tech pioneers, with a limited scaling window to build an infinite growth curve, invented metrics and manufactured wins to fool investors, so they could secure additional investment and solidify their pole position in this “new economy” they were inventing, with even more imaginary growth.

AOL cracked open the internet by wrapping it in a friendly, walled-garden desktop interface, bombarding the population with physical CDs to creates an immediate consumer monopoly. Wall Street, blinded by the cultural phenomenon and its own greed, abandoned traditional cash-flow analysis. They invented a new gospel of valuation based entirely on subscriber acquisition velocity.

Twenty-seven years later, OpenAI gamed out that same playbook with ChatGPT.

By suddenly dropping a simple, imperfect, sycophantic, hallucinating text-based AI prompt, earlier than all his fellow traveling AI broligarchs and Chinese nemeses (all with very similar blueprints), wrapped in Olympus-like fanfare and God-like promises, Sam Altman and OpenAI achieved the fastest consumer user-base scaling in history and manufactured a market. Learning nothing from previous experiences, and entirely uneducated in the underlying tech, Wall Street tripped over themselves capitulating to the hype, valuing OpenAI not on any historical software margins, but on the made-up metric of token generation rates — entirely disconnected from basic financial grounding.

The fundamental error in both eras was identical: based on Barnumesque promises by charismatic charlatans, the market simply believed. “If a complex new product (that we don’t fully understand) becomes suddenly ubiquitous, it must be inherently valuable as a product and industry – throw money at it!” (Also see: Crypto.)

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND-TRIP

As the initial high of both helium bubbles began to fade into reality, both AOL and OpenAI ran into brutal financial brick walls. Neither company could organically sustain the staggering operational overhead they needed with their real, real-world revenues. AOL faced the massive capital drain of maintaining dial-up modem banks and network infrastructure; OpenAI faced an even more catastrophic cash burn, running up $34 billion in total costs against $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025, driven by relentlessly rocketing computational, infrastructure costs, and contractual obligations. Neither AOL or ChatGPT could possibly generate enough actual revenue to justify their valuation or cover their mushrooming expense. AOL’s fail was historically epic. After years of rainmaking hype dance, OpenAI just postponed their long-anticipated trillion-dollar IPO to avoid pulling back the curtain on the scope of their charade.

Both were first with revolutionary tech. Neither could make the math make a profit. Both hid foundational structural deficits from investors and maintain hyper-inflated valuations. And both AOL and OpenAI resorted to the same financial engineering tactic: round-trip balance sheets.

At the heart of both the Dot-Com and AI Bubbles is an identical deception: manufactured revenue from shuffling the same big bag of money around a closed loop of co-conspirators.

To appease Wall Street’s insatiable demand for top-line growth, both AOL in 1999 and today’s 2026 AI coalition transformed their balance sheets into revolving doors. They routed their own investment capital through interested and needy third parties, only to receive it back to book as their own “organic” revenue.

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🐭 We focused on Disney Streaming — for good reason. Disney’s D2C Streaming profits more than doubled: up 116% to $712B in 2Q.

🐭 I also unpack and explain the deal Disney announced yesterday with TikTok:

TikTok is integrating into Disney+ with a curated feed of Creators and much of the content focused on Disney IP. Importantly, Disney will package and sell this ad inventory across BOTH Disney Streaming and TikTok - something that will be popular with Creators and Advertisers.

🐭 This move allows Disney to begin to compete with social platforms, on mobile, outside the living room. It is also another shoe dropping in the verticalization of Premium Television. As I told Romaine, this is more than Brands Cosplaying Creator, it's a careful and 1000% necessary move into mobile.

🐭 I mention the success of Toy Story in the interview. Here are the receipts:

Toy Story 5: $1B+ at the global BO; Toy Story catalog: 2B hours streamed this summer; Toy Story Merch: $1.1B in sales this year; Toy Story drove a +20% jump in OpInc at Disney Parks & Experiences. Walt’s Flywheel in action.

