00:00 Speaker A

Now time for some of today’s trending tickers. We are watching Comcast, IBM and Honeywell. First up, shares of Comcast moving on reports that NBC Universal is exploring the launch of a sports cable network to rival Disney’s ESPN as early as this fall, according to the Wall Street Journal. Um, the planned network would feature content also available on NBCU’s streaming service Peacock, including NBA games, Sunday Night Football, the WNBA and more. Separately, the New York Post reporting Amazon founder Jeff Bezos considering a purchase of NBCU’s CNBC. Uh, Ali Kanal is back with us here. Um, and Ali, of course, you track the media industry closely, so it’s interesting to get these sort of various threads.

01:46 Ali Kanal

Yeah, and it was very interesting and surprising to me a little bit to see this report, considering that we have companies across the media sector, including NBC Universal, that are actually moving away from linear television. So NBC is going to be spinning off most of its cable properties by the end of the year. Warner Brothers Discovery is doing the same thing. They will be separating linear networks from studios and streaming. Those are the growth drivers of their business. At the same time though, we know what keeps butts in seats is sports, right? That’s really what consumers are tuning into on television. It’s appointment viewing. We know NBC as a whole, they’ve sync, they’ve committed a lot of money into various sports leagues, like the NBA, for example. And even a company like Netflix, which previously said it didn’t want to be involved in sports, they have been doubling down on that as well. So the sports side of the equation makes sense to me. The cable network situation, I just don’t understand how that adds to the value of this company, especially when we know linear network, uh, revenue has been consistently declining here. NBC Universal told me no comment to this report. They also told me no comment to the report that Jeff Bezos was considering a bid for CNBC. There have been other outlets out there that say he’s no longer weighing that option, but Julie, nothing really would surprise me here when it comes to the media industry. Things are moving so quickly, so fast, and a lot of these companies are having to pivot just in order to survive here.

04:12 Speaker A

Yeah, I think as members of media industry, nothing would surprise us either. Ali, let’s talk about IBM though. Software revenue, they are coming in below expectations during the most recent quarter, though headline sales and adjusted earnings per share topped analyst expectations. And on the earnings call, CEO, CEO Arvind Krishna mentioned that geopolitical tensions were causing clients to move cautiously, as he said. He also called out more constrained spending from the US federal government, though he noted the company doesn’t expect it to create long-term headwinds. A big tumble there for the shares. Although, we should mention on most metrics, IBM beat, and the shares have been out performers this year. In fact, the stock, um, well within the last month, uh, has been at record highs.

05:49 Ali Kanal

Yeah, and if you take a look on a year-to-date basis heading into this earnings print, we were up around 30%. So perhaps some of this good news already priced in, and we’ve seen that really across the board with a lot of these tech big tech companies, especially those with high valuations. You can just look at Netflix last week, which initiated a beat and raise on that report, and then we saw the stock decline. But like we’ve been talking about, IBM beat on revenue, margins, free cash flow, gen AI growth also accelerated. In fact, at this point, over 10% of revenue is now tied to gen AI. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who you were just speaking with on the program, he wrote that IBM’s business flywheel is starting to accelerate. He said that he would be a buyer in any knee-jerk weakness this morning. The firm did maintain its outperform rating and $325 price target on shares. But you did mention some of that disappointment on the software side. Software is the biggest piece of IBM’s business, so maybe that’s where investors are hinging their wagon to when it comes to the declines that we’re seeing right now in shares. But again, the stock has been an outperformer, especially over the past month.

07:36 Speaker A

Right, exactly. Um, and let’s also talk Honeywell. It’s lifting its full-year outlook for the second quarter row, as the company continues plans to separate its aerospace, automation and materials units. Honeywell’s now expecting organic sales to increase between 4 and 5% for the full year. Earlier this year, Honeywell said it expected $500 million in tariff-related exposure. The shares there, Ali, down about 5%, but for a lot of those big industrial companies, we’ve actually seen outperformance this year.

08:32 Ali Kanal

Right. And you know, we did see modest declines in operating and segment margins, some softness in industrial automation, maybe that’s contributing to some of the declines that we’re seeing today, but when we talk about the eventual separation here of this company into three separate publicly traded entities, that has been a long time coming. There’s a lot of talk on Wall Street that that’s going to unlock value. It’s going to be less confusing for investors. It’s going to increase the focus on executives. And you can look at this space in general and how we’ve seen that in the past. General Electric, for example, last year they split their company into three separate businesses: GE Vernova, GE Aerospace, GE Healthcare. We just saw GE Vernova report solid earnings, shares soared. So still a lot to come for Honeywell. I will say when we’re looking at the declines in shares today, we’re just up around 1% since the start of the year, so not necessarily an outperformer in this environment, but maybe down the line when these com the company separates, we could see a little bit more tail of a tailwind there.

