The lead  ·  01

Comcast splits in two — a new streaming-ad giant is born

Comcast announced (June 29) it will spin off NBCUniversal and Sky into a standalone public company, separating the media empire — Peacock, Sky, NBC, Bravo, Universal, theme parks — from the…

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The week in one paragraph

This was the week the bundles broke apart — and someone else started setting the price of your content. At the top, an empire split: Comcast will spin off NBCUniversal and Sky into a standalone, ad-dependent streaming giant, ending a 15-year experiment and putting a chunk of CTV’s plumbing (FreeWheel) into play. Underneath, the AI middlemen kept re-pricing content on their own terms: Google reportedly told publishers to license their archives for AI training or lose their checks, OpenAI built an entire ad platform in 19 weeks with no publisher revenue split, Apple quietly abandoned SKAdNetwork and left mobile measurement without an anchor, while Cloudflare shifted AI-crawler pricing from “pay per crawl” to “pay per query” — the rare move that meters value back to publishers. The programmatic pipes shifted too: agentic buyers skipped 86% of auctions and still won, and The Trade Desk pushed OpenPath into the Netherlands while its 4.5% fee and transparency drew fresh scrutiny. And publishers pushed back: six UK publishers united as Atria to curate their own inventory at scale, the Economist launched a cheaper audio-and-video tier to grow a younger audience it owns, even as “surveillance pricing” laws came for the data-driven subscription pricing publishers rarely admit to — and Reddit went all-in on performance to pull yet more lower-funnel budget onto a platform. One thread ties it together: as the old bundles come apart, the giants are deciding what your content and attention are worth — and the publishers who win this quarter are the ones setting their own price, through owned audiences, legible inventory, and collective leverage.