🐭 I also dug into Disney’s Sports game. OpInc at ESPN and Sports fell -17% in 2Q. That’s because their NBA fees skyrocketed 86%. Disney’s sports fees (alone) are $12B in 2026 - that’s 60% of Netflix’s entire 2026 programming spend. That said: the NBA Finals rose 100% this year, with viewing among P12-24 up 140%. The NHL Finals also grew 100% this year. So the Sports bet is starting to pay off.

🐭 The question is, can Josh D’Amaro and Disney transform ESPN into a streaming service faster than Trad TV dies? Otherwise, even the Knicks may not be able to make the sports math work.

Some Disney things we didn’t cover on Bloomberg:

🐭 Overall Net Income at Disney fell -52% in 2Q: This stems from their sale of their half of A+E Global Media to Hearst - taking a $900 million write down on value in the process.

🐭 Disney has finally started to improve their position in the FOX acquisition seven years ago: Because of the full integration of Hulu and FOX content (The Simpsons, X Men) into the Disney Universe, they’ve moved from -$67 BILLION negative asset value to approximately -$40 BILLION.

🐭 Still, at this rate, Disney won’t break even on the FOX acquisition until 2034.

🐭 Disney shares are up 5% this week.

Let me know your thoughts on all that.

Cheers.

ESHAP

Adam Smith’s original theory of Capitalism was deeply moral, violently anti-monopoly, and structurally designed to protect the working class. Smith’s belief was that healthy competition in a free market would incentivize individual people and businesses to provide the best services at an optimal price, to be the most competitive, and attract the most customers. A shoemaker can’t charge exorbitant prices or make shitty shoes, because their competitor will undercut them or make better footwear. To succeed, a cobbler must make great kicks at a fair price and pay workers a competitive wage, so they don’t quit and design sneakers next door.

Crucially, Smith’s work warned harshly against companies that became so large they would be monopolies and about collections of magnates colluding to corner markets.

For real Capitalism to work, Smith explicitly dictated that the wealthiest members of society should pay a higher, disproportionate share of taxes, as a core, foundational component of a healthy capitalist economy.

Capitalism, in its truest form, as conceived by its architect, is a free market based on fair competition, where those who are most successful pay a “disproportionate” amount of their income back into the system, offering new competitors necessary resources to foster the rise of new competitors, and to prevent one company (a monopoly) or small group of colluding companies (an oligarchy) from squelching competition and taking advantage of consumers aka the public.

Smith’s original concept bears zero resemblance to the version of “Capitalism” practiced in America in 2026.

In 1976, fifty years ago, the top tax rate in the US was 70%. Over a certain amount of income, the biggest “winners” of American Capitalism had to put 7 out of every 10 dollars they earned, back into the system, enabling Americans who made less to be educated, eat well, stay healthy, and build new competition for “the winners.” This ensured that competition itself continued and the best products and services, at the best prices, were available to everyone.

This is precisely how the American Middle Class was created. Just as Smith envisioned. It wasn’t perfect, but it was far fairer than feudalism. It was also much more of a free market than we have today.

Today, the top tax rate in the US is 37% – nearly half of what it was fifty years ago. By comparison, Finland, ranked the happiest country in the world for nine straight years, has a top tax rate of 58%. That is how they provide universal healthcare and universal childcare to every single Finn – enabling people to invest into their families, their careers, and into new businesses. Additionally, in Finland, all corporations pay a flat tax rate of 20% – no loopholes, no exceptions. While America has a stated top corporate tax rate of 21%, a humongous share of US companies pays $0 in taxes. 88 of the most valuable companies in America, including Tesla, Disney, Liberty Media, Yum Brands, Roku, Live Nation, and Wynn Resorts, pay zero taxes. In its entire 24-year history, SpaceX, run by the world’s richest man, has never paid taxes.

Consequently, over the last fifty years, America’s income and wealth have been consolidated among very few people, at the expense of most Americans. The top 10% of Americans (34 million people) now control more than two thirds of America’s total wealth. Today, the 308 million Americans in the bottom 90% hold just 32.8% of wealth of in the United States.