10:08 Speaker A

Yeah. And I mean the XLI, um, which is the industrials group, is up 17%. So definitely a pretty big contrast there. Thanks, Ali. You can scan the QR code code below to track the best and worst performing stocks via Yahoo Finance’s trending tickers page.

MUMBAI: Taiwan has taken a step in driving regional wellness innovation with the launch of the ‘2025 Go Healthy with Taiwan’ campaign in India. Spearheaded by the Taiwan International Trade Administration (TITA) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and executed by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), this campaign encourages Indian public institutions, enterprises, and SMEs to propose pioneering ways to apply Taiwan’s health-focused technologies to local community needs.

The campaign is structured as an open call for proposals across three strategic sectors: Fitness & Sports Technology, Cycling, and Smart Healthcare. Participants will vie for three $30,000 cash prizes, awarded to the most impactful and innovative proposals. In addition, the top six teams will be invited to Taiwan for an exclusive “Go Healthy Tour”—a curated, immersive experience offering direct access to Taiwan’s health technology ecosystem. This tour will feature hands-on demonstrations, site visits, and networking opportunities with Taiwanese companies, enabling participants to explore collaboration, product integration, and market expansion opportunities firsthand.

This international call not only highlights the strength and innovation of Taiwan’s health industry, but also encourages collaboration with global partners—such as India—to develop smart and sustainable healthy lifestyles through Taiwan’s cutting-edge technologies and solutions,” said Joe Chou, executive VP TAITRA.

Sectoral Focus Areas:

1. Fitness & Sports Technology: From AI-enabled training systems to connected workout equipment, Taiwan’s smart fitness innovations are designed to boost personal and population-wide wellness outcomes.

2. Cycling: As a global manufacturing hub for high-performance bicycles and a leader in urban cycling infrastructure, Taiwan champions cycling as a sustainable, health-positive mode of transport.

3. Smart Healthcare: Taiwan’s Medtech sector offers advanced diagnostic platforms, telemedicine capabilities, and wearable technologies that are reshaping healthcare delivery and preventive care models.

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I cover int’l TV from London. I wrote about how sports doc producers navigate a “brutal” landscape, why Amazon is fumbling its U.K. business and the British company behind Netflix’s Adolescence. I’m at manori@theankler.com

“Partnerships” and “collaborations” for survival have been proposed and chewed over more times than I can count in the last 24 months, but a hefty streamer-broadcaster cross-carriage deal out of Europe wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card back in January — let alone three such pacts in the span of one month.

First came the mega deal: Netflix and French commercial broadcaster TF1’s shock distribution partnership in June — which in summer 2026 will see TF1’s live channels (and on-demand content from streamer TF1+) freely available to Netflix members in France as part of their subscription. Unveiled by Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters and TF1 CEO Rodolphe Belmer at Cannes Lions, the tie-up has launched myriad LinkedIn missives about Netflix’s potential future as a linear aggregator.

That the deal happened in France’s tightly regulated market was eyebrow-raising. That, a fortnight later, we saw another pact out of France — public broadcaster France Télévisions partnering with Amazon Prime Video to share its live channels and 20,000-title catalogue with the global streamer (effective immediately!) — was game-changing.

Still, all is not hunky dory within the French production sector, where stakeholders sound baffled by what these deals mean for windowing and future deal-making with the streamers. More on that spicy discord below.

The partnership contagion then headed north to England, where Disney and British commercial broadcaster ITV struck a landmark agreement to share a selection of each other’s original titles on Disney+ and streamer ITVX. The deal went live July 16 and sees promotional units on each service featuring 12 shows. On ITVX, you can watch the first seasons of Andor, Tracker, Atlanta and — yes — even Desperate Housewives, while Disney+’s “A Taste of ITVX” features first seasons of Love Island All Stars, Mr Bates vs the Post Office and Grantchester.

There are nuances that make each of the three deals unique.

Today’s column — my last before I take a few months’ maternity leave! — I take you inside the streaming plot twist shaking up Europe, including:

• Netflix’s real game in Europe: Is the deal about churn, ads, or goodwill with local audiences?