Since 1976, the incomes of the top 1% of Americans have grown 322%, while the wages of 90% of Americans have grown just 27%. Fifty years ago, the average US minimum wage worker earned 1.2% of the average income of the top 1%. Today, the average minimum wage employee earns 0.86% of an average one-percenter.

The last increase to the federal minimum wage was in 2009. Why? Because in 2010, immediately after the last minimum wage increase, regulators in the US uncapped the limit that corporations can spend on elections, and the CEOs of those companies have lobbied stridently against raising the minimum wage. As the population has grown (+57% since 1976) American regulators have allowed our wealthiest people and companies to pay far less (or absolutely nothing) in taxes, so less cash gets funneled back into society, stifling the ability for those in the 90% to compete fairly, thus winnowing America’s Middle Class.

As a direct result of the collaboration of a small cohort of “capitalist winners,” in the last half century, American Capitalism has transformed (read as metastasized) into “American Casteism.”

You may ask yourself, “so, what does this have to do with Hollywood?” The answer: Literally Everything.

Hollywood’s Entertainment Industrial Complex personifies the American ”Capitalist” Caste System more than any other industry.

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If you're uncomfortable right now, you are not alone.

If you want to do something about it, check out my complete guide for taking control of your career trajectory and get some great advice in the webinar above.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in live!

Don’t miss out on any of my Substack content. Become a Premium Peacenik with this special summer offer!

Cheers!

ESHAP

Of all the gravitational forces in the Media Universe, by far the most powerful is the dramatic tilt of the planet’s generational axis from Baby Boomers and Gen X to Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen A.

Among Media’s power elite, there is a massive misunderstanding of who actually populates the planet and how that one factor has upended Media consumption in every region on the planet.

81% of the world’s population — 70% in the US, 67% in Europe, and 81% of Latin America — are now under 55.

I chose the 54/55 axis point as a focus of this study for a very specific reason. The generation gap for Media consumption between those over and under 55, in these eight major regions, is massive — and widening.

The data I’ve posted below comes from the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index: The first zero-sum, wholly-deduplicated map of human attention in history. The index is a free, interactive app that allows you to see the total attention, by generation for eight major markets around the world.

In the last week, The Index has gotten a lot of attention from Media pros in these markets.

It’s also managed to upset a number of executives in the Measurement Industrial Complex, because I’ve used their publicly available data, cross-collateralized with handset data and consumer panels from those regions, to show that our collective TV measurement is a mirage.

Why? For two reasons.

1. Traditional measurement companies in these regions all assume that if a TV is turned on, that it’s actually being watched. Think about your own media habits to understand the fatal flaw in this assumption. Three quarters of all consumers watch TV with a phone in their hand. Most audiences, often or always, are using those phones to look at something else rather than the television screen. Contrary to conventional Media wisdom, it is not possible to pay attention to two screens at once — attention, in fact, cannot be divided.

2. These organizations are either Joint Industry Committees (JICs) controlled by the companies whose very survival relies on inflating TV tonnage over mobile realities, or for-profit corporations whose massive fees are disproportionately paid by those same companies. As a result, their math skews towards over-indexed TV consumption by the eldest people in those countries, who watch-max for television usage over social video consumption. This is exactly how the world’s major television platforms have found themselves locked inside a geriatric trap of their own making.

Naysayers — all of whom work for or with traditional measurement organizations, by the way — have taken some exception to our methodology. You can see their vague critiques in my comments section (here). Yet none of them, when asked, could point to specific data from their own platforms to contradict our findings. They simply do not like that I have used their very own data to show the innate flaws in their own data, and want me to stop.

If you know me at all, you’ll know I can’t stop and won’t stop. I encourage you to click through to the Cross-Screen Attention Index and look at all the data — and methodology — yourself.

However, for the visual learners out there, below I’ve posted a set of infographics, comparing the time and attention spent on the major platforms between the cohorts over and under 55 in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, and Mexico, from December of 2025 through May of 2026.

In these charts, you’ll see two things: the huge gap between generations of audiences around the world; and the urgent need to accurately measure attention across all our screens.

The 55+ audience spends a disproportionate amount of time and attention on Trad Media. They consume more television than all the other generations.

However, when you zoom in on audiences under 55, you will note that the top-four most-used platforms are YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, and Instagram — with the exceptions of Brazil and Mexico, where national broadcasters replace Netflix in the top four.

In fact, in all eight regions, TikTok beats Netflix for total attention among all consumers under 55, and surpasses the rest of traditional media in every region except Brazil and Mexico.

US

The rest of this post is only available to Premium Peaceniks. To unlock the full, volume-weighted telemetry for all these regions, you’ll need to upgrade.

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Below, please find my official autopsy of Traditional Media as we know it.

These 👆 are the results of a massive, Media measurement mission: Create a global cross-screen index to track the total attention of today’s consumers, regardless of which screen they use, across all the generations of the planet.

THE ESHAP CROSS-SCREEN ATTENTION INDEX — a FREE, interactive dashboard for global attention, across eight countries (US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy) — is NOW LIVE AND ONLINE.

(To play along, take a sec and open another window and pull up The Index now.)

Look at this chart again.

This is the share of consumer attention, across these eight major regions, for all people 13+.

Note that the Local Legacy Media index is a combo of ALL local traditional Media from these eight nations, compared to the rest of the global players on the chart. Note also that for total attention, all fourteen of the Legacy Media platforms, combined across all eight regions, lose the battle for cross-screen attention to the global attention champ, YouTube.

If you decouple all the trad media, the top four platforms for total cross-screen consumer attention, for all people Bar Mitzvah or older, are: 1. YouTube, 2. Netflix, 3. TikTok, and 4. Instagram.

More importantly, this is total attention paid, from all people 13+ in these regions. When we ZOOM IN and look at how the majority of humans on earth consume media… it looks like this 👇.

Of all the data in this report, perhaps the most pivotal is this: 81% of the world population — 65% of the people in these eight regions — are now 54 or younger.

This new index reveals that, across the planet, Legacy TV relies, almost entirely, on a shrinking minority of our most senior citizens, watching the same stuff, over and over and over, throwing off the balance of our measured video consumption.

When you remove that dying demographic (of which I am, myself, solidly a member), the combined fourteen Legacy outlets in this index are surpassed — handily — by YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok.

Even more eye-opening: Across these countries, YouTube garners more attention among people 13-54 than Disney, Disco Bros, Paramount, NBCU, and FOX — combined. And TikTok beats all other platforms except YouTube for attention paid, including Netflix, and Local Legacy Media.

But a zoomed-out, global view is not truly actionable, nor the point of this new index.

Rather, our intent with this new, free, interactive, user-driven platform, is to provide a strategic fiscal and investment planning compass for each of these regions.

The ESHAP CROSS-SCREEN ATTENTION INDEX (ECSAI) is now live — with data for total cross-device attention, for France, Brazil, Mexico, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US, from December 2025 through May 2026.

It is the first zero-sum, wholly-deduplicated map of human attention in history.

It shows the total hours of attention paid to each platform, side-by-side, accounting for daily human attention as a finite resource, which cannot be divided between screens. In this index, if someone is looking at a TV, even if they have a phone in their hand, the time is allocated to the television. But, if someone is scrolling TikTok, even if the TV is on in the room, we apportion that attention exclusively to the phone, while discounting the TV that’s not being watched.

The data in The Index tells a remarkable story — a crime thriller, really — about the current state of global Media. See the chalk outline for yourself!

While Trad Media continues to cling to an aging audience, in ALL EIGHT MAJOR REGIONS — even where Legacy Media is deeply entrenched in the free Media culture and protected by local regulations — among the 13-54 majority, YouTube is the most used platform, by a sizable margin. Netflix plays bigly across all eight regions, but among 13-54 and all the younger demos, especially with Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen A, in most of these areas, TikTok outpaces Netflix, and all other comers.