• My interview with Enders Analysis’ François Godard about what to read between the lines

• The next markets to fall: Germany and Spain and the role of HBO Max

• What sports rights have to do with it

• Why advertisers could be the biggest winners

• How Disney+ and Prime Video’s “softer” deals reveal different strategy

• Why broadcasters would rather cozy up to Netflix over YouTube

• What this means for producers, compensation and financing

• How these deals might help streamers dodge Europe’s content quotas

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White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks speaks as President Donald Trump listens at an event for the signing of the GENIUS Act, a bill that regulates stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency, in the East Room of the White House, Friday, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Donald Trump has unveiled a sweeping new plan for America’s “global dominance” in artificial intelligence, proposing to cut back environmental regulations to speed up the construction of AI supercomputers while promoting the sale of U.S.-made AI technologies at home and abroad.

The “AI Action Plan” introduced Wednesday embraces many of the ideas voiced by tech industry lobbyists and the Silicon Valley investors who backed Trump’s election campaign last year. Trump, who ordered a broad AI strategy after returning to the White House in January, is also expected to sign three executive orders at an afternoon event.

The unveiling is co-hosted by the bipartisan Hill and Valley Forum and the “All-In” podcast, a business and technology show hosted by four tech investors and entrepreneurs, which includes Trump’s AI czar, David Sacks.

The plan includes some familiar tech lobby pitches. That includes accelerating the sale of AI technology abroad and making it easier to construct the energy-hungry data center buildings that are needed to form and run AI products. It also includes some of the AI culture war preoccupations of the circle of venture capitalists who endorsed Trump last year.

Trump had given his tech advisers six months to come up with new AI policies after revoking President Joe Biden’s signature AI guardrails on his first day in office.

The plan prioritizes AI innovation and adoption, urging the removal of any “red tape” that could be slowing down adoption across industries and government.

But it also seeks to guide the industry’s growth to address a longtime rallying point for the tech industry’s loudest Trump backers: countering the liberal bias they see in AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

Trump’s plan aims to block the government from contracting with tech companies unless they “ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” A Biden-era framework for evaluating the riskiest AI applications should also be stripped of any references to “misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change,” the plan said.

The plan says the nation’s leading AI models should protect free speech and be “founded on American values,” though it doesn’t define which values those should include.

Sacks, a former PayPal executive and now Trump’s top AI adviser, has been criticizing “woke AI” for more than a year, fueled by Google’s February 2024 rollout of an AI image generator that, when asked to show an American Founding Father, created pictures of Black, Asian and Native American men.

Google quickly fixed its tool, but the “Black George Washington” moment remained a parable for the problem of AI’s perceived political bias, taken up by X owner Elon Musk, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Vice President JD Vance and Republican lawmakers.

Chief among the plan’s goals is to speed up permitting and loosen environmental regulation to accelerate construction on new data centers and factories. It condemns “radical climate dogma” and recommends lifting a number of environmental restrictions, including clean air and water laws.

Trump has previously paired AI’s need for huge amounts of electricity with his own push to tap into U.S. energy sources, including gas, coal and nuclear.

Many tech giants are already well on their way toward building new data centers in the U.S. and around the world. OpenAI announced this week that it has switched on the first phase of a massive data center complex in Abilene, Texas, part of an Oracle-backed project known as Stargate that Trump promoted earlier this year. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and xAI also have major projects underway.

The tech industry has pushed for easier permitting rules to get its computing facilities connected to power, but the AI building boom has also contributed to spiking demand for fossil fuel production, which contributes to global warming.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called on the world’s major tech firms to power data centers completely with renewables by 2030.

“A typical AI data center eats up as much electricity as 100,000 homes,” Guterres said. “By 2030, data centers could consume as much electricity as all of Japan does today.”

Hitting the hay earlier might be the simplest way to boost your movement

Want to move more tomorrow? Try going to bed a little earlier tonight.

That’s the takeaway from a new study by researchers at Monash University, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who found that even modest shifts to an earlier bedtime can lead to significantly more physical activity the next day.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study, conducted from 2021 to 2022, draws on nearly 6 million nights of sleep and activity data from 20,000 Americans wearing Whoop fitness trackers.

The data showed a clear pattern: earlier bedtimes were linked to more moderate-to-vigorous physical activity the next day. For example, participants who typically went to bed at 9 p.m. logged about 30 more minutes of exercise than those who stayed up until 1 a.m., and 15 minutes more than those who typically went to bed at 11 p.m. (the average bedtime for participants).

Interestingly, when people went to bed earlier than their usual time but still got the same amount of sleep, they tended to log their highest levels of activity the following day, a combination that can be especially impactful.

“Even small changes in when you go to bed may be linked to how active you are the next day,” said Josh Leota, a research fellow at Monash University and lead author of the study, in the Harvard Gazette. “Rather than viewing sleep and exercise as competing for time, we should think about how they can support each other.”