In fact, as this new data shows for the first time, in many regions — particularly in the US — while YouTube is tops for total attention, TikTok actually beats YouTube among Gen Z and Gen A (consumers 13-34).

And this, ☝️ right here, is precisely why we need a Cross-Screen Index.

No one else is measuring all these platforms, side by side, across all devices. As a result, the industry gets easily distracted by feckless signposts that tells us “YouTube is #1* on TV!” (*with P2+ and without counting phones, laptops, or tablets).

Traditional Media currencies only track specific, individual devices, but not the humans who use them. They count a television playing to a room (whether full or empty) as an absolute premium, while viewing high-intensity, mobile consumption, with active thumb-and-eye engagement, as "digital background."

This collective industry blindspot is precisely why Trad Media drove into a brick wall. Legacy tracking systems want you to look at Media through isolated silos — weighting a television playing to no one as more equal than rabid attention paid to a phone.

A hyper-disproportionate amount of our Media measurement investment is spent measuring television viewing — even when that TV is not being watched. Thus, Media execs spend an equally disproportionate amount of time, energy, and resources fighting for control of a screen that only captures 40% of video consumption. That’s not just bad business; it’s a suicide mission.

The Index is designed to prevent that — it is designed to show, specifically, where the entirety of consumer attention is actually being paid, so that Media professionals can invest in content, advertising, overhead, and infrastructure, accordingly.

To achieve this, the ESCAI incorporates a Sovereign Boundary Model: with hard, quantitative ceilings locked down entirely by local, currency-grade telemetry logs (Nielsen, BARB, Médiamétrie, Comscore, Sensor Tower, etc.). Rather than asking consumers to estimate their viewing hours, the index uses this codified telemetry to establish absolute macro volumes.

Behavioral data from GWI Consumer Diaries is introduced strictly as a coefficient matrix to map friction points and calculate the mathematical overlap when two devices are running in the same room.

Three quarters of consumers actively use smartphones while the TV is on in front of them. Yet legacy currencies rely on passive boxes in empty rooms — counting televisions playing to heads buried in phones as “active viewers.” Instead, we use behavioral data to verify actual human presence and device co-activity. By injecting human reality back into blind hardware metrics, The ESCAI enforces the absolute laws of human physics and accounts for time as a non-elastic, zero-sum commodity — a closed market sponge.

SEE: ESHAP CROSS-SCREEN ATTENTION INDEX METHODOLOGY & SOURCING.

Each quarter, we will update the ECSAI (pronounced EE-say) with new data, on a rolling six months basis. Simultaneously, we will drop an Index Report, with deep analysis of the data and the trends, right here on Substack.

This is different from other measurement offerings, which provide small, irrelevant glimpses of data for free, then charge clients millions of dollars per year to fund it — while keeping the vast majority of us who work in Media in the dark. This incentivizes the measurement industrial complex to lock our data in silos, dividing and double-counting consumer attention.

Below you’ll find my first-ever ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index Report, with a deep dive into all the data from all eight regions.

HERE ARE THE RED HOT TAKES FROM THE FIRST ESCAI REPORT:

• While Local & Global Traditional Media in all eight countries continue to draw attention from local consumers, their businesses have become senior living societies — disproportionately dependent on the shrinking minority of their populations over the age of 55.

• For the supermajority of audiences in all eight regions (people 54 and younger), YouTube now dominates our collective attention.

• However, TikTok is coming on, fast. In the US and many other regions, TikTok is now #2 with consumers under 55 for total attention paid each month, #1 with consumers under 35, and actively threatening YouTube’s attention title with all consumers under 45.

• Netflix is strong in many of these regions. Yet, they appear vulnerable to phone consumption around the world.

• Netflix loses to YouTube in every region. More urgently, they are now behind TikTok for total cross-screen attention with consumers 13-54 in the US, the UK, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.

• For audiences 13-44 Netflix loses the battle for attention to Instagram in five of the eight regions: Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Italy, and the United States.

• When we collapse Facebook and Instagram into a de-duplicated Meta metric, Meta sweeps Netflix in all eight regions for users 54 and younger.