To validate the findings, researchers turned to data from the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, in which a demographically representative cohort was given a free Fitbit device to participate. While the effects were slightly smaller, likely due to fewer fitness-focused users than Whoop users, the pattern held steady: earlier sleep, more movement.

See Also

The study adds to a growing interest in understanding and encouraging the interplay between rest and performance. Equinox Hotels, for instance, is focusing on better rest as the future of hospitality. The brand recently partnered with renowned sleep scientist Dr. Matthew Walker to launch the Equinox Hotels Sleep Lab, an immersive experience at its New York City property designed to optimize guests’ sleep through smart tech, sleep-driven spa rituals and recovery-focused amenities.

Other companies are following suit. Eight Sleep’s new Pod 5 mattress system uses AI to adjust temperature based on biometric signals, while wearables like Somnee, also co-founded by Walker, are designed to help users fall asleep faster and sleep longer. In addition to wearables, mouth tape and sleep-focused experiences, supplements are increasingly being marketed as a way to improve sleep.

Looking ahead, the research team hopes to build on these findings by testing whether earlier bedtimes can cause an increase in physical activity, not just correlate with it.

“We would like to test whether encouraging earlier bedtimes directly leads to more physical activity the next day, within an experimental paradigm,” Leota told the publication. “This would provide strong evidence for updating public health messaging to improve population physical activity levels.”

Sports Technology Market

Sports Technology Market size was valued at US$ 18.59 Bn. in 2023 and is expected to reach US$ 54.80 Bn. by 2030, at a CAGR of 16.7% during a forecast period.

Sports Technology Market Overview:

The Sports Technology Market is undergoing a significant transformation as the integration of advanced technologies reshapes how sports are played, analyzed, and consumed. From wearable fitness trackers and smart equipment to performance analytics and AI-powered coaching tools, sports organizations and athletes are embracing innovation to enhance training and audience engagement. The rapid digitization of sports infrastructure, combined with rising investments in sports science and data analytics, is propelling market growth. Additionally, increasing demand for real-time insights and immersive fan experiences is fueling the adoption of smart stadiums and virtual/augmented reality solutions across professional sports leagues globally.

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Sports Technology Market Dynamics:

Several dynamic factors are shaping the evolution of the sports technology landscape. On one hand, the growing emphasis on player safety, injury prevention, and performance optimization is encouraging the adoption of advanced wearable and biometric devices. On the other hand, the increasing consumer appetite for interactive and digital experiences is accelerating innovations in broadcasting, fan engagement, and mobile applications. However, challenges such as high implementation costs, data privacy concerns, and the need for seamless integration with legacy systems are acting as restraints. Despite these hurdles, strategic collaborations between tech companies and sports organizations continue to open new revenue streams and competitive advantages.

Sports Technology Market Outlook and Future Trends :

The future of the Sports Technology Market looks promising, with continuous advancements in AI, IoT, and machine learning expected to redefine the industry’s core capabilities. Over the next few years, we can expect greater use of predictive analytics in talent scouting and injury management, along with more personalized training regimens powered by real-time data. The rise of e-sports and digital sports entertainment is also expected to create new monetization opportunities for tech-driven platforms. Moreover, the deployment of 5G in stadiums will enable faster data transmission, enhancing both in-game strategy development and fan experiences. These trends indicate a growing convergence of sports, entertainment, and cutting-edge technology.

Sports Technology Market Key Recent Developments:

Recent developments in the Sports Technology Market reflect a surge in innovation and partnerships aimed at boosting performance and engagement. For instance, several global football clubs have introduced AI-based performance tracking systems to better understand player workload and improve fitness strategies. Meanwhile, wearable tech firms are launching next-generation smart gear designed to collect more accurate biometric data. In broadcasting, virtual reality and AR solutions are being tested to deliver immersive viewing experiences. Additionally, technology firms are increasingly collaborating with sports federations to co-develop analytics platforms tailored to specific sports like cricket, tennis, and basketball, signaling a more data-centric future for the industry.

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Sports Technology Market Segmentation:

by Technology

Devices

Smart Stadium

Analytics & Statistics

Esports

by Sport

Soccer

Baseball

Basketball

Ice Hockey

Football/Rugby

Tennis

Cricket

Golf

Esports

Others

Some of the current players in the Sports Technology Market are:

1. IBM

2. Ericsson

3. Cisco

4. Fujitsu

5. SAP SE

6. Oracle

7. NEC

8. LG

9. Sharp

10. Samsung

11. Fitbit

12. Apple

13. Garmin

14. Sony

15. ARRI

16. Panasonic Corporation

17. Modern Times Group

18. Activision Blizzard

19. Valve Corporation

20. Tencent

21. CJ Corporation

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