• On the interactive Cross-Screen Index, we allow you to toggle the data to combine or separate IG and FB into one metric for Meta. However, we measure Instagram and Facebook separately in this report, as they have dramatically different user-bases.

• 53% of Facebook’s user-base in these eight countries is over 55, whereas 90% of Instagram’s audience is 54 or younger.

• YouTube still beats Meta in all these regions among consumers 13-54, but not by much.

• Global Trad Media in The Index — Disney, Fox, Disco Bros, Paramount, NBCU — play differently in various regions, but their total lack of cross-screen strategy has them losing badly to Global Big Tech platforms in all eight territories.

• All of the Trad US Media giants fail to secure even one #1 or #2 spot among people 13-54 in any of the eight regions that we cover — including their home territory.

When we embark on projects like this, we start fresh. No preconceptions. No confirmation bias. We let the data give us the plot, then we tell the story. This is, by far, our most ambitious data endeavor yet. It’s a Mt. Everest of data, and it tells a remarkable story about the future of Media, based only on the actual needs of real consumers.

We will keep following the data where it leads us. And The Index will always be totally free. For my Index Report, you will need to upgrade to Premium Peacenik (aka paying subscriber). This helps us fund the work behind The Index, while keeping it free for everyone.

CROSS-SCREEN ATTENTION INDEX REPORT: JULY 2026

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THE AUGUST 2026 MAP: 6TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

My name is Evan Shapiro. Many people refer to me as a Media Cartographer. This map is why. Since 2020, using only publicly available data and powerpoint, I have been mapping the Media ecosystem, redrawing it each month and posting it here.

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

As a point of comparison, here is my first Media Map, from August 2020.

I have updated this map every month since the first. I’ve published more than 100 versions - all made with a palette of Excel and PowerPoint. This process has changed my brain. Drafting these maps, by hand, in PowerPoint; digging into the earning reports of every company on the map quarter after quarter; tracking the trajectories of all the planets, month after month, year after year, offers useful and unique perspective.

You can see maps from each of the last six years at the bottom of this page.

Changes to the map and universe these last six years have been immense - following a trajectory the first map revealed. With each edition, the center of gravity has shifted further toward Big Tech. For perspective, at its last valuation, OpenAI, a company without a demonstrable business model, is now worth more than Netflix, WBD, Paramount, Disney, Fox, and Comcast, combined. For countless reasons beyond this map, the universe on this map is on the brink of its greatest change since I began mapping.

However, after this mapping, the August 2026 map - The 6th Anniversary Edition - is the last map I will make, before we entirely reinvent it and set it free into the wild.

This is a sneak peek at our new, user-driven, fully-automated Media Universe Map we will premiere, right here, on October 14. The video shows a test drive of the desktop and mobile maps. This new map will be entirely interactive, live and dynamic, including a time machine to take you back to Media Universe Maps from even before I started making them.

I’ve come to realize that to unlock the real value of my Media Universe Map, I need to set it free. Each new version has reliably sparked discussion in our community. Many of the best improvements I’ve made have come from reader comments and DMs. However, until now, it’s been too much monologue not enough conversation.

This new worldview will allow you to drive the conversation - to double-click on individual companies, deep-dive into specific segments, to zoom out for new views, and look back across longer trajectories. Crucially, it will be a live platform, continuously updated and controlled by the user, revealing different things to each visitor, creating more dynamic conversation and value in the community.

Opening the aperture of my mapping opened new worlds to my experience and introduced me to new people all over the planet. I’m so grateful for the enormous value you all bring me every day. I am really nervous about the changes we’re making and incredibly excited to share them and start a new conversation with you.

Much of this newsletter is free for everyone. But to help us fund all this cartography, we sometimes ask you to upgrade to Premium Peacenik - aka paid subscriber. If you want to join us in that effort, there’s a special offer below, just for you! If not, no worries — please keep reading for free.

Enjoy the Universe!

ESHAP

MEDIA UNIVERSE MAPS 2020-2026: IN HIGH RES